The Lost Cardian

Neyla

Neyla, Halifirien and Chronofantasy break bad on a yagudo.

arranged for us to do the Rank 7 Windurst missions for Chronofantasy. We have the cardian fight and BCNM battle against the four yagudo down to a science at this point, although I died in the attempt. My Stoneskin dropped right as the Summoner started using Astral Flow. I survived the blast, but I had hate from using Hexa Strike and the yagudo finished me off. We always save him for last, so I waited until the fight was over before I raised myself.

We went into Castle Oztroja to farm a Judgment Key. I love it that I'm Lv. 70 now, because I don't get aggro unless I'm up near the top floor. We didn't have any problems getting past the Yagudo High Priest, either. I was amused to see the Yagudo Avatar standing on a higher platform, but we didn't go anywhere near him.

We leveled our NPCs a bit in the Sanctuary of Zitah, but my modem seems to be dying and I kept getting disconnected. It was really starting to piss me off. Nothing went wrong for a good 90 minutes after that, so I switched over to Monk and managed to get a party in the jungle, only to get disconnected after killing the second goblin. It was thirty minutes before I could get online, and by then they'd already replaced me.

I was only about 200 away from reaching Lv. 29, so I went to San d'Oria and fought some Easy Prey mobs until I dinged. Neyla was running around Qufim and offered to powerlevel me a bit, but I quit after the third or fourth fight because getting a PL at that level is just depressing.

Once

The Dancing Weapon and Cardians want to beat me.

I was back on White Mage, we went back to the ruins to get a Ten of Cups card to finish the cardian quests. I got one pretty fast, but we stuck around for respawns. We managed to get a Ten of Coins card worth about 200k because of its place in the Opo-Opo Crown quest. A Japanese taru WHM wandered in trying to get the Coins card, and Neyla sold him ours so we could split the gil. That bit of money gave me the extra I needed to buy a set of Blessed Pumps, but none were for sale in Jeuno.

The Cups card was only 10k at the Jeuno Auction House, so Neyla bought one and we finished the quest. We were both misting up a little at the way the story resolved. Neyla decided to keep the Green Cape as a token, but I sold mine. I'll just pay a bard to let me watch the cutscene again if I get nostalgic.

Fool's Errands

Quieren was aggravated when I logged on because Hayatox had some errands to run and probably wouldn't be coming for the trek through Pso'Xja. Q wasn't sure Andreva would be coming, either; he was grumbling about replacing members of the static because all the "foot dragging" was killing us.

"Taking a day to farm because Truegrave's mom was in an accident doesn't count as 'foot dragging,' Q," I told him.

"Bah. I'm tired and bitchy," he said.

I'm too relaxed for my own good, I guess. I don't get worked up about delays because I know the missions will still be there when everyone is ready. Of course, I can afford to be relaxed because I'm not taking time away from my family to do missions and getting pissed when people don't show up. "You're the happy little turtle," Quieren told me at one point, "and I'm the irritable bunny."

Andreva

The Gargoyle's in Pso'xja are very tiresome.

had a family emergency, but the rest of us decided to push ahead. The Pso'Xja run is pretty straightforward: work your way through sixteen small rooms, each one of which has a door which pops a doll NM called Gargoyle. The rooms have hecteyes and cryptonberries and magic pots in them. The first set of rooms was easy because the mobs didn't aggro, but it started going downhill when we reached the harder mobs. Our party setup -- NIN, WHM, BLMx3 -- didn't help matters, but we gave it a shot.

The end came when a mob slept me and I couldn't get through the door in time. I'd read the best thing to do in that situation is to pop the Gargoyle and let it kill you so you can be tractored through the door. Unfortunately, the doll killed me and immediately ran through the door and started fighting Quieren, Truegrave and the others while they were already fighting other things. We wiped out, and that was the end of the run. Quieren is going to recruit a few heavy hitters for the next attempt.

Neyla and I finally set out to finish the cardian quests in Jeuno. The prerequisite quests "A Cook's Pride" and "Hoist the Jelly, Roger" had to be taken care of, so we went into the Crawler's Nest with a stack of rolanberries to torture our way through a small chain of NMs in hopes of fighting the green crawler and getting royal jelly.

It

The Guardian Crawlers are unreliable little worms.

sucked. Sometimes we'd place a rolanberry and nothing would happen. At one point the event was skipped because I was renewing buffs. We were also delayed when some idiot Black Mage use a -ga spell in the sac room and got all the lizards attacking his party; they all died, so I had to raise them with the help of a passing Beastmaster while Neyla was fighting Killer Mushrooms in the room where one of them had died.

We finally gave up in disgust and started killing the wasps near the entrance to the nest. It was less frustrating to get the royal jelly from them, although I'd like to go back some day and fight the green crawler.

The cardian quest is heartbreaking, to say the least. We're going to help someone with the Windurst mission cardian fight and yagudo BCNM tomorrow, so we'll get the card we need while we're tromping through the Horutoto Ruins.

