Tanking: in which I poke things I shouldn't

So here's a thing.

Tonight my linkshell event got canceled, leaving me at loose ends for the night.

Here's another thing.

Now being the whimsical and somewhat haphazard Red Mage that I am, I figured tonight would be a perfect opportunity to attempt to copy someone else's success. I headed out to Abyssea Attohwa and began climbing Parradamo Tor.

Parradamo Tor is a particularly obnoxious mountain with ledges two feet wide and obstacles littered all across the path to the summit. I've only climbed it twice before and heartily detest it. Seriously, it's one of the more obnoxious level designs in FFXI, which is saying something.

When I finally dragged myself up to the top of the mountain I could see Yaanei drifting along in the distance. I quickly buffed myself and crossed the plateau in search of Yaanei. After some running back and forth I managed to locate the aberration.

As I fought, I found it interesting that this creature which is essentially a second zone boss was susceptible to all of the standard enfeebles. These days most NMs are immune to a bunch if not all of our enfeebling magic. Being able to use my enfeebling magic unhindered makes just about any fight go a lot smoother.

The beginning of the fight was fairly simple. Yaanei swings a little faster than most big monsters, but it's not enough to make shadows useless. The only concerning threat is the tier IV AoE spells he casts, but with Addle and their native cast time you should have plenty of time to switch into a MDT(magic damage taken -%) set even if you aren't able to run out of range. I found my nukes were either getting horribly resisted or that Yaanei is packing some mad magic defenses. My tier IV nukes weren't even breaking 1,000 damage and my nuking set isn't exactly terrible. So this was looking to be a long and drawn out fight.

As I was shaving off the first quarter of Yaanei's health I almost tripped over something low to the ground and a tad beligerent. There was a Tarutaru Black Mage who had scaled the mountain as well and we was offering to assist me. Somewhat disheartened by my uninspiring damage output and the ticking clock, I agreed to accept his offer. For the most part my play didn't change. I had built up a ton of hate and Yaanei was very intent on trying to clobber me and didn't care too much about the Tarutaru that was dropping stuns and additional nukes. Kill speed had gone up considerably, though it was still a slow and arduous process to be sure. At some point the Tarutaru asked for me to pass him party lead. Turns out he had two friends on the way to help as well.

When the White Mage and Warrior Tarutarus finally arrived, a curious thing happened. I found myself receiving Hastes and -na spells for the nasty status effects Yaanei was now doling out. It seemed that no one really wanted to pry the beast's attention away from me so I was going to be allowed to tank. No one actually said it, but there's an old saying that still holds true: "Actions speak louder than words", and the party's actions spoke volumes. I'm sure both the Black Mage and the Warrior could have taken hate if they'd cared to, but with our rag-tag band I was best suited to holding the monster's attention while simultaneously Not Dying. It was fun, it was amazing, it was something I thought I'd never get to do after the update that nerfed all of Red Mage's enmity tools. But hey, if I can cap hate early and not fall over it's all good, right?

As the Caturae was on its last legs, they asked me to slow down on killing it as they were still trying to proc red for the atma. An odd request given our slow and steady approach thus far, but ok. I slowed nuking almost to a halt. Spellcasting became slower as I mainly cycled shadows and tried to recall which spells in my arsenal still gave me cumulative enmity, because I knew the shadows were slowly eroding my hold on hate. I knew enspells gave some CE, and renewing enfeebles seemed to provide enough volatile enmity to hold out long enough to proc red. Afterwards, at about 10% health, Yaanei decided to get really mean and began unleashing nasty AoEs that inflicted horrible status effects like terror and also swatted some of the Tarutarus after hate reset. There were enough targets that we were able to survive while the monster induldged a serious case of ADD. Eventually I regained hate and was able to hold Yaanei as the rest of the party tore down the last few shreds of its HP.

We won. I got a spiffy new cape. Congratulations and fireworks were had by all.

And people say Red Mage tanking is dead...Ha!

Soloing.


Celebrating our victory.


This is what happens when my linkshell is waiting on people to get to Voidwatch.


I've been having an absolute blast in Nyzul Isle lately.


Ah bunny punching, it never gets old.

Look Pimpin'

Oh this has been a long time coming. I can finally wear my pimp hat in my idle set again and it goes well with my new pimp coat. Life is good and I am stylish once again.

