Assault: Sergeant Kiki

We're still keeping up with the weekly ClanBEB assaults, and there are always a few assault runs before Salvage on Fridays too, so I'm making progress in the ranks, despite having few unique assaults. For the pre-Salvage assaults, I somehow have manage to end up in a trio doing Golden Salvage, with one or two Summoners. This means I stand near where the Rune of Release will pop when one of the Summoners finds the right chest. I feel pretty useless, but it gives me time to get some hi-potions out of my hi-potion tank, and the points are really nice (1100/run).

For the BEB runs, we'd been working on getting Ryken to rank up so we could start in on the higher level ones. We started out with Imperial Agent Rescue, moved on to Seagull Grounded, and then Orichalcum Survey. Ana and Yobun got Ryken through Golden Salvage and Excavation Duty, so he was able to get to PFC in less than a week.

The next week we snuck in an SP - Saving Private Ryaaf - without Ryken, then did Lamia No.13, followed by Preemptive Strike. People were short on tags, so we had a small crew on Orichalcum Survey, cutting it close, but pulled out a win.

The next week we were a bit short-handed again, so we did 4 repeats of the mining for Ryken. He was finally able to Rank up to SP, so we were looking forward to starting in on SP assaults the next week.

On Friday June 8th, Anastasia and Yobun were up for some assaults after my Salvage run, so we decided we'd give the Corporal level assault The Double Agent a try. This was really kind of fun. You headed into a Mamool Ja Training Ground area, and have to question the Qiqirn NPCs to discover which one is a traitor, and "capture" him for the win. Your points are based on how many times you try capture the wrong Qiqirn - the more mistakes you make, the fewer points you get. There are several Puks in the area that are hard to avoid, so you do need to fight a couple of them, but they're pretty weak. We ended up doing this one twice, and that gave me enough points to be able to pick up the quest for my promotion to Sergeant.

The quest for the promotion has you acting as a "dectective" to help a Qiqirn perfumer find her former teacher. There are several cutscenes in Whitegate, and you need to give a Qiqirn a Sutlac in Nashmau and then head out into Caedarva Mire for a cutscene. Other than the traveling around, it's a pretty simple quest. Since we were doing ToAU Mission 35, I was able to travel once for both the quest and the mission, so it worked out quite well for me.

So Erock decided to come back to the game, after over a year of absence. We're all thrilled to have him back, but of course this means we've got another person needing to rank up for assault, so it's back to basics again! We used up his three tags last Monday with Seagull Grounded, Imperial Agent Rescue (all three gates were broken down with thrown weapons! that was a first for us), and Excavation Duty. That sure goes fast when you've got 3 hasted Monks beating on the walls. We were able to get our three walls down at exactly the same time it took Ana to nuke her one wall. Usually the BLM finishes first.

After that, Yobun, Itera, Ana and I tried Building Bridges. This one is a bit annoying, but there's no risk of death either, so it could be pretty fun (though if we lose too much, it will be a waste of assault tags). This has a 15 minute time limit, and you have to make your way to four switches in the north, south, east, west rooms of the Periqia map. Once you've hit all the switches, a bridge appears to access the final point in the central room. Making this complicated are the Lamia NPCs patrolling the tunnels. If they spot you and are able to "catch" you, you get warped back to the starting point. I found them very hard to avoid, and never made it to a switch room. We ended up with 3 of the 4 switches flipped when the time ran out.

It will be fun trying all the new ones as we get Erock and Ryken higher in the ranks, but it the mean time, it's fun doing the repeaters. I feel kind of sorry for them as we drag them through the early assaults, without really explaining anything to them as we go, other than the minimum instruction to get them to do their part ("take off all your subtle blow gear and your weapons", "follow Kiki", "stand there").

New title: Sergeant