Leveling: Spinners in Mamook (75)

Yobun heeded the pleas of Kiki and Wendell and found us an unpopulated spot for the Low Level Static on Sunday night. We fought Spinners in Mamook, near the zone to Bhaflau Thickets. They took a bit longer to kill than the Sea Puks on the other side of the zone, but they were almost all Very Tough, and yielded better experience than we'd been getting from the Puks. Plus Spider Web is much less annoying than the Puks' knockback attacks. Best of all, they don't have Radiant Breath or Firespit, and Sickle Slash isn't as fearsome as it once was. We got mostly chain #5s, and 4 chain #6s, averaging around 150 per mob.

The Spinners do not aggro, but they do link. Most of the time, Elboron would keep one asleep while we fought the other, but once Yobun had three on him and he zoned two while we grabbed one as he went past.

We fought for less than 2.5 hours, with a couple of AFKs in there, and ended up with 13,733 with sanction and empress bands. Once again I selected the Refresh bonus with Sanction, and once again it helped reduce the need for juice on top of Ballad.

This was my first exp party since I got my fancy new Tatami Shield, and I was quite pleased with the intimidation rate on the spiders. I'll be keeping it. I'm sure my BST will love having it when it gets high enough to wear it as well. I stuck with wearing a good bit of enmity gear, but switched to tank food this week (taco, then black curry). My accuracy suffered as a result (64%), so if we end up in the same camp next week, I'll eat bream sushi for the VIT and ACC, use my High Breath Mantle instead of the Knightly (lose VIT, gain Enmity), and wear my Woodsman Ring instead of my Mermaid's (lose Enmity, gain ACC). Overall, I'll have more enmity and accuracy, and less VIT and DEF, but the spiders weren't hitting all that hard, so we'll see how it goes.

Itera and Charcole are quite the monsters these days, and Itera's put a couple of Merit upgrades into his Hand-to-Hand skill. Even if I was completely kitted out to be a Damage Dealer, there's no way I could keep up with them, and in doing so, I'd lose all of my +enmity, and wouldn't be tanking. So as long as I continue to be the tank, I will have to ignore how little damage I do. I wish there were Paladin parsers to show the number of hits and damage taken, shield blocks and parries, and HP recovered by cures. :-)

One thing we noticed here: the Spinners were stunned by Chi Blast. None of us have ever noticed Chi Blast ever stunning anything. They really did some interesting things with the various mobs in the new expansion, making it new for everyone, instead of the same old repetitive things we've all seen before.