You lose some, you win some

Usually in that order too.

This weekend's adventures were largely frustrating with a sprinkling of success.

I kicked things off with another attempt to get my Fencing Degen. As a level 49 Red Mage I figure I'm way past due for this thing seeing as how you can equip it at level 41. Unfortunately, to get my hands on it I first have to contend with Purpleflash Brukdok, a rather nasty Orc who enjoys chain-nuking me into the dirt. The last time I tangled with him I managed to wear him down to about 75% health before he decided it was time for me to go home. Needless to say, I was a bit wary about confronting this guy again, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and try until it works.

Or in my case you run like hell when all of his Orc buddies decide to join in the fun and warp back to town before they can shank you.

Only a minor setback really, but it got me thinking that maybe I was going about this the wrong way. At this point there were two ways to proceed.
1. Keep leveling until I could kill the Orc by virtue of being a much higher level
2. Level Ninja as a subjob and abuse the hell out of shadows.

Being stubborn I figured I'd do both. At level 50 I would gain access to Aspir which might help keep me on my feet longer during the fight by keeping my MP up. Since I didn't have Ninja unlocked yet I figured the best thing to do would be to put up my Looking-for-party flag while I started the quest to unlock it.

As some of our more educated readers know, the quest to unlock ninja took me to Korroloka Tunnel, which I can never spell without the tab auto-translation feature. The quest itself is pretty straightforward. The fun part comes when you unknowingly run into a newly introduced Notorious Monster that eats adventurers for breakfast. Yes, in Korroloka Tunnel I met Thoon. He looked a lot like all the other Gigas in the tunnel except that he had a name and therefore had to be attacked on principle. Apparently Thoon hits really hard and likes to invite friends. I swear, this guy was tougher than Purpleflash. I didn't even get a chance to solidify my defenses before I was face down in the dirt. Ah well, it's all part of being an adventurer.

Unfortunately adventurers tend to be very stupid creatures. No, I don't mean they go around attacking random monsters, I mean they're incapable of coordination beyond getting them to all attack the same monster. Yup, tonight's party was pretty horrible.

After getting thoroughly trounced by Thoon, I got an invitation to a party that was forming in the Quicksand Caves. I had partied there twice before with good results. In fact one of the best parties I've ever had ended up there, so the prospect of returning there was appealing. Once I made the trek out there I met with the rest of the party at the entrance to the caves. On the surface you would think this was gearing up to be a great party. We had a Paladin tanking and a Dancer to back me up on healing. What could possibly go wrong? The fact that there was a Beastmaster in the party should have been my first clue that this was going to suck. I have nothing against Beastmasters, but I don't understand how they fit into the party dynamic and so I'm always a little confused when I find myself with one. This particular one would contribute greatly to my distress. When we entered the dungeon I noticed there was a high level White Mage hanging out near us. I soon discovered that it was a second account belonging to the Beastmaster.

Someone had brought a White Mage to power level us in the Quicksand Caves. This was insulting. Not only was this offensive to me as the main healer, but it inspired a wrecklessness that quickly degraded the party's performance. Most notable was the Paladin who decided that the presence of a PL meant he didn't have to play his job correctly anymore. No curing, no flash, no job abilities, just auto-attack. Apparently the goal was to let the White Mage tank. So we have everyone flailing wildly, pulling without regard to MP levels, mob difficulty or anything else that might be important under normal circumstances. It left me feeling very disoriented and unable to get into a good rhythm. This party was chaos and it was painful. The exp was pretty crappy too, I barely made back the experience I had lost to Thoon.

The one good thing to come from this party was that I got to find another Dancer to add to my list. A good dancer can fix just about anything with the exception of a PL. Nothing can quite fix the level of stupid that brings out in people.

Needless to say I was thrilled when my friend sent me a /tell asking me if I was busy and if I wanted to take another go at Purpleflash. Luckily for me he party had all but broken down at that point and was hitting some downtime, so I excused myself and put as much distance between myself and that party as I could.

So we head to Davoi, a level 49 Red Mage and a level 60 Monk. This should go well so long as my friend doesn't get utterly blown apart by the Orc's magic, but hey he's got 11 levels on me so maybe he'll be more durable. So it turns out that the fundamental difference between Red Mage and Monk is that Monks punch holes through people, monsters, mountains, and possibly the time-space-continuum. We're still waiting for the test results on that last one, but the results for Orcs were pretty conclusive.

