Heir to the Great Water

As some might have guessed from the theme of the past few days, I went about completing my summons, which meant fighting the one final avatar (not including Fenrir) that I needed to get.
Leviathan.

The problem with Leviathan is that, not only is Leviathan one of the harder avatars, since his Spring Water cures him by quite a fair amount, he is also the hardest to get to. In order to reach him, one must travel through the Den of Rancor, which involves traversing through the Temple of Ugglapeih (and I'm sure I spelt that wrong). Not only that, the Den of Rancor is behind a door in the Temple, that can be opened only with a Paintbrush of Souls.

So not only is finding six people willing to fight Leviathan hard, but you also need to find some way to get the Paintbrush. Fortunately for me, Anora had the paintbrush, and with the same group as last night, we were off!

Actually, that's skipping ahead a little bit too far. We actually went out and defeated Titan and Garuda again to get the whispers before setting off for Leviathan, but that's of minor concern right now. ^^

Compared to the rest of the Cloisters, the Cloister of Tides is probably the coolest of the lot. The protocrystal is situated in an underground cavern, flooded with water, with underground streams trickling water in on the sides. Only the Cloister of Gales cold rival its beauty, although to be fair, a lot of the other cloisters had a lot more potential. The Cloister of Flames, for example, could've had the crystal surrounded by a moat of lava, but I guess the designers felt stone walls would suffice. Oh well.

Anyway...



As predicted, Leviathan took the longest, although his attacks didn't seem anywhere as devastating as any of the others. I don't recall any AoE status effects like Ramuh's Paralyze-ga or Shiva's Sleepga, so I had an easy time for the most part. His attacks also felt somewhat sluggish, giving Serephia (WAR/NIN) plenty of time to recast Utsusemi in between. Eventually, we managed to kill Leviathan without too much trouble, which was a good thing since I was running low on mana. >_<



Leviathan's probably the coolest looking of all the avatars, although Shiva and Garuda give him a good run for his money. ^^

Defeating Leviathan completes my collection of the seven basic avatars, and with three whispers done, it is only a matter of time before Fenrir is mine. :D First though, I need to get BLM70 to at least put up a decent challenge.

Anyway, since I forgot to post pictures of me and my newfound summons, here they are now:





So....going back to getting BLM70.

Eventually, I decided to forgo hanging around, trying to get the money for my Elemental Torque (gimp, I know ; ;) and just go for it. It wasn't long after I put up my flag that an invite came in, and I came into a party that consisted of BLM WHM RDM PLD THF SAM. With that, you'd expect the xp to come in, and I have to admit, initially, my hopes were up. You have a good tank, the mage trio, a SAM and THF for frequent, powerful Distortion skillchains, and as I soon found out, the PLD's Swift Blade for Darkness as well. (My first 3rd level skillchain!)

For some reason though, the party turned out disappointing. Maybe it's because I'm too used to Black Mage parties now, but I had to struggle to just stay awake. Comparatively, the xp felt like it was trickling in, and to be honest, the rate didn't seem all that good, like maybe 2-3k an hour. I really don't know what's wrong with the setup, but oh well. When the WHM said she had to go, rather than stick around for a replacement WHM, I decided to go off and do some other things and with that, the party was called to an end. Too bad though, the PLD wanted the party to go for a {Long time}, but I guess that was not to be.

So I come back a few hours later to find BLM BLM BLM BRD seeking. :D

It took a little bit of convincing as some people didn't seem all that familiar with how things worked- the BRD felt that we needed a tank, and the Rank 10 (BRD75) BLM felt Stun + Blizzard III was in order, but after getting them to try out the classic Freeze plan, we settled down pretty quickly. I think we made about 8.5k in our first hour of partying? We had to disband pretty quickly though, since one of the BLMs needed to pick his parents from the airport. We tried going along with 5, but other people had stuff to do (and I died after lag interrupted my {Stun} on a {Flood} from a Water Elemental we were fighting ; ;) so instead, we decided to just set a time and come back then.

Until then. ^^