I can see for miles and miles…

Big weekend in Glam-land gaming-wise.

Friday ended up as Dynamis Xarc. We did fairly well, but we had a problem on job mix. We lost a healer due to a disconnect so one of our thieves had to change to a healer. Good on the healing front, but bad for pulling. I was asked to step in. Now bard is a good puller most places… Dynamis is NOT one of those places. The problem is I come /whm to help on healing and to save a bundle on Reraise (hairpins ain’t cheap). If I knew I was pulling I would /nin or /thf; I think thief would be better to help with sacrifice pulls, but ninja for overall pulling. I’m not on the raise+ priority list but I don’t worry too much about that as I always bring a XP buffer to the game. I think I’ll just /nin in the future.

It turns out the best way for me to pull is NOT to use a song on a statue, it’s to run in and get agro while under Mazurka and then run like hell. Using a song costs me my Mazurka while simply being detected does not; I can keep it until I get hit with something. All that being said, I had issues on Friday with pulling. Where else? The Eye wall, everybody’s favorite place. 1st pull went well, surprising considering I’ve never done it and did not come in my pulling configuration, and that it wasn’t a double-sacrifice (there is a point to a puller having a group sleep ability). It was the 2nd that caused problems. I tried to pull the next set of stuff but died too quick to make it back to camp. Next I tried to just pull the time extension around the solid wall of mobs; for experienced pullers the distance LOOKS ok for a clean pull but it turns out its link range is HUGE. Nonetheless, we did manage to get the extension. We may want to try an alternate strategy, holding a ranged attacker in reserve when we do the 1st pull to attack the TE and bring it in the 1st wave as the conventional strategy only brings the bottom 1/3 of the wall to camp and the TE is in the middle. That way we don’t have to fuck with the rest of the wall on farming nights unless we want to.

Saturday was a leveling sub-jobs day. I started the day at level 45 on my white mage. I was able to FoV to 46, then I got an invite to a Dunes party which I decided to take. It lived up to my misgivings. The party was level 13 and I expected they were by the lizards (as no one would answer my position question) so I did a Tele-Dem and ran in to grab FoV Refresh and Reraise on the way to party. Well, they are on the far side of the tunnel and say to grab page 2, which I do. I fight my way through the bats in the tunnel with the help of a pixie that took up residence there and eventually get to the party. We kill the crabs easy enough but instead of pulling lizards from where we are, we run back to Lizzyville, changing sync to 10 on the way. We barely make it to camp and I lose my FoV buffs in the process. We I renew those and rejoin the party, which is very bad at partying normally. The low guy eventually levels and in 2 hours I made about 4k in XP.

So I decide to go back to FoV, but I got an invite to a synced party in East Ronafure (S) through an LS buddy, Chrispy. I take him up on it (I had been checking for a level-appropriate party for me at 46 all day but there were never enough people). This goes much better as the noobs were not involved. I do make it to 49 in this party in about 2 hours, moving smoothly because I had healing help from the dancer main that was our sync. However, no skill points at all. I logged for the night.

In the middle of Saturday however was Abyssea. I geared up the bard/dancer in hopes of another recapping of XP and 10 merit point day. It was not meant to be however. We had bad luck on light and were just not getting our XP anywhere near cap. Not sure why, maybe just luck of the draw. In the almost 2 hours we were there I think we got about 20k. I’m going to need to go again soon as it’s the best place to merit. I might want to set-up a run in Konschtadt though in hopes of getting the pop item for the NM that drops the beast axe. I’d love to use that when I’m not able to work on trial weapons.

Sunday comes and I had some RL obligations, so my playtime was cut shorter than usual. I 1st did a gear shuffling with my mules to stow my mage gear and get my level 40 dancer stuff. I also maxed out my Abyssea time and triggered the quest for my dancer AF weapon. When I got back from my RL things I was ready to do the quest which unfortunately requires me to stay dancer throughout. I call for help on the LS and Loraa and Orague show up. 2 level 80 samurai is a bit of overkill for this NM so I got my War Hoop easily. Now it’s time to level my dancer.

I had already decided to dancer/beast when solo to make life easy. Strangely enough dancer main doesn’t seem to be too popular with parties, no idea why. Well the job is ridiculously easy if you pick the right camp (although the fact that I have all my skills capped at this level certainly isn’t hurting me either). Pretty much you just charm, make 3 kills, zone to get rid of (and heal via repop) the pet, zone right back and repeat ad nauseum. I didn’t get a level, but only because I ran out of time before Nyzul.

I changed to beast/dancer 80 for Nyzul as it seems to be a bit more useful than my bard, unless we don’t have a blue in which case bard is needed for light-based dispel. We did ok, 2 runs went very smooth (in fact, our 1st run we did 6 floors because our pole person didn’t know to choose exit). The last run we ran into time issues. We had multiple kill all floors and one was packed with undead. 2 of the kill all floors also had the “do not destroy gears” thing as well which just sucks. We ended up running out of time on the 15th floor while fighting the leader who was hard to find.