Smashed

Neyla has been tinkering with the idea of soloing the Prime Avatars for awhile, and we were bored enough to give it a try today. I went along as backup and to provide Raise III if it didn't work out. We decided to start with Titan because he tends to be the easiest.

He

Titan Prime smashes Neyla.

woke up on the wrong side of the protocrystal today, because he was in a bad mood and wanted to take it out on Neyla. He was hitting hard, and it started turning sour fast. As he tends to do in these situations, Neyla told me to run for it. I was going to escape us out, but that's when Titan smashed Neyla into the ground and killed him. I started tearing ass for the exit. Titan was on my heels the entire time, and he finished me off just as I was clicking the exit. Neyla's going to read up on strategies for the fights so we can try them again.

We were going to level Neyla's NPC for a bit in the Quicksand Caves, but we forgot to escape first and only had access to spiders and worms in the lower area leading to the cloister. Waiting for repops was a pain, so we finally just left.

To stave off boredom, we decided to try the escort mission in the necropolis. I've never done one of those before and wasn't sure what to expect, so it's no surprise the NPC died in the very first room to Lost Soul aggro. We zoned out and tried again. We were doing fine up to the Liches and Fallen Knights. The NPC died at some point while we were fighting them.

I'd

A White Mage with a hammer is deadly to Fallen Knights.

been eager to find out if I could solo a Lich, and it turns out I can. The White Mage mantra is usually "Easy Prey? Run Away!" but Hexa Strike was wiping the floor with them. Some Ancient Papyrus dropped and Neyla looked and saw there was a Lv. 50 Dragoon in the area. I had him leave his party and invited him so he could lot it.

We decided to try our hands on some coffer mobs after that. The Tomb Mage and Tomb Warriors still aggro me, but I was still doing great damage against them. The Spriggans were Decent, and our foray into the depths of the necropolis ended when Neyla attacked a Spriggan and it brought a friend. One of its weapons did a Defense Down effect, and their Dimensional Death attacks didn't help. I cast Escape and got us out of there.

While all this was going on, Elemmire was hanging out in Jeuno and hoping enough people would show up for a Dynamis run. It didn't happen, although it might have if she'd proposed it as a farming run from the start.

Neyla Guest Entry: Hodgepodge

Neyla and Halifirien farm hippogryphs with friends.

I tossed my pearl to the HNM linkshell I was associated with today, in the little bit of time I was actually online. With the recent schism it suffered, the shell and the message boards its members and ex-members frequent have been alight with bickering, flames and snide remarks, some with merit and some without. All of it adds up to a lot of the type of drama that turns me sour on endgame in the first place, and makes me swear there's a passive job trait called "Drama Queen" that kicks in with every job post-70.

Again, life is simpler when you don't care about things you don't actually need. The armor and riches are great, but the cost in time and friends is sometimes too high.

Maybe

Fear and loathing in Dynamis-San d'Oria.

I'll find another HNM LS at some point or eventually make my way back to Sky for something other than a merit/XP party. As things stand at the moment though, I'm in no great rush for either one. I'm simply focusing on making gil and helping people for the time being, but for the last couple days I've been concentrating more on getting some rest. Real life exhaustion can make the game seem torturous.

My little bit of time online has been limited to leveling NPC (43 now) and a merits points party with Apu (SAM), Veresko (RNG), Nanunanoo (WHM) and Wulfgar (PLD) from WickedWayz. Due to a pair of parties that were already stepping on each other's toes by wiping out every Decorative Weapon they could find, we had to travel around Sky a bit to look for worthwhile prey and eventually settled on Aura Weapons. RDMs have never been my favorite mob class to fight and I quickly remembered why. Unless you grab them just as they pop, you'll be Dispeling them four or five times to erase all the buffs.

While we were fighting there was some talk about the new uber-avatar prime fights that were introduced to the game this week. The rewards seem small for all the effort (thus far anyway) but I know there's an army of high level players salivating over the challenge. I can't wait to be slaughtered by an avatar for the very first time. Try as they might, the regular primes have always failed in their attempts to knock this mithra down.

Farming Runs

Truegrave

The barge in Carpenter's Landing is the only place to catch Muddy Siredons.

had a family emergency which kept him out of our CoP static's scheduled run, so we decided to gather items for the upcoming fights. Bajarrat sold us ten Cluster Cores for use in the Snoll Tzar fight. Quieren and Asmodious headed out to Uleguerand Range to get Snow Lilies from the tigers. Since I'm the fishing expert, I was tasked with catching Muddy Siredons for use against the mithran trackers. Aarjuna tagged along to Carpenter's Landing and we started making the circuit on the barge.

The fishing kinda sucked, really. The siredons are Rare/Ex, which means you can only catch one on each ride. It wouldn't be so bad if the Blackened Muddy Siredons you obtain from the tonberry NPC were stackable. They take up too much space to be really be practical, so I stopped after getting three. I fished up the NM pugil Aipaloovik as a joke, even though it doesn't drop anything.

