...And I'm out of gil again

That's not hyperbole. Tonight I signed off with a grand total of zero gil. I'm just that talented.

This seems to be how all of my gil-making schemes go. Get a great idea for making tons of gil without the headache of abusive 4 to 6 hour farming sessions just to pull in a pittance. Great idea requires some investment capital to get it under way. I throw all my gil at the startup investment.

???

Profit?

My current gil-making scheme involves gardening.

There is surprisingly little reliable information about it, given just how well documented the entire rest of the game is. Hell, there are still people who swear by the 'run around your mog 3 times on a quarter moon during water's day between 12:00 and 14:00 if you want X result instead of Y' kind of mumo-jumbo. It seems the FFXI community has managed to breed that superstition out of crafters, but since gardeners are a secretive bunch they've been left to develop on their own.

I might be speaking from ignorance here, but from my limited experience all this day, moon cycle stuff is total superstition. Nothing more and nothing less. It didn't affect drop rates or crafting results, I see no reason why it would affect gardening.

You know what I do believe in?

Pots, Crystals, Seeds and the almighty Random Number Generator gods. Anything else is players experiencing a coincidence and subsequently convincing themselves of a correlation that doesn't exist. SE adores their RNGs in all other aspects of the game (drop rates, hit rate and crafting success capping at less than 100%), why should gardening be any different.

Sort of got off track there, sorry. It's just really frustrating to deal with a bunch of superstitious nonsense thrown in with the lack of documentation when trying to research something.

Now where was I? Ah yes, I have no gil. I have no gil because I threw all of it into purchasing new flowerpots.

This had damn well better work.

Melee RDM at Level 55: a Headache

Today's post is about gear choices. If that's not your cup of tea just scroll down to the pretty pictures at the bottom.


Well I've finished up leveling Blue Mage for the time being and it's time to start getting ready for my fight with Dark Spark. This means I'll be needing to overhaul my sword and shield gear so that I can have a chance at actually winning the fight.

For the most part I've been neglecting my melee gear because it's not welcome in parties and what I had was always "good enough" for soloing on my own time. However I'm pretty sure this fight's going to be a bit more demanding so it's time to start the painful process of figuring out what I need to update. Unfortunately it looks like I need to overhaul just about everything, as my current melee setup is pretty sad:

Sword: Knight's Sword
Shield: Hard Shield
Head: Crow Beret
Neck: Black Silk Neckerchief
Earring: Morion Earring x2
Body: Brigandine Armor
Hands: Guerilla Gloves
Ring: Knowledge Rings and Saintly Rings...+INT/+MND respectively
Back: Red Cape +1
Belt: Mercenary Captain's Belt
Legs: Magic Cuisses
Feet: Warlock's Boots or Rambler's Gaiters

The good news is that just about any upgrade I make should considerably improve my performance so I won't have to worry so much about minuscule increases in performance or sidegrades. When you're at rock bottom the only place to go is up.

On the other hand, I'm relatively inexperienced when it comes to gearing for melee so I'm a bit lost as to how to prioritize stats. Oh and then we throw evasion into the equation and it all becomes a mess. Is that few points of evasion enough to help me survive longer or do I forgo it to make with the pointed sticks that make the enemies fall down faster?

Preliminary research has revealed a lot of options...and a lot of stuff that's simply out of reach for now.

Headgear options
Valkyrie's Mask
Walkure Mask
Shock Mask
Precision Bandana

Personally I'm leaning towards the Shock Mask just for the balance it offers. Valkyrie's Mask would be nice, but it'll break the bank for me.


Body options
Jaridah Peti

There's only the one option for me here but I gotta say, it looks pretty good.

Hands
Battle Gloves
Combat Mittens +1
Combat Caster's Mitts
Jaridah Bazubands

I have no idea what to pick here to be honest. They all look like decent options so I might just go with whatever is cheapest.

Pants
Republic Subligar
War Hose

My fashion sense won't let me pick up the subligar when there are such stylish pants to be had.

Neck
Tiger Stole

I don't know of anything else to put in here.


