PS2 Woes. China OTW.

When Sony made their latest generation of the PS2, they made it so that it was no longer able to use the internal hard disk that FFXI uses. So guess what? I can't play FFXI on my NEW PS2! WTF. I'm considering returning it and getting the old generation PS2, but then again, that thing is huge. I like the PS2's sleek new design. Why can't they just make it so I can use my own external hard drive and connect it to the PS2 usb ports?! Sorry Sony but you're DUMB. Now I know why I prefer Nintendo.

I logged in late to Vanadiel last night due to a long day at work. I completely missed sea. They killed fortitude (got the virtue) and then waited for temperence to pop, to no avail.

So I just did besieged twice (once on WHM, once on SMN), netting me ~ 2250 exp and IS. The second besieged, we actually killed the Galool Ja Ja. That fight was so badass. Nekoi (RDM) had popped the HP+++++ and MP+++++ drinks, but he was low on MP nonetheless. He converted and got his 1800 mp back, then chainspell Thunder III and Blizzard III the HNM. He then used a mega-elixir and regained all his MP back and repeated the process. He had to use the Revitalizer too to use his chainspell a second time. I have to say that was one of the coolest things I've ever seen lol.

I leveled with two different parties in Crawler's Nest as SMN. Both were mediocre and contained "DCs". Yeah right. Those parties are always so unstable since ppl hit 37 and split. I'm actually going to take my smn to 40 so I can use it in lvl 40 capped BCs and areas. In particular, I'm aiming to kill Carmine Dobsonfly ;)

It looks like my BST duoing partner is hella busy these days. He lives in Singapore and now works during the day, so he doesn't have time to party. So it looks like BST is on hold until I move to China, where we will both be on the same time zone.

Also just a heads up to everyone. I am moving to China in the beginning of January. No! I am not going to sell gil. It is for work. I'll be in southern China about an hour away from HK. My playing schedule will be almost entirely different from yours: 7am-12pm EST. I'll catch the morning folks most likely. Right now I forsee myself in China for about a year, but it could be longer. I am toying around with several ideas on what I want to do during that time:

(1) EITHER Recruit JP and other non-Chinese asian players to CK, so that we can have round-the-clock action OR Level WAR or RDM to 75.
(2) Do Dynamis with a JP shell, or just once per week on the weekends with Invictus.
(3) Finish BST to 75.
(4) Fishing
(5) Farm up a PCA.

Most likely it will be low-key. But we'll see!

Brown Belt, Morgenstern Completed!

Went 1/3 on Nue Fang, 1/1 on Dodo Skin and 4/5 Morbolger Vine (from KSNM30 Contaminated Colisseum). Hey that's 900k in my pocket. :)

Rigelus helped me finish my morgenstern points late saturday night in the Boyahda Tree, and in return I helped him finish his Tachi: Kasha points in Kuftal Tunnel and killed Aquarius for Rig's axe. We actually wiped the first time we fought Aquarius. But lucky for us another RDM had came to solo him to about 50%, then we just took over after he wiped and finished it up with a hundred fists and benediction. The best way to earn points imo is to find a place with lots of EP elementals and just do 3-4 SCs per elemental. Also to make sure you take off your serious attack and str so that you do as lil damage as possible. It was pretty interesting because I was able to keep up or beat Rig's 71 SAM on TP when tanking as pld/war. 306 shield skill and joyeuse ftw. We finished my points in about 2.5 hours and then his in 1.5 hours.

Morgenstern is amazing. When farming my nue fang, I got an 1127 Hexa Strike on the TW tiger PHs. WOW :D <3!>.>;

We did Limbus: Temenos NW (i think), the one with the giga NMs, tonberries, demons, etc. Got some nice items: blm, whm, smn, thf, drg and the win of course. 3 ancient beastcoins each, putting me at 7 total. 13 away from getting my healer's mitts+1.

