Ground Strike!

I decided that I needed to make a concerted effort to break the latent on my (Great) Sword of Trials, if for no other reason than to free up the inventory space, since seriously, when do I actually use Great Sword? But my skill level is capped, and the quest (Inheritance) was open, so it really must be done.

For quested weaponskills, you are given a trial weapon of the type for the specific skill, and you need to perform weaponskills on mobs that are Easy Prey or higher. The mobs in Besieged count for this as well. You need to get 300 points to break the latent, and get 1 point for solo weaponskills and 2 to 5 for opening or closing various levels of skillchains.

I picked up the quest in November, which was a bit more recent than I remembered, but it was the week before the expansion came out, and I've been spending all of my spare time in campaign battles. Since you can't break latents in campaign, I wasn't getting very far on the task. I'd done a few random Besiegeds, but at the rate I was going, I wouldn't be done for a few years. Since I hate bugging people to help me with stuff like this, I geared up my PLD/RDM and took Balu-Falu to The Boyhada Tree. My trusty NPC kept me hasted, and we killed dozens of Robber Crabs, but I quickly realized I really didn't need his help at all. With Phalanx up, the Robber Crabs were frequently hitting me for 0, and I never came close to running out of MP.

After Balu-Falu called it a day, I decided to head up to the upper level and see if I could get any parrying skillups from the Even Match/Tough Steel Shells up there. I'm between 0.8 and 1.0 points off my parrying skill cap, and I'd love to finally have that done. I switched to sword and shield, used my Parrying Torque and Boxer's Mantle to enhance my parrying skill, put on my most defensive gear, and pulled a Tough crab to the Cloister of Storms zone for a quick escape if things got bad. I was actually surprised at how easily I handled the Tough. I was able to get Stoneskin up reliable with flash, and with Phalanx and shield blocks, I avoided a lot of damage. I did use Chivalry during the fight and had to rest for mp before pulling the next crab, but still it was a bit surprising to me. Alas, despite frequent parrying, I got no skillups on several crabs, and I headed back down to the Robber Crabs to work on my trial greatsword a bit more before heading home.

A couple days later, I headed back to the Tree to see if I could finish the latent, since it had to be close at that point. Sure enough, after two or three crabs, the latent was gone, and I was finished! Hurray! I headed upstairs to try for parrying again, but after two crabs and no skillups, I decided I'd try Pucks in the Den of Rancor. This was actually much more exciting than the crabs, since I couldn't keep stoneskin up at all, and by the time my fights with Toughs that yielded 180 exp points, I had no mp, my HP was below 400, and I was poisoned to boot. I parried a lot more with them as well, but still no skillups. After 3 Pucks, I decided it wasn't worth the effort, and I'll get my capped parrying some day in Limbus, Dynamis, Nyzul Isle, or Salvage. :-)

I took my trial greatsword back to Gumbah in Bastok, and he told me to head to West Altepa to obtain the Annals of Truth to prove my worth, so later that afternoon, I asked ClanBEB if anyone could help me with the WSNM for Ground Strike. Itera, Demin, and Wendell (yes! Wendell! he's back! Sort of...) all volunteered, and we met up in West Altepa. After killing the local goblins for TP, I popped the NM Tiger Maharaja. It was an "easy" fight, though both Itera and Demin used Hundred Fists at some point, and both Wendell and I were a bit low on MP when it was over. Hurray! Thanks guys! Allia had suggested that she and I could duo it as RDM/WHM and PLD/NIN, but that probably would have taken quite a bit longer.

I ran back to Bastok to give Gumbah the Annals of Truth, and he rewarded me with the knowledge of Ground Strike. I played around with it a bit in Campaign, which was fun, but as I mentioned, I'm not sure how much use it will get. In the meantime, I'll be using my Subduer when I get the chance, and one day, its latent will be broken as well.

I guess club should be the next weapon I work on capping. Again, the uses for this are a bit limited, but there are situations where something like the Templar's Mace and its increased Cure potency might make sense (main healing as a melee PLD/WHM perhaps?).

Yes, I'm still doing Salvage

I was going back through my notes to see what I should use for my next blog entry, and realized that I haven't said anything about Salvage since August. I somehow still find myself in Whitegate every Friday evening for our UltimatesForever runs, though I still haven't quite figured out why.

It seems like we've done a zillion Bhaflau runs, but so many of them are completely drop-free, and time and time again it feels like all we're doing is spending 100 minutes killing mobs to see if we can put all our armor back on. We've made a few attempts on Long Bow Chariot, but have yet to defeat it. As for the other zones, we did a bunch of Silver Sea runs in the fall, but Zhayolm and Arrapago runs have been less frequent.

The most exciting thing really in the past 7 months was when we actually got a drop off of one of those silly Qiqirn in Arrapago Remnants. It was the level 35 piece that goes towards the Ares's Cuirass, and went to Venn. We also managed to get a drop off of the Dune Widow NM (level 35 pants for the WHM set, which went to Meshe) back in November. It's so rare for us to even get an NM out of those Ramparts, let alone get a drop from it. This past Friday, we popped the Don Porrogo NM Silver Sea, and got the level 15 Ares's body piece, so Venn's now 2/3 towards his Ares's Cuirass. We got two other pieces on this run as well, but all three of them are 100% drops from their respective mobs, so the excitement is in actually getting to and killing the mobs, rather than getting rare drops off of them.

