Party of Three
Nov. 5th, 2006 04:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianOMFG. Where did the evening go?
Okay. After the miserable trek out to Jeuno, I bought my weenie gear at exorbitant prices after selling damn near everything I owned in the 'high street' shops instead of waiting for auction house proceeds, then thought I'd go back and at least try to get my lvl 20 just to make the evening not feel like a monumental failure and not end on an "argh why do I bother?" note. And next thing you know, I'm in this ... party. It was ... y'know, okay. Well, compared to the second party of the evening, at least. It consisted of the usual contingent of a damage-dealing black mage, a cure-slinging white mage, a couple of physical damage dealers and a couple of tanks. It was good, except for the fact that our puller never gave me a chance to rest up enough to regain mana points. Mana is the means by which magic is cast, so without it, I'm pretty much a paperweight, to quote [GM]Dave. So ... yeah. Anywho, I managed to get back to lvl 20 again fairly quickly, and the next thing you know, I'm lvl 21. Woo-hoo. However, eventually it got towards dinnertime and I said my good-byes, thanked the party kindly, and then disbanded, Warped back to Jeuno (gods I love that spell), and went to cook things.
Afterwards, there was Sleepy Hollow for awhile but I got bored and decided to try my luck. I wanted to start the chocobo licence quest, but somehow I managed to start the chocobo breeding quest instead. So at some point I have to get to La Theine Plateau. When and if I ever get a decent amount of gil, I will have to start doing the "(Teleport-Dem), (can I have it?)" thing. I get the impression that most high-level WHMs expect paying. Unless, of course, I can manage to find one of the people on my LS to get me as far as Dem. Then I can cut through Konschtat, nip through the Dunes as carefully as humanly possible and then hit La Theine, where I can track the runaway chocobo and pick up my Holla crystal at the same time. (Then, of course, there is the minor difficulty of getting back via Jugner and Batallia, but I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.)
Going back to my original thread, I put up my party flag again after this, thinking that I might, if I was lucky, get a party that's on its way to or through Batallia Downs. Of course, it isn't likely, seeing as most of the people at my level are looking at Qufim exclusively, but I could hope. However, what I got was a "Mrsfrumpy" asking if I wanted to party. I came very close to asking what other jobs this party contained, but decided not to. Note to self: next time it occurs to me to ask what jobs are working the party, do it. Because this was the train-wreck party to end all train-wreck parties.
The leader of this party was a Taru Ninja/Warrior. Yeah, you heard that right. And she still couldn't maintain the spell needed to keep up her defensive shadows to save her life, even with a Taru's MP. Let's see, what else did we have? Elvaan WHM (with the dryer-lint MP), Hume Puppet Master (who'd set his spindly little doll to be a damage-dealer but ended up having to make it tank because the Taru ninja wasn't working for shit), Taru Summoner (random summons of random avatars rather than focusing on the weaknesses of the creature we're actually fighting), and a Taru ... I think Red Mage but I'm not sure because she never bloody well did anything. So the group was predominantly focused on magics with one weak tank and a general cluelessness about how to lead a party. I met them, we went to Qufim, and I asked myself repeatedly why I was doing this to myself, being surer than ever that I was going to have an absolutely miserable time.
However, we got to the same place where I'd gone up two levels a few hours previously and the first thing that happened was that we tried to camp directly on top of someone else. That didn't work well. There was an argument about who was going to pull the mobs into our camp. After a few suggestions got passed around and rejected, someone said, "Well, we don't need a puller; we're just going to run around anyway". Um ... no. See, running around in a mob-infested area just causes unnecessary aggro from things beyond our skill level and gets us killed. We don't want to do that. Except, apparently, we did want to do that. I don't know why. We just did. And, of course, we were too busy running around like idiots to actually aggro much of anything, and did rather badly in terms of XP.
Now, I warned them when we turned up at the lake that banshees turned up in the area during the nighttime hours. Our Puppet Master said this started at 10pm Vana'diel time. I knew for a fact, both from reading and from personal experience, that they turned up at 8, so I corrected him. I got told, "Yeah, whatever" and summarily ignored. I also got ignored when I mentioned that Dia and Poison as spells don't stack and shouldn't be used together, and that, once again, I wasn't being given enough of a chance to recuperate. I'd started to develop a system towards the end of my first party of the day; I'd cast a few spells, then take some time to rest during the battle. It meant that I'd put a dent in the mob and been generally helpful, kept the hate off me so the WHM wouldn't have to worry about curing me, and overall kept me alive. However, I couldn't do that with this lot because if I hadn't been pouring on the damage spells and taking more hate than strictly speaking necessary, they all would have died, me included. So on the whole, this train wreck of a party was doomed to failure. Disaster was going to strike, and it did, around 8pm Vana'diel time.
Note I did not say 10pm Vana'diel time.
