Apollyon Ravaged!

TheNewUltimates finally beat Proto-Omega, on our third attempt. We've tried different approaches on our previous two runs, and we learned quite a bit from those frustrating experiences, but the standard strategies don't fit for our shell. Lucrezia worked really hard to put together a strategy that would work with the jobs we had available. Rather than wait for that perfect moment when everyone was actually available for a run (we've got several members "on leave" at the moment), Luc recruited two former members of TNU, two members of TU, and one friend from BEB (who we'd like to have join TNU, but he can't commit to two nights a week). So on Thursday night, we ended up going in with three parties, with 17 people total (I may not have the sub job right for everyone):

NIN/WAR Lucrezia
PLD/NIN Tsakiki
WHM/BLM Anrita
RDM/DRK Morgoth
BRD/WHM Ranzz
BLM/NIN Reefermadness

BLM/NIN Fliggity
BLM/NIN Darsonavin
RDM/DRK Elbryan
SMN/WHM Ardan
SMN/WHM Meshe
SMN/WHM Thom

DRG/WAR Venn
MNK/DRK Ryken
MNK/SAM Itera
MNK/SAM Tye
SAM/THF Helldam

Luc's plan was to have the tanks establish hate, with the help of 300% TP Spirits Within, then the SMNs would be the primary damage dealers for the bulk of the fight. They were to use either physical or magical rage bloodpacts every minute, depending on which form Proto-Omega was in (one form is magic resistant, the other is resistant to physical damage). The BLMs and RDMs were on a Stun cycle, along with nuking (and refresh). The BLMs were also on gunpod duty, with no tank helping them out, which was one of the "troubling" aspects of the strategy beforehand, but was a non-issue in the fight. The BRD would keep double march on the tanks, and double ballad on the tank party mages, and the WHM would do everything she could to keep the tanks alive and hasted.

Meanwhile, the melee were to sit on the sidelines, figuratively eating popcorn and watching the show as they would boost, meditate, or sleep for tp. At 25%, when Proto-Omega goes into a rage mode, they were to rush in, unleash the dogs of war, and demolish Proto-Omega. The main reasoning for this was to reduce the amount of TP gained by Proto-Omega, which would mean fewer nasty attacks on the tanks, and it would also be relatively hate-free, allowing the tanks to keep Proto-Omega on a short leash. It would also keep the melee out of harm's way until we were ready for a final burst of extreme damage to get him dead as quickly as possible.

We had an uneventful trip to Apollyon, and Lucrezia made sure everyone was fully aware of the strategy. We buffed up, slept for TP, and headed into the fight. At this point, I was wearing HP gear, and with Pescatora had around 1600 HP.

Luc and I ran in, and Luc voked Proto-Omega and moved him over to where we intended to fight him. We unloaded our TP, and Luc switched to his katanas, while I swapped in my haste/enmity/shield gear. With double march, Haste, and +14% Haste from my gear, I'm pretty sure I was at the haste cap, but I didn't really check my timers, as I was too busy at the time. It was really so much better than the first time we fought Proto-Omega, when I was PLD/NIN, but we didn't have a BRD in the tank party. Flash and the two Utsusemi spells were up so quickly, it really seemed so easy to stand there, casting shadows, flashing for hate, and using my other job abilities as needed to hold/regain hate. The stun cycle helped Luc and I an awful lot, stopping TP moves, and giving us plenty of time to get shadows back up.

We decided to let Helldam come in for a big weaponskill fairly early in the fight, which is something we probably won't do next time, since he pulled hate and got killed for his efforts.

Luc and I were sharing hate quite well, with the first couple pile pitches shifting hate between us, but then Luc got killed, and it took awhile for him to get his hate level back up (a bit dangerous when fighting weakened). I believe we lost control of Proto-Omega twice during this phase, but I was able to get him back over to me with a Flash and a big cure without him flattening someone. I was really happy that I was able to straight tank the two legged phase, since I feel like things get so sloppy with kiting. We only had one gunpod ejection, which the BLMs were able to quickly defeat.

