Dynamis
Still seeing some rather low turnout for these runs. We're well beyond the "back to school" excuse. I had speculated before that with the increased drop rates in CoP and the Northlands, we'd start seeing a rather drastic decline once the demand was met. That's not saying we're unsuccessful in our attempts. It takes a little bit more finesse pulling and a lot more job tweaking in most cases, but the runs still turn up the generally same results.
We had Windurst yesterday. Windurst is, in my opinion, the second hardest zone to actually clear behind Xarcabard. Going in there with lower numbers tends to worry me since we're usually in cramped places fighting AoE heavy critters along with extensions being spread out all over the map. We had 2 wipes at the SMN house. One of which infuriated me and the other, on any normal day, I probably wouldn't have been pissed about but given the wipe right before it, it didn't sit too well with me.
The first wipe was caused by lack of communication. For the SMN house, we normally put the RDMs on crowd control until the BLMs can take down the 4 statues that are running around. We had 3 RDMs, 2 of which were apparently dead and afk and no one bothered to tell me. Pretty much tantamount to a complete noob moment. Needless to say, that didn't end well.
The second wipe was due to an Astral Flow going off. That SMN house is sometimes a crap-shoot. I saw the Sleeps being cast right as Tidal Wave started, but it was just a second too late. The sequence I saw and gathered went like this:
- Titan wakes up
- RDMs cast sleepga and sleep Titan.
- Leviathan had been slept via Sleep II and woke up the second after sleepga fired. (Obviously sleepga didn't land on Leviathan due to Sleep II being what slept him.)
- Leviathan Tidal Waved.
There's not really anything anyone can do when that sort of stupid timing happens. It was icing on the previous wipe-cake.
Up to this point, it had been a rather solid run. There were a couple kill-order issues, but for the most part, it was shaping up to be similar to the previous Windurst run where we had 0 wipes and pretty much raped everything in the zone sans 12ish statues. Wasted about 20 minutes with those 2 wipes, so I called an audible and changed up our strat to get the clear. The guys made up for it by basically pulling a win out of their asses.
You see, before the first wipe, they had taken down the SMN NM. This left us needing to take down the BLM and RDM NMs to pop the boss with 30 minutes left. Normally we just go counter-clockwise around the zone up to Heaven's Tower, then kill the boss on the west bridge at the fork behind the AH. The audible I called was to do it the old-school Obsidian way by moving everyone back to the base of Heaven's tower and clearing everything from there. This eliminated a number of statues that were going to get in the way of our success. I didn't pull any punches with the pulling. Often times, there were 5 or 6 birds and a couple statues roaming about the rest of the time in there. They held their ground and killed the boss pretty much at the 1 minute mark. What they ended up killing in those 30 minutes was:
- 3/4 of the Death House
- The entire BLM House
- The 6 repop statues on the HT Bridge
- The 2 statues on the back side of HT
- The entire RDM NM pull (2 chanters, 2 prelates, 2 somethings, 3 statues and the NM)
- The 2 statues repopped at the base of the bridge from the RDM NM's death (6 Yags, 2 Stats
- The Mega Boss (which I almost botched the pull by getting nuked from 50' away...)
So yeah...while I was happy they hunkered down and got the win in this zone, it just makes me wonder what happens to this zone if that focus shown in the last 30 minutes was shown the entire run. I've always found this to be the single hardest aspect of leadership. That of trying to maintain everyone's focus. Most of the time, it can be done by keeping them constantly active, but from time to time, we have runs where vets and noobs alike check their brains in at the door and ultimately ends up costing us some time.
I also think this is the main reason Dynamis, as an event, isn't something people generally look forward to. In an age of MMOs that focus on quick, low-manned content (FFXI included in recent years), it's become hard for players to justify allocating a 4 hour block of time. Ringthree suggested a while back that we start giving 10 minute breaks during runs to help alleviate the sheer amount of time spent doing a Dynamis run, but often times, we're up against the clock and 10 minute breaks aren't truly able to be given. I have started looking for those opportunities though...it's just hard to gauge when a 10 minute break can be given during each run because they're all different groups and circumstances.
As long as we're consistently hitting 25ish people for these runs, I won't worry too much. Some of the sacks have talked about pulling the plug on Dynamis if things get too bad, but I figure that's still a ways down the road. We know if it comes to that point, we're not going to get into the habit of canceling runs. The shell is too old with too much history to continually cancel/reschedule runs. Our Einherjar attendance shows that our member base is still very active though, they just seem burned out on Dynamis. I think if SE wanted to freshen Dynamis up a bit, they'd cut the max times down to two hours in each of the cities and northlands and adjust the drop rates and monster difficulty accordingly.
Einherjar
Had to postpone Odin a week due to low signups. We had 22 people signed up with a max of 24 that could possibly go. Normally, that number isn't something that worries me. What actually got me to postpone it was that we simply didn't have the right job combination. Primarily in the PLD dept.
After looking through the roster, it became rather apparent that T1 and T2 wins were missing from a very large portion of our member base. Pretty much a no-brainer to schedule those two. T1 was ridiculously easy for us Saturday. Was one of those in-and-out-in-10-minutes rooms. T2 wasn't so easy this past Tuesday, but wasn't super difficult.
