Awesome

Man my weekend was filled with so much awesome, I'm not sure the confines of this blog can contain it. I'll cut right to the chase in order of awesomeness...

Awesome Part 1:

Einherjar was awesome. T1. Ran roughshod, etc. Odin numbers are up now at 30 presently with another 6-7 people looking to potentially complete sets with a T3 win Tuesday.

I really dislike the Buffalo boss though. We had a bit of a mishap with the thing and ultimately wasted part of our bard two hours, but as I've said before...it's so damn hard to lose a T1 that we probably could have completely wiped twice and still won. We were nowhere near wiping though...I think I was only one that died on boss thanks to a 1.4k Big Horn up the ass. Boss dropped right as the 10 minute warning came through and this was after us mostly screwing around for 10 minutes with this damn thing.

With a win on Tuesday, the crew will be set for our BBQ Odin Fight Extravaganza. Canuck is the only one missing a feather.

Awesome Part 2:

Dynamis runs were awesome as well. Obsidian did Dynamis Buburimu and Bastok. I was on the Bubu run. I have to say I have NEVER seen that many kills in all the times I've done this run. We literally cleared out the 4 main dragons, the WHM turtle, the Megaboss, the Nightmare Ravens, Nightmare Crabs, Nightmare Efts, and Nightmare Bunnies and still had an hour left on the clock to farm.

So I dragged everyone over to the scorpions. Cleared those. Dragged everyone over to the Mandragoras stopped by Old Man's aggro of some turtles. Cleared the turtles, killed a couple Dhalmel (since they were there and one person wanted a warrior stone...) then proceeded to wipe to the Mandragoras thanks to my being one step too close waiting for a clean pull and accidentally pulling all of them on top of us.

We got up, ran over to the Cocks and cleared those right as time expired with some fancy passing after the 30 second mark to get a PUP cape (that we had never seen before iirc) to drop to it's bid winner.

So recap...

The 4 bad dragons. The WHM Quadav NM. Apocalyptic Beast. All the Nightmare Ravens. All the Nightmare Crabs. All the Nightmare Efts. All the Nightmare Bunnies. All the Nightmare Scorpions. All the Nightmare Cockatrice. A couple Nightmare Dhalmel. A couple Old Man aggro'd Quadavs. A couple Nightmare Mandragoras and a wipe to the rest of the Nightmare Mandragoras.

That's not too shabby for a day's work.

Dynamis Bastok had some decent success too. Three 100 coins dropped along with collecting near 200 singles. Usually with a fuller run, we pick up around 250-300 singles from Bastok, but they did most of the run with 22ish people.

Awesome Part 3:

With some help, we finally stumbled on a very successful way to beat Splitting Heirs. I haven't been as motivated to put these runs together due to my lack of success in them. After Einherjar finished, Mav asked in party if Ceri and Oust were doing anything. Ceri had plans and I don't recall seeing if Oust answered. Mav had himself and 2 others lined up at that point and I thought it'd be a good opportunity to try to join up with him to see how it went.

So I grabbed Girlfriend and Inbred and off we went with Mav, Jess and Ravax.

The set up wasn't much different from what we had tried in the past. Usually, I would try to go in with 2 PLD, 2 DD, a main healer and a main sleeper/backup healer. This is generally how Mav would try to do it too. We had the pieces necessary to do this, but we opted to try a bit of a change to it.

We went PLD/NIN (Izman), DRG/SAM (me), DRK/SAM (Jess), SAM/THF (Ravax), WHM/BLM (Kaylea), and RDM/BLM (Mav).

And a couple very important notes:

There weren't any multihit weapons involved. There weren't any Bards. There weren't any Corsairs. The only thing that was present that could be mentioned as way above average was Gungnir, but that was present in most of my other attempts too obviously. These attempts were just the raw players. Not super-buffed, multihit shortcut machines or a manaburn group. That's not to say all of us aren't above average players, but it is to say that it fkn sucks when people can't find a way to win unless they have KC DRKs or a BLM Brigade.

We proceeded to go 6-1 against this BC. Our only loss was a couple of unfortunate and ill-timed sleeps, but that was quickly corrected by giving the finger to trying to sleep the BLM baby twice and just rape it the second he shows up.