The SMNs and mages got Proto-Omega down to 25% pretty quickly, and as we were switching Ranzz over to the melee party for soul voiced attack songs, I got killed by 3 big attacks of some sort that were too quick for anyone to do much about. I was stunned at the time, and couldn't do anything myself either. But the timing worked out pretty well, since everyone jumped in for the final zerg, with the RDM/DRKs using chainspell stun, and everyone going all out. I reraised and ran over to try to help out, but my flash and invincible didn't do anything at that point, since I was starting from 0 on the hate threshold at that point. He was quickly dead, and I think the only casualty at that point was Morgoth, one of ths Chainspell-Stunners. It was so exciting for us to finally win!

It's so very satisfying when a plan comes together, and everyone works well together as a team. We're so much greater as a whole than simply the sum of our parts, and we all need each other to succeed.

The treasure chest contained Omega's Eye and Omega's Tail. Based on our lotting rules, the Eye went to Lucrezia (main lot THF) and the Tail went to Venn (main lot DRG), so we finally have two shiny red pieces of Homam in our shell. And hopefully we'll be able to repeat our success, and get to the point where we can say "lolOmega" like people who are in shells that have long ago mastered Proto-Omega. Then we'll have to muster up the courage to try killing Proto-Ultima for the mages' fancy red gear. Even the lolOmega people say Proto-Ultima is a bitch.

I couldn't take any screenshots during the fight, so I've borrowed Thom's to illustrate this entry. Note the tiny spec in front of Proto-Omega in the top shot. That's Kiki, doing what she loves to do best, tanking mobs 20 times her size. :-)

New title: Apollyon Ravager

WHM Ready for the Jungles! (20-24)

I managed to get two parties for my White Mage over the weekend, and got from level 20 to level 24, so next time I take it out, I'll probably just head to Kazham.

My party on Saturday had a THF, SAM, WAR, SMN, and another DD that I can't remember, and me as WHM. I had a really hard time keeping up with the curing on my own, and the little Summoner didn't help as much as he should, and ended up getting kicked out of the party after repeatedly failing to respond to requests from the leader. I ran into the leader the next day in Lower Delkfutt's Tower, and apparenty the same SMN had been kicked out of that party as well, by someone else. I kinda of feel sorry for the little noob, since he just doesn't quite seem to get how to work with a party. Even when he wasn't helping out with healing, he didn't even have his avatars out, so he was kind of just standing around. But he seemed like a nice enough person, and wanted to be helpful - he just didn't quite know how to do it.

We started out near Pug Alley, but there were two other parties there, so we were closer to the cliff. We ended up heading into Lower Delkfutt's Tower. I had a hard time with hate, partly because either the WAR, who was the lowest level in the group, was tanking, or the SAM was tanking, and they took lots of damage and needed lots of healing. When I hit Level 21 and had Regen available, it did help a lot, but not nearly enough, especially when fighting the low ITs. We ended up disbanding with me just 80 points away from level 23, as I had to get ready for Dynamis. I'd agreed to stay until the SAM got a level, so was already past my "cut off" time, so I didn't mention how close I was before we disbanded.

The next morning, I did my weekly chocobo race before the Conquest Tally, and used the scroll on my WHM to nudge me up to level 23. Later that afternoon, I put my flag up in Jeuno, and got an invite to a party as a "replacement". The invite came from a WHM, so I assumed I was replacing him, but I actually replaced the PLD. Apparently the WHM had decided it was just to hard to have a single healer in Qufim (an opinion with which I heartily agree), and so we were a WHM-greedy party and had two. The party had 3xSAM, a WAR, and 2xWHM. When the WAR hit 24, he left, and was replaced with a MNK, who was nominated "tank" based on his "high defense" of 113. I put up Cocoon and pointed out my defense was 151, but no one suggested I tank...

The party worked quite well. I sort of did the RDM role, and was using paralyze, slow, and dia on the mobs, while hitting people with regen, bar spells, and protectra/shellra. I also helped dump cures when damage got too high, but the other WHM did pull hate a lot more than me. At least when I pulled hate, I usually had Metallic Body up, so I didn't take much damage. The other WHM and I worked pretty well together, without really discussing it, and we rarely negated each other spells, so it was pretty nice. It's too bad that we felt like we had to have the two of there in the party.

