The above picture was taken from a party that I described as being pure Neal Patrick Harris... that being totally Awesome. 3 Samurai's, 1 Galkan Red Mage (take that haters!), 1 Scholar, and a Bard. Seigan tanking is pure fun. Although at the price of losing Hasso, it's worth it when you achieve exp chains like this:


Sure it's not that great of a chain compared to the monsters you see in Merit parties, but this was a freaking Lv60 party. You don't see many getting this high, especially a random pickup party.

So this is what has been keeping me busy for the past month, hence the lack of updates. I think I've now seen it all. From Thieves that have no clue that Tachi: Enpi -> Viper Bite = MASSIVE DAMAGE and having to predict when ever he was going to Weapon skill, just so that you could sneak one in before him, to out tanking NIN's with Seigan. Finally hit 61 today from a Besieged (I only needed 400 exp, the party from earlier today left me that close when the Paladin bailed due to sleep related issues), so the final count down to 75 has started.... 14 levels to go til Askar and other funky SAM's would kill to have, and somehow I have it. Still need an Aces' Helm, I wonder if I could get that somehow...

To be honest, I can't remember when I started leveling Samurai from 13, but I'm guessing 13-61 has taken around a month, maybe less. Other things that I've managed to do during this time, I finally hit Bonecraft 70, moved 2 levels in Fishing to 45 (finally), and zerg'd Alchemy from 4-20. Not sure how much further I will take Alchemy, I think I might just stockpile all the meds I make for our Salvage group. Speaking of which, our run tonight was great. We are getting better with each run. Drops from tonight (although they are only crappy 15's):

Enyo's Cuisses: Sily
Njord's Gloves: Yul
Hoshikazu Hachimaki: Schultz
Anu's Gaiters: Profile, Taxman, Hacksign, Schultz

We've had no luck getting any of the NM's to drop anything yet. We have only really been focusing on Arrapago Remnants at the moment. I know some of the other areas are much easier, but might as well perfect one and get what ever you can than randomly fail at all others for a much longer time.

Dear SE,

As you quite possibly know, and if you don't here is a brief run down on 3 elements of your game. The spell Utsusemi and the ability Third Eye give you the ability to "shadow" or "anticipate" most physical attacks. The spell Blink gives you a chance to "shadow" physical attacks.

So my question to you on this fine day is simple. Why did you make Blink overwrite Third Eye, when Utsusemi (the other guaranteed damage mitigation spell) can't be overwritten by Blink. Sure the Summoner was doing his job and throwing out Aerial Armor, but it's really annoying when you go to put up Seigan/Third Eye in anticipation (no pun intended) for Pecking Flurry only to have it erased and replaced with a spell that is totally useless and will in turn not block the incoming attack.

-- Schultz

Long weekends (in this case Anzac Day falling on a Friday) are a real curse for me. I see them as an excuse to torture myself into sleep deprived states of camping bliss. Well this long weekend was only slightly different. It started off with seeking on Samurai. Many, many, many hours later with still no invite I headed out for some Corsair merits, then back to seeking again. During this time I had started on my Alchemy (which was at that time a bleak level of 4). Later that night I went out to camp Fafnir, claiming with N.head/Beard dropping). Afterwards we headed to Sky for some Ullikummi, a hour or so later and we had two drops, with the time getting close to 9AM so I decided to sleep.

The next day was pretty much the same, Samurai exp wise. Yul helped me out by power leveling my Samurai at the Kuzotz Outpost on Goblins (EM-VT). After gaining a level I went back to Alchemy zerging while I sat there seeking. I think it was a total of 11 hours seeking on Samurai before I gave up and geared my Black Mage for some Fafnir hunting. What we didn't expect was Nidhogg to make an appearance.


Congratulations Daden on the E.Body, and Toralin on the A.Body. But the fun didn't stop there. Around 10% into Nidhogg we were made aware of Voluptuous Vivian sitting outside zone. 30 minutes or so later (yes it was a slow kill, bite me), half of the attending members raced to grab Vivian. It was at this stage that I noticed that some members of Ancients were also en-route. We claimed and a whole lot of bitching went on (apparently), but I was actually out of range as I was handling a spider that someone had aggro'd moments prior. Unfortunately no ring dropped, and I get this feeling that what ever respect that I might have had in Ancients members might have completely disappeared. New shell, new orders, I follow orders, I do what I'm told. I'm sorry if by doing this I tread on old, sore toes, but it's something you have to do when you are a pleb again. That "day" or of what I could call a day after waking late in the afternoon, I went to sleep around 4AM.

