If you're out there, Drizz...

[Mystoval]

I'm actually putting my money where my mouth was. I got a new computer. And I got the urge to play again. I know. Just BST, chillin, whatever. But I gotta solve this Mystoval thing that I couldn't figure out last time. So if you're out there, Drizz, or anyone who knows what the fate/current PW of Mysto might be (or might have been) please let me know!

[Carlyle]

(no message)

[Drizz]

I'll message you in a few mins with the info. Dinner time now.

[Vodevil]

ha, I assumed Mysto being in POL was just Drizz getting ready for the Mog Bonanza.

Also a lot of things have completely changed. Leveling is done in alliances nowadays and most people will gimp it out to 99 then actually gear a job.

[Manilladoom]

**pokes head in**

I am not sure little Manillagorilla could handle another 39 levels. It took me what 2 or 3 years to get to 60...

[Mystoval]

I've got a couple more now that my old harddrive is kicking again.

Not sure what this was about exactly, but seems like a pretty typical exchange.



Here you musta been closing in on 60.




I will say... it may have taken you 2-3 half-assed years to reach 60, but you could get from 60-99 in about 2-3 half-assed months now. It's weird, man. Somewhere I have a picture also of when you and Animalmother & I climbed Parradamo Tor, that really annoying, shitty hill in Attowah Chasm. I'll post it if I can find... sometime.

In the meantime, here's another great older shot, with a Vode in the background.

[Manilladoom]

In no particular order: Aasher, Decker, Mystoval, Manillagorilla, Valiere, Junyi



aforementioned Attowah Chasm pic



What's this? Mystoval defeated by Manillagorilla? HECK YEA!

[Manilladoom]

Two pics with Xabu and Mystoval that I cannot leave out...



and

[Manilladoom]

Manillagorilla is reactivated.

For some reason I applied my new activation codes to a new char ><
SE is reviewing the case and will make a decision whether or not I should get new codes to apply to Manillagorilla, which will come at the cost of deactivating my new Lv.1 Taru Manilladoom. Forums across the interwebs say this process could take between one week and one month.

I hear soloing is viable these days for all classes. How so? Keep in mind, I still have no 75s.

See you soon!!

[Vodevil]

Did you happen to buy the wrong region code like Mysto did? I was helping him with his code and it turns out the new copy of the game he bought was the EU version. Those codes are not compatible with an existing NA account. For any expansion codes, you need to match the regions.

[Manilladoom]

Did you happen to buy the wrong region code like Mysto did?

Nope! All the codes are good, just mistakenly applied them to wrong POL account. Typicalaru...

[Manilladoom]

Some more goodies I found:

[Mystoval]

So... some pics of what I've been doing since I've been back.

Plenty of Magian Trials. I don't mind these things too bad, I guess, but then, I've been doing earth and wind, which are both pretty easy. Fought Amemet a crapload of times. Made a bunch of +1s that sell for lol60k, but hey, it's gilz.




It's been kinda satisfying going back and doing some of the things I didn't or couldn't do before, although of course, I've fought this guy many, many times. But no campers anymore, really. And I can't make the same mistake I made before and sell the damn bow. Not that it dropped, of course.




Speaking of stuff I couldn't do (or lot on) before, made it a mission to give this guy a serious crack. This was the first time I fought him, duo with WHM. I think I was Lv90 at the time. No dropskies.




G10 with the Vode army. You're looking good, Drizz! Way sicker NIN than mine anyway.



And here was my first completely solo attempt, I think Lv96.



BAM! Finally got the drop. Notice I'm d/cing, and this is literally moments after the fight ended. I did, in fact, totally d/c, and would have probably lost tiger/pop items if the fight hadn't finished less than a minute before.



That kind of emboldened me, so I started looking up other crap I could solo, and KS99 came up. You know, it's weird. It's like, levels come so fast now, it's hard to even know what Lv96 "feels like". Back in the day, you had a pretty good handle on your capabilities and their limits, but 24 levels shot by so fast, I didn't even really know what I was capable of. Anyway, was gonna try solo Horns of War, but a couple bored BSTs on the LS jumped in. Got a nice dropskies.



How could I have left this game? Hah!









More as events warrant.

[Drizz]

Nice pics.

