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