The Hills are Alive!

Tonight, Eratosthenes invited me to join Evilstar and his BLM crew on what might become the next generation of BLM-supported BCNMs: The KS99 Themis Orb uncapped fight, "The Hills are Alive!"

This particular KS fight pits a full alliance of 18 people against one Adamantoise mob named "Tartaruga Gigante" for some reason. He has various abilities, including Silencega and Flood, but most dangerous of all, he will, at some point, draw his head into his shell. Once inside, not only is he almost impervious to damage, he also starts to regenerate HP at a ridiculous rate. He can also cast Slowga, but that's usually not a big problem. ^^

Reading the Alla forums, he also can cast Waterga IV (didn't see this), has a Regen rate that's much much faster than either Aspi or Genbu, and is generally a whole lot harder than either of the two aforementioned turtles. >_<

Hence, you call in a whole bunch of Black Mages. Or about 14 or so in my case.



The plan was simple. Just like Divine Might, everybody opens with a simultaneous Elemental Seal-Blizzaga III. From then on, the BLMs all scatter to minimise damage and continue to unload the various Blizzard-line nukes onto the Tartaruga Gigante until it dies. All BLMs should bring a couple Echo Drops per run to counter Silencega. Some form of drink is also highly recommended, since a bunch of us needed to Manafont in order to actually kill the turtle. >_< At some point, as mentioned before, it will withdraw into its shell, but the sheer amount of nukes we cast on it will cause it to pop its head out again without too much setback. Overall, it doesn't take too long to clear the battle- only about 5 minutes or so if everyone knows what they're doing.

I have to admit, after all this time, it felt very good to be back with all my fellow Black Mage peers. I don't mean the junky "I want to MB Freeze at level 64"-type Black Mages which seem to be all the rage these days, I'm talking about the Black Mages who were already there before the Ranger "nerf" convinced half the FFXI population to take up BLM and completely ruin our reputation.

Of course, the other fun part is seeing big Blizzard IVs go off. ^^



...Blizzard IV is just so purrrty sometimes...^^

Anyway, this particular KS99 drops all sorts of juicy items, including a whole host of job-specific weapons that I have never seen before. Both runs we did dropped a Damascus Ingot, so I'm quite curious just how much the rest of the items are worth.

Like I said, this could very well turn out to be the next generation of BLM KS-business. The way Evilstar chose to run this, the client gets to keep any one item that drops, and the BLMs split the rest. I'm not entirely sure what kind of deal that is, simply because I don't know the value of just about everything that drops, but hey, whatever works. ^^ I hear really high-end items like Shining Cloths and Black Belt items can also drop from this KS fight, so that's definitely something to look forward to.

Time will tell what happens to this, I guess. ^^