It would be nice if we could actually manage to complete a piece, but Venn's 2/3 is the closest we've gotten, and the third piece is a possible drop of LBC, so doesn't seem likely in the near term. The more this drags out, the more convinced I've become that Salvage simply doesn't work if you only do one run a week. I really think to do it "right", you'd need a group going 5 times a week, but in order to do that, it would have to be the only thing I do. It would also be difficult to find people with the assault points to be able to do that as well. It's easy enough for me with over 27,000 points stockpiled in each of the 5 zones, but so many people seem to have barely enough for one Salvage run a week (1500 AP needed).

Some of the runs actually have been a bit of fun, but in general, it's a really frustrating event. I think it's time that I reclaimed my Friday evenings, but I don't know how to quit. As useless as I feel at times, I still feel like they do need me, but that's probably more of a "any warm body will do" issue. There are others who could tank if I wasn't there. But knowing me, I'll just keep showing up.

The Liberation of Temenos

It's been a some time since my last Limbus update, and it's a bit overdue now, since not only did we manage to finally wrest a heart from Proto-Omega (and tear off a foreleg while we were at it), we finally beat Proto-Ultima! Hurray! It wasn't pretty, but a win's a win, and it was much much better than our previous attempts. We opted for a "manaburn" strategy, and were very mage-heavy. Venn was the only non-caster in the group. Our team for the win was 2xPLD/NIN, NIN/DRK, 2xWHM, BRD, 3xRDM/DRK, 4xBLM, 3xSMN, BLU, and DRG.

The crucial Dissipation at 19% health didn't get stunned, but it didn't spell disaster for us as it usually does either. Having fewer people up close to Ultima helped enormously for the AOE attacks like Armor Buster, and we were really good about leaving the Citadel Buster target alone with Ultima. I did survive the one that hit me (lots of magic damage reduction gear), but the following attack for over 200hp knocked me out of the fray. I believe it was a DOT spell that ended up killing Ultima, but it was so exciting to finally see that evil biomechanical thing collapse to the ground. We ended up with two legs, and sadly the treasure assignment caused some drama, but hopefully we'll have more wins soon, and more mages with bits of Nashira gear.

Our chip farming runs are generally pretty mundane these days. Our attendance is somewhat variable, so some nights we'll do one zone with 16-18 people, romping through quickly, other nights we'll scarcely have enough for two successful runs, so often we will have one team of 6 sent off just for coin farming. We try to mix things up between Apollyon and Temenos, but whichever we do, someone complains about not doing the other. There's no pleasing some people!

Once in awhile, we have a particularly exciting farming run, like one recent SW Apollyon (fomor, treants, mimics, elementals). We linked nearly all of the 10 fomor on the first pull, and we wiped. Anrita had DC'd, but I'm pretty sure we still would have wiped on that. We killed just the ones we needed, took the time chest and ran up to the next floor. On the second floor, we killed just the NM treant to open the vortex, then ran up again. We had to fight 4 mimics before getting the time chest (but also managed to get items and restore chests). I think we had under 3 minutes to go when I found the time chest. We dashed up to the elementals, and had time to kill a total of 8 of them before exiting. We ended up with only 18 coins, but at least we'd got the chip.

The most fun I've had recently on a coin farming run was with a 6-man group in NW Apollyon. We had Erock as WAR/THF, Fliggity's BLM, Serenity's BLU/DNC, Anrita's WHM, Zorris' BRD, and my PLD. We killed all of the normal mobs in the zone, except for one of the wyverns, and the bosses from the first floor. We weren't careful enough around Faffy-lite, and kind of wiped, but we had plenty of time and recovered and headed up to get the baby behemoths as well. We ended up with 40 coins, which helped bulk up the coins from the Temenos chip upgrade run the other group had done. I don't think we could have beat Kaiser Behemoth with our group, but we sure had a blast with our coin farming.

In mid-January, we had an absolutely terrible Proto-Omega run, which reminded me way too much of our first attempt, but somehow we managed to win despite ourselves. We ended up with pants and boots on that run. Our next run, on Valentine's Day, was far superior. Not only was it our best performance yet (with one death - me, probably because I let myself get a bit distracted by some /tells), but we finally had the heart drop, which went to Luc for the Homam Corazza, and the second foreleg we've seen. I lotted a disappointing 282, but Toshimitsu lotted an even more disappointing 88, and I finally have my Homam Manopolas! Hurray!

Some time last month, I stockpiled enough Ancient Beastcoins for my final purchase from Sagheera, a Loquacious Earring. It seems pretty expensive for something I seem to only use for casting Utsusemi Ichi, but I'm sure I'll find more uses for it. It was nice to have in an exp party that I was in as a PLD/WHM main healer... I'll be selling my coins from here on out, which should help cover the costs of the Cosmo-Cleanse.

New Title: Temenos Liberator