We then spent the next half hour searching for a storage hole to go with the key I'd found on the orc. Yeah, a hole in the ground and I need a key to get into it. I don't get it either but we found it pretty quickly considering how many different places it can show up. With my quest MacGuffin in hand I raced back to San d'Oria to collect my shiny new sword:

A big thank you to Mohan for helping me out tonight.

How did I get myself into this mess?

For as long as I can remember I've had an MMORPG itch. For a long time I didn't have the means to get into subscription based games so my forays into the MMO scene were often brief and sporadic. The earliest one I can remember diving into was Runescape back when it was still in its infancy. It didn't last long, but it was fun for the few months I played it back when I was young and foolish. After remaining dormant for a few years I picked up Rubies of Eventide. What looked like a promising free MMO turned out to be unable to capture my attention once it was installed, and so I slumbered for a few years longer. During college I got that old urge to go adventuring once more. This time I found a private server hosting Ragnarok Online. I've never been one to fault a game for its graphics and the gameplay was solid enough to keep me around long enough to meet a few folks. Unfortunately the community wasn't strong enough to compete with the increasing workload, so I was dislodged yet again. I suppose I should probably make mention of the fact that I tried Guild Wars and that it was worse than all the free MMOs. That'll learn me, and so once again the urge to play MMOs went dormant for a time.

At this point you're probably wondering what all of this has to to do with FFXI. See, as much as I've been drawn to MMORPGs over the years, I've never really agreed with the subscription bussiness model. I was used to buying games that for $50 that I would play for literally at least 4 to 5 years. I just couldn't see the sense in paying over $100 for one year of gameplay. Final Fantasy XI managed to break me of my disdain for subscription based games.

It was the summer after graduating from college and I had a lot of free time on my hands and no truly pressing obligations, what better time to start diving back into MMOs? I went through a few titles that summer, but the ones that stood out were Dungeon Runner for being wondefully satirical but ultimately too shallow and Runes of Magic for being the clunkiest game I've had the displeasure of playing. Seriously, I spent a good two nights getting that thing downloaded, but once I got it installed I pitched it after about 20 minutes of very poor interface and game design. Alas it seemed that I would not be finding an MMORPG worth my time and would have to be content with whatever else I could scrounge up. I gave up my search and went back to my old fall back: a huge pile of console and PC games that I needed to get around to finishing.

Then a funny thing happened. One of my friends had been roping me into online gaming excursions for a while now, the most recent being a failed attempt to start turning a profit by drafting M:tG Online. About a week after I had given up hunting down a new MMO my friend came to me with another online gaming scheme. Only this time it involved a proper MMORPG, the kind that came complete with subscriptions and all that jazz. I was reluctant to touch anything of that nature but he managed to coax me into it since we could just try it out on trial accounts for two weeks and see how it went. I was wary, but agreed to give it a go. 2 weeks for free and then I could just cut myself off if it wasn't worthwhile right?

Not so much. I got sucked in hard and haven't been able to escape since.

While we wrestled with getting FFXI installed and trial accounts set up, my friend and I started doing some light homework on what jobs we would take up. We both debated the merits of rolling as Thief in order to play up the cowardly asshattery that we would invariably bring to the game in some form or another, but after a long and thoughtful deliberation my friend decided he'd rather just punch his way through the game and rolled Monk.

Class selection has always been a long and drawn out process for me. It takes me a while to overcome my indecisiveness, and with 20 jobs to choose from in this game there was quite a lot of choices to narrow down. My initial picks were Thief, Blue Mage or Red Mage. I had no real interest in playing a white mage, but with my friend rolling Monk I would need something to fill the gaps. Thief became less and less appealing as I continued to look at it and quickly following that was the realization that Blue Mage as awesome as it sounded, would not be available for quite a while. Even with this in mind I was still unsure of what to roll.

Then it hit me.
Why not go with the job that does everything but does it poorly?

Yeah, let's go with Red Mage and be a master of mediocrity.

At this point I was no longer taking job selection seriously and figured I might as well goof off and have some fun with my free 2 weeks of playtime. Red Mage has traditionally been a class that does a little bit of white magic, black magic and swordplay, but does all of them rather poorly. Since I couldn't really decide what I wanted to be, it made sense to simply choose "all of the above" and be done with it.

You want to know something really funny?
I have a knack for picking out absurdly powerful classes that take a lot of finesse to pull off correctly. I do this without realizing it or even trying.

Well needless to say my friend and I had fun with our two weeks.
Now I'm stuck on one of the most overpowered jobs in the game and I love it to death. I figure if I'm gonna keep at it I may as well make an effort to not suck.

I strive for mediocrity.
(Yes that includes the blog)