Assault: Chief Sergeant Kiki

This week, we were able to do a batch of Lance Corporal assaults, and since I had four tags available, I got enough points to pick up the quest for Promotion: Chief Sergeant! That was sure quick.

We started out with the Shanarha Grass Conservation in Leujaoam Sanctum. For this assault, you're supposed to exterminate the cute little bunnies that are eating all the grass. There are around 20 of them, and they split up into two groups, with one group heading north and the other south. They're not too tough, but they do hit kind of hard and fast for DC bunnies. The first set wasn't too spread out when we started attacking them, but we managed to get them all killed without dying in the process. The second set was easier, since they'd spread out pretty well. It was really a pretty easy assault for the 6 of us (Yobun MNK, Demin MNK, Daden SAM, Itera MNK, Erock RDM, and Tsakiki PLD).

Next up was Breaking Morale at the Mamool Ja Training Grounds. This one's a stealth mission, with a bit of danger. You're supposed to run in to the area, find the supply coffers, and return to the NPC at the start with the supplies you've pilfered. The trick is to do it without getting caught. The area is filled with Mamool Ja Recruits, who will attack you if they see you, and Mamool Ja Trainers, who will send you to the prison area when they see you. There's a pot of viscous liquid at the prison area, which conveniently puts you into a Mamool Ja costume, but at the cost of a heavy poison. This takes off 22 HP per tick, and slows your movement speed. We learned a few things on this run: if you get aggro'd by a Recruit, run away to find a Trainer to get sent to prison. This will shed your aggro. Watch your HP, the costume can kill you. We didn't do as well as we would have liked, but we were able to turn in two sets of supplies and got the win, at the expense of two deaths.

For our third run, we tried Evade and Escape in Lebros Cavern. We switched around the group a bit, and had Diasuke WHM, Yobun WHM, Daden SAM, Itera MNK, Erock RDM, and Tsakiki PLD. For this assault, you need to find 3 switches that can be in 6 different rooms. Once you've found all three, you need to activate them within a minute of each other in order to active the Rune of Release, then have someone get to the Rune of Relase for the win. The complication for this one is that there are 3 Daleks roaming the pathways in the Cavern. The rooms themselves are safe from their patrol, so you have to watch them and try to avoid being spotted. Yobun assigned rooms for each of us to check, and mine was the furthest from the entrance, in the southeast corner. It was kind of fun finding spots to hide from the dragons as I made my way to the switch room. We did have several deaths in the process, but we found the three switches, and completed the assault.

Our final run for the night was Shooting Down the Baron in Periqia. This one has a 15 minute time limit, and you need to find an imp and kill him. There are pugils in the zone that will aggro as well, but it's best to avoid them to save time. The imp will warp to another location, which means hunting him down again. The hide and seek aspect is a bit annoying, especially when you don't have much time, but it worked out well for us (Diasuke WHM, Ryken MNK, Daden SAM, Itera MNK, Demin MNK, and Tsakiki PLD). We spotted the Baron pretty quickly, and very nearly killed him before he warped, thanks to at least one of the MNKs using Hundred Fists. However, he did warp away, and we ran all over the place looking for him. Fortunately he doesn't regen after warping, so when Itera spotted him, he quickly finished him off, and we won the assault.

I now had 28 points towards my promotion, so I ran off to talk to Abquhbah and picked up my quest for Promotion: Chief Sergeant quest. Abquhbah's messed up an easy task and fears the wrath of Naja, and needs help getting out of the situation. I had to go find some special "scourshrooms" in the Aywadeen Subterrane, which involved picking a mature scourshroom and then planting it in a sparse mushroom patch, waiting until 4:00 the next game day, and then getting two young scourshrooms to take back to Abquhbah. I completed the quest, and was promoted to Chief Sergeant. Only one mercenary rank left, though I'm sure they'll be adding more soon. I hope they're not done with the Perdu weapons that you can get from mercenary rank and ISP. They still need a one-handed sword Paladins can use....

