LOL BRD

It's funny how the game changes so much.  Rather, how the people who play the game change.

While going through all my old posts last week I remembered my decision to work on BRD.  The level cap was still 75 and I had WHM RDM and WAR @ cap.  I wanted to level BRD for merits and so that I could fill another role in the ever-popular (at the time) Puk ISNM.

Ia couldn't believe my decision since I told her after messing around on her character a few times that I would never level BRD.  It just wasn't something that appealed to me.  But, people change.

So I went at it.  Of course, invites aren't that great at the low levels, but I managed to get something like 40 levels in a couple of weeks.  I imagine that I could have actually made it to 75 in a month, but I took time off to do LS stuff.

Those were the days of BRDx2 or BRD+COR onry.  For me, it was a toss up if I was going to come on a healing job or BRD, but I enjoyed them all equally (well, except for RDM, but that was a gear/macro issue).  Those were the days where if I was on BRD and not /anon, I would receive invites for parties.

And then: Abyssea happened.  The days after the level cap went to 80, I still had lots of invites.  The community still hadn't figured out how abyssea lights and xp chains worked, so they found other xp party alternatives (xp pt in promy?!?).  Eventually the lights and xp chains in Abyssea became common knowledge and people figured out how to make the epic xp rates.  They also realized that with the cruor buffs and atmas that BRD songs weren't really necessary.  All of the auto-refresh that is available for mages makes the extra 5mp/tic from ballads seem pathetic.  Mobs generally die so fast that doing marches for the melees also seems like a waste.  Madrigals?  Melees don't even eat food. Minuets?  Most heavy DDs have capped (or almost capped) attack.  Why get a BRD when that spot would be better filled by another DD, healer, or nuker?

And so it was this weekend that I was casually seeking on BRD, hoping for an XP alliance in abyssea, for a total of 10 hours.  The only invite I got was from a group going out to farm Sedna (or was it Sobek?) that wanted me for yellow stagger. 

I knew that getting a party on BRD would be difficult, which is why I was planning on piggy-backing it onto a more desirable job.  Seek on WHM, RDM, BLM, SCH, WAR, or MNK, then go in and cap xp/merits and job change to BRD to finish it up.  It kind of worked.  I took MNK into an alliance and capped xp.  I came back on BRD but the alliance ended up wiping when all of our healers were AFK simultaneously (no joke) and nobody felt like recovering.  I had just dinged 93 as that happened. 

Maybe I'll find myself with some spare time this week.  I still need to get WAR, DNC, and BRD to cap.  It is easy enough to get invites on WAR, and it shouldn't take too much longer to at least get BRD to 95. 

DNC is a job that I enjoy playing so much that I won't mind taking it to cap a little more slowly.  Maybe work on doing some F/GoV and try to farm at the same time.  I'm going to need a lot of gil if I'm going to be able to afford all of the scrolls between 91-95!