Return of the Incomparable Deathgnome
Dec. 15th, 2008 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianSo ... yeah, there's been this whole 'radio silence' deal. Sorry 'bout that. This time, no quizzes or memes or anything - I'm actually going to post about how I'm doing.
Answer is: "Not particularly well", if I'm honest. It's sort of a stressful time all around and I don't really want to get into it on a level quite this open, but suffice to say that I'm looking forward to the holidays primarily because it's a time when there are no financial or career repercussions to curling up under the duvet for a week.
Still, there are my little bits of escapism, some more escapey than others. I'm back on FFXI at the minute, and that's been having its ups and downs. Levelling anything past 50 is a bit of a bitch, I have to say. Even the level synch thing isn't all that wonderful, mostly because it seems to make people even more impatient than they already were, and the quest for maximum EXP in minimum amount of time becomes even more of an obsession.
They've made a few changes to FFXI in the last little while, most impressive of which being the ability to level synch. See, the main problem with finding a party in FFXI is finding the requisite number of people in the right combinations at or around your level. There's a two or three level leeway point, but after that, you're shafted. The level synch system changed all that. Now, with the click of a button, the party leader can change the level of every player in the party to correspond to the level of the lowest-level player. This does not require you to haul around a wide variety of gear (the stats on your gear downgrade when you do) and generally speaking increases the likelihood of you getting a party in the first place.
However, there have been some changes to the EXP system as well - soloing's a bit more profitable, but correspondingly, partying has become a little slower. Which means that people - particularly people who have level synched down to correspond to a player at a lower level, for the most part - are prone to tackling zones and mobs out of the party's ability range in order to increase EXP gain. Someone needs to remind these people that they lose EXP whenever their character dies...
Okay, yesterday: I was in Sauromugue Champaign, watching an Old Sabretooth Tiger die for my Ranger flag quest, when someone sent me a tell asking if I wanted to be in a level 47 level synch party in Crawler's Nest. I hate Crawler's Nest, and usually at that level, one's killing bats in Garlaige anyway, but I figured, why not? What's the worst that could happen? I wanted to level a bit anyway...
Yeah, that will be known as Bad Idea Number One. First of all, I wound up getting lost in Crawler's Nest while trying to find the party (this always happens - not as bad as the jungles, but bad enough) and then it turned out that my party didn't have a Black Mage, Blue Mage or Scholar on board. This is always bad because that bit of magic-nuke ... yeah, that's important. Still, I've been in parties without a nuke before, and it's not gone too terribly, so I have hope. Or at least, I had hope until the point where the party decided after one kill that we weren't getting enough EXP off the Soldier Crawlers and decided to move to a higher-level part of the zone for Rumble Crawlers. So we moved, saving one party member who ran off without Sneak or Invisible and got aggroed by a Crawler and a Beetle all at once as we went, and wound up in another overcamped bit of zone where a high-level player was levelling their NPC. Still, we persevered and killed one Rumble Crawler. Then we ran out of Crawlers (partially because there was another party just a few steps away from us) and decided to go for a Beetle.
That will, I should mention, be known as Bad Idea Number Two. Simple rule of thumb: if it's armoured, you need a nuke. So crabs and beetles should not be tackled when all you've got for damage dealing are the melee classes. Our Dancer wasn't keeping Drain Samba up, which meant I had to spam-cure and took a lot of hate as well as draining my MP to the breaking point despite the Bard keeping the refresh effect on me, and then the tank (who was vastly unsuited to the job) died. So now it's four melees (three if you don't count the Bard), all laying down misses like there's no tomorrow, and me with no MP. I should, now that I think on it, have weighed in and pummelled it. However, I didn't. Instead, I cured as much as I could and then, when the thing was nearly dead three or four minutes later and most of the party was in the yellow, I did the only thing I could - I used my two-hour. Benediction is a great two-hour if used correctly - it restores all HP and removes all adverse effects on all party members in range. However, it consequently generates an extreme amount of hate, and should not be done unless people are a couple of hits away from killing the creature in question. And they would have been, had they not kept bloody missing... Anyway, I died in three hits, and I then realised the one serious problem with the level synch - when that's put into effect, all buffs drop and you have to recast them. This includes Reraise, which I'd cast on myself just before the party lead synched us down to level 47. So no Reraise. And then not one, not two, but three Rumble Crawlers turned up to turn the rest of the party into a damp smear on the walls of Crawler's Nest. So on that rather unfortunate note, I homepointed and disbanded. There is some abuse I just will not take.