Oh Hello Endgame

Spending a month floating through empty social linkshells has been less than fulfilling. Oh let's not mince words, it was terrible. Without a core group of people to run with you're left trying to accomplish everything either through pickup groups filled with incompetent people, or you end up soloing a lot.

Not being a social butterfly I chose the latter.

As a Red Mage there's a fairly large portion of the game you can realistically get through on your own. However, that doesn't mean it's always fun to go it alone.

That's why I jumped at the opportunity to apply to my first real endgame shell, Ouch.

My only experience with endgame thus far has been with a terrible dynamis shell and the ocassional event with a nice social shell that no longer exists. I figured it would be nice to finally experience events while running with some folks who actually know what they're doing.

So far it's worked out pretty well. The folks themselves seem pretty laid back, the rules are straight forward, fair and pretty sensible. Everyone seems to be competent at the jobs they bring to events, and there are plenty of events throughout the week to keep me busy. It's a sharp contrast to what things have been like in the past when there was never a clear plan for each night and events were pulled together on a whim rather than a schedule people could plan around. I'm really enjoying it.

It's still an endgame shell though, so unless it's event time it's fairly empty. But while it is about events and getting stuff done, it goes about it with an air of business casual rather than a suit and tie operation. Folks chatter enough that I don't feel like a nameless cog in a giant machine, although on reflection that might be because they gave me a nickname the first night I joined the shell.

Since the whole game is currently still revolving around Abyssea that's what a lot of the stuff we do is, but there's a good mix of other stuff in there as well. Every Monday we do Voidwatch, and I have to say it's probably one of the more enjoyable events I've participated in so far. The rewards are pretty lackluster and the drop rates are terrible, but the event itself is something I find a lot of fun. Tackling huge monsters with as many people as we can wrangle up in a night appeals to me. Unlike Abyssea it isn't everyone but the tank and the White Mage sitting around until procs are taken care of, instead it feels like an actual fight with a threatening foe. Sure you can't have the DDs feeding the NM TP the whole time, but it always feels like there's something for everyone to contribute to the fight.

I don't think I'm alone in this either. Last night we were short a few hands, but it wasn't because people didn't want to come. Quite the contrary we had a number of members who were disheartened that they couldn't make it to the event due to personal schedules and whatnot. Voidwatch is fun.

An endgame shell is never going to be a replacement for a good social shell, but right now I'm pretty content to enjoy what they have to offer.



Ouch.


I need to get out of Abyssea more often. The rest of the world is so beautiful.

Generic update

My brain is all melty so it's generic rambling today.

It's been a month since I updated last. Mostly it's because I've been trying to keep busy.

Lately I've been spending a lot of time working on Dragoon. It's quite a fun job and offers a stark contrast to Red Mage. It took me some time but I finally got it to cap. Looking back I feel a tad silly for buying top of the line gear for it on the way up rather than just slumming it since it always got stuck in some god-awful sync. Then again, it's a lot of fun to do roughly 40% of a party's damage, and the thought of my wyvern outdamaging people is both hilarious and depressing at the same time.

I feel like leveling Dragoon has opened a few doors to me. Before all I had to offer at events or pickup groups was Red Mage. What with the metagame being the way it is, Red Mage doesn't bring much to the table unless there aren't other options available. Sad but true. Now I can at least offer up the other half of the job spectrum (Magic vs Stabbing) so things are a tad more flexible now. Unfortunately I still feel like my Dragoon is woefully unprepared for prime-time. I've done what I can to start gearing it properly, but it's still miles behind my Red Mage. Just means I have more shinies to chase I suppose.

Mmmm...

How to put it.

The Linkshell I came to Valefor to join has since broken. The leader burned out and I can't really blame him. The guy worked weird hours and was putting in a lot of effort running the shell and trying to keep it accessible for everyone. Just too much stress I suppose. It's a shame, because I think it was honestly the best shell I've been in.

So when he stepped down from being the leader the shell split and people went in different directions. Some folks built a new shell designed for continuing to support new players while other folks drifted off into another social shell that was a bit more geared toward veteran players. I ended up following the folks to the social shell. It didn't have quite the same feel, but at least it had some friendly faces...I guess.

Something about it just didn't feel right. The atmosphere was a tad less friendly and jovial. The leader, who had done some events with the DiV shell previously, was a lot more talkative in their own shell.

How do I put this?

She was a bit cold, and sometimes her sarcasm bordered on just being mean to other shell members. The other night a few of us voiced some concerns. She did not take well to being told to stop repeatedly abusing a specific shell member. People got told off in an extremely aggressive and hurtful manner.

