The {Tarutaru} is back!

...And I'm back!



At least from my perspective, those three weeks flew past a little too quickly for my liking, but I guess if you're enjoying yourself, that's a given. ^^



In any case, I did kinda miss Vana'diel and was happy to log back in again after my absence. I had been able to follow some of what was going on through forums, and to be honest, my primary worry was the state of the economy when I would return.



Fortunately, such fears were largely unfounded...I think.



To me, the big "ouch" comes from the rising cost of Gold Ingots. When I left, they were 1.5m/stk, but now selling steady at 2.2m/stk. However, a lot of the other things I deal with are more or less the same as when I left. Of course, the big ticket items , like an Igqira Weskit literally skyrocketed (7m to 16m!) in those three weeks, but I didn't really feel much of the "OMGWTF" factor as I had originally anticipated.



Of course, with three week's absence, how can one not want to party? ^^



Well, I still felt like leveling my Summoner, but my interest in the job has declined quite considerably, and I don't know why. Actually, I think the break did me some good, as it put quite a lot of things into perspective, and I suspect I am going to end up taking the game a lot easier from here on.



Oh, and while some things went up in price, others went down. Like a Noble's Tunic, which was 22m when I left, but 18m when I got back. ^^ And so, after some random haggling on the AH...



"You buy the noble's tunic for 18,500,000 gil."



Funnily enough, purchasing the tunic was rather...lacking in emotion for me, which is strange considering how much I've wanted this tunic over the last year. Not being an active participant in sky/HNM activities make things a lot more difficult for me to get the big ticket items, and so I've had to buy it the hard way, through cold hard cash (er, gil).



A friend, Faeyth, also recently quit FF and joined the WoW side of things, and left me all his things to sell. Suffice to say, there were a lot of things that I managed to liquidate, and I got enough to push my gil reserves to well over the price of a Noble's Tunic, and with some to spare. Normally, I'd hold onto the gil for my Goldsmithing, but given the glacial rate at which I skillup my Goldsmithing, I figured I might as well invest the extra gil into items, and so I bought the Noble's Tunic. I also have some spare Astral Rings lying about that I'm also keeping as investment, although only time will tell how worthwhile those will be.



Anyway, the problem with the Noble's Tunic was that at the time, I was WHM67, while the tunic is Level 68 gear, and so, it was back to the leveling treadmill for me. -_-



Fortunately, Woulfgang was in the midst of organising a Warrior party down in Bibiki Bay, and he invited me along for the ride! The end result was unlike any Warrior party I've been in- personally, when someone mentions "Warrior party", I think "WAR WAR WAR BRD RDM random job". However, when we set off, the party setup was...much simpler.



WAR WAR WAR WAR WAR WHM ftw!



Well, I don't know to be honest. It certainly sounded fun at the time, but looking back, I think we overdid on the WARs and really needed a second support class. I came /SMN for the Auto-Refresh, since I figured I wouldn't be resting much, but still ran out of mana on curative magic alone. I couldn't even spare the mana to Haste the others, which irked me.



Eventually, one WAR dropped (after an acciednt resulting in a party wipe), and with just 4 other members, I was able to keep a semblance of a Haste cycle, which I felt made things a whole lot smoother. Anyway, I felt we really needed a BRD as the 6th, but in the end, we just went on with five members until we got a second WHM who would eventually replace me in the party.



Anyway, I ended up getting a decent amount of xp for the time put in, and as a result, I dinged WHM68, and am now a happy taru with a Noble's Tunic! ^^







I have to admit though, having a Noble's Tunic and Auto-Refresh from a Summoner subjob is quite nice, although I still think a /BLM subjob is the better one overall. I found that WHM/SMN has little in terms of link management which was a problem that reared its head quite frequently. Oh well.



It's good to be back. ^^

Where is the Tarutaru?

I'm not sure how many people have noticed, but I`ve been absent from Vana'diel for the past few days. I meant to　tell people sooner, but things just got a little too overwhelming, so I didn't get to tell nearly as many people as I had hoped for.



