+1 x 2

I've spent a lot of time running around in abyssea - altepa doing quests for body seals (BRD, WAR, WHM, RDM). I managed to finish my BRD and WHM +1 bodies over the weekend. The BRD body is a full-time piece (except for lullaby, but I'll get to that in a minute) and the WHM body is an idle piece, which could eventually become a curing piece (also more on that in a minute). As of today, I'm 6/10 on WAR seals and 4/10 on RDM seals. The more I look at those two pieces, the more I want to have both of them!

Friday night we did dynamis valkurm, and got the win which was pretty nice since it was the last CoP win that I needed to have tavnazia access. I also lotted and won a Duelist's Chapeau -1. I was 1 of 4 people to lot, and similar to when I won the regular chapeau in Xarc last year, I was the last person to lot. The highest lot was a 8-something, so I didn't have much hope (earlier in the night, I lotted a 34 for the WAR acc). It turns out that luck was with me 'cause I lotted higher than the others. Immediately after dynamis, I went out and traded everything in to get it +1'd. It's a meh upgrade, but I'm liking it as my very first piece of +1 relic!

Back to the body seal questing. As BRD, w/ ASA legs, I could do both quests in 6-7 minutes. I could have cut that down to ~5 minutes if I would have warped out instead of running out, but I didn't want to lose cruor every time, even if it was only a 100 cruor loss. The BRD/WHM seal quest was Brygid the stylist returns. She asks you to wear specific pieces of body and leg armor and then model it for her. Originally, I had planned to do that quest as WHM or BLM, since the list of armors that they could wear that she would ask for was relatively small. But, since the other quest that I wanted to do involved a lot of running around, I ended up doing both quests on BRD. The problem with BRD is that they can equip mage gear, but they can also equip a fair amount of melee gear. In the end I was carrying 20 pieces of armor for this quest, which was rough on my inventory. It didn't help that every time you completed the quest, she'd give a piece of augmented subligar as well, so each run was inventory -1. Now, I could have just dropped each piece as I received it, but I elected to save them and NPC 'em when I was back in town. They only NPC for 600 gil, but that's better than nothing!

Most of the augments were pretty meh. I was pleased when I got hMP+4, light resist +20, and CHR+10 augments on 3 separate pieces. One of the last augments that I got was pretty epic, though... I almost NPC'd it, as a matter of fact! This augment was Refresh +1... in other words: auto-refresh on a piece of leg armor! The armor is level 70, equippable by all jobs, so it makes for a nice idle piece for all of my mage-ish jobs. Gotta tweak all my macros again Now, if only I could come across the hairpin in konschtat highlands that can also have a refresh augment on it. That would give me an additional 2mp/tic refresh on WHM, BLM, and BRD from gear... I might actually try to pursue it sometime soon!

Various LS folks have helped me camp/kill Mangy-tailed marvin a few times, hoping for an Orison Cape to drop. We've killed him ~10 times but haven't seen a cape yet (we did get 4 adler rings, which aren't terrible TP rings). Recently, we killed Ovni between marvin pops since Shiji wants a bullwhip belt, which has 7% haste on it. Our kill we didn't manage to proc blue !! but we did get the kill. He dropped the Augur's Jaresan, which has INT/MND/CHA +13 light elemental magic accuracy +10, summoning skill +10, and enmity -5. Of course shiji didn't want it since he's got morrigan's robe for BLM/RDM, and wack didn't have any jobs levelled which could equip it, so I lotted it. It's use is very limited but it makes a great repose/lullaby/requiem piece. We also killed pallid percy a couple times and managed to get a couple RDM head seals out of it, which puts me @ 3/8 on that upgrade.

I also decided to pick up a medicine ring for WHM, which has a latent (75% or lower HP) of 10% cure potency. With that ring, noble's tunic, +2 surya's, and orison cap +1, I am at 49% cure potency! I was avoiding it for quite awhile because I was worried about hitting and staying in yellow HP. However, with some recent additions to my gear, I found that on BRD, I was dropping my HP to 63%. (previously, I was only hitting 74%, which was very frustrating when trying to keep myself in latent for 4 songs @ 4-6 seconds each, before auto-regen from /WHM would take me out of latent) I haven't really looked into what % that gear puts me @ on WHM, but I'm pretty sure it will be easy to maintain a < 75% HP for the extra cure potency. The nice thing about medicine ring is that it brings me that much closer to being able to get rid of my noble's tunic and still maintain that 50% cure potency.

So, I'm starting to sell my brygid armors back (at a loss, but I consider it the price to pay for having two body armors +1'd), which is relaxing my inventory a bit. I'm getting some nice gear which I feel is making me a stronger player, which is great.

This week, maybe I'll be able to finish WAR and RDM bodies, pop that t2 VNM in vunkerl for my crooner's cithara, and finish selling back the rest of that armor and/or farm a bit to recover some of the gil that I've been throwing away the last couple of weeks.

Posted Jan 17 2011, 11:25 AM