a-looey looway o-o we gotta go now

Confused? You should be…

When last we “spoke” I was leveling ninja. Leveling ninja was a bit like having a high colonic—painful and degrading but strangely cleansing when all was said and done for something that’s completely full of shit. Also a total pain in the ass when you get the final bill. Don’t tempt me, I can keep this up all week. Well, I’m done with all that crap, after flushing about 1,000 tools…

Started out by doing the quest for my AF weapons (ninja used to be the only people with dual-wield, consequently they were the only job with 2 AF weapons). Unlike my dancer AF, I could use a different job for the fight, so I solo’d the fight in about 2 minutes with my beast. Yes, ninja AF weapons suck, but since the whole job sucks I was damned if I was gonna spend any $$$ on it or any time I didn’t have to. They were free, that’s why I used them.

Although I did do a bit of ninja/dancer solo, about 90% of my time was spent in East Ronafure (S) tanking synced birds parties. Apparently I missed something the last time I read the Terms of Service; the only permissible places to level in a party are the dunes or against birds, I’ll have to read them again, whatever. There were several times when they actually synced below 37. Advice to any ninja invited to one of those parties: think VERY carefully before accepting. Having only 1 Utsusemi spell means you’ll be doing most of your tanking without shadows and ninja are almost as bad as black mage taking hits without shadows. Not to mention problems holding hate since ninja mostly hit like a pillow fight. Personally, I was spamming ninja spells for all I was worth, fuck the red mage enfeebling. I also got pretty voke-happy.

It took awhile (roughly 18 hours all told), but I finally finished off LEVELING ninja. Now I needed to deal with my 9 level skill gap. I went /anon at this point to keep down the rudely irate “requests” to come tank more birds parties. This is a very important thing to do if you need to do something other than XP if you’re on a needed job (tank, maybe healer) unless you like being harassed by people desperate for a tank. Seriously, what part of “sorry, I’m done” is so hard to understand? I looked into it carefully and decided my best bet was to go to Misreaux Coast and kill molboro and flytraps (which cap at tough to me at 49) with my NPC set to tank. Martial master was up, so I had that going for me too. It took about 25 kills to get me to caps on ninjitsu and katana, so hopefully I’m done with this job forever now.

This left me with 1 more important sub-job to level, red mage. I checked my spell list and luckily I had almost all the spells I would need already between my 49 white and 25 black mages plus a few scrolls I’ve managed to pick up through the years and pitched on to mules or my other characters. Still needed were Bio II, a couple bar spells, water II and phalanx. All but phalanx are fairly reasonable, but phalanx is currently going for 300k on my server. That’s bullshit! I have 1650 seals and I refuse to spend that kind of $$$ on 1 scroll. The problem is getting a group together to do the BCNM (Royal Jelly, highest drop % of the BCNMs that have it according to wiki) even if it is only a 3-man event. I looked (in LS and friend list only as pick-up groups are kinda hit-or-miss) for about 3 hours the 1st time, then I logged. Came back on about 5 hours later and was able to get a group together for 5 cracks at it. Won all 5, set the record every attempt but no luck on phalanx. Incidentally, 2 beast/dancer and 1 ranger/ninja rock on that BCNM.

The next day I get lucky as 2 guys are looking to do it when I get on. This doesn’t go quite as well. We wiped on the 1st attempt, and I think it was because I had autotarget on since one of the guys is /assisting me (apparently the zone is too dark for him to target). The job mix was different too. I was still beast, but my partners are pup/healer now and the damage was simply not as fast in coming from us. The other runs we won, but I think the queen jelly formed on every run and no records on any of the wins. Phalanx finally dropped on the 4th (and final) run. This is where shit got weird. We had lotted/passed with no difficulty on any of the other runs. For some reason that didn’t work this run; I lotted, Samonosuke passed but Darthstoner said he was unable to lot since I already had everything (about 20 seconds after he said that I got the system messages saying that all had dropped to me). In the total 8 other runs, as well as the probably 40 other times I have done BCNMs this has never happened that someone was not “allowed” to lot. I even confirmed that quartermaster was off (although if it weren’t then treasure drops would have been affected on all the other runs too, wouldn’t they? The back-door implication that I was cheating in some way bothers me.

As you may have guessed, I’ve been trying to level red mage since I got ninja finished. We started with another gear reshuffle to get rid of ninja stuff and replace it with level 25-ish mage gear. So, after about an hour I’m done shuffling shit and decide to solo FoV pages while I seek. I got good at the pages. All my skills are currently capped for red mage, so there is no need to fight EM and up, just kill and XP fast. Red mage/ninja may be a good soloer, but it is not a FAST soloer, at least at 25 it isn’t.

You may recall above I said you might want to /anon “and maybe healer” if you don’t want to be pestered? The “maybe” is in there because between the 1.5 days I spent 9 hours seeking before I got my 1st party. Yes, I am on red mage, and yes, I had turned /anon off. I think the reason I got invite is because I had just called up NPC with my tactical earring. Of course the invite comes just in time to completely waste the charge. However, the party was excellent. I had only partied once in the past with one of them, Midniter, but the mix was right. We had a dancer, a scholar, a paladin, a warrior (who ended up pulling since the dancer forgot her throwing weapon), a beastmaster (later replaced by a dragoon after he left) and yours truly on red mage. We were a level 22 sync in qufim and got the sync to 25 without a single non-tank death (and that was on a 291 screwdriver). In fact, we had so much surplus healing (with 4 of us having curing ability) that about all I did was enfeeble prey. After we moved to jungle (which is when the beast left and the dragoon joined us) we had a couple of hiccups, both resulting in the puller’s death. Luckily, the dragoon must have been leveling another job since she ran back to town and came back to raise 3 the puller. When she got back, I took over pulling until the warrior lost weakness). Poor guy, smithy agro is an ugly thing, especially at level 25. Well, unfortunately it was the last day of the holiday weekend and it was getting kinda late. We got the sync to level 26 and then we broke the party. Happily, I’m almost level 30 on red mage and expect I’ll be moving right along.

The cap increase and the next Abyssea expansion come out tomorrow and that might take awhile to download, so I’m not sure how soon I’ll be able to finish red mage. I’ve decided however that I will finish it before I work beast and bard to 85. I’m so close to finishing my primary subjobs that I don’t want to leave this hanging out there on my to-do list if you get my meaning.