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.

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.

G4 is brilliant

No not that awful TV network.

I am of course talking about the fourth limit break quest.

It emphasizes what I continue to love about this game: its attention to detail and world-building.

Maat gives you four clues and tasks you with finding four corresponding people scattered throughout the world. This must have been desk-gnawingly frustrating for people back when the game was in its infancy before wiki documented everything. But even so, it illustrates a point which Maat articulates better than I:

"Remember, adventuring is not all about battles and monsters, but about the people you meet along the way."

I feel this is something many adventurers need to reacquaint themselves with, and even a few folks on the design team.

Holiday festivities were particularly elegant in Bastok.

Sticker collecting

So Genkai 3 happened last night.

I think I'm slowly getting over my aversion to accepting help on these things. While going on suicidal runs is fun and all, it's rarely successful and when the quest is hard enough it's still a tad suicidal even with a group. So yes, the Linkshell helped again and I lost count of how many times one of them died over the course of the night.

We started with the Orcish headquarters and managed to somehow build a massive aggro train on our way to the Wall of Banishing. Aforementioned member of the LS built the train and took it right to the wall and then died, at which point most of the orcs vanished. Unfortunately there were enough still there that our deceased Red Mage could not safely be raised, so our Summoner ended up sending out Leviathan to distract the orcs while I used Chainspell to raise him. Once Freguer was back on his feet he opened the wall and we all made a mad dash for the zone-line. Once we made it inside the rest of the trek to retrieve the Orcish Crest was relatively uneventful.

Our next stop was Beadeaux, Quadav HQ. I definitely learned a lot while we were there. For instance, I had not realized you can avoid the curse from those infernal machines by voluntarily silencing yourself using another nearby device. This reinforces my suspicion that I need to spend more time exploring the world than I have been lately. Other interesting thing, Moxxy showed me that Leviathan can cure status ailments, which we used to freely remove silence after bypassing the horrid devices. While I do a lot of homework on RDMing, I'm really quite clueless when it comes to some jobs, like Summoner. There so much I don't know about how they work, it's actually a little embarrassing.

Anyway, once we made it into the room with the Crest, we immediately caught aggro and ran away to clear the way. Upon re-entering we caught aggro again and realized a Notorious Monster was blocking our path. We decided our best course of action would be to stomp on the Ruby Quadav and simply remove it. It took a while but didn't pose much trouble. Once that was taken care of we ventured further in and caught sight of the crest, whereupon I caught aggro and was beaten into a fine paste. Turns out there were more true-hearing turtles in there, including another Ruby Quadav. Moxxy and Freguer cleared out some Quadav on the side of the room so I could safely reraise.

Then there came a shout: "Doc, up now!"

Figuring Freg had a better sense of aggro ranges I reraised. Then he pulled the most amazing trick I have ever seen. He timed his casting so that right as I revived, I had Sneak. There was no window for aggro at all. Easily the most incredible bit of spellwork I have seen in a long time, possibly ever.

Unfortunately, in my haste to retreat from possible AoE range I slipped and fell over a ledge, meaning I had to circle back around through the labyrinth again. Once I got back the NMs seem to have cleared out so I nabbed the crest and we boogied on out quick-like.

The Yagudo HQ portion of the quest was significantly less entertaining. We pretty much waltzed in and grabbed the Crest without encountering any resistance. It made me paranoid that maybe we'd picked up a fake Crest or something, but Maat couldn't tell the difference so it doesn't really matter.

Stylish Elegance at its finest.

Genkai 2

*sigh*

"Underwhelming" is the only description that springs to mind.

Tonight my Linkshell took it upon themselves to run me through my second Limit Break quest. This one involved defeating some Notorious Monsters in the frozen northlands of Xarcabard.

I had wandered up to one earlier in the week just to see how hard it hits and it floored me in less than a minute. It wouldn't even be worth attempting to solo, unlike Dark Spark where I could see a glimmer of hope poking up just beyond the horizon.

Stomping on them with three higher level players helping just didn't bring me any satisfaction. It made the whole ordeal trivial, a chore, a minor inconvenience. I knew this was going to happen too. Hell I didn't even have to properly research the NMs, we just wandered up there and slaughtered them.

This was not an adventure.

I really need to make a point of exploring the Shadowreign era. It turns up cool stuff like this.

Genkai 1, or: An adventure in losing exp

I've been having so many adventures lately that I haven't had time to sit down and record any of them. So I'm taking some time today to jot down what I can recall of them.

Genkai

After a particularly bad party in Crawler's Nest I finally hit level 50. For those of you following along at home this is the level where you stop being able to level up until you complete a specific quest to extend the level cap. It turns out there's this snarky old man in Jeuno who wants you to travel to three dungeons and pick up some items off some rather nasty monsters. It's a breeze if you can get a group of people to give you a hand, but if you try to do it on your own it becomes extremely difficult.

Being the stubborn mage that I am, I decided that I would attempt to complete this quest on my own before infringing on my friends' time. It also helped that I had about 4,000 extra exp I could afford to lose before I would actually de-level back to 49.