Somewhere in this long weekend was a Tiamat pop. Unfortunately we didn't get claim (most of the shell was happily snoozing while AFK waiting for phone calls to wake them so Eminence claimed. Two or so hours later they finally downed it, for what... a Horn. The streak of Gaiters that we'd had over the last 3-4 pops had been broken.

Sunday I awoke on a few occasions, the final time being around 3PM when I realised that I was meant to be going out to watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall with Yul after she finished work, at 4PM. Hastily I got ready and called a cab to take me out to where she worked. The cab arrived and I thought nothing much of the Australian Flag on-top of the room and some Australian like signs down the side (since hey, it was just Anzac day a few days prior, and the cabbie might have just been too lazy to take the flag down, or might have even been in the spirit of things still). So I get in the cab to notice more flags, this is when I started to think to myself, is this guy for real? He then spoke with a rather... we call it down here "ocka" slang to his speech. If the cab was not already in motion I would have jumped from it right there and then, this was far too strange a cab ride, and I've been on a lot of them in my time (once had some cabbie comment about an old man and his dog walking on the side of the road at 7AM, that they should be both put down... my brother, his friends and I quickly sobered and shut up. The ride back to my place was the longest ever).

So back to this cab driver. Wondering what I had got myself into, I then noticed that there was some Indian semi tradition/techno style music playing. I took a double take, did the singer just say "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie"? I was sure that I'm hearing things. Then it was there again.. I was now peaking on the panic scale. With the ride usually about 15 minutes long, this one was suiting up to probably pass the old man and his dog ride.

I get to the end of the trip finding out that the cab driver was actually the guy singing, and he had a whole cd of other songs. Turns out that there's even a documentary done on the whole thing, and you can see the filmclip to the song I heard here: Song Australia - The guy's website is: www.songaustralia.com.au - Once we got talking about stuff and I had learnt that he was the singer/songwriter for the music I was actually interested in what he had to say. I think that my trip can be best summed up by what is said on his website:

"Now everyone who steps into his cab gets to enjoy his patriotic message of harmony and goodwill through his Indian-flavoured music. It's a ride no one forgets in a hurry!"

So after seeing Forgetting Sarah Marshall of which I seriously think that there was far too much Jason Segel penis for my visual liking.. not that I like seeing penii at all... just I kind of liked seeing him as "Marshall Eriksen" from How I met your Mother, now all I will see when I watch that show is the burned in image of him standing in front of Kristen Bell naked and the sound of him slapping it around for her... OMG I'm going to vomit.

So as I was saying after seeing that, we headed home and out to King Athro, which we'd been camping for the past week and a bit (yes thanks to this stupid NM I hadn't got to sleep until 3AM for most of a week). I had totally forgot though that our Nyzul static which is now slowly moving to be a Salvage static since most of us have the gear we want, was doing 4 tags of assaults for some points this coming week. I left camp after the 3rd window leaving Kairo with Taxman out there to help kill if we claimed (he's more of a weak DoT atm in his gear deprived state, or as Kairo lovely puts it RMT'ish look). We were half way through our 3rd Assault when it popped and we claimed. Taxman was actually doing some decent damage, I wouldn't say great, but he took hate on a few occasions, but these were just your usual hate spikes.


DO-FREAKING-RP! So many claims and failed claims and we finally get one to drop. From the camps I had been over the last week, I think this has been the first in over a week. Congratulations Kairo.

So that leads to right now, writing this entry. Hey if you got this far, then you are doing good, these long entries don't happen that much, hell I can't remember the last time that I did one this long. So to sum up this weekend: Samurai 45-46, Alchemy 4-16, Guild Points 0-19468 (yeah I know 4 sweet items to give me 1/5th of what I need for my apron in a short amount of time). Now guess what... I'm freaking camping Behemoth... at 2 freaking A damn-it M. Oh and expect another one of these mammoth entries in a few weeks time, there Labour Day happening here soon.

In recent days, our Nyzul group has been trying to level up our H2H skills in preparation for Salvage. Well while soloing as NIN/PLD (for Refresh/Cures) I noticed that I guarded a few hits. First time I thought it was strange, second time I was curious, third time I checked my gear.

Main: Tactician Magician's hooks +1
Ammo: Bomb Core
Head: Denali Bonnet
Neck: Peacock Charm
Ear1: Ethereal Earring
Ear2: Brutal Earring
Body: Haubergeon
Hands: Dusk Gloves
Ring1: Sniper's Ring
Ring2: Sniper's Ring
Back: Amemet Mantle +1
Waist: Potent Belt
Legs: Byakko's Haidate
Feet: Fuma Sune-Ate

None of these items have any form of guard skill bonus on them. I'm almost sure that I wasn't imagining things, as I know what guarding animation looks like, and when I checked the logs at the time it happened, the damage dealt on that hit was significantly lower. Does Denali Bonnet have an additional hidden Guarding bonus? It's the only item there that seems out of place. I can't find anywhere else that talks about this.

