Tuesday, December 21, 2010

I believe I can see the future, don't know exactly what it means...

Growing pains, strangely apropos term...

SE keeps adding additional content. I honestly think it isn't just to keep players interested; instead I think the designers feel it's a challenge to make sure no one ever accomplishes everything! Fair enough, I'm certainly never going to beat them.

The last time I wrote I was contemplating the coming level cap and trying to get my thief to cap before the increase. I came close. I had to spend alot of time solo due to the lack of any need for thieves-at least compared to the number seeking-in Abyssea or any other XP activity for that matter. Obviously, I spent some of that time farming (I like solvency), but I spent a good bit in Campaign. Too bad campaign is largely abandoned these days. Being a thief I don't have reraise so I would frequently be waiting for a random raise from either a pixie/sprite or from the rare passing player. I did get pretty good at knowing the flight paths of the local faeries...

That being said I did get some Abyssea love and a little help from my friends. My friends in LS did keep an eye out for spots in XP partys they got where my 67 thief (yes, I soloed 64-67) was not a complete liability. Generally these parties would get me 1-2 levels-when an Abyssea party starts having to replace people it's usually a sign that the end is coming (but not always), pulling about half the time and melee DD the rest. Too bad the skill-up rate (at least for me) is so low in Abyssea, my ranged skills are now severely lacking and even my melee skills are a bit behind. I understand that I can probably cap all that while farming so I'm not too concerned about it. As I rose in level I was more and more a puller; thief is what you call a spike DD in that we do very little damage until we WS and/or SATA when we put out some of the highest damage in game, instead of just a steady diet of hard hits. Some people refer to it as "just feeding the mob TP" and without a tank (hate control is pretty scarce in all Abyssea areas) to transfer the hate to it can be very dangerous to do.

I got extremely lucky with the level cap increase. Having jobs already at 85 and switching back to them I was able to get both beast and bard to 90 within 1 week, and I managed to get thief there in about 1 week more (82-90), all via Abyssea parties. I'm now back to working the dancer up. However, there are a couple significant changes to the game that bear mention. The 1st is the mog sack, a new storage area exclusive to the player (and equal in size to the safe) which gave me another 80 inventory slots-accessible in the field-so I can keep more gear on Glam making job changes (and available space when farming) much easier on me. The 2nd change is that AF3 seals now drop from Bastion/Dominion Ops too, instead of just quests and NMs. Granted they never drop a seal I can use...

Per my last post, my dancer was 50. I got it to 52 via a short party and some solo work as dnc/bst. 52-56 I got via an Aby party we did in lieu of a scheduled Dynamis run (more on that later) where I was key whore. Annoying, but easy. 56-57 were mostly gotten via FoV, and the last little bit to 58 I got mooching off Fashnek while he solo'd some dominion ops (Abyssea's version of FoV, but with no downtime). Extremely quick XP that way and again my combat skills are capped for a good bit yet, so no worries about skilling up. I'll be seeking as much Aby XP as I can get, but once I hit 75 I'll have another motive, my trial weapons. The only other job that uses dagger much (besides my bard, thief and dancer) is ranger, and that is mostly because of the ranged bonuses on daggers-they uses axes too for the same reason. Because a ranger's melee weapons are mostly for show, I'll have no reason not to finish my daggers (which should also top off my dagger, parry and evasion skills).

Ok, I promised you a Dynamis update and as you can guess it's not that great. We have had to cancel many runs due to no-shows. This sucks for me since I depend on relic as bridge gear until I can get my AF3 upgraded-the base gear is not particularly good. The biggest problem-besides the no-shows-are the people trying to show off. When they try to solo or low-man a mob it leaves all the rest of us vulnerable to AoE and other problems. We are wiping almost as much as we did at 75 when we shouldn't be wiping at all! Ok, XP is easy to regain now, but why lose it for no reason? If we can win easy we can farm the zone after the win but instead we have to accommodate the wipes and are left with no time just as we used to be. I know people in shells getting almost 50 relics a run, we are lucky to see 20 because we lose so much time. What can you do when no one is listening tho?