Tanking Dancer?

We did Tyger for ZNMs last night. Pretty close to the setup that we did the last week, but with a few little job changes. Dexie was RNG, Teia subbed NIN, and I came DNC instead of BLU.

Yup! Instead of bring a heavy DD job capable of healing, dispelling, enfeebling and more, I brought out my little dance shoes, subbing NIN to try some experiments. The problem with BLU on this fight is... mostly my preferences. I'm not really big on the whole DD side of things, so going in to do damage and running back out again isn't my thing. That's one reason why I'm normally BLU/WHM or BLU/SCH, because I like the flexibility of Blue Mage. Those who go to Nyzul with me know how I adjust BLU for the job, handling everything from sleeping, pulling, debuffing and even spike damage. For Tyger, however, the flexibility of BLU is mostly wasted since everyone has a pretty much defined role. Last week I went BLU/WHM to heal. This week I decided to change things up a bit with Fuuji's consent.

Initial thoughts
My initial thought on bringing DNC was pretty simple. I figured that since the problem we had last week was that the healers were building up too much hate that I'd use Steps to help speed the kill along. More damage = faster fight, right?

I went DNC/NIN for this fight to absorb AoE attacks, even though I normally prefer /SAM. Accuracy was okay with my accuracy gear, but it still wasn't the perfect "land every step" that I wanted. Nothing that a bit of sushi couldn't fix, of course :D

Besides Utsusemi, I also kept Fan Dance up full time in order to reduce any damage taken. Since Fan Dance's effectiveness is based on how many hits I've taken instead of duration, keeping it up and refreshing it whenever the timer runs down is a pretty good strategy even if I wasn't the person being targetted. TP gain isn't a problem thanks to No Foot Rise & Reverse Flourish merits, and I figured that I'd be able to contribute a good bit to healing too.

1st Tyger & sudden backup tank
The first Tyger pop was going fairly well at first. I had a little problem keeping track of which Step was up next as I was trying to get both Box Step & Stutter step up to level 5. Steps only last about a minute on the mob and each type of step needs to be constantly refreshed. It's easy to miss a step if I'm busy doing something else like getting Utsusemi back up or healing people. That said, I did manage to get Stutter Step up to level 5 a few times and keep it there for a while, but later Varg pointed out that we didn't have as many BLMs to do much damage. I guess I should have taken a closer look at the roster first. ^^;

Tyger has a few really annoying moves for a Dancer. First, there's Tenebrous Mist that resets TP. This isn't a problem when he uses it once as I can simply use Reverse Flourish and be back on healing, but when he does it back-to-back, it can take another 30 seconds before I'm ready to heal again. Fulmination is annoying due to paralyze since that could cripple all my Waltzes until it is removed, and all the AoE damage moves are very annoying due to their side effects such as terror or stun.

That said, Fan Dance actually does help in the AoE attacks. Since some of the attacks are physical, it really helps when shadows are down. In fact, one of my deaths was because I had forgotten to put Fan Dance up before moving in >.>

Partway through the fight, Wuwu went down and Connie went down not too long after. Tyger was walking towards the mages when I used Animated Flourish. I was surprised that it actually worked and Tyger turned towards me since Animated Flourish is actually really weak for hate generation, maybe about a half strength Provoke. I'm not sure if having Fan Dance up made a significant difference either, since Fan Dance is supposed to "increase enmity". I guess that made me backup tank suddenly, and I wasn't really ready for it ^^;

Went okay for a while, with me trying to use Waltzes to heal damage. Since a Dancer's main hate tool is curing, I'd have to try to get my Waltzes in before the WHMs in the party could heal me, or else there'd be more risk of losing hate. One thing I screwed up on was that I would try to recast shadows using Utsusemi: Ichi when Ni was down. Tyger attacks too fast for this, and my attempts would end up being interrupted when I should have been attacking and Stepping for TP instead. I finally died when I made the wrong decision of trying to cast Utsusemi when I was low on health instead of simply curing myself back up again using Curing Waltz.

So... lessons learnt from this: Dancer does generate a large amount of hate, enough to actually grab it from tanks. Curing Waltz is our main hate tool, which requires us, or someone to take some damage. Keeping HP up is more important than Utsusemi. Rely more on Fan Dance to keep the damage down. Also, use mainly Utsusemi: Ni unless I can time shadow cancelling properly, which is something I don't have much practice at yet.

2nd Tyger - Front-line healer
The second Tyger went a lot better than the first. No tanks went down, and people were logging to clear hate as appropriate. A few things happened that were interesting though...

Just over halfway through the fight, I started trading hate with both tanks. That is, if either tank was hit, Tyger would switch attention to me and start taking my shadows down, or actually hitting me instead of just catching me in AoE moves. Now when a healer gets hate, what would normally happen is that the mob would end up moving away from the tanks towards the squishy mages, which could possibly result in a wipe. However, as a front-line healer, Tyger would just start attacking me instead since I'm right there next to both tanks. With Utsusemi and Fan Dance, two tools that regular healer-mages do not normally have, I can easily tank the mob until the regular tanks can put their shadows back up and work to try to get hate back. Instant, uninterruptable curing also makes staying alive and maintaining hate that much easier.

(It was a little funny when Tyger used Toubillion on me and knocked me back that Fuuji thought that a mage had taken hate :) I guess i wasn't standing in the right position to prevent from being thrown back?)

Wu is right though. If I'm at the front-line and holding hate, that means I'm one of the tanks and I shouldn't be afraid of pulling & holding hate and taking a few hits!

Further Dancer tank testing
What does this mean? Can a Dancer main tank? I'm not certain yet... I've noticed a few things from all this time experimenting with Dancer:

- It takes a long time to build up a solid amount of hate. PLDs, NIN and even RDM have lots of different tools to build hate. Flash, Provoke, Ninjitsu, or the RDM spamming of enfeebles are lots of ways to build up a lot of hate in a short amount of time. Dancers rely on healing to generate hate, and that means that someone needs to take a lot of damage for me to heal up.
- On the other hand, once we get our hate built up, it's really hard to get rid of it. For Tyger, our mages have to log out in order to reset hate. In Einherjar and Dynamis, if we have a large pull, I'll eventually end up pulling hate from the later mobs simply due to healing my party. Rooks says that's why I get a THF in my party for Einherjar!
- Evasion doesn't work against level 80+ NMs >.> I should have just stuck to using Haste or Accuracy gear against Tyger. In campaign, I can easily handle 5 mobs at the same time using evasion gear + Fan Dance, but evasion simply doesn't work against Tyger.

So, I think the best tanking situation for a Dancer would be a backup tank. We're up there on the front-line healing anyway. A mistake by a main tank would mean taking over until the tank is brought back up. Once our hate levels get high enough, we can take a few hits easily and co-tank to take pressure off the main tank. Main tanking would be tricky due to the small number of tools a Dancer has to generate initial hate. Perhaps if a few people would use Trick Attack on the Dancer, it might work. Further testing is definitely required.

Also, more Fan Dance merits. I might end up going 5/5 on this one instead of splitting some merits with Saber Dance if further testing proves to be positive! Maybe the next Omega, or ZNM run!

Finally: If you're leveling Dancer... be sure to unlock the three meritable abilities as soon as you hit 75! They really, really change how the job can be played!

Week of fail continues!

The "Week of Fail" continues into the 2nd week with even more FAIL!

Let's see... what do we have...
- Limbus: Super-low attendence, plus no luck getting time extensions mean a really short Wednesday Limbus farming session
- ZNMs: 2x wipe to one Tyger! Even with Mort's best efforts to zombie a mob we previously took down with ease, we still manage to wipe to it twice and lose yet another Tier IV pop set
- Nyzul: 0/4 for armor drops! Floors 2x60, 2x100. Based on the statistics on Wiki, there is a 7.65% chance that we'll get 0 drops for doing all four of these floors. Maybe it's time to take Ashle and get him "fixed"... if you know what I mean ;) On the good news, I'm 17/20 for Nyzul weapons, and we're now completing these floors in record time, reaching the boss floor with 16-20 minutes left on the clock, and exiting with over 11 minutes left.
- Dynamis: Well... not a COMPLETE fail since I got BLU AF2 body (yay! though seems like I'm the last BLU to get it), but I still haven't seen a single DNC drop at all. Meanwhile, I'm surprised to see quite a few Dancers around Jeuno with a few pieces.

Strange... I'm seeing a lot more 75 Dancers around. While before I'd rarely see any at all, now there are a lot more running around with Chocobo Jig, campaigning, etc. Did the Category 2 Merits really change the job so much that people play them now?

More thoughts on Dancer Category 2 merits
Couple of things seem interesting:

Saber Dance:
For Saber Dance, it seems more efficient to *not* perform any steps, Waltzes etc. when I first activate this job ability. Since the Double Attack rate is highest when it is first active, it seems best to do any steps, waltzes, etc. at first, then use it and let TP build up. WSing with Saber Dance up also affects WS damage, and of course, TP return.

Saber Dance's effectiveness is based on time decay, so the most bang for the buck is during the first minute or two. After which it's still effective, but I'd be more inclined to turn it off in order to do some Waltzes. I'm probably going to merit another minute off of this.

Fan Dance:
Fan Dance is definitely different. Effectiveness is based on the number of hits, so... if I anticipate tanking, or taking a lot of damage by AoEs, I could possibly activate this before engaging so that the recast timer would come up earlier. Of course, meriting this timer down further would help a lot too.

Between the two new "dances", Fan Dance seems like it would benefit the most from having the recast timer down. This would mean another few hits of reduced damage earlier and more often, leading to less damage to heal. Having Saber Dance recharge sooner just means a little bit more damage. Fun, but not critical in an emergency.

No Foot Rise, Reverse Flourish Merits:
Having No Foot Rise and Reverse Flourish Merits is changing how I use Reverse Flourish. Merits into RF mean that for ANY RF, I'll get an extra 12% TP return. This means that even with 1 Finishing Move, I'll get 10+12 = 22% return. It really doesn't matter how many Finishing Moves I have now. As soon as my RF timer up, I should just use it for the highest TP return due to that 12% bonus.

Fan Dance vs. 1000 Needles!

Utty pulled me out to help Tayles to fight a Cactuar NM, Saotender Enamorado.

Turns out this NM likes to spam 1000 Needles! After the first one, I threw up Fan Dance and went into pure healing mode to keep everyone alive. As a result, I got some solid numbers on what Fan Dance does.

3 people, so regular damage is 333 without modification
With Fan Dance up, this did: 33, 66, 99, 133, 166, 233, then 266 onwards until the end of the fight.

So, Fan Dance damage reduction is: 90%, 80%, 70%, 60%, 50%, 30%, then 20% on until it either wears, or the effect is cancelled. The mob got one regular hit in on me between the 166 & 233 1000 needles, so i'm guessing that's the 40% hit.

