TV and FFXI

[thistlechaser]

TV: It's official. I love The Dresden Files more than I do Heroes! It's not even a close race, either. I love the characters so so so much in Dresden (EEE!) and the story is so cool! And all the ideas are just so... so... cool. I hate to keep reusing that word, but I must have gone 'Cool!' out loud four or five times in the last ep. I love all the supernaturalness of it, the spells, the witchcraft (the main character is a wizard! How cool is that!).

The characters are so great (so much love for Bob! Eee!), and the plots are always so interesting. (I should have seen the twist coming in this last ep, but I didn't! I was grinning once I saw it!) And the way there's magic/witchcraft in the real world is just so... cool!

Really, it keeps coming back to the characters though. I can't think of a single one I don't like. Even the one-ep characters are really interesting.

It's showing on SciFi, but you can find whole eps on YouTube (that's how I watch it).

---

FFXI: Ugh. Another of those nights that made me wonder why the hell I'm still playing this game.

First part of the night: Hello Dunes! All I needed was 5K XP and I had all night (and TWO XP band charges) to do it. 2K free XP, 3K XP needed. Easy, right?

Ha ha ha ha ha.

At first I thought I was in luck. A good enough party with a PL. I got 2K XP! Yay! Then the PL and the WHM left, and the whole night fell apart. The party leader took a 5 minute smoke break every 15 minutes, plus told us he was on drugs. Did I mention he was our puller? By the end of the night, I actually said "For the love of god, pull! Pull something! Anything!" He would just stand there, not moving, WHM's MP full and us all waiting.

Parties during the night featured: A RDM/WAR, a WAR/BRD who had never used a single song scroll, but the real winner was a MNK 19, no subjob, in a few pieces of level 1 armor (but mostly naked), using a level 1 staff as his weapon.

The staff MNK was the straw that broke the night's back for me. I try not to be pushy in parties, but I told the leader to boot him. The NIN told him to boot him. The WHM wasn't happy. The leader wouldn't, but finally the MNK picked up on how much we hated him and left. 9.9 And the leader replaced him with the WAR/RDM! Wheee!

It took me about 5 hours of this hell (god awful party with no PL), but eventually I hit MNK 20. As a 19-20 party, we were killing crabs and flies, and the WHM's MP was fully drained after each fight. About 50 XP per kill.

So anyway, MNK 20! Yay! I trotted off to Jeuno to do my chocobo license quest!

SE to Thistle: Ha ha ha! Fuck you! You think your night's about to get better? Ha!

That god damned 'chocobo on the loose' quest blocked my license quest! The fricking quest where you have to run around the world and you're rewarded a chocobo egg! $&*#@&$)~&$~)&)

I wanted to cry or scream or take a hammer to my computer, but instead I did all the required running around for the damned quest. And I dropped the egg as soon as I got it. I would have dropped it sooner if I could have. Damned thing.

By the time I was done, it was about 30 minutes before I usually log off, and I hadn't even logged Thistle on all day. I almost skipped digging, but I'm so broke I decided to push and do it. Went straight to Meri Mountains, got mostly crap (1 gold ore, 2 gold beastcoins).

And, as if that wasn't enough crap to ruin the night, the Candysense was taken while I was at work. ><

So very sick of the game right now. Really and seriously.

I am never, ever, ever, ever going to XP another job outside of a LS party. Never. Not a single random XP party ever again.

Two small good things from leveling MNK:

1) Counter may be the best job ability ever. I don't think I've ever had anything so satisfying as hitting a mob back because it dared to hit me.
2) I can no longer call BRD boring after playing MNK. Engage, nap, WS when you have TP, nap, oh look the fight is over! Stand around and nap while someone pulls... (Tonight was semi-better because I was backup voke for the NIN tank.)

Comments

[gbeans.livejournal.com]

Counter may be the best job ability ever. I don't think I've ever had anything so satisfying as hitting a mob back because it dared to hit me.

If you think that's emotionally satisfying, you should play MNK to 51 and get kick attacks. Boot to the head!

I can no longer call BRD boring after playing MNK.

Hahaha! That is both the awesome, and the not so awesome part of MNK. You can easily coast your way to 75 without doing more than engaging and going to make a sandwich. On the other paw, if you actually care to play the job, you can. Some of the most thrilling moments for me while leveling MNK was pushing myself to match my TP generation with other, faster TP gain jobs. There can be a lot of fiddling during parties if you're trying to make sure your TP gain matches your partner, but also doing the max amount of damage per hit.

It gets a lot more interesting when MNK starts feeling the consequences of DoT damage. (In other words, when they start really stealing hate just from meleeing. This becomes a noticeable problem in the early 60s when MNK evolves and PLD and NIN don't quite have the tools yet to keep up.) If you actually care about the party dynamics you can try to lower your hate while still walking the line for damage. It can be an interesting challenge at times :x It's why /NIN becomes an important MNK sub later on... So that you can lower your damage/hate and have some shadows to protect you when you steal hate anyways ^^;

[achika-soladia.livejournal.com]

I can no longer call BRD boring after playing MNK. Engage, nap, WS when you have TP, nap, oh look the fight is over! Stand around and nap while someone pulls...

It's all true. Except replace nap with "Play DS."

