Woot Serpentes Set go!

Take a break from the game for my birthday, come back – upgraded my crystal in 2 kills and then Niamh, Hasiano and Uremeki for helping me today complete my set

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Serpentes Cuffs

Serpentes Sabots

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Pretty

Serpentes Set

That was the weekend…

Was going to moan about Monday morning, then realised with the holiday weekend that it was Tuesday.

PLD

I managed to run around on Saturday morning and finish up my PLD set. Many thanks to Aunshi and Execrate for their help.  Especially Exe who helped me with Dark Spark/Key farming in Castle Zvahl. I am now a Paragon of Paladin Excellence… but more to the point the keys are out of my inventory and the set is now stored.

Krabkatoa Steamers! Dorps!

I had a quiet evening this evening, finally giving into the pressure of an E Ron party for my 47.5 PLD. I’d been pling myself in Batallia [S] on beetles and it was working, but it’s slow. I really need to get to 50+ and then it should get easier.  So once the party was done, I’m left with a barely 49 PLD who needs to recap shield for level 48 and then of course the newly acquired 49. Not too bad.  48 means Life Belt, not sure if anything of note happens at 49 but 50 is big for PLD.

Krabkatoa Steamers

So, once I’m done, I ask Aunshi and Bergi whether Ix’DRG has popped yet and it hasn’t and more to the point they’re bored and Bergi wants to try the pathing trick for Krabkatoa. So, I gear up SCH/RDM and head on out. Mart comes out to help on BLM once the fight is under way.

Krabkatoa

The pathing is messed up. You can make a crab the size of a small house, almost non-threatening. His AoE range is huge though, and I died a couple of times from bubble shower. Helices land really well and do nice damage and you can keep him completely busy with care. I only really died because I was trying to buff others and wasn’t looking out for myself, it was completely avoidable.  I can understand now, how this fight is soloable but I wouldn’t have the balls to try it, that’s for sure! Duo/Trio – yes…

Krabkatoa Pool

I asked nicely and a friend brought TH4. Not only did we kill the krab with 3-4 of us (I was out of it mostly for the last half), TH4 paid off and we got full drops! Huge grats to Bergi on his Karka ring and to Aunshi on his aerodynamicaru Arubens Helm! I have some dead sea life in my invent now as no one really wanted.

Aunshi and Bergi

VNM

I’m going to write two posts today. This one, about recent events we’ve messed around with and another. So let’s get the fun stuff done first.

VNMs and Trial of Magians

Various people have come out and helped with killing mobs so that slowly I am getting my trials for the cure potency staff completed. Niamh came up to Ro’Maeve to help with the latest one and we managed to get 38 mobs done in lightsday once he got there. So I need another 62 and I will be on the next trial which involves the killing blow being 50+ light damage.

We helped Kaz complete his Bonesplitter for a mighty 100 damage GA by killing various VNM mobs in Sarutabaruta and Ronfaure. Lots of people are working on trial weapons at the moment, I think Kai has 5 on the go.

 Then we tried killing Lord Ruthen and Orcus (tier III VNMs). The first time we tried the vampyr we messed up fairly badly and whilst we did good damage, too many people were getting caught in the AoE drains and so it we messed it up fairly badly. We didn’t wipe but we didn’t do that well. We went back for a rematch and took him out fairly easily. As long as you keep people out of the AoE and have a decent support team for your PLDs you should be ok. RNG and SMN really are win. Add a COR in with the SMN. I’m sure you could do this with quite a small group if you were careful.

Orcus we didn’t really know what to expect and we didn’t expect what we got. He kicked our butts. He attacks very, very fast and has some nasty JA. I think we were a bit tired after Lord Ruthen which didn’t help. We messed and he depopped.  Still, we learnt a lot about him and he’s an awesome looking mob. He’s absolutely huge too, which made quite a sight in West Sara.

