I'm a BEAST(master)!

This past week was pretty eventful.  We did some Nyzul Isle to get Lun's runic key and her DNC dagger so she could unlock Pyrrhic Kleos.  Ev tagged along as well and we just stomped through the place.  SE tried to slow us down by giving us something like 5 or 6 soulflayer leader floors, but in the end, we were just too hot to handle :)

Here are the four of us getting ready to destroy floor 100!

Floor 100, here we come!

Zman recently came back to the game, so he, Lun, Jethor, and I went to Abyssea - Altepa to pop Orthrus and get Z his atheling mantle.  It was a long fight with Lun's pet tanking.  Jethor came as SMN instead of BST, and his SMN is merited for Shiva.  Since Orthrus is fire-based, she wasn't dealing as much damage as another jug would have done.  Eventually, after sacrificing Zman, we got the kill.  Z got his mantle and a dude there bought the claws from us for 100k each, which was split amongst the 4 of us.

Lun, Wack, and I all had Bennu pops, so we took an hour to go kill him a few times.  I was able to get a couple more Cards of Ardor.  I'm currently at 5 or 6 of 9 for my SCH body.  I'll need 18 27 more to finish bodies for other jobs (MNK, WHM, and BST).  Yes, I said BST... more on that in a minute.

Slayne solo'd Suzaku for me on his BST in an attempt to make some money for me.  Then, he informed me that he can solo Horns of War, one of the KS99 BCs that drop black belt items.  As I had 600+ KS, I took him up on his offer.  We went a total of 4 times, but haven't seen a tongue drop yet.  At least each kill is pretty much a guaranteed million gil from the Beastly Shank (used to pop Behemoth outside of the BC).  The gil from selling those shanks has finally brought my gil above 10mil!  /cheer 

I was bored one day so I went up to the top of Delkfut's tower to try and get a Potestas Bomblet out of a brown treasure casket.  I was up there killing for a little over 2 hours when I finally got the drop.  It should sell for ~1.5 mil.  Unfortunately, it looks like someone is trying to screw with the price and bought the last 2 for something like 2.4 and 6 mil each, so they haven't been selling.  When it does, it'll be a nice addition to my wallet ^^

With all of the soloing/duoing that Slayne and Lun have been doing lately, it really made me want to level BST so that I could do that stuff on my own.  My concerns were the ToM trials and the atmas that I would need to be an effective BST.  As it turns out, Lun said the trials weren't hard at all and that she was able to get hers done in just a few days.  I was only 1 Dominion Op in Grauberg short of having the most important BST atma: Ducal Guard, so I thought maybe I should look into leveling BST.

I scoured my storage and my mules for low level gear and hit sarutabaruta as a level 11 BST.  With an emperor's band/novennial ring, it wasn't long before I hit Tahrongi Canyon and Buburimu Peninsula.  My first session I went to 20.  My 2nd session took me to 28. It was a lot of fun this time around. 

I remember that I couldn't quite get the hang of it when I first tried it out.  Back then, there may have been an xp penalty associated with pets.  I remember being super disappointed at my slow leveling progress and didn't understand how anyone would be pleased doing a BST solo or duo all the way to 75.  Well, the changes that SE made to the xp from EP-EM mobs is really noticeable now.  DC mobs were giving up to 300 xp (with xp bonus on).  It turned out to be faster xp to just decimate every mob in my path instead of targeting the mobs for the FoV/GoV page that I was doing.  Solo, I was getting somewhere in the ballpark of 16k/hour. 

Protecus wanted some XP on his dancer to bring it up to cap and Ev wanted xp for his gimp BLM sub, so they joined me doing FoV and GoV pages.  When Wack finished his DNC sub, I had dinged 34.  Ev had to leave, but Wack changed to MNK and went to PL me on pots in Abyssea - Grauberg.

