Eternal Mercenary

The August 27th update brought us, amongst other things, the completion of the Treasures of Aht Urhgan missions. Lucrezia organized ClanBEB's runs for the actual fights last Saturday, so we all got our cutscenes done beforehand. The first fight (for Mission 42, Path of Darkness) takes place at the Nyzul Isle staging point, and you have Naja Salaheem helping out. The fight has three phases, the first against Amnaf (a Blue Mage) and 4 single gears. You have to kill all the gears and get Amnaf down to about 50%, when she warps ahead. The second phase has Amnaf summoning 4 triple gears, and again you have to defeat the gears and get her down to half health. The third time, Amnaf has changed into a Soulflayer, but doesn't summon any more gears.

We ended up failing the first attempt, but learned enough to modify our strategy to win the next two fights (we had 7 people, so 5 of us had to repeat the fight). Lucrezia would flee into aggro Amnaf, and kite everything while the rest of us assisted Naja, fighting whatever she decided to fight. The Soulflayer itself was pretty resistant to physical and magical damage, but wasn't a very tough fight.

After a couple more cutscenes, we were ready for the final battle, for Mission 44, Nashmeira's Plea. Yobun had to leave after the earlier fight, so we just had a single team: Lucrezia (THF), Ranzz (RDM), Anastasia (BLM), Ryken (MNK), Goto (WHM) and Tsakiki (PLD). This fight is also in the Nyzul Isle staging point, so travel was a lot easier than it was for some of the earlier missions. For this fight, you first face Raubahn, another Blue Mage, and Razfahd. The BLU reraises twice, so you have to kill him three times, while Razfahd gives up after he's at half health and then you have to fight Alexander, a very large automaton with lots of annoying, powerful, AOE attacks. This part of the fight was actually tough enough to be quite satisfying when we won. We wiped, reraised, and finished him off with little time to spare.

We headed back to Whitegate for a few more "missions", bringing the storyline to completion. I found myself getting a bit misty-eyed at a couple of the scenes. Our group picked out our shiny new rings from Nashmeira (I took Ulthalam's Ring, which has Accuracy +4 and Attack +4, plus STR+4, DEX+4, and Regen in Assault and Salvage), then got our Glory Crown back from Naja.




New titles: Endymion Paratrooper, Naja's Comrade-in-arms, Nashmeira's Loyalist, Preventer of Ragnarok, Champion of Aht Urhgan, Eternal Mercenary