We ended up moving into Lower Delkfutt's for awhile, and everyone got a level before we disbanded. I now could have Drain from subbing BLM, but I still think BLU will be better until level 30 (when I'd get Elemental Seal from /BLM).

Salvage Blues

The UltimatesForever has consistently been doing Salvage every Friday evening, with anywhere from 9 to 18 people. We've mostly been doing the Bhaflau Remnants, and have gotten a lot of the level 15 pieces that drop there, but we've only seen one piece for the Ares set (Enyo's Leggings). It dropped with less than a minute to go, and we had a few dead people who couldn't lot or pass, so it was lost when we were booted out of the Remnants. SquareEnix really has to change that aspect of the game - force the treasure to drop just before the alliance gets booted out, based on the lots/passes already done on the loot. No one in the shell has got more than 1 piece towards any of the final pieces, but two of the Usukane lotters have their level 15 body piece in addition to their level 15 hands, so they're "further" along. The body pieces are dropped from an NM Flan in Arrapago Remnants that we used Bhaflau Cards to spawn.

We seem to do a lot better with smaller groups of people, since we all get geared up pretty quickly, but other people seem to think we need to have a full alliance of 18 people to do better at getting gear drops. I feel like when we have more than 12 people we use up so much of our limited time trying to get everyone some of their gear and abilities unlocked that we don't have enough time to fight NMs that drop different gear pieces than the normal mobs do.

Back in May, before they added the starter chest in the June update, we had one run with no MNKs, and it was a dismal dismal failure. I think we killed one of the Bifrons, but had people die, reraise and die again before getting reraise up. With no magic to raise people, no way to do enough damage to any other mob, we had no choice but to give up. Adding the starter chest has made it so much easier to get started. We always get at least a weapon, subjob, and job abilities cell for the main PLD, and magic for the main WHM. Everything just those few things make it a breeze to start in on getting more cells for everyone.

We've gone after the Long Bowed Chariot, the megaboss of Bhaflau Remnants three times now (I missed the second one), and they haven't gone very well. Granted, this is supposed to be the toughest mob in all of Salvage. Albany keeps having us try different strategies and maybe we'll figure it out some day.

We organized our cell distribution so that we get the "main" person in each category get well-equipped before letting the bottom feeders get the leftover scraps. We all /random before the run, and from that have the main PLD, the main WHM, the main RDM, the main BLM, and the main melee.

I hate being the bottom lotter when we have a lot of people. There have been runs where I didn't get a weapon, a subjob, job abilities, magic or much armor until the last 10 minutes of the 100 minute run. Since I have no H2H skill and hit for 0 when I don't actually miss, there's no point being engaged with the mob, where I'm likely to get hit with an AOE and just waste MP that could be used to cure someone who's actually doing damage. Without magic, I can't help cure or flash. Without a subjob, I have no provoke. One run, I had job abilities unlocked, so I'd just run up, use Rampart for a bit of a boost for the main PLD, then run back out of AOE range. It seems so utterly pointless.

I'm getting a bit discouraged with Salvage, and often feel like I should withdraw from the group. I don't feel very useful, even when I win the lot for main tank. Other shells seem to favor MNK tanks, and don't bring along stinky PLDs. The cells I get as main tank could be going to a MNK, who would do more damage, and yes, maybe they'd take a bit more damage than a PLD, but most things in Salvage don't hit that hard, and if they get magic unlocked and sub Ninja, they don't take much damage at all. We'll see how things progress.

Leveling: White Magery (17 -> 20)

This past weekend, I decided to dust off my White Mage gear and see if I could get a party. This was partly because I was able to pick up the three main crag teleport scrolls for a small fraction of what I'd sold mine for over two years ago, when I was absolutely positive I'd never level White Mage. My husband laughed at me for buying them, since my WHM has been leveling at a glacial pace, so I figured I should hop to it and just get it to 37 and be done with it.