Basically, starts at 90% reduction, then goes down by 10% every hit until it stops at 20% reduction and stays there!

Dancer - 3rd Impressions

More playing around with Dancer...

Fan Dance may be more useful than I initially figured. Besides being a "save my butt" ability, it did let me tank 2-3 Yag SAM campaign mobs at the same time. In Einherjar, Fluid Spread nearly killed everyone from the many slimes, but Fan Dance kept my damage down to be managable. Even with the effect decaying by the number of hits it "absorbs", it was still good to keep up as a survival tool.

Saber Dance is also pretty good. With Saber Dance and Drain Samba III, I could basically go all out on a single campaign mob, WSing whenever possible and the double attack + Drain would easily keep me alive.

So... now I'm debating how to spread my merits out. Still doing 3/5 on NFR... but I might end up doing 3/5 for both Fan & Saber Dance. Closed Position is definitely a solo-type merit... +evasion & +accuracy while face-to-face... It'll have it's uses, but I'm still not sure if I should put one merit into that, or bump either Fan or Saber Dance's recast down another 30 seconds.

Gearring up Dancer
With these new merits unlocked, I'm starting to experiment a little more with other Dancer possibilities besides main healing. Saber Dance usually means I'm spamming WS's, so I've been investigating how to maximize Dancing Edge damage with Toku's help. Need to change a bunch of macros around to get this to work, but hopefully it'll be worth it.

Fan Dance opens up quite a few new possibilities... low-manning, or soloing mobs that I previously couldn't... initial testing (via aggro) has already shown that I can solo an EM Gnole now, while pre-update, we'd be locked into an endless dance as we'd both use TP moves to heal up to max. To further adjust this, I'm going to finish gearing up on evasion gear. I've already purchased an Evasion Torque and Velocity Earring... need to get a Boxer's Mantle with Ancient Beastcoins, and get lucky on some Denali drops in Nyzul. >.>

Besides the boxer's mantle and Denali gear, the main things I still need on DNC are:
- Enkidu's Leggings
- Etoile Tights
- Etoile Tiara
- Etoile Casaque

Week of FAIL
Seems that last week was a complete week of failure. From wipes on stuff that we normally handle without a problem, to complete crap in drops, the whole of last week since the update should basically not have happened. In fact, we're further behind now than we were during the update due to lost pop sets, lost exp, and lost time. Not a single event I'd consider "successful", and that's getting really, really frustrating.

About the only thing I'm still finding "fun" is either doing the WotG missions, or playing around with Dancer... Unfortunately, SE in their infinite wisdom decided to make WotG missions impossible to get a group to do since you need people in YOUR nation to do quests to advance to the actual missions, and the actual missions have nice little annoyances where you have to spend hours farming EX items.

That leaves Dancer as the only thing I'm currently finding fun.

So... for at least the next few weeks, I'm going Dancer exclusively for events unless someone can give me an absolute good reason why I should be on Blue Mage. Right now, the only event where I'm using BLU to the fullest capabilities would be Nyzul Isle. Everything else I'm either a DD spammer, or Curebot, neither of which really does the job's flexibility justice. Dancer can fulfill both of those roles, and I think it's time to do some serious experimentation on the job!

Nyzul Isle - Farming & Climbing

Sorry about that messy transition to splitting the group. I thought I talked to everyone about climbing, but I guess I missed some people >.<

Anyway, the number of people who wanted to do Nyzul finally hit critical mass and I had to split the group or else end up juggling people back and forth. Nobody wants to sit out on the sidelines while waiting, and nobody wants to do 10k+ WS points, so time for you all to go climb!

Should be pretty straightforward... You've all done a bunch of climbs already from farming weapons, so you know what to expect. I think it's a good mix of jobs too.

Nanopy: WHM, main heal, Repose, Dark-Based Dispel with /SCH
Abhor: BLU, DD, light & dark sleeps, Light-based Dispel
Conceptx: PLD, tank whenever possible, backup heal, DD
Parn, Teia, Karou: DD, don't hold back, /NIN for Sneak, Invis & damage mitigation

Don't forget, don't climb without 6/6. If someone can't make it, Parn has level 20 that you can farm some armor at the very least. 5/6 can handle bosses almost as easily as 6/6.
You're your own group now, so you can adjust your schedule however you like!

Farming group: Back to the old members... 'usual schedule, probably 5/6 on Sunday farming so we'll avoid floor 100 on Sundays.

Dancer - Cat2 Merits - 2nd Impressions

Took Dancer out to Dynamis and Limbus last night. Tried out the new abilities... let's see...

Oh yeah, went as DNC/SAM for both events!


Dynamis
Dynamis-Jeuno this time around. in past Dynamis, I'd end up either spamming cures to keep the party alive and healthy, or occassionally I'd end up really bored my party would have people who kept out of harm's way and I couldn't do much other than WS whenever I got to 100% TP.


Last night's Dynamis was the former type. I could use Saber Dance once in a while, but the loss of Curing Waltz was too painful to keep it up all the time since people would be taking damage, and my party's WHM would often be low on MP. Plus I had Val in my party, so I really wanted to be able to throw him a cure if his shadows dropped from a pull.


Unfortunately, clicking Saber Dance off does not take effect immediately. It takes about 2-3 seconds after I click it off before Waltzes can be used again. Strangely, switching from Saber to Fan Dance is instantanous, and for emergency situations, I can go Saber->Fan->Cure instantly.


Fan Dance didn't get used much in Dynamis. The one wipe we had was an Astral Flow, and the one time I got the mob's attention, I took an Eagle Eye Shot that killed me before I could throw up the Dance xD


Limbus
Limbus was much more fun. Thank you Nain for covering healing duties even though you wanted to take it easy ^^; I basically had Saber Dance nearly full time, except for the Mandy floor so that I could wake people up. Add in Haste, March and full haste gear, I was swinging crazily fast, hitting 100% under 30 seconds nearly constantly. Add in Reverse Flourish, Mediate... basically spam WS's. Had a little WS competition with Chopxsticks on THF to see who could pump out more Dancing Edges over one mob. We ended up tied both at 3, but he said that he started at 90%+ TP, and I had a 4th WS ready to go when the mob died. Oh yeah, self-SCing Darkness is fun too, but like BLU self-SCing, it generally isn't worth bothering since chances are someone will get in the way :)


Fan Dance came in useful a couple of times too... when extra mobs aggroed or linked, my heals would end up gathering the linked mob's attention until Ashle provoked it. It also helped against slimes and their Fluid Spread move. Damage was cut significantly... Fluid Spread did 70 damage to me, and 770 on Vanh. I didn't have shadows since I was /SAM. Screwdriver hit me for under 200, while it hit Ashle once for 900. Definitely a good job ability for emergencies!

Campaign
Did one campaign after all the events last night just for fun... it was against Orcs in E. Ronfaure [S]. I guess I arrived after a wipe or something as there was lots of people around, all /healing and mobs were running around. I picked one up and started soloing as normal when a 2nd one showed up and linked. Throw up Fan Dance, kept building TP, and it was no problem tanking both mobs until people unweakened and decided to join the fun. Ashle decided that he wanted some exp too and grabbed my 2nd mob.

After finishing off the grunts, I tried going up against Posionhand... not a problem. Normal hits are reduced enough to be able to easily handle with Fan Dance up. Of course, getting hit means that I'll lose hate and the next melee on the hate list will quickly get his attention... and die... It wasn't until he used 100 fists that people started going down. I might have been able to handle it if I had thought about it and used Trance to keep my HP up, and Fan Dance to reduce damage while he used 100 fists, but I didn't think of it at the time.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with these two job abilities! Saber Dance does have a potential to let Dancer do significantly more damage than normal. Fan Dance is good at saving a Dancer's hide

So, that's it! I need at least 9 more merits to get No Foot Rise leveled up... plus another 22 after that to finish Saber Dance and throw one upgrade into Closed Position... merit party anyone?

Dancer - Category 2 Merits, 1st Impressions

Whee... first, early impressions on the new category 2 Dancer merits. After ZNMs last night, I went to campaign to try them out in a non-exp-loss situation and also went with Zurar to help Karou with that "Purple, the new Black" dragon killing mission to see how well they worked. Here are my early impressions.

Saber Dance
Double Attack seems to start off at 50% when the job ability is first activated. From 0% TP, it takes me about 30 seconds to get 100% TP with Saber Dance up in full haste gear! And that's still missing my leg piece since I still don't have anything yet for that. When it's first activated, it almost feels like having a Soul Voice Double March Bard effect on. I'd like to see what happens during next week's Einherjar when I actually do get SV March and put up Saber Dance.

DA seems to taper off gradually, getting full effect of about 50% for... I think a minute or more. Around 3 minutes, it's not as significant as it was before, but DA still happens even at the very end of the 5 minute timer. Together with a Brutal Earring, Saber Dance is a lot of fun! Plus you can use it with Haste Samba for swings! I need to do some experimentation with /WAR to see how much DA I can get. Self-skillchaining isn't even a question anymore... it's easy to do!

The 5 minute recast timer is a little painful as I'd be looking to when I can refresh the full effect again pretty often. This is definitely a good ability to put up when a fight is first starting to build TP ASAP, then keep up whenever I don't need to heal. I may end up meriting this timer down so I can put it up as frequently as possible. I need to do a few events to see how this changes my play habits on Dancer.

Fan Dance
Well, the good news is that the damage reduction is really significant at first... I was fighting Yagudo Samurai, and their hits went from 70-90, to... 9 when I first put up Fan Dance.

The bad news is that the +enmity isn't really noticable. I tried holding hate in two situations: Campaign with a bunch of DDs going all out on the mob I was tanking, and in the Dragon Mission fight. In both cases, it was harder to maintain hate compared to how I would normally do it. The problem was that by taking less damage, I have less HP to cure up, so I actually end up generating less hate compared to just straight tanking without the ability and curing myself in campaign. For the mission, I tried Fan Dance + Animated Flourish + some curing, but that wasn't enough to hold hate against a WSing SAM.

So, the big gain on Fan Dance is the damage reduction really. It'll make a good emergency ability to throw up if I get the attention of a mob when Third Eye or Utusemi is down. Definitely not going to bother putting any more merits into this.

No Foot Rise(NFR)
Of the 3 new abilities, this one was the one I had originally not thought much of, but I'm finding to be the most useful! Besides the most obvious benefit of being able to gain TP & Finishing Moves outside of battle, I'm finding that I'm using this to insert Flourishes, or add Finishing Moves during battle... A few ways I've used it already:

- Getting 1 Finishing Move, then starting a battle with Violent Flourish while people get situated
- Topping up 4 finishing moves to 5 so I don't waste a step when I want to self-skillchain
- Getting a Finishing Move so I can do an Animated Flourish to at least pull a mob off a mage desperately fleeing for life

NFR definitely has the most use of the 3 new job abilities. I'm going to merit this ASAP to level 3 as that seems to be the right balance. 5 would be overkill since I'd be stepping all the time anyway. 3 would let me pair NFR with one step to get to 5 FMs, or be able to have a full strength Animated Flourish or Building Flourish at any time.