I found out that my assault "static" is not so static after all. The core members are supposed to be myself, Rigelus, Wyle and Nomar. Nomar hasn't made the past three meetings, Wyle now has a job that may make it impossible to make our meetings. Kink and Firebrand can only make Sundays, and even then they don't have that much time since they need to go to sleep early. It leaves me reeling trying to find members at the last minute, and it always ends up being a patch up job than anything and prevents us from ALL ranking up and progressing together. We went 2/4 on assaults last night. We should've been 4/4. No excuses. I have to rethink this "static," perhaps adding or removing members in order to make it more coherent.

Nice to have a vacation!

I've been relaxing a bit, finally! On Black Friday I bought a playstation 2, FFXII, FFX, FFX-2, and part of FFXI (though I still need to buy the harddrive and original game). I want to play on ps2 because I don't want to buy a new state of the art laptop to take with me to China. It's cheaper to buy a ps2 with ffxi -- and also gain the ability to play ffxii :D

I've been working on my smn. Went 29-34 in one day, and am now seeking for the last bit. Will be nice to have the extra mp as whm because right now whm/blm only has 962 (with my best mp gear and no food). Hopefully I'll break 1k.

Also been working on finishing up the brown belt. Friday night I camped Deadly Dodo as bst for a few hours. It took quite a while to pop. I was pretty scared that there was CC, but actually there were none. There are just ppl who camp the cockatrice for meat, skins and giant bird feathers. Actually if you are thf or /thf you could do pretty well here... maybe 30-50k per hour. Well, needless to say DD was easy and I got the drop 1/1 ^_^

Saturday we went sky farming. Ulli and Zip are our prime targets every week but somehow they elude us. While we were camping Ulli, Faust popped and Javir tried to solo. Somehow he couldn't get Faust to run down the ramp and he died. Sinhard was watching and then died too. We were like oh hell, we might as well go kill Faust and raise them. Double whammy, right? Wrong. As soon as we escape, the very next PH pops Ullikummi. WTF XD Just one of those things I guess. We ended up getting Faust and Steam Cleaner (after a long two hours of camping that one). The RMT are definitely got the whole place on lockdown, especially Zip and Ulli. I'd say they get 50% of all of them.

After taking a break, I came back to CK camping Overlord Bagdogek(sp?) Apparently gilsellers showed up as they were key farming in monastic caverns, so we thought that they might have the ToD and are here to camp. So we decided to stick it out and see if they did. But guess what? They didn't have the ToD and were just /search whoring us. Wonderful. So we left after a couple hours only with a handful of stonega IIs (worth 120k each). I then went to camp Nue for an hour. Easy as hell to camp but... 0/1.

Gonna seek on my smn a bit more then head back to Nue if no invite. Take care!

Update: 212/500 Morgenstern

Swift Belt! {mine}

This was a good weekend. On Saturday we farmed sky. A couple months ago I picked up a curtana and gave it to Moriarti and said "Hold this, we'll do BB next week." Two months later we finally used his damn curtana lol. I had another one too that I had picked up only a week before, so we did two BB. We had so many ppl there at sky farming that we decided to do a couple seiryus. Congratulations to Javir and Rimare on A. Legs, Moriarti for W. Hands, and Kypdurron on S. Kote. After that Faust popped. I taught Javir how to solo the dolls up there and we were gearing him up to try and solo Faust. He tried to solo it, but I guess even with powder boots and a bind he wasn't fast enough. One of the big problems was that he was /whm. He thinks he knows what to do to fix it -- so, next time. We ended up getting Faust anyways and then spending the rest of our time waiting for Ulli to pop. Unfortunately he popped about an hour after we left.

We did Bahamut v1 again. I think Saturday nights are a terrible time to do events in CK since its like pulling teeth to get ppl to go. It always ends up taking an hour or more just to gather ppl. Somehow we were able to gather 16, and we went and killed him. He wiped half the alliance with gigaflare and his last like 8% proved to be difficult to take down with only a few tanks, mages, and a ranger hehe.

After that I did ksnm30 Copy Cat for the first time. I went with Godofdeath, Jediknight, Naotakun, Moriarti and Voxx. It was an easy fight and we went 5/5. We got four pairs of fuma sune-ates (420k each), several a. ingots and one o. ingot. I also got a retributor and Naotakun got a coffinmaker for his COR. Nice :)

After that I farmed up my codex 1/15 and then Wyle came to help me fight some BST Fomor, which FINALLY dropped the subligar for me. W00t!

