More sea farming...

It's been about 5-6 weeks since my last entry. As promised, I haven't quit the game (obviously), but to those still active in-game, you would have noticed that my playtime has been drastically cut. ; ;

What little time I've been able to squeeze out of my playtime thus far has been towards upgrading my Black Mage some more, for reasons I briefly detailed out in my last entry.

To be quite frank, my BLM gear leaves quite a bit to be desired, particularly for someone slowly gearing up for (light) endgame activities such as myself. Last time around, I worked on getting my Rairin and Hyorin Obis, as well as my Relaxing Earring. Now, I decided to work on another Obi- Anrin.



The Anrin (Dark) Obi requires seven Aern Organs, which proved to be even more of a pain than say, ten Phaubo organs. Part of this is because of the low drop rate, part of it is because the damn Aerns reraise, part of it is because the damn Aerns link with one another. -_-

Admittedly, I could have farmed the Aerns outside in Al'Taieu, but I figured I might as well get some xp for my troubles, so I decided to take on the Eo'Aerns inside the Grand Palace of Hu'Xzoi instead. The advantage is that all the Aerns here are VT, reaping 240-300 base xp/kill, but all the Aerns here also have a chance of dropping the HQ organs, needed to pop Ix'MNK.

I camped in the western room from the entrance- the start point of the escourt for CoP 8-2. Frankly speaking, either the western or eastern rooms would work, but I preferred the western one, since the Aerns that spawn in the western room are either WHM, BLM, DRK, RNG or WAR. Three of the jobs are Aspirable, while the RNG has (noticeably) lower HP, which is a lot easier for me to handle solo, than say, DRGs.

Things get tricky when links occur, although a quick Sleepga followed by a dash back to the entrance of the Grand Palace easily fixes that. The problem is that because all four Aerns roam across the entire hall, it can be quite trying to safely kill an Aern without any of the other three linking. Especially when it Reraises.

Reraises are more of a time sink than anything since although you get xp for the first kill, nothing will drop. The problem is, you're out of mana so ou finish it off with a dance of Sleep II, resting and nukes while you can. All while trying to avoid links again. However, the main problem I had with Reraises was that it threw off the respawn timer making it difficult to predict when to expect the next Aern to pop. A solo BLM can just about clear all four Aerns within the respawn timeframe, but with Reraises thrown into the mix, it gets difficult to anticipate.

In any case, as I mentioned, the droprate is terrible. In the time it took me to get my seven Aern organs, I had racked up some 40,000 limit points. -_-



Of course, in a rare occurance, stuff like the above happens, but I only saw a double drop like that occur once. >_< Fortunately, I have three HQ Aern organs for my troubles. My next step would be to get the squid organs and tissues (I only got one T_T) and see if I can find people to help me out with Ix'MNK. ^^