New title: Chief Sergeant

Besieged: Old News

On June 28th, Lakshmi finally lost a Besieged, to the Mamool Ja, after 769 consecutive wins. I really thought it was going to be the Undead Swarm that beat us first, but I thought wrong. It happened around 6PM Eastern on a Thursday evening - which is pretty much still part of our server's "quiet time", when most of the Japanese are still asleep and the North Americans are still getting home from school and work. I wasn't there, apparently there were between 400 and 500 people in Al Zahbi, but they were too busy playing with the still-novel level 8 HNMs to bother keeping the generals alive, and they all fell quickly. This happened soon after world transfers were enabled by SquareEnix, so there's been rampant speculation that some people transferred from Siren to sabotage our Besieged by training the mobs into the Hall of Binding, but I think it was just our own fault. So Siren remains the only undefeated server, and people probably won't care as much as they did when we were trying to maintain our record.

The Astral Candescence was recovered within 10 hours, and we got back to regular Besiegeds starting at level 1. We quickly built back up to level 8s again, and have had a few close calls since then, including one on Sunday evening. With nearly 500 people in the zone at the peak, we should have done better than we did, but after about an hour of fighting, all 5 of our generals were dead, and some of the Mamools were in the Hall of Binding. We were able to get them out either by killing them or kiting them away, but there were lots of deaths in the process, mostly from Mijin Gakure. I think the mobs are pretty stupid - if they were really focused on getting the Astral Candescence, they wouldn't let swarms of puny adventurers picking away at them keep them from just running up and grabbing it once the Hall of Binding was open. Fortunately for us, we can divert them from their intention.

Quests: Shadows of the Departed

After completing the Zilart Missions and The Storms of Fate, the next step towards Apocalypse Nigh is the quest Shadows of the Departed. You're asked to investigate three locations, one on the fourth floor in the three main Promyvions. I'd flagged this quest last January, after completing the Storms of Fate with Splinte's gods/hnm linkshell, Eminence, but never managed to get a group to do it. One afternoon during my vacation, Diasuke asked if anyone needed to do that, and I jumped up and down and said "Me! Me! Pick me!".

We couldn't drum up any volunteers for help, nor did we wish to shout in Whitegate, so we decided we were crazy enough to try to duo it. We geared up as a SMN/WHM (Diasuke) and BLU/NIN (me), and headed off to the Dem crag to see how we would do. At this point, Erock said he would come and help us, but would need a bit of time to get his level 30 WAR gear. We decided to give it a whirl anyway, and we actually did pretty repectably, but probably would have been overwhelmed by the strays with just the two of us, so we waited for Erock to arrive. The three of us had no troubles making it to the 4th floor, and Diasuke and I got our first sliver. We headed into the Spire, and Dia teleported us to the Mea Crag. Itera met up with us there as a MNK/WHM, and made things even easier.

I think they made the memory receptacles a lot easier in a recent update, and changed the mob placement as well, since it was really pretty easy for us to completely avoid aggro without excessive waiting for mobs to change position. I did get caught by an IT Craver on one of the upper floors of Mea, and that was really a close call for us, but we survived (no MP and Erock in the red, but still alive). And when we had to go through the fences on the second floor of Holla, there was an unavoidable wanderer as always, but it was no match for us. We had our share of fake receptacles as well, but overall it was a pretty painless process to get all three slivers.

Diasuke and I headed to Jeuno to turn in our slivers and complete the quest. The following morning, I went back again to start Apocalypse Nigh, and headed to the Empyreal Paradox to enter the battle to get the cutscene as well. Now I just need to find 5 people to do the fight with me, and an Ethereal Earring will be mine!

Crafting: Gourmand Gratifier

Most of my "spare" time in the game over the past two months has been focused on increasing Qiara's cooking skills, building up Guild Points for Qiara, and raising Kiki's fishing skills. And hopefully make some gil in the process.

All of the coeurl subs that Qiara had made had finally sold off, so I moved her on to Tavnazian Salad and Flounder Meuniere to get her to 92 and 93, respectively. The salads were handy for making lots of tacos, both for sale and for Kiki. The Flounder Meuniere sell for a handsome profit, but they sell so rarely, it's not really worth putting them up on the AH. I sold a lot of them to NPCs for a smaller profit, to get some grocery money back for Quiznos, but since they can also turn up as Guild Point items, I've hung on to quite a few. Qiara had the ingredients on hand for a few tonosama rice balls, so she did 3 synths and got the .1 she need to push her to 93.

