All right. What happened? Is everything cool?
Not sure if you heard the one about the nine accounts from one LS getting compromised, stripped of sell-able gear & gil and then transferred to different servers... well, it happened. Last week to be exact, and the public chronicles can be found at the following:
BlueGartr forum: Account Lost and Recovered - this is the main thread. Between that thread and the thread in our LS member forum (now 52 pages), all the pieces began to fall in to place, and over the course of a day we found out what all had happened.
Basically what happened was that the Ultima LS forum was compromised, allowing Taj to get in to the admin's account. We're not sure how exactly yet, but once in he downloaded the database and sifted through the PMs, finding ten accounts' information (ID & password).
When he started messing with the actual accounts, logging in and changing passwords, one of the ten was online and noticed he was kicked from his account. So that one person immediately logged in and changed their password, but did not think anything of it initially. I think this was early Monday morning.
The other nine accounts, well, seven were transferred to Leviathan and most had their names changed; all seven accounts have been recovered, most of their gear has been recovered, but not sure about the gil and one of the accounts had its content IDs deleted, so it's not reactivated at this time. The two remaining accounts were sent to Hades; one was basically a super-mule account, with thirteen mules, most with fully expanded gobby bags and mog houses, and about 600 items and 9~12 million gil missing. The other account sent to Hades is missing most sellable gear (an Osode, a Manteel, Hauberk +1, not sure what else, but basically his whole set of BST, BRD and BLM gear), and that LS member had no idea about any of this until this past Monday, as he had been offline the past two weeks, and in the hospital the past week we think; he has ulcerative colitis.
People in the LS are working to get the characters' transfers reversed and placed back on Valefor, but they will all probably need to wait the full 90-days to get transferred back, and at their own expense. We will be doing some charity KS99, ENM, sky and maybe Ouyru/Bahamut runs to get these characters back on their feet. Five of the characters have level 75 BRDs, all had Manteels crafted from Vrtra and Bahamut v.2 drops, and I think all of those Manteels are gone now. Taj gave Eticket his account info so E could distribute items and gil from Taj to the Leviathan group, but a lot is still unaccounted for.
I got lucky, as I had not shared any account info on our forum, plus no one has had my password for over a year and a half, and it has changed at least four times now since that time. I recommend changing your password after reading this. Also, a lot of the threads about this event play out like the telephone game, a lot of misconstrued information.
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That all said, Ultima is carrying on, albeit with 28 or so active members instead of 36. We have seen a few old retired members reactivate in the past week, and we have continued doing our normal LS activities. This past weekend I made it for Proto-Omega, was on the lotting list for Homam body and feet, but neither dropped; hands went to Modoja, and legs went to Fodder. And that means tertiary jobs are starting to get Homam; I think we get more legs than any other piece. There was also a sky raid on Saturday night, but I was out all day. We did some sky farming last night too, and a new Limbus cycle starts tonight.
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I told cujoinffxi that I would post some shots of my storage set-up. I currently have 62 storage slots and still have enough elemental energy to maintain Moghancement: Bonecraft.
It was a while ago that I came up with the core of this set-up, and it was based off of this guide. The event over the summer allowed me to get three 2-storage trees, which in turn let me place a sixth mannequin and the 9-drawer almirah. I can probably tweak this out a bit more, I just have not looked at the numbers in a while, so I am not sure what I can add.
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No mention of this on any guides about PLD merited abilities, but last night running through Ro'Maeve I had Fealty dispelled.
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This past Sunday I signed on to Besieged, which is my 220+ skill up party now, and LS members planning a merit party for an hour later. Somehow we worked out to be a PLD buffer party.
I rolled out my "functional" DD PLD/NIN set-up, and we were getting decent exp/hour and chains got up to about #20 or so.
TP set-up:
WS (Vorpal Blade) set-up:
It could definitely use a good bit of work, but the main thing is I capped PLD exp for the first time in over a year, plus I got a merit out of it.
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After getting HP/MP merits to 3 HP/3 MP (goal is 5 MP), which is enough to affect a support job going to 37, I decided to worry about the last two MP merits until later, and just jump to working on the WAR category 1 merits. Double Attack is at 4/4 as planned, and now I'm 1/3 on both Berserk and Aggressor recasts. Hopefully I finish those up this week.
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Last week was also the start of a Nyzul Isle group, from my LS. Aluciont is heading it up, we have a good spread of jobs in the group, and substitute member plan that I agree with (if 5 can go and 1 is missing, a temporary member is picked up for that night's run). We worked our way up to floor 20 last week, but only had two shots at the floor boss that night; one fight there was no drop, and the other we ran out of time with the boss at 5% HP. Lamp floors seem to be our biggest obstacle right now as well, mainly the ones that require lamps to be turned on in a sequence.
We did four runs last night, messed up the first one on lamps, and then fought the boss three times. Only one fight had a drop, the fight against Fafnir:
Exactly what I was hoping to get out of Nyzul Isle for my PLD.
The boots look tough. They will be really nice for kiting, and to macro in when my shadows are down on PLD/NIN, in some situations. I need to read up on them a bit more, to be sure when I will want to use them.
Once everyone gets their first level 20 item, I am hoping we can do a few more so I can try to get Denali boots for BLU.
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Finally, still working on crafting myself a signed Lamian Kaman +1. So far I am 0/28 on these, and they're supposed to be a tier1 HQ. I have been doing my synths in batches of 14, and just having bad luck. Plus my money is below my comfortable threshold, so I need to run some KS, BCNM and ENMs to get my money up, and probably burn through a bunch of crafting materials I have on mules.
And looking at FFXIAH.com, it looks like Valefor's price on the HQ bow is more than most servers, and there have been fewer listed on the AH than other servers. I think only around six or seven have been sold on the AH. Once I craft my own, maybe I have a shot at making some money crafting more HQ's. I doubt it though, all my old money items are shot to hell.