He started by doing a quick page 6 so that I could unlock ducal guard, then proceeded to beat up on the Sinister Seidels.  It was actually slower xp than what I was getting solo (thanks to the novennial ring and the long walk back and forth to the Dom Sgt. for pages, which took me out of xp range).  In the last ~20 minutes or so the xp/hr finally surpassed what I had been getting solo and what we had been getting as a trio.

When we were all done, my BST had just dinged 38.  I will probably try to get into a book burn in the crawler's nest to get up into the mid-40s.  Maybe I'll be able to land a key-whore spot in one of the scars zones.  If either of those options fail and Wack is online, I'll join up with him for more pot-slaughter.  I'd like to have BST at 75+ by the end of the week.

Starting a new job is really straining my inventory while I'm cycling through lower-level gear.  As a result, I think I'm going to put my BRD and RDM AF/relic/Empy armor into NPC storage.  I virtually never play those jobs anyways, so I think the extra space will do me wonders, at least until I get BST to the point where I can wear some of my WAR gear. I had been collecting seals for THF and NIN AF3, but I guess I'll have to change gears and focus on BST seals! 

I'm really hoping to be able to solo a bunch of NMs for +2 upgrade items and also make some extra money solo (I'm looking at you, Dynamis).  I never thought I'd level a pet job, but I'm glad that the pet job that I chose to level isn't PUP or DRG! :)

I'll leave you with the last screenshot that I took on Ia.  What an imposing set of mages!

Who says Galkas can't be mages?

SCH > RDM

I got rid of the last of Ia's things and officially cancelled her account (again).  I really think that this is it for her character.  She has such little interest in playing FFXI compared to other games.

Over the weekend I spent some time doing dynamis with Wack.  We hit Sandy (MNK + DNC) to collect touches that he needed for his Melee Gloves +2. That zone is pretty tight and each TE is guarded by a PLD and RDM.  Well, we couldn't seem to get the TE w/o adding it's guards, and Chainspell really gave us some problems.  The 4th TE easily took us 30 mins to take out since we kept on getting nuked to death :(.  It should be mentioned that his MNK was only 91 at the time.  Eventually we were able to get all the TEs and do a bit of farming.  We didn't do great currency-wise or forgotten touch-wise, but we learned that we need to just focus on getting the TE out of the way before worrying about adds.

The following night we went again, this time as NIN + RDM.  Having Protect/Shell and sleeps really helped a lot.  We camped over by the manor and had a pretty steady stream of mobs coming in.  Once again, we had a pretty meh run when it came to drops.  Despite the fact that I was almost constantly casting one spell or another, I really felt kind of useless/helpless.  It was nice to be able to wear the +2 hat and have 5mp/tic refresh in my idle gear, but I just didn't feel like I brought enough to the table.  I had considered going /DNC to melee, but I'm glad I didn't.  My gear/macros/everything is not where I want it to be for RDM, so I generally don't really look forward to playing it.  Plus, and I've said this before, I hate being a sole healer on RDM.  It just doesn't have the MP conservation tools that WHM(/SCH) or SCH have, even when I do go RDM/SCH.

The night after that we decided to drag Lun along for funsies.  Just as we were about to enter, Skadan showed up wanting to tag along.  After we got inside (and got all of our TEs) Lun asked if Genesisblue could join.  We ended up with SCH (me) NIN (Wack) THF (Skadan) BST (Lun) MNK (Gen).  We really kind of cleaned house.  Wack got the last of the forgotten touches that he needed and decided to not take his split of the currency, so everyone else ended up with 23 or 24 currency.  I also had 3 touches sort to me, for an extra 120k.

We were going to do Nyzul after, but Lun went AFK for food and it was getting late, so Wack and I hit Horlais Peak to do the orc KCNM 'Last Orc-Shunned Hero'.  This is a pretty straightforward and easy fight, even as a duo.  We both managed to get the greaves, which is a nice 1.5mil.

