Noble's Tunic!

Finally got one for myself Thursday night. We took down two Kirins melee style for one Kirin Osode (Rigelus), Crimson Cuisses (Anaeran), Noble's Tunic (Enz), Kirin's Pole and Damascus Ingot (Split). Congratulations to everyone :) Special thanks to Aeron for making my Noble's Tunic! :D

As for an update on doing Kirin melee style, we're definitely improving, but still are having a lot of deaths. I think we need at least one whm in the alliance for barstonra, curagas and scoping out who to cure. The other thing is I think melees are going into the fight without major buffs like Shellra V, which makes 2hrs and stonegas hit harder. The deaths make the fight last longer overall, but we're still doing an average of less than 30 minutes (including killing all minis). We'll keep fine-tuning, to make sure we can reduce the deaths and speed up the time.

Been hanging out with my gf a bit more since she's here to visit me. I'll be playing a little bit more next week before I head to China.

omg ty google!

jp :D

Merry Christmas!

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! I spent half the weekend in LA and the other half here in the bay area. A lot of it I was sick, the flu or allergies or something, but I still had a great time :)

A very fun weekend :)

Happy Monday to all of you. Small update here.

Thursday I came on quite late to a quarrel between the gilseller LS Tarutaruhome and CK about who got to pop Byakko. Apparently, Tarutaruhome were going to pop Byakko ("Baihu" White Tiger) until they dropped Haidate and weren't letting other LSs pop including CK and Rawr. We had been waiting for 30 minutes and everyone was very upset. I talked to Demolamane (the leader) and asked if we could just get one pop in and then they could continue. He's actually very nice. He immediately agreed. I also apologized for some members who had taken their frustrations out on them =P Congrats to Eulore on the Haidate :) That night we also popped two Suzy and one Genbu for mediocre drops. No Kirin since we didn't have the time.

Saturday we farmed sky and got Ullikummi straight away. We even watched Zipacna die at the very onset, so we knew ToD and re-camped it when it's window was back up and got it. In between it was a very quiet couple hours trying to camp SC. No luck there. We also narrowly missed Faust. Gilsellers pulled it earlier than us. We thought that they were going to wipe because they prematurely pulled. The PLD ALMOST died, but they held on ftw. After we killed Zip we checked on MG one last time and he was up. Finally! A nice three NMs to snag. Not a bad farming day.

I spent some time leveling my red mage from 37 to 41 this weekend. My first party as a refreshing rdm was with four ppl to be refreshed... AND a moving party. wtf. RDM is a tough job because you have to be focused at all times throwing all sorts of disparate things at the mob. It's very demanding, but very rewarding :) Exp and invites are fast.

On Sunday we did Apollyon NE and got a shiteload of coins. Pauge paid me back some coins and now only owes me another 10. But this puts me at 25. Debating on whether to get the healer's mitts +1 at the cost of serious loss of space.

After Limbus, I asked Mori to help me with Rutter Sabatons, since he'd promised he'd come back to help. Well, we went and somehow messed up the gates and I had to go get some more firesand. It was a slight setback, but in the end was worth it. I got my pair, which by the way I LOVE. Helps out those Vorpal Blades a lot :) Thank you Moriarti, Zylia and Caliysto!

Ended the night with some Assault. Anaeran just finished his semester, so we set out to help him finish up some PSC assaults. We won all three, but ALMOST lost the mamool ja training grounds one, which I really hate. I had to go before I could spend my last tag since my gf called.

The Mad Juggler!

Last night "Shadows of the Departed" quest that we had decided to do on a whim was cancelled. The KSNM that I had signed up for wouldn't start for another few hours.

Something about me: I can't stand doing nothing. I'm always doing something. Not only in game but irl too. Last night I had a couple hours to kill so I found the warhorse footprint thanks to Amenti :) and ranked up to Superior Private. After that, I kept myself on hold and waited for the KSNM to start -- we were waiting for Daodao to finish assaults and had no idea when that would be. Could be 1 hour, could be 2. No idea. So I just waited. Drove me insane!

I'm also working on some stuff irl concurrently while playing. I'm recording 23 one hour camcorder videos onto my computer. So every hour I'm rewinding tapes, putting in new tapes, playing with some software. Also I call up my gf and talk to her. So you can imagine: I have two computers running, fiddling with a camcorder, playing a game, talking to my gf all at once. Might as well get some balls and juggle while I'm at it.

