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.