Our dear Mrsfrumpy was not paying attention to where she was running in her crack-brained search for killables. Therefore, she ran directly into the path of one of the aforementioned Banshees. I saw her get attacked and killed ... and then I tried to hide. However, that didn't work. It had spotted me too, and I was already hurting from an encounter with a Clipper that most of the party weren't good enough to deal with easily. And of course, I hadn't had time to heal properly and didn't even have time to cast Cure, much less Warp. Just a few short smacks and I went down, as did two other members of the party. In the end, two-thirds of us ended up face-down in the sand because our party leader can't look where she's going.
I spent a half-hour face-down in Qufim, waiting for someone to find a high enough level WHM to Raise the party. Well, most of the party. Our Mrsfrumpy actually homepointed after 20 mins, giving control of the party to the Puppet Master. The Puppet Master, after about two minutes of this, basically turned around and said, "Sorry. Tired. Bye" and disbanded ... except he didn't set a new leader for the party when he did, so when he disbanded, the whole party went. Well, frankly, by then I was in a very much "good riddance" frame of mind and, when the Raise effect wore off and I had enough MP to do so, I warped back to Jeuno.
A quick trip to my Mog house revealed that the fire crystals I put up for auction in Bastok sold, so I had an extra 3.5k gil to spend. Which meant that I could finally afford my map of Qufim. So I bought that and used some of the extra to pay the transaction fees for a stack of earth crystals that weren't exactly working very hard. (Look; in most civilised towns like Windurst and Bastok, the transaction fees are in double figures at most. I had to pay 250 gil to put a stack of water crystals up for auction in Jeuno. Fuckers.) Then I put my party flag back up, thinking, "Just once more. Maybe the next one'll be better."
'The next one' was actually a party we were sharing space in Qufim with. Nice bunch - one of them speaks French, so they're either really hardcore Europeans or, more likely, bored Quebecois. Either way, they had five good physical types, including backup tanks and damage dealers, and a WHM power leveller. So really, when I got there (so much easier with a map), I didn't have to do a whole lot, and I levelled to 22 without much effort. Eventually, I got tired and had to sign off, feeling a whole lot better about the whole thing despite the fact that banter was at an absolute minimum ... or maybe because of it, I dunno.
So no, I did no writing today. After that second party, I'd have been too pissed off to write much that was coherent anyway. I'll pick it back up again. Really. I'm not going to fail this year just because of a little thing like MMORPG. Or Mage, which is tomorrow. Ah, the gang gets to talk to the assembled representatives of the Fera. Goodie for them. And for me; this is gonna be fun...
And then I'll write.
Okay. After the miserable trek out to Jeuno, I bought my weenie gear at exorbitant prices after selling damn near everything I owned in the 'high street' shops instead of waiting for auction house proceeds, then thought I'd go back and at least try to get my lvl 20 just to make the evening not feel like a monumental failure and not end on an "argh why do I bother?" note. And next thing you know, I'm in this ... party. It was ... y'know, okay. Well, compared to the second party of the evening, at least. It consisted of the usual contingent of a damage-dealing black mage, a cure-slinging white mage, a couple of physical damage dealers and a couple of tanks. It was good, except for the fact that our puller never gave me a chance to rest up enough to regain mana points. Mana is the means by which magic is cast, so without it, I'm pretty much a paperweight, to quote [GM]Dave. So ... yeah. Anywho, I managed to get back to lvl 20 again fairly quickly, and the next thing you know, I'm lvl 21. Woo-hoo. However, eventually it got towards dinnertime and I said my good-byes, thanked the party kindly, and then disbanded, Warped back to Jeuno (gods I love that spell), and went to cook things.
Afterwards, there was Sleepy Hollow for awhile but I got bored and decided to try my luck. I wanted to start the chocobo licence quest, but somehow I managed to start the chocobo breeding quest instead. So at some point I have to get to La Theine Plateau. When and if I ever get a decent amount of gil, I will have to start doing the "(Teleport-Dem), (can I have it?)" thing. I get the impression that most high-level WHMs expect paying. Unless, of course, I can manage to find one of the people on my LS to get me as far as Dem. Then I can cut through Konschtat, nip through the Dunes as carefully as humanly possible and then hit La Theine, where I can track the runaway chocobo and pick up my Holla crystal at the same time. (Then, of course, there is the minor difficulty of getting back via Jugner and Batallia, but I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.)
Going back to my original thread, I put up my party flag again after this, thinking that I might, if I was lucky, get a party that's on its way to or through Batallia Downs. Of course, it isn't likely, seeing as most of the people at my level are looking at Qufim exclusively, but I could hope. However, what I got was a "Mrsfrumpy" asking if I wanted to party. I came very close to asking what other jobs this party contained, but decided not to. Note to self: next time it occurs to me to ask what jobs are working the party, do it. Because this was the train-wreck party to end all train-wreck parties.