We've been slogging away at Nyzul for a while now, maybe 6 months or so now. I'm not entirely sure (Entry around 22nd-Oct-2007 says something about us doing Assaults), but it looks like we are under the 6 month mark, which is pretty nice seeing that we have 5 complete sets of gear, a myriad of other pieces (46 drops in total). I think it's safe to say that apart from the random shit hand that SEI deals us, we could pretty much do Nyzul with a group of brain dead piss fart monkeys for characters.

Last night's efforts netted us Goliard and Askar (of which I got both pieces, bringing me to 3/3 on Head and Hands now (I swear I'm not a gear whore... much)), BLM, SMN, PLD, BLU Nyzul weapons. We didn't have any problems that I could see, having faced Cerb and Hydra only... even Hydra isn't that much of a pain in the ass now.

Full Askar is nice for it's additional HP bonus, but will it be useful in the long run for PLD? Only time will tell, trial and error.

Last night we got our second Nyzul disc to Floor 96 access. On our way up to our first 100 run on that disc we encountered the following:

96: 2x Racing Chariots
97: Uriri Samariri
98: 6x Soulflayers (5 were in one small room together)
99: Uriri Samariri

We ended up exiting floor 99 with less than a minute to spare. Why? Why are SE so mean? We continued on two more runs before the end of the night obtaining Goliard Chapeau (Yul 5/5), Swordbreaker and Brave Blade. Our last run broke our 5 drop streak of Nyzul head pieces.

Little joke I had while waiting for the last run. Mandau + Swordbreaker + 1,000,000 Imperial Gold Pieces = Relic Dagger -1. You will then need five times as much currency as the normal relic to upgrade to Mandau +1. I think if SE did this, there would be a global boycott of the game :P

In other news, I took Samurai from 34 to 39. This totals 14-39 in 3 sittings, 14-24, 24-34, 34-39. The first 1.5 sittings were solo, where the other half of sitting 2 was with two members of our Nyzul group. I did plan to try and duo Taxman and Schultz both on Samurai but I had a head cold over the weekend (still have it) and didn't feel like operating three machines (2PC, 1 Macbook) at one time.

On Sunday night we attempted our first Floor 100 runs of Nyzul Isle. Having only received information about this floor from friends as well as bits and pieces from forums/wiki, I expected it to be well, hard. Oh what a disappointment it was. Upon hitting 100 for the first time we were confronted with Cerberus. "This was the last thing we needed, Gates of Hades on our first run, oh gods help us now" was the first thing that went through my mind. Well Gates of Hades did come out, and oh boy did it suck... 100 damage, give me a break, we were scared of that?

So we dropped the doggy fairly smoothly and obtained our first Floor 100 piece. With the knowledge that we you defeat floor 100 without any sort of mass two hour zerg, we tried again this time getting Khimaira. I don't remember much of the fight, but it went down fast like normal. What we didn't expect was the following.


Here's a heads up for those players out there who are on servers like Lakshmi. Do not do Nyzul Isle around Japanese Midnight on a Sunday night! Basically if your server is anything like ours, it is packed with atleast 80+ people outside Nyzul spamming to get in. This causes the server to freeze upon exiting, causing you to Black Screen and then disconnect from the server. What happened to us, is that our disc holder crashed out of the game but was still in the zone so he was unable to pass on the item.

Upon a lengthy discussion with a GM (and might I add that he was actually quite polite and helpful with the matter), the following was said.


It is sad to see that they do acknowledge that when "they" (being their hardware/software) is at fault, they are unwilling to fix issue and refund anyone who is hard done by it. I'm sure that their opinions would be different if a hardware malfunction cause all Delivery Box transactions that were pending to just vanish. How many people store multiple pieces of crap in there?

Anyhow lesson, learned. Trial by Fire? We got burnt. Next time we will make sure not to run Floor 100's on Sunday nights around Midnight, and possible put Leader to someone other than the Disc Holder. Keeping with the topic, Fire that is, here's an amusing shot I took today.

Curses (LJ Entry)

Sorcerer's Gloves finally fell into my possession last night. Over two years of seeing less than 10 drop and letting them pass on to other BLM's along the way, the timing could not have been better since I'm now on a mission to re-gear my BLM.

Other items on the list (I'll throw this up the top).

HQ Ice Staff (Rest will follow, slowly... /cry 500k a pop)
Wizard's Petasos +1
Penitent's Rope
Spider Torque (Enfeebling Torque if I get magically rich overnight)
Dark Torque
Snow Ring
Sorcerer's Ring

More will come later.