Dog Days of Summer...

It's official. It's the middle of summer and I'm a little burned out on FFXI. A large part of this has to do with what I've dubbed "Project Catch Up". Not that I mind doing this for friends, it's just hard juggling these events when real life gets in the way consistently.

This is a common theme for summer though. In the entire time I've been up front organizing events in the various shells I've been a part of, summertime is usually the longest stretch of time where people simply don't stay indoors as much to play MMOs. Can't really blame them as it's only natural for someone to actually want to go on a vacation or spend some time outside doing whatever. I always see a drop in average attendance for Dynamis during the summer.

That drop in attendance generally leads to burn out for me as I'm usually scrambling to either find replacements or having to lean on certain members/people a little harder than usual for jobs that are necessary. Knowing that I'm probably going to disappoint a few people, at least a little even if they say they aren't, just simply wears me out.

Einherjar

This is a good example. This past Saturday's Einherjar was a T3. When I went to sleep Friday night, we had 2 bards signed up and 4 people on the wait list. When I woke up Saturday morning, we had 1 bard signed up and 0 people on the wait list. That many signouts the day before a run isn't all that uncommon...even in the busiest time of the year, but what makes this notable is the fact that there were 0 people on the wait list. That doesn't happen too often. On top of that, the real life bug seems to have bitten nearly our entire array of bards.

I didn't go out specifically recruiting bards for Einherjar. I have to say that's one thing we've been blessed with. People can win Einherjar w/o having a ton of bards, but the vast majority of the time, your melee having bard support is the difference between winning and losing. A quick run down of our bard list looks like this at the moment:

Kimille - gave birth, out of action for a while.
Rudithina - Active
Invy - Active, dislikes bard in large quantities (i.e. having to come as bard repeatedly).
Omoikitte - currently moving, ISP in limbo, generally Tuesday only member due to work.
Amnezia - No idea about his sporadic attendance, generally makes about half the runs.
Manders - Disappeared about a month or so ago. Assuming this is work-related, but not sure.
Ceri - Active, missed Saturday due to funeral.
Artix - Newer member, haven't got a good feel for his overall attendance yet, but was missing Saturday.
Zerolzero - Up until Saturday, had been MIA due to ISP issues.
Reijbyrn - See Amnezia.
Jamel - Generally doesn't sign up, but shows up when he can.
Darkdawn - Haven't used him as BRD before, but generally makes about 1/4 of the runs.

Outside of those people, we have a half dozen or so other members with BRD between 69-74, but as you can see, we're certainly not hurting for bards from a membership standpoint. The main problem, as you can see, is that most of them all got tied up with real life issues.

I hate having to ask people to repeatedly change to a job. Especially on consecutive runs. Every one of these guys understands that they have something that is necessary for the win most times and are great about changing, but I know there are times they get bored with it and want to come as something else. Lately that hasn't been too much of an option for them. Hopefully the rest of the crew manages to get things sorted and back to active so the current 3 people who are basically stuck as BRD at the moment(Rudi, Ceri, Invy specifically) can start playing something else for a bit.

"It's only 30 minutes" is something that's tossed around when we see complaints about said job, but it does add up. It's hard to tolerate someone complaining about job changing when they haven't been asked in a while over a 30 minute event, but for the guys that have to show up run in and run out...yeah it does get boring.

Even I have to say, as much as I love Dragoon, having Gungnir has pigeonholed me into the role of a DD for this event as there aren't many people that can out-do me on a parse. My being pigeonholed as a damage dealer means someone else is getting pigeonholed as a puller or as a healer (respective to the jobs I have leveled in Einherjar).