That said, some of the other jobs I'm levelling have been fun. I'm adoring Dragoon, though not so much Summoner - this might have something to do with the constant MP drain and bloody Carbuncle being boring. I ought to petition the rest of the linkshell to help me kill the other avatars so I can get them instead of just a few elementals and my bloody blue squirrel. But Dragoon is good, and I'm interested to see what benefits Ranger gets me once I've finally finished the job quest. I'm thinking about unlocking all of the advanced jobs, even if I don't intend to do them - Dark Knight might be amusing, though it'll mean I have to level Warrior a bit, and I really want Scholar. On the whole, there's still a lot I want to do. So the game's definitely worth the money.
Which is why I bought it for Mum for Christmas this year. You can't get the pre-Wings of the Goddess set anymore, but at least the full package wasn't too expensive. I intend to include with the game a little note including the server I'm on, a few helpful links to teach her how the game's played and a little IOU for decent level one gear for the job of her choice. She's been dithering between FFXI and WoW for nearly a year now, and I figure that since she can't play WoW with her US friend (I understand that there are separate servers for Europeans and North Americans in WoW), she can instead play FFXI with me. Hee.
There's other news, of course - still writing, obviously; solved the mystery of where my copy of "A Game of Thrones" went (lent it to Mum, who loved it so much that she went out and bought all the books currently available, read through them all in the space of four months and is now annoyed that George RR Martin keeps changing the release date on the next one); Sims 2 continues fun; etc etc etc. I may not be very talkative at the minute, and escapism seems to be my milieu, but I am still here and I'm sure I'll crawl out from under my rock any day now.
Answer is: "Not particularly well", if I'm honest. It's sort of a stressful time all around and I don't really want to get into it on a level quite this open, but suffice to say that I'm looking forward to the holidays primarily because it's a time when there are no financial or career repercussions to curling up under the duvet for a week.
Still, there are my little bits of escapism, some more escapey than others. I'm back on FFXI at the minute, and that's been having its ups and downs. Levelling anything past 50 is a bit of a bitch, I have to say. Even the level synch thing isn't all that wonderful, mostly because it seems to make people even more impatient than they already were, and the quest for maximum EXP in minimum amount of time becomes even more of an obsession.
They've made a few changes to FFXI in the last little while, most impressive of which being the ability to level synch. See, the main problem with finding a party in FFXI is finding the requisite number of people in the right combinations at or around your level. There's a two or three level leeway point, but after that, you're shafted. The level synch system changed all that. Now, with the click of a button, the party leader can change the level of every player in the party to correspond to the level of the lowest-level player. This does not require you to haul around a wide variety of gear (the stats on your gear downgrade when you do) and generally speaking increases the likelihood of you getting a party in the first place.
However, there have been some changes to the EXP system as well - soloing's a bit more profitable, but correspondingly, partying has become a little slower. Which means that people - particularly people who have level synched down to correspond to a player at a lower level, for the most part - are prone to tackling zones and mobs out of the party's ability range in order to increase EXP gain. Someone needs to remind these people that they lose EXP whenever their character dies...
Okay, yesterday: I was in Sauromugue Champaign, watching an Old Sabretooth Tiger die for my Ranger flag quest, when someone sent me a tell asking if I wanted to be in a level 47 level synch party in Crawler's Nest. I hate Crawler's Nest, and usually at that level, one's killing bats in Garlaige anyway, but I figured, why not? What's the worst that could happen? I wanted to level a bit anyway...
