Platinum Pursuits

As the name implies, I have embarked upon the next stage in Goldsmithing. After finally getting around to it, I have accumulated a small harvest of Platinum Nuggets. My current recipe, as suggested by Pikko's Pots, seems to be working quite well, and I can usually get a full stack of Platinum Nuggs (48k) out of two pots. Given that a Cutting costs about 6k, that's roughly 18k profit per pot! ^^ I started off a little cautious though, with just small harvests, but given the results, I have just upgraded to twenty pots worth of Tree Cuttings. My guess is that if I sold four stacks back to the Auction House, I could then recycle that money to buy the next batch of Cuttings (even at the outrageous prices of stacks in the Jeuno AH) and still have plenty of Nuggets left over.

However, it is possible to flood the nuggets, so I needed some way to use up a lot of Nuggets myself. What no better way to do this, than to burn up some platinum?

Granted, I was a whopping nine levels below the cap, which would be insanity under normal conditions. But then again, I had Advanced Imagery support, a powerful Fire Moghancement, and my shades, so I didn't think it would be as bad as say, starting Insect Paste at Cooking 20. If there's anything I heard the hard way though, Firesday is a whole lot better for success than Lightsday. I tried Lightsday, Full Moon (100%), and broke my first three attempts, losing two Ores and nine Nuggets. I called it quits right then and waited for Firesday to roll around. Still a Full Moon (96%), I went back and did everything again, and ended up succeeding five consecutive synths, getting +0.2 in the meantime. ^^ I was quite happy, except that somebody had already listed six Platinum Ingots up on the Jeuno AH. I'll probably wait for those to sell before putting mine up. >_<

Finally, just was I was finishing up my Goldsmithing, Aka suddenly decided to have one big group picture! Rushing over to the Ru'Lude Gardens, we tried to take the picture. It was a little awkward at first, with people slowly showing up, and changing clothes (I had to go back to Windurst to change into my WHM AF! >_<). Not to mention the amount of time we spent trying to get people into position, only find that once we got that part done, the sun had set, so we had to wait another real half hour for it to rise again...

But anyway, here are the results:



And this is the other screenshot, more suited for a desktop wallpaper. Personally, I prefer this one to the above, but hey, some might object to that. ^^



I should probably go about making that second picture a real wallpaper, but I'm too tired right now to do that. I tried fiddling around with it a bit though, with a half-baked attempt sitting in Photoshop, and another half-baked idea sitting around somewhere that went roughly like:

Set of Elemental Staves: 800k.
Igqira Weskit: 1,800k.
Spells learnt to date: 3,200k.

All the friends I've met during all this: Priceless.

There are some things that money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s IGE. ^^

Yeah...

Anyway, before I go, I need to ramble a bit about the dunes again. Yes, I took my SMN for a spin. No, it was not a nice experience. I was invited to a party where three of the members hadn't done their subjob quest yet, which was okay, since this was Level 14. The other two members, a MNK, and a NIN were both Rank 4 and 5 respectively, so I figured it couldn't be that bad. Yet, people's incompetance never ceases to amaze me sometimes. The Rank 5 NIN somehow got it into his head that leveling NIN15 (or 12+ for that matter) without Utsusemi: Ichi was a good idea, complaining about the costs of that spell. He later proclaimed to be a RDM52, which made me /slap my forehead in an attempt to figure out why he'd still want to level NIN15 without Utsusemi, given that he's already seen how important the spell is.

Seriously, if you do not have Utsusemi at NIN15, I will kick you. Complain all you want about the costs, but hey, it's not called an advanced job for nothing.

First mob, the whole party wiped out except for the MNK. Gee. Nobody knew what roles they were supposed to be doing- the WAR didn't Provoke, I had to go pull, the BLM couldn't keep his finger off the trigger, the WHM didn't know how to ration Cure IIs to stop getting hate (and coincidentally, dying)...it took roughly three hours to get that last 1k that I needed to ding 15. I think I'll be solo'ing more from here on...