Break from the Beast

Neyla

We can finally wear the complete Beastmaster AF.

and I returned to the Quicksand Caves and blazed our way through the last bit we needed to reach 60 and then got ourselves a 5k buffer. We can wear our Beast Trousers, the final piece of Artifact Armor. It's time to begin our "break," which means we won't be going hardcore at grinding out levels for awhile. We'll still be running around on the job and skilling up scythe in the Crawler's Nest when we're bored. There's new gear to buy, after all.

I fished a few squid in Qufim and went to Jeuno to buy a Jujitsu Gi, which I can't wait to wear. I'm going to level Monk tomorrow. I also need to dig out my lowbie MNK gear for Neyla, who plans to take the job through the Dunes soon so he can start leveling Warrior.

Besieged?

This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
-- T.S. Eliot,
The Hollow Men

I wanted to quest my Olduum Ring and then go level Monk for the rest of the day, but word came down that troll mercenaries were on the verge of invading Al Zahbi. There was no way in hell I was going to miss the first Besieged event on our server.

Neyla

We're waiting for the trolls to arrive...

scrambled to get back to town as I moved up onto the walkway overlooking the gates. Elemmire, Bajarrat and several other people I know were already there, waiting for the invasion. Spirits were high. It wasn't hard to imagine soldiers sharpening their blades in anticipation. Players were checking the Besieged map to track the progress of the army.

The cry would go up with every change in status. "They're at 95%!" one would shout. "We're all gonna die!" shouted another.

I called a MayflyFamiliar jug pet and freaked out some people who saw it and thought the fight had started. Veresko even tried to shoot it.

Neyla arrived, and I sent out invitations to him and Veresko so we could form our own three-man wrecking crew. When Uliwela logged on, we grabbed him as well.

More and more people crammed themselves into the area to get a shot at the monsters. Everyone joked and tried to pass the time without going nuts as the number of mercenaries slowly ticked upward. 96%... 97%... 98%... 99%...

And then word came over. The trolls were on the march. Members of Veresko's Sky linkshell joined up with us to form a full alliance.

Veresko

Yep... still waiting on those trolls...

ran outside to see if he could spot them on widescan. I cast buffs and waited, giddy with the excitement of standing in the middle of a sea of Optical Hats. Quieren and his manaburn party had returned and formed a line near the gate.

Word filtered back that Kaizen had intercepted the trolls and were killing them on the road. Howls of outrage sounded through the square, but we relieved to know they couldn't kill them all.

"Ladies and gentlmen and cannon fodder!" Elemmire shouted over the throng. "It's my duty to lead you into battle. I'm not going to lie to you, some of you may time out. But when your hand goes into a pile of LAG that used to be your best friend's face, you'll know what to do!"

"They're coming faster than I thought," Veresko said. "They're almost here."

Lockdown. The cutscene began with the appearance of our invaders. Neyla cheered at the sight of the Black Pudding slithering beside the troll, shouting "Kill 'em all!"

And then silence.

"Where are they?"

The server's first Besieged fizzled like a wet firecracker. About a dozen monsters made it inside and were instantly cut down by the waiting horde of over 300 eager players. I managed to get in one swing on a crawler before it was over.

There

Fighting a Notorious Monster is fun when you don't have much MP to spare.

wasn't much to do after that. The Undead Swarm was massing for invasion, but I didn't feel like sticking around for it. Neyla and I quested our Olduum Rings and returned to town. I bought ingredients for Insect Paste to see what I could catch in Al Zahbi; I caught six moat carp, some sazanbaligi, and something I couldn't reel in because it fought like a Takitaro. Neyla and Uli went out to duo Marid's for some drop, and I was more than happy to leave town and give them Raise IIIs when they died.

I picked up Feriz and teleported him out to Rabao and made several stacks of Insect Paste for him so it wouldn't go to waste. Smothered by the anticlimax of it all, I wandered out to Xarcabard for awhile to level my NPC and encountered a ghost NM called Ereshkigal, which was a fun fight because I didn't have a lot of MP and couldn't spam Banish III. It didn't drop the Lucent Cape, which I was later amused to learn is worth about two million gil.

Hopefully Besieged will be tweaked to make the monsters harder to kill, or maybe the fights will be harder once the shiny-and-new aspect has worn off and there aren't nearly as many people waiting to repel the onslaught.

