Labor Day Weekend...

Anyone else notice that you always get swamped with work the week before you get ready to have a visitor or get ready to go somewhere for a few days? It's almost like customers just have this sense built into them that tells them "Q is getting ready to have company over, I better get my computer to him now" without any prompting whatsoever from me. Some of the "work" have been things that I've self-imposed, but as far as my business work goes, this past week has been on the insane side. Especially considering the week before was just completely dead.

Anyway, onto FFXI-related stuff...

Critical Break: 0-60 Series

Some of you probably already know this, but if you don't, I've been doing a crafting article once a week on Ringthree's blog since the beginning of June. The primary idea behind that article is to give some insight into the various things I learned over the couple years I spent getting gil together for Gungnir as well as my opinions on various other crafting-related issues that become semi-decent topics to discuss.

Having essentially run out of things to talk about, I went looking through FFXIAH.com and Wiki for something I could write a short blurb about when it dawned on me that a lot of the crafting guides that had been written were either out of date or didn't offer much in the way of actually being thrifty. Ctownwoody's (from Asura) guides on Wiki are easily the best guides out there, but even some of his stuff was a little outdated as most of his 0-60 guides were written years ago. He's updated them a bit, but the bigger problem with Wiki guides (especially if you don't use Firefox with AdBlock and NoScript) is that a lot of their scripted frames just suck.

So given all of that, I decided to undertake writing my own guides. At first, I was going to write one guide per week. I had enough fun doing the first one (Bonecrafting) that I decided to go ahead and get the second one out of the way. Then I realized Girlfriend would be here when it was time for the third one, so I went ahead and wrote it too. Then I just said "fuck it" and wrote the rest. Right now there are 8 guides sitting on Ring's blog that are waiting to be trickled out to press. I mentioned in my last guide (to be published Oct 13th) that once all of the guides have been published and pushed off the front page, I would publish them here on my blog in their own section so that readers don't have to sift through searches for information related to a specific guide.

One thing that I do like about this is that it seems to have a lot of opinions on the best routes to go. Between comments posted on my guides, /tells in game, and conversations over IM, I've had the assertion of "There's a ton of ways to go about this" reaffirmed quite a bit. I wrote those guides trying to find the cheapest, most efficient route possible to 60. Some people, for example, may find the level 28 Gelatin synth a far better use of their time as opposed to what I suggested in the form of Beetle Ring - Beetle Earring - Horn Hairpin path. The end results are about the same either way you go. You either spend a lot of time killing Dhalmel or you spend a lot of time killing Beetles.

I found that I had a lot of fun working on those things. Even though I'm technically done writing anything for Ring's blog until mid-late October, I've still got a bit of an itch to knock out the 61-100 Series that I have in the works. These will likely be shorter guides since we're not covering as many levels, but I get the feeling that the narration for each step will likely be longer. I may knock those out once Girlfriend heads back home...

The order these guides will be appearing will be:

Bonecraft - Clothcraft - Woodworking - Leathercraft - Alchemy - Cooking - Smithing - Goldsmithing. So keep your eyes peeled for them and, by all means, leave your thoughts on what could be a better approach. :)

Dynamis

This past Wednesday, we had Dynamis Tavnazia and Dynamis Valkurm. Numbers were still low, even for Tavnazia as I found myself looking for people who weren't signed up to fill a couple holes. Tavnazia went relatively smooth up until the last 30 mins where a botched sac pull and some irritating Nightmare Clusters caused us a couple wipes. I did manage to get my first piece of AF2-1 ever from this zone:



Was a good run with 9 drops total, most of which were actually wanted. Tav is seriously to the point where if you're only after AF2, Xarc and Glacier are kind of pointless.

Valk surprised me though. Obsidian isn't very well known for being the low-man type of Linkshell. Don't get me wrong, we have a lot of people who do a lot of low-man things outside of Obsidian, but usually, we have numbers that don't require low-man strategies. The Valk crew consisted of 21 people and they beat the zone. For some shells, that may be commonplace, but for us it isn't. That goes a long way towards boosting my confidence in our ability to overcome lower numbers when seasonal reasons like we're currently experiencing cause us to have issues with attendance.

Now for that low-man DL strat...

Einherjar

Man, I royally fucked up the Odin pattern this month. I knew after the last Odin, we needed to get two T3 wins to keep Odin on pace cause of mule issues. That wasn't a huge deal until we snapped a 9-run winning streak on a T3 that forced me to postpone Odin by a run-day.

Then I went and picked the wrong T2 the next run thinking that Nirimule and Dantmule had the same feather sets. So...postpone Odin by one more run-day.

Yeah...but in better news, I did a little research on our 2009 win-loss record. I mentioned it on the Obsidian forums, but wanted to point it out here:

Since the beginning of June, Obsidian is a rather staggering 22-4 in Einherjar with 2 of those losses being low-manned Odins (24 or fewer people, losing one at 1% and the other with fewest people (21) we've ever had). Since the beginning of 2009, Obsidian is 55-15. We've had two separate stretches of 25-5 since then with that rather horrible 5-5 stretch happening between Jan and Feb. I think it's pretty safe to say we've found our stride.

Misc. Notes

- Fishing is at 78 and stalled for the time being while I work on getting more Giant Catfish for the Fish Ranking contest. The hope is that we'll pick up enough to get a few friends some Pelican Rings. Once that's done, I'll hit the fishing a little harder to try to finish this off to 100.

- I'm currently 168k/200k for my Boneworker's Signboard. I'm curious to see if it's actually "Skill+1" or "Reduces chance of material loss". Consensus seems to be that it's the latter, but there are some that are swearing it's Skill+1. If it's truly Skill+1, then I should see an increase in HQs from the Trumpet Ring synth. Looks like I have some testing to do in the future. Hopefully I'll catch a good wave of guild point items and finish this up in the next week or so.

- Girlfriend is here until Tuesday, so I probably won't be in game much. It's Corvette Homecoming weekend this weekend and one of her friends came down with their family for it. Her friend's Dad owns a couple Corvettes and drove them down from Boston for it while Girlfriend and her friend flew down since they couldn't take the time off work to spend 2-3 days driving each way.

- Now that I don't have to worry about Critical Break columns for a month or more, I can possibly start working on my Weapon Skill gear series again and make the corrections I need to make, but the itch to do the 61-100 Series is stronger than the itch to do the WS Gear series.

- I started turning in my Marduk pieces. The only piece I'm missing to finish the set are the 35 hands. I turned in the parts for the legs and the feet last week, but don't really know if I want to spend 16-17 mil total on the Head, Body and Hands. Most of this set looks completely pointless for WHM with the exception of the head, but you could make the argument that the Walmart Turban is better. BRD and SMN definitely benefit more from this set than WHM as the combination of the Noble's Set and the Blessed Set just pretty much pwn this Salvage Set completely.

That's all for now. Next post will likely be Tues or Wed unless something really good happens over the long weekend. :)