On Sunday morning we did a swift belt run. I'm telling you the absolute best time to do swift belt is during the new moon 1 darks day / fire day time frame. We went 5/5 on that damn belt, which only weeks before had jipped us at 0/7. Congratulations to Kyr, Chantal, Rece, Javir and myself :D It was a good time and I'm really happy to have ended that chapter. It took me nearly 20 hours of camping. After that I went to finish a few quests that had me backed up with some ra/ex items. I took a short nap afterwards because honestly I was exhausted.

I woke up to everyone teleporting to Dem for Limbus. Man I just barely woke up in time to make it. We have been making a habit to kill a yovra before entering each Limbus -- and I got the organ this time! W00t! All I need is 1 aern organ and 3 hpemdes for my Soil Gorget. We then fought Omega. I had really been anticipating this fight for a long time since the last time I did it was many months ago -- the first time CK fought him. Since then they had fought him two or three more times and I had missed him each time. Not only that, a lot of my comrades had started to amassing Homam gear -- so I was really hoping for a piece tonight. I really want to tank a Wyrm as pld/nin, and I feel that these pieces are absolutely critical. Omega is pretty easy with rdm/drks and we had two, but somehow things went awry and almost EVERYONE had wiped before we got him down. I lotted very low lots for the drops ; ; But, congratulations to Eulore for the Homam Cosciales (HOT) and Zylia for the Homam Gambieras!

After that we did a few assaults, flawless victories of course. I duoed some merits with Pauge in Caedarva Mire, but it was freakin packed as all hell. A lot of ppl duo there now too so its even more crowded and we didn't fare as well as in the past.

Update: 85/500 Morgenstern. Slowly but surely.

I'm going to relax a bit this Thanksgiving week and catch up on some much needed sleep. Have a great one my friends!

BCNM Under Observation

Is the most retarded BCNM ever. I'm 0/15 or so now on PCC. What a waste of seals. I wish there was a more profitable BCNM out there. The only good thing I can say about it is that I've gained 32 Ninjutsu skill while doing that BCNM >.>

We did Kirin and Byakko last night. Byakko had uninteresting drops. Kirin we did tp burn style again. We kited the minis (THANKFULLY) before burnin Kirin down. Unfortunately we decided to do this all on earths day. Once minis were dead it took Kirin a full 15 minutes to die -- and he took a lot of ppl down with him. Overall he was a LOT harder than last time. We still have to practice a lot before we can say we've mastered this technique. Good drops though! Kirin's Osode to Pauge (finally eh?), Neptunal Abj: Body to Zylia and Shining Cloth to Gilsplit. Thanks to AerialNexus for patiently waiting for us to finish and also helping us out on minis.

I crafted my own Haubergeon -- after about two years of wanting this damn thing. I supposedly have a 10% HQ rate. Before that I made 8 Haubergeons and broke one. This was my tenth synth and I was keen on getting a +1 :D But luck wasn't on my side today and I'll have to settle for an NQ. I am broke now tho.

Assault = lots of fun without the gilsellers. We did Lamia no.19, Pre-emptive strike, and Requiem. I'm already at 18/25 to my next rank. This next rank will take longer because we will NEVER do Lebros Supplies. Pretty hard to believe but I already have about 3k points per assault region. That means I'm 15% way done for a full set of Yigit :)

Update: 19/500 on Morgenstern points. Fizzywig who also got his the same day already has like 350 points. He found a mnk who needed to unlock destroyers. LUCKY!