 Other events

Dynamis was a great run up until the Boss, CS stun went off fine but he just spammed crap and we lost Valk again. This zone seems to be the bane of our existence. I think we’ve won 3 lost 3 so far. It annoys me somewhat. I’m going to try and put Fairy Ring back into the run as we often have the time now. Initially we struggled but we’re much faster and more organised now. Flies and Nantina were pulled with no issues, people didn’t aggro anything etc.

Limbus was another Omega. We need a couple of bodies and some legs. So we got hands/feet. Shao can use most of it for his BLU so he got the feet and two of us levelling PLD got to lot the hands. I lost the lot but Carp passed in the end because he wants to finish WAR more. So my level 43 PLD has a pair of Homam hands… we struggled to give them away last time too. However, unless the people who do still need them actually show up, what can we do? Thankfully, hardly anyone does now. We’ve had rivers of Homam, including a lot more bodies than most but we’re still not capped. I’m guessing we never will be. From both Ultima and Omega what we need are bodies and legs, more than anything.

My PLD is about 1500 from 44. I’m going to put some serious work into levelling it up over my vacation time to push it closer to 75. We really need another PLD around for the odd thing especially considering the news I’ll write about in a bit.

I’m not at this point going to make the effort to upgrade the Marduk Body. I really can’t justify it. I may if I get lucky in the Mog Bonanza or something but for now the pieces will stay in storage. If  a speed belt drops during our KSNM99, then the gil will probably go on gaiters and a novio. Otherwise I’m going to work on a second Sarameya pop for  items to sell. Kaz and I still need to finish off our current set, with Nosferatu being the last thing we need to kill for our pop.  Along with wanting to get working on oracle’s pigaches, I need to gather quite a few zenis.

Busy time. Something I think a lot of people are feeling right now. So am trying to pick and choose a bit. Have tried camping Ix’DRG a couple of times but no luck getting him to pop or, some other group popped him in the room we’d cleared before we got back there… c’est la vie.

Catching up a bit. Random post is random.

Haven’t written much recently because life has been strange over the last couple of weeks.  Here in the UK, the Easter weekend is a 4 day weekend and I was sick for a few days.  We cancelled Einherjar and any formal Sunday event over Easter because a lot of people had family commitments. I’m a bit of a heathen so Easter doesn’t mean much to me, but I completely understand the necessity of entertaining small people with coloured eggs.

Staff I am aiming for

I’m nearly done with the next trial on my magian staff.  Mart logged in last night and we knocked out another 20 mobs before Salvage and so I think I have 23 left to do and I can move to Ro’maeve. I haven’t pushed for this as hard as I might have done before but I am making steady progress so it will happen sooner or later.

Everyone seemed very emo online last night. There wasn’t any drama, just a few people up and down.  We restarted Salvage and as ever, saw nothing drop. More tonight I think.

Have been messing around with VNMs with Kaz, Bergi, Aunshi, Ure, Clevan and others. Have helped Kaz kill NMs in Sara past and present for his Great Axe. Have killed the northlands Tier II NMs and a few in Ronfaure. I’m hoping to trigger a crystal change to a blue crystal this week before we attempt some Tier IIIs sometime over the weekend.

I have somehow ended up with a Fierce Belt, Warrior’s mufflers and Valor Gauntlets after the weekend. Of the three, the gauntlets are the only thing I really wanted. No one else needed or even wanted them and as I’m still working on allied notes and it may be decades before I have enough, I figured that the relic hands would be nice for PLD for a while.  We did also see a Wyrm belt drop, which was nice for Hasi, he’s almost done on DRG now and had a couple of good weeks in a row.

In Limbus I was very pleased to see this and so complete the upgrades I wanted to do for COR. Neph had it already and Bergi either didn’t need or want.  I’ve actually been playing COR more often recently. Every now and then it just makes more sense for me to come COR, especially as we have more BLMs than ever.

Send some good thoughts this way, concerned about a close friend, they could use a few.