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thessalianSo ... um ... Aht Urghan scares the crap outta me.
So once you get past level 50 or so, people start wanting to party with you in Aht Urghan and surrounding areas - Waojham Woodlands, Blafhau Thickets, etc etc etc. The issue there is that Aht Urghan is a good long ways away from anywhere particularly interesting, and it takes awhile to get there. As I understand it, you can get warp capability there, but it's all to do with being a mercenary and other brands of crap. I honestly have no idea and am going to have to start searching. There's the 'set homepoint and warp' dodge, but they had to take the homepoint crystal out of Aht Urghan because it was getting overpopulated so it involves going into the mog house, changing jobs and going out again, being sure to set your home point there when it requests that you do so for your own safety. In the end, that's what I had to do because no one wanted me for a party anywhere decent unless I could get to Aht Urghan in 30 seconds or less. I love impatient people...
So anyway, point is that I managed to set my home point in Aht Urghan yesterday and got my first party invite to Blafhau Thickets this afternoon. Now, not that it wasn't a great party (it takes some serious heavy XP to level once you pass 50, and I managed to crawl from 55 to 57 this afternoon), but it was one of those ones that did not entirely seem to understand that if you do not stop to let your White Mage rest for MP, your White Mage becomes little more use than a paperweight and the party dies. I found workarounds, at least, so I didn't run entirely out of MP at inconvenient times, but I swear they were relentless. The puller was bringing in mobs when we'd only got the HP bar on the one we were already killing down to about half. Every time the puller pulled one of those teary-emoticon faces due to lack of mob spawns, I breathed a sigh of relief.
We were fighting Lesser Colibri - basically big pink toucans from hell. They've got these really annoying special moves, the first one being Feather Tickle - basically takes your TP down to zero. TP is ... well, you have special weapon skills that you can only do when your TP is at 100% or greater. Weapon skills are good because they do more damage than standard attacks and when you do them in the right combination with other weapon skills, you get skillchains, which do more damage. (You can add magic bursts to that and do yet more damage, but Black Mages aren't in a lot of demand these days so you don't see as much magic bursting as you used to.) So if you're preparing to start a skillchain and this bastard bird resets your TP to zero ... yeah, that's an issue. Then there's Snatch Morsel. If you're a combat monkey and fighting Lesser Colibri, don't bother with food. See, food gives you certain stats advantages and a lot of people use it to increase strength, dexterity, accuracy, whatever. However, Snatch Morsel removes those advantages, one at a time. So, seriously? DON'T BOTHER. Unless you're standing at the back with the mages using a ranged weapon, you'll have every bonus snatched away and you will have blown a lot of gil on food to no appreciable benefit.
Still, at least they die fast. We were getting some pretty hefty XP chains throughout, and I racked up something to the order of 30k XP in the course of a few hours. We had one poor sod disconnect mid-battle but we replaced him quickly enough and managed well enough with five in the meantime, so I can hardly complain overmuch. Though it did amuse the hell out of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mitchy to hear me screaming about how we didn't need another damn bird because we hadn't finished killing the last one, and "WHY WON'T THAT BLOODY SPELL STICK?!?" I levelled my enfeebling magic like whoa because there was a PL who did little but helped from time to time, and our tank was a Paladin who told me not to heal him too much because he needed to heal himself to generate hate, though he blew a lot of MP using Flash to blind the damn birds so how he expected to keep throwing Cure IIIs at himself when he was blowing MP and stood to get interrupted mid-cure by being smacked upside the head by beak-from-hell, I could not tell you. Anyway, that all means that I passed the time throwing enfeebling spells that hardly ever stuck. *sigh*
Also, things you never want to see when you're trying to keep track of when your Samurai loses the Haste effect so you can recast: a /tell advertising the services of a gilseller. I keep getting these; it's like Twitter spambots. I've made more GM calls about the bloody spambots than I've ever had to for anything else. It's really depressing that bots are just so prevalent. People who are obviously gifted at coding are using it to sell shit (understandable), break rules (not so much) and piss people off (inexcusable). I wonder if this is how the large contingent of Chinese gilsellers is getting around the recently passed law against selling fake money in MMOs. Either way, I wish it'd stop.
In less boring news, I got Chaos Magic Chapter 23 up yesterday, and am now sitting down to write an article. Woo! I'm thinking I might even get the last chapter out tomorrow, time and energy permitting. After all, massive hiatus and everything; all it really needs is editing and putting together. Nooooooo problem. But that depends on how the article goes.
Waiting to hear whether I got the job I interviewed for on Thursday. I was told I'd hear by Monday - I had a little bit of wishful thinking wherein I hoped they'd decide straight away, but that was not to be and so now I wait 'til Monday and try not to think about it too much. I'm hopeful and reasonably confident, but even if it doesn't work out, I've got people falling all over themselves to give me interviews, so it's not like I lack for options.
