Leveling: Filling the Empty Vessel

I'm not really sure this should fall in the "Leveling" category when we're basically just fighting things to learn blue magic, but we have been leveling, so I guess it works. We've been having a lot of fun collecting our spells, and are now at Level 8, with all of our current spells, plus the 3 we can use at level 12 (Battle Dance, Feather Storm, Head Butt) and 2 of the ones for level 16 (Sheep Song, Helldive).

We've been playing BLU both as a duo and a trio with Elboron. He's been soloing BLU as well, and has pretty much the same sells. I think he's missing Sprout Smack, Head Butt, and Sheep Song, so he'll need to spend a bit of time in Gustaberg. We're at the point now where we really have to get proper gear - we've been wearing what we call "Mule Wear" up to now: Dream Hats, Aketons, swimsuit bottoms, starter ring. I'm still not sure what stats are most appropriate for BLU, though I assume it should depend on what role we decide to play in a party.

We spent one evening in Ronfaure, trying to pick up Power Attack, Queasyshroom, and Battle Dance. We didn't all manage to get all of them, and went back the next evening to complete our collection. The first evening, Kiki got aggro'd by an Orc while we were fighting a beetle, and ended up dead. Grym ran back to San d'Oria to switch to WHM to raise Kiki, and Elboron decided to keep fighting a beetle, but a tough golbin had other ideas and went charging after him. Grym raised Kiki first, and another Orc was too close and smacked her down again. After we were both raised and no longer weakened, we headed back to San d'Oria, fighting things along the way. Even with a level 43 WHM in our party, Elboron was able to learn both Queasyshroom and Power Attack, so I'm not sure what the "rules" for being able to learn Blue Magic are. It sure seems like it's too easy if you can party with higher leveled friends and get the spells without being able to earn any EXP points at the same time.

The second evening, we headed to Sarutabaruta after finishing up in Ronfaure. There we fought crabs for Metallic Body (Grym and Kiki got it the same time, on the second crab they fought), crawlers for Cocoon (this took a lot of crawlers for Grym to learn), yagudos for Feather Storm (all three of us learned it fairly quickly, mandies for Wild Oats for Elbo, and vultures for Helldive (Grym and Kiki got this pretty quickly, but Elboron had to keep trying for several days).

We've still been sticking to the process of engaging, fighting with our bare fists and blue magic to get the mob down to a sliver of health, and letting it fight us until it's used its TP 2 or 3 times, hopefully getting the move that we're trying to learn. As I mentioned above, we've got to start wearing proper gear for this, as things are starting to hit us a bit hard. However, we've gotten good at bouncing the hate around, using Pollen or Cures to pull hate when one of us starts dropping a bit low in HP. Since we're basically spamming Pollen on ourselves in every fight, it's been getting our Blue Magic skill nicely capped before we level.

Saturday morning, Grym and Kiki headed to the Gustabergs to try for Head Butt and Sheep Song. Head Butt came pretty quickly, but Sheep Song took awhile. We never saw a "Grymalkyn has learned Sheep Song!" message, but at one point Grym was looking at her list of spells, and there it was! He scrolled back through the chat log, and there never had been a message. That's a bit annoying, as we may have kept fighting sheep long past him learning it, since we didn't know. I've read reports of other people having the same problem, but I just assumed that they missed the message. Now I'm of the belief it's a bug. It just means we'll check our spell lists regularly to see if we've learned something without realizing it.

We got some Fresh Blood off of one of the sheep, so we decided to change to our level 71s and headed out to Dangruff Wadi to see if we could spawn the Chocoboleech and get the rare/ex katana Gassan for Kiki's NIN20, since she really will have to level it to 37 some day, as much as she's adverse to the concept of using NIN as a subjob. We had to run around and check the three different spawn spots a few times before it finally appeared. We popped the leech, and did him in rather quickly. A passing SMN seemed to be looking for the same thing, but he'd have to wait and find the right spot when it spawned later.