Beastmasters: Levels 53-54

The lack of blog updates over the past week and a half was due to the fact I was on vacation, and as usually happens while on vacation, I didn't have time to write entries (I usually write on the train while commuting). Grym and I spent a lot of time leveling our BSTs in various spots around Vana'diel. We really prefer the spots way off the beaten track, where no one else comes along to take either our pets or our prey, and we were pretty successful in finding such spots at times. We'd do a search on all the BSTs from 50-60, see where they were, then would do searches on the areas where the BSTs weren't, to make sure they weren't overrun with parties or other people farming or leveling NPCs (this was pretty hard to tell at times though).

Working together as a duo certainly makes BST a lot safer than it would be solo, and we really have a lot of fun with it. It's really nice when we can get a good chunk of time where we can level BST and feel like we're making progress.

Sea Serpent Grotto (Level 53)

At level 53, we headed to Sea Serpent Grotto, behind the Mythril Door. Here we mostly used leeches against Sahagins, with a crab thrown into the mix from time to time. Then Grym pulled a sahagin with a funny name, and I said, "An NM? Can we handle it?" He replied, "An NM?!". It was Myuu the Waverider, and we decided we couldn't handle him, and logged out while our pets were keeping him busy. Fortunately the 30 second logout timer wasn't too long for our pets, and we got out safely. When we logged back in a minute later, we decided that if we were going to stay there, we'd have to kill the NM so it wouldn't bother us. So we snuck back to Norg, switched to our PLD and THF, and went back to take out Myuu. It was a tougher fight than we'd anticipated, and would definitely have ended up in our BSTs deaths had we tried to fight him. We killed him but didn't get the polearm he drops. After finding a coffer to use one of the keys we'd got, we headed back to Norg and decided to seek out a new hunting ground rather than continue with the Sahagins.

Bostaunieux Oubliette (Level 53)

We ended up heading to the sewers under San d'Oria, where we used Dark Aspics to fight Werebats. We decided to take the exp cut by having pets, and used our two hour on the Dark Aspics to keep them charmed for a full 30 minutes, and makes them tougher as well. They really tore through the bats, and the exp piled up. I had a lot of work interruptions that day, so it actually worked out pretty well - we'd fight for half an hour, I'd do some work, and our two hours would be back, and we'd repeat the process. We made it to level 54 before calling it a night there.

Bostaunieux Oubliette (Level 54)

We headed back into the sewers, but ran into an anonymous NIN55/BST27 at the Ronfaure zone. He asked to team up with us, and we decided to give it a try, but it was really a miserable failure. He pulled hate off of the pets and we had to blow through our limited MP curing him, and we ended up with blood aggro and deaths. After our second homepoint, we gave up the experiment. If we hadn't been using our Empress Bands, we would have had an exp loss for the 90 minutes of experimentation.

A few hours later, the NIN was off in Whitegate looking for a normie party, so we headed back into the Oubliette and had a pretty easy time getting to Level 55.