The End of UltimatesForever

It's been a long time since I posted an update on Salvage. Allia ended up killing off the UltimatesForever linkshell in June, and I suppose this is as good a time as any to post my final comments on it. I actually stopped going to Salvage after our May 30th run, my 58th Salvage. It was yet another disappointing run. I really think we just didn't do things quite right.

Overall, we did do OK I guess, as long as the goals set for a given run weren't too ambitious. Part of the problem was that some people seemed incapable of focusing their attention on the game for 100 minutes straight. I don't think Salvage is an event where you can get away with phoning in your performance.

We never managed to complete a single piece in the 14 months we ran Salvage, and I believe Venn was the only person with two of three towards one piece (Ares's Cuirass). I finally got the 100% drop part for the Ares's Mask in April, but it didn't seem like we'd ever manage to get the other two pieces I'd need to complete it.

At least my Friday evenings are free now! It was such a relief to finally be able to say "I'm not coming to Salvage any more." I felt bad for giving up on it, but some times you just have to cut your losses and move on. And really, I kept going to Salvage for a year after I wanted to stop...

Freeing the Virtues

I've really been enjoying my adventures with Eminence, and I especially enjoy the variety of things we've been doing as linkshell events. These are scheduled events that take place on Thursday evenings and Saturday afternoons after Einherjar.

The first events after I joined Eminence were Sea farming excursions, gathering pop items for tier 2 Jailers, then several Jailer of Love fights after fighting the tier 2s. For the first few, I was part of an alliance trying to pop the Jailer of Temperance in the Grand Palace of Hu'Xzoi. This involved running around to 5 different spots on the ground floor of the Palace, having Quasilumins opening portals, killing aggro (or sleeping and running) as we went along. At each of the potential spawn spots, there is a Zdei that we would kill. Either nothing would happen (most of the time), or the Jailer of Temperance would spawn.

To fight the Jailer of Temperance, we had to kite it around one of the "shafts" that go through the towers of the Palace. The mages would try to keep gravity on it, since it moves faster than we can run. As the fight wears on, gravity is less and less likely to stick, meaning people get hit a bit more often. Temperance is immune to all but one type of damage at any given time, and switches between modes, making the fight "interesting" for the damage dealers. It's a pretty fun fight as far as kiting fights go (I hate kiting, really I do), and didn't give us much trouble during the two fights I was on. Getting it to pop is the troublesome part.

There was usually a second group trying to pop Ix'DRK and Ix'DRG while we were working on Temperance. I really need to get a map of the place some day - it's just not the same looking at one outside the game.

On a later run, we popped the Jailer of Fortitude a few times. This is another kiting fight, but less annoying than Temperance. He is a Paladin Ghrah in Hume form, with two helper birds that are killed first while JoF is kited around.

The next Sea event was the tier 2 gods, Jailer of Hope, Justice, and Prudence. Hope is a phuabo, Justice a xzomit with babies, and Prudence a pair of hpemde. Fun fights for the most part, and I was surprised that I was given the third Justice Sword that dropped. Weapons are a 100% drop of the Jailers, but not all of them are very desired, the Justice Sword is one of the desired ones.

I was very happy to get my sword, but am finding it hard to find time to farm organs to keep it supplied with Virtue Stones (which are used to make it "occasionally" attack twice). I pretty much have only been using it in Nyzul Isle on non-boss floors, but it would be nice to use it in campaign as well, if I could justify using up my virtue stone supply. I have had fun trying to solo different sea mobs for organs though, with varying success.

The Jailer of Prudence was the most painful of the Tier 2 Sea gods. They hit like a freight train, and we needed to swap tanks in and out quite a bit. We didn't get as many torques from the different Jailers as people would have liked, but we did get some that people were very happy to see.

We ended up doing 4 Jailers of Love on two different days. JoL is a UFO that mostly casts magic. We would have 3 tanks on it, in a triangle formation, just out of reach of JoL's melee hits. We mostly went PLD/RDM so we could spam spells like bind, blind, dispel, gravity and sleep. With Kachiko's relic horn in the tank party, mp was never an issue, and we were able to keep hate at a pretty high level. JoL will summon a group of pets every so often, so we had an "adds alliance" to pull those off and kill them separately. JoL was relatively generous with torques, but I think people would have like to have seen more items for Novio Earrings.

We had Absolute Virtue spawn after one of our Jailer of Love kills, but other than a couple people getting one-shotted for "fun", we pretty much left him alone and he returned the favor.

I could see people getting bored with Sea farming if they did it a lot, but I enjoyed it quite a bit, and by the time we get back to it, I'm sure it will still be "fresh" for me.

Now where was I?

It's been so long since my last real post, I don't know where to begin. Hmmm. I know, a Dynamis update!

On July 5th, we had our third Dynamis-Tavnazia run. We were supposed to do one at the end of May, but had so few people sign up that we had to switch to another zone. Since then, we've had quite a few more people gain access, with our recent wins in the other CoP Dynamis zones.

We had more than 18 people wanting to go on the run, so we conducted a lottery to decided who would go. Since only a couple people bothered to show up for the lottery, I ended up doing the /randoms for nearly everyone. Then of course on Saturday night we had people upset that they weren't included, and others who hadn't even bothered to sign up upset that they couldn't go. We'd been telling them for a couple weeks to sign up, and had it posted on the boards as well, but I guess people just don't pay much attention.