Saturday afternoon, I put my flag up, and used the OP teleport to go to the Dunes, and I stood by the Outpost and waited. And waited some more. After about an hour, I decided to head back to Windurst to grab my Signal and Tactics pearls to head to Buburimu to solo with my NPC instead. Of course, as soon as I got to my moghouse, I got invited to replace a WHM in a party back in the Dunes. They were fighting on Goblin Hill, but we moved to the Secret Beach as soon as I arrived. The party had a MNK, WAR, BLU, BLM, DRK, and WHM. The WAR left and was replaced by another BLM, and later when the original BLM left, a NIN joined. The party had a WHM power-leveler, but as PL'd parties go, it wasn't so bad. People mostly did their jobs, except for me - I pretty much played RDM-lite, buffing the party and enfeebling the mobs with dia, paralyze, slow, silence, and blind. The PL asked me if I had healing magic capped, showing some concern for the poor little WHM at least. It was nice being able to enfeeble though, it really helps the party. I generally can't spare the MP for too many enfeebles when I'm trying to keep the party alive.

Having a PL does make it really hard for me how to toe the hate line as a WHM, since as a career PLD, I use Cures as one of my main hate tools. It's hard for me to learn how to keep a party alive without pulling hate if I have someone else doing that for me. But since my intentions for WHM are to use it as a sub for PLD in certain situations, it's not a long term issue. I do try to hold off using Cure II until just after a provoke, but some times I don't feel I have that luxury as people are getting hit hard, and of course the mob comes running after me. Regen should help a lot when I hit level 21. The party broke up after one person hit 20 and two others decided to leave as well, so I headed back to Windurst to get ready for Dynamis, with my WHM at 19.

On Sunday, I decided to try WHM/BLU to see if Cocoon and Metallic Body might help, and I found that I was able to get a decent MND boost over /BLM, with just 5 less MP. Losing BLM spells at that level is really immaterial too, especially if there's already a BLM in the party. I headed to Jeuno and threw up my flag. I got an invite pretty quickly, as the first invite for a new party. The guy quickly filled the party, but one of the members was a linkshell mate of his: a level 19 Monk who was still in the Dunes and didn't know his way to Jeuno. So I switched to my PLD/RDM and met him at the Dem crag to walk to Jeuno with him. I kept him sneaked and invisible most of the way, and we avoided any aggro.

Our party consisted of a NIN, BLM, MNK, DRK, WAR, WHM, and we headed up to fight worms. We added crabs and bats to the mix, and things mostly went pretty well. I really do like using BLU as a sub - stoneskin and cocoon both saved my butt a couple of times. After awhile, a WHM73 friend of one of the party members came along and I got relegated to enfeebling once again, though this PL was a bit more haphazard than the one in the Dunes, so I did have to throw out cures on and off. We moved to the ice pond, since the banshees wouldn't be a problem with the PL. I have to say I absolutely hate running from worm to worm at the ice pond. The parties get so uncoordinated, and everyone thinks they should be the "puller", and multiple mobs get engaged, usually meaning disaster for the party. And as a mage job needing to rest for MP, it's just for hard to have to keep getting up and scurrying after the melee.

This party wasn't quite that bad, but when the PL had to go AFK for a bit, the party kept going at things as though I had the resources that a WHM73 has at their disposal, leaving me lower on MP than I would have liked when they started in on a new fight. The BLM decided to melee and was getting badly damaged, so I had to hit him with a couple of cures (I don't mind pulling hate on worms, with barstonra, the spells don't hit so hard). Suddenly, a crab comes tearing over to smack me, which I didn't understand until I later scrolled back in the chat log and saw the meleeing BLM had decided to use a -ga spell on the worm the party was fighting, and hit a crab. Since I cured the BLM, the crab got quite angry with me. The crab killed me pretty quickly, but the rest of the party managed to survive.

The BLM decided he'd been partying too much that day and disbanded the party. The PL came back and tractored me out of harm's way, raised me, and waited around for my weakness to wear to hit me with a Cure before I could get blood aggro, which I thought was pretty nice. The Monk and I snuck back to Jeuno (I had hit level 20 and now have Sneak on my WHM), where he looked for a new party while I got ready for Limbus.