You want to run your shell that way? Fine.
I want nothing to do with a leader who thinks it's funny to pick on people and just generally be a raging bitch. It's such a shame too, I liked some of the other folks in the shell, but I just can't be happy in a situation where the management is like that.

So now I return to my eternal quest to find a good linkshell. Until then, I'll be aimlessly floating through Vanadiel.

Relocating

So a little over two weeks ago I decided to switch servers. The good folks over at Dreams in Vanadiel have been egging me on to make the jump for a while now and the way things were going on Quetzalcoatl it just seemed like a good time to do it.

In many ways I find myself realizing that yes, I was quite unhappy in my old linkshell. Sure I knew the folks in there and we all got along fairly well, but it was always so empty and devoid of activity. We could barely ever accomplish anything in that shell. Don't get me wrong, they're good people, but they weren't terribly skilled and there weren't many of us to begin with so a lot of the time I had to fend for myself to get anywhere and that gets old after a while. Also the LS leader was a tad clingy in ways that made me uncomfortable, though I was always too polite to let him know.

But now I've moved to Valefor. It's a very different culture I think. After spending a few years on one server you become familiar with its quirks and the personalities on it. I think I prefer those of my old server, but the bigger and better linkshell I'm with now more than makes up for it. No longer must I sit in my mog house thinking: darn, I wish I could get together enough friendly faces to go do event X. Now people are dragging me off to go do events or I can just ask and find a handful of people actually interested in doing the event, rather than realizing the only other people in the shell are afk bazaaring again.

I feel like I've accomplished more in the two weeks since I've landed here than in the past several months on Quetz. It's a good feeling.

However, there's always the flipside. While I'm getting more accomplished, I don't quite feel settled in. There's still a bit of that social awkwardness that comes from being the new guy. It will pass in time.

I'd always wondered what it was that possessed people to pick up and leave an entire server full of familiar faces behind, but it doesn't seem so odd now that I've done it. I guess it's just one of those things that's part of the FFXI experience.

One thing that I'm really hating about Valefor: the fish market.

It's so flooded and over-saturated that I haven't even bothered to go fishing once since I've moved here. It makes me sad because I really do enjoy fishing, but it just isn't worth it in this market.

I've been spending some time moonlighting as a mercenary. I like my boss.




Just some fun shots I took in Ro'Maeve


I've been spending more time in Abyssea lately, for better or worse I'm not sure yet.


I cannot tell you just how tempted I was to pick that option.


I've rebooted project Level Dragoon.




Living dangerously as a Red Mage.


I've said it before and I'll say it until the day the servers shut down, the attention to detail in this game is absolutely incredible.

Failure is a good thing

The more you fail, the more opportunities you have to improve yourself. It is only when a player refuses to learn from their mistakes that we ought to ruthlessly and shamelessly make fun of them.

Today I had a wonderful failure in Abyssea, Vunkerl Inlet to be precise.

One of our Linkshell members had expressed interest in obtaining a Pluviale during today's scheduled romp through Abyssea. Due to some attendance issues the event was postponed a bit.

Being the reckless Red Mage that I am, I figured I would make use of the down time to scout out the Notorious Monster that dropped the frilly prize we'd be after. Turns out we'd be fighting a hulking behemoth made up of scrap metal and spare garbage cans.

I found the beast wandering around when I got there and decided I may as well poke it and see how hard it hits. The verdict: not as bad as I feared, but still enough that I'm not keen to stay within punching distance. Quickly I turned on my heel and ran, trying to dodge some tigers along the way. Sadly they were far more alert than I gave them credit for and one of them followed me out of the valley, joining the Executioner's quest to pound me flat. The tag-teaming worked and I found myself face down in the dirt.

After dusting myself off and resting up I realized I needed a new approach, or at least a different escape route. There's another valley to the south that proved to be much more suited to my task, even if it meant dragging the Ironclad Executioner on top of all those Bastion combatants. It was fairly empty, but had plenty of rocks and trees to put between me and the overgrown dumpster. I tried kiting to the end of the valley and back to the initial spawn area, and that worked for a while but ultimately it ended up being a little too risky. The spawn area isn't really suited to kiting and a number of times I ended up within punching range over there. Eventually that proved to be my undoing as I got caught in a stun-lock and was beaten into a fine paste while a Tarutaru watched on the sidelines cheering me on.

