Busy Weekend n' Stuff

I ended up doing a ton more this weekend than I originally had planned or felt like I did. Here's the run down...

Salvage

I went to the Thursday and Friday Salvage runs. Thursday was rather interesting as Old Man decided to mix everyone's jobs up. I know I won't remember everyone's jobs, but the roster usually looks like this:

Ring: SAM or WHM
Omoi: WHM or BRD
Celestria: BRD
Blaize: THF
IceB: RDM or THF
Darkdawn: DRG or COR
Ninjafox: RDM or THF
Q: DRG

The job set up we did on Thursday looked like this (apologies in advance if I missed something):

Ring: NIN
Omoi: DRG
Celestria: MNK
IceB: THF
Darkdawn: RDM
Ninjafox: DRG
Q: WHM

Needless to say, I was rusty. I also came to the conclusion my WHM gear is rather high end for a job that I barely use...so I decided to sell some of my higher end stuff and replace it with mid-range/acceptable items.

Back to the run tho', was rather bonkers. It definitely added an air of freshness to the runs. I believe the only item picked up was the Lv.35 Skadi pants, which is rather rare for us to begin with.

Friday saw us do SSR with our more normal job setups. Ended up seeing Lv.35 Ares pants drop and {Nice to meet you} :)™ is now 71/75 Salvage pieces. If I remember correctly, she just needs Lv. 35 Usu body, a Skadi piece and Lv. 35 Ares head and feet(?). Should go to show she's been doing Salvage a very long time. Her inseparable in-game counterpart has picked up a similar number of parts as well.

I don't know what they did on Sunday as I was occupied with another task that's bugged me since I hit 75 on DRK. I'll get into more of that later.

Einherjar

Saturday's Einherjar run saw us doing T3 as an extra run before Odin. Was a relatively solid run. Ozulus' first real foray into pulling caused us to cut it a little closer than I would have liked, but we still won and I probably could have fixed the slowish pulling by jumping in myself to pull.

The series of runs between our last Odin (Dec 19th) and the upcoming one have been rather bad. A number of late starts and some holiday hangover are the primary reason for the frustration, but the past week seems to have seen these issues rectified.

"How bad was it?" you might ask...

We managed to lose a T1 run with 24 people. This was the run right after Christmas, so "holiday hangover" was blamed mostly.

Anyway, T3 win is a T3 win. Hopefully Odin is nice to us and drops some long-waited-for E.Bodies.

WotG City Missions

I kind of held off doing these because I didn't want to wait as long between the end of these and the next updates. I did most of the legwork for these last weekend while I was up at Kay's with Kay. The last fights that were released were rather tough, but nothing to really write home about. I rounded up Celestria and Blaize to help out with these, but quickly found out that we needed more than 4 despite the caliber of players we had.

I went looking at FFXIAH.com's search feature for people who were on Fate A Haze. While this didn't mean that they had necessarily done the latest batch of quests, it did mean there was a much better chance that they were there. I happened to see a number of Obsidian members on that list, so I started asking around. Most hadn't done the new stuff yet and if they had, they were tied up doing some other stuff at the moment (last minute invites are last minute etc...). I was referred to Drakus who, thankfully lent us a hand.

While waiting for Drakus to finish up his crafting binge that I interrupted, another old friend appeared next to where we were standing. Kauna just happened to be putting together people for the final Windurst fight. Our crew combined with his crew and wiped out the Windy BC (which was a joke really with 10 people...). Kauna then hung out with us to finish up Bastok and Sandy.

Howl From The Heavens - Shows us the day the "great beast" (Fenrir) was summoned to turn the tide of war into Windurst's favor. Out of the three final fights, this one was probably the weakest from a challenge standpoint, but, by far, the strongest from a cutscene standpoint. That departs from the norm of the fights themselves as the Windurst fights and cutscenes are the strongest of the three. I won't get into the spoilers, but I will say you're missing a lot if you don't do this leg. There's a TON of story they tell in this particular series of quests.

What Price Loyalty - Bastok's story has kind of jumped around a bit. It's only been the past couple of updates where any sense of continuity was established. The reason I liked the cutscenes here was it got into the history of one of Vana'diel's more legendary characters, Zeid. We all know Zeid and Volker were primarily responsible for ending the war and Zeid's appearances throughout the game are usually clouded in mystery and questions about where his loyalties lie. The storyline has progressed to a point now where it's pretty clear we're on the precipice of that final confrontation.

The fight itself isn't difficult if you generally know what to expect. Klara's AoE petrification weapon skill is a pain to deal with, so you have to go in with mages that are on top of the Stona game. The first 50% of the fight is cake. The last 50% sees Klara potentially lay a significant beatdown on anyone who's pissed her off. The first couple of attempts our crew had (sans Drakus and Kauna) saw us lose at 33% and...1%. We were also on our way down during the third attempt until Drakus decided Mijin Gakure was necessary and ended up getting the killshot.

Blood of Heroes - This is easily the toughest leg/fight out of the three. The fight itself is set up similar to Splitting Heirs, only with a much weaker main NM. Excenmille joins the battle as well and it's necessary to keep him alive.

My biggest beef with this storyline is the importance placed on the kids and how the kids seem to be insanely more powerful/intelligent than their adult counterparts. Don't get me wrong...some of the cutscenes in this series have been amazing, but often times, they're ruined by the childish overtones. The cutscenes here are decent, but again, too much kid.

The last fight in this series thusfar is rather chaotic at the beginning. You're faced with Kingslayer Doggvdegg, 4 Orc Warriors, 2 Orc Black Mages and Kingslayer's pet bugard. We didn't do anything particularly special in dealing with this, but the idea was to have one healer focus on the kid, another person kite the Orc assistants while the main melee group took down the bugard. Once the bugard was down, kill the BLMs, then the WARs (who were rather weak...) and then focus on Kingslayer while keeping the kid alive. Once the bugard and first few "babies" were dead, it was a very easy fight.

The cutscene afterwards saw everyone's favorite BCG General show up and foil Kingslayer's trap along with the funeral for some Elvaan hero that seemed to have just instantly shown up that gave his life when the trap the San d'Orian forces laid got messed up by some dipshit soldier dropping his sword. The kids have a reunion of sort while they watch people cry around them over their fallen comrade. This fight was easily the toughest out of the three, but probably had the weakest story "ending" of them all.

Many thanks to everyone that helped out here. It's pretty obvious that this wasn't the end of the city story lines as references to a final battle in Oztroja are made, Klara got away and the San d'Orian army is still hidden away in Xarcabard. I don't know if they're going to tie all of these things together with the next batch of mission updates, but my best guess is that we're going to see WotG Main story update - City finales - WotG finale. This likely means WotG isn't going to be done until the end of 2010.

Weapon Skill Points

This was the main thing I did over the weekend and the reason I missed Salvage on Sunday. This is also one of the main reasons I dread leveling other jobs because I know I'm going to have to unlock some weapon skills or latents or something that involves me spending hours on end somewhere just spamming my weapon skills with someone.

Between Saturday and Sunday, I accumulated 850 weapon skill points across three weapons. I picked up Ground Strike, Spiral Hell and Insurgency. I whored out a lot of people in the process (namely people with Impulse Drive for the latter two weapon skills) and many thanks to those that helped me out.

Still on the list of things to get done before leveling BLM is to get Lect's Coffinmaker, Dissector and his WS Detonator unlocked. Not as many points there as he's been working on them off and on in the same time period that I was working on mine.

Now that the holiday stuff is over, I'm hoping I can resume a more normal-ish schedule. There are still a number of little things I want to get done in game that I haven't yet, but this weekend went a long ways towards clearing that list.