I think I'll see if I can keep my WHM gear on Kiki rather than mules so I can easily look for parties when I have free time in the game. As soon as someone needs me to help them with something on another job or with a level cap, I'll have to swap stuff over to mules, which will make it harder to quickly get ready for white magery excitement.

Recent Adventures in Limbus

As with Dynamis, it's been quite awhile since my last Limbus update, when I'd reached the 40-run milestone. Since then, we've been doing quite well with the normal runs, and not so well with the special runs. We've had several people join the shell, and for a brief shining moment, we had nearly full alliances for serveral runs. Unfortunately real life interfered for some people, and we're back to 10-12 people for runs on a normal night.

I still love Limbus, and have a great deal of fun on (most of) our runs, but without a consistently large group, we're just not going to get enough tries with Proto-Omega and start to see the big payoffs from all of our work (not to mention Proto-Ultima, which we don't even want to attempt until we've beaten Proto-Omega a few times). I love the variety of the different zones, and the beat-the-clock excitement on a few of them. And some of the bosses in Apollyon are just so much fun to tank. Two zones routinely give us trouble though: Temenos N, with the beastmen (the Tonberries are such a pain if someone gets aggro when we're trying to sneak through) and Apollyon NE, where the Gigants on the second to last floor so often wipe us out. But the frustration on those makes them that much better when we win.

We had a "metal chip run" in early July, again trying CS Apollyon. We thought we had a better plan than our first time, but sleep was resisted too much and things didn't go so well.

After we'd built up our forces with Fliggity, Darsonavin, Theodoric, Frostwitch, Jarbit, and Isengard, we tried another Proto-Omega run last month. We ended up with 17 people in the zone, but Lucrezia's plan went awry from the start when (one of) the melees didn't allow the tanks to get hate set up before getting the weapon running all over the place. We had 2 NINs and 2 PLDs, but we just couldn't get hate under control. I was on gunpod patrol, and I really should have gone as PLD/NIN - those things are slow and hit really hard. I didn't much like PLD/NIN on our first run, but perhaps with more practice and a Bard in the tank party, it will go a lot better. Hopefully we can try again in the near future.

My latest Limbus excitement was that I finally got the 75 Ancient Beastcoins I needed to pick up my Brutal Earring from Sagheera. It grants the wearer Double Attack if they don't have it, and enhances the effect if they do (by being either WAR or /WAR). That's a nice addition to my DD gear, and will pair well with my Suppanomimi for when I'm more interested in smacking things rather than tanking.

Quests: Like the Wind (Boneyard Gully ENM)

Have I mentioned that Erock came back to the game, after being gone for over a year? Sort of? Well, he did. And since he gave away most of his stuff when he quit, he's been trying to rebuild his gear for both WAR and RDM. Towards this end, he's needed help with some things like the "Like the Wind" ENM to try to get a Maneater. He'd manage to get one, but since ENMs are a quick and easy way to make some potential gil, he asked Itera and I to go one night.

It's actually pretty fun - there's one Eft to fight, Race Runner, and he tears around the area. The challenge is to get enough hate to have him stand still for a bit so you can beat him up. We got a Galateia cloth, which translated to 55k gil, and 2000 exp for our efforts.

Since then we've done it several more times, but haven't got anything worth more than 10k. It's still nice getting the 2000 exp/limit points though. It feels like we had better luck with the drops in the Antlion ENM, but I don't think we could manage that one with just the three of us.

Dynamis: Dynamis-Qufim Interlopers!

It's been about three months since my last Dynamis update, so here's a bit of what's been going on in The Ultimates. We've been doing lots of runs, both farming and flag, and have been getting lots of relic drops for people along the way. We frequently lose our scheduled zone on Saturday nights to Japanese shells doing their early morning Sunday runs, but no matter where we end up, people get relics and/or flags, so it's all good. Plus it's just really fun when we can roll through the cities with 40 people.

