Burst is a Go, Captain!
The long dulldrums between Nyzul runs the weekeneds when people have work and school and stuff and no really fun events happen take a lot of the fun out of EreBlogs, but I am trying to update more than once a week, so…
Soloed Black Mage up from… well, whatever it was at before… up to level 58. I do level synch parties on my black mage with Brim and Santi and Kisa and some of Kisa’s friends occasionally but they only meet on weekends and I’m trying to do BLM in sort of a hurry. The good part about soloing is that I can do it totally on my own time, and the good part about level synch is that it doesn’t matter how much farther ahead of the rest of them I climb. Burst is a go, captain!
To anyone that wants to level Black Mage in this post-ToAU world where you can’t get parties, I highly recommend this soloing guide on the wiki. It’s attributed to this Lion_heart guy, but it clearly seems to be a large-scale group effort to find the best possible camps and explain all the dangers surrounding them. I’ve used this guide off and on since starting BLM out at 37 and it has served me well. As these recent screenshots prove, I’m willing to bet I’m getting similar, if not better, exp than most exp parties that would want to invite me anyway.
OH GOD! Chopsuey Chucky will let nothing stop him from EATING OUR SOULS! This was kind of lawl Dynamis - Windy. We had a ton of people but kept wiping anyway from some really bad pulls. At one point, with all our tanks dead, I declared myself main assist (me on BLU) and just started attacking stuff. BLU didn’t drop. I’m pretty sure it’s a myth.
First piece of WAR AF, acquired the very day I retire my WAR. Yeah, it’s retired. I never really found myself wanting to go out on WAR to level it (especially since I only get level synch parties that want me to tank at some ungodly low level on WAR…) and it’s difficult to justify holding onto a million gil’s worth of gear when I owe Brimah so much for the Morrigan’s. So it’s into retirement, for now. I’m notorious for abandoning jobs in the 60s and even moreso for eventually restarting them - BRD, PLD, and SMN all got left there at some point. Maybe eventually I’ll restart it, but for now, BLU is handling my dd job requirements quite nicely. I also got THF AF from this run, but let's face it; I only lotted it to stop a lootwhore from winning every free-lot AF for no particular reason.
Speaking of BLU, stupid people are bitching that Expiacion sucks. To these morons, I say this; YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. No, Expiacion will never be as strong as Sidwinder or Asuran Fists. Do you know why? Because strong weaponskills are pretty much all those jobs have! BLU is a hybrid job that can do many things simultaneously. Does this mean we’re always going to be weaker than other jobs? Hell no. It means we have to think a little harder and plan a little better to catch up. This screenshot is of me doing a solo darkness skillchain on an IT aern. Incredibly Tough mob. And yes, I know they’re weak to darkness. That’s the whole freaking point. I can solo light or darkness now and whip out damage spells at a whim. You’d better believe I’m going to do the ones that are the most effective for the situation. Not many other jobs have that sort of flexibility.
Did campaign a little the other day. Auoral Alicorn, aka “Light Ixion”, is a freelance NPC working for windy on Sylph (along with pretty much every other freelancer on the server). He seems to have mostly attack moves plus an AoE regen. I also saw a bard that would cast songs on people (on BLU I got ballad II!), a melee galka WHM that would R3 people, and a lot of the usual suspects like Aurehat. Campaigning for windy is pretty sweet. I’m going to build up some more allied notes to buy the cobra feet at level 67 and still have a healthy amount left over for whenever they release the bodies for the sets.
Much to my insurmountable shame, I have to level RDM as a subjob for BLM. I don’t like RDM. I don’t like too many RDMs. I have a couple RDM friends but the general attitude I get from the job has always been that they’re too good to do anything “beneath them” like main healing and so they cast slow on mobs when alliance members are in the red. Smug bastards. With repose and sublimation on WHM, I pretty much free of needing their pithy support. But, as the saying goes, if you are not careful you become what you hate the most. I refuse to consider it on those terms. I’m simply a white mage that is meleeing stuff to death with a sword.