The real kick to the nuts at the moment is the fact that it looks like Chahya's account has been compromised. Hopefully we don't have to postpone Odin again to finish up Dantess' set (8/9, missing a T3), but that's certainly looking like a possibility at the moment.
Dark Knight
I set a goal this weekend to get DRK to 60 and pick up Guillotine. My biggest frustration leveling this job at the moment is that most of it's scythe weapon skills absolutely suck prior to Guillotine. On top of that, Scythe was skilling horribly slow for me. You may remember from an earlier post that I went from 37-42 on XP Scrolls, so obviously no scythe skill there. I followed that up by level syncing to 31 and going from 42-50. I didn't uncap scythe until that party hit 37 obviously, so essentially, I got scythe up to about a level 41 cap when that party ended...and I was level 50. I picked up another couple levels doing FoVs with Lect and that helped out on the scythe front, but by the time I got into some parties over the weekend, I was still 9 levels behind on the scythe cap.
The party I had Friday night was outstanding. The set up was PLD, COR, BRD, DRK, SAM and RDM. While I didn't put up any eye-popping numbers, I came to the realization pretty quickly that (this being my first actual party where I was the same level as the level sync anchor) pretty much everything DRK does draws hate. It seemed like the very act of me pressing CTRL+A drew hate before I even took a swing. I managed to pick up a lot of scythe levels here. That party got me to 56 where I retooled my gear. I ran into a Mamool Besieged where I worked on capping Dark Magic and started trying to skill up elemental. Drakus pretty much made all his XP in there raising me since I kept dying to AoE.
Saturday showed promise of attaining my goals. I put together what amounted to an Obsidian party after Einherjar in the form of Mimitsu (COR), Ninjafox (DRG), Rael (PLD), Lectrikelion (RDM), and Clubber (BRD). After a bit, Rael dc'd due to a power outage, Clubber had to leave for work and Ninjafox had go try to get his name changed to something more manly I think.... They got replaced by Izman (PLD), Tohmane (MNK) and Zerolzero (BRD). After hitting 58, we moved to puks where we all got tired of leveling. We disbanded at 59 around mid-afternoon.
After assessing my skill levels at that point, I determined that I sorely needed to cap elemental magic (it was 131...with a cap of 191...) and that I should find something to skill up scythe on again as I was 5 levels under cap. I happened to catch a Troll Besieged where I did nothing but spam stone and water. I got elemental magic from 131 to 181 in that Besieged. Afterwards, I joined Kimille out in the Boyahda tree to skillup on the Steelshells she was skilling GS on. I ended up capping Scythe, Elemental Magic and Dark Magic in about an hour out there.
My attempt to put a party together afterwards when Rifu and Milie showed up failed though. All of the people that could heal the party in the form of a RDM just weren't available.
After an old man nap on Sunday, I put together a party consisting of Kakashibankai (RDM), Tikki (SMN), Kalakalo (PLD), Milie (BRD) and Rifuburade (THF) and headed back out to Puks. Kaka (/snicker) had to afk about 3 kills in due to a fire call and was AFK for the better part of 1-1.5 hours. Tikki seems to be bound and determined to change my mind completely about what SMN is capable of though. He managed to keep all of us hasted and alive while we 5-manned puks waiting for Kaka (/snicker) to come back. After an hour, I decided to replace him with Kimille and naturally, he comes back shortly after Kimille gets there...
Good thing too as Kalakalo had to leave. I had Kaka (/snicker) go change to PLD to replace Kalakalo and the party continued.
I ended up getting Guillotine and in typical DRK fashion, I damn near killed myself the first time I used it. Needless to say, the killing went a lot faster once Kimi got there as DRG and once I picked up Guillotine. DRK is now 61 and on the rise fast. Hopefully I can get it to 75 before Christmas. :)
Summoner
Back to Tikki for a second though. I had spoken months ago about Tikki main healing in Dynamis and bringing Ringthree around to the idea of using SMNs in the main healing/buffing roles of a party. When you get a SMN that understands there are two sides to the SMN coin (support and DD) and is willing to do both, SMN is actually really powerful. Obviously their hastes aren't going to match a RDM or WHM's haste and they can't mass cure with a Cure IV or Cure V, but to a SMN who knows how to play a job, they can make up for this rather easily. This was actually one of the first times I had used a SMN as a main healer in an XP party past 30 and he didn't disappoint.
I'm not saying that SMN would work in every situation, but I am saying that maybe people should take a little bit of a closer look at SMN. We all know how useful they are in the end game arena (in some cases circa 2004). I think if SE gave them a BP that did an AoE refresh similar to a Ballad or Ballad II (not both), SMN would probably find a lot more spots in an XP party. Especially if said effect could be 'buffed' with Evoker's roll. They have a huge MP pool comparative to their RDM and WHM counterparts, Auto-Refresh and what appears to be a decent chunk of enmity down gear. Tikki certainly held his own in keeping a rather suicidal party alive, so it tells me they really aren't that far off from being on the level of a WHM or RDM overall.
And a new feature I'm going to periodically put up here that's a straight play on The Daily Show's "Moment of Zen".
The Moment of Fail
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