Closed Position
The one category 2 that I don't have any merits in yet... seems straightforward, just make sure you're face to face with the mob for accuracy & evasion bonuses. Definitely useful for soloing since we have pretty good evasion to begin with, but in party or event situations? Probably not...


1. Chances are the mob is going to be turning all over the place... except when there's a tank, and...
2. If there's a tank, and there's a THF... chances are I don't want to be Trick Attacked!


So... it's going to be useful, but not *that* useful. I'll throw any leftover merits into this..



What to merit?
Now the big question on how to sort out my merits! So far, I have 3 merits in each of the abilities. Add two more to NFR, and I'll still have 5 Dancer Category 2 merits left to assign. I don't really see any point to upgrading Fan Dance. The +emity isn't enough to really be a tank, and it's more of a "for fun" ability.


With 5 cat2 merits left... At this time, I'm thinking I'll probably end up meriting Saber Dance down to 3 minutes so I can basically turn it off whenever I want and still have it back up in a reasonable time. The last cat2 merit I'll throw onto Closed Position for at least... some use. :)

So, that's... 4+5 for NFR, 4+5+5+5 for Saber Dancer, and 3 for Closed Position for a total of 31 merits, or 310,000 limit points. I currently have... 1... so, that's 30 more to go! Now I remember why I never merited Diffusion down >.>

Side note: So far, I don't think I've seen a single good guide to Dancer online at all. It seems that the people who wrote them all looked at Dancer on paper, but never actually played it seriously or experimented with it. Some choice quotes... "only useful for Steps with /THF", "Sit at 300% TP", "Only a B weapon with accuracy problems", "must sub ninja", "cannot main heal". The podcasts aren't any better either... Part of me doesn't mind because it means that I'm more unique, but another part of me is annoyed at them spreading blatantly wrong information >.>

December Update - Dancer!

Big update today! Big news for Dancer with category 2 merits, AF2 & AF+1! Plus SE threw in a few more toys for Dancers in there :)

So, reading through update info, here's my first thoughts before trying anything.

Category 2 Merits
If category 1 wasn't hard enough to choose, this time around SE really did a number on Dancer. On the surface, it looks like every item is worth meriting. However, I realy do wonder what SE is thinking with these merits. From 1-74, Dancer is designed to be a front line healer, doing some damage while being able to do the majority of the healing. Suddenly, you get two meritable abilities that... focus Dancer into doing more damage, or even tanking?!

Anyway, quick look at the merits
Saber Dance
- High Double Attack Rate, but no Waltzes.
- Recast: 5 minutes, Duration: 5 minutes.
- Effect gradually decreases
- Additional merits shortern recast time by 30 seconds
At first glance, this appears to be the "let Dancers go merit" ability. Double Attack only applies to the Dancer, and this is not a Samba. However, I'm seeing this a little differently. DA = more TP, so putting this up at the beginning of a fight, or whenever you're low on TP should mean that a Dancer can build up a ton of TP really quickly. The duration is as long as the initial recast, and further merits are supposed to bring it down, so this is clearly a "click off" once you need to use Waltzes. I'm figuring this is SE's way to compensate for the maximum TP being 300%. With this, Dancers can get TP faster, and WS if they want to and be confident of getting TP back quickly.

Fan Dance
- Reduces physical damage, increases enmity, but no Sambas
- Same recast & duration again
- Effect gradually decreases with each hit taken
- Additional merits shortern recast time by 30 seconds
This is a really weird one... It's effectively saying that Dancers... are supposed to be tanks at endgame? The AF2 Hands also have +enmity on them, which is a change from the -enmity on AF. I'd have to experiment to see how much enmity increases, and how effective the damage reduction is. I already get enough hate with all my -enmity gear, so this makes this ability quite strange... Can it really be used to turn Dancer into a real tank? We get high enough evasion, have evasion gear, plus we have a form of Provoke... if necessary, we can sub NIN, and if we don't take hits with /NIN, does this mean that we'll be able to hold hate? Plus even if shadows go down, we do have decreased physical damage...

No Foot Rise
- Grants Finishing Moves for standing still!
- I think it's a 3 minute recast...
- Each additional merit increases the number of Finishing Moves granted
Initial thought was... gain TP without doing anything, basically a Mediate for Dancers. After thinking about it some more, I realized that this actually can be much more powerful! Most Dancers... well, ok, GOOD Dancers would typically use Reverse Flourish every two steps. This is the most efficient as it does not waste any Finishing Moves, and it lets you use Reverse Flourish every time the timer is up. However, this means that you won't be using Finishing Moves for your other Flourishes... Violent Flourish, Animated Flourish, etc. No Foot Rise *should* allow a Dancer branch out a little more without having to worry about running out of TP!

Closed Position
- Accuracy & Evasion bonus being face-to-face with the enemy
This seems to be the solo merit ability. We have high evasion, good accuracy, so this really pushes it up. Fully merited, it's basically a Scorpion Harness +1. As for group events... well, most of the time mobs are spinning around, or you can't always be at the front... so it's of limited use.

So... what does this mean for merits? At the very least, I'm going to unlock Saber Dance, Fan Dance and No Foot Rise. I'll probably put at least 2 merits into NFR since 2 Finishing Moves are required to use most Flourishes including Wild Flourish & Animated Flourish. After that, I'm not sure... It would have to depend on whether the recast timers on the two Dances are reasonable as is, or if I feel they need to be merited down further. It's possible I'll end up fully meriting Closed Position or NFR

Dancer AF+1
Dancer AF is already a macro piece for the "enhances effectiveness/duration". Unless the +1 version actually increases this effectiveness, there isn't really a reason to upgrade any piece. Even the body +1 has the same "Waltz potency +10%" as the regular AF. The only piece that may be of interest is the Dancer's Tights +1, which gives Accuracy+5 and could replace Cobra Unit Subligar's Accuracy+4.

Dancer AF2
Dancer AF2 is... incredible >.< Almost every piece is useful or significantly better than any alternative piece of equipment. I'll list the key characteristics and why they're important

Etoile Cape: Accuracy +5, Evasion +5, Chr+5, Dex+5
- No other cape has as high accuracy, evasion, or chr or dex bonuses!
Etoile Tiara: Waltz Potency +5%
- Together with the regular AF body, that's +15% total!
Etoile Shoes: Increases Step Accuracy, Accuracy +3
- Additional macro piece to land steps. Combine this with the AF hands for even more step accuracy!
Etoile Tights: Increase Jig duration, Haste+3%
- Hopefully Jig duration stacks with AF Boots. This is also the only other leg piece that has Haste on it! Maybe I don't have to do Ashu Talif after all
Etoile Casaque: Accuracy +10, Attack+12, Dex+4, Enhances Violent Flourish Effect
- Soooooooo... Scorpion Harness++? Added stun effectiveness is good too!
Etoile Bangles: Evasion+5, Attack+5, Enmity+2
- This is the only piece I'm scratching my head over... Evasion+5 and Enmity+2 would be good for use during Fan Dance I guess?

Overall, this is muuuuuuuuch better than any other equipment for Dancer. I waaaaant~

Nyzul Isle - Splitting the group

As of right now, we have a pretty large group of people who do Nyzul together...

With a Runic Key (floor 100)
- Ascule (BLU/SCH)
- Ghiren (Lots)
- Zurar (SAM/NIN or /DNC)
- Ashle (THF/NIN or NIN/WAR)
- Kuraikaze (SCH/RDM who is back into FFXI after a month break)
(Utaru - retired... doesn't come atm)

Without a Runic Key (and at floor 0)
- Teia (DRG/RDM)
- Nanopy (WHM/SCH)
- Conceptx (PLD/WAR)
- Karou (SAM or WAR/NIN)
And... Zurar says that he would like to climb his alt Yasunami up as well. She's not 75 yet, but he says that he's going to blitz her up to 75 during this holiday season. Would be coming as SCH/RDM

So, we have a total of 9(or 10) people who want to do Nyzul, half of which need to climb to 100. The good news is that we can acutally do Nyzul with 5 and still win, though it is a little tight if we get a bad boss. The bad news (at least for me) is that coordinating 9-10 people while being fair to everyone quite a headache.

To try to fix this... I'm proposing the following:
1. Continue farming with our existing group until Yasunami is of a level to actually do Nyzul. This means farming for the next month or so until Yasunami hits at least level 65-66 and can be useful. Farming group would be: Ascule, Zurar, Ghiren, Teia, Ashle and Nanopy, with Kurai & Nanopy swapping spots whenever we do a floor which either of them already has the armor. i.e.: Floor 80 Kurai will come along since Nanopy already has the Goliard Body.
- Karou will fill in for whoever can't make a run... so on Sundays, Karou will come since Ashle can't make it most of the time. If you can't make it, let me know on AIM/POL messaging so I can let people know.

2. Once Yasunami levels up enough, split into two groups. The original static will continue farming with 5, while a new climbing static will start going from floor 0 with Nanopy, Teia, Conceptx, Karou, and Yasunami.
- Party is a little weak on the DD side and could use a 6th person. I'll see if I can slide in a 6th person for you. Yasu should also nuke on Dark Arts whenever possible to speed up kills.
- For "no white magic" floors, Teia can heal with Healing Breath using Poison as a trigger spell. Alternatively, Conceptx can come PLD/DNC and use Waltzes once he gets the sub leveled up
- This also means that Zu probably will end up doing a lot of Nyzul back-to-back, or change the days which this climbing static goes.

Anyway, farming schedule wise, will be Thurs & Sun. 3 runs on Thursday@9:45pm PST, 4 runs on Sunday@8:30pm PST. Be sure to pick up a 4th tag sometime between Sunday night and Wednesday night. I normally pick mine up right after ZNMs on Monday.

Any comments/issues? Feedback much desired...

The frustration of FFXI and SE's ploy

This is a followup rant to this earlier post about SE and FFXI wasting people's time. You can read the first part of this rant here: http://ascule.blogspot.com/2008/09/respecting-time-and-lack-thereof.html


So, last night we did ZNMs again... Tier III mob, and we didn't wipe this time. However, out of all the mobs, we only got one drop that someone actually wanted. This is really taking things too far SE. Let's see how much effort was put into this:


1. Farming the zeni necessary to buy the pop items. This is at minimum 6000 zeni for Tier I, II & III
2. Actually going out to kill the Tier I & II mobs
3. 14 people spending 3 hours to pop and kill these mobs for a total of 42 man-hours



Ignoring points 1 & 2, even looking at just item #3, that's a lot of people's time spent on this mob. Let's put it in perspective... Assuming the US Federal Minimum Wage rate of $6.55/hour, that's $275.10 of productivity spent on getting this one item. The very least they could do is have the drop rate be reasonable instead of this crazy low drop rate that leaves everyone doing ZNMs feeling discouraged at the end of the night.