Waist
Swordbelt
Life Belt
Headlong Belt

These are all good. I guess this one will depend on what the rest of my setup looks like. I am decidedly undecided.


Earring
Beetle Earring +1
Tortoise Earring +1

It appears I'll be taking a hit to evasion regardless of how I gear here.


Ring
Assailant's Ring
Venerer Ring
Woodsman Ring
Ecphoria Ring

Ecphoria Ring looks like a good bet, and I guess I'll pick up one of the others as well as gil permits.


Back
Jaguar Mantle
Bellicose Mantle

Again I'd opt for the defensiveness that Jaguar Mantle offers. Maybe I'm over-thinking this whole thing.

Wait, no I'm not.

Swords
Wise Wizard's Anelace
Royal Guard's Fleuret

They're both stylish and offer awesome stats. I don't know what to pick. I want both of them.

There's clearly enough there to give me a huge boost in performance, but it's all so foreign that I'm struggling with the indecision.

Maybe the best thing to do would be to just start picking up gear for each slot and sort out the min/maxing later. It can only improve my performance so it's not like I can go wrong, right?

Yeah, I'm definitely overthinking this.






San d'Orian sunsets just aren't as nice as Bastok's.



It's the subtlety of the atmosphere that really brings this game to life for me. This isn't a cartoon, it's a living, breathing world.

Worst Design Choice

There's been a lot of new stuff that came with the update. Some of it good, some of it bad and some of it easily ignorable.

However, I think I've managed to pin down the worst design choice of the entire update:

They put a Cavernous Maw right at the zone line for Konschtat Highlands!

I'm sorry, but this is worse than any mechanics tinkering or quest line nonsense. This utterly kills the aesthetic appeal of the game. This thing looks like a big ugly monster and you stick right at the spot where new adventurers from Bastok are going to zone in? What were you thinking? This is a gateway to endgame content, the least you could do is hide it out of the way like you did with the original Maws so players have to go out of their way to get to it. To me this screams "We are ignoring the possibility of new players", not to mention it utterly ruins the immersive atmosphere that I've come to love in this game.

I know the game is fairly old at this point, but there's no excuse for these shenanigans.

Obligatory Update Entry

So Red Mage tanking got axed today.

I'm pretty pissed about it. I was nowhere near being able to even attempt it, but it was always something I was looking forward to eventually trying.

Now I can't have that to look forward to.

Weekend Wipe

That Blue Mage thing is still happening, but I'd like to steer the blog away from focusing on that for a while.

One of my friend's has been getting back into the game lately, so I've been spending some time giving him a hand with some of the nation missions. The most recent one we tackled took us to the Gusgen Mines where he had to fight a Pugil. I came along on Red Mage as backup so he didn't have much to worry about, aside from his sporadic connection. We've been perplexed by this phenomenon in which his connection takes a nose dive around the same time every night before stabilizing an hour later. The weirdest part is that it seems to just boot him off FFXI, because he doesn't get kicked off his XBox Live thingy. We're pretty much stumped at the moment, but at least it beats the satellite internet connection he had at his old place.

The other big thing to overcome when making a return to the game is making gil. I did what I could to spot my friend some gil to get him back on his feet, but the need for income is a constant problem for all of us. However, a few coincidences coincided to make it clear what my course of action ought to be.

Many moons ago I had spent a lot of time running around in Rolanberry with a Corsair while searching for my Rambler's Gaiters. At the time we had devised a scheme to see if there were any money making schemes we could tag-team. We had decided to attempt a Burning Circle Notorious Monster(BCNM) fight. In preparation I had saved up and spent 30 Beastman Seals to acquire the requisite Sky Orb. Unfortunately before we had a chance to make the attempt the fight, the Corsair vanished. I still haven't heard from him since.

The other half of the equation is that my friend just recently reached level 30, the level this particular BCNM fight is capped at.

So what the hell, I thought. This thing's been collecting dust for months and we could both use the gil so why not make an attempt? The original plan was to attempt to duo Creeping Doom, but I decided to see if anyone in my Linkshell was interested. My old pal Mohan decided to tag along. Awesome, the more punching power the better.

