I don't like mondays...

Long weekend. Left work after half a day Friday for a dental appointment. They had told me they were going to sedate me, but they didn’t, so I actually could have gone back. Pulled muscles in my upper back (they feel like intercostals) were making me miserable so it was just as well I didn’t go.

I got home and fired up the game to finish off getting thief to 45 before Dynamis. It worked, so I’m happy going in. Return to Sandy to change over to bard for Dynamis. Weird run… First off, I’m put in a damage dealer party, where I’m NEVER put. AFTER I enter I’m told I’ll be pulling. Wish I’d known that going in, because I’m set-up as bard/white mage. Ordinarily, when you pull on bard you sub ninja, although thief could work too, ninja for shadows or thief for flee, both give substantial evasion. The white mage sub was actually decent though, blink and stoneskin before pull and I was usually ok. The problem was that I couldn’t do all the bard goodies for my party the way I normally do as I had to prep for the next pull, reapplying buffs and doing ballad to fuel myself and the healer.

Now I’ve never been main puller in any Dynamis zone, although I do a few specific pulls in Windy and have had some instruction in Bastok, and of course I do pay attention to as much as I can follow during runs so I’m fairly familiar with what our pattern is. All things being equal, I think I did a pretty good job. Only 2 dirty pulls, which is actually about average, and I think the wipes had more to do with our low attendance than the pulls. We did get some aggro through carelessness on a sneak move. And I ate a couple deaths that I shouldn’t because we were short on sleeps. Luckily, I keep a good XP buffer on my 75 jobs—old habit from leveling beast. Had an incident with a latecomer running through and popping half the zone, cost us a couple safe pulls and a 10 minute time extension that we would have gotten. Most important thing was that even makeshift, we got our win.

The next day I got lucky. Ran into Mousie and got to duo with her dragoon in a level sync to me. We were able to get 2 levels before I had to log for the day, even made some money with all the bird bits in East Ronafure (S). Treasure Hunter 2 is a definite moneymaker, but it does have an annoying tendency to fill your inventory with crap too, so it requires some housekeeping.

Sunday I break my rule about syncing downwards for an all LS party—about the only time I will sync down is for a friend—all the way to 16 for a Dunes party. Well, by the time I left, we had gotten Krazytrane from 16-22, which was enough to take me from 47 to 50 on thief. Yes, the required XP/level rises as the levels rise. I’m getting a hell of a lot of practice pulling though, and I really haven’t partied much in the past, being such a soloist. This is a good thing I think.