We've been coming up a bit short on members for runs lately, partly because a lot of people are taking breaks from the game, but also from general real-life activities and a few just moving on to other shells. So we're under a big push for recruiting new members right now. If you're on Lakshmi and looking for a nice bunch of people to do Dynamis with, please apply at the TU forums. We're currently taking applications from all level 75 jobs except for Summoner. Our runs are 8:30 PM Eastern on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

A couple of weeks ago, Venn promoted 5 of us to sackholder, since it's a lot of work running 3 linkshells, and his management team was pretty small. Albany, Allia, Fliggity, Lucrezia and I are now sackholders of The Ultimates and the sister linkshells that we're already in. We've had a few meetings to try to get responsibilities spread out amongst the group, and come up with ways to improve linkshell morale and increase attendance. Venn needs to have more leaders in place, since he's starting law school in a few weeks, and won't be able to spend as much time with FFXI any more. At least he'd better not, if he means to do well in school.

We recently had a flag run for Dynamis-Beaucedine, but managed to get three drops (MNK, BLM, BRD) as well as 2 100 pieces. We even skipped the Orcs for time. Itera was the only lotter for his Melee Cyclas, and now is 5/5 on his Monk Relic armor! He was a very happy Galka. We thought we'd come back in and farm after the we'd killed the Megaboss, but the dragons were still wandering back to Fei'Yin and killed us all after we'd reentered. We never had troubles with them before, so that was unexpected.

Our practice of having the PLDs /random for main and sub tank responsibilities has mostly been working out pretty well. There's this myth in the LS that Kiki always wins, but I think we've kept it spread around pretty well. It seems like there will be a few times in a row that I'll win the lot, but then I'll go quite a few runs as backup or just a kiter. Lumikumi wasn't able to make it for quite awhile because of work, but he's back in action now. Jarbit (and Frostwitch) are currently on a break, but I hope they'll be back soon. Amyalfrodo has real-life conflicts frequently as well, but we always have at least 2 PLDs show up. There are quite a few others in the LS with PLD at 75, so we could always have them show as PLD if necessary.

One of the most exciting runs in the past few months was our third (since I joined the shell) Qufim run. We did two runs in July. The first was with 30 people in the zone, and it went really well, but we ran out of time when we messed up the pull on the megaboss. However, Lucrezia and I learned a lot from that failure, and we went back two weeks later and had what was nearly a picture perfect run, except for the part of not quite killing the megaboss. Lucrezia unlocked our subjobs within a minute of entering the zone, and we quickly worked our way through the zone - killing some Quadavs, the Water Elemental, the Kraken, then more Quadavs as we made our way towards Behemoth's Dominion. We killed the Rocs, the goblins, and the Golem, then headed out to get the Ice Elemental before taking on Antaeus. Lucrezia had us approach from the side (we'd gone in from the front the last time), while everyone was camped back in the corner. I'd brought my Powder Boots for the pull, an d Luc ran in and aggro'd everything, while I grabbed Antaeus and headed back to camp with him. I think our main problem is we had all the mages too close, and a few of them got killed by one of his AOEs before they'd even got a spell off. But we ended up getting him down to just a sliver of health before we wiped. It was very exciting, and very encouraging for future runs.

Even better was our fourth Qufim run this past Saturday, with 34 or 35 people in the zone. We won! Hurray! We got our subjobs before we got to the Quadavs, and did well until someone got aggro'd by the Nightmare Snolls on the way to the Rocs. We quickly killed them off though, and ended up doing better on the Golem than we had previously. We did the Antaeus pull with 10 minutes left on the hourglass, and this time the BLMs lived through it, and we beat the Gigas with not all that many deaths! We were all very excited to have won, and went on to try to farm for the next hour, but we lost a lot of time wiping on the Nightmare Diremites (they just kept multiplying), and ended up with no drops for the night. In addition to the diremites, we cleaned up the snolls and killed some Orcs as well.

I think we're going to try to do a few Valkurm runs in the near future, and finally get the win there as well. It will be exciting to finally be able to try Dynamis-Tavnazia.

New Title: Dynamis-Qufim Interloper