Anyway, T3 was mostly nice to us. I'm not real sure if Cerberus picked up a massive Defense and Evasion bonus about halfway down or not, but as we were burning him down, my damage and accuracy fell off the map...even with bard buffs. I know Magma Hoplon gives him a rather large stoneskin effect, but I haven't seen anything anywhere about those boosts happening and I have never seen Cerberus pick up that level Defense and Evasion before. Seriously, I'm probably the most accurate melee in the entire group and I was doing good to hit him half the time. I was also lucky if my Drakesbane damage exceeded 200. Maybe someone out there can clarify this for me, but yeah he had Angon, Dia III and Feint on him and I still sucked some major ass. We just managed to kill him right as the 1 minute warning came up and got everyone a feather despite the vast majority of us being dead.

Dynamis

Windurst

Had Windurst this past Wednesday. Ended up going in with 40ish people, but the big part of the run, at least for me was...

Mav vs. Qtipus

Y'see...Mav finally got his long-awaited E.body from our last Odin run. I was curious to see how he stacked up against me in Dynamis on his WAR. So with Ring parsing, we both just let it fly.

I'll be the first to admit though...I had a huge advantage cause we were fighting monsters that were weak to piercing.

I had to take over pulling after the AH area due to Kreoss' rustiness, but up until that point, the parse numbers came out looking like this:

Qtipus: 18%
Mav: 14%
Ringthree: 13%

To put that in perspective...

There were 3 people who were making up nearly half the damage out of the 40ish people there.

An amusing moment that happened early on though was against our first two targets after we entered. I don't remember the exact numbers, but both of my Drakesbanes on these two targets were in excess of 1.8k. This prompts Ring to announce:

(Ringthree) And with 1% of Dynamis mob precincts reporting, I declare Qtipus the winner.

Xarcabard

Xarcabard was yesterday. We ended up with 45ish people for that run. Ring was concerned about not having a "real healer" as his party had Tikki in as SMN for his healer. His primary concern was that he was going to be slowed and blinded the entire time.

Normally I'm the first person to LOLSMN anything, but with some of the buffs SMN got a couple updates ago, they aren't anywhere near as bad as they used to be in Dynamis. That's not to say I'll start utilizing them more and they're still my favorite targets for job changes, but I do know what SMN is capable of and if they aren't able to change to something more useful (In Tikki's case he's not atm), then we utilize them.

Tikki is a bit of an aberration when it comes to SMNs though. One of the reasons SMN gets knocked on so much is that the guys playing them often times forget the fact they can actually BUFF parties. They typically just want to dump their MP into BPs and see how much damage they can do as a result. This is generally the foundation for Ring's concern, but I've been around Tikki enough to know he knows better.

Y'see...I was in the same situation for the longest time with DRG. Back when it was a huge LOL job, it was the only job I had at 75. So my main focus was to make sure I was geared in a manner that benefitted my teammates. This meant I couldn't worry about huge WS numbers. It meant I had to worry about having TP ready to open skill chains. It meant I had to worry about MP gear and recognizing which statuses to remove from various TP moves if I was on the sidelines providing support. I understood what a DRG's limitations were completely at the time and I didn't continually try to be something I wasn't. I'm completely aware of how Tikki approaches his play of SMN as I've been in that situation before. (Tikki is also one of the reasons I'm hoping SMN does get a bit more love in the future, but even if they don't, they haven't been anywhere near as LOL as DRG was in the past.)

With that being said, I knew Tikki being in the same party with Ring would likely change Ring's perception about SMN in Dynamis. I also knew that up until Tikki showed him that he actually knew how to play SMN and wasn't entirely worried about how much damage Predator Claws was going to do, Ring was going to go Ring and gripe about not having a real healer.

It took all of 2 pulls to convince Ring he was safe. Even remarking later in the run to me that "Dynamis is so much more fun when I'm in a party of people that know how to play their jobs".

Now obviously, SMN is still limited to the fact that people actually have to be in range of their support BPs for them to be effective. However, the facts that SMN Hastega can now overwrite the slow from Demonic Howl and having a SMN that can actually remember to cast Blindna when their party members get hit with hecatomb wave makes the SMN job a lot more appealing to use in a zone like Xarc.

Long story short, Tikki won over Ring for the duration of Xarcabard. Since I knew Tikki would doesn't diminish the fact he actually did. Safe to say Tikki is conquering the bad perceptions of SMN one cranky old man at a time.

