Orastery Woes

After finally getting Ground Strike, the quested weaponskill for great sword, in March, I've been working on raising my club skill to 230 so that I could pick up the quest for Black Halo, the quested club weaponskill. I used some of my Saturday afternoons and Tuesday evenings for this, which meant I neglected my Campaign duties, but with all the scheduled events I have, I don't have much time for all the other things I'd like to do, so I have to pick and choose.

I'd already had it around 168 from messing around with it over the years, so I started out with the handy Windurst Walls entrance to Toraimorai Canal. As PLD/RDM with phalanx and regen on, I could walk away from the game and leave Kiki fighting Impish Bats without me paying attention. One really nice thing about leveling club is that I still have my shield on, and shield skill really helps Paladins an awful lot.

The next skillup spot was the Robber Crabs on the lower level of the Boyahda Tree. These are still easy enough for phalanx/regen/not-really-paying-attention fighting, and have the very nice side benefit of dropping coffer keys. Every half hour or so, I could take a little break and run around looking for treasure coffers, netting 10-13k gil from each. :-)

After gettting club skill to around 200, I had to move up to the DC-T Steelshells on the top level, since my skill level was getting too high to get reasonable skillups on the Robber Crabs. It was no longer the carefree task it had been on easy mobs, especially when I had a Tough Steelshell to smack. In order to conserve crabs, I would fight the one at the zone to the Cloister of Storms, and I would zone when I had it down to a sliver of health. That way it would despawn when I zoned, and a replacement would repop within a minute. If I had killed it, it would be 16 minutes for the next spawn, and I would have to go find another crab to fight. If there are other groups working off latents, skilling up, or Beastmasters leveling, the Steelshells can get pretty scarce at times.

Depending on the level of the crabs, I'd either wear my DD gear or my "turtle" gear, and I'd keep Phalanx and Stoneskin up. Stoneskin would usually get used up about the time Flash was up, so it was relatively easy to get Stoneskin back up with the help of Flash. On Tough crabs, I'd usually end up using Chivarly in the middle of the fight to recover 400-465 MP, but it still was pretty easy fighting these.

One evening, a Mithra WAR/NIN when flying past me into the Cloister, with an angry Steelshell hot on her tail. She came back out just after her attacker despawns, and knelt to heal. I tossed a Cure IV on her as I was working on my own crab, and she asked to team up. I hesitated momentarily, since I don't like to spend my skillup time healing other people, but since she was working on club skill herself, it seemed likely I could hold hate, so I teamed up with her.

Turned out she was less than 1 point to cap on club, then switched to her great sword. She also neglected to mention that she'd wanted to work on parrying skillups as well, so instead of just having someone lightly rapping on "my" crab with a club, not interfering with the rythym that works so well for me soloing, I now had to deal with someone using provoke to pull hate off of me, along with berserked greatsword weaponskills. She didn't keep her shadows up either, and took so very much more damage than I did with phalanx up. So my last hour of "skillups" netted me 0.1 skillup and I spent most of my time curing her and resting for MP. She didn't even pull either. Nothing like being treated as though I was someone's personal Soothing Healer NPC... It was a good reminder of why I prefer solo skillups - or at least self-sufficient skillup partners.

On May 5th, I finally hit 230 in skill, and headed back to Windurst to pick up the Orastery Woes quest and get my Club of Trials from Kuroido-Moido. I figured it was best for me to try to fight things that would give me club skillups (PLDs have an A- skill in club, which caps at 269), and since I needed an 108-Knot Quipu from DC Yagudos in Sauromogue Champaign [S] (for the quest, Knot Quite There), I decided to give that a try. It took me a couple of sessions, but I finally got the drop, and had some skillups and plenty of weaponskills in the meantime. The BLM Yagudos there are a bit deadly, but there's a handy Pixie patrolling the area, which helped a lot when I was fighting those.

Since the Steelshells are so much easier to solo, I finished off both my trial club's latent and capped my club skill over another three days in the Boyahda Tree. I even had Balu-Falu join me for a bit. The Haste was certainly handy, and he needs to get some exp once in awhile. I teamed up briefly with a NIN/DNC who had 4 levels to go on getting her Dagger skill to 230 to pick up the quest for Evisceration. She and I were a compatible duo, and both benefited from the other's abilities, so teaming up isn't always a bad thing...

I finished my trial weapon before I capped club skill, which surprised me. I also thought I was keeping good track of the points, but I was off by about 30. Maybe my skillchains with Balu-Falu counted. I headed back to Windurst, and turned in my Club of Trials, and asked the linkshell for help with the WSNM - Eldhrimnir, a magic pot in Ro'Maeve.

Serenity, Ranzz and Erock offered to help me, so we met up in the Sanctuary of Zi'Tah, Serenity as SMN/WHM, Ranzz as RDM/WHM, Erock as WAR/NIN, and me as PLD/WAR. We made our way to the SE corner of Ro'Maeve, and killed an Apocalyptic Weapon that was near the spawn point for Eldhrimnir. I ran over and touched the ??? spot, and the pot spawned and I ran back to the group. We killed it fairly quickly, though we did aggro a Cursed Puppet in the process. While the others killed that, I ran back to check the ??? spot and obtained the Annals of Truth for Kuroido-Moido.

I hurried back to Windurst to complete the quest, and thanks to my helpers, I can now use Black Halo. It seems to be quite powerful, and as with all of the quested weaponskills, it has a more interesting animation than the "normal" ones. Kiki does a cute little spin as she gets in her extra hits with the club. I'm still not sure how much I'm really going to be using it, but I like having the ability there for when it makes sense to use it.