(Just for comparison, the China minimum wage is $0.138/hour. To accomplish the same thing hiring players in China would have cost $5.82. Is there any question as to why there is a gil farmer/RMT problem?)


Similarly, on Sunday night, we had 3 Nyzul runs with... absolutely no drops. 6 people, 1 1/2 hours wasted and logging off discouraged.


The reasons behind the low drop rates is simple... SE wants to keep people playing FFXI for as long as possible. Almost all "endgame" events are designed to make you keep your subscription going for as long as possible. For example: the time limitations on how often you can enter Limbus & Dynamis, the limits you have on the number of assaults or campaign ops that you can do a single day and more. Would it really break things that much for SE to at least throw people a bone? Let's say they changed Nyzul such that a boss fight would give a 100% drop of an armor piece... a group of 6 people would still be spending 30 straight runs (or 30 days) of farming armor before they each got one full set. Additionally, the drops would not necessarily match up with what is wanted, so a little bit more time would be spent on it. Or people could end up working on multiple sets, bringing the amount of time "invested" in this activity to up to 3 months. The very least this would do is allow people to move on to something else instead of spending months or years at one repetitive activity. It would also free up assault tags to either: Do other assaults, accumulate assault points for Salvage, or even help other people do their assaults! As far as I know, very few people have actually "completed" any single event. They either grow frustrated and quit, or too many people lose interest and the event disbands.


Instead, by making it probability, they're allowing statistics drag the time out instead. 1 month stretches out to 4 months, 3 months to a year... and meanwhile, while you're stuck doing one event, you don't have time or resources available to do a different event, or help someone out, or do something fun, level another job or just goof around experimenting with other things. Adding new content to the game no longer matters as people do not have time in their schedule to actually try it out. WotG zones are empty except for people doing campaign. The [S] NMs remain untouched, and nobody (at least on this server) bothers to try the campaign ops, or to invade a beastmen territory. Instead, due to the way the game is set up, you end up going to the same event week after week, month after month, year after year. It's gotten to the point where people have been going to same events for 3, 4 years.

That's no longer a game. It's a job.

Puppetmaster - Most complex FFXI job?

I think I have a pretty decent understanding of most FFXI jobs. The jobs I've played to sub levels I know how to play, or how to effectively sub. Most other jobs are fairly straightforward with clearly defined roles such as tank, DD or healer, and I have a decent idea of how to effectively use hybrid jobs such as BLU, RDM, DNC, DRG, and force some hybrid jobs like SAM/DNC. I've even played with BST a few times (though I think only taru should be BST since it's soooooooooooooo cute watching them run away from a mischarmed mob!)

PUP on the other hand, still confuses the heck out of me. Just looking over the sheer amount of attachments that they have, the different manuvers, frames, heads, and how you can make am automation behave based on your own behavior, or putting up different manuvers or gear... and all this at level 1! It seems really complex... and it seems to have a high amount of potential.

BLU is complex enough already, from having to choose your spells for the right mix for the job, to choosing between different traits, subjobs. Add onto that the issue of equipping not just yourself, but your puppet with the right attachments and put up the right manuvers, it's easy to see why people don't understand PUP are afraid to invite them to parties. Still... I'd like to see more PUPs in events to see how they work!

Is there a PUP out there who would come and show the job off?

Back and doing crazy stuff already!

My DSL came back sometime on Saturday, and since then I've somehow managed to get pretty busy pretty quickly again.

Let's see... what did I do...

- Managed to get killed twice in Einherjar!
Ok, so one of those times was basically the boss looking at me, and everyone else that the boss looked at went down as well, so that part wasn't too surprising. What did catch me by surprise was being targetted during the one giant pull. This happened before during Dynamis where near the end of a big pull, I end up being targetted by mobs as soon as they wake up. As far as I can tell, this is just based on the face that curing generates hate either doesn't dissapate, or does so very slowly. As a Dancer, I usually end up spamming Divine Waltz to keep my party healthy. Doing so cures a lot of HP over time, but mobs do not pay attention to this compared to Provoke and flash until someone on their hate list has been cured by a lot. I think I had a BLM in my party, so that explains that.

- Promy as WHM/SCH
This is kinda weird... I don't know why I felt like it, but i brought out my WHM after... over a full year of not playing the job. I just felt like playing it when Connie mentioned needing help for Promies. WHM was my initial job that I took up to 30 in order to unlock BLU. I had a good mix of equipment from leveling SCH to 37, sO i was actually decently equipped. WHM/SCH was a good combination too, with Light Arts helping a little for MP efficiency.

The promies themselves were fairly easy once we got the necessary items to actually win. Anima for both promies, and poison pots to prevent Sleepga. Ironically, between the exp from the missions themselves, and the one ENM we did, my WHM hit level 38 and now I need to go do two more teleport quests!

- ZNMs - Enkidu's Cap
We did 2x Tygers this week. Quite a few people did not have the 500 zeni necessary to enter the area for Tyger... There really is no excuse for this since we have the schedule up at least a week before the event, plus reminders in party chat, and finally, if you're doing ZNMs, you should be farming zeni in the first place! 500 zeni isn't even enough for a Tier I pop item. For every mob we fight, someone has to go out there to farm anywhere from 1-4k zeni. Newcomers are forgiven, of course, but everyone should have some zeni on them and help share the load

Unfortunately, Tyger didn't drop much of consequence... first pop we nearly lost when both Frodo and Wuwu went down, but Connie stepped up and did great in blood tanking the doggie while everyone basically kept him alive for almost 10 minutes before Fro & Wu were able to take over again. 2nd Tyger was very smooth, but the only interesting drop was Enkidu's Cap, which went to me since... well, nobody else had it on their list ^^;; Personally, I put it up there just cos I hate having incomplete armor and I wanted a full Enkidu's Harness set! (I even have a full Scorpion Harness set... probably the only full set across all servers!)

Enkidu's Cap is pretty decent... DEX+3, AGI+3, Accuracy+8, Ranged Accuracy+8 and Subtle Blow +2. Overall, it replaces my O-hate permanently so I don't have to look at it anymore! I still find it kinda funny that my "endgame" armor seems to come in on specific slots. So far, I have 3 head pieces (Enkidu, Homam and Denali) and two hand pieces (Enkidu and Homam), but no other slots.

- Crazy party for Nyzul Isle
After a super-long 14 hour day, I felt like doing some Nyzul... plus I promised to take Connie sometime to give him a taste. We also grabbed our new LS member... (forgot how to spell the name) and put together a pretty crazy party. We had BLU/SCH, DRG/RDM, SAM/DNC, WAR/NIN, PLD/WAR and THF/NIN. Three non-traditional hybrid job combinations, and three "traditional" jobs. The basic idea is that I was to main heal + support with both Teia on DRG/RDM and Zuzu on SAM/DNC backing me up.

We ran into a few big problems... first is that people were careless and ended up aggroing a bunch of mobs unnecessarily (Mousse anyone?) With me as the only sleeper, it's really hard to keep a party alive while sleeping 3+ mobs ^^; Not going to name names, but people should know better ;) Second problem is that we ran into a series of crazy hard floors. Chariots are hard enough on their own, but we got Chariots + Gears. Got a series of Eliminate Enemy Leader floors which prematurely ended both climbs. Connie did great for his first time through, and we introduced our new people to the AP tradition of wiping for no good reason. :D

I still think that crazy job combinations can handle Nyzul. Just need more experimentation to figure it out :)

Offline

Fast post... my internet is dead at home. I'm completely offline, soooo... that means no events, and I'm not updating the other blogs!

Zurar has graciously taken over the ZNM blog. Nain has taken over the Limbus blog as well, so those two are taken care of. For the time being, I'm completely out of FFXI and all the events... it's kind of a relief really ;)

Anyway, for Nyzul, this week looks really empty. Utaru, Kurai & I are all out. If you all want to go do it tonight, that's up to you. So far, you have Ghiren, Zurar & Ashle who will be around. For replacement members, we have:

Flayer - Has already agreed to come... just send him a /tell and let him know what's up. Have him come RDM/WHM
Zerofaith - SAM/NIN. Wants to come, but is inexperienced. He'll be waiting for a /tell too

Additional backups:
- Lazymashi - We've gone before... may or may not be on
- Vertiigo - I think we've gone before. Utaru said that he would like to farm armor too

Stratagy wise, follow Ghiren. He knows what to do and has lead our Nyzul before!

Nyzul - Farming update

Whee... finally getting some decent Nyzul results from our farming!

Last night, we got:
Denali Bonnet (head) - Ascy
Goliard Clogs (feet) - Kurai

No drops on one run, and failed the final run because we basically had me weakened when we reached the boss floor and was running low on time.

Big thanks to Flayer & Zerofaith who filled in for a certain taru that decided to go play inside scary houses! It looks like we might have additional guests for the next few weeks too since both of our tarus are probably going to be out for at least part of the next few weeks. Flayer is going to join us as a replacement for most of these, including those next Thurs. He'll be wanting Goliard stuff!

Current armor pieces so far:
Ascy: Denali - Head
Ashle: Nothing
Ghiren: Nothing
Kurai: Goliard - Feet
Utaru: Askar - Body & Denali - Hands
Zurar: Askar - Feet
Guests:
Lazymashi: Askar - Head
Flayer: Nothing (wants Goliard)
Zerofaith: Nothing (wants Askar)

Ghiren & Ashle still have not gotten anything yet, so they're next up on the priority list. Ghiren would like Askar Feet & Body, so next week we're going to concentrate on floors 20 & 80. Ashle is being a nice guy as usual and is passing on stuff other people want, but he would like some nice Goliard gear for his up-and-coming RDM. Of course, when we have guests along, they're welcome to lot too for items that they can and will use.

Statistically speaking, if we get on average 2 armor drops per 4 runs, we should be done with getting everyone a full Nyzul armor set in about... 3-4 months... This is also assuming we maintain this drop rate and the items we want drop instead of getting a ton of Askar. That's not too bad given that we took 5 weeks to get up to floor 100 doing 7 runs a week. The climbing schedule was a little crazy, so I don't want to hold people to that for farming, but we can always still go on Sundays or Tuesdays.

Actually, I'd like to find out if there are any people who would like to go on Sundays or Tuesdays for farming runs. That way I can look out and pick up some guests to fill in for those who do not want to go and we can get some more armor for everyone. Sundays would be ideal, around 8:30-8:45pm PST gather time for up to 3 runs. That gives the tags enough time to refresh before Thursday. Let me know if you're up for that!

