Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Please allow me to introduce myself,..

Time for another update I guess.

1st off, I finally finished off my dancer subjob to 49. Luckily, all that time leveling thief and bard has kept my skills capped on dancer, so really all I needed was XP and practice. It shows in no uncertain terms however that a fully skilled character is MUCH more effective than those with a skill lag.

The next level cap increase is set for early September and it will be 85, not 90 as I was suspecting. New content is being announced every couple days, but already I’m excited for my beast and bard. Beast is getting a TP ability for pets, important since my meriting has me trying to pop special attacks faster than the pet has been getting TP; there’s also an axe I want from Abyssea that will help that. For my bard the biggies are a Phalanx type song and the long-awaited Mage’s Ballad III. Bard/red mage may end up becoming my permanent job combo for missions and groups. Lots of good stuff for most of the other jobs too, but check another forum for those as I don’t have them. There is also going to be new augmentable job-specific armor coming out, no details I’ve seen as yet, but the clear implication is that it will be the new end-game armor of choice as it is customized to your style of play over and above some base stats good for your specific job. We’ll see.

I spoke before about my trial weapons and such. There’s not much happening on those as I’m currently working almost exclusively on my subjobs. Outside Nyzul Isle and Abyssea I’m not fighting any XP monsters, so I’m not able to make any real progress on them. IF I manage go get subs finished before the update I’ll end up working on them a bit, but taking my thief main to 80 will be my priority at that point so we’ll have to see.

Once I finished my dancer sub I had a big project shuffling gear to mules. My current job is ninja, that means 11 stack of toolbags as well as 11 tags of tools plus all the wearable gear I needed had to get to Glamdring. To make space for all that, I sent all my non rare/exclusive mage gear to mules (excepting the bits I use brd/whm) as well as all the bolts and quivers I use on thief. I also crafted a few consumables to use them up. However, I’m going to need to make a few more tools as I’m keeping my ninjitsu up this time and due to how I use ninja.

I hate blink tanking; I’m not even fond of partying with a blink tank. Unfortunately, I happen to be a GREAT tank. I just happen to believe ninja is more effective as a puller and melee DD, using the wheel as a DD tool while a paladin (or a warrior to a lesser extent) is better as a tank. As a matter of fact, I would like to do party builds with a pld/war, thf/rng or /nin, nin/dnc, healer, and 2 whatever, using the nin/dnc as a drain source, back-up healer, DD using the wheel and the thief’s SATA buddy, unless the nin is taking hate from the tank in which case the thf can SATA the tank when that happens which is who you want the thf to SATA in the 1st place.

Unfortunately, the only place I can consistently get parties is East Ronafure (s) on birds as the tank. This leaves me with weapons and ninjitsu that are highly skill-gapped. Unlike dancer, the only way I can skill up ninjitsu or katana is by playing my ninja, and since I hate the job, once I hit 49 it is done until almost every other job is at 99 and capped and fully merited as well (the only job I hate more being scholar). I do however want my ninjitsu capped as things I’ve read lead me to believe that skill also helps with interrupt on casting and I do need to /ninja situationally on my beast, bard and will need to on dancer and thief eventually.

Enough about my squishy tank, let’s talk Dynamis Dunes. NOT our lucky zone by any stretch. We’ve tried it now the last 2 Mondays and it has not treated us well. Subjobs are a pain in the ass to start as you are not seeking a ???, you need to actually pull a fly that is buried in group of other mobs. The fly itself is an easy kill, but the critters it is with are not. Just to add to the fun, the little fuckers move around too. As you start with 1 hour and the only time extender IS the Mega-Boss you really need to knock them out quick so you can get to work on the NMs you need to weaken the Mega Boss to a manageable level.

The only NM I can actually discuss is Fairy ring as we haven’t gotten past him. He’s a funguar, one of the toughest regular critters in the game. He hits like a truck, moves VERY fast and hides behind a pile of yagudo. I’m not sure why (as the guides are mute about it), but the normal way to pull him is to sacrifice pull the yags away, shadowbind him in place, voke and run back to camp, presumably so he can link as many yags as possible when they return once Shadowbind wears. Well, OUR 1st attempt we kind of expected to fail, we were light on people and hadn’t been there in at least a year so not many (including yours truly) were particularly up on the strategy. Our pullers couldn’t even find the NM.

Last night we did find him. Once shadowbind wore he proceeded to come for us, linking a Yag bard on the way. I luckily saw the bard and was able to sleep it. However, we didn’t do so good of a job on the NM. Melees did not all engage at once, and we could not keep hate off the nukers. Consequently, the NM was running all over the place one-shotting everyone and generally making life miserable for all. I ended up as the last one left (not from skill, just wasn’t doing enough to put a lot of hate on me) and we had mabe taken off 40-45% of its HP. At this point, the yag woke up and between the 2 of them they managed to off me as I was sleeping them (actually died with 1% left on casting time before lullaby would have gotten the yag, think the NM is immune). With 2 of our players dying where they could not be raised, requiring another sac pull, we simply ran out of time to have a realistic chance at win. We’re looking at other strategies since the most likely to work (the LS showing up) isn’t really likely to happen unless we start offering real-life cash payments to people as near as I can tell.

No comments:

Post a Comment