Anyway, on to FFXI stuff.
Big news of the day is...
Kimille
Don't know how many of the readers are aware of this, but Kimille is a co-sack in Obsidian with me. When we promoted her, we knew she was preggers. So over the past few months, it's been "bun in oven", "fat" and "turtle" jokes abound. (Before some readers crucify me...Kimi makes those jokes at her own expense too.)
Last night prior to turning in, I was talking with her about our Odin run as well as various other in game activities. She informs me that her hubby (Gavin) has been doign a lot of flood cleanup work due to various nature issues where she lives. I made the off-hand comment about how ironic is it that her hubby is cleaning up flood damage and she's about due to make a flood of her own.
She was apparently supposed to go in Thursday for some tests, but this morning, just out of the blue, the following conversation takes place over MSN:
[10:18] Kimille: Heyyy.... it didn't happen during dynamis afterall..
[10:19] Qtipus: ?
[10:20] Kimille: Popping
[10:20] Qtipus: you had your baby?
[10:20] Kimille: No.. water broke, and this was the first chair...
[10:20] Qtipus: XD
[10:20] Qtipus: WTF, go to the hospital
[10:20] Kimille: Waiting on Gavin now..
[10:21] Kimille: I am! Just.. yah.. waiting on my ride. <_>
Obviously, since I'm in possession of beans and frank, I have no f***ing clue what goes on inside of a body once that water breaks. I'm relatively sure there's not any major pain involved or any contractions, but it seems to me that water break = sign to get to the hospital (anyone who's had a baby can feel free to correct me here). The humor in this conversation is that Kimille is basically sitting there about to give birth talking on an IM client about it to various people as well as apparently having been logged in game to announce said water breaking.
Needless to say, Kimi going to be out of action for a while as she adjusts to her new lifestyle of no sleep, no peace and quiet and lots of poop. GOOD LUCK KIMI!~
Einherjar
This Saturday marks the one-year anniversary of Obsidian doing Einherjar. If you look at the member list and sort it by the number of runs, you can get a really good idea who makes up the core of our group. From August 2nd, 2008 to August 1st, 2009, there will have been a grand total of 105 days that we had Einherjar scheduled. I've bragged a lot on this blog before about where we started vs. where we're at now. We've certainly had our highs and lows, but last night saw us hit a couple of milestones.
The first of which was that "elusive" e.body that Mav's been after since we started finally dropping. I'm not going to go as far to say that we've had bad luck with Odin, but I will say that anyone who waits patiently enough for a year or more for one drop is certainly to be commended as a person focused on team. Mav certainly earned this with the time he's put into our group, so a huge CONGRATS! to him.
In the year that we've been doing Einherjar, we've fought Odin 11 times compiling a 9-2 record against him. For some groups, that looks like a rather paltry number. A large reason for the low numbers is the fact that it took us 4 months to stock up our mules and find our identity. On top of that, we were heavily divided between a Tuesday crew and a Saturday crew as I made a specific point of trying to put a very NA friendly time in and a very EU friendly time in when setting this up.
After our first Odin win, I tried to set it up so that each "crew" would have an opportunity to win one on each tier between Odins. This meant that we were doing Odin every 7th run day. We stumbled a bit between our first few odins forcing me to push an Odin or two back by a week, but we eventually found our stride. Once I felt like we were capable of winning consistently, I lowered the Odin frequency down to every 5th run day. I knew this would lower our Odin attendance by a bit, but I also knew that killing Odin was entirely possible with 25ish people with a little bit of difficulty and it's been that way since May. This alternates which day Odin was on between Tuesday and Saturday, so I was able to keep the NA and EU crews happy by not monopolizing Odin on one day. All of this brings me to the second milestone...
Last night's Odin was done with 26 people. It marks the first time we've killed Odin with fewer than 30 people. Two Odins prior to this one, we had 25 and timed out at 1% (the blame for which is on my head for calling off damage over a 2 min period to get recovered a bit for a final push). Even with 26, I had a feeling it was going to be cutting it close, but after eating up 2-3 minutes getting everyone in, the crew last night kicked the living shit out of Odin killing him sometime around the 7 minute mark. That pretty much amounts to 26 people killing Odin in 20 minutes.
My how far we've come. Not too shabby for a non-end game shell eh?
I'm not going to get ahead of myself and assume that this will be the case every time we go in, but I'm certainly very confident that we're capable of this now and I'm certainly very confident in the fact that our crew is confident it can happen too.
The major reward in this for me is that I'm part of something essentially built from scratch. When you take the fact that most of Obsidian's members have little to no end-game experience, putting them in something like Einherjar seems like a recipe for disaster. The learning curve was definitely steep, but looking back on where we were this time last year vs. where we are now, it's very rewarding to me personally to know that I helped build something that can last for a long time and reward members consistently w/o having to go through the drama of HNM camping.
Everyone taking part in this can definitely take a minute to feel some pride in what's been built. Einherjar is not something very many groups have success in, much less have success in it very frequently.
A Moogle Kupo d'Etat
Yeah...more fetch quests although the story in this one is more entertaining than ACP. The first major fight, "Roar! A Cat Buglar Bears Her Fangs" was certainly entertaining though even though the fetch quest running around all over Quicksands Caves finding ???s marked on your map was something extremely annoying. I'm not going to bitch too much about it because I know what's coming up and this is apparently nothing on the annoyance scale compared to what we're about to deal with.
Anyway, the fight itself was very fun. We went in with Lect (RDM), Suraph (BLM), Rifu (SAM), Brizzy (SAM), Kauna (COR), and myself (PLD/NIN).
AND YES KAYLEA I REALIZE YOU'RE NOT ON THIS LIST~
It opens with Nanaa Mihgo and her three Goblin assistants. Suraph ES Sleepga IIs them all while I build up hate on Nanaa and Rifu/Brizzy take out the goblins. After 2-3 WS, each goblin went down and Nanaa had just woken up as the last goblin went down.
Nanaa Mihgo herself is no walk in the park. While the first major ACP fight in Fei'Yin had us getting dogpiled by 4 seed monsters resistant to sleep, Nanaa Mihgo basically dogpiles you by slapping damn near every annoying status effect in the book (Paralyze, Stun, Poison and Silence) through her normal melee attacks, she also uses a move called King Cobra Clamp.
This move actually went through Invincible and shadows I should note and knocked me around for 800-1200 each time.
Oh...and she spams it as her health gets lower.
To top it all off, she "summons" two mithra helpers as the fight is going on. As long as you haven't DoT'd Nanaa, you can sleep her and focus on her helpers. They've got more HP than her goblin counterparts, but they still go down rather easily. She will spawn either a NIN or a BLM helper first, then the other one later.
After the second helper went down, it was damn near impossible for me to keep my shadows up to avoid her en-status crap. On top of that (as mentioned before), Invincible was basically useless due to her special TP move. Our crew won this with a little effort, but I ended up eating a Cobra Clamp right as she died that killed me...so I got to watch the cutscene afterwards with 0 HP. :)
All of this sounds a lot more daunting than it really is though. As long as you keep your tank's HP high and know what to expect from the various assistants, then the battle is pretty tame. As I said before...anyone with a lot of experience in dealing with multi-mob BCNMs shouldn't have any issues with this.
I'm not looking forward to doing the stuff after this BC though. I'll trudge through it, but I'll likely bitch every step of the way.
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