Scholar - 1st impressions

Hey! That's weird... results show a sudden influx of votes for RDM and BRD, but no supporting evidence in the comments of the last post! Someone's stuffing the ballot box!

Anyway, this post is about Scholar and my initial impressions for the lowbie levels.

Magic
First up... the magic side of things. Having access to both black magic & white magic at essentially the same time feels very much like playing RDM. Basic play seems to be the same in a party... throw out some enfeebles, regen the tank, maybe throw out some nukes. Unlike RDM, I didn't really feel like meleeing with the weak staff or club, so after taking care of the party, I'd end up /healing once I'm comfortable that the party has enough health to last till the end of the mob.

After getting Light Arts & Dark Arts, it took a little more thinking and planning as to when I was going to cast spells. Due to the 1 minute recast on switching arts, I'd throw out all the White Magic enfeebles and cast regen before switching to Dark Arts and finishing off with Black Magic enfeebles and nukes. Regen really makes main healing easy, and SCH getting it earlier than WHM makes me a happy schoolgirl!

As expected, I'm enjoying the healer side of the job a lot more than the nuker side...Nuking just isn't that fun, and level sync is making it even worse since my elemental magic skill is lagging behind what it should be. While level sync has made it a lot easier to put parties together, I'm finding it a little annoying cos my skills are lagging behind, and the satisfaction of leveling up is taken away when I realize that I can't use the new skills or spells I just obtained until the sync'ed person levels >.>

Strategems
So, I found that the fun part on SCH came with the various strategems... saving half MP cost when casting a big nuke makes for very efficient nuking, and being able to regen a couple of melees back to back helps a lot when you're trying to get through a cycle. Basically, it feels a lot like forcing Conserve MP & Fast Cast to come on whenever you want!

Tabula Rasa really shines with these active... It kinda feels like a miniture version of Chainspell or Manafont. I tried Tabula Rasa out twice in parties, once for an emergency situation where we needed some Cures fast among many people, and another to nuke the last mob in an exp party down. Being able to regen a whole party without waiting for that recast timer is quite effective, and doing a ton of nukes for half MP cost almost made it feel like a manafont nuke!

Sublimation
Sublimation is niiiiiiiiice! Being able to pool up a bunch of MP and taking it out when you need it is just too cool. It effectively expands my MP pool by 25%. Since I don't have Stoneskin yet, it's necessary to turn Sublimation on when getting up from /heal, then switching it out before /healing again. I've taken to essentially using up my MP while Sublimation is up, then taking out the store before /healing, or using it as necessary.

Subjob choice
I didn't realize what a difference the various subs would do for SCH. I had originally figured on just going SCH/WHM until level 40, then switching to SCH/RDM for en-ga spells. Turns out, there are good reasons for choosing one sub over another.

SCH/WHM: Gains access to White Magic enfeebles (Dia, Paralyze, Slow), the Bar-ra spells. Especially important when you need to Bar-ra groups of people. In the Jungle, I went as SCH/BLM once, and regretted it as I lost access to Barsleepra
SCH/BLM: Gets the Black Magic Enfeebles (Bio, Blind, Bind), and the other ones like Choke, etc. and of course, Elemental Seal. My last party had me coming as a nuker, but I showed up as SCH/RDM... could probably have done a little more damage if I came as SCH/BLM
SCH/RDM: Gets all the enfeebles from both schools of magic, but loses the -ra spells and elemental debuffs... probably still the best overall choice for versatility, but there are some situations that call for the other two subs.

Soooo... looks like I'll have to finish leveling /BLM & /RDM at some point so I can switch between all 3 as necessary. Both BLM & RDM are at level 18, so that's another 19 levels to finish them up as subjobs. I'd really want to get RDM up before leveling SCH past 40 since I still think Ascension & En-ga is nice and broken!

Scholar as a Sub
This will be quite interesting... the obvious benefit is of course, Sublimation. Other benefits include:
- Job traits: /SCH gets Clear Mind II, Conserve MP and Max MP boost. This means I no longer have to set my Conserve MP spells
- Light Arts: Since this boosts healing skill... supposedly it actually helps with BLU heals like Magic Fruit & Healing Breeze
- Strategems: Being able to cast Raise faster, or for less MP should be useful in various situations
- Addendems: Access to Dispel, and Aspir... this still needs some testing to see how effective it will be subbed.

The main place I'll be trying this out is Nyzul Isle since in Nyzul, just having Sublimation would be a huge upgrade as we do not have a RDM or BRD in our group!

Unfortunately, SCH will have to be put on hiatas for the time being... I want to level up at least the RDM sub, possibly both subjobs before going further, and I actually need to raise some gil! SCH spells are starting to get expensive, especially those that can only be purchased from vendors, and I do need some gil before taking it further!

More blogging for procastination!

The ironic part about being so busy is... that... sometimes I just get into a mood of not really wanting to do anything, and that tends to be when I update my blog ^^; I'm really busy this week, with deadlines on Thursday, plus lots of other things going on that I'm in no mood to really do, sooooooooooo... here's another blog post!

Yet another poll is up, this time focusing on the possible {Support Role Job}s that I might possibly pick up next. My exploration into PLD as voted did not end well. I ended up being super-bored with the job, partially because tanking at lower levels mainly consists of letting the PL take hate, partially because trying to cast spells while being hit is an exercise of frustration when your spell is interrupted. At least with NIN you know that if you're being hit, it's your fault for not counting shadows correctly!

So, going back to the jobs that seem enjoyable, at least to me...

Scholar
Ok, the main reason why I'm leaning towards this job is... it's brand new, seems really flexible and... it's not BRD4life or RDM4life >.> From what I've seen, it seems to be a weaker combination of both a WHM & BLM combined into one. You get all the -na spells, along with Raise II & Reraise II, but you can also switch to BLM mode and nuke to a reasonable degree, even Dispel. Just about the only utility spell you can't get at all is Haste.

Other considerations... how useful would it be as a compliment to my existing jobs? Considering that I can do a good portion of "Back Line Job" roles as BLU/WHM including -na spells, Diamondhide, and even an occassional Haste via Diffusion-Refueling, the WHM side of things wouldn't be too big of a deal. Dancer is of course, a frontline healer, so if it were a situation where I'd be main healing, I'd much rather take Dancer out. The other side is the nuking side, and I'm not certain how well SCH would hold out when it comes to nuking big things such as Proto-Omega. Anyone with any experience with this?

Red Mage
The big reason why I'm hesitant to level this, or BRD is... the attitude of RDM/BRD4life that seems to be around. I'd be really annoyed that... if after I leveled up RDM, that people would expect or demand that I play RDM only instead of BLU or DNC. The sad part is that I actually like RDM. It's a flexible job, capable of doing a lot of things both in a group and solo, and most importantly, is not dependent on /heal to get MP back.

The last time I leveled RDM was... during an age where WHM was the preferred healer, BLMs were the core of a party with skillchains & magic bursts, and a RDM was a last pick after you got the tank(PLD) and other melees. I was a frontline RDM that would keep up a haste/refresh cycle while fully enfeebling the mob, backup healing and magic bursting together with a BLM. That was also a time when I experimented with RDM/BRD for even more MP regen, even though it nearly drove me crazy xD

Leveling RDM again would have some other challenges. For starters, from what I understand, a full array of elemetal staves is now expected past level 50? I'd also probably want to pick up various +MND or +INT accessories for the job, which would represent quite bit of gil. Time for more NM camping? Moldy earring, Joy-toy... not sure what else I'd need for a RDM equipment wise. Oh, and finally I'd want to go unlock and level up a DRK sub o.o; That's a large investment of gil & inventory slots...

Bard
So, BRD seems to be an interesting job, if only for my recent interest in pulling. It's a great supporting job, and getting positioning right for the mages and melees is a headache at any level past 25. Being able to go out, pull a few mobs and sleep them without any concern about MP usage makes it seem like fun in a merit party situation. BRD equipment is mainly CHR based, so some of it would overlap with what DNC uses. I intend to pick up a Delta Earring from Einherjar just for the +2 Chr at some point.

My only concern about BRD is that it seems that it would get too boring under other circumstances. In emergency situations, there's not much a Bard can do to turn things around in a pinch. The nature of the job and the songs mean that the abilities take time to show effectiveness. Also, the job is basically performing the same 4 songs over and over again. It's busy, but it seems highly repetitive...

Conclusion
In any case, I won't be leveling anything seriously at least until December when this quarter of school is finally over @.@ Currently, the jobs sit at SCH12, RDM18 and BRD16, so they're all pretty low at the moment and really need some fun lowbie parties to get up to the levels which they start showing their own job traits... BRD25, RDM41, and... I have no idea when SCH starts becoming unique.

If you vote on the poll, put a comment in this post on why you voted for the job and try to convince me why I should level it :)

Nyzul - Completed floor 100, future farming

First up, good job in completing the 1-100 run in record time! Looking back at my blog posts, we started on 9/11, so we basically climbed up to floor 100 in about 5 weeks. We still have to finish Ashle's 91-100 disc, but that shouldn't be a problem this coming week.

Nyzul Farming
Going forward, we'll be doing Nyzul for the express purpose of farming armor. The schedule will be Thursdays only, gathering at Whitegate at 9:30pm Pacific. We're starting as soon as Ashle gets on, and we'll be doing 4 runs. Ge in Whitegate on time so that as soon as Ashles gets on, we can start our first run and people can get to sleep at a semi-reasonable hour. We won't be scheduling any more Sunday runs, freeing up assault tags so that people can do other assaults. Of course, if you actually want to do more farming runs on Sunday, just bring it up to people and if we have free tags available, we can do up to another 3 farming runs and pick up some friends to fill in for people who aren't around. Just be sure to pick up your 4th assault tag so that we can do 4 runs on Thursdays.

Farming schedule will generally be: 1-2 high floors (80/100), and the remaining lower floors. I'm not sure how bad token usage will be, but we'll continue to spread the floor picker around so that everyone has more or less the same number of tokens.

Farming Strategy
Strategy will be slightly different since we can't just spam 2-hrs on every single run! Basically, 2-hr at your discretion. If we hit the boss floor with only 5 minutes left, chances are everyone will have to use your 2-hr to try to get the win. If we have more than 5 minutes left, then it would be best to hold off and save your 2-hr for another run. I'm leaving it up to you all to use your best judgment on whether to 2-hr or not.

Item strategy remains the same. Melees might want to pick up additional damage drinks (like Soldier's Drink, Champion's, etc.) Jobs remain the same, though if you want to switch things around a little, let me know. I think we can have some flexibility in job choices.