We all met up in Giddeus, two Monks and a Red Mage. After discussing some strategy we entered the arena.

Oh my god was I unprepared. I'd done my homework on this fight and figured subbing White Mage to help deal with paralysis would be a good idea. What I hadn't counted on was just how durable the crawler was with the ability to spam Cure III on itself. I ended up wasting a lot of MP trying to silence the darn thing. Even with level appropriate gear for the fight, it just wasn't going to happen. Maybe I should have subbed Black Mage for Elemental Seal after all.

However, I feel that my choice of sub-job wasn't really the issue here. I felt really rusty and flustered during this fight. I had planned to join in the melee after dropping the initial enfeebles, but when the time came I ended up fumbling with my gear a bit while trying to make sure my friends were on their feet and not paralyzed. Between that and trying to land Silence I wasn't really as quick on my feet as I needed to be. The chatlog flew by me and I wasn't even watching for enfeebles wearing. It was just a shameful performance on my part. Because of my indecisiveness I also managed to completely ignore the need to rest for mp. I placed too much faith in my Yagudo drinks. We lasted a good while, but the constant Cure III spam from the monster outlasted us. One by one we all hit the dirt.

Nothing ventured nothing gained, right?

I'm not so sure. My friends didn't seem to think too much of it, but the more I turn the scenario over in my head, the more convinced I am that this loss lies squarely on my shoulders. I wasn't on high alert, I didn't read the situation and adapt to it the way I needed to. Worst of all, I panicked and froze up often enough to disrupt the flow of things and eventually that got us killed.

Makes me wonder if I'm really cut out for this Red Mage business.

The "Fun Pile" after our wipe. Good effort guys, we'll have to try again sometime.

I picked up some cool shades from a Bazaar and I've taken to wearing them everywhere.

Carpenter's Landing makes for an interesting and photogenic environment.

Screenshot Spectacular, the First

Oy, what a slow week it's been. Low level solo adventuring is rewarding in its own right, but sometimes it just doesn't make for good blogging. No one really wants to hear about how I spent all week hanging out in Buburimu Peninsula beating up bunnies and trying for hours on end to learn some Blue Magic.

Unless of course I spice it up with a bunch of screenshots and other unrelated goodies, which is why I'm pleased to announce the first chronic Screenshot Spectacular. Today we'll be mixing in an unprecedented number of screenshots to go along with our tale of adventure.

As many of you know, I've recently taken to leveling Blue Mage. It's been a slow but relatively painless process. During the lower levels I can't imagine how a player would manage to join exp parties and keep his spell list up to date at the same time. You simply gain levels before you even have time to learn your spells.

Anyway, this week's menu of delicious Blue Magic took me to the Konschtat Highlands to hunt down some woolly critters. Now I know sheep can be noisy, but I wouldn't think to refer to their bleating as anything resembling a song. But hey, a Light-based sleep spell is a darn handy thing to have, so off into the highlands I trekked. The sheep had all gathered near a collection of windmills for my convenience. After a time I found a sheep that was decidedly more of a stray than the others:

I've become even more reckless as a Blue Mage than I ever was as a Red Mage. I think it's the faster damage output that does it.

Sadly Stray Mary didn't have a soul for me to dine on.

Later in the week my hunt took me East, to the Horutoto Ruins just outside of Windurst. Whilst trying to hunt down some Cardians I was savagely ambushed by a lurking Goblin.

Being stabbed in the face for nearly 200 damage per hit tends to be detrimental to your health.

I later found out that the Cardians were in a different section of the ruins. Regardless, after taking such a beating I opted to explore Tahrongi Canyon searching for Dhalmels instead.

Even taking the high ground you can't look a Dhalmel in the eye.

