Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Bitch is Back

Can't believe I actually managed an Elton John reference, I'm so ashamed...

Banner night for the Glamthing…

Ok, computers don’t care about daylight saving time. Truth be told, neither do I, I’m a night owl. That being said, we entered the better part of 1 hour late on Friday. Dynamis requires a 72 hour elapsed time since your last entry. Between the late entry and the time change (for most of us) we would have been almost 2 hours late starting. So the leaders wisely cancelled the run.

So what do you do? I after all consider this to be New Dawn time; it’s allocated that way at least. Well, we decided to try for mine and Usul’s win on ASA final. So we gather the troops; Woochekitty, Darthstoner, Yanxia and Blonda on summoner, Usul on paladin/ninja and me as bard/white mage. We did all right on the 1st run, but we died with weakness too close to the time limit to really have a chance on the win.

So now we have to re-gather the hexes to trigger fight. This involves A LOT of sneaking around unless you get a group that wants to fight their way through. Well they didn’t want to fight, so I had to sneak around, which takes a lot longer. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m good at this, but the monster layout practically guarantees that you will get attacked at least a few times, for me it was 4 out of the 10 where you could get attacked. Now bard/ninja is a decent (not sought after, but decent) melee, bard/white mage not so much. So all of these fights took forever it seemed. All in all I spent almost 2 hours getting hexes back but I managed it with 0 deaths, so that’s cool.

Now in the mean-time it’s past Blonda’s bed-time so she has to bail. Enter Doncado on his red mage. He was already there having helped with the lamp lighting needed to open the door to the fight. So we sacrifice a bit of attack power in favor of increased healing, probably a good thing since bard/ white mage really isn’t that good as a healer. Truth be told, on a fight like this I’m little more than a glorified gas station for the caster types and a bit of back-up healing assist. The enemies are largely immune to what I can dish out. Strangely enough, several of the guides suggest using bard to hold one of the enemies, but I actually think a bard/ninja with double paeon and shadows could probably manage it, even doing some damage with our Damage Over Time spell, Foe Requiem VI, slow with elegy and some decent damage with daggers, and Hymnus (reraise song) after 1st death.

Well, the epic battle ensues. This time we all do a better job of avoiding the Area of Effect damage from the bosses, which is really the key to victory in a summoner-based strategy, excepting Usul whose job it is to eat those attacks. Don mostly, but myself a little bit work on Usul’s status effects and we help with slow and DoT on his target. But mostly I just kept the summoners and Don up on their MP (magic fuel) so they could keep going. We had some hairy moments, but a look at the clock is very reassuring so we kept plugging away.

We won, so I’m now 1/7 on this fight. I was so afraid I was going to end up 1/20 like I did on the A Crystalline Prophecy fight, so massive sigh of relief from me. Now I get to view the longest cut-scene I think in the entire series and it’s set up so you can’t just spam through it. At least it was decent. So now I go to Windurst to get my final cut-scene and it’s off to the Tenshodo to claim my prizes. I got a crappy Hi-potion +3 with my level 75 key—blech—but I have the advantage of the other guys who’ve done this in that I have already decided to go beastmaster build on all 3 pieces. Actually, this is the only piece where I seriously considered doing something for my bard because the song recast delay augment is very sexy; however, that’s like conceding that I will never get my relic pants for bard (which I think are the best, most versatile choice for bard in currently available equipment), something I will not do. In addition, other than assisting other players on stuff or recapping my XP, I’m really never on bard, so why not invest in attack gear for my main job?

With the time change and such I’m now tired and starving at the same time, so I had to log without getting to test this stuff out. I’m concentrating on leveling thief too, so it might be awhile before I get to evaluate this stuff. Rest assured, I will be giving it a workout soon…

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