I Hate Paladins!

Neyla and I unlocked Blue Mage yesterday. We also traveled out to Arrapago Reef to unlock Puppetmaster, but I didn't realize until we were almost there that I'd forgotten to talk to an NPC back in town. I'll finish it later, since I have no plans to level either job.

The

The Ranger-type Antican Aedilis has very poor defense.

main event was our return to Beastmaster. We're making our final push for 60, and we made our camp in the Quicksand Caves from the far south-western entrance from the Western Altepa Desert. I truly love this camp. There are five or six lizards running around just inside and several Tough and Very Tough anticans roaming down near the weighted doors. It's nicely concentrated, an improvement over all the running around we had to do during our last Quicksand Caves visit.

The Ranger, Warrior and Black Mage anticans were pretty weak and provided no problems. The Paladin-type Antesiganus was a serious pain in the ass. You'd build up enough tp for a Rampage killshot and see it use Cure IV on itself after you'd released your pet. Bah!

We only had to zone from linking mobs two or three times, and I had a nasty mischarm which earned me a lizard's Fireball to the head. No deaths or anything. I depleted my short supply of Echo Drops since the bastards like to spam Jamming Wave.

We

At least there are things to charm on the ferry to Al Zahbi.

finished out the evening by traveling to Jeuno for a mission cutscene and then riding out to Al Zahbi to flag the Olduum Ring quest. Sorta like the Tavnazian Ring, it teleports you once a day to the Wajaom Woodlands near the town. I'm a Windurst boy who refuses to keep my homepoint in Jeuno, and the ring will allow me to keep that going. It looks like an easy enough quest, but we were too tired to finish it.

We're only 5k away from 60. We'll go back into the caves Thursday, get our level and a healthy buffer, and then walk away from the job for awhile. We have gear to buy. My current shopping list is 1) Jujitsu Gi, 2) Woodsman Ring, 3) Haubergeon, 4) Kabraken's Axe, 5) Scorpion Harness, 6) Ochiudo's Kote.

Don't Make Me Punch You

It seems like everyone is scrambling to unlock and level the three new jobs, which makes this a wonderful time to level other lowbie job to round out the party slots. It's a testament to how seldom I level that I was shocked to players already in the thirties with the new stuff.

In

Five more levels and I can stop dressing like a Christmas elf.

this case, I decided to level Monk. I got an invitation from a Paladin who was putting a party together for a run at Garlaige Citadel. The PLD brought a Lv. 75 WHM along to powerlevel us, which sorta irritated me from the start and then really irritated me when I saw how lazy it was making her. For one thing, she never cured herself. No curing equals no hate-holding. I can only hope her parrying, shield and all those other nifty tank skills are capped from another job, because she was pretty bad.

I finally got so fed up that I would start tanking whenever the bats or beetles would go for the mage. I didn't have problems holding hate, either. I was an MP sponge when I'd do that, but that was the PL's problem.

The PLD got disconnected and couldn't log on again, and the leadership dot fell to me. Normally I'd dodge that responsiblity like I was pushing a spider out the door with a stick, but after several sessions of making parties for the linkshell static it's not as scary to me. I got a tarutaru Ninja; even though she hadn't played the game in months and was trying to figure out how to setup macros on the Xbox 360, she was still tanking rings around the Paladin.

The PL warped out on us without a word. "Playtime's over, kids," I said to the party. The best part is the xp wasn't affected. Zylia, our Samurai, was skillchaining with me and the others. It was awesome.

The highlight for me (other than getting my MNK to 35) was getting a chance to party with some Blue Mages. We had two different ones over the course of the session, and it was wild. Both were BLU/NIN, dual-wielding swords and spamming Bludgeon and using debuffs like Sprout Smack, Feather Storm and (my personal favorite) Wild Oats.

Neyla

Neyla and I fight our first imp.

and I ran around Al Zahbi a bit and got Hadafal to guide us out the gate Quieren couldn't find yesterday. We got there in one piece, although we had to stop at the zone so I could give Raise III to some players. I left to do a little fishing in the Sea Serpent Grotto. I tried to guide Neyla through the Puppetmaster quest by looking at an online map, he got slaughtered by a bunch of fleas just before he reached Arrapago Reef. We'll go together tomorrow.

In other news, I bought the Male Hume Mannequin this morning. Only three more to go before I have the entire set.