Without any further troublesome planning or strategy I set out for Crawler's Nest(I seem to end up here a lot lately). My prey was a large mushroom-like critter called an Exoray. I had seen a few during my last party in Crawler's Nest so I had a good idea of where to go to find some. Unfortunately, I hadn't realized just how densely populated the place was. In retrospect it was a miracle our puller had managed to bring in so few links. The monster density wouldn't have been as much of a problem, except for the fact that everything in the room was aggressive. The flies wanted to kill me, the crawler's wanted to eat me, the beetles wanted to run me over, the Scorpions wanted to impale me and the Exorays just wanted to give me a good old fashioned kick in the ass.

My first few trips in were mainly spent running and hiding while I searched for a good spot to set up camp. The mobs here were tough enough that I probably wouldn't be able to handle them more than one at a time, so I needed to find a place where I could pull one for a one-on-one fight. There weren't any such places to be had really. I died quite a few times figuring that out. Clearing the room out didn't work too well either, since Red Mages take forever to kill anything. I did eventually find an Exoray in a tunnel that was far enough away from the other Exoray in the tunnel that I felt I could make an attempt to fight it. Did you know mushrooms hit like tractor-trailers? I went down pretty fast, but not before getting a ton of skillups.

At this point I was becoming frustrated and decided to spend some time(and exp) getting some skillups before making another serious attempt. I figured maybe if I could get my evasion skill up some more I might be able to dodge often enough to keep myself alive long enough to defeat the Exoray. In short: I died a whole lot and got a bunch of skillups.

Round 2 went much better, although it was still a very difficult fight. The Exoray was kicking through my Stoneskin almost as soon as I was putting it up, so I ended up relying pretty heavily on Bio II and Poison II to deal most of the damage for that fight while I focused on trying to keep my buffs up. There was an amusing point towards the end of the battle where both me and the Exoray were paralyzed. Me from a move the Exoray had used, and the Exoray was paralyzed from Ice Spikes. I swear we sat there for a good 2 minutes each of us paralyzed and unable to do anything. The Exoray was getting low on hp and finally managed to knock my stoneskin off and was able to keep me from recasting it. With my hp quickly dropping, a moderate amount of mp left and the end in sight I decided to nuke my way to victory. I ended the battle with no stoneskin, ~11 hp and poison ticking. The item dropped and I've never been so happy to warp out of a dungeon before.

All in all, I'd say my expedition to Crawler's Nest was a smashing success.
I even learned an important lesson: disable Composure after you apply your buffs or the increased recast times could quite literally kill you.

The next dungeon on the agenda was The Eldieme Necropolis, where I would need to go Lich-hunting. I was all set to go get myself killed when a friend found out and decided to intervene before I lost anymore exp(I had already burned about 2,000 in Crawler's Nest). This actually turned out to be very good for two reasons:
1. I probably wouldn't have been able to defeat a Lich on my own.
2. Navigating through the Eldieme Necropolis requires multiple people to hit switches and open doors if you want to get to certain areas.

We had a few close calls, but with two people hunting down the undead, it was a relatively uneventful task. Honestly, it was kind of boring compared to what I went through in Crawler's Nest. There's just something about being able to die at any given moment that adds to the excitement and gives a certain sense of satisfaction when you emerge alive and victorious. Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the assistance I receive from folks, but some days I wish I had a group of people to hang with that were all at the same point in their FFXI careers as I am. I guess I missed that boat by quite a few years, huh?

With two of three MacGuffins in hand, we set out to pick up the last one in Garlaige Citadel. We were kind of playing it by ear. Turns out the Citadel is even more obnoxious to navigate than the Necropolis. The bomb monster we needed to hunt down was behind a gate that required four people to open it. No one in my LS was free to come help at the time, but my friend managed to rope one person from his into helping us and so we headed out. When we got there we stumbled into another band of adventurers who were heading through the gate. Naturally we decided to team up and help each other out.

Once we got through the first gate we fought some magic pots and bombs through a few rooms. Somewhere along the way the item I needed dropped. The other people needed help opening a second gate to go deeper into the Citadel. Turns out they were searching for some treasure coffers for some spiffy artifact armor, so they were going to be there a while. We all agreed to stick with them and get them through the second gate. It was no burden to us, and we had already found what we came for so why not help them out? Along the way we encountered more magic pots and bombs.

I died a lot learning about magic aggro.

We saw the treasure hunters safely through the second gate and wished them well on their hunt. It was then time to call it a night and the rest of us headed back to Jeuno. I handed over the items to the snarky old man and he gave me a snarky response. I'm still working on coming up with a snappy retort, but I fear it may be too late at this point. At least the quest was done though, and I could get some sleep.

There are more adventures to tell of and I will post them in time, but for now enjoy the sunset over Lower Jeuno:

From Mediocre Mage

From Mediocre Mage

From Mediocre Mage

From Mediocre Mage