Monday morning: The good and the b-zzzzz.

[thistlechaser]

I won't go into details on how it came about, but I got less than four hours sleep last night. Bah. Since I could hardly move, I skipped walking and got breakfast instead. (No exercise, yes food! Now there's a recipe for success!) However, I have a Diet Coke to go with breakfast, and while it will rot my bones, it also has caffeine. Yay caffeine.

Usually I would have had juice with breakfast, but for the rest of this month I'm avoiding every bit of sugar I can (more than just the "no candy/cookies/chocolate/sugar-only foods" which I had been avoiding before). I have to go in for my bloodtest "in June" (I'm going to go the end of May instead), and be damned if I want that one test not to be better this time. There's no way in heck I'm doing those insulin shots, I'd rather eat no sugar for the rest of my life. (As a reminder: There are two glucose tests they can do on your blood. One is a picture of a long period of time, one is a picture of a short one -- a couple days. My long term one was fine, but the short term one was borderline high. The doctor gave me a couple months to bring it down through diet.) I know it's sort of cheating to eat differently for this month than I will for the month after the test, but... I don't care! No shots, no shots, no shots. (I don't mind if the doctor has to give me one, but I'm not doing it myself.)

The expected extra work here at work hasn't come in yet, so I've been reading my flist. Yay! I was at skip=350 when I started, and I'm down to skip=150 now. (That's just one weekend of posts! Friday evening until this morning.) Some folks have suggested filters, but I decided not to go with them. Anything on my flist is something I want to read, so I'd rather just take longer to get caught up than to miss/skip posts.

A little FFXI stuff I've been pondering: I guess it's understandable, but when you're new you don't recognize when someone is especially good. I've partied with loneguardian and Draque twice now, and for a long while I was scratching my head over something: Easily 95% of my Cures were going to Draque -- no one else ever seemed to be hit, ever! (I joked to myself that I should set up my macros to just target him, that'd save me the step of picking who to use the spell on.) After the first partying I realized it must be that "holding the hate" thing, but it wasn't until the second time we partied that I really saw how it was done (or at least part of it, I think there's more I missed). It's odd, but I thought the fighters in a party had it really easy: Just target the monster and the game will make you attack as the time allows, but at least for some fighting-type roles in the party, that's not true. (I always envy them! They can chat mid-battle! I have way too much to watch, I can't type more than it takes to fire off macros. :) )

I'm probably the newest FFXI person who knows of my LJ, but a hint in case any WHM-types read this: If you're partying, it works really, really well to use your chat filters to turn off a lot of the stuff. You have no need to know when a hit misses the monster and lots of other battle-stuff. By filtering out all the stuff except when a party member got hit, I was able to almost keep up with the dialogue box! This means I had more of a chance of seeing when someone yelled out "poisoned!" midbattle. (I know there's a way to filter the party channel into a whole different window, but I need to look up how that's done. That'd probably be very useful, too.)

Back to LJ reading! And fics, too! I actually read a HP fic this morning. :) Woo! It was good (if not at all worksafe)!

Comments

[loneguardian.livejournal.com]

Draque is a KICKASS tank. :3 Tanks are meant to do just that, take all the hate and keep the monster on them, making the WHM's job a little easier in just needing to heal one person instead of five. Plus, he can heal himself, with also keeps hate. ^^ It really can be a difficult job, especially when you have to keep the mages safe and all. Paladin really isn't a melee job that you can chat while doing and still be effective. Now, me? XD I was just a Warrior, secondary voker in case Draque lost hate for some reason. I have to keep an eye out, but aside from that, yeah, my job's easy. Smack the monster, munch on mithkabobs, make sure Berserk is on as much as possible, and keep an eye out for the skillchains. :3

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Plus, he can heal himself, with also keeps hate. ^^

Which is extra-handy! It looked like only about half of his Cure/Cure IIs were working (understandable, since things kept hitting him and interrupting), but even with not all of them working, it's still a great thing to be able to do!

The idea of a tank is really interesting (and smart!). Is it unique to FFXI or is it a common MMORPG thing?

[loneguardian.livejournal.com]

It's a common MMORPG thing. ^^ Groups usually focus around the Tank, the Healer, and the Nuker. *shrugs* They just have different names in different games. While there's a Paladin, White Mage, and Black Mage in FFXI, it might be... a Knight, a Cleric, and a Sorceror somewhere else. :3

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Ah, makes sense. Thanks for the info!