CK Swat Team

There was a server update on Monday night. Instead of going to sea we decided to camp HNM. Fafnir, Behemoth and Adamantoise popped -- none claimed. I wish we went to sea! ; ;

On a spur of of the moment, we decided to do KSNM30 Contaminated Colisseum. We had 2x SMN, BLM, WHM, DRK, NIN. It was really easy. We went 4/4, though had a few deaths. The money drops aren't that great from this one, but we did get 3 morlborger vines, two morgenstern, one thyrssustab, one senjuinrikio, two o. ingots, one adaman ingot, and other misc. junk. Overall it was a lot of fun! So happy I got the best whm/pld club in the game. Now just to unlock it. 1/500 points so far >.>;



Afterwards we went to sky to camp Ulli. We were freakin lucky all night. Within 10 minutes of arriving, Ulli popped. Unfortunately, I was resting and Pauge was watching a statue die for ToD -- and we missed it ; ; JP got it (instead of RMT) so that was good. We're then like damn we just came up here for nothing?! Hell no! We went to Steam Cleaner and popped him first try -- win + indra katars (rdm can wield those?!). We then went to water and got two Ro'Maeve Waters in less than 30 minutes. We killed both ollas, np. We then went to Faust (and picked up a Curtana otw) to see if we could duo or trio it -- but it wasn't up. Not only that but the RMT camp it like it were Ulli. They sit there at his spawn point. Don't expect to EVER see an available Faust again. Mind you we did this all with 5 people. I think this is the way sky was meant to be done. We were a CK swat team. GTFI -- get the job done -- GTFO.

Two Behemoths, Ullikummi, and some Swift Belts

This weekend we camped Behemoth both days since Fafnir was pretty much too early for us to contend for. Both times we missed claim. I think the key to claiming Behemoth is standing near the center and spinning around until you see him and then smashing your claim button. KB was on Sunday... and boy was he mean. Element had claim, but they were getting eaten alive with meteor. Probably almost ten meteors had gone off, both of their tanks had died, some BLMs were kiting. It was a mess. I think even some other LSs had gotten some hate in by curing the tanks or ppl who had died that were in the alliance and then using invincible. This prolonged the mayhem even further. Element realized at that rate they weren't gonna make it, so they brought out another pld. To our dismay, they stabilized and averted what would have been a disaster ending in KB going hyper.

We camped Ullikummi two times on Saturday, once before Behemoth and once after. There are now gilsellers there constantly, but luckily one of them is one that I know well and am on good terms with. Do you guys remember Peterli and Flypanda? They are back and they are part of the reason you are seeing gilsellers fighting Kirin. In fact, they've already done it all on Midgard -- including sea. So it's only a matter of time I think. Give it another half a year and they will have penetrated even more parts of the game. Peterli is actually running his own business now and employing his friends. Every month he's earning more and more. Anyways, the first Ulli we lost claim to gilsellers. The second time around, they claimed it but the claimer died on the way back and Ulli went yellow. We picked it up, destroyed it, caught MG on WS and destroyed him too. MG was a bit more difficult because we only had one BLM. It was a terrible pull and one pld irrecoverably died. And somehow, each one of those slaves were beaten individually, while MG was kited. However since we were low on DPS it was a slow fight... much longer than usual. We won though and called it a day for sky farming.

Later on Saturday night we did Ouryu. Trying to get ppl to go to Ouryu is like pulling teeth. It took 2 hours just to get ppl there. Unacceptable. Our brd dropped before we could even start. So when we did start we only had 17 ppl. It was a rough fight. We tried using pld/war tanks this time, and they were taking a ton of dmg from magic. WHMs were burning mp too fast. Meanwhile, a few melee new to this BC were there and they were hitting sleeping worms, using their ws on worms instead of on Ouryu. I mean how hard is it to communicate with your skillchain partner: "Hey im at 125% tp. Let's go." then just rip it on Ouryu. Just give BLMs like 3 second notice thats all you need. It's not rocket science. Hopefully next time we'll have our act together.

Did another swift belt run on Sunday morning. I farmed my codex 1/1 the night before :D I thought my luck had changed. It did kind of, we went 3/5, but I didn't get the swift belt. I'm 0/3 now ; ; I did get Tungi afterwards though, 1/4 overall! :)

Got BST to 56. I wear horns on my head now. Wonderful. Also (almost) have rampage. Trying to build up some str gear to help things out. Probably will be buying a Haubergeon this week (finally). Sold an astral ring to do it though.

