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?