My NIN was pretty good, but I still needed a better Hi set, especially for non-abyssea. I didn't know Gades was back.

[Artea]

Gades is back.

[Zenogias]

Keep posting pics. I love seeing screenshot-styled 'blogish' posts.

[Manilladoom]

Decided to challenge Maat on my first level 70 job, Warrior. It did not go so well. The Shattering Stars guide I read on FFXI Wiki was clearly written by a Galka. If Tarutaru, don't use Berserk against Maat...


Having lost my first battle in record speed, Mystoval and I were convinced my bad play was not at fault for the loss, but rather my relatively low Axe Skill. We went to Cape Terrigan to correct this problem. I learned that screen capping the new Flying Mithra Deathstrike WS is simply impossible.


Having raised my Axe skill into the 220s, we were convinced that an easy win was in my grasp. Maat had other ideas. End result? Howling Fist to Manillagorilla's face.


3rd time is the charm, right? This last fight was possibly my worst, yet the stars and planets aligned for Manillagorilla and gave him the victory! I forgot to activate Mighty Strikes for my first two weapon skills, predicted my own death, and somehow pulled it out in the end. So six or seven years after his birth, Manillagorilla has finally done the impossible.


Fight log

[Mystoval]

Nice dude, saved me the hassle of posting those. Ima try to post some more here during my trials NM downtime. Plenty of that!


Ok so, been working on some more KSNMs. This is preparing to enter Wyrm KCNM. Really liked this galka group here.



And here he is... In retrospect, nothing that impressive or interesting about this picture I guess. Oh well!



So this is the group we had assembled for Lumbering Lambert. Ninja doom squad. It almost made me feel bad for these NMs, you know? Just like the old pop NMs way back when. Like, NM decides "oh, it's been 24-27 hours! Guess ima log onto FFXI, see what's up for the day." Soon as it pops, descended upon by a horde of flailing katanas and dies within seconds. Kind of a short, brutish, and nasty life, to paraphrase whoever that was.



And here's turtle KSNM. Got this down pretty well now. Unfortunately, I was the only one who didn't get an egg on two runs, but oh wells. Still got a bunch of seals. EDIT: oh, for the record, I'm not necessarily implying causality here, but both eggs dropped, back-to-back, on Watersday. Mine was on Windsday. You never know!



And finally, a signature closing shot. In mah new hat, nice rainbow in La Theine.

[Priphea]

This thread needs more photos posted to help me procrastinate at work.

[Mystoval]

I would have posted more, but I forgot my password, and then sent a reset request to (as I found out) my old .pol account which does not exist anymore. I reminded Vode a few times to reset my password, but then got this bright idea, so here we are.

After I found out about the Tenshodo battlefield warp, I basically would spend 30min or so a lot of nights just trying to pop shadows, and stay logged in to get ToD if possible. Man, TimeStamp is great. Anyway, duder finally dropped his loot for me, for the second time ever.




Leveling BRD with some Men! of! The SEA! during double xp.




Eggzactly.



Got BRD to 99! And my own Joyeuse! XD After all those other times, yes, and he was still slow as hell to pop, but a fun fight on THF. Also, in this picture you'll notice my moogle changed his name. As a matter of fact, all my Adoulin NPCs had wonky names like this. It was pretty funny. One NPC's name was like ColonizationSlave#05. WIsh I'd gotten a picture of that. Just had to filecheck and boot my old dat swaps.



...........

[Mystoval]

I'm watching the Tour de France, during the only 3 weeks of the year that I really pay any attention to sports. I actually like the other non-TDF races more, tbh, but they don't broadcast them on American TV, and I have to like, hunt them down on the internet and watch them in Belgian and shit. So I generally don't bother. After all, there are underleveled NMs to stand around camping for hours with a random band of dangerous looking, cockatrice-hating ninja.




Correct:




I like the Vunkerl Bridge.




