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thistlechaserI was going to do this post at work tomorrow, but I don't feel like going to bed yet, so here it is now.
Saturday: Almost totally uneventful and boring. Farmed lots, though was bored most of the time. I did all the offline stuff I wanted to (watched the new Bleach ep! Yay!) and had tons of time left, so logged onto the game and just farmed for lack of anything better to do ... and because I needed the money. *cry* I had just gotten to the point where I could start looking at Thick HQ pieces again, then noticed what happened to bomb core prices. (I'll need one at 63. Need it, it's not a toy like a HQ thing.) The price had been 300K when I made my shopping list many weeks (months?) ago, but they were now nearly 600K. For an item (ammo) you can throw if you're not careful. *cry*cry*cry* I got mine for 590K, but that was more than half the money I had. I spent most of the day grumbling in my head about it. (Okay, +12 attack will be nice, but if I had gotten it long ago I could have saved so much! But I suppose you can say that about most armor, at least on Midgar.)
The one high point of the day was that I went into Oldtown... um, that moblin city zone. It was my first time entering the zone (other than just stepping across the zoneline to hear the music). I didn't go far because I had no map, but still! It was highly highly highly cool and I want to go back sometime.
Sunday: It's been a long time since I've had so frustrating of a day. I missed Escort static because fricking Comcast decided that I didn't need an Internet connection for that hour. I really needed the XP, so was especially sad. I'll have to try to grab some random people during the week.
But at least I got back online in time for main job static! For those who don't know our group: We rock. I hate to sound that way, but we do. We've been working together for 60 levels now. We rarely get a death (maybe one a month, often less). We get outstanding XP/hour. We're usually ready for XP grounds before the recommended levels.
Today none of that mattered. Never, ever, ever before had we ever had a full-party wipe, but we had TWO today! Gah.
The first wipe was annoying because it was 1) preventable, and 2) muchly my own fault. We were leveling on Toramas (coeurls), and while the XP was darned good, the fights were really hard for us.
Then our puller (Kawaru) saw that Ose was up! (Non-players: He's a NM coeurl that has a really, really nice drop.) We put in a call to our LS, and high level folks came out to kill him. We decided to take him and tank him till they got there. (Or at least some of us did. I was a big 'Yeah! Let's try it!" excited voice.) Waru pulled Ose (Look! A good picture of a NM! I never usually get a good one!) but another darned torama popped on top of us, and it was too much. Waru's Last Stand -- we all died. And nevermind that our high level people arrived and were killing the non-NM kitties to keep Ose from linking, a damned HNM LS swooped in and stole him from them. (Edit, next day: To prevent wrong impressions, it was two people from that HNM, not the entire group.) Grrrr. (Edit: To be fair, at the time of the deaths I wasn't upset at all. I repeatedly said (in my head) that it was worth it. We got to fight another NM! Might not have killed him, but we battled him and I got screenshots of it! It wasn't until the day continued that my memory of it soured.) (Edit3: See the many comments on the whole "stealing" thing.)
So after we scooped ourselves up, we started XPing again, but things went really bad. A cat behind us, a cat ahead of us (close enough so that we were invisible to keep from aggroing them both), then a cat popped in camp. We escaped, but not before Ashn (taru NIN tank -- he had a "fun" time with the cats) had another death.
Now, RL me is rarely angsty. I try to keep other people happy and smiling, I try to be entertaining, but this had been the very worst party we've ever had. And since I'm the group's leader (today making me question that even more than usual), I was feeling rather responsible for the whole mess. While the mages went to rescue dead Ashn, I sat alone and thought about stuff. I really like that picture, as well as the moment I had there. The waves were washing up around me, all I could hear was the sea and the wind, and I thought about what we were doing wrong.
We decided to move and try something new. Either chain the heck out of VT mobs or to go and try antlions in A-whatever Chasm. The Chasm was close, so we tried there. The antlions were much, much, much better for us, but far from perfect. Conning them was very hard (one IT- could be much harder than another IT-), and once more we ended up all dead again (non-players: The monster is that big round brown thing in the upper corner. Antlions look like massive, ugly, horrible ticks).
Somehow I got an odd camera angle, and got a really nice shot of Eadwyn. I was trying to get a picture of how detailed things are (his eyes have multiple shades in them!), but that shot doesn't show it well. I should post the full-sized version, but even that doesn't show it as clear as it was in the game.
In more weekend-depressing-FFXI news, my Guillotine moves were just so totally embarrassing. I did more on a crit hit and some normal hits! I mean seriously, they did as low as 82 and 86 against both the cats and the antlions. I was seriously WTFing over it. On our very last fight I was bad (the first time I was bad the whole XPing day, so it was okay!), I told Cehra not to panic, then SE+TA+Guillotine'd. Yay! Finally a damage number like I had been seeing on the Friday night eye-hunt!
On, and one last screenshot, for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zubis. Remember how, after you asked for a D2, I told you not to blame me for what was happening? That I hadn't said anything bad? Well, here's proof! See? It was all Ead's doing! ;)
So anyway, back to serious stuff: I had been fully confident that we would hit 61 today (I needed under 10K XP, and we always easily make more than that!), but we didn't even get close. We made 5K in 4.5 hours. Horrible, horrible. (That's so bad it almost seems like my math must be off. 2:30-7:15 = 4 hours and 45 minutes. I started 5,555 into level and ended ... 10K in? No, I guess 12K in. So I guess 6.5K then. That's still a really low per hour figure.)
So no wearing my yagudo hat this week. Hopefully next week. We're going to go back to the Chasm and stick with the VT lizards there.