Things aren't going so badly, all things considered.
So once you get past level 50 or so, people start wanting to party with you in Aht Urghan and surrounding areas - Waojham Woodlands, Blafhau Thickets, etc etc etc. The issue there is that Aht Urghan is a good long ways away from anywhere particularly interesting, and it takes awhile to get there. As I understand it, you can get warp capability there, but it's all to do with being a mercenary and other brands of crap. I honestly have no idea and am going to have to start searching. There's the 'set homepoint and warp' dodge, but they had to take the homepoint crystal out of Aht Urghan because it was getting overpopulated so it involves going into the mog house, changing jobs and going out again, being sure to set your home point there when it requests that you do so for your own safety. In the end, that's what I had to do because no one wanted me for a party anywhere decent unless I could get to Aht Urghan in 30 seconds or less. I love impatient people...
So anyway, point is that I managed to set my home point in Aht Urghan yesterday and got my first party invite to Blafhau Thickets this afternoon. Now, not that it wasn't a great party (it takes some serious heavy XP to level once you pass 50, and I managed to crawl from 55 to 57 this afternoon), but it was one of those ones that did not entirely seem to understand that if you do not stop to let your White Mage rest for MP, your White Mage becomes little more use than a paperweight and the party dies. I found workarounds, at least, so I didn't run entirely out of MP at inconvenient times, but I swear they were relentless. The puller was bringing in mobs when we'd only got the HP bar on the one we were already killing down to about half. Every time the puller pulled one of those teary-emoticon faces due to lack of mob spawns, I breathed a sigh of relief.
We were fighting Lesser Colibri - basically big pink toucans from hell. They've got these really annoying special moves, the first one being Feather Tickle - basically takes your TP down to zero. TP is ... well, you have special weapon skills that you can only do when your TP is at 100% or greater. Weapon skills are good because they do more damage than standard attacks and when you do them in the right combination with other weapon skills, you get skillchains, which do more damage. (You can add magic bursts to that and do yet more damage, but Black Mages aren't in a lot of demand these days so you don't see as much magic bursting as you used to.) So if you're preparing to start a skillchain and this bastard bird resets your TP to zero ... yeah, that's an issue. Then there's Snatch Morsel. If you're a combat monkey and fighting Lesser Colibri, don't bother with food. See, food gives you certain stats advantages and a lot of people use it to increase strength, dexterity, accuracy, whatever. However, Snatch Morsel removes those advantages, one at a time. So, seriously? DON'T BOTHER. Unless you're standing at the back with the mages using a ranged weapon, you'll have every bonus snatched away and you will have blown a lot of gil on food to no appreciable benefit.
Still, at least they die fast. We were getting some pretty hefty XP chains throughout, and I racked up something to the order of 30k XP in the course of a few hours. We had one poor sod disconnect mid-battle but we replaced him quickly enough and managed well enough with five in the meantime, so I can hardly complain overmuch. Though it did amuse the hell out of
mitchy to hear me screaming about how we didn't need another damn bird because we hadn't finished killing the last one, and "WHY WON'T THAT BLOODY SPELL STICK?!?" I levelled my enfeebling magic like whoa because there was a PL who did little but helped from time to time, and our tank was a Paladin who told me not to heal him too much because he needed to heal himself to generate hate, though he blew a lot of MP using Flash to blind the damn birds so how he expected to keep throwing Cure IIIs at himself when he was blowing MP and stood to get interrupted mid-cure by being smacked upside the head by beak-from-hell, I could not tell you. Anyway, that all means that I passed the time throwing enfeebling spells that hardly ever stuck. *sigh*Also, things you never want to see when you're trying to keep track of when your Samurai loses the Haste effect so you can recast: a /tell advertising the services of a gilseller. I keep getting these; it's like Twitter spambots. I've made more GM calls about the bloody spambots than I've ever had to for anything else. It's really depressing that bots are just so prevalent. People who are obviously gifted at coding are using it to sell shit (understandable), break rules (not so much) and piss people off (inexcusable). I wonder if this is how the large contingent of Chinese gilsellers is getting around the recently passed law against selling fake money in MMOs. Either way, I wish it'd stop.
In less boring news, I got Chaos Magic Chapter 23 up yesterday, and am now sitting down to write an article. Woo! I'm thinking I might even get the last chapter out tomorrow, time and energy permitting. After all, massive hiatus and everything; all it really needs is editing and putting together. Nooooooo problem. But that depends on how the article goes.
Waiting to hear whether I got the job I interviewed for on Thursday. I was told I'd hear by Monday - I had a little bit of wishful thinking wherein I hoped they'd decide straight away, but that was not to be and so now I wait 'til Monday and try not to think about it too much. I'm hopeful and reasonably confident, but even if it doesn't work out, I've got people falling all over themselves to give me interviews, so it's not like I lack for options.
Things aren't going so badly, all things considered.