I went down to the crossroads...

Lots of stuff over the weekend.

Friday was supposed to be Dynamis but we ran into the dreaded body-count issue. I personally hate canceling runs. The worst part however is that we tried to do alternate activities. Doncado settled on helping Umbrao with part of the 3 Paths mission for CoP. For whatever reason CoP statics always seem to die at 3 Paths. So Don was trying to put a party together for that and asked me to lead a 2nd party on something else. When I asked if anyone had any needs or wants I was getting no response. People just started logging out of the LS and Don wasn’t getting a full party because so many are unwilling to have anything to do with level-capped missions. Not exactly a shining example of “team spirit” if you catch my meaning. I ended up joining Don’s group because I had some utility in the fights he wanted to do.

This really illustrates one of my pet peeves. People in the game frequently will only do things if there is some benefit in it for themselves, and it shows a lack of foresight on their part. Using the above example, it clearly never occurred to the people that just disappeared that they might want to do sea or Limbus with Umbrao someday, because until he is further in CoP he doesn’t have access. If people were willing to help maybe we get him further along; hopefully he remembers those that weren’t willing to help when someone is looking for a party there and needs him to flesh out the group. I’m not saying that you have to always be willing to help but this was scheduled NewDawn time; it should have been spent helping with ND members.

Ok, enough with the rant du jour. Saturday, I started out with my red mage and trying to work more towards level 20 (my next major gear swap and spell shopping trip). For whatever reason, a lot of people were on MUCH earlier than usual this weekend. Mousie sent me a tell when I wasn’t even looking for her as she’s never on at that time inviting me to join her and Usul on killing puks. Point of fact, Usul is killing puks, we are just there leaching XP. I had to do some major gear swapping, but I broke out the thief and joined them. I really didn’t contribute much other than my Treasure Hunter 2 ability so that we had something to sell after the fight. Mousie had to go after a bit, and eventually Usul did too. He’s right, when you start dying to critters you should be able to beat easily it’s a clue that you are not on your game. I did pick up about 10,000 XP before all was said and done.

Sunday I woke up and decided to finish thief to 59, as I only needed another 6,000 XP. Yes, I had to try to solo. Now I blew a lot of money on Friday (about 20k on stuff for Umbrao and another 40k on food, although the food will last me about 2-3 weeks of Dynamis), so I decided to kill stuff that drops money. Davoi has usually been good to me in that department when you have to solo; at that level Castle Ostroya is just too prone to links and Beadeaux is really inconveniently laid out. It’s actually just kind of a black hole on decent soloing from about 57-62 if you like killing beastmen while soloing. The kills are coming slow even with my NPC (I discussed the damage problems of my NPC and thief combo earlier, Triple Attack helps but it’s still a struggle). Merrit invites me to join him on FoV in Cape Terrigan, another XP leaching basically, but he has to leave after only 1 page and I died on that, meaning I only netted about 500 XP (not his fault). I logged for awhile, and when I came back I decided to do FoV in Western Altepa on scorpions to get shells for my bonecrafting, which still needs skill-ups before I can switch to making Demon Arrows and arrowheads. It took about 2 hours but I finally finished off the 4.5k I needed. I also finished off the weekend getting about 35k gil. Not good, but certainly not bad considering I wasn’t working on decent gil fights.