Star-ordained Warrior.

When I woke up this morning, I was 15,000xp away from level 57, and was hoping to narrow that gap down to 10,000xp.

As I type this, I am still 15,000xp away from Level 57. /cry

Ah well, not all is lost. As the title so blatantly reveals, I managed to get Mission 5-1 completed, completely quite by chance, too. This afternoon, nobody was seeking, so I was simply idling around Lower Jeuno, periodically checking the Jeuno Auction House for Mythril Ores and Beastcoins to add to my collection. Every once in a while, I'd give a Teleport-Vahzl to somebody for the standard one thousand gil. It soon became apparent that I was teleporting a lot of people from the same party over to Xarcabard, and eventually, curiosity got the better of me. I asked what they were doing there.

"M5-1 ^^"

"M5-1?!"

Needless to say, after returning their Teleport money, I managed to find myself a spot in the overall scheme of things. Granted, I was their seventh member, but they had no qualms about going through the fight a second time. Given that people in my linkshell had already tried earlier in the morning, and had lost didn't help to quease any worries I had. But they assured me the fight was easy.

Arriving at Fei'Yin yet again this week was rather odd. I've been here three or four times already in the past few days, all for various reasons. I have yet to return here to try and get my Warp II scroll, but that's another matter altogether. It was rather amusing though, since I had to rummage through my Mog Safe to try and find equipment that a Level 50 could wear. Fortunately, I had my Gold Hairpin, Wonder Braccae and um, Light Solea to replace my Healer's Cap, Panteloons, and Boots. When we got inside the Cermet Portal, I remember thinking how odd a Burning Circle is in the middle of Fei'Yin, which is about as cold a place as you can get.



The fight was pretty easy with a Bard and Black Mage in the party. They'd all pull the newly spawned skeletons over to one side and keep them slept while the other members would pummel the main boss of the fight, Archlich Taber'quoan. For a skeleton, that guy sure has a lot of HP, but hey, you don't get called "Archlich" for nothing.

Things got tricky at the start when I first discovered that the battle arena was larger than I had expected (felt a lot bigger than the arena in the Waughroon Shrine) and thanks to the Level Cap, my in-built equip macros to ready my Light Staff when I wanted to Cure somebody would interrupt my casting. In the end, I had to type out everything by hand. My fingers still hurt from jamming in "/ma "Cure III" " as fast as I could. ; ;

The other guys were going to head off to complete Mission 5-2 later, but they wanted me to be level 60 first before they'd let me go. Oh well. Then again, wasn't 5-2 originally done by a full alliance of Level 50s? /shrug.

The other funny thing that happened was chancing upon another miner by the name of Younai. He was selling Darksteel Ores in Jeuno for 5000 gil apiece, so I figured I might as well pick up a few for Glueforever to craft up, since his Smithing reaps him nice profit off Darksteel. The definition of "few" certainly didn't match up to what we were expecting.

32 Darksteel Ores and 64,000 gil later, we're not only scrambling around trying to find space to store all this Darksteel, but we probably singlehandedly created an overnight shortage of Iron Ore in Jeuno, Bastok, and San d'Oria. I suppose you had to be there in order to grasp the hilarity of the situation, but oh well. Turns out that Younai is one of the Chinese gilfarmers, and while we were wondering if supporting the online gil selling was a good idea, we couldn't really say no to cheap Darksteel. C'est la vie.

After trying for a few more hours to get a party (and subsequently failing) I eventually resigned myself to try and mine again, although I decided to pop down to the Palborough Mines for a change. After all, I needed the Mythril, the common drops are the same as in Gusgen, and Platinum Ores would go a long way to financing my Goldsmithing once I hit the dreaded 41-48 stage. One hour later, I come to the conclusion that mining Pally alone is a losing affair. The points are so spread out that it just isn't worth it to mine here unless you're in a team, much like logging in the Jugner Forest. I briefly entertained the idea of creating a mining linkshell so we could mine out Palborough effiectively, but that is more than likely not going to happen. Oh well.