General: Vacation Time

Sorry for the lack of updates over the past week, but I've had another at-home vacation, and as usual, I didn't take time to write things up as the week went past. Grym and Kiki spent a good portion of the week working on getting long-outstanding quests completed, so it seems we spent most of our time farming for elusive items in far-flung spots: Demons in Castle Zvahl Baileys (Sands of Silence), Sand Diggers in Quicksand Caves (Ancient Salt), Hurricane Wyverns in Ifrit's Cauldron (Wyvern Skulls), spawned crawlers in Crawlers Nest (Rolanberry 874s), Tonberry Stalkers in the Temple of Uggalepih (Giant Fish Bones), Brook Sahagins in Sea Serpent Grotto (Blackened Toad), Mycophiles in the Aywadeen Subterrane (King Truffle), and Young Opo-Opos in Yuhtunga Jungle (Wild Pamamas).

A lot of these actually gave us limit points, and some even provided some skillup opportunities, but it still seemed like a lot of time doing nothing. For the King Truffle, we gave up after getting 1 in close to 3 hours of farming. I'm surprised they don't sell for more on the Auction House. I was solo farming the Wild Pamamas, but after over 3 hours, left the jungle with 3 stacks of pebbles, 2 stacks of regular Pamamas, and 1 single bunch of Wild Pamamas. I bought a second on the AH in Windurst - they don't seem to sell more than once a month. I guess no one does that quest (Greetings to the Guardian).

Another colossal waste of time was the Vana'diel week (~8 hours) that we spent in Gusgen Mines. It was RSE week for Female Tarutarus, and I really want my Sweet Sachet for my mage jobs. For the RSE sachets, there are 3 possible spawn points in the dungeon for the RSE armor quest. If a character of the correct race/gender examines the ???, an Aroma monster spawns, and you have a chance of getting the RSE sachet from killing it. There's a 30 minute wait between spawns. The Mines were fairly quiet, with a handful of RMT miners running from mining point to mining point. There was one female Tarutaru PUP33 working on her RSE chests, but she did start scouting out the ??? spots between chest spawns when she had a high level BLM helper. Fortunately, we managed to get every single ??? spawn over the course of the day. Unfortunately, the Aroma Flies in Gusgen weren't very cooperative with me, even having Grym's TH2 and my own TH1 (PLD75/THF25). We went 0/14 that day, on top of another probably 6 more casual attempts in other dungeons on other days.

Between spawns, I spent my time catching Gavial Fish, but only ended up with .2 skillups on around 100 fish. Grym did some bone chip and elemental farming, but grew a bit bored with it, and left to do other non-game things while I fished. My fishing spot was close to one of the spawn points, and Grym would wait near another one, so we had good coverage of the three. Knowing the kill times helped give us an advantage over the PUP as well, so we didn't miss a single one (nor did they see us actually killing the flies).

I also seemed to spend a lot of time trying to get exp for my PLD, to build up a better buffer for all the Dynamis deaths I foresee in my future. We attended every Besieged we could, and did quests for exp scrolls as well. We did the Eldieme escort quest with Wendell, Ryrra, and Itera one Saturday night, made sure to get in chocobo races before and after the conquest tally, did back to back Cookbook quests in Sacrarium before and after the tally a week ago, and then tried the Crawlers Nest escort quest as a duo: PLD75/BST37, THF75/BST37. Our plan was to charm mobs that would aggro Olavia, use them to fight other mobs that would aggro her, use leave when Olavia was past, and then charm the ones that had been fought, and repeat the process as we worked our way through the dungeon. We thought if she took the coffer path we wouldn't stand a chance, but sure enough, that's where she was headed, so we decided to give it a shot.

Turns out it wasn't so bad at all. We had a couple mischarms on the Helm Beetles, but nothing critical. Olavia did get smacked pretty hard once, but we managed to pull the angry beetle off of her in time and got her health back up. We ended up completing the escort in around 12 minutes - much faster than we've ever done that particular route when we've had to fight all of the coffer mobs along the way.