Sunday night CK did Apollyon NE. Was a pain in the arse. Ton of coins though! Each person got four coins, plus we got 2 drk and 2 blm AF items. I still have to decide which AF item I want first. I can choose from any of the whm or pld pieces since I have the items for both of them. Right now I'm leaning more towards some WHM piece, but we'll see what I decide in a few days.

Assault was a blast, as always. We got Firebrand his PFC and then did the Orichalcum Survey PFC run. It takes a bland activity like mining and makes it a lot more fun :) Maybe they have a fishing assault?

Kirin Bum Rushed

Thursday we fought Kirin for the first time in a month. We were going to tp burn him down and see how that went, instead of our traditional kiting and mp burn him down. The last time we tried this we weren't ready when spawning and we had to revert to our old strategy. Well, we were all psyched. For extra safety, we killed all the minis before attacking him (which took approximately 22 minutes). We then proceeded to beat the living hell out of him -- all in all killed him in ~5 minutes. I am sure we can fine-tune it a little bit more and bring it down. Next time we're not even going to bother with minis and see how it goes.

News Flash: YOU DON'T NEED RIDILL/ARMADA HAUBERK WARS, OR BB MNKS TO MELEE BURN KIRIN. Well I'm sure it will cut your time down by a few 10s of seconds. I think it's more about organization and everyone knowing what to do than anything.

Cheers to CK! Of course Kirin jipped us yet again: Shining Cloth and O. Ingot. Let's hope for some real drops next time.

In other news, I got BST 55. We actually got 10k exp in one night. Stunning yes I know. We camped Behemoth and Adamantoise yesterday. Unfortunately no claims (nor HQs). In Limbus on Wednesday we did the oh-so-easy Apollyon SE. We got the win and 3 ancient beastcoins each. Not only that, but I also now have full sets of WHM and PLD items so that I can get AF+1 once I can afford it coins-wise. After that we did four assaults -- all wins. Got my Private First Class Badge as well :) Movin' on up baby! Did four runs of BCNM40 Under Observation -- Got an Utsusemi: Ni. Hot. Well, I guess luke warm. No scratch that, luke cold. I'm so far 0/14 on the pcc now. 0/3 on Tungi, 0/5 on frog trousers. WTH man somethin has got to give.

I've been debating about getting back into gardening. I'm holding onto some cash until I decide.

Also, there are rumors spreading that some end-game linkshells are buying their winterstones. I will upfront say that CK has never bought anything from gilsellers and probably never will. I can understand the temptation, especially now the gilsellers have ulli locked down and the drops from Byakko and Kirin can more than offset the price of the winterstone. It's almost like free abjurations. Almost.

But, I believe that more often than that the gilsellers are using these winterstones themselves. Did you realize that gilsellers are now offering services to provide you with WHATEVER abjuration you want at a substantial cost? Defending Ring ~ 25M or like $750 bucks, W. Legs 8M or $240, W. Feet 3M or $80, etc. So I think that more likely than end-game shells buying winterstones is that they are using them themselves. This is completely evident in the fact that gilsellers are concurrently exping perhaps 50 new characters to level 75. They are trying to provide this new service by Christmas time.

Recollection

Also check out Sosuke's videos. I think it's an excellent journal of life in Vanadiel.

A Sobering Post

This is a story about a WoW council member that had just recently quit and his feeling on MMORPGs in general:

http://soulkerfuffle.blogspot.com/2006/10/view-from-top.html

I hope you guys have time to read it. I'm not asking for everyone to omgwtf quit, but just evaluate your behavior with regards to the game, and whether it is consuming you. Is it a drug to you? Do you need to back off some? Am I fostering bad behavior in others? The last thing I want is for anyone in CK or even outside for that matter to become unrecoverably lost in Vanadiel -- forsaking all their real life commitments, opportunities, family and friends.

Also, in one part he feels like a "drug dealer" dealing out new content to players. If you ever feel like any of the CK officers are like this, please let me know. I never want anyone to feel like we're forcing an addictive drug down your throat.

We're all here to have fun, conquer new things, improve as players, and generally enjoy the Vanadiel that is -- but not at the cost of our own personal health and success. Let's take care of each other, and even more importantly take care of ourselves.

Game responsibly!