This time around I had managed to wear down the beast's hp to well under 50% so one more try wasn't so unrealistic. However, before continuing I decided to take some time off. If you tackle NMs too fast and too often you end up burning yourself out. Sometimes it's good to just take a break and reflect on what you've learned. In this case, I'd learned that the goal of soloing the NM was well within sight and that the southern valley had proven to be a safer location for pulling it off. In particular, there is one tree at the end of the valley that works well as a pivot point, letting you slingshot yourself back north while the NM crawls around after you (instead of making a bee line straight for you). It's not a lot, but it slows him down enough that you can put a little distance between you. On the northen end of the valley, there's a couple of rock formations that can provide a similar reaction, although they seemed to be less reliable.

It's not just during downtime that you learn though. During my next attempt I began to pick up on other things that were important, such as how dropping a tier IV nuke always seemed to leave me open to swatting due to the slow cast time. Actually a lot of spells were long enough that I had to time it just so, or I'd end up getting swiped at. Luckily the wonderfulness that is /SCH offers a solution: Alacrity and Celerity. When your primary concern is keeping yourself out of harm's way, mp efficiency becomes secondary to getting your spells off fast enough to let you get back to running. When stratagems are down your options tend to shift a bit. Instead of dropping high tier nukes you drop lower tier nukes. With buffs you end up having to just pull far enough ahead of the mob that you can hopefully finish casting before it catches up with you. Poison II and Bio II cast fast enough that you don't really need to waste stratagems on them.

In case I was being too subtle, /SCH is really what makes the whole operation work, but not just because of the stratagems.

No, what makes /SCH work so damn well is Sandstorm and Desert Boots.

For those of us who aren't fortunate enough to have spent years in a Sky linkshell getting Crimson Cuisses, /SCH offers the unparalleled boon of increased movement speed at a very affordable price. It's not as noticeable as the boost given by bard songs or the super Kupowers, but it's enough that you can realistically outrun the NM without applying Gravity. You just need a long enough corridor in which to do it.

So yes, on my third attempt I managed to take what I'd learned along the way and annoy the iron giant to death. Failure is a good thing kids, it's how we learn to kick more ass.

If You Want to Rock and Roll

It's taken me nearly two years but I've finally reached the level cap.

This morning I got up with the intention of heading out to Attohwa Chasm in Abyssea to see about finding myself some stylish new shoes. On a whim I joined a shout for an exp alliance there and figured I could use it to do some of the legwork before I started up a farming session solo. Before I knew it four hours had passed and I was suddenly sitting at level 90 with a full exp buffer. I had also managed to get the footwear I set out to acquire. All was well in the world.

Level caps are a funny thing. You spend a lot of time grinding to reach them, but even after you get there you'll still have plenty of things to chase after. The closer I've come to the level cap the more I've come to realize that there's no shame in racing toward it as fast as possible. In the game everyone's always going to be at different places in terms of game progression, whether it be by level, by gear or simply varying interest in content. The level cap offers an equalized playing field for folks. It's where you can stop playing "catch up" and start playing the game with the rest of the population. Without that stopping point there's no way to really get everyone together. Before you hit the cap you're likely to be relying on help from people higher level than you, but you can't really repay the favor by helping them with their content because you're too low level. Once everyone hits the level cap you can all help each other, which is part of FFXI's core even if it's been muddled as the years roll by.

I wish I'd figured this all out sooner. I remember discussing this all with one of my shellmates many months ago when he finally caved and zoomed to the cap. He told me how much better the game became once you stopped goofing around in zones like Dangruf Wadi and actually got to the level cap. He was right, but it still took me a while to get around to finally doing it.

Some of my reluctance was based on my desire to see if I could pull off some of the amazing feats others had done with all the level 75 content over the years. There isn't a Red Mage out there who hasn't heard of some of the crazy solos that were possible. We all think at some point or other, "Hey, I'd like to try pulling that off". But at some point I realized I would be better off just getting myself up to speed with the current game than trying to live in the bygone era. I am a little disappointed that now all my solos of old content can just be chalked up to level advantage, but overall it's gonna be more fun this way.

Now I just wish I could get some of the lowbies in our shell to make the jump so we can all hang out and do stuff together.

It's all about style.

Sky is pretty

So I got access to Sky last week. It's been a fun set of missions to get there, barring the completely arbitrary "you need multiple people" switches in the Quicksand Caves. Other than that, it's been a lot of fun. There's no level caps on any of the fights, but even so I had a lot of fun with one of them which I was almost certain I'd need help with: Return to Delkfutt's Tower.

