Productive Weekend is Productive

A lot to get to, so a short(er) intro today.

VNM

Didn't get a whole lot done here due to crystal changes being stubborn, but had a decent turn out and explored the Lord Ruthven section of these new events. I have to say that Feurunke and Erebus are both pains in the ass.

What was notable about this event was that it marked the debut of the tanking duet of Kreoss and myself. I'm still rather uncomfortable in my role as a main tank for events like these, but apparently all of our normal tanks we have available for Dynamis are set up elsewhere for these things. You do what you must though. After about 2-3 hours of no crystal changes, we called it a night and will come back at it again later this week.

Einherjar

Pretty easy T3 finally. We had something like 3 straight T3s where we either had Behemoth or cracked out normal monsters that just ate up a lot of time. Two of those 3 we ended up losing. The last ended up being a display of what happens when everyone does everything right. It's not often people face the max number of critters in T3. Usually it's in the 36-42 range. Prior to the last Odin, we had a room with all 48, Behemoth and we won. So we were due for an easy T3 and it didn't really disappoint.

Notable here was the return of Kaeko (Kaea now) to Odin and Obsidian. I'm pretty sure I mentioned this somewhere before, but Kaeko was instrumental in helping Obsidian develop a lot of the strats we still use today and put in a lot of time in Obsidian's early days grinding out Dynamis with the rest of us. When Obsidian was losing Einherjar rather consistently the first few months we did it, I was approached by Kaeko about him joining our runs (which was a no-brainer) and ultimately picked his brain as the runs progressed about what we could do differently.

By that time, I had already integrated the members shared between Versus and Obsidian into the runs and came close to maxing out the numbers. Really at that point it was just a matter of time and experience. Kaeko offered up strategies in dealing with some of the bosses (most of which, a lot of our members had never encountered before Einherjar) that helped accelerate our success as well.

It's kind of laughable now when I think about it, but there were seriously a good portion of people back then who didn't understand what a bard swap was...

Sea

I don't blame people for hating sea. I'm not super fond of it myself. There's not a whole heck of a lot to get from down there aside from torques and a couple of earrings off JoL since AV is currently not defeatable, but I suspect by the end of this year as people start getting their jobs to 99 and whatnot, we're going to end up seeing AV taken down consistently.

That would be what I'm preparing the shell for. If the event this past Saturday was any indication, we still got a lot of work to do. The biggest problem with sea is that there's tons more time spent running around and trying to MGS a bunch of true sight critter than there is actually fighting stuff. This means people are dying and getting frustrated which makes for a not-fun event.

We managed to take down Ix'MNK, Ix'DRK, Jailer of Fortitude and Jailer of Faith during this run, but yeah...clearly we need a few lessons in exactly how sea works. :)

As with other events, time and experience fix it. It's just a matter of patience.

Sky

I have to say, I love the fact that SE reduced the respawn timer of the ???s in sky to 2 minutes. We killed off 9 gods Saturday evening in about 3 hours of a relaxed killing environment. I ended up tanking again along with Reijbryn and got a better feel for exactly how hate works and whatnot, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.

Humbling moment of the night though was Kirin wiping us and depopping. Happens to everyone from time to time and Kirin pop sets certainly aren't as time-intensive to farm as they used to be. Yeah...a broken shadowbind on a chainspelling Suzaku combined with a main WHM dc'ing combined with Kirin popping out babies faster than the Octomom just made for a mess.

Dynamis

Sunday's Xarc run will go down as one of the most productive in Obsidian's history. Our attendance was up a bit, so that was certainly a factor, but it really seemed like a lot of people brought their A game. A quick run down of what we did:

- Got to DL in approx one hour and 45 minutes (the normal deliberate "pace" is about 2.5 hours)
- Killed DL in approx 30 seconds.
- Picked up Shadow Mantle for Glacian
- Killed Animated Claymore for Kreoss' new shiny stage 4 relic weapon.
- Killed Animated Great Axe for Calix's new shiny stage 4 relic weapon.
- Picked up 12 drops, most of which were actually wanted.
- Picked up 2 100 coins for Alaistair's sponsored month.

A couple kind of sucky things happened during the run, but definitely weren't sucky enough to take away from what we accopmlished.

One of the sucky things was a THF drop. Assassin Armlets dropped and Millenas had the bid won. They dropped in the middle of a pull that kind of surprised a lot of people and we had a few dead bodies as a result. Millenas was one of them. After she had raised and lotted, she ran off behind one of the little cermet spine thingies to recover...

...where her XBox decided it was time to crap out and not let her play for a few minutes. Unfortunately, no one saw her DC'ing because she was behind said thingy. So we're all just killing along and I'm waiting for the next opportunity to pull when I see:

Darkdawn obtains a pair of assassin's armlets.

I've known Darkdawn for a while now and there's nothing in his nature that I know of that would lead me to believe he'd ninja lot something, but my first reaction was to check the log in case I missed something. Seeing no other lotting occurred, we tried to figure out what just happened.

Millenas dc'd shortly before they dropped, no one saw her dc'ing and the rest is history. Darkdawn basically obtained a free pair of THF arms. Not a complete waste though as DD has THF at 75. This bodes well for the Salvage group at least since they have another semi-regular TH4 option to haul out.

There are some that would look at this being some sort of "Snipe Karma" as it relates to the bidding practices Millenas will employ at times. While I tend to lean towards that mentality a bit, no one really wants to see that sort of thing happen to anyone cause it all comes around eventually.

The other sucky thing that happened was something out of everyone's control really. A third BLM hat dropped within the last 2 seconds of the run. Said hat would have gone to Ringthree if everyone had actually had the chance to pass it, but 2 seconds just flat out isn't enough time.

Not that she was defending Ring, but Omoi and I had a debate about killing things in the last 3 minutes of the run. It really comes down to a "Why? vs. Why Not?" debate. On the "Why?" side, you have Omoi's points about it being demoralizing for someone to see a drop right before getting kicked out and it just adding to frustration that's inherent to the way Dynamis drops work.

On the "Why Not?" side, you have my points about losing items every now and then, but most of the time, they get passed within 10-15 seconds. There are a lot more comments along the lines of "Good job passing that item there at the end" buried in the results on the forums than there are "Damn, we lost another item" comments.

Neither side is wrong really, it just boils down to which side you lean towards. To me, we paid for 3.5 hours of time in there, I'm going to utilize every second of it that we can.

Overall though, this run was a hell of a lot of fun and very productive. Sure I would have liked to see more drops cause we really did clear an absolute Fuckton of demons yesterday, but I can't really complain too much considering the tasks we actually accomplished.

If this is what the expansion of Obsidian is going to look like on a week in and week out basis, we got a lot of fun times ahead. :)