Leveling: Ninja Blues back in Qufim (23-25)

Sunday night, the Ninja Blues static headed back to Pug Alley in Qufim, and had a good two hours of exp there. There was another party there at first, so there was a bit of competition for the Pugils, but it wasn't too bad. It slowed down more when a third party camped on top of us. They were a bit odd in that they had 5 Tarutaru mages (3xBLM, 2xWHM), all in their starter RSE outfits, and 1 Galka PLD. They were only level 21, but did very well. The PLD would lose hate, but he was far enough away from the mages that he could usually get the mob back before the BLM with hate would get him. I think it's really a shame there are so many RMT groups making their way through the levels, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Since I hadn't had a chance to level my WHM and won't have Cure II on my /RDM until BLU28, Grym took over main healing for the night. I gave her all my +MP and +MND gear and I got all the +STR and attack gear. I still subbed RDM to backup heal, but I did a quick check in the moghouse to see how different the stats are between BLU/RDM and BLU/DRK. The biggest difference is about 20% more Attack, which explains why Elboron's been far and away the damage leader of the group. I did a lot more damage this time round, since I wasn't healing other than an occassional Healing Breeze between pulls, moving from 13% to 20%. Having a couple merits in Sword Skill helps my accuracy too.

We had one run-in with a Banshee that the three parties all decided to gang up on. We seemed to be doing well with it, getting it nearly dead, when it would drain HP from all of us and be back at full health. That happened two or three times, and things started looking grim. Fortunately Diasuke showed up and had Carbuncle blast it to bits for us. He stayed around to protect us from further undead attacks, which was nice.