Such a depressing weekend. Hopefully the work week will be better. (Ha ha.)
Saturday: Almost totally uneventful and boring. Farmed lots, though was bored most of the time. I did all the offline stuff I wanted to (watched the new Bleach ep! Yay!) and had tons of time left, so logged onto the game and just farmed for lack of anything better to do ... and because I needed the money. *cry* I had just gotten to the point where I could start looking at Thick HQ pieces again, then noticed what happened to bomb core prices. (I'll need one at 63. Need it, it's not a toy like a HQ thing.) The price had been 300K when I made my shopping list many weeks (months?) ago, but they were now nearly 600K. For an item (ammo) you can throw if you're not careful. *cry*cry*cry* I got mine for 590K, but that was more than half the money I had. I spent most of the day grumbling in my head about it. (Okay, +12 attack will be nice, but if I had gotten it long ago I could have saved so much! But I suppose you can say that about most armor, at least on Midgar.)
The one high point of the day was that I went into Oldtown... um, that moblin city zone. It was my first time entering the zone (other than just stepping across the zoneline to hear the music). I didn't go far because I had no map, but still! It was highly highly highly cool and I want to go back sometime.
Sunday: It's been a long time since I've had so frustrating of a day. I missed Escort static because fricking Comcast decided that I didn't need an Internet connection for that hour. I really needed the XP, so was especially sad. I'll have to try to grab some random people during the week.
But at least I got back online in time for main job static! For those who don't know our group: We rock. I hate to sound that way, but we do. We've been working together for 60 levels now. We rarely get a death (maybe one a month, often less). We get outstanding XP/hour. We're usually ready for XP grounds before the recommended levels.
Today none of that mattered. Never, ever, ever before had we ever had a full-party wipe, but we had TWO today! Gah.
The first wipe was annoying because it was 1) preventable, and 2) muchly my own fault. We were leveling on Toramas (coeurls), and while the XP was darned good, the fights were really hard for us.
Then our puller (Kawaru) saw that Ose was up! (Non-players: He's a NM coeurl that has a really, really nice drop.) We put in a call to our LS, and high level folks came out to kill him. We decided to take him and tank him till they got there. (Or at least some of us did. I was a big 'Yeah! Let's try it!" excited voice.) Waru pulled Ose (Look! A good picture of a NM! I never usually get a good one!) but another darned torama popped on top of us, and it was too much. Waru's Last Stand -- we all died. And nevermind that our high level people arrived and were killing the non-NM kitties to keep Ose from linking, a damned HNM LS swooped in and stole him from them. (Edit, next day: To prevent wrong impressions, it was two people from that HNM, not the entire group.) Grrrr. (Edit: To be fair, at the time of the deaths I wasn't upset at all. I repeatedly said (in my head) that it was worth it. We got to fight another NM! Might not have killed him, but we battled him and I got screenshots of it! It wasn't until the day continued that my memory of it soured.) (Edit3: See the many comments on the whole "stealing" thing.)
So after we scooped ourselves up, we started XPing again, but things went really bad. A cat behind us, a cat ahead of us (close enough so that we were invisible to keep from aggroing them both), then a cat popped in camp. We escaped, but not before Ashn (taru NIN tank -- he had a "fun" time with the cats) had another death.
Now, RL me is rarely angsty. I try to keep other people happy and smiling, I try to be entertaining, but this had been the very worst party we've ever had. And since I'm the group's leader (today making me question that even more than usual), I was feeling rather responsible for the whole mess. While the mages went to rescue dead Ashn, I sat alone and thought about stuff. I really like that picture, as well as the moment I had there. The waves were washing up around me, all I could hear was the sea and the wind, and I thought about what we were doing wrong.
We decided to move and try something new. Either chain the heck out of VT mobs or to go and try antlions in A-whatever Chasm. The Chasm was close, so we tried there. The antlions were much, much, much better for us, but far from perfect. Conning them was very hard (one IT- could be much harder than another IT-), and once more we ended up all dead again (non-players: The monster is that big round brown thing in the upper corner. Antlions look like massive, ugly, horrible ticks).
Somehow I got an odd camera angle, and got a really nice shot of Eadwyn. I was trying to get a picture of how detailed things are (his eyes have multiple shades in them!), but that shot doesn't show it well. I should post the full-sized version, but even that doesn't show it as clear as it was in the game.
In more weekend-depressing-FFXI news, my Guillotine moves were just so totally embarrassing. I did more on a crit hit and some normal hits! I mean seriously, they did as low as 82 and 86 against both the cats and the antlions. I was seriously WTFing over it. On our very last fight I was bad (the first time I was bad the whole XPing day, so it was okay!), I told Cehra not to panic, then SE+TA+Guillotine'd. Yay! Finally a damage number like I had been seeing on the Friday night eye-hunt!
On, and one last screenshot, for
zubis. Remember how, after you asked for a D2, I told you not to blame me for what was happening? That I hadn't said anything bad? Well, here's proof! See? It was all Ead's doing! ;)So anyway, back to serious stuff: I had been fully confident that we would hit 61 today (I needed under 10K XP, and we always easily make more than that!), but we didn't even get close. We made 5K in 4.5 hours. Horrible, horrible. (That's so bad it almost seems like my math must be off. 2:30-7:15 = 4 hours and 45 minutes. I started 5,555 into level and ended ... 10K in? No, I guess 12K in. So I guess 6.5K then. That's still a really low per hour figure.)
So no wearing my yagudo hat this week. Hopefully next week. We're going to go back to the Chasm and stick with the VT lizards there.
Such a depressing weekend. Hopefully the work week will be better. (Ha ha.)