Next up was Black Curry, which caps at 94. Kiki had to do a bunch of ferry fishing to get the tuna Qiara needed, and got some noble ladies in the process. I also needed Grimmonites from Sea Serpent Grotto, which got me Bastore Bream and Nebimonites as well. Black Curry sells for a pretty good price, but it's quite slow unless it's that day's Guild Point item. I opted to sell a lot of them rather than save for Qiara's GP, since it's a poor gil/GP ratio.

One time when I was fishing on the ferry, Silverhook came along, with no WHMs camping for him. I decided to attack him (as PLD75/BLM35), but didn't buff up or switch out of my fishing gear first. That was kind of dumb, so I warped out before he killed me.

Fishing skillups have been reasonable, though really random. One day Kiki got 1.1 skill ups on fewer than 24 black sole catches, but then caught another two stacks without a single skillup. Kiki's at 73.5 now, and that should continue to increase as I need to have her catching Grimmonites and Black Sole on a regular basis, both for her own foods (Pescatora and Tavnazian Tacos mostly) and for selling as well.

Since Qiara got to 94, I've been having her make Rice Dumplings, which cap at 95. These also require Woodworking Level 15, so Qiara switched her focus to woodworking for a few days. She made lauan lumber, maple wands, workbenches, ash lumber, ash wands, and ash staves to get to 10, all while still in Windurst, with cheap wood available from NPCs. I typically would desynth all the items until the materials vanished, but the skill up rate on the desynths was worth it.

Qiara had to travel to San d'Oria to pass the exam at the guild, so I switched her to THF1 and walked there, taking the ferry from Mhaura to Selbina. I always enjoy the level 1 runs like that, but I was wishing I'd brought along prism powders in a couple of spots, just to save some time instead of waiting until I could safely get her past groups of goblins. Once she passed the test, she stayed in San d'Oria until she hit level 15, making mostly willow lumber, willow wands, and crossbow bolts of various types.

Another thing I need for Rice Dumplings is a steady supply of Coral Fungus. This is pretty easy to grow from Grain Seeds, so I had Kiki farming for them in La Thiene a couple times. This prompted my husband to remark that one can get a lot of Grain Seeds from harvesting, and that I'd need lots of fresh mugwort from 95 to 99 as it was. So I decided to have Grymalkyn start working as a harvester. She has lots of inventory space, and wouldn't get any aggro in Giddeus, plus she has clothcraft at 53 and can turn a lot of the raw harvesting materials into more salable goods. It made perfect sense, and my husband didn't seem to get mad at me for using poor Grymalkyn in that way, so all is good. I sent her the harvesting gear, had her buy stacks of sickles, and sent her off to Giddeus as a BST60/BLM22. She now stays there until her pockets are full, then heads back to Windurst to process/sell/distribute items as needed, then back off to Giddeus she goes.

Ohrly's been trying to grow Coral Fungus from the grain seeds, and gets quite a bit of Tarutaru rice in the process. This is always handy, since I tend to make/use/sell a lot of sushi, but more Coral Fungus would be nice too. Qiara is slowly making rice dumplings when she has the ingredients, but it will take me awhile to get her the last few points needed to hit 95. After that, it'll be years of Sweet Rice Cakes to take her to 99. I'm not sure I'll be able to get that last point to 100 though, unless I luck into a steady supply of dragon meat. :-)

In the meantime, I've been having Qiara turn in items for guild points when items are really cheap/easy to get, or if I have them on hand already, or have time to have her make them. The first 70,000 for her Chef's Hat didn't seem to take so long, and she got that just over a week ago. The 100,000 I need to her Chef's Apron seems to be a lot more daunting for some reason.

