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