And This




Know what bothers me about Abyssea? It's that the lighting never changes. I guess their world sucks so bad the sun is frozen in place? I'm sure I was hurrying through that cutscene on my way somewhere. But what's annoying about this is that shadows always fall in exactly the same places. So some spots are essentially invisible, all the time. Think about the variegated terrain on the edge of the crag around CF2 in Aby-LaTheine. You gotta take certain paths to get up to where you wanna go, but there are a couple little ramp-ups in the terrain that are constantly in shadow, and you can never really "see" where they go. Or maybe that's just me and my gimp computer and resolution. But it IS true, that up this ramp I'm running in the picture, there's this annoying clipping/ramp issue where you have to run all the way to the left, almost like you'd fall off if you didn't know better. This surely has been reported, yet it remains, so I can only assume SE sees some value in it. Great job! On the other hand, they gave us a nice moon.



This was just some random ">>Hey," tell I responded too. Good stuff.



And now the tour stage is over, so ima log on to get my daily tally and such. But here's a gloat shot for those still playing especially, who can attest that such a thing is, apparently, quite rare. Gotten in an Aby-La Theine party I think while I was gold-chest shopping for Briareus KIs.

[Mystoval]

Trying to post these in full rez. Looks like they get cut off in the preview. We'll see. I'll fix em if it happens I guess. [Edit: yep, looks that way.]




Figured out the correct combo of the festival bonus gear. I was glad to get some stuff I'd missed out on before!





Saw this, which terrified me. I don't know if it's the same Gogo or not, but I had no desire to find out. Haven't really seen it since, so there's that.





Voidwatch. I did dig the character design for Hahava though. Gilgamesh? Or uh... can't remember the name of that other look-alike dude in the FFXI bestiary.





Whoamg it's...





Priph the scholar!

[Vodevil]

BARD!!

[Priphea]

I am like a million times more annoying and nerdy than that slut Adelheid. Just saying.

So are like the old-world NMs always just sitting there untouched or are they still regularly camped?

...Also, why does Dhalmel Leather have an 8000/synth profit margin? I just don't get this game anymore!

[Vodevil]

So are like the old-world NMs always just sitting there untouched or are they still regularly camped?

Depends on the NM. There are a lot of Magian Trial quests have incorporate old underused NMs to make them somewhat relevant. But for the most part, lowbie gear isn't worth camping a NM for. With level sync, only gear within certain level ranges are actually useful. With how fast leveling is nowadays, players quickly outgrow their gear. Taking something from level 1 to 99 can easily be done in a week's time. It's pretty common for people to gimp along till 99 and then they'll put some effort into gearing a job.

[Mystoval]

As for dhalmel leather, and crafting in general, it's weird. I don't know where all the dhalmel leather goes. I do make it regularly, and usually sell when it's in the 15,000-20,000 range. I think basically, there are far, far fewer crafters than there used to be, in part because gil itself is less useful now. You still have master craftsmen with 110+ skill levels making cursed stuff, and certain HQs, but the army of midlevel crafters (like me at 93 now) isn't there anymore. So there are certain busy-work synths you can do for some good money, namely the ones you can't HQ, like leathers and ingots.

I have another big photo dump btw, but ain't got the time to get to it right now. Stay tuned!

[Mystoval]

[Mystoval]

So... a while ago, I searched the insides of very many bugards (both Minax and Sobek) for all the ridiculous junk I needed for my Kannagi. I will say that it was worth it, and once I settled into the groove on both NMs (Sobek and Briareus I mean) it went pretty smoothly. But I'm not really in any hurry to do it again.




Goes pretty quickly when you get drops like this! Well, sort of. Found drop rate to be >50% double skins with Falcorr. You can also see how much he evades here in the chat log. For atma I eventually settled on Mounted Champion, Razed Ruins, and Gnarled Horn. Used mah Anwig and usually 1 -PDT and 1 +Evasion axe. Two evasion didn't give me a significant improvement in dodging, so I figured -11PDT was better to have. But between the +11 AGI on the evasion axe, the increase in dodging, and +50 from Gnarled Horn, I noticed a dramatic decrease in mob TP moves.




Weird glitch!




Yes, I cheated! I got the tongue and beard from BCNM, but thank god for mog bonanza, I got the damn egg already!





Speaking of MNK stuff, finally got this guy to give up the goods too. Took one pop of PH XD. I warped to Fei'Yin (for 1000g), ran to pop zone, killed PH, 5 minutes later killed Western Shadow for the drop. In and out in 10 minutes!




High dmg so far, on any job.