Though, low level soloing is a heck of a lot easier since the recent update. Fast Blade at level 1! Really good exp from decent challenge and easy prey mobs! I soloed up to 13 or so with extremely minimal hassle and it’s tempting to jack a PL and just go as far up as I possibly can. Easy prey mobs are still pretty easy prey and they’re giving like 65 exp a pop; that’s not bad.
I actually went to Thursday sea farming. Yeah, normally I blow it off and take a nap or something. I’m admitting it. I don’t go because no officers show up and the people that lead it are usually totally inept at leading anything and they consider getting a few HQ aern organs in four hours is considered a solid night’s work. Waste of f’ing time. But because I was suffering some sort of brain damage that day, I thought it might be a good idea to go. It wasn’t.
We were camping Ix’DRG and actually spawned him in the first room. We wiped quickly because nobody knew what to do. Did you know that after THREE YEARS of sea being released there are people that can’t find the central elevator in the Garden of Ru’Hmet? No, seriously. Well, I guess it’s kind of a hard route with a lot of turns, so I prepared the following detailed map to help people get there.
“Okay, so head straight in. Yes, straight forward. Don’t touch the left or right keys at all. That’s it… that’s it… NO NOT LEFT! STOP! TURN AROUND! ”
Anyway, it despawned and we got up and cleared another couple rooms, and within like 10 minutes spawned it AGAIN. Two Ix’DRK pops within 10 minutes of clearing would be amazingly good luck to a legitimate LS. But no, we wiped AGAIN because the idiot in charge told us to zerg the Ix when we had two IT aern adds on us, then when we wiped, complained that we just HAD to attack the Ix before the adds and we were all stupid and spastic for not following his obviously brilliant plan that mostly involved yelling nonsense in all caps and then swearing at us when it all went sour.
That about filled up my daily dose of tolerance from fucking idiots and I was about ready to just home point and tell them to go screw themselves, but Brimah managed to survive the wipe by fleeing through one of those glowing weird portals and kept aggoring the Ix outside party to keep it from despawning while we raised up. He then came up with a pretty simplistic plan - he’d pull the Ix and get hate on all the wyverns and kite them around with speedy boots while we killed Ix. As long as nobody touched the wyverns, nobody but Brim would get hate on them, and we’d be good to go. This seemed like a good plan and I conveyed it to the group with a firmness of purpose that silenced any opposition. We encacted our plan and killed the Ix with extremely minimal hassle.
This is sort of interesting in kind of a nazi-ish way. I never really thought everyone in AXI was outright stupid, and I know they don’t have terrible gear, so there’s really not too many excuses for our failures. I think just everyone is so used to being told what to do that, if we run into a situation where we don’t have a set-in-stone plan or a leader to start barking detailed instructions that most everyone in the LS just sort of freezes and does their own thing. I saw exactly the same results on a Salvage run where Shpen couldn’t go and was trying to lead by remote on ventrillo. His lack of being there telling them exactly what to do meant people started doing really amateurish stuff despite having done that salvage run literally 30 times before.
The solution, it seems, is to treat everyone like very young, stupid children. Since they can’t be trusted not to simply let themselves die with no resistance, someone has to tell them how to fight back. The key there is “someone.” No officers are ever on during Thursday farming time (I believe at least some of this intentional, as it seems a little suspicious that five people can’t make the same night when they’re free most others) and they won’t move the farming time for reasons that make absolutely no sense. So it falls to the incompetent to try to lead since the competent (such as myself) just flat out refuse. Meh. Brim and I saved an Ix’DRG pop and got one of the people we dislike the most a rare cape. In the end, it’s hard not to think that it would have been wiser to just home point.
Nyzul Isle tonight! And maybe a Mamool Ja beastking run on Sunday! I got invited to that second one from a guy that, apparently, reads EreBlog. SO! If you’re on Sylph server and you want a competent WHM/SMN/BRD/BLU/DNC for Einherjar (I’ll even go BRD, I’m serious about this!) or basically anything else I’ve talked about wanting to do on EreBlog, or you find yourself with too much gil and want to help out
someone who’s about 6 mil in the hole, hit me up with a tell in game.
It’s true, you know.