Loot Lot Rotation - Round Robin
Simple round robin rotation... basically, everyone will lot on the pieces that they can and will wear. Once you have 1 piece of armor, you're out of the lotting pool until everyone has at least one piece, then we open up lotting again for the 2nd piece, 3rd, etc. This way, hopefully we can spread out armor to everyone so that we all finish up our sets at the same time.

Current armor pieces so far:
Denali: 1x Hands (Utaru)
Askar: 1x Feet(Zurar), 1x body (Utaru), 1x Head (Lazymashi)
Goliard: None

From a previous blog post, we have the following priorities for pieces:
Kurai: All except head for Goliard
Ascy: Denali feet & head
Ghiren: Askar body & feet
Zurar: Askar body & head
So... that probably means we'll be doing floor 20 the most since we have demand for all 3 armor pieces there, followed by 80 & 100. We'll catch up on 40 & 60 later once we get everyone a few pieces that they really want.

For weapons, I think almost everyone has already obtained the weapon for their main jobs, right? The only one I can think of that we haven't obtained is DRG for Zurar. Don't worry though, we'll get that easily... all Zu needs to do is get DRG to 75, then we'll have him start a 96-100 run. The floor 100 boss always drops two weapons, one random one, and the other will be for the job of the person who selected the floor. (Which is why Wightslayer dropped last night. I picked the floor after Utty DC'ed) If you have any other weapon desires, let me know, otherwise all weapons are free lot.

Nyzul Weaponskills - Pyrrhic Kleos & Expiacion
Very... very flashy! Both weaponskills put out a lot of light and are very flashy! Of course, I've seen Expiacion before since Varg demonstrated it to me right after the updated, but I've never seen Pyrrhic Kleos before, not even on youtube.

4 hits, flashy... my initial impressions of Pyrrhic Kleos was that it looked like a tiger slashing claws, similar to Claw Cyclone, just with a lot of light. I need to figure out a way to make videos in FFXI and upload it xD Or... at the very least, remember to take some screenshots :o I'll try to put some up soon.

Damage wise, Expiacion was what I expected, not as good as Vorpal Blade and more of a setup for a Darkness skillchain with Vertical Cleave. Pyrrhic Kleos on the other hand, was fairly decent... about 280-500+, depending. I need to experiment with it a little more to see if Building Flourish affects it, and if the damage can exceed Dancing Edge consistently, maybe try it with more accuracy in case I'm missing hits.

Big thanks to Ghiren who helped me with the points for this! My turn to return the favor now :)

WoTG "endgame" - Campaign Ops & Stronghold NMs?

So, one thing I've said about WoTG was that I would go about organizing whatever "endgame" event came out in the expansion. It seems that two events managed to sneak into the last patch without me noticing!

1. Stronghold Notorious Monsters (SNMs)
This seems to be a system similar to the ZNM system. In each [S] stronghold, there are 8 NMs that need to be killed for drops that are turned into key items once they are traded to a NPC. Once all 8 NMs have been killed, this unlocks an alliance Sealed Container NM (SCNM) battle in the stronghold.

It's similar to ZNMs as in you need to kill a bunch of mobs in order to go for the final battle. The good news is that there is no "zeni farming" that needs to be done. Besides dropping the key items, each NM also has their own two drops, and of course the alliance SCNM has some interesting drops as well. More info on the mobs & drops is available at http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Category:Stronghold_Notorious_Monsters

I'm thinking of gathering some people and going to play over in the past! I don't think we spend enough time in the WoTG areas... the beastmen stronghold are virtually deserted, and it should be easy to find these NMs, get some exp while playing around in the past! Given people's really filled up schedule, I'm thinking... Friday evenings, 7pm PST start time... any interest? Leave a comment or send me a /tell!


2. Campaign Ops
Apparantly when a nation has control over a beastman stronghold, there are offensive campaign ops that are opened up with rewards. There are two rewards that caught my eye:

From the Windy Op "Plucking Wings": Roundel Earring - Waltz Potency +5%
From the Sandy Op "Splitting Heirs": Cuchulain's Mantle - Str+4, Dex+4, Accuracy +5

Both of these items are really good for Dancer. Waltz Potency is something that only the AF body has right now, and that's the highest accuracy I've seen on a Dancer-usable back piece. The Str & Dex are also really good for Blue Mage.

Two small issues with doing these ops...
1. We need to own the beastman stronghold... given how slacks Hades is, it might be a while before this happens :) However, doing the Stronghold NM system might help with this... I have a feeling the Recall spells will become a little more used in the near future.
2. To do the op, you need everyone in the party to be affiliated with the nation. Hence, to do the Windy op, we'd need 6 people who are all affiliated with Windy [S], have the appropriate rank and have the op active in order to actually enter the battlefield. This takes a little more coordination compared to Assault.

Personally, once Hades gets control over Castle O[S], I plan on grabbing 5 other people and spamming that campaign op until I get that earring. After that, it'll be time to switch to Sandy and do the same thing for the mantle!

Yet another random update

Whee... some randomish updates on my adventures.

New toys
Let's see... surprisingly, my Blue Mage has been getting quite a few upgrades recently. Besides the recent rash of gloves that I've picked up over the last few weeks, just last night I managed to (finally) learn Mind Blast and picked up a new shield from ZNMs. It was free lotted and I happened to win the lot xD

Legion scutum DEF: 16 MP +20 Enmity -2MP recovered while healing +5Lv. 71 All Jobs

Pretty good shield... It's weird to actually see myself running around with a shield since none of my jobs actually have any shield skill. I might try wearing it on DNC/SAM just for the -enmity. It should really help when I take on support roles on BLU. I've put together a enmity down equipment macro that throws on all of my cobra unit gear as well for use during heavy healing events.

Merit parties
Kurai has been trying to level SCH up to 75, so I've been tagging along for a couple of meritish parties on Dancer. We seem to also grab more or less the same people... Dexie, Zurar, and he's grabbed Ghiren, Savage and Styles in the past. I've been coming as DNC/SAM for these, and overall exp isn't too bad, about 12-13k/hour without band.

DNC/SAM allows me a little more freedom in using TP to basically main heal the party while I'm pulling. I think I'm a little rusty now since it's been a while since I've actually pulled for a merit party. Couldn't break chain #16, partly because our party wasn't full of 75s, but mainly because I still don't have the right timing down on when to go out to get another mob in order to keep the chain going without bringing a mob back too early and getting us all killed. ^^;

4 merits stored up right now... I might just keep storing merits for use when level 2 merits come out for Dancer... or I might put a few merits into sword for Blue Mage. I do need just a little more accuracy on Blue Mage to throw out those 7-800+ Disseverments more consistently xD

Nyzul
Floor 75 now! 3/4 of the way there. Just 5 more successful climbs before we hit floor 100 and finish climbing. Hopefully we should be done with that by the end of this week, and we can switch over to a lighter farming schedule. We had our first Denali piece drop on floor 60, the gloves. Good tanking piece for NINs I think, so it went to Utaru.

Coming up though, I think we may have a scheduling problem. Originally, I'd figured that we would simply switch to a 4-run Friday-only schedule for farming, but this poses a problem for people who want to sleep (relatively) early on Friday for work on Saturday, as well as for people who want to do other Assaults on Sunday since using up all tag on Friday would mean that you only have 1, maaaaaaaaybe a 2nd tag late at night on Sunday.

Right now, proposals are:
- Do 4 runs on Thursday night - Can't be done since we start too late for people with work on Fri
- Do 4 runs on Friday night - Samish problem as above, plus lack of tags on Sunday
- Do a split of 2 runs each night, allowing for 2-3 tags on Sunday for other Assaults

Nyzul people, let me know what you think.


ZNMs
Mild fiasco last night when the Experimental Lamia basically had her way with the whole alliance. We had a problem when the tank party was getting one-shot one at a time, leaving the Experimental Lamia to aggro the rest of the alliance and start taking us down. Didn't help that the pets spawned and immediately started attacking the tank party as well and tanks weren't able to grab them in time.

Next week we should have a better strategy that involves a very foolish Blue Mage getting the attention of a bunch of lamia at the same time... mmm... that sounds almost like the plot of a h-dojin o.o;

Meanwhile, since Aqqy has basically abandoned us for the evil World of Warcraft, I've put together a ZNM site to take over tracking of what's going on, wishlist items, etc. It's available at http://znms.blogspot.com. Right now, it is quite out of date as I need to get information about what has happened over the last few weeks, what items people have obtained, what pop items are available, etc. If you know of anything, let me know in game, in the comments, or even email at (my char name) at GMail.

More random updates

Phew... caught up a little on my life, enough that I can actually watch some TV tonight instead of rushing from thing to thing... I had a few minutes, so I figured I'd put up another random blog post! Let's see...

Blue Mage - New Gloves
Seems that I need to throw a few merits into BLU... with my "physical nuking gear", I'm at over +30 Str & Dex with my new Enkidu's Mittens. However, that seems to be at the expense of accuracy as I seem to be doing more damage with my regular melee gear on. My nuking gear takes some accuracy off in favor of putting on more Str & Dex, so to get the best results, I'll need to raise my accuracy a little... probably through some sword merits since physical Blue Magic is dependent on main weapon accuracy. I might throw some into Blue Magic skill as well. I haven't touched either of these merits since... well, since I hit BLU75

Nyzul - floor 55
I was experimenting with gear in Nyzul. Of course, it didn't help that I was targetting high evasive rats, and I wasn't using Sushi since I'm very much a hybrid role in Nyzul, switching between healer to full-on DD to sleeper all during the same battle.
Still, we're just over the halfway point for Nyzul! Pretty good for 3 weeks of work. We have 9 more successful climbs to reach floor 100, then we can switch over to a slightly more relaxed farming schedule. We have 5 runs scheduled between tomorrow & Friday, so... with a ton of luck, we may actually hit floor 100 by the end of next week!

Other topics
People around me have probably noticed that I've been a lot more testy recently. I haven't been on as much, and may have been snapping at people ^^; Sorry for my behavior... it's just been a trying few weeks. Besides the crap going on with the stupid economy, I've also been really busy at school with basically taking the lead with my final project, which is going to be larger than any project that we've ever done.

About the economy... this is going to be bad. I think we're still at the beginning of what will be at best, a 1-2 year recession, and at worst, a 4-5 year depression. I've already taken measures to protect my investments, but it really does suck that I'm going to be graduating in the beginning of next year. If you're in school, try to delay graduation for at least another 2-3 years... by then we should be out of, if not climbing out of this mess >.<

Gloves come in pairs!

This is kinda funny... I just got two new pieces of armor over the past couple of days from Limbus & ZNMs. What's funny is that both pieces are gloves!