Yeah, that will be known as Bad Idea Number One. First of all, I wound up getting lost in Crawler's Nest while trying to find the party (this always happens - not as bad as the jungles, but bad enough) and then it turned out that my party didn't have a Black Mage, Blue Mage or Scholar on board. This is always bad because that bit of magic-nuke ... yeah, that's important. Still, I've been in parties without a nuke before, and it's not gone too terribly, so I have hope. Or at least, I had hope until the point where the party decided after one kill that we weren't getting enough EXP off the Soldier Crawlers and decided to move to a higher-level part of the zone for Rumble Crawlers. So we moved, saving one party member who ran off without Sneak or Invisible and got aggroed by a Crawler and a Beetle all at once as we went, and wound up in another overcamped bit of zone where a high-level player was levelling their NPC. Still, we persevered and killed one Rumble Crawler. Then we ran out of Crawlers (partially because there was another party just a few steps away from us) and decided to go for a Beetle.
That will, I should mention, be known as Bad Idea Number Two. Simple rule of thumb: if it's armoured, you need a nuke. So crabs and beetles should not be tackled when all you've got for damage dealing are the melee classes. Our Dancer wasn't keeping Drain Samba up, which meant I had to spam-cure and took a lot of hate as well as draining my MP to the breaking point despite the Bard keeping the refresh effect on me, and then the tank (who was vastly unsuited to the job) died. So now it's four melees (three if you don't count the Bard), all laying down misses like there's no tomorrow, and me with no MP. I should, now that I think on it, have weighed in and pummelled it. However, I didn't. Instead, I cured as much as I could and then, when the thing was nearly dead three or four minutes later and most of the party was in the yellow, I did the only thing I could - I used my two-hour. Benediction is a great two-hour if used correctly - it restores all HP and removes all adverse effects on all party members in range. However, it consequently generates an extreme amount of hate, and should not be done unless people are a couple of hits away from killing the creature in question. And they would have been, had they not kept bloody missing... Anyway, I died in three hits, and I then realised the one serious problem with the level synch - when that's put into effect, all buffs drop and you have to recast them. This includes Reraise, which I'd cast on myself just before the party lead synched us down to level 47. So no Reraise. And then not one, not two, but three Rumble Crawlers turned up to turn the rest of the party into a damp smear on the walls of Crawler's Nest. So on that rather unfortunate note, I homepointed and disbanded. There is some abuse I just will not take.
That said, some of the other jobs I'm levelling have been fun. I'm adoring Dragoon, though not so much Summoner - this might have something to do with the constant MP drain and bloody Carbuncle being boring. I ought to petition the rest of the linkshell to help me kill the other avatars so I can get them instead of just a few elementals and my bloody blue squirrel. But Dragoon is good, and I'm interested to see what benefits Ranger gets me once I've finally finished the job quest. I'm thinking about unlocking all of the advanced jobs, even if I don't intend to do them - Dark Knight might be amusing, though it'll mean I have to level Warrior a bit, and I really want Scholar. On the whole, there's still a lot I want to do. So the game's definitely worth the money.
Which is why I bought it for Mum for Christmas this year. You can't get the pre-Wings of the Goddess set anymore, but at least the full package wasn't too expensive. I intend to include with the game a little note including the server I'm on, a few helpful links to teach her how the game's played and a little IOU for decent level one gear for the job of her choice. She's been dithering between FFXI and WoW for nearly a year now, and I figure that since she can't play WoW with her US friend (I understand that there are separate servers for Europeans and North Americans in WoW), she can instead play FFXI with me. Hee.
There's other news, of course - still writing, obviously; solved the mystery of where my copy of "A Game of Thrones" went (lent it to Mum, who loved it so much that she went out and bought all the books currently available, read through them all in the space of four months and is now annoyed that George RR Martin keeps changing the release date on the next one); Sims 2 continues fun; etc etc etc. I may not be very talkative at the minute, and escapism seems to be my milieu, but I am still here and I'm sure I'll crawl out from under my rock any day now.
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Date: 2008-12-15 05:15 pm (UTC)