I said I was the cops, your husband’s in jail, the state looks down on sodomy…

Blink182, we miss ya!

When last we spoke I was thrashing around on random activities in game in multiple jobs, I’ve been continuing to thrash. 1st off, I’ve finished red mage to 49, courtesy of going key bitch in an Abyssea party. 44-49 in I think 2 hours. Those 1000 XP chests add up in a hurry, once you can get them to start dropping anyway. The party was just started however…

I went back to town and saddled up the bard/ninja and came back to the party. Eventually ended up being the puller, and in maybe another 2.5 hours I went from 6k to 81 all the way to the 85 cap! I could have kept on going and gotten some merits but my ass was asleep and I needed to go.

With all my subs now leveled it was time to do stuff with my main jobs. I did some work on my dagger trials using bard/dancer for the most part and knocked out several of them. However, I did look further down the trial path and found that the level to use my trial weapons will be going up and I'll be needing them at 75 and 80 respectively for my thief and dancer jobs, so I stopped so they will be useable when I get them there. That left my beast and his axes.

Now beast was still 80 as of my last post. I did all of my beast leveling 80-85 and several merit points (each merit is equivalent to 10,000 XP, and even match critters give 100/kill to give you an idea), each level requiring close to 50,000 XP. Now as I mentioned before, for those who don't know a trial is performing a specific action with the weapon equipped. There are also armor trials (courtesy of the last update) but I haven't started those so I'll discuss them some other time. Some trials are easy, some hard and some are just tedious. For the most part I soloed my trials, but I got a lot of help from Doncado and/or Woochekitty on 2 of them specifically. I was doing an elemental axe on light element and light weather is almost non-existent in the game. Well, 2 of my trials were in sea, an area with no light weather ever, 100 pet kills on sharks and later 125 pet kills on flowers. The good news is it didn't have to be MY pet, just a pet in the party. So Woochekitty brought her puppetmaster out and Doncado his dragoon (he also needed the XP, being significantly lower level than Woo and I on his pet job) when they were on during light and we went to town. Generally we got about 18-20 per lightsday (which only happens every 8 real-life hours). For those wondering why I'm bitching about the weather kills under weather count as 5 kills while those on the element's day only count as 1. Basically, all of October was spent getting my beast and both of my axes to 85, but they are all spiffy now, excepting the new AF3 armor which needs a lot of hard work.

As some of you may have figured out, I like to combine items on my “to-do list” whenever possible, it's generally more efficient that way. Well, one of the items I combined is my axe trial on vermin with getting my materials to make my Dancer AF1 gear. Unlike the original jobs those that were introduced with the Treasures of Aht Urgan or Wings of the Goddess expansions do not get all there AF from fights and coffers ( a kind of treasure chest) but instead generally require 3 of the 5 pieces to be made by an NPC... with the player furnishing the materials. The materials are generally quite expensive and also fairly rare to find for sale and for the most part require crafting by someone with a skill level above level 70, maybe even above 90. Since I needed wamoura silk in large quantities and the items are kind of a rare drop (and my thief didn't stand a chance of farming it at 61) I used my beast, and some help from Peenut and others to help farm the stuff. Actually, the drop rate is so low I had to keep killing for a bit even after my vermin trial was done. Obijam from my Dynamis LS had the clothcraft skills to make the stuff and was kind enough to do so.

Once I had finished all of the beast trials and leveling I wanted to get to thief. I mentioned in an earlier post that thief has a tendency to really fill-up your inventory in a hurry. Yes, gear reshuffling time again. All my red mage gear went to mules (I can use most of it when I get around to leveling my other MP-using jobs), some craftables were used up, my beast and bard relic gear went to the storage NPC when not in use and I sold a bunch of crap. I still needed room however so I leveled my dancer form 49 to 50 so I could do my AF quests and store the results as well as using up the materials I had stored on Glamdring. I could actually still use some room.

The last several days have been spent-for the most part-leveling my thief. Parties are generally non-existant outside of Abyssea or occasionally a low-level affair so I haven't been making that much progress. Mostly I've been hanging with Peenut (on her 85 dancer) doing her trial weapons. The XP sucks (10-20/kill generally) but I've been taking advantage of it to cap my ranged skills-my melee skills already being capped from leveling bard and beast, excepting parry and shield which are VERY hard to skill-to approximately the level 78 skill cap for thief. Thief has gone from barely 61 almost to 64. It is to be hoped that I can get an Abyssea XP party soon to cruise to 85, we'll see how my luck goes.

Lots more to come...