It took me two tries, but Bind/Nuking did the job just fine as a level 80 RDM/SCH. I'm still not sure if that should feel like a big accomplishment, but it did. During the first attempt he seemed to be breaking out of Bind rather quickly and finally got close enough to wallop me with Light Blade, which pretty much ended the fight. Second go around went smoother, although I'm not sure why. Fewer resists maybe? Dispelga was kind of obnoxious but I'm OCD enough about getting all my buffs up before battle that I was able to shrug off most of the ones that got dispelled. All in all it was a very fun battle and it felt good to not have to rely on bothering other people to take time out of their schedule to help me progress.

Soloing babble aside, the visuals from the Zilart expansion are utterly entrancing. I simply love the architecture and the cutscenes are very well done. Finally getting to Sky itself was pretty fantastic. There's all sorts of cool stuff up there. Unfortunately there's also tons of magic aggro and it's easy to get lost. It's looking to be a love/hate relationship, but it's one I look forward to.

A musty old temple.


Where did these headstones come from?


Shiny.








This is oddly reminiscent of Midgar.




Definitely one of the more serene places in the game.


The Bastokers are here to kick some ass.




I thought this was a really cool effect.






Sky.


I've also been working on Chains of Promathia. I hate this mountain so much, but it makes for good screenshots.


I found the ugliest hat in the game. Do I get a prize?

Dear Black Mages

Stop opening with Sleepga II.

It's like wearing a neon flashing sign that says "I am terrible at my job."

Why can't I have nice Dynamis runs?

Soloing in a Broom Closet

While it's not exactly a noteworthy accomplishment to solo a level 70 Notorious Monster when you're level 80, today's adventure feels noteworthy all the same.

I've been meaning to get to Sky and I've started the legwork on the missions. Today I've been going around to the Cermet headstones and collecting fragments. But enough with the exposition.

I wandered into Cape Terrigan and tackled Axesarion the Wanderer. He's a Shadow and takes reduced damage from magic, so my nukes weren't exactly melting his face. The tricky thing though, was that he's located at the end of a tunnel that's constantly patrolled by goblins, meaning I couldn't exactly kite him over long distances. In fact I couldn't really kite him more than a few feet. The room was incredibly tiny and the goblins were all breathing down my neck the whole fight, but I somehow managed to keep enough distance between me and the NM that he couldn't swing at me while bound.

This is sort of the problem I've always had with the concept of kiting NMs, there's always an entire zone full of aggro waiting to ruin your attempt if the NM doesn't. Today I started learning some basics of how to get around this. You really don't need much space at all if there's a clear spot that doesn't have aggro. Just enough space that the monster can't swing at you. It kind of blew my mind when I realized what can be done with just a broom closet of aggro free space.

It got pretty hairy when I got caught with Convert down.

That room is so tiny.

Dear Mages...

Cast Haste.

I'm tired of being the only competent mage in Abyssea pickup parties. Don't make me Haste the entire alliance by myself, stop slacking.

Even Quadavs know how to cast Haste. Why don't you?

Abyssea's effect on low level pickup parties

I have now seen the aftermath of Abyssea firsthand and it isn't pretty.

Tonight one of the newer players in our linkshell basically said that the lack of low level parties caused by Abyssea was discouraging him from logging in.

Sure we've all had nights where we sit around with our flag up and no invites, but I think it's reaching the point where there are enough people forgoing low level parties that it's actively driving players away from the game.

A little too easy

Well it's nice that the servers are back online again. I was beginning to go crazy from the lack of FFXI in my diet and had to find something else to fill the void. But now we're back so it's all good, right?

Wrong!

I've been dodging this whole Abyssea thing for a while but now that I'm past Maat I figured it was time to venture into that mystical place everyone's been raving about for the last few months. So after some time with my flag up I landed myself an Abyssea party.

My first impressions were not good. Actually seeing a whole alliance exping together shattered more than a few dreams. There was little to no organization that I could discern. People were constantly pulling in multiple mobs, but no one bothered sleeping anything. There didn't seem to be a designated /assist, it was more just a free for all of Damage Dealers with some Healers tacked on for good measure. I honestly had no idea what was going on and felt largely superfluous to the whole operation. Things were dying too fast to bother with enfeebles other than the occasional Dia, no one was coordinating Haste cycles, Cures were already thoroughly provided for. It left me wondering why I'd been invited in the first place.

