Dancer@75, taking a step back

Dancer & Merit parties
Managed to get to level 75 Dancer on Sunday night... late Sunday night in a merit-type party. Since Dancer has no job-specific merits yet, I kept on exping until I got a 20k buffer on Dancer and later dumped one merit into dagger. 2nd job at 75, one more then I had originally figured I'd do, but after Dancer was announced, I just *had* to play with this job! It's a great change from mage jobs, but it's still a support-type job. I had originally debated between playing WHM & BLU, and I'm glad that I chose BLU as DNC really fills my desire to be a healer.

I think this is my... 5th merit-type, continous pull exp party where you don't take any breaks, just kill the next mob lined up... I had three others, once on BLU in the late 50s with a 4x BLU, BRD & token NIN party that got to chain #17 before the BRD overdid it and died... Did one merit party on BLU with Aqqy , Utty and others, and of course the two other partieson DNC with Varg, Aqqy, Fuuji, Nain & Dexie. I realized that I really... really don't like merit parties at all. Doing it on Dancer is a lot nicer compared to BLU where I'm sitting at 100~200MP since DNC has the endurance to go on forever as long as you can hit. However, the monotony of continously going fron one mob to the next, killing, healing, next... for hours on end is just... boring. Not my idea of fun, and I'd probably never actively seek it out to do. And it can be even stressful if you're doing the pulling and trying to keep the chain going. Definitely not leveling BRD given that chain pulling is a bard's job, and that's just not my idea of fun.

Taking a step back
So, with Dancer basically done, I think I'm going to take a step back from FFXI and take it easy for a while. Summer is almost here, lots of other games are coming out, plus I really, really want to spend some time search for a new RL, non-sucky job now that I actually *can* take on a new job. You know all that talk about the H-1B visas taking jobs away from Americans thing? Well, all the stories out there for, and against legal immigration totally have it wrong. There's a different reason why companies prefer to hire from abroad, but that's a rant for another time.

FFXI content wise... let's see... I'm two fights away from finishing the ToAU missions, and about 3 weeks of assaults left before finishing that as well. That's 3 nights of events that should be going away soon. Nyzul Isle... well, I'm not sure how much of that I'd want to do. Part of me wants the challenge of coordinating a group well enough to climb up to floor 100, and kill off the NMs in between, but I don't want to spend two nights a week doing it. I'm also not sure how much more Limbus I want to do... It has become much too routine and boring now, even though we've finally got our Omega strategy down. I'm just not really up for... doing this for months and months on end. I'll probably at least do enough runs to get coins to pay Toku back for the Dusk Gloves he pre-sold me, and definitely to try out Dancer in Limbus a few times as a change from going as Blue Mage. That would just leave the Friday SPT on RDM left as a commitment.

Other content wise... Let's see... WoG missions still haven't seriously been released yet, though I do need to catch up a little on those mission-quests... Bastok Rank missions have been in the background, and unlike the CoP or ToAU missions, I don't really feel an urgency to complete them as the story so far seems pretty boring. I'm Rank 7 Bastok right now. I suppose that sometime I should get some people together and finish that off. This past weekend, I tried Salvage out with Varg's group. It was actually quite fun, and quite a change from the usual routine. I'll blog about it some other time once I get my screenshots off my computer. Still, I doubt that I'd have the patience or desire to repeat it for months on end to get items. I'd rather do it a few times just for the fun of it!

No, this doesn't mean that you've gotten rid of me. I'll still be around, probably afk-campaigning here and there, though more afk going forward. I *want* to go do some events... like the Swift Belt & Soboro runs that we did before, or if Zuzu gets off his butt, help out with some missions.
I'd also like to grab some people and go merit/exp in the [S] beastmen strongholds instead of sticking to the normal routines. I don't want to go merit in ToAU areas, but I'd love to explore & exp in the deserted [S] areas just to see what's around there. Nobody ever goes there at all.

Interestingly, this feels very similar to the last time I quit FFXI. I was bored with the endgame routine, sky, dynamis, etc. I'd finished leveling the jobs I wanted to, some of my friends planning to transfer servers, and the people who were left were too busy doing endgame stuff to do anything outside of the usual windows/schedule. I had only found one person among my friends who wanted to explore the "new" CoP areas with me (which I now recognize as Attowa Chasm & Bibiki Bay) Unlike the last time though, I recognize that I do enjoy certain aspects of FFXI and that it is possible to be a casual player, as long as I don't get drawn too deeply into the time-sink activities. When I started up Ascy, I promised myself that I wouldn't do any soul-sucking endgame stuff, and I'd like to keep that promise :)