An odd thing happened while hunting Dhalmels. A bunch of high level players were running around one-shotting the behemoths I was trying to track down. They left enough of them alive that I could still hunt, but it baffles me. What could they possibly want from a bunch of low level Dhalmels that don't have any spectacular loot? The only thing I can think of is that new Trial of the Magey-thingies, but I haven't been following that too closely so it might not even be that. Luckily it didn't take too terribly long to learn Healing Breeze.

Taking a break, I helped my friend reach level 30 on his Monk so he can start unlocking advanced jobs.

He decided to unlock Dark Knight. For those of you following along at home, this means he has to undertake a quest that involves slaying 100 enemies with a very slow and blunt Greatsword. Since my Scholar was of a similar level I decided to tag along and give him a hand with it. We ended up having me beat the mob within an inch of its life, at which point my friend would finish it off as I ran off to start on the next mob. Up on Vomp Hill we had a few close run-ins. Worms and sheep and goblins, oh my! It was actually a lot of fun, figuring out how to manage the hate levels and pace ourselves so we could fend off an extra critter or two. Last I heard he was still up on that hill swinging his sword.

I was running some errands one day and on my way to Jeuno I came across a terrifying sight.

Holy crap! A dragon in Rolanberry!

It was eating all the adventurers and there was nothing I could do. If dragons normally wander through Rolanberry, then I guess that might explain why we no longer have Rolanmart.

In other news, people have taken to keeping pet Tremor Rams at the Dem crystal.

I gotta say, that's a really terrifying thing to zone in to. I still have a deep-seated fear of Tremor Ram, which is why you might have noticed I'm trying to get away in the above shot.

Ah, another week in glorious Bastok. Onward to adventure!

*munch munch*...delicious souls

Some nights it all just falls into place perfectly.

So lately I've been slowly working my way up the ladder as a Blue Mage. It's been a lot of fun so far. I get to wield a sword and chuck spells all day long, complete with really nifty animations. Seriously, I will never get tired of the hand gestures that go along with Blue Magic. There's also the fun of skilling up a whole new branch of magic along the way, so that's been rewarding as well.

The only down side so far has been the need to farm spells, and that hasn't really been much of an issue once I acquired my first spell. It's a chore sure, but it's one I can enjoy. Having to hunt down spells means hunting down specific enemies, which means exploring all kinds of areas. Ok, ok, there's always the option of standing around in Gustaberg tickling a Quadav with unarmed attacks until he gives you Head Butt, but why would you do that when you can go explore Palborough Mines or the Turtle HQ? So yes, farming for Blue Magic has been a bit of an adventure.

The whole mechanic seems tailored towards solo play. EXP parties tend to hunt in very specific locations and only attack certain kinds of enemies, so you can't rely on them to learn your spells. Also you can't always count on the enemy to use the spell you want if you tear through it too fast. This means you either end up poking the sickly bunny with a stick until he kicks you in the face and you kill him, or you find a bigger bunny with sharp pointy teeth who'll give you a run for your money and last long enough to use a few monster moves on you.

What you don't do is go pick a fight with the biggest, baddest, meanest mob in the zone.

Unless of course you're me.

Tonight I was romping through Giddeus punching Yagudos out left and right in the hopes that one of them would teach me Feather Storm. Sadly they weren't terribly keen on using it. So I wandered around for a while until I came across a rather large and intimidating Yagudo named: Juu Duzu the Whirlwind.

By now you all should know what happens when I encounter a critter that has a name. That's right, I ran headfirst into the big fluffy oaf and began slicing him up. With a notoriously large health bar, I decided now would be a very good time to make use of Azure Lore. This was followed by a great many Head Butts and Foot Kicks. It's really amazing how much damage a Blue Mage can pump out in a short period of time if they completely empty their MP pool.

It was close but I emerged victorious on all fronts. I had defeated the Big Bird ninja and he had relinquished a pair of Light Soleas, which I immediately equipped. Most importantly however, the Yagudo had lost his soul. I ate it and learned Feather Storm.

I really enjoy being a soulless monster that sustains itself on the spiritual essence of others.

I have a penchant for sunset shots

My friend needed some help collecting subjob quest items for the journey to Whitegate so we got horribly lost in the Gusgen mines.