First: Homam manopolas for my Blue Mage. Great stats on this for a BLU:
DEF: 20 HP +20 MP +20 Accuracy +4Enmity +3 Haste +3%
These are basically max MP + melee gloves for BLU. Haste & Accuracy, plus the extra MP basically means I can retire my Cobra Mittens, BLU AF gloves and Dusk Gloves on BLU. The Haste + Accuracy traits would actually make it really good for Dancer as well, but so far, Dancer & Scholar have not yet been added to the Homam/Narshima sets.

I'm surprised by how far I've come with Limbus. 2/5 so far on the armor set. When I first started it about 6 months ago, I figured I'd just try it out for a brief period of time and get bored of it. I never thought that I'd use Limbus to fund armor purchases and even end up with some pieces of Homam armor for myself!

Next: Enkidu's mittens for both Blue Mage & Dancer.
DEF: 24 STR +4 DEX +4Accuracy +5 Ranged Accuracy +5"Subtle Blow" +2
For Dancer, these are the most accurate gloves possible, replacing my Cobra Mittens. Unfortunately, they're bright red that clashes with my normal dark purple look, but at least they'll match my Scorpion harness! I'm not certain, but they may actually be better for Step Accuracy compared to my Dancer's Bangles. Dancer's Bangles only says "Increases Step Accuracy" and does not actually say how much it increases it by. Much testing is required!

For Blue Mage, the Str, Dex and Accuracy bonuses make these the best gloves to cast physical BLU spells. With Disserverment & Frenetic Rip with both Str & Dex modifiers, and Hysteric Barrage having Dex as a modifier, I'm expecting that the increase in damage should be quite noticable. This also means that the Light Gauntlets that I've been using since I hit 75 are going back onto the AH after months of use!

Other gloves I'll still carry with me are my Cobra Mittens for the -Enmity, and my Dusk Gloves for when I'm on DNC and I can actually use that extra bit of haste. Chances are that for both jobs, I'll be mainly in these two new... bright red gloves xD


Thanks again to everyone in Limbus & ZNMs for helping to get this gear! Still lots more mobs out there for us to kill to get everyone what they want! ^_^

Nyzul - More progress, lots of weapons, 1st armor piece

We're making a ton of progress in Nyzul. Since the previous Sunday, we haven't had a single failed run yet, and except for a few minor mistakes, we're doing these runs almost perfectly! As Fuuji says, we're no longer a "noob nyzul group" :D

We've only run into one ordered lamp floor since the previous Sunday as well. Seemed to be a little confusion during the run, so I figured I'd write a quick clarification about ordered lamps.
- When you first find a lamp, activate it at once and stay there. If you see other lamps nearby that do not have people on them, shout out so that someone can get to it.
- When all the lamps have been found and activated, you'll see all the lamps light up. This tells us that we have found all the lamps and we can start to figure out the order
- This also means that if you aren't on a lamp, you should head back towards the Rune unless someone at a lamp has aggroed something and needs help
- In most cases, if someone has aggroed, try to keep the mob slept. If this isn't possible (i.e. You aren't Utaru, Kurai or me) fight it off and other people should come help you. Be sure to say something to let us know to come
- When we are going through figuring out the sequence of lamps, even if your lamp does stay on, you still need to activate it in the right sequence in the order for it to count. So when I talk about starting the next sequence, make sure you activate your lamp at the right time even if your lamp appears to be "on"

Good progress so far. Last Friday we completed our 16-35 climb, and we're set to climb from 36-60 this coming Thurs & Fri. We're having a ton of weapons dropping, and while I'm trying to keep track of them, it's getting hard to remember :)
Since Thursday, I think we've seen:
SCH - Ghiren
NIN - Utaru
MNK - Ghiren
RNG (again) - Dunno
SMN - Ghiren
SAM - Zurar
BST - Ghiren
At this point, Ghiren says he's 7/20 for the weapons and is going for a full set! Keep in mind that you can store any weapons you're not using for 1 Imperial Bronze Piece, so if you think you'll ever level a job in the future, may as well grab it and put it into storage. We also got our first armor piece on Sunday. Askar feet went to Zurar! Congrats! That's the 1st armor piece we've seen in all our runs, so we're 1/4 in terms of armor. And... that's without a THF xD (though Zu did come /THF)

We're going to try to start a little earlier on Thursdays. The time that we get our 2nd tag on Thursday nights is what determines when our tag refreshes on Sunday, so the earlier we start on Thurs, the earlier we end on Sunday :) So that means, try to be in Whitegate, on the right job and all ready to go by 9:45pm latest. Ashle, try to be there and ready to go as soon as you can login too!

We'll keep to this schedule for at least the next 3-4 weeks. If all goes perfectly, we'll hit floor 100 in the next 3 weeks and then we can decide what to do then. I doubt that we'll have picked up much armor for people given the armor drop rates, so if people are interested in farming armor, we can switch to a slightly more relaxed schedule. I'm thinking just 4 runs on Friday night, plus possibly two runs on Sunday nights as well for a total of 6 farming runs. That will open up Thursday for people to do other things or to get more sleep.

Slightly different topic: Is anyone actually considering unlocking the full weapon?


In other news... just a brief update in other misc stuff.
- I've finished meriting category 1 Dancer merits. Ended with 4 Haste Samba, 4 Reverse Flourish and 2 Step Accuracy. I think this is a good balance between all of them. I can hit dynamis and limbus mobs very consistently with Steps now even wearing full haste gear without food, and my Reverse Flourish gives a significant enough TP return that I'd use it with any amount of Finishing Moves during downtime. For now, at least, I'm temporarily done with meriting Dancer. Maybe it's time to look into HP or MP merits, or possibly BLU merits.
- Been dying a lot for some reason. Seems like every event OTHER than Nyzul has had some form of wipe... ZNMs, Dynamis, Limbus. And of course, in Einhjar, I went down after getting a ton of skeletons beating me up... I guess I was healing my party too much? xD
- DNC/SAM works quite well in exp parties. Tried it out in the mire in a level 69 level sync'ed party against Imps. The extra TP from meditate basically meant that I could main heal without any worry for running out of TP, and even if the mob did face me, it would go back to the tank after hitting me once. Worst case, I could get Third Eye up to prevent a second hit. As long as the mob can't one-shot me, I think DNC/SAM is more effective compared to DNC/NIN

Nyzul - Great progress, floor 20

Great two Nyzul runs last night. We did 16-20, and surprisingly, we reached floor 20 in just under 15 minutes both times! We hit a series of easy floors... killall, eliminate specific enemy, and lamp floors that only had one lamp to activate. We still need to get some practice on ordered lamps before we can be completely confident of climbing and handling floors with little problem.

Two lessons learnt in last night's run:
1. The XBox 360 overheats and will crash. Especially if you just did something laggy like Besieged, Campaign, or even a merit party. Try not to use the 360 for time-sensitive things like this where you may crash :) (Actually, I stopped using the 360 cos it's just unreliable for FFXI)
2. Be careful which item you use. Fanatic's Drink instead of Body Boost... or... Fireflies instead of Fanatic's Drink ^^;;

Good work on the runs! I think now everyone has a feel of the strategy, items to use, when to use them, etc. After tonight, I hope we'll be about 1/3 of the way to floor 100! That's just in 2 weeks, so good job so far.

Hopefully we'll start getting some better luck with drops... I can't believe we got two Killer Bows last night >.> That's in addition to the one we got last week. And we got no armor drops on the floor 20 boss... twice! (Yes, we had a THF!) Just for curiousity, here are the drops I've seen in both my runs, and a few pickup runs with Varg/Fuuji.

2x BLU - Ascy & Ghiren
1x DNC - Ascy (on a pickup with Varg)
3x SCH - Ascy (on pickup with Fuu), Kurai & one lost due to not passing in time
3x RNG - Ghiren, Ashle & Ascy (auto-lot)
1x THF - Ashle
1x DRK - Utaru
1x WHM - Fuuji
1x DRG - Dexie (was her floor 100 run, so it was a guranteed drop)

Think that's every weapon I've seen drop so far, I think. Need a DRG or SAM one to drop for Zurar so that we'll all have a weapon to go WSing in once we finish climbing.

Btw: For free/auto-lot weapons, there's no harm in picking one up if you think that sometime in the far, far, far future you might want to level the job. There's a NPC in Whitegate (K-10, 2nd floor next to the teahouse) who will store any Nyzul weapon for 1 Imperial Copper Piece. That's where I've dumped my RNG bow, and will probably put my SCH staff once I take it out of storage.

Respecting time and lack thereof

Warning: Rant follows... you might want to skip this post.

I did a quick calculation and figured that we just blew through the equivalent of 1-1 1/2 man-months worth of work with the two ZNM failures last night. Counting time we spent on the other pops, farming zeni, etc., we basically spent in total over 200 hours between everyone participating in the event...


And virtually nothing to show for it =/


Try telling any project manager that you blew through a man-month without any progress and see what their response will be. I'm starting to remember one of the things that got me frustrated with FFXI the first time around when I quit... also why I've been avoiding doing any NM hunting at all, or trying my best to stay out of any endgame activity (though I've been failing that recently)


One thing that really bugs me about FFXI is that SE does not respect peoples time. Time is one of those irreplaceable things that, once it's past, you can't get back. Money you can spend or lose, but still earn more of. Food is simple, you eat, then once you're out, you go buy more. Time on the other hand, is something everyone has limited amounts of, but the game is set up in such a way as to waste as much of your time as possible in the name of profit.


Let's take a look at the recent things that SE has added that are designed to waste time


Nyzul weapons
Putting a static group together so that you can climb from floors 1-100 isn't exactly the easiest thing to do. SE claims that the average player is supposed to be able to obtain the mystic weaponskills. Their concept of "average" isn't exactly what I had in mind...


In an ideal case, you'd climb from floors 1-100, obtaining your weapon along the way and assuming that every single run is successful, you'd require 10 hours of climbing. Add in another 250 WS points, and assuming that you can find someone to SC light or darkness once a minute, that's 11 hours of "work" spread over 20 days (5 floors per day)


A more likely case for the average player who does not not have a Nyzul static, and can only go with a few pick-up groups is that they obtain a weapon through luck, and then try to unlock the weapons. Current reports say that it's between 12,000-15,000 WS Points to unlock a weaon at around floors 0-5. Rounding that down to 10,000 WS points, that's 2000 light skillchains. Let's say that you can do 1 light every minute, that's 33 hours of doing nothing but skillchains to complete just one weapon.