The strat was relatively simple. Izman held hate as best he could. Mav kept the MNK and PLD babies slept. Kay heals. Ravax, Jess and I just beat the shit out of stuff. We also made careful use of our Weapon Skills. We tried to only use them when Darkheir used Berserker Dance.

This set up had a lot of good teamwork built into it. Ravax could plant hate on Izman (if Ravax managed to avoid Tornado Edge or Shoulder Charge long enough to survive...) or he could turn around and plant it on me so that I could shed it with a High Jump or Super Jump. Jess and I pulled our share of hate, but Izman's tanking ability and Ravax's ability to plant hate never kept it on us for long.

The big key was the control of the babies. I've mentioned before I thought this was the key to winning, but there was an observation I made during this batch of fights that made me /facepalm if it turned out to be true. Before, we'd have issues sleeping the babies more than twice. So the DDs were constantly bouncing off the main NM to the babies after that 2nd sleep. Mav somehow managed to keep the PLD and MNK NMs slept 5 or more times. The observation was that if the BLM NM was up, all of the NMs had a higher chance of resisting sleep. Mav's gear is awesome and all, but the difference between his gear and the gear of the other RDMs I've done this run with isn't significant enough for that level of difference. So when we'd see the BLM NM come up, Mav would sleep it once, then Jess and I would just go kill it instantly and resume our beatdown of Darkheir.

All in all, results were great. We got a money drop in 3 of the 6 wins we had (1 mantle, 2 sash). I'm hoping Odin takes control of the zone again by the time I get back from this BBQ so I can set up some more attempts with this crew as we've all generally agreed that we've just formed "Team Splitting Heirs".

Awesome Part 4:

Had to do the annual 4th of July/Blow Shit Up dinner at the In-Laws place Saturday too. These are always a lot of fun as they generally will go out and spend $1000 on fireworks that the men of my generation in the familiy get to blow up. Unfortunately...that $1000 in fireworks gets to sit on the shelf until next year due to rain.

It's hard to be disappointed though. My niece was eating up all the attention and putting on a show for everyone there. She's 2.5 years old and can already sing the entire Alphabet song and count to 50. She also apparently doesn't understand that spinning around until she pukes isn't much fun...such irony. Smart enough to basically already know everything she'd be learning in Kindergarten...but not so smart on the healthy stuff yet. XD

The highlight of the evening was a Pee-Wee's Playhouse moment involving her though. We were all sitting at the table talking and it was just about bath time for her. Apparently there was a bit of an incident a year or so ago where her other grandmother (on her dad's side of the family) had turned on some jets in their tub while she was in it. The idea was to make some bubbles for her...but there was no water in the tub and it scared the piss out of her.

So we're all sitting at this table and my sister says "Breanna are you ready for your bath?"

/tantrum.

After the tantrum went away (amazing what a potato chip will do to stop that..."She's going to be a porker if you keep that up!" muses one of the guys at the table), we resumed our conversations. "Bath" was said again...

/tantrum.

Tantrum went away after a minute or so and about then, I catch onto it...

"Bath."

/tantrum

"Bath."

/tantrum

"Bath."

/tantrum

God it was funny. Everyone got in on it. It literally was like Pee-Wee's secret word of the day where everyone went crazy if it was said. It eventually got to the point where when one of us would say it, we'd throw our hands up in the air and start making a lot of noises along with the tantrum she'd throw. But the really funny part is...

...Breanna caught on to what we were doing. And...

Breanna: Bath!

/craziness

Breanna: /giggle

Breanna: Bath!

/craziness

Just cracked her up entirely when we'd do that. She was eating all that attention up. She had 11 people in the palm of her hand and she knew it. She also showed us a couple of her new "tricks". Apparently if you say "Breanna can you show us your pretty eyes?" she'll bat her eyelashes at you. She'll also answer being asked "Who's the man?" with "Uncle Pad!" (her current variation of my name since "Ch" is a hard noise for her to make for some reason) or "Daddy!"

She ended up being a lot more entertaining than fireworks. I obviously don't have kids of my own, but even I recognize these are the sorts of evenings that get talked about for years among family members and the sorts of stories that get told to embarass the hell out of you when you bring that first g/f or b/f home or for family reunions.

Anyway, time to start finishing up my open projects for customers and get to packing for my week-long excursion to Maine. One more blog post tomorrow most likely, then done until Wednesday the 15th most likely.