15 November, 2004

Rank 9!

Yep, this past Saturday, I managed to get together a rather rag-tag party together and go get Rank 9! We had to improvise quite a bit, since while the guides recommend a 12-man Lvl 65+ Alliance to beat the NMs, we went with a single party consisting of five people around 60-65 and one BLM75.

To any other Windurstians who feel like attempting Missions 8-1 and 8-2 in the near future, this takes AGES. All in all, we spent a whooping eight hours completing this, upon which we immediately disbanded and ran to go eat. We had a bit of trouble beating 8-1, partially because the endless links and aggros that surrounded the hut wherein lay Dirtyhanded whatshisname was a right pain to get by. We ended up killing the Orcs, my getting aggro from inside the hut, then having to Reraise, then killing the outside Orcs again before we all went in and killed the NM for the first time. Once that was done, we camped the corner to prevent aggro/links until he spawned two more times. Easily done, no real sweat.

Okay, so maybe Aeroga III was kinda scary, but a quick Stun and Baraera fixed that.

8-2 was a right pain though. Not because it was difficult, oh no. We actually cheated on the last two Queen Cardians, with me subbing my Summoner (you can tell I wasn't very happy about going WHM60/SMN10), Sneaking up, spawning the Cardian NMs, then Carby pulling one of them in he process back to camp. (Carby very quickly learned the meaning of 'pwned', too >_<) By the time we killed the pulled NM, the other had despawned, and voila! Cutscene!

The real pain was traversing all of Vana'diel to get the four rings we needed, and coming back to visit Apururu goodness knows how many times in between. We went from Windurst Woods, to Waters, back to Woods, to Fei'Yin, to Davoi, back to Woods, to the Horutoto Ruins, back to Woods, to Walls, back (again) to Woods, over to the Horutoto Ruins, back to Woods, back to Walls, back again to (you guessed where) Woods, before getting the final cutscene.

Simply put, it was a LOT of running. The random accidents that happened in between didn't help much either. Oh well. In any case, I got my Rank 9, and loving it!

The 80,000 gil I got also managed to boost my finances so that I could now fund an entire stack of Gold Ingots! Profit? Immedaitely went, crafted a stack out of Gold Ores and Nuggets (all for +0.2 ; ;) and waited about a day before a very sweet 371k appeared in my d-box. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any Nuggets anywhere, so I've had to take a forced break from skilling up Goldsmithing for a bit. ; ;

So, I found other endeavours. I dabbled a bit in Alchemy, as you know, and since the pricess of Chips haven't reset, I won't be leveling that up in a while. I leveled up my Smithing, throwing away about 10k to get Level 24. Somewhere in there though, I found the joy of desynthing Silver Rings. Let's just say that I've had okay experiences with desynthing Rings, but after meeting a fisherman who had 20-odd rings on him, I spent an hour (and about five stacks of Lightning Crystals) breaking them up. The results? 33k profit, all in one hour, without even leaving Jeuno. I now have a new addition to my shopping list whenever I go visit the various AHs. ^^

Finally, Tuuf is now a BLM50! If there's anything to enjoy about BLM50, it's the /cheering everybody does when a Freeze MB goes off, not to mention that being in charge of the skillchain to begin with is a very refreshing break from having to monitor when people do their weaponskills. First time I ever had to look at melees' TP as a BLM...

I was so excited, I built a macro, demonstrated it a few times, and then clarified with everybody how it worked. We pull an Antica, the melee say they're ready, and I hit the Freeze macro. The announcements fly by, the weapon skills come, but I'm standing strangely still.

I had forgotten to put "/ma Freeze" in my Freeze macro! ; ;

Yes, yes, it was very embarrassing. >_<

Three tries later, we were 0/3. Seems that we couldn't quite get the timing down right for the Ranger to get in a Sharpshot and Piercing Arrow, but eventually, the fourth time was a charm.

Skillchain: Distortion.
Tuufless casts Freeze.
Magic Burst! The Helm Beetle takes 1081 points of damage.


Yee-haw!

Crafted up a little bit tonight as well. By my calculations, once everything sells, I'll have about half a million gil! :D Okay, okay, so many people have hit their first million before 60, but cut me some slack here, okay? ^^

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