ZNMs
So, besides the fact that we can get wiped out at a moment's notice due to virtually not fault of anyone involved, the whole ZNM structure is designed to waste time as well. Let's see, we have...
1. Time spent taking photos. Alright, this is actually good compared to the time wasted looking for randomly dropping pop items in Sky. Takes about 15 minutes to get 24 photos assuming you use two cameras, but this benefit is quickly destroyed by...
2. Time spent turning in photos. Yup. You only get to turn in 10 photos per hour. In between, you can do whatever you want... which basically involves... well, doing nothing. Given travel time between places and setting up to do other stuff, do you really think you can do anything else? If you wait too long to turn in your photos, chances are that they would have moved on to another mob.
3. Time spent "climbing the tiers". The way the ZNM system is set up is that for every Tier IV pop you want to do, you need to do 3 Tier IIIs, 3 Tier II's and 3 Tier I's. In theory this would mean that we would be able to spread the fighting around and fight various NMs for different drops, but in practice, this means that we spam the easiest possible Tier I & II fights in order to progress towards Tier IV. Additionally, the 3-1 ratio means that on average, we'll end up with a ratio of 3:1 lower tier drops compared to Tier IV. This means that quickly, we'll be spending most of our time simply farming the lower tier pops for the right to pop tier IV and throwing their drops away. We already see this happening... Nobody wants the Beast Slayer sword from Cheese Hoarder, or the Insect Ring from Chigre, but we still do those in order to farm pop items for Tier III & IV

Anyway, that's just a rant about the more recent things that have been added. I'm pretty sure that we don't need to talk about the other SE-designed time-wasters like Limbus, Dynamis and NM pops.


I just want to say one last thing about time and respecting people's time. We have many scheduled events where people know the start/gathering times, yet still show up 20-30 minutes late while making the group wait for them to get to the location and change jobs. Please try to remember that there are other human beings there waiting for you, not NPCs in a video game. Showing up on time shows that you respect their time, as does being prepared for any event. Finally, when you're doing something, please pay attention. With many of these events, we've been doing them for months, doing the same thing over and over again. It can be boring or routine, but you should at least give your friends the courtesy of paying attention to what you and they are doing.


Tinnin - Analysis of what went wrong
As far as I can tell, in both cases last night, things fell apart once both of our tanks died when Tinnin used two highly damaging TV moves back-to-back. I can think of two reasons for the failure.

1. Healing not fast enough
2. Someone was "drawn in" and triggered a 2nd TP move back to back

For the first case, I'm really not seeing a good solution to the case where Tinnin does two TP moves back to back. Our mages are already casting Cursna *before* Tinnin doesNerve Gas, and we have mages also casting cure at the same time to try to get HP up as fast as possible. White (and Blue) magic casting time means that our tanks have about 1-2 seconds of having low HP. Most of the time, this is okay since shadows will protect them, but when the mob does two TP moves back-to-back that deal heavy damage and ignore shadows, they're going to go down.

One possibility is... keep a 3rd tank ready in the background, not in range to be taken out with the first two tanks, but ready to step up and grab hate if both main tanks go down. This would likely be very hard and might require Invincible to stop Tinnin from chasing mages.
Another possibility is to have a Dancer ready for instant emergency cures in the tank party. Curing Waltz IV can heal about 700-800 HP, and is instant with no cast time. It's a risky proposition and would require split second timing to pull off, but it might be able to keep one tank alive in the case of back-to-back TP moves. Steps could also be used to lower magical defense for the BLMs, and to keep TP up. Dancers do not actually need to hit the mob to use Steps, so giving the mob TP isn't an issue.

I think the real key to winning is to prevent the two "back-to-back" TP moves. Why this happens is quite well understood.
1. Everyone in the alliance has hate building up. The PLDs have more hate than everyone else, but the BLMs and healers are building hate right behind them.
2. Tinnin does a TP move that wipes out 3/4 of the HP of the PLDs. Taking damage reduces their hate level to below that of other members of the alliance
3. Tinnin changes targets to a helpless BLM or healer. Tinnin draws the person in and immediately uses a 2nd cone or AoE TP attack. This wipes off another 3/4 of the HP of the PLD before any WHM can cast cure. Since 3/4 + 3/4 = 6/4, the PLDs die and we wipe.

So, to prevent this from happening, we just need to keep hate on the PLDs. We can do this in two ways...
1. Push the hate line higher... Frodorn & Cronus are already doing their best to do this. The only thing more I could imagine is to have all our melees sub THF and Trick WS's onto them. Wu is already doing this, but having everyone do it would help more
2. Reset hate for mages. No matter how high the PLDs set the bar, Tinnin is going to do a TP move that will hit them. To prevent this from triggering a "draw-in" event and wiping everyone, mages who think they have a high amount of hate can log off, and come right back on with their hate reset. Logging off takes 30 seconds, and another 30 seconds to log back in, so you won't be out of the fight for that long. Additionally, everyone really needs to be aware of how much hate they are pulling, both healers and nukers.

So... yeah, hope the next time we come up for Tinnin we won't wipe again >.<

Nyzul - Lamps & progress

Good progress so far on Nyzul Isle. Up to floor 15 right now, and we tried one stab at floors 16-20, but we got hung up on an ordered lamp floor and barely ran out of time. We had 3 minutes going into the boss floor with virtually no MP, but we still took off a good chunk of the tortoise's HP before we ran out of time.

Good news is that we're getting much better at flooring up with minimal hassle. The first 2 floors only took us about 10 minutes, and about 10 minutes was spent on the lamp floor. The 4th "killall" floor we drew was a tough one as it also included a Darak >.> I'm pretty confident we can get through 16-20 easily this Thursday and continue climbing.

Lamp Strategy
There is still some confusion over lamp floors... Not too surprising as they are confusing, and even I'm not quite ontop of this yet! Here's a little info to help us out.

There are three types of lamp floors. You won't know what kind of lamp floor this is until we find the first lamp and touch it.
1. Activate all lamps at the same time - Easy... Just split up, find a lamp and stay there. There are between 3-5 lamps. Once we have people on the lamps, I'll call a time and we'll activate them. The person who does not have a lamp should either help with aggro, or go back to the rune and prepare to get us up
2. All must activate one lamp - Even easier. Everyone must go to one lamp and touch it. This means everyone has to move out. First person to activate the lamp should go back to the run and bring us up
3. Lamps must be activated in a specific order. More details below

For specific order lamps, here is some information on the behavior of the lamps
(Mostly taken from http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=79;mid=119498020713612950;num=14;page=1)
- The lamps will not light up until all of the lamps on that floor have been activated. So, if we've hit all the lamps that we've found and they do not light up, that means that there is another lamp we're missing
- Once we have activates the lamps in any order, they will all light up for 10 seconds. After the 10 seconds, the ones that are in the right order will continue to stay lit. The ones in the wrong order will fade and turn off.
- If a lamp is in the right position in the sequence and is still "lit", when we start doing other sequences, you still have to "activate" the lamp even though the light is still on. We need to hit all the lamps in the right sequence for it to work.

So, if we get a lamp floor, this is the sequence of what will happen for an ordered lamp scenario:
- Fan out and search for lamps. This is a fully-independent floor and everyone is on your own to avoid aggro. Keep in mind which mobs are sneak and which are invis. If you can sleep (me, Utty & Kurai), take a more dangerous lamp. If you see someone who has aggro and has to fight, go help and kill the mob ASAP. We may take out some mobs near some of the earlier lamps when we're still grouped together
- Whoever finds the first lamp should touch it and immediately say what kind of lamp it is. If it is an ordered lamp scenario, activate it at once
- Other people will continue to search for lamps, activating them as they find it and staying by their lamp. Make sure to say something in party chat (i.e.: "Found a lamp... one more S of me")
- As soon as we find all the lamps on the floor, they should light up since we've been activating them as we find them. At this point, we need to determine the order
- To figure out the order:
- Wait 10 seconds after the lamps activate. Some lamps should go out. If yours goes out, call out "off" in party chat
- I will call out an order to reactivate the lamps.
- Once you activate your lamp, do "/" in party chat so the next person knows to go
- Once everyone goes, the lamps will light up, if they are not already. We have to wait 10 seconds, then SOME lamps will go off
- If your lamp goes off, immediately say so in party. People with lamps that remain on should also call out that their lamp is "on" as soon as they see that someone else's lamp is off
- I will call out another order immediately. We repeat until we get the right sequence.

The logic puzzle behind the lamp activation order is actually fairly simple. Lamps that are lit up in the correct place in the sequence will stay lit. Lamps that are not right will turn off 10 seconds after the sequence of activations has been completed. This means that if your lamp stays on after the sequence completes, you will always be in the same position.
Example scenario:
- After me, Kurai, Zurar & Ghiren find and activate 4 lamps, the lamps actually light up.
- At this point, Utaru & Ashle should be heading back to the runs to prepare to release
- 10 seconds later, one, or all of the lamps will go off. If your lamp turns off, say so
- I'll call out an order... "K, Z, G, Asc"
- Everyone activates their lamp in order and use "/" in party chat to indicate that they have done so
- The lamps that are off will light up... Wait 10 seconds, then some lamps will go off again
- Let's say Zurar & Ghiren's lamps go off. In party chat, it will be:
Ghiren> Off
Zurar> Off
Kurai & Asc> On
- I'll call out another order... "K, G, Z, Asc"
- Same thing, and this time since we swapped the only two lamps that turned off after the sequence, it will activate the rune and we're done.

Critically important: 3 messages need to be said in party chat:
1. Use "/" to say when you have activated your lamp. This will let the next person know they can activate their own
2. After the 10 seconds is up, if your lamp turns off, make sure to say so in party chat ("off" or "lamp off")
3. After you see someone saying "off", if your lamp stays on, say "on" or "still on" to help figure the order out ASAP.

I think that's it for lamps... that's the last puzzle for climbing that we have confusion on. I'm pretty confident that we can get to floor 100 now that we're getting used to Nyzul :)


Boss Floors & Farming
Sunday nights are our farming nights. Hopefully we'll just need to pick up 1 person who has a tag available and wants to get something. Thanks Marduke & Fuuji for coming along the last run.

How late our tags refresh on Sunday actually depends on how early we start our 2nd run on Thursday. We can pick up a new tag at the same time that we pick up our 2nd tag on Thursday. Hence, if we start at 10:00pm and pick our 2nd tag up at 10:40pm, we won't be able to do a 2nd run on Sunday until 10:40pm.

Kinda makes it hard to farm if we're running that late :) As such, try to be on time, or even early for runs so we can get through and let people sleep!

As for farming, weapons drop pretty much randomly from NMs. As for armor, think about which pieces you'd really like to get and we'll concentrate on those floors. Right now we can only farm the feet piece since we only have access to level 20, but in a couple of weeks if not by this week, we'll probably have access to level 40 armor. Let me know which pieces you'd like and we'll concentrate on the appropriate floors :)

The armor sets are:
- Askar Korazin Set (Heavy melee)
- Goliard Saio Set (Mages)
- Denali Jacket Set (Light melee)
Floor 20: Feet / Floor 40: Legs / Floor 60: Hands / Floor 80: Body / Floor 100: Head