Whoa

Well, I managed to axe one of my mules. But I still have one in Bastok that is taking forever to sell everything. This month is her last. Turns out I was holding somewhere between 200-300k worth of goods per mule. Just had to sit at the AH and sell EVERYTHING. What a pain!

You know being gone for a long time and seeing the economy drop like it did is crazy. Some items are worth as little as 10% of the original price. All items dropped, but some dropped far less than others, especially HQ items. I've been considering cashing out some of my non-HQ more common items that are worth quite a bit (like cassie earring and gigant mantle) to buy HQ. Anyways, with the price as low as it is now this may be my only chance to buy HQ. Well, at least I can say that I'm glad I held onto my cash since it's worth so much more now!

Not much new otherwise, though I did get fishing to 46 *spins his party favor and blows his kazoo*

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!

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!

Onzozo Pillaged

Well, we did kill LoO the night before and were under the impression that the NM was 21-24 (half the members were convinced). So we head out there and camp for a few hours. Purpose shows up -- how did they know to come? Don't ya love being search whored? I wonder who they search for. We might as well put it in our search comments: Camping LoO come join us. Anyways we were killing, claiming, claiming, killing PHs as they came. In between, the 8 or 9 of us would camp EVERY SINGLE NM in the whole damn zone. We were killing every PH for every NM. That night we killed Mysticmaker Profblix x2 (2 moldavite earrings for Pathogen (random dude) and Tripods (Pauge's Alt)), Hellion (L' A'outrance to Wyle), and Peg Powler (Schwarz Axt, mine!). Congratulations to all. I just narrowly missed claiming Ose too. Oh well. We stayed at LoO for a full three hours without a pop. Now we can confirm for sure: LoO is on an 18-24 hour timer =P.

Also there was an ENTIRE alliance of gilsellers leveling on Torama. I was chatting it up with them, well more like probing them why they do what they do. They basically said, "It's not my fault, if you have a problem ask my manager." Whatever. It won't be long before these guys hit 75 and a new wave of gilsellers will be camping sky or HNM. Probably some of those characters will be sold on ige.

We also did sea. Killed Jailer of Temperence, Ix'MNK. Got a first virtue out of all that. You know, sea is one of the last bastions of this game left untouched by gilsellers. We ought to milk this sh*t while it lasts.

Bahamut, Swift Belt and Gilsellers -- Oh my.

Another Monday at work. Good news this week is that I will be going to visit my family in Poland starting on Thursday. One of my cousins is getting married. I'll let you know how it goes when I come back! Hopefully this Polish wedding won't be _too_ crazy.

This weekend was an interesting one.

On Saturday we spent a few hours at Ulli trying to pop him. He didn't pop. Instead I utilized my Chinese to give the gilsellers that were gathered there a hard time. I think I flustered them because one of them got aggro had to HP. On the other hand it really distracted our team and we couldn't kill PHs as fast as we should have been. So, I'm sorry for that XD. We'll work on getting some Ullis early this week.

"Ni ying gai zhao yi ge ZHEN de gongzuo"
You should find a REAL job.

After sky farming we tackled Bahamut v1. The hardest thing about doing these battles now is that it is really hard to form up an alliance of ppl to do this, especially on a Saturday night. Needless to say after pulling some teeth, grabbing some pickups and waiting for some others to actually flag the quest, we made our way to the BC. The fight itself was pretty easy. We had 6 blms, 1 pld/nin, 1 nin/drk, 1 nin/war, a couple whm, 1 rdm, 1 brd and some random melee. In fact the worst part about it is that we were trying to kill him too fast. He spams his flare every 10%, causing you to have to continually withstand huge damage. At about 50% we backed off on nuking to let mages regain some MP for the final push. Bahamut went out not with a whimper but with a bang. Mega-flare wiped half the alliance. Overall a fun fight! I can't wait for Apocalypse Nigh and some new earrings :D

Finished up BST AF and got level 54 this weekend. Been slowly working on that when both Wyle and I have time. I dread having to gear myself up with new DD gear. I don't have the gil atm to put myself in the latest and greatest. Hopefully at least I can get a Hauby, which will be useful for both PLD and BST and any other melee I decide to lvl.

BTW I've been an avid fan of gardening for about a year and half. But I've had enough. SE made changes to gardening that lessened the yield of tree saplings from cuttings. Instead of mindlessly producing saplings, you have to be more careful about when you harvest. You have to wait until later in the harvest before you harvest, and harvest on earthsday to get the full yield (like it used to be). Otherwise you're going to get a lot of rock salt and shell bugs. Well, I waited to long in my harvest and lost 75% of my crops -- an approximate 150-200k loss. My playstyle has changed too since I've been working a lot and now I don't have too much time to check my plants. I'm tossing in the towel on gardening. Not sure how I'm going to earn gil in the future, but I think I might just stick with fishing, ksnm and bcnm for now.

Also tried for swift belts this weekend with some current CK members and old friends. I spent a few hours (and few deaths) in Phomiuna Aquaducts farming up a codex (quite boring and dull), with every 2 hrs grabbing an oil spill to kill the BST fomor. We went to Sacrarium with 2 nin, 2 whm, 1 brd, 1 rdm, 1 sam, 1 thf. All the NM fights went really smoothly and we had only a few deaths. 0/6 on swift belts though. WTF. We'll be back there in a couple weekends. Hopefully, with at least SOME swift belts =P

I missed Limbus and no Assault this weekend. Instead merited for a little while, and then trioed my carby mitts with Pauge and Heilger. Thanks guys! Tried to get the Asklepios NM to pop but by that time I was about to pass out. So I did.

Hope you guys have a great week in Vanadiel. See you there :D

Beastmaster Artifact

This week I've been busy as all hell with work. Today is our self-imposed deadline so my schedule should ease up in the coming weeks. It has caused me to miss a few events I really didn't want to miss though!

CK attempted Jormungand last night with 32 ppl. I have to admit to all of you that this is about the fourth or fifth revision of our strategy and it's almost there now. Not only that, but our players have gotten a lot more equipment, merits, and experience since our first fight. As a result we brought Jorm down to 11% before someone CFH accidentally (that's better by 41% since the last time we tried). We were going to win -- how sad :( But still we know we can win and will beat it veryveryvery soon.

Meanwhile, I been logging in late so that all I really have time to do is finish up my BST AF -- all I need now is the garlaige citadel coffer. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HELP OPEN TWO GATES. As a consolation prize, I will offer the chance that old two wings MAY pop and we MAY pass him. Hey it could happen. Once I get level 60 and can wear all my AF I'll model for all ya'll to see.

I also camped Fyuu (F U MF!) for several hours without spawn ... and without my shrimp lure to fish. Needless to say I was very pissed. This NM is retarded and should be shot. Except, that would leave a hole in my monitor. ; ;

CANT WAIT FOR THIS WEEKEND. Bahamut v1, sky farming, Limbus and more assault! tgif tgis tgisAGAIN.