Aggro the MOBS, not ME!
Oct. 19th, 2006 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianSo I log into FFXI and hoist my party flag, then make a dash for Selbina and start fishing. While I'm doing so, I get a party invite. No tell or anything asking, mind you, but what the hell. So a couple of us meet up at the outpost in Valkurm Dunes, and I follow them out to the secret beach. I have had previous good luck at the secret beach, apart from that whole "Let's aggro a bogy! AGH! If it weren't for our power leveller, we'd all be dead!" thing. However, there is a minor problem on the way of a spot of Goblin Leecher aggro, from which I just about escape with my life. Get Cured (thankfully one of the half-a-party travelling with me was our white mage) ... then get aggro off a Giant Bat. Cue one dead deathgnome. I HP back in Selbina right around the time one of our other dead party members is getting Raised (oh joy) and decide to disband because there's no way in hell I'm getting out there without dying repeatedly.
So I hoist my party flag again and go back to fishing. Then I get multiple tells from the party I was with asking me if I would rejoin the party if their power leveller escorted me to the secret beach. Damn, they must have really needed a black mage. So I accept the new invite, toddle to the outpost again and wait for the power leveller, catching snippets of party conversation as I do. Party conversation is ... aggravating as this one member who tells us he's sixteen years old proceeds to be horrifically impatient and insulting and I'm about ten seconds away from just disbanding because of this pain in the arse. But I figure I can ignore him well enough when the nice power leveller arrives (I have no idea what he was but he had Cure and Protection spells up the wazoo and he wasn't a mage or summoner). We dash off to the secret beach with only one instance of aggro, which the power leveller kindly deflected so I could run for my miserable life, and we meet up with the rest of the party.
Of course, everyone wants to be on the secret beach (why? It's a pain in the arse to get to and the mobs are kind of piddly; I could solo the secret beach, almost, if it weren't for the bogys) so this so-called 'secret' is packed to the fucking rafters. And we're reduced to intermittent pulls of Beach Pugil and the occasional Goblin (no one thought to exp-chain some Snippers, despite the fact that the place was crawling with them, even though I did suggest it) and making some fairly unimpressive exp. I asked them to pull a skeleton-thing so I stood a chance of getting that one drop I still need for the subjob quest but I might as well have been speaking Urdu.
Worse yet, the sixteen-year-old is still being a pain in the arse throughout the whole miserable experience.
"My sword sucks." (random but continuous)
"Anyone have a sword I could have?" ('spare monies for a n00b'?)
"exp is sucking!" (yeah, we know; we're dealing with it)
"It's not my fault I can't afford a good sword! My drops always suck!" (whinge moan; moan whinge)
"No, I can't tank; my sword isn't good enough!" (note: tanks do not need good swords. They just need good armour to take a lot of damage, and high evasion helps.)
"Bastok sucks!" (welcome to the random)
"C'mon; just pull something already!" (note: both mages and the power leveller were low on mana at that point. No mana = no doom spells and no cures. Suck it, bitch-boy.)
"They keep stealing our mobs!" (At that point I actually said, "They're not our mobs until we pull them; shut up.")
Finally, bitch-boy leaves (to our intense relief), shooting choice insults as he goes. Then our power leveller finds a group and has to leave. Then our white mage has to leave just as we find a sixth member. So the whole party disbands and one player uses an Empress Ring to go directly to Bastok. Lucky sonuvabitch. One guy decides to hang around waiting for a party (good luck to him) and the white mage just logs out. That leaves the party leader and me. Thankfully, the party member has Provoke so he agrees to see me back in the general direction of the outpost, lending me some Silence Oil to get through the caves without bat aggro. That goes off without a hitch, I regain my old spot next to a pile of boxes and shut down. I'm a little richer in exp now, but didn't even manage to level once. And the aggravation factor from that one little snot...
I'm going back in a minute. But now I see again why people hate the Dunes. Sure, you can get some decent exp if things are going right, but the rest of the time? Arseholes!
So I hoist my party flag again and go back to fishing. Then I get multiple tells from the party I was with asking me if I would rejoin the party if their power leveller escorted me to the secret beach. Damn, they must have really needed a black mage. So I accept the new invite, toddle to the outpost again and wait for the power leveller, catching snippets of party conversation as I do. Party conversation is ... aggravating as this one member who tells us he's sixteen years old proceeds to be horrifically impatient and insulting and I'm about ten seconds away from just disbanding because of this pain in the arse. But I figure I can ignore him well enough when the nice power leveller arrives (I have no idea what he was but he had Cure and Protection spells up the wazoo and he wasn't a mage or summoner). We dash off to the secret beach with only one instance of aggro, which the power leveller kindly deflected so I could run for my miserable life, and we meet up with the rest of the party.
Of course, everyone wants to be on the secret beach (why? It's a pain in the arse to get to and the mobs are kind of piddly; I could solo the secret beach, almost, if it weren't for the bogys) so this so-called 'secret' is packed to the fucking rafters. And we're reduced to intermittent pulls of Beach Pugil and the occasional Goblin (no one thought to exp-chain some Snippers, despite the fact that the place was crawling with them, even though I did suggest it) and making some fairly unimpressive exp. I asked them to pull a skeleton-thing so I stood a chance of getting that one drop I still need for the subjob quest but I might as well have been speaking Urdu.
Worse yet, the sixteen-year-old is still being a pain in the arse throughout the whole miserable experience.
"My sword sucks." (random but continuous)
"Anyone have a sword I could have?" ('spare monies for a n00b'?)
"exp is sucking!" (yeah, we know; we're dealing with it)
"It's not my fault I can't afford a good sword! My drops always suck!" (whinge moan; moan whinge)
"No, I can't tank; my sword isn't good enough!" (note: tanks do not need good swords. They just need good armour to take a lot of damage, and high evasion helps.)
"Bastok sucks!" (welcome to the random)
"C'mon; just pull something already!" (note: both mages and the power leveller were low on mana at that point. No mana = no doom spells and no cures. Suck it, bitch-boy.)
"They keep stealing our mobs!" (At that point I actually said, "They're not our mobs until we pull them; shut up.")
Finally, bitch-boy leaves (to our intense relief), shooting choice insults as he goes. Then our power leveller finds a group and has to leave. Then our white mage has to leave just as we find a sixth member. So the whole party disbands and one player uses an Empress Ring to go directly to Bastok. Lucky sonuvabitch. One guy decides to hang around waiting for a party (good luck to him) and the white mage just logs out. That leaves the party leader and me. Thankfully, the party member has Provoke so he agrees to see me back in the general direction of the outpost, lending me some Silence Oil to get through the caves without bat aggro. That goes off without a hitch, I regain my old spot next to a pile of boxes and shut down. I'm a little richer in exp now, but didn't even manage to level once. And the aggravation factor from that one little snot...
I'm going back in a minute. But now I see again why people hate the Dunes. Sure, you can get some decent exp if things are going right, but the rest of the time? Arseholes!