Another issue I had was that with a group that large there wasn't much in the way of chatting. That's something I liked about the six man parties, you could usually get one where folks were laid back enough to shoot the breeze so everyone had a good time regardless of how the exp was. In Abyssea....not so much. It was pretty much just maul, maul, maul, oh have to replace someone, maul, maul, maul. That's no way to meet people.

The exp flow's pretty silly. I went from 72 to 75 + capped buffer in under two hours. I can see the appeal for folks looking to race another job to the level cap, but that kind of leveling speed really just took all the satisfaction out of finally hitting 75. You know, one of my big goals for the game...now it's totally not an accomplishment. I feel dirty for taking that party now.



My Little Pony: better than Abyssea.

The oddest of findings

There's something I've been noticing lately. I've recently added the following line to my search comments while seeking for a party:

{Support Job} : {Scholar}

Ever since I added that, I've started getting invited to Japanese exp parties more often. I can't be certain but I think there may be a correlation. It weirds me out a little but I don't mind since they bring me Paladins and usually make for more relaxed parties. You've got to love a tank that will cure itself for you.

The Bunnies are coming...

Idling in a Red Cap

With Maat knocked out of the picture I'm starting to feel like I'm at loose ends.

Back when I first got into this game I had very simple and realistic goals for myself.

• Complete my Arfifact armor
• Beat up Maat
• Reach level 75

With the advent of Abyssea and the recent patch to exp, the last of my original goals will be met in short order, leaving me in need of a new set of accomplishments to strive for. What sort I haven't decided yet.

The obvious choice would be to find myself a complete set of relic armor, or to be more precise: pimp hat 2.0. But then, that's just another list of gear to get and while satisfying, it isn't really what I want my main focus for the game to be. To go through the game with nothing but the intent to get more shinies seems like a good way to burn yourself out.

My previous list of stuff to do was more about the journey to the top, but now that I'm getting up here I find myself losing perspective. When I was a small and inexperienced Red Mage I used to be all about the running around to dumb places to exp and couldn't understand why folks wouldn't want to sync down. But now that I'm all the way up here at level 70 I'm starting to understand. There's an definite appeal to keeping all of your abilities and spells, because they're a lot of fun to use. The higher you go the more you can do with the job and the more fun it gets. On the other side of the coin is a gradual erosion of that mystical sense of adventure you had when you first joined the game. No longer do I run headlong into Dangruf Wadi to smack bunnies and evade goblins for the thrill of it. Instead I find myself sitting in exp parties wanting to strangle my various party members for being horribly inept.

Somewhere in that journey something changed in me, and it's not a change I like. My fear is that if I continue playing primarily for the acquisition of shinies that it will only cause that change to fester until it turns me into a very bitter player.

He really is just an old man

For years and years it has been commonly accepted that Red Mages have the toughest time fighting a certain snarky old man in Jeuno. I've heard from just about everyone I've talked to how this guy is the biggest badest fighter around and how he'll turn you inside out at the drop of a hat.

Well tonight I threw my own pimp hat in the ring against this trouncer of intrepid travelers and there's something I need to set straight once and for all.

The Maat fight for Red Mage is not difficult.

Yeah, you heard me.

The only people Maat is going to break in half are those folks who are utterly unsuited for the job. You know the kind, the ones who like to pull out their wand and beat on gobbies during a party. The ones who are better off leveling a less complex job.

It really irks me how there's been this aura of fear cultivated for this one specific fight and it has totally failed to deliver. I was really looking forward to having Maat wipe the floor with me and force me to rethink my strategies. You know, something to challenge me to be a better Red Mage. Instead, I got a mewling kitten of an opponent who did not teach me anything.

The fight itself was really quite simple.

Once I got in the arena I regained my Composure and proceeded to apply most of my normal buffs. Then, mindful of the importance of recast timers in a fight like this, I dropped Composure and ran in to find Maat casting some buffs of his own. Well we certainly couldn't have any of that, so I hit him with Sleep and proceeded to strip him of all his buffs. It took a fair chunk of mp, so afterwards I dropped Sleep II over top of the original sleep and grabbed a few ticks of mp for myself.

Brimming with mp, it was now time to knuckle down and start smacking the elderly around. Maat didn't take kindly to Gravity the first time around, but it hardly mattered. If you drop an Aero III from far enough back then he won't even make it through Blink before you've slept him again. Scoot back, nuke again, Sleep II and grab mp, repeat.