Assault: Sergeant Major Kiki

Amazingly, the ClanBEB Assault fad has persisted, and I managed to get another rank last week. Over the past month, I've mostly done repeats. We got Erock to PSC pretty quickly with 4 unique assaults and 5 repeats, and then SP came quickly as well. The most notable of that group was when we did Lamia No. 13 with Yobun as SMN. Garuda really tore apart Lamia No. 13, and made the assault go much more quickly than when we'd have just the NPCs attacking her to avoid hate issues.

We tried the Troll Fugitives assault, and it's similar to the Preemptive Strike for PSC: kill all the trolls, and get experience points in the process. I think that's my new favorite for recapping my exp after a rough weekend, and for getting limit points once that's done. It's more fun than the Mamools, since the fights are more interesting - the Trolls all can use their two hours. Plus it's a bit more experience as well, and it's a zone where I really don't have a lot of assault points.

Another new SP one we tried was Sagelord Elimination. We had Daden (WAR), Yobun (BLM), Anastasia (BLM), Goto (WHM/SMN), Erock (RDM), and me (PLD). This one is pretty annoying, and I'm not sure we'll rush to be repeating it, but it was kind of fun. For this one, you have to infiltrate the Mamool area, find the Sagelord, and kill him. This means trying to avoid the other Mamool, since there are too many to kill them all. To make it more difficult, after the Sagelord takes a certain amount of damage, he takes off at flee speeds. So you're likely to pick up aggro from the others as you're running after him. We had Goto's Garuda on him to make it a bit easier to follow, but we ended up getting somewhat overwhelmed and had a near wipe. Yobun had disconnected out to shed hate, and we managed to raise safely and killed off the Sagelord for the win.

Last week I finally had enough points to pick up the Promotion: Sergeant Major quest. This exceedingly annoying quest took me hours to complete. It consists of 3 minigames where Naja has you "training" three subpar recruits to whip them into shape. You can attempt each minigame once a game day. For the first, you have to observe them doing pushups and point out the slackers to Naja. This one wasn't so bad, but it did take me two tries. Next, with a very amusing cutscene of Abquhbah in his skivvies, you need to get them to do a number of situps in unison. This too wasn't so bad, but again, took me two tries to get it right. The final part was encouraging them to keep up in a foot race. This one took me 5 or 6 attempts before I finally had them all with me at the finish line. Naja was very pleased, since I turned the poor guys into lean mean fighting machines.

So now that we got Daden, then Ryken, the Erock to SP, guess what? Yes, we had a couple more people join us. Last week, Lucrezia joined in, and she got the last points she needed for the SP promotion. And this week, Ranzz finally relented, and last night he got the last points he needed for SP as well, so we should be done with PSC and PFC for awhile!

We actually had 10 people show up for assault last night, so we broke into two teams of 5. Itera needed Mamool points to get his P. shorts, and Ranzz was only PFC, so I took Itera, Ranzz, Erock, and Anastasia off for three rounds of Preemptive Strike, while Yobun took Demin, Erock, Ryken, and Lucrezia for the Trolls, Ryaaf, and whatever other SP fun they had.

New title: Sergeant Major

Quests: Divine Might

I had the past week off from work, and as usual, I probably spent more time playing than I should have. However, this has provided some blog fodder, so maybe I really will get back to posting regularly again.

Saturday, as I ran through Whitegate to get Sanction before heading out to solo Lesser Colibri to get Great Sword skillups (and work off the latent on my Subduer), I noticed a shout recruiting jobs for Divine Might, including PLD. This has been on my to-do list pretty much since we got Sky access in April 2006, but I've always been afraid of pickup groups. Last year, a ClanBEB group did Zilart Mission 14 instead, so I'm one of what seems like only a handful of people to complete Zilart without doing Divine Might.

I decided to throw caution to the wind, and I sent a tell saying I'd like to join. Since they needed a PLD, I was invited to join. We were to gather together in 90 minutes, so I headed out to work on my great sword (202 now, only 48 more levels to go...) before heading back in to town to get ready for the fight. I got all my gear and items ready, and was invited to the growing alliance as we waited for everyone to gather. It was full moon, so I grabbed a piece of parchment and went to Rolanberry to check bazaars for an Illuminink, but couldn't find one. Then I headed to Ro'Maeve from Jeuno and waited for everyone to gather together. It turns out that all the full moon nights on Saturday had weather in Ro'Maeve, so even if I'd gotten the Illiminink, I still wouldn't have been able to get an Ark Pentasphere. You can only get them during clear weather between 00:00 and 03:00 with a Full Moon. I did however get to use the bridges and run straight back to the Hall of the Gods. I'd never done that before.

