Curse You, StarOnion!

My

Red feathers galore for RedGirl.

new chocobo, RedGirl, reached adolescence today and finally has the red feathers I'd been so eager to see. I'm raising her mental stats so I can teach her some abilities, hoping like hell that I'll still have time to max out her physical stats after she learns what I want.

I'm doing it because of StarOnion, that evil green chocobo that's become a thorn in my side during the chocobo races. I finally jumped full-bore into the racing scene when I found out you can use the chocobucks you've won to buy special intense training programs for the chocobo you're raising, but StarOnion has a nasty habit of winning because she has the Gallop and Canter abilities. Bah. Second place doesn't pay very well.

Canter is the tricky one because you can't learn it until later in the bird's life. Gallop can be learned early if you raise your chocobo in San d'Oria, so I'm thinking it might be best to get Canter for RedGirl and hope she passes it on to her offspring. I could raise that chick in Sandy, teach it Gallop early and then max it out as my racing bird.

Meh. I'll work it out later. I still have that green chocobo egg to worry about.

In other news, Neyla came up with a great leveling location for our Ninjas. Lower Delkfutt's Tower has some magic pots and four gigas on the bottom floor if you go through the locked door. We keep the keys in our moghouses for stuff like this, so we spent some time in there.

You

Lower Delkfutt's Tower has nice tough gigas to fight.

can burn off an Empress Band charge in two rounds of monsters, provided the person doing the powerleveling takes out the two ghosts in the hallway. I dinged 33 and used my two-hour so I'd have my timer reset before BigKahunas took on Proto-Omega. We changed jobs and I powerleveled Neyla to 33 and a buffer.

Speaking of Proto-Omega, he died fast. Quieren said he'd tell everyone to use their 2-hour abilities when it was near death, so I was surprised when he shouted for it because we'd barely been in there ten minutes. The only deaths were from a gunpod that got loose and started creating havok. Quieren got two Homam pieces out of it.

I rode out to Whitegate to buy some Wildgrass Seeds when it was all over. I need to start growing more carrots.

Another Hell Level

With Shakrami no longer viable for Ninja leveling, we had to find a new spot.

I'd

How can something so fluffy hit so hard?

hit on the idea of Lufaise Meadows, but the sheep, bugards and gigas near the Valkurm Dunes vortex were on the freakin' insane side. Trying to kill them was a nightmare, so we returned to Windurst and ran around a few different areas around Jeuno.

We finally settled on Sauromugue Champaign. The skinks and goblins were almost always rated Decent, but the coeurls and yagudo were in the Even-Tough range. It meant a lot of annoying running around, though.

It was a short day for me, and I logged out after we got back to Windurst so I could watch the first disc of Prison Break.

Fall of the Astral Candescence

Be careful what you wish for.

Neyla

When more than a dozen monsters attack General Zazarg at once, it's not pretty.

wanted some Besieged action, and today he got it in spades. All three armies attacked Al Zahbi at Lv. 7 strength.

The first two were back-to-back assaults by the Mamool Ja and Undead Swarm. The skeletons and lamias were marching before we'd managed to repel the first army. Lally, the taru White Mage from some of our other Besieged events, teamed up with us again.

I stuck with General Zazarg as usual, keeping him healed up as best I could. I eventually ran out of MP, popped a Megaelixir, and ran out again. That's about the time he finally got overwhelmed and died. I moved over to the mithra general's area near the Hall of Binding to keep track of her.

We returned to Windurst to work on Ninja in the Maze of Shakrami. We saw the trolls were preparing to invade, but we weren't really in the mood to go back there. That changed at the end of Neyla's turn on Ninja and they'd only just started to march. We didn't have anything else to do, so we went straight to Mhaura to catch the ferry.

The battle had just started when we reached Whitegate.

It

They took the Astral Candescence.

was an extremely nasty fight. Zazarg was back on his feet, but he didn't stay that way. Watching him fight was like watching an old Tazmanian Devil cartoon, because he was swarmed with mobs and it was like a cloud of flailing limbs and crunching sounds. As more and more monsters swarmed in, it was inevitable that he'd fall.

General Mihli was the last, and we made a valiant effort to keep her alive, but the horde that had just killed Zazarg moved directly to her position and took her out. The doors to the Hall of Binding were thrown open and players rushed in to save the Astral Candescence.

Players can't stand up to that many bombs, scorpions and trolls. Weakened players were resting in front of the Astral Plinth when one of the scorpions skittered in and began one-shotting them. The big troll NM stormed in and and was nuked down to ash by every mage in the area, but it didn't stop the assault. They took the Astral Candesence.

I got a little over 3000 limit points from the day, so it wasn't a complete waste.

Brain the Size of a Planet

Boredom

This place isn't so scary now.

makes you do silly things, so this morning I decided to hit Arrapago Reef to unlock the Puppetmaster job. It's something I tried back in the first week of the expansion's release, traveling out to the boat with Neyla, but I'd forgotten to speak to the galka at the automaton shop and was too lazy to go back.

It's not as spooky on Beastmaster. Having a karakul pet as for a bodyguard took away any worries I used to have about chigoes and imps when I did it on White Mage. It also doesn't hurt that I have the map of Caedarva Mire now and didn't spend half my time wandering aimlessly.

I snagged the automaton and returned to Whitegate, waited for the day to change, and spoke to the appropriate NPCs to finish unlocking the job. The initial list of names sucked, so I paid 10k to change the named to "Marvin" in honor of my favorite paranoid android from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. My alternate choice was "Bishop," since Lance Henriksen was awesome in the Alien sequels.

I zoned out to Bhaflau Thickets and death-warped back to Windurst by attacking a spider. Good times.

I geared up my White Mage for the day's limbus run. We finished another Omega set by running the zone with the dhalmels. I was annoyed when I arrived in Port Jeuno and found out Quieren had chosen Kyrial over me for the tanking party. I've been in the tank party since... oh, I don't know... the start of the damned linkshell.

"I can't invite you from Windurst," he joked. "When have you known me to be patient?"

"Every other run," I told him. "You've always waited until I got there before," I shot back. Technically there's no shame in not being in the tanking party, but fuck it, I felt like I'd been demoted. Kyrial went afk and Celvantes died at one point. When Quieren sent me a "..." /tell, I said "Hey, don't look at me."

Everyone

Introducing my automaton, Marvin.

got four Ancient Beastcoins, and we'll be doing the Omega fight on Wednesday. I'm willing to bet attendance will be high.

I logged out and came back for the ENM and escort. Our new Ninja couldn't make it because construction had knocked out his internet (I think this makes the third week since he officially joined, and I've yet to actually meet him), so Cmdrfly tanked.

The escort mission was a clusterfuck. A Ninja was soloing it and two Japanese players were waiting ahead of us in line. The duo, a White Mage and Beastmaster, managed to propose through Auto-Translate that we should team up as one party. The language barrier turned it into a nightmare because there were multiple false starts from one person or the other being outside the zone when Cannau started her run, meaning the people still outside wouldn't get credit for the win. The JP WHM also started Cannau running up to the switch plate and almost got Cannau and Neyla killed by the exploding bomb.

New rule: No non-English speakers in the escort. Ever.

In other news, my beloved Emperor Fish have been undercut to hell on the auction house. They were a nice supplement, netting 10k each. Now in less than a week they've plummeted to 1.8k and I'm not happy about it. I knew it had to happen sooner or later, since I was one of a handful of fishermen hauling them in. All I can do now is hope the impatient asshole who caused this is scared away and prices can go back up again. I kinda doubt it.