Aside from that, our last two Xarc runs have produced a total of 37 AF2 and 5 100s. Rather insane, even for us.

Salvage

Summertime is also effecting a lot of the Salvage runs. Since I finished Ares legs, I've been to a grand total of 2 Salvage runs. Some of the normal Salvage runs didn't happen due to various people not being around, but a couple of them I missed due to Project: Catch-Up and my own physical fatigue from a lot of work that I've had lately.

I'm hoping the guys in the Salvage crew won't think that I'm done with Salvage just cause I finished Ares set. Salvage is still a fun event for me to do (except for the frogs...), but like a lot of others, I've been derailed a bit by various circumstances.

There might also be some Saturday Salvage runs organized by me in the near future for people involved in Project: Catch-Up. There isn't really anything I want or need from Salvage, but given I have a ton of experience with it now, it's only natural I start trying to pass that knowledge off to the guys who might want to start picking up stuff from Salvage to further their own gear.

With the addition of the end game augments though...they may opt to take their chances that way to get on par with some of the Salvage gear.

A Moogle Kupo d'Etat

I have to admit, this mini-expansion is growing on me.

I was pissed off after A Crystalline Prophecy. I hate level capped shit with a passion. I hate long, drawn out level capped shit even more than that (looking at you Delkfutt crawl...).

I haven't done the final BC for MKE yet (supposed to do that tonight), but I have to say I've been pleasantly surprised with the stuff after the "Roar! A Cat Burglar Bears her Fangs" BC. Even the ???s fetch quest prior to the Roar BC, wasn't that much of a pain. Looking back, one would think the ACP Fei'Yin crawl is easier, but in reality it's not. There's a little more time involved from a running standpoint in the MKE Quicksands Cave tour (and LOL @ requiring maps...god I love SE sometimes), but you have static locations for all of the ???s. With a Tele-Altep and an Escape, getting around isn't so difficult. There's no moving, sparkly piece of crap to frustrate you to no end like ACP's Fei'yin crawl.

Oh yeah...I was talking about the stuff after the Roar BC. The mini-games, especially the glacier part, are a little annoying, but compared to how pissed off I was after the ACP Delkfutt crawl, I was actually HAPPY after the mini-games.

I've got a pretty good idea how the final BC is going to play out. If it does play out that way, I'll be blogging at some point about how much better the final BC is than the ACP final BC that requires a zerg or a crapload of ranged damage.

On top of that...I've been waiting to beat the shit out of a moogle for a long time.

I'm still a little torn on what to get for my hat though. I know for sure STR+4, WS ACC+15 will be on there, but the other half, I'm not sure about. I'm looking at "ACC+10, Att+5" as an almost for sure thing, but the two other augments that are tugging on me a bit are "STR+2, Haste+2" and "Eva+10, Store TP+4". The "why" to those last two are simply one would give me more total STR than I currently have (until I get N.head) and the other is simply cause I'm a Store TP nut. We'll see what shakes out though...

Girlfriend

She's coming to visit me the first week of September. Right now, there's a running bet going on. The bet is...

If Transformers 2 is still in theaters when she's here, will she escape her visit without seeing it?

She says she will.

I say she won't.

History is on my side.

Reasons she'll go see it are:

1. I have a car she will be relying on while she's here.
2. I'm the guy that convinced her to go see Rambo on Valentine's Day.
3. She didn't get out of watching the first Transformers. Three times.

Reasons she won't are:

1. She convinced me to watch Twilight. She did so knowing damn well I had no clue what it was about and had never heard of the books. She just said "Vampires" and "Baseball" to me and I actually wanted to see it.
2. Her friend, (we'll call her Coco) and Coco's family will be here for the Corvette homecoming. It's entirely possible Girlfriend could be kidnapped in the middle of the night in order to avoid watching Transformers 2.
3. My family may work to undermine me if my plans get back to them.


Place your bets now folks. :)