Then there's the parties that made pull. Those actually were fun. Not the best exp, but fun.

I still haven't learned hate management though. =( Never WS on a MNK mob in Dynamis. Also, lolnin.

[linmayu.livejournal.com]

Counter may be the best job ability ever. I don't think I've ever had anything so satisfying as hitting a mob back because it dared to hit me.

If you think that's emotionally satisfying, you should play MNK to 51 and get kick attacks. Boot to the head!

Hell, level it to 71. Get melee gaiters from Dynamis-Bastok (so that Counterstance actually works and doesn't kill you) and then use Counterstance to tank Plague Chigoe or some other mob that has hundred fists. That has to be one of the most satisfying things I've done as MNK. :3

And then beat up that lv19 staff-wielding monk.

[linmayu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've never been bored while playing MNK, mostly because I had a static that made me pull from 37 to 75. With pebbles. xD

[achika-soladia.livejournal.com]

The bad thing about pebbles, they almost require terrible terrible macros:

I'm gonna rock your world (t)

Getting stoned is bad for your health (t)

Oh no! Barney's stealing my Fruity [Pebble]s!

And so on.

I always carried around 2 pellet belts with me. =( My friends made fun of me, and I can't convince any of my friends leveling MNK to do it.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Heh! While that does sound fun, MNK20 is as far as Chaser is going. She just needed a chocobo license!

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Heh! Yeah, I did some pulling, too. Voke pulling, can you imagine? :P

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

If you think that's emotionally satisfying, you should play MNK to 51 and get kick attacks. Boot to the head!

While tempting, Chaser is done done done done done with XPing! Yay!

I saw a little of the DoT hate coming into play even now. I finally stopped eating food because I just kept getting hate by doing "nothing". <3 the MNK HP though! Gob drops bomb, rest of the party in orange and me white! :P

[achika-soladia.livejournal.com]

Voke pulling, can you imagine? :P

NUUUUUU *stabstabstab*

That made the PLD in me sad in side a wall. =(

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

*laughs* I know. 5 hours in the Dunes, and we had three pullers:

1) WAR ran up, hit it, put his weapon away (not just unlocking) and ran back to us.
2) The BLU who pulled with sheep song. 9.9 *pulls* ...time passes... "lol look how many flies I got!"
3) Me voke pulling.

Voke pulling was the best of the bunch! :P

[achika-soladia.livejournal.com]

When I was first leveling Achika, I had asked someone to bring me a ranged weapon in the dunes because I had to hit-pull mobs. I refused to voke pull. =O Then by the time I got my ranged weapon, party disbanded. =(

I think I've done pulling on every job I've taken through the dunes so far. WHM, BLM, BRD, etc. =O I don't like when there are pullers that take their sweet time pulling. =o Or understanding the aggro rules. Like the time I partied with someone who wouldn't pull beetles in fear of link, I ran up on PLD, Flashed one, didn't link because they're sight aggro, not sound like the guy thought they were. >

[gbeans.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, I actually think pulling is a lot of fun. I had a blast with it on RNG. I think one of the coolest pulls I ever did was in Gustav tunnel pre-TAU post-RNG adjustment. Wyvernpoacher was up and no one was there to molest her. (Ha -.- she was so camped before RNG was adjusted..) There was a party at the entrance (us) and then a party down each of the side tunnels, so a lot of competition for mobs. My party wanted me to bring back Robber Crabs... When one wasn't close enough that I could peg it I'd Tonko up, go down one of the tunnels, Shadowbind a crab, and then Camouflage my way past Wyvernpoacher to get back to camp. I scared the daylights out of the party doing that, but I got our crabs :3!

[quasilemur.livejournal.com]

You should read the Dresden Files books; they're very good if you're into a bit of light urban fantasy. I like what they've done with the TV series for the most part; I have some qualms, but they're mostly minor.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the reminder! I meant to hit up Amazon and order them. Doing that now...

[wanderingscribe.livejournal.com]

I've found that the nicest thing about the Dresden Files is that Sci-Fi plays it numerous times over the week. I never have to worry about missing an episode or not knowing about what's going on or what happened before, which is perfect for someone as scatterbrained and easily distracted as I am.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

That too. I just like watching it on Youtube (at work) because (amazingly) I'm less distracted that way. At home, almost without fail, anything I watch is watched while I'm playing FFXI. At work? I can pause it if/when I have to work, but other than that it gets most of my attention.

[tharpy.livejournal.com]

Dresden Files is awesome. I'm not sure it's surpassed the Heroes love, but it is getting close.

[reynardstruan.livejournal.com]

Um...you're going to hate me, but...

If you get the chocobo on the loose quest, you can talk to the guy immediately after the CS in order to start the chocobo license quest. You don't have to actually complete the quest.

I just got my chocobo license on 2 mules, did this on both of them and didn't bother getting a chocobo egg.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

That's odd, I tried that and he just told me to go to LTP. I even zoned and logged, and he would still only talk to me about the quest.

Strange, but I'm glad you didn't have to do the running around!

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Every week my love for it grows. Last week I had been unsure I liked it more, but this week it's certain. I think at least part of it is that it focuses on a smaller number of characters; Heroes feels like such a mess at times, and there are so many main characters I don't even like. I love everyone on Dresden Files. :)