Dynamis-Valkurm Interlopers!

TheUltimates had a very exciting time last night, when we finally beat Dynamis-Valkurm. This was either our 3rd or 4th run since I joined the linkshell in January, and the previous runs have always been unhappy events. Lucrezia modified the strategy a bit, and made perfect pulls up to Cirrate Christelle, the Mega Boss, leading to a wonderful win. Instead of sending 3 runners out for each of the Nightmare Flies, Luc pulled each in sequence. I shadowed him just in case of links, and it was interesting to see just how far away the flies could be. He pulled the fly from the northeast first, bringing it back to the outpost as people were still in the process of entering. He and I immediately headed to the southeast for the next fly, while Lumikumi led the team to Selbina when the first fly was dead. Luc brought the second fly back to them, then he and I headed to the western fly, with Lumi taking the team to the eastern edge of the Valkurm Emperor's beach after the second fly was dead. The pulls were completely clean, and the group dispatched the flies with ease.

We rejoiced to have our subjobs back and moved on to the Fairy Ring. Phelan's RNG headed into the Fairy Ring cave after Lucrezia made a sacrifice pull on all the Yagudos to give Phelan a safe passage. Phelan used Shadowbind on the funguar and ran back to where we were all waiting on the beach. Lumikumi, Amyalfrodo and I shared hate and seemed to keep it on us pretty well. The only death was Amyalfrodo. It was hard to believe we'd already made it past the Fairy Ring, with only 2 deaths (one intentional), and not a single bit of aggro.

With plenty of time on the clock, we headed east to get Nant'ina, a Goobbue NM, from Highland's zone. The group had to fight several Quadavs and statues to clear Luc's path to the NM, but nothing gave us any trouble. We thought we'd given them enough to keep busy while Luc and I skirted past several Manticores to get the NM, but it's such a long pull that they were impatiently waiting for more things to kill before we got back to them.

Now that the Mega Boss had been weakened by killing the Fairy Ring and Nant'ina, we headed over to the Selbina gate, gathered in our appointed spots near the Mega Boss (tanks with their backs to the gate, support mages to the tanks left, damage mages a bit north of the support mages, melee behind the malboro). We buffed up, some slept for TP, and we cut loose. The actual start of the fight was a little bit chaotic, as Lumikumi was counting down from 5, and the Malboro went red when he was at 3, so someone jumped the gun. We had quite a few deaths during the fight, but I think it was only around a third of the alliance. We had to immediately kill the two Nightmare Malboros that were spawned when we engaged the Mega Boss, then we got everyone on their feet and everyone got their Dynamis - Valkurm Sliver and danced around happily, basking in the moment of triumph.

We had about 70 minutes left on the clock for farming, and we were pretty lucky with the drops. We got two Cleric Belts, a Warrior's Mask -1, and a Warrior's Stone. Meshe won the first belt, while Fliggity was blessed by Altana, and won the three other items. He's now 6/6 on WHM and WAR relic, the lucky bastard!

Some of the pulls after the Mega Boss can get pretty messy, but we didn't have a lot of deaths, and pretty much just mowed through the mobs. We fought mostly Manticores, Hippogryphs, and Cactuars, with a few Sheep thrown in for good measure. Unbelievably, I survived the night without a single death (I was backup tank, so was main tanking whenever Lumikumi got killed). The lag was absolutely wretched, especially on the Nightmare Cactuar pulls. My screen froze so badly several times that I thought my PS2 was crashing.

We now have a bunch of people with access to Dynamis-Tavnazia, but I'm not sure when we'll be trying that. There's a limit of 18 people in that zone, so ideally we'd have 36 people with access and go in on a Saturday night in two waves (so the three day wait doesn't interfere with our Wednesday night runs). We'll have to revisit Buburimu and Qufim to get more people their slivers for access. I messed up the Mega Boss pull on our last Qufim run, spoiling the flag chance for a few people. I was a bit emotionally distracted at the time, but shouldn't have let that get in the way of doing my job.

We've been having some pretty good runs in general over the past month or so. We completely cleared Bastok before the Mega Boss one night, and that was exciting, and another night in Windurst, we just pulled from the Death House and killed them all while working our way through the trigger NMs. It sure made it easier to set up camp for the BLM and SMN trigger NMs.

For awhile there, the linkshell myth was that Kiki always wins (drops, main tank), but lately it's been Lumikumi who always wins. He's been main tanking quite a bit, and on a recent rare farming run in the Glacier, he won the covetted Valor Breeches. It was nice to see them drop! We got further on that farming run than we ever had before too, so that was fun.

We've been having troubles farming Xarcabard some nights, mostly because of a lack of tanks on a particular run. We just need to have more on some of those pulls. We do so much better there when we have at least 3 PLDs and 3 NINs. I think we'll be ready to try the Dynamis Lord again soon. I'd really love to see us beat him!

New Title: Dynamis-Valkurm Interloper