Heck, even when the old man let loose a Chainspell it didn't matter, he slept right through that too. When I readied my own Chainspell he called for a time out after the first nuke. It was quite sad really.

This guy has been built up as some sort of monster in the guise of a little old man and it just isn't the case. I'm sorry, but this was not a challenging fight.

The silver lining to all this was learning about Maat's past. The fact that he was a fisherman, and therefore absolutely crazy, makes everything fit into place for me somehow.

Still searching for a worthy adversary.

Things I have learned from Dynamis

1. A disproportionate number of mages are incompetent

It's very discouraging to be a Red Mage helping with Sleeping large hordes of mobs only to see one of the Black Mages open with Sleepga II, thoroughly preventing us from keeping the horde in check. We are not going to be able to maul everything in 90 seconds. You're just making it harder to stagger the influx of assailants, so cut it out.

Another horrendous choice I saw made: White Mages not using Sublimation when we're encountering mobs that are continually sleeping the whole alliance. Yes that Refresh II is appealing, but you know what's more appealing? Being able to wake up the alliance so we don't risk a wipe and lose more time.

My own failures in all this boil down to not being on the ball enough. I've done a shamefully poor job of keeping up Refresh and Haste cycles with people running all over the place while simultaneously trying to make sure everything is slept. I feel some of this could be alleviated if the alliance was a little more coordinated, but I also know that I need to step up my own game, or maybe just mess with my chat filters some more.

2. Communication is the most important thing ever

Our shell leader insists on using Vent when doing Dynamis. I was reluctant at first, but I'm warming up to the idea. The problem however, is that this leads to there being almost no communication in-game. This coupled with the fact that the vast majority of the shell is not on Vent means that the whole thing is very poorly coordinated, which leads to all sorts of frustrations. We really need to take some time before the next run to just sit down and make sure everyone is at least listening in on Vent even if they don't own a mic. It would make it easier to issue instructions and keep everyone on the same page rather than having half the alliance left in the dark for most of the run.

3. Not everyone is suited to lead a Linkshell

Without going into too much detail, our shell leader had IRL issues last night that forced him to abandon the run early, and those issues are likely to do so again. If your situation outside the game is such that you cannot consistently be there during the event, then maybe you shouldn't be leading a shell. I'll stick with the shell for now, but last night raised a number of red flags for me.

Dynanonymous

Some folks from my social LS roped me into joining a Dynamis run tonight. Let me transcribe part of the thought process:

Oh this is neat.

Wait, why is there no map? Oh god this is going to be terrible.

No, we're all moving in a group that's good.

Wait, these groupings make no sense. Why are you moving up there?

Oh god why are all the party members moving in different directions? I'll never be in range now.

Oh hey, some orcs...OH DEAR GOD WHERE HAS MY FACE GONE!?

Tonight was definitely an interesting experience to say the least. Thankfully everyone managed to keep their pants on through the many many many wipes that were had over the course of the evening.

If I had to give a brief description of Dynamis I'd say it consisted of battling a large army in small chunks while slowly making your way through a city.

The whole run felt very disorganized from start to finish. We got off to a rocky start when our first pull consisted of the puller bringing back a boatload of statues, each of which proceeded to spawn approximately eight thousand orcs apiece. We were very very dead very very quickly. After everyone got back on their feet and re-buffed we tried again, with similar results but we were at least making some progress in reducing the number of orcs in San d'Oria. By our third go round we managed to not wipe. I wouldn't say we'd settled into a good rhythm, but we managed to not die horribly and that was progress for us.

The arrangement of who went where in the alliance didn't make a lot of sense to me. I think in my own party there were at least three mages, a puller and something that pretended to be a tank, all of whom went in different directions making it damn near impossible to organize them into a cohesive unit that kept itself within casting distance for me to support. I have no idea what was going on in the other parties, no one bothered to really stop and explain who was in charge of what.

Ok that's not entirely true, the alliance leader kept yelling at the four Red Mages to cast Sleepga.

Would you like to see what those Red Mages looked like?

90 RDM/WHM

90 RDM/WHM

90 RDM/SCH

66 RDM/SCH

Yeah...about casting Sleepga, and it totally not happening.

That definitely lead to a few wipes. Manifestation + Sleep II from a single RDM doesn't cut it. There was a Summoner helping though, so we managed to not Die Horribly all the time.