I will be gone for the next three weeks. Yeah, it's a long time, I know.



However, in the meantime,　I am living things up in J-A-P-A-N! ^^ Yes, I'm typing this up from my host's home in the greater Tokyo area, and suffice to say, coming all the way here just to play FF is a bit of a waste, no? ^^



More stories to come when I get back. ^^

Happy New Year!

...And a Happy New Year to everybody out there!



As usual, with all the stuff going on, I haven't really been able to play much as of late, although I've been trying! Honestly! >_< Actually, I only just started to promote the Campsitarus blog
over on Killing Ifrit, and so far, I've been getting some very nice complimentarus from people about it! Unfortunately, that kinda makes me want to make sure I actually do a good job, so working on the campsitarus blog has been taking up...quite a lot of my time as of late...^^;



However, I do have some unrelated happenings in Vana'diel, albeit, a little out of date. First of all, I now have a Guide Beret! The Guide Beret is a reward you get for bringing a friend into the game via a Gold World Pass, and after a certain time has elapsed (I think 40 real life days), you and your "sprout" can both make a party to go get a pair of berets- a Guide Beret for the person who bought the World Pass, and a Sprout Beret for the person who received the World Pass.



Of course, that begs the question, who did I bring into this world? Well, I brought Hirushi back! Hirushi was my trusty Bard back in the days of manaburning through the 60s, and while he quit (and deleted his character -_-) when he hit BRD70, he's back, and back to the BRD leveling treadmill again. Given the rate at which I xp, he's probably almost caught up to my Red Mage now, come to think of it...







Personally, I liked the white Sprout Beret better at first, although the Guide Beret has since grown on me. It's just too bad we couldn't exchange them (RA/EX) to see what they looked like on each other. But meh, I'm the black mandy-taru of {death}!!!! Hear me rawr!!



I feel as if I should've mentioned something about the massive price increase over Christmas, given that it is something big, and got quite a lot of people talking.



For those who missed the memo, a lot of the high-ticket items just skyrocketed in value practically overnight over Christmas. Haubergeons went from 7m to 11m, Astral Rings from 1.2m to 3m, among others. I, like many others out there, suspect a ridiculous amount of credit-card power to be going on during that weekend, further aggravated by the special Christmas rates the Chinese-based companies were giving out.



In all honestly, IGE gets waaaaaay too much collateral damage for what it does. It doesn't take very long to realise that the Chinese companies offer rates that are a third or even a quarter of IGE's rates, so I feel the real culprit lies with them. Heck, when gil goes as low as $4.95 per million, not to mention an extra, free 1 million gil as a Christmas gift for purchasing 30 million (/stare), what excited little kid wouldn't want to come bursting into mummy's open arms to get the money to buy the Scorpion Harness he really wants?



Well, maybe that's a bit of an unfair assessment there. Personally, I have little qualms about actual gilbuying since I know there are those out there whose real life commitments just do not give them the time to sit around farming and crafting for gil for hours each day. What I do have gripes against though, is reckless gil-spending, although as many have said, the two are somewhat related. Someone who buys their gil has very little concept of how much that gil is actually worth, and so they are wont to just splurge it on the first shiny thing that catches their eye, as opposed to someone who actually farmed/crafted/haggled for the gil.



In retrospect though, my real lesson was one in investment- cash on hand is a very bad thing. My purchasing power literally halved overnight because I had held onto my gil instead of buying "investment" gears. Had I invested my excess gil into say, four Astral Rings, I would be 8 million gil richer now, and well on my way to getting Goldsmithing 80. Alas, it was not to be. /sigh



Ah well, lesson learnt. Time to just take the hit and move onwards. ^^;



Finally in closing, I got a classic slip-up form none other than Sakurato, who revealed her true colours after she and I were talking about her Greater Manticore party up in Cape Terrigan. This is what she had to say:







Oops...^^;