Everybody's working for the weekend...

As usual I didn't post over the weekend despite having plenty of time, go figure. The stop smoking thing is up to 5.5 days now; irritable, raspy-voiced (not fun since I like to sing, I sound like a deep-voiced Kim Carnes now) and just generally bad company. Did you know you can't find the giant pack of Big Red gum most places? I need something to do with my mouth in lieu of cigarettes; I'd rather not substitute morbid obesity for the cigs if you get my meaning...

It's been a few days since my last post so several things have happened. Friday was Dynamis. We got jacked on glacier by Straymetal, a JP shell that I am convinced is all RMT (real money traders) based on their always entering and running with low-man crews. They must be doing something right however as they always seem to do full 3 hour runs. In any event, we end up doing Sandy again.

Fashnek was pulling zone for the 1st time. He didn't think much of the job he did but he was wrong. The pulls were clean and the pace was right; it seemed slow, but we actually had time to spare to kill the boss and farm which is exactly what you want. The only dirty pull was one that is supposed to be a sac pull, and Fash had people guiding him on what the pulls were, the guide screwed up in not warning him that it was a sac, Fashnek did fine. Point of fact, we all did for the most part.

We did end up in a long debate about reraises though. One of our members was using reraise items (we actually have a rule that says you will have RR items with you, but the way it is worded makes it sound like leaders will tell you when you have to use them. He seemed to think using them was mandatory. For what it's worth I think it should be. NewDawn has had issues of late with fielding large enough groups, we've even had to cancel several nights due to low attendance. When you have to low-man zones wipes are more common due to lack of damage output, insufficient healers, sleepers die and are less effective while weakened (enemies resist the spell), etc. Raise is a spell to come back from death that white mages, red mages, scholars and paladins have (although only whitemages have Raise 2 or 3) or those using white mage as a sub-job. This means that only a few people can raise our deaders after a wipe (I don't have sufficient MP to do so until weakness wears myself). In addition, there is a time limit before raise can be cast again. Now reraise removes the burden of raising for every player who uses it. We also have players who think they are too important to take anything but a Raise 3.

Brief explanation of what happens when you die for non-players. Obviously, you are out of commission. You can return to your home point and instantly be at full strength. Death costs 10% of the XP needed to reach the next level(at whatever level you are when you die), and you can actually lose your current level if you are too close to the bottom of your level. Raise can revive you without your having to homepoint, XP loss is reduced but you suffer from weakness for 5 minutes from the time you get up, if you die while weakened you will be double (or triple, quadruple, etc.) weak, meaning that ablilities that can be resisted are more easily resisted by enemies, and your HP and MP are greatly reduced, meaning you can cast less and take less damage. The XP loss is why responsible players work to keep their XP "capped", i.e. as high as possible (43,999 at level 75) so that they can survive multiple deaths without losing their level.

So back to the debate. The argument was because of the time it takes to recover from a large death. The sooner the whole group is up, the sooner weakness wears and we can fight at full strength. If players are not using RR, that means they have to wait until one of our raisers has MP and their Raise timer is up; if they insist on a higher raise (to save XP) it takes even longer for the group to recover. When we are struggling for time this means we may have to fight at reduced strength, lessening our chances for survival as I believe I mentioned, just to have a chance at achieving our goals. I've never understood why people don't keep their XP up. We all have 5 days with no runs to earn lost XP back. One person said some of us have jobs, lives and children, but since all of us have work (or school), family and lives that argument doesn't really wash. Better to say some of us have dedication and leave it at that. In any event, we didn't settle on anything as far as policy on using RR items.

We got the win, unfortunately we didn't get that much relic. Some nights are like that tho'. Usually when we do have tons of relic falling it's all for jobs noone needs, like puppetmaster or something. When I first joined NewDawn beastmaster and bard were largely unwanted, to the point that I had to go into negative points to get relic, as leaders hate seeing needed relic hitting the floor I was told to take it despite not having points at the time. So that was Friday night.

Saturday I split my playing time up. I was on through the early afternoon killing funnel bats in the Shitadel as I was able to get some range skill-ups off of them with my now 55 thief. I was on so I could monitor my CoP shell, which is supposed to run on Sat. afternoons 2pm EDT. However, noone needing it ever logged on to do fights. So I logged to tend to some RL tasks. When I logged back on I fully intended to continue killing bats, but Doncado was on LS asking for help with killing scorps for his trial weapon augment. He needed to sync down so that scorps would give XP (the kill doesn't count if they don't). Well I offered as scorps would work even better for skill-ups than bats if we synced to my level which was fine with Doncado. I did add a bunch of skill to my range attacks in between the FoV pages we were doing, although the page mobs were useless. Unfortunately, the weather was not cooperating for scorps, as he needed fire conditions. I think we managed 3 scorps total.

Sunday when I logged on is also supposed to be a CoP run (mornings, I have better things to do than waste time and money on church). While I'm waiting for the 10am run-time I decided to make more bolts; skilling up underleveled marksmanship means I go through alot of bolts so I made the lumber and then bolts to the tune of 15 quivers of acid bolts. I really should have done this saturday morning because the full moon increases the chances of getting high-quality results (in the case of bolts and lumber that means getting more-not better-than the usual synthesis results), but I wasn't thinking that far ahead, sue me. Run time came and went with noone showing up, so I decide to finish off getting 56 on thief. I also did a bit of inventory management before I logged to do housework and the like. Think I'm going to get some crafting done soon just to get my inventory under control. Since abandoning my other characters I now have 15 (instead of 9) mules so it sure needs doing. And both of my crystal storage mules are overflowing (that means 300 stacks of crystals, enough to make a few things).