tldr: Ere Doesn't Like Bard in Salvage
I don't like writing angsty entries, but if that's not what blogs were first invented for, I don't know what it was. If it works for teenage highschool girls all over the world, it can work for me! This has nothing to do with my normal FFXI findings, so if you don't want to hear me bitch, then go away now because I'm not going to apologize for it later.
The salvage group is doing well lately. We've almost finished with LBC farming forever and are making tentative runs into other zones to get minor pieces that people need to complete some sets before doing full-out farming and boss runs. It's sort of exciting to see the group doing well and new areas are always a nice change of pace.
You may have noticed in all of my screenshots I go bard. That's because I pretty much always go bard. At the beginning this really bothered me, but after a while I got used to it because it was pretty obvious how much difference Soul Voice makes on boss fights, and I had a direct vested interest in us winning since there's no point going to salvage at all if you're not in it to win. So I endured, and I put up with it, because it was acomplishing things.
The other day Shpen, our leader, says he wants to try either Bhaflau rampart farming or Zhayolm frogs + boss tonight. Ramparts I know about, but Zhayolm I've only been to once. So we're talking about it a little and he says he wants the group to split up on floors one and two and farm different areas simultaneously for more cells more quickly. And I say I'll read up on the zone so I can lead a group and answer any questions, and he says sure. And the one time I went to Zhayolm I was on BLU and I did MASTERFULLY there on BLU, so I figured it was a given that I would be going BLU again.
Today Shpen decides that we are doing Zhayolm after all. My assignment? I'm not going on BLU, he got another person that always goes melee to go as BLU. I'm on bard. Again. Oh, and I'm not leading a farming group, but to sneak and invis and go to the portal in the southwest and wait 20/30 minutes so I can go up as soon as the others are done and we can save someone 30 seconds of running to the portal.
The rules of salvage are unwritten but none-the-less very clear. It can be basically summed up with "follow orders, do your best, or get the fuck out of the way." A no-nonsense attitude works so well there because it's a static group and the conditions for failure are so easy that people quickly learn that if we're not doing what we need to be doing, we will easily fail the run and get absolutely nothing. So I have no real recourse to this sort of thing if I want to stay in the group, which I do.
BUT I DON'T HAVE TO LIKE IT.
I'm not vindictive; I didn't do anything to intentionally spite the group. I didn't drag my feet, I sang my little stupid songs. I passed absolutely every cell that anyone else had lotted, even if was a free lot cell, because what does a bard need with cells? When we were fighting the frogs I didn't point out how frequently they would use water bomb and what moves to stun, because a bard doesn't concern themselves with those things. The hope was we'd be able to fight the boss at the end, but we weren't even really close. I never even used my 2hour.
I'm going to make this clear here right now for anyone that reads Ereblog. I don't like bard. I never did. I only leveled it back when ToAU came out and nobody wanted my WHM, so I needed a job to get merits on. I had abandoend bard at 55ish like a year beforehand so it seemed like the easy route for merits. I wasn't even in an endgame shell when I made this decision. I ONLY use bard because it makes certain things a hell of a lot easier. But really, it's getting to the point where I couldn't give a flying fuck about how easy things are, because I have other jobs with considerably more combat options and I'm SO FUCKING TIRED of watching situations that are SO EASILY OVERCOME turn into total clusterfucks because someone's there on a melee job, their 8th job to 75, and they don't have a goddamn brain in their head as to how to use the job to the fullest. So I'm stuck playing fucking ballad while they make stupid error after stupid mistake, totally unable to do anything more than giving mages another few tics of refresh.
I swear to God, I can't think of any good reason not to delevel bard to 5 and be fucking done with it. "Greater good" be damned. There's no point in playing this game if I'm not having any fun.
I logged in disgust tonight after the run. Shpen probably thinks I'm pissed at him. I'm more pissed how useless I've become as a character in the game. Someone program an autofollow bot that sings ballad every 2 minutes and let me go AFK at events, please.
Thus, the introduction of the emo tag.
AND TO THINK! I was really looking forward to this run! I was thinking earlier in the day, I'm going to write a salvage guide and put it up on For Glory to share my strategies with everyone for the betterment of all. And I was thinking, this'll be great, I'll go BLU on a zone that was a lot of fun last time, it will put me in an excellent mood to get a good start tonight and spend a few hours and make some real progress.
Well, fuck that idea.