On Sunday we finally managed to do some Nyzul Isle.  First we did a climb for Lun's runic key.  We went from 65-70 as NIN DNC SCH very easily.  For the 2nd run, instead of climbing some more, they decided to do the Uncharted nyzul (geared towards 99s).  I don't understand why they wanted to do this lowman.  Regular Nyzul is understandable as it was geared towards level 75 characters.  Taking 3 99s in there is a walk in the park.  But the uncharted version and lowman just seems kinda pointless.  We managed to clear a total of 3 floors (getting to floor 12) before we exited due to lack of time.  I don't want to do uncharted again unless we've got a bit more firepower and support going along. At least 4 people!

We got two real ??? items from our run: Serket Ring from Serket, and Bravo's Subligar from Oqdan(sp). 

After Nyzul, Wack and I did another dynamis, this time opting for Xarc for some forgotten hopes.  There was a THF there who wanted to get some exp on his +2 relic trial, so he joined up with us.  We managed to take out all 5 TEs in about 5 minutes, then spent the rest of the night camping in the middle of the map, laying waste to everything around us. The dude's TH was working overtime and we ended up walking out with almost 200 currency.  Wack got 8 hopes to add to his collection (bringing him to a total of 19) and I managed to get the DNC relic that I had been wanting.  When all my currency sells, my split will be ~575k.

With all the dynamis that we've been doing and the lucky drops on the KCNM, I'm currently sitting on the most gil that I've ever had.  It's probably not a lot compared to what others have, but I'm very pleased and would like to keep working on the ol' bank roll to see if I can break the 10mil mark.

So, I had a chance to take both SCH and RDM to dynamis and I have to say that SCH just beats the pants off of RDM.  It has so many more useful spells to bring to the table, and much superior MP recovery/conservation tools.  I like the gear that I have for RDM, but SCH is way more enjoyable for me to play, especially in a solo-healer (or solo mage in general) role. The only thing that RDM had that I wished I had on SCH was addle.  It made fights against BLM/BRD/BST pets so much easier.

This week, I expect to do more dynamis, maybe some more Nyzul Isle to get lun's disc up, and maybe work toward getting more Cards of Ardor for my +2 SCH/WHM/MNK bodies.

Here are a couple of funny stagger poses from the Xarc run: 

Have a good week!

Melee Gloves +2

I didn't do much over the weekend.  I picked up the Forgotten Touches that I needed to upgrade my Melee Gloves to +2.  I'm looking forward to trying them out along with the 5/5 upgrades that I finished putting into Shijin Spiral.



Wack and I duo'd the MKD mithra fight in Chamber of Oracles.  We went NIN/WAR + DNC/NIN.  I think he was a bit confused about which fight it was since when we got in, he said that he forgot that we needed sleeps.  We went for it anyways and did very well.  Managed to get the win without much trouble and now I'm at the point where I run around Beaucedine Glacier and Xarcabard investigating pips or something like that.  After that is the level 1 run through Castle Z, then the final fight and a nice, new, inventory -1 hat!

I've been toying around with picking up some gear for WAR, specifically the Fazheluo Helm. 



I currently TP in Walahra Turban, so this offers a little bit more for the same amount of haste. I think if I picked this piece up, I'd mule my turban, even though I still use the haste on it for the recast timer on spells like stoneskin.  In reality, I very seldom have to actually wait on the recast timer for most of my spells, so I think I could get away with it.

Inventory got a little tighter over the weekend since Ia said that she doesn't plan on picking FFXI back up.  So, I started getting rid of her sellable stuff, and took all my BRD instruments back.  As nice as it is to have a pocket mage handy, I don't feel like paying the extra $12.95 every month, especially since she wants to resubscribe to WoW.    I was looking forward to playing with her again, but we just need to admit to ourselves that she's done with this game.  She enjoys other games more... What is the point in paying for/playing a game when you know you could be having MORE fun playing another game or doing something else?

I'm not sure what's in store for this week since today is a Version Update day.  Maybe SE will have some good changes to implement.  I might have to redo a whole bunch of merits after today's update!