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.