Oh what a night!

Tried to pop Jailer of Temperence to no avail. Popped Jailer of Hope and beat the fool down. Tier II jailer? No way! He's definitely one of the easier jailers. All we got was a Hope Staff, wtfdropintrash. Was kinda dumb because our alliance accidentally dissolved before the staff dropped so it was thrown away.

Afterwards, a few of us went over to sky to do some off-hours farming. There was like 30 ppl total in all of sky, and the majority of them were gilsellers doing Seiryu. So we basically walked all over it and took our most prized targets home: Ullikummi and Zipacna. Both fights went incredibly smooth for only 8 ppl. I'm still getting used to my new MacBook Pro's keyboard, so I accidentally use invincible at the wrong times, but oh well! It worked out all the same. Zip dropped the Ushikirumaru (sp?) gkt. Unfortunately, Rigelus wasn't there to pick it up, so it dropped to Moriarti who will someday far in the future work on SAM. We were going to take Faust, but someone had gotten him while we were at Ulli and Zip. MG was up but we didn't have the right setup for it so we called it a night.

There is a new set of gilsellers doing Ulli now. They easily miss Ulli if it pops and someone is CCing. They were pretty friendly though. Also, TarutaruHome yesterday fought 8 Seiryus. I think they plan on doing about 10 Kirins in this month, including one today. Might be worth it to CC them on Kirin since it is their first.

Good luck to all taking finals! Everyone: A+++++ kthxbai.

Less playtime

I've been really busy at work due to a deadline this week. Been staying until 7-8PM PST almost every day. As such, I've been missing most events.

I managed to squeeze out four merits this week and five gold imperial coins. Now 5/20 towards my turban. I put two of the merits into crit rate up and saving the other two so I can raise crit rate again.

I assaulted on wednesday night, quite late though. Rigelus had already fallen asleep and somehow woke back up by the time we started. We did Golden Salvage (with brd/smn and whm/smn!), Excavation Duty, and the psc mamool ja training grounds one where they throw weapons at doors. We won the first two, lost the third. That one is so random. Not to mention that some of the weapons that were thrown missed the doors, so that didn't help. Only up ~1600 assault points on the night.

Thursdays are our sky nights, and I had 6/8 mini pop items to use. Not only that, since I had come late, they pretty much cleaned out sky except Ulli, so we had a few more gods to go through. We did two genbus (a. hands to Zy finally! Genbu shield to me and Ase, w. feet to wak), one seiryu (s. kote moriarti and d. head i forgot?), and one suzaku (n. feet to Kyp and s. scythe to me!). We did pretty well on the night. Suzy we fought on Firesday, and for some reason our chainspell stun was useless. He got probably 4-5 firagas off and almost completely obliterated the alliance. Luckily, we had a friend Blazeoffury there who we invited and held onto it as we regained our composure. In the end it was worth it since it dropped the incredibly rare n. feet :) We decided not to do another Suzy that night lol. We never lose to Suzy, but she can pack a punch on firesday. Beware! Congratulations to all that got goodies.

This weekend I'll be in LA to visit my gf. Going to take a break from the game. See ya'll on Monday!

I don't want to talk about it...

But I do. We claimed Fafnir for the first time in quite some time and wiped. There were several key aspects to this wipe:

(1) Ppl getting hit by breath because of standing in front of Fafnir
(2) Inability of mages to keep up stoneskin.
(3) Winds day, the day when Fafnir spams wings
(4) Mistake claim of a darter.

Ultimately (4) brought us down, but (1), (2), and (3) were really stunting our ability to bring him down at the onset. It reminded me of HappyAngels fight with him only the day before, where he did 24 wings, mostly on Winds day. If not for (4), we probably could have regained composure to put some serious heat.

Once you claim a darter it's pretty much over. 3/4 tanks were weakened. Our BLMs were living from elemental seal to elemental seal just trying to keep fafnir asleep. 5 Darters. What can you do? We tried to nuke + melee one darter at a time, but Cursed Sphere is a b****. It will drain your alliance hp fast, taking the mages mp with it. Timed nuke, timed sleep by BLMs would include Fafnir and most likely they would die from a combined darter+fafnir attack. That would probably be your best bet though. The whole ordeal would take 10 minutes, then another 5 minutes to recover, all in all losing about 15 minutes. That's the best case situation. Worst case, fafnir moves and you get flailed. I

It's in the past now. I think we all learned a lesson on which we can improve our gameplay and are moving forward.

