Quests: Playing Catch-Up

We completed a few of the other quests that we've had sitting in our quest logs for quite some time now.

A Chocobo's Tale has several different parts, and requires a lot of running around (Jeuno, Bastok, Pashhow, Beadeaux), and requires each person to get three Warding Oils, which are an exclusive drop off of Emerald Quadavs in Beadeaux. We did that part of the quest months ago, but put off the final part until last week. The last task for the quest involve checking a headstone in northwest Batallia Downs, and fighting the five NM tigers that spawn. We had been worried that we'd have a bit of trouble fighting them all as a duo, but it was a needless fear, and we easily defeated them, obtained the key item and headed back to Jeuno to complete the quest. The quest involved the story of two chocobos that were in love, but ill-fated (star-crossed?).

For Cid's Secret, the proprietress of the Steaming Sheep in Port Bastok needed a Rolanberry 874. We could have bought these on the Auction House, but opted instead to get them for ourselves from the spawned crawlers in Crawlers Nest. I bought 3 stacks of Rolanberries from the Duty Free Shop in Port Jeuno before our last escort quest in CN. When we finished up with Olavia, we headed back to the first lizard room, where people fight crawlers in the mid-30s. There's a basket there, and if you place a Rolanberry in it, there's a chance a Guardian Crawler will come charging in to get it/you. They drop slightly older Rolanberries, the Rolanberry 881. From the 36 regluar rolanberries, we ended up with 10 Rolanberry 881s. We took these over to another area with another basket (the room with the Rumble Crawlers). The room was empty, so we didn't have to worry about links, and we lured Drone Crawlers to the basket by placing the Rolanberry 881s. We ended up with 4 Rolanberry 874s, which worked out well, since we could use the two extra for the Cargo quest in Selbina.

We headed back to Bastok with our bounty and completed the quest, obtaining a ram mantle as our reward. We picked up the next quest in the series, The Usual. This time Hilda needs a King Truffle for one of her patrons, a galka who knew her husband. She didn't know his name, or where to get the King Truffle, and needed our help. We tried to tell her she could get them on the auction house, but she just ignored us. So we headed off to Aydeewa Subterrane to kill Mycohoppers for a few hours. We gave up with only one King Truffle, so I took that back to Bastok to complete the quest (with a Speed Bow as my reward). These two quests gave us a bit of background story on Cid, which was pretty interesting.

When we were farming for Grym's Giant Fish Bones in the Temple of Uggalepih, we also fought the Trompe L'Oeil for the quest A Question of Taste, in which we'd been instructed to hang one of Angelica's paintings in the Temple. The Trompe L'Oeil didn't like the painting, and ripped it to shreds, then attacked us. We had to do the fight twice, once for each of us, and the first time the fight was a bit tougher than we thought it was going to be, so the second time, Grym subbed BST and had an Opo-opo helping us out. It was much easier with our helper monkey. Returning to Kazham to report what had happened, we were rewarded with a bit of gil.

A very old quest that we were probably just too cheap to complete was Wondering Minstrel, where we're tasked with cheering up the minstrel at the tavern in Windurst Waters. A friend of his in the Merry Minstrel in Lower Jeuno told us we could cheer him up by bringing him a piece of Rosewood Lumber. I made three pieces from logs I bought from the guild, and the third piece of lumber paid for the logs I bought. We brought the lumber back to Windurst, and the minstrel was indeed pleased. He gave us both a Faerie Picollo for our troubles. To our surprise, those were selling for 90k gil on the Auction House, so it was definitely a nice reward.

Finally, we completed Better the Demon You Know, the last in the series of quests with Koblaqik in Oldton Movalpolis. She was afraid her brother was taken by the demons in Castle Zvahl Baileys, and asked us to go look for him there. We'd been a bit worried about this fight, versus the Marquis Andrealphus demon and his 4 minions, since the Marquis is known to "escape" whomever has hate, sending them out to Xarcabard, making the fight tough for those left behind, and making it possible that you'll have to do the fight over for the escaped person to get the key item after the fight. The move is blocked by utsusemi, so we decided to have Grym tank as THF/NIN. The fight went pretty well, and the minions all disappeared when we killed their boss. We found Zeelazok's Earplug and headed back to Koblakiq to complete the quest. She gave us a Goblin Grenade (30k on the Jeuno AH) for our troubles.

I really enjoy the quests for their little bits of story, but some of them seem to require a lot of time running around and/or obtaining hard-to-get items and the rewards are often very trivial. I guess I can understand why a lot of people don't want to bother with them. Those people are playing a slightly different game than me.

New titles: Chocobo Love Guru, "Steaming Sheep" Regular, Down Piper Piper-Upper, Apostate for Hire