So I found myself in Sky, for the fifth time ever, and first time since we'd beat Eald'narche last August, completing the Zilart Missions. I guess people who don't do gods don't have much use for Sky any more. I think Grymalkyn and I would have leveled our BST duo there if we'd ever continued past level 60.

Anyway, back to Divine Might. Finally we had everyone gathered together, and we started going over strategy. One person kept yelling to just trade the ark already. Apparently this was his 8th attempt and he was impatient to get in there quickly so he could add another failure to his list. For our first run, I think we had 3 NINs, 2 PLDs, 3 BRDs, 3 WHMs, 2 RDMs, a DRK, a WAR, and 3 BLMs. Each tank was assigned an Ark Angel to kite (I got the Galka) and the kill order was set for TT -> MR -> GK -> HM -> EV. We planned to kill the first two, wipe, reraise, and finish the rest. Unsure about buffs, we buffed once we entered the arena. The first two went down as planned, but a few of us didn't make it to the stairs before dying, so we couldn't reraise until the rest were up and unweakened and started fighting again.

We ended up timing out on the EV, but in general, the fight had gone extremely well for a first run with a bunch of strangers. We were all confident we could pull it off. People needed more reraise items and echo drops, so the other PLD headed back to Whitegate to resupply people. Meanwhile, one of the WHMs and RDMs had to leave. There was another group that had just made an attempt or two and failled, and three of their people (two BLMs and a PLD) wanted to join us if they could. Our other PLD didn't "need" the fight, so he bowed out after delivering his supplies.

For the second fight, we changed things around a bit. We knew buffs wouldn't wear, so we buffed up before entering, saving a few minutes. The tanks were supposed to kite the HM, GK, and EV up near the entrance, keeping people safe from AOEs and also ensuring no one would die in the arena. This time I was in charge of keeping the wyvern and BST pet off of the Bards as they kept them slept. The TT petrified the BLMs right at the start, which meant it took a bit longer to get him dead. The kite support people missed the memo on the kiting changes, so at one point I dumped a Cure IV on one of the NINs who'd dropped under 200 HP, which meant he was no longer kiting. We didn't even get the MR on this round. So we wiped, and decided to abandon the attempt and try again.

The third fight went extremely well. We'd learned from our other attempts, and very nearly even killed the GK before wiping. I think we would have if the person who'd had hate had brought him back to the arena when he was supposed to. For this fight, I was again on pet duty, but I also stuck close to the BLMs and helped keep them alive. We all died in safe places, reraised, unweakened, and took out the remaining three Ark Angels, without too many casualties in the process. Everyone ran off to the Palace to get their earrings, and great joy was felt within the alliance.

Many thanks to Killarutaru for gathering us all together, and to Djnem for taking charge and telling us what to do. And thanks to everyone who participated. I didn't write down everyone's name, so I won't try to list them from memory and leave someone out.

I picked the Suppanomimi over the Knightly Earring, since it's really unique in what it does for you. Even if I'm not dual weilding, it still gives me an extra 5 points of sword skill, which is very nice. It's definitely for when I'm in merit parties rather than tanking in Dynamis or Limbus, but I don't need the shield skill from the Knightly earring, since it's only a bit better than the buckler earring, and I already have other earrings I prefer for tanking (Hades +1, Cassie, and hopefully soon, Ethereal). With my normal tanking setup, I already have 313 shield skill: 276 base, +8 from merits, +10 from my boxer's mantle, +12 from my Gallant Leggings +1, and +7 from my shield torque, without wearing my Buckler Earring. At one time, I thought the Beastly Earring would be my choice, since I thought Grym and I would be BST75s, but that's never going to happen. The Suppanomimi just makes the most sense, much like the Sattva Ring made the most sense for me from CoP.




New title: Pentacide Perpetrator