We gathered together in at the Heiroglypics in the Tavnazian Safehold, with 1xBRD, 1xTHF, 1xNIN, 2xPLD, 2xWHM, 2xRDM, 3xBLM, and 6xDD (SAM SAM SAM RNG MNK DRG). We did our usual walkthrough, since this was the first time for at least 7 of the group. We headed in, made short work of the Bugard, ran up to the top floor and took out the Antlion, then back to the main floor where were got our sub jobs back from killing the worm.

At this point, we had a choice: try for the two ??? time extensions and then head for Diabolos, or just head for Diabolos. We opted to try for the time extensions first. We nearly wiped on the third? set of Fomors pulled, and it just wasn't going well at all. We changed our minds, and decided to head for Diabolos after everyone was unweakened.

All four of the Umbral Diaboli were clustered together right at the entrance to the hallway. We stood watching and waiting for our chance to get past them without them noticing. Allia went first, and made it through, with a few more following soon after. The 10 minute warning came up and we felt more urgency, but still waited for our chances to get through. Unbelievably, we all made it past the NPCs, so Goldfish pulled one, the Jeuno Christmas music started, and Diabolos Spade spawned.

The fight started out fairly well, but quickly became messy, with much death all around. When I was killed, Diabolos didn't have a lot of HP left, and I quickly reraised, and Serenity sent me a tell to get her up, since she still had manafont available. I did so, and started getting hit by Diabolos, but the spell completed, and she got up and started nuking Diabolos Spade. I was dead again without having been able to get reraise back up. Soon after, Diabolos was defeated. Hurray! We'd won! Now it was a race against time to get people up so they could get the flag.

Peti raised me, I popped Chivalry and had enough MP to raise Goldfish. I managed to get the flag, but the ??? despawns at the 30 second mark, and both Goldfish and Erock just missed it despite getting raised "in time". We ended up with nearly half the group missing the flag. But they got the title for killing Diabolos, and we gave them preference on the roster for the next run. It was a very exciting fight, and it was so nice to win it, no matter how poorly it seemed to go.

On our next Tavnazia run, just this past Saturday, we went straight for Diabolos right after the bugard, antlion, and worm, but unfortunately the group wasn't as stealthy as we needed to be, and we aggro'd too many of the NPCs. So we gave up on the clear and farmed the rest of the evening. The only drop was THF hands, but that was our first ever drop in Dynamis-Tavnazia besides a 100 piece once.

In other Dynamis news, we've been having a bit of trouble again with people not playing nice and using the Rusty Buckets calendar. A couple HNM shells moved to Lakshmi, merged, and call themselves Vicious now. They've got a huge superiority complex since they get so many HNM claims with their botters, so they think they don't have to work with other linkshells cooperatively. So, we've found ourselves switching zones at the last minute a lot, and on Wednesdays, that usually meant a CoP zone. This suits me fine, since I enjoy the CoP zones the most, but we do have a lot of people needing cities, and others who still haven't managed to get up to Chapter 4 in the CoP missions.

I'm still struggling with the PLD crew, since people quit, get deployed to Iraq, or just plain don't show up on a regular basis. We do have a lot of PLDs now, but I can't count on 3 of the PLD mains to be there any given run. We've also had a few runs where neither Goldfish nor Lucrezia have been able to attend. As our main pullers and strategists, we've become pretty dependant on them for the success of our runs, but we've been able to win without them, which has been good for our confidence. It was especially nice to win both Qufim and Beaucedine with our less experienced pull team.

I've completed my BST relic armor set (shown here on one of my mannequins) - getting the gloves in Xarcabard in July when lotting went to BST60+, and then the helm in Windurst early in August to complete the set, also at BST60+. With so many BST75s running around, I was surprised I was able to complete the set relatively quickly as a BST60. I doubt the CoP accessory for BST will ever drop to BST60+, but who knows, maybe I'll get that one day as well. The big question now is will I ever find the time to level it further and actually use the gear?

New Titles: Nightmare Awakener, Dynamis-Tavnazia Interloper, Confronter of Nightmares

Unintended Hiatus

I haven't meant to stay away from my blog for so long, but the days keep passing without me feeling much like writing about Kiki's adventures. She's been a fairly busy little Tarudin, all things considered, but I had already fallen behind on blogging when our adored 7 year old cat suddenly got ill and subsequently was euthanized on July 20th, after 4 days in intensive care at an emergency pet hospital with no hope of recovery.

Adding to the misery, my husband, sensitive soul that he is, passed out at the animal hospital and fell, gashing his left eye and chin badly. We spent the next 6 hours in a human ER down the road from the animal hospital, where he ended up with two dozen stitches in his eyelids to put them back together, along with a couple more for the cut on his chin. The eyelids have healed up pretty well, but his jaw is still bothering him a lot. I'm so glad he didn't damage the eye itself, or break his neck even.

Needless to say, I've had too much on my mind to write stories about the fun Kiki's been having fighting monsters.

It's not fair - Willow was supposed to be around for years. It was our 18 year old cat with kidney disease that was expected to go first. Now Isis wanders the house, yowling, looking for her little buddy. It's been just over three weeks since Willow left the house for the last time, and Isis slowly seems to be realizing that Willow isn't coming back.

Hopefully I'll be back to my usual posting soon.