It hurts to lose like that, especially with the competition onlooking. But we'll bounce back. We always do. We'll be there tomorrow. The next time we claim Fafnir we will not lose.

'Til next claim. Shout out to all of CK. Keep ya head up!

omg my gf's back! w00t!

My girlfriend, btw the sweetest girl in the world and a hero in her own right, just came back from a trip to Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. She had been gone for six weeks. She'll be here in the states for another 5-6 weeks before we both head out to China. I'm glad she's back safe and had a great trip.

WHM/WAR
The new thing apparently. Increase your chances to claim HNM! We camped Nidhogg and Fafnir this weekend and HappyAngel and Element claimed them, respectively. We're all down about this claiming business, but we keep trying. I think next time I'm going to claim Fafhogg as whm/war just you watch. On another note about claiming, I stood next to the wildly successful Chronicles, who has claimed 8/16 Perserverence Fafhoggs, just for good luck. She is a beautiful elvaan female. Maybe she just takes a quick look at Fafnir and tempts him her way! Or maybe she just bots.

Saturday we farmed sky with our newly formed strategy. We NEARLY swept the entire place clean. We narrowly missed Ullikummi and never even saw MG, but we got everything else, including the much needed Zipacna! This will be the first Genbu in more than a month. A. hands where!?!

I synthed a Haubergeon for Thuron on 26% windsday waning crescent, supposedly a good day. NQ. I'm now 10/11 on NQs, 1/11 breaks, 0/11 HQ. When is my much awaited for break through?

Assault with a more static static: Moriarti, Caliysto, Enz, Rigelus and Dynamis. We had a blast yesterday, though we were only able to do 3 assaults: 3/3. I controlled that prisoner in Seagull Grounded. I hate that guy. I wish I had a gun so I could shoot him in the heel when he runs away, that bastard sword! We also did Preemptive Strike and Orichalcum Ore. So far out of the four times we've done orichalcum ore, I've found it twice! :D Currently sitting on ~7k points in Ilrusi Atoll, ~5k in all others, except for 2k in Lebros Cavern. That place is hard to get points in. I want to rank up so we can find a cooler mission for that area. I'm almost SP but I have to find the warhorse footprint -- BUT unfortunately the chocobo stables dude in Al Zabhi was kidnapped. Almost impossible to find now!

Javir Soloing Faust Update: Javir recently been perfecting his technique. He got Faust down to 80% before he came up the ramp and whirlwind raped Javi to death. Good Job tho Javir, much props to you for your efforts!

'Til next time gadget.

Dorps!

We did Kirin on Thursday night, same as we had done in the past few that we've done. We took a while again, maybe 10 minutes to kill Kirin once minis were dead. Ppl were dying left and right, mainly because we weren't killing Kirin fast enough. We need brds with troubadour who can stay on top of soul voice and songs on as many parties as possible. I think three brds rotating between each party isnt even a bad idea. That way you can get double march, double minuet, double madrigal. Our drops were the shiiit tho! W. Legs (Eulore), Kirin's Osode (Rsouljah), and Noble's Tunic (Gunblade). Congratulations guys!

I got my own set of cool drops in the past two days. I camped carmine dobsonfly with a group. I promised I wouldn't lot on the sallet as long as they let me lot on the jaeger ring. np, since they drop like candy from a pinata. So I got one of those. Sallet is a different story altogether. It's very rare. On Friday night I went to camp it again but we missed it. Some JP LS came a tad earlier than us. I fought Turtlerider omw to Seww the Squidlimbed. If you ever see that sahagin, do not fight him. He drops suck and the fight takes like 20 minutes. Seww however popped within the second PH I saw and I claimed and got the frog trousers (1/7) w00t! Then, after waiting forever, I joined a super late Rostrum Pumps run and got the first pair! :) 12 blms pwn alastor antlion btw. Huge couple days for me!

Hope all is going well with you. Hit me a line!