The leader of this party was a Taru Ninja/Warrior. Yeah, you heard that right. And she still couldn't maintain the spell needed to keep up her defensive shadows to save her life, even with a Taru's MP. Let's see, what else did we have? Elvaan WHM (with the dryer-lint MP), Hume Puppet Master (who'd set his spindly little doll to be a damage-dealer but ended up having to make it tank because the Taru ninja wasn't working for shit), Taru Summoner (random summons of random avatars rather than focusing on the weaknesses of the creature we're actually fighting), and a Taru ... I think Red Mage but I'm not sure because she never bloody well did anything. So the group was predominantly focused on magics with one weak tank and a general cluelessness about how to lead a party. I met them, we went to Qufim, and I asked myself repeatedly why I was doing this to myself, being surer than ever that I was going to have an absolutely miserable time.
However, we got to the same place where I'd gone up two levels a few hours previously and the first thing that happened was that we tried to camp directly on top of someone else. That didn't work well. There was an argument about who was going to pull the mobs into our camp. After a few suggestions got passed around and rejected, someone said, "Well, we don't need a puller; we're just going to run around anyway". Um ... no. See, running around in a mob-infested area just causes unnecessary aggro from things beyond our skill level and gets us killed. We don't want to do that. Except, apparently, we did want to do that. I don't know why. We just did. And, of course, we were too busy running around like idiots to actually aggro much of anything, and did rather badly in terms of XP.
Now, I warned them when we turned up at the lake that banshees turned up in the area during the nighttime hours. Our Puppet Master said this started at 10pm Vana'diel time. I knew for a fact, both from reading and from personal experience, that they turned up at 8, so I corrected him. I got told, "Yeah, whatever" and summarily ignored. I also got ignored when I mentioned that Dia and Poison as spells don't stack and shouldn't be used together, and that, once again, I wasn't being given enough of a chance to recuperate. I'd started to develop a system towards the end of my first party of the day; I'd cast a few spells, then take some time to rest during the battle. It meant that I'd put a dent in the mob and been generally helpful, kept the hate off me so the WHM wouldn't have to worry about curing me, and overall kept me alive. However, I couldn't do that with this lot because if I hadn't been pouring on the damage spells and taking more hate than strictly speaking necessary, they all would have died, me included. So on the whole, this train wreck of a party was doomed to failure. Disaster was going to strike, and it did, around 8pm Vana'diel time.
Note I did not say 10pm Vana'diel time.
Our dear Mrsfrumpy was not paying attention to where she was running in her crack-brained search for killables. Therefore, she ran directly into the path of one of the aforementioned Banshees. I saw her get attacked and killed ... and then I tried to hide. However, that didn't work. It had spotted me too, and I was already hurting from an encounter with a Clipper that most of the party weren't good enough to deal with easily. And of course, I hadn't had time to heal properly and didn't even have time to cast Cure, much less Warp. Just a few short smacks and I went down, as did two other members of the party. In the end, two-thirds of us ended up face-down in the sand because our party leader can't look where she's going.
I spent a half-hour face-down in Qufim, waiting for someone to find a high enough level WHM to Raise the party. Well, most of the party. Our Mrsfrumpy actually homepointed after 20 mins, giving control of the party to the Puppet Master. The Puppet Master, after about two minutes of this, basically turned around and said, "Sorry. Tired. Bye" and disbanded ... except he didn't set a new leader for the party when he did, so when he disbanded, the whole party went. Well, frankly, by then I was in a very much "good riddance" frame of mind and, when the Raise effect wore off and I had enough MP to do so, I warped back to Jeuno.
A quick trip to my Mog house revealed that the fire crystals I put up for auction in Bastok sold, so I had an extra 3.5k gil to spend. Which meant that I could finally afford my map of Qufim. So I bought that and used some of the extra to pay the transaction fees for a stack of earth crystals that weren't exactly working very hard. (Look; in most civilised towns like Windurst and Bastok, the transaction fees are in double figures at most. I had to pay 250 gil to put a stack of water crystals up for auction in Jeuno. Fuckers.) Then I put my party flag back up, thinking, "Just once more. Maybe the next one'll be better."
'The next one' was actually a party we were sharing space in Qufim with. Nice bunch - one of them speaks French, so they're either really hardcore Europeans or, more likely, bored Quebecois. Either way, they had five good physical types, including backup tanks and damage dealers, and a WHM power leveller. So really, when I got there (so much easier with a map), I didn't have to do a whole lot, and I levelled to 22 without much effort. Eventually, I got tired and had to sign off, feeling a whole lot better about the whole thing despite the fact that banter was at an absolute minimum ... or maybe because of it, I dunno.
So no, I did no writing today. After that second party, I'd have been too pissed off to write much that was coherent anyway. I'll pick it back up again. Really. I'm not going to fail this year just because of a little thing like MMORPG. Or Mage, which is tomorrow. Ah, the gang gets to talk to the assembled representatives of the Fera. Goodie for them. And for me; this is gonna be fun...
And then I'll write.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-05 05:59 pm (UTC)Psssst. No there isn't. Set your home point in Jeuno and just warp back! =) Warp, it's a beautiful spell.
~Kyr
no subject
Date: 2006-11-05 08:28 pm (UTC)