Overall I just would have liked to see more organization to the whole thing. My friend kept trying to apologize throughout the whole thing because it was such a terribly executed run, but he really didn't need to. I could definitely see how Dynamis could be a fun thing to do if it was with a group working like a well-oiled machine, rather than a crowbar stuck in a block of cement like this run was. But even more importantly, this run let me get into Dynamis to see what it was like without having to hold any real responsibility, which is how I've wanted to get my feet wet in Dynamis since I first heard about it.

At this point it's very difficult for me to say if I'll enjoy it. If runs continue to be painfully slow, inefficient and filled with stupid leadership choices like tonight's was, then I'll probably stick it out for a piece of gear or two before making my escape. However, I'd much prefer to see the shell get itself smoothed out and have some proper runs, because I think I could get into it if it was done right.

My biggest concern right now is actually the leadership. I think I'm still holding a grudge against the LS leader because of that Summoner burn I helped him with that took two hours and kept me from my delicious dinner. That's like a cardinal sin with me. You don't keep me from my food. It ends badly for everyone.

The rumblings of my stomach aside, this guy just hasn't really laid out a clear system for how the shell is going to be run, or how gear is distributed. Maybe I missed the memo, but the shell's pretty young and I can't get him to tell me how the LS bank is going to work. He's said we can access the gil in it, but has been vague about how. At this point I think I'm going to press the issue and if possible abuse the existence of the bank to pay for some of the stuff on my shopping list along with my consumables until some concrete rules are laid out.

Likewise I'd like some gear acquisition protocol. Is this crap freelot for everything, or are we gonna have a points system? Or worse, is it going to be a "because I said so" rule of distribution?

None of this has been established yet as far as I can tell, which raised a ton of red flags for me tonight. I'll probably end up being the problem child of the shell and bother them about it constantly until they put something together. Or at least that's the plan.

My first Dynamis. I think it went well.




Did you know they put Tarutarus in treasure chests? If anyone has the Bastok one I'll trade you my San d'Oria one.



Shadowlord's home turf. I'm so glad no one managed to spoil the cutscenes for the rank 6 mission. It was so awesome.



A sense of impending doom.

Krakens off the port bow!

Tonight I spent some time reaffirming my suspicions that soloing isn't always easy.

I've been sitting on a sizeable stockpile of Beastmen's Seals for quite some time now but I never bother to actually round up people for BCNM fights to actually spend them on.

Tonight I decided to fix that somewhat and took it upon myself to try soloing Up in Arms.

This seemed like the logical choice for me. I had heard that a Red Mage could solo the fight earlier in the week. I've also become considerably averse to syncing down past level 51 if I don't have to or if it isn't for friends, so a level 60 fight was right up my alley. Lastly, this fight was against a lone Sea Monk, which was the logical progression of what I'd been fighting recently.

See, I've spent the last week or two hanging out in the Sea Serpent Grotto soloing Sea Monks in the room Charybdis spawns in, keeping tabs on the NM for the rest of my shell so we can all get Joyeuse.

So a fight against the type of mob I've been practicing on seemed like a good choice.

I proceeded to do my homework on the fight and learned that the Sea Monk would gradually build up a resistance to Sleep spells, so I would have to modify my usual tactics somewhat and use Bind and Gravity more heavily than I had been. Also there was a time limit. Some nasty special moves as well.

So I spent my evening gearing up and heading over to Waughroon Shrine. I got into the arena and buffed up. The fight went pretty much how I expected it would, Gravity sticking and nuking down the long hallway and then throwing Bind in the end rooms to hold the monster in place while I doubled back into the hallway again. It was actually pretty easy once I got into the Rhythm of it, basically using Bind where I would have used Sleep before and saving the Sleep spells for times when I needed to recover some mp by resting. There were a few iffy moments where Stoneskin went down and I had some tentacles reaching into places they shouldn't, but overall it went pretty smooth. Sailing along nicely I had wittled the monstrosity down to about 2/5 of his health left, maybe a little less, but then something awful happened.

The time limit was up.

I felt foolish. There had been little to no danger of me actually dying. Instead I lost simply because I hadn't been nuking fast enough. What a frustrating turn of events.

I'm hesitant to try again right away because the problem seems to be more than just slipping up. This is more along the lines of forcing myself to unlearn bad habits I've picked up soloing in a dark, damp cave.

Or maybe I should have just used chainspell to nuke at the start of the fight and kited the rest of it.

Port Bastok is Beautiful.