Salvage: Zhayolm Remnants

Venn, in an effort to spend every day of the week with members of his various Ultimates linkshells, has added yet another activity to the agenda. He's created a new shell, UltimatesForever, specifically for Salvage. We're meeting on Friday nights, and had our first run last week. We had 11 people for our inaugural run, and Albany is guiding us in our infancy.

Salvage is like Limbus in that you can have up to 18 people participating, you have a time limit, and you're trying to defeat mobs to get items that can be turned into really amazing gear, such as the Ares armor. It has a 100 minute time limit, with no extensions. The fee for entering is 2000 Assault Points, which means people have to keep doing assaults to get enough points for Salvage, as well as any Assault items they might want.

When you first enter Salvage, you have no access to your job abilities or subjobs, you cannot equip any gear, and your stats are all severely reduced (-50 on all visible stats at least). The mobs you encounter can drop "cells" of different types that will lift one particular restriction from the individual that gets to use it. There's strategy involved in deciding who gets what first, to best benefit the whole team.

We meant to start out with Bhaflau Remnants as our first run, but ended up in Zhayolm Remnants instead. It was pretty amusing watching the group running around in their underwear, punch mobs. Most of us were pretty pitiful, with no hand-to-hand skill, but Itera was doing a good job of killing things, even with his bare fists.

I nominated Jarbit to be main tank, since we were were the two PLDs and he's got more HP than me, so he was the first to get his subjob, then weapon and shield, then job abilities. Goto was our only WHM, and he was the first to get his use of magic unlocked. A few mobs will "drop" treasure chests, which contain temporary items such as regen milk and HP restore potions, which came in quite handy. It was a bit chaotic, and we ended up with nearly a full wipe on a Poroggo NM, but we got back up and continued on up to the second floor. We ended up timing out before we'd made significant progress, but it was really an awful lot of fun. I'm eager to go back tonight and see what we can do!