Staff chucking?

Life is good in Vana'diel.

After getting my pimp hat and hitting level 60 I spent some time in Crawler's Nest finally learning the basics of soloing without using my sword. It's a very different sensation than I'm used to and it seems a whole lot slower than just pulling out my sword and beating a mob to death. On the other hand I was badly in need of some magical skillups and with some shiny few Fast Cast on my hat it seemed like a good idea.

The basic theory behind spell slinging soloing is to nuke a whole lot and keep the mob from getting close enough to chew on my face. Between Sleep, Sleep II, Gravity and Bind this can be done fairly easily provided you can get your spells to land without too many resists. Unfortunately relying on Sleep means I can't speed up kills using Poison or Bio, and the kills are already long enough to start wearing on my patience. Sure it's safer, but it doesn't silence the little voice in the back of my head that keeps telling me I'd be getting better exp by sword-chucking.

I think the thing that throws me the most about this whole kiting/sleep-nuking method is the awkwardness that comes from running away to keep your distance from the monster. Dodging aggro might be an refined art, but I'm starting to suspect picking an appropriate battleground is just as important. Being unable to see in 360 degrees, I'm either losing sight of the mob I'm trying to kill, or I'm running blind straight into walls, rocks, shrubbery and disgruntled goblins. Usually I'll opt to keep an eye out for goblins, but that makes it hard to tell how far away the pursuing mob is and with the camera rotation being slow as it is, this either necessitates guesswork or stopping long enough to turn around and discover that yes indeed the mob was close enough to begin preparing an adventurer sandwich.

As with most things, I suspect more practice will make this easier as time goes on.

If nothing else I'll eventually develop nervous ticks for when all the spell timers are ready.

We've been doing some Avatar runs lately.

I've taken to stealing all the killshots.