With

It's not easy to find a tiger to give you flowers.

that out of the way we joined the others to kill tigers. Hayatox and Andreva turned up eventually, and we soon learned why those flowers go about 50K at the auction house: the drop rate sucks galka butt. I called my NPC and was pleased to see him ding 35 while we were out there. Andreva, who's been leveling her NPC for ages, is set to do the NPC's G3 quest. It must be handy to be a Monk with a portable healer who can use Cure IV.

In other news, additional drama with The Nameless has me and Neyla ready to chuck our pearls over the side. It would be a small loss, considering how little time we spend in there. I'm still debating. I'm going to see how Saturday night's Dynamis run goes, but I'm thinking of dropping out of that, too. Saturdays have been my vacation from the game for months, and I like it that way. A weekday Dynamis shell would be more my speed if I can find one that doesn't wait until 10 p.m. to get started.

The Immortal Fisher, Lu Shang

I'd like to be in charge of the LaTheine Plateau Convention and Visitors Bureau, because as soon as today's maintenance and update ended the ??? in Carbuncle's circle of stones was flooded with players eager to get the initial cutscene for the battles against the souped-up Prime Avatars. Instead of six, you can take an alliance of 18 to fight an avatar with four elemental friends who like to spam Tier III -ga spells. Sign me up, because I wouldn't mind getting my hands on the new Ramuh Club.

Today was mostly about fishing. I need gil to buy Blessed gear and to fund my upcoming Maat fight. I also wanted to work on the fishing tourney. I've caught dozens of bladefish in East Sarutabaruta using meatballs, and my current entry is a monster measuring 101[lm]/498[Pz]. I got 599 points for it, but I don't know how high I'm ranked in the top 50. I only have to be in the top 20 to get the ring.

The

Irmilant is the Lu Shang expert in Rabao.

most horrifying part of my day came when I rode the ferry with Neyla. I had a lot of meatballs to use, and the first bite I got was a Ryugu Titan. I wore it down -- they don't have a lot of stamina, but they fight so much it's hard to keep up -- and the bastard snapped my Lu Shang.

"FUCK!" is what I yelled.

"And that's when the fish jumped out of the water and called him a fucking noob," Neyla said later when I was recounting this to Veresko.

Let me tell you, it's a very sick feeling to see your main source of income snap and realize you can't fix it yourself. I had nightmare images of going to buy Ancient Lumber andf discovering it was some astronomical price. Fortunately, it's only 50k for a piece. I bought one and hit Rabao to let Irmilant repair it for me. Doing that earned me a new title: "The Immortal Fisher, Lu Shang."

I've got to crank up my woodworking so I can take care of this if it happens again. Veresko has a woodworking mule high enough to repair it for me, but I don't want to wait around if I don't have to.

Bored

This was one of those days when you're not sure why you logged on. There's nothing planned and it all seems like too much hassle. Better to log off and sleep or read or watch DVDs or go shopping or anything else.

When

A firedrake takes a bite out of Zoner.

I logged on, I ended up joining Veresko, Zoner, Nanunanoo and Otak in Cape Riverne to flush out some wyvern NM Nanu has been wanting to kill. I had already muled my BST gear, so I went as WHM this time.

We killed a lot of wyverns and hippogryphs, but we never found the NM. Nanu got aggro from an Atomic Cluster during one of the fights and ran off a short distance to die away from us. We moved camps, but during the second wyvern fight we got an add and I had to teleport us out of there. I took a hit and got interrupted, but the second cast worked and I landed us in Tahrongi Canyon with 22 HP to my name.

I spent some time flipping switches for Quieren in the necropolis so he could find his Black Mage AF pants -- "They look like MC Hammer pants!" he remarked with some glee -- and we even ventured out to the glacier entrance to check the coffer spawn there. There was one last place in the main drag he hadn't checked, so of course that's where the coffer was and the glacier trip was unnecessary.

I went back to Windurst and was going to work on the fishing tournament a little, but Neyla had another taru adoptee named Jasper who was going for Rank 4 and needed the key from Porphyrion in Delkfutt's Tower.

The

Jasper, Halifirien and Neyla build tp on a gigas.

outpost teleport put me at the base of the tower and we worked our way to the top and started building tp because the NM wasn't there. When Jasper asked why we were building up 300% TP I said it was because we wanted to show off. Porpyrion died on the opening skillchain. Neyla and I forgot our keys, so we warped to Windurst and grabbed them to show Jasper which room to go to at the bottom of the elevator.

I finished out my evening by hitting the jungle and leveling my NPC a bit. Gauldeval reached Lv. 34, and my shield skill hit 96. I'm getting good shield skillups every time I take him out there, so I'm killing two birds with one stone. I just need about 105 more levels to cap my shield skill.

It's a nice setup; I teleport out and buff myself before resting to full, and then work my way around the clearing and killing every crawler I see. It takes about 25-30 minutes for us to reach quota, and I'm not even out of MP because I only cast Stoneskin, Haste and Dia II. The cats and malboro there checked Easy Prey to me at 69, so I can level him there for a long time.