Final Fantasy XI

[Masaya]

Hey anyone check out the new Trailer? anyone else excited? Every time a new expansion comes out, it attracts a whole new wave of people. I'm pumped, though I still haven't gotten back into the game. I need a more steady job than I do currently for the summer. Which I'm close to getting.

I really want to come to Titan too, hopefully by then the world transfer program will be running!
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[Deleted User 1]

I'm hoping for the world transfer, but I'm also really looking forward to the official Windower they've been talking about. It'll make looking up information -world's- easier for me!

I'm still working on plowing through all of the other expansions, so I can wait on WotG, but more new players is more of a good thing than a bad thing, I'd say. ^_^

Lately all I've been doing is tele taxi and farming. I need to save up for a 200k katana. @.@

[Sniper_Zegai]

Ive left FFXI for good.

Its a shame I could'nt hook up with any of you guys on one of the servers.

Hope you all enjoy Wings of the Goddess.
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[AA]

You'll be back, they always come back :P

I am looking forward to WotG even though i have hardly touched the other expansions, i think the main reason is that i ant to learn about the history of Vana'diel, i can find the website with a lot of historical information if any one would like it, i know i have it somewhere.

In other news i just unlocked Beastmaster :)

[Masaya]

Yeah, I hardly have gone into any of the expansions either. I used to farm in CoP, when the memories used to be worth something. Other than that I haven't done any of the Dem, Holla or Mea, Missions. Technically my story is all up to the point where I need to go kill the Shadowlord. But I get so sidetracked with other aspects of the game and end up not taking the time tog o level until I'm strong enough.

As soon as I start my job I"m resubscribing ^_^. I'm getting pumped.
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[Aurelien]

Well ... there have been a lot going on in the game to me since the last time I posted here. Obviously, there is no way that I remember every single thing XD so I'll share some things that I do remember.

1. Galliard Trousers.
Yes ... finally I got that nice nice Rare/Ex pants for my PLD. Galliard Trousers are obtained as a 100% drop from an NM called Kurrea which is a Bugard type monster in Lufaise Meadows. To pop him, we need an item called Adamantoise Soup which required, if I remember correctly, around level 60s Cooking skill. Now it looks pretty straight forward when I started looking at the ingredients required until I came into 3 particular items, namely Diatryma Meat, Tavnazian Ram Meat, and Chicken Bone.

Diatryma Meat is not AH-able, and therefore must be either bought from bazaar, traded to you, or farmed. So I opted to farm it and to my surprise, it dropped quite easily. So one down, two to go. I checked Chicken Bone and apparently it can only be obtained from excavating at certain places. I checked AH and saw that there was none up in Jeuno. I was prepared to buy picks and whatnot to excavate and haul my ass to Tahrongi Canyon. But then my friend managed to find one in Windurst's AH. So I was saved from the trouble.

Now the last problem is the biggest of all. Tavnazian Ram Meat is dropped from, well you guessed it, a mob called Tavnazian Ram. Problem is, it is VT-IT mob to a level 75 and obviously it's not something that I can solo on my PLD. The easiest way to farm the meat is to form an exp party and start party there. However, no one partied there these days anymore. So I had to rely to my trusty friend who isn't scared of death and looking for exciting adventure. He was RDM/BLM while I went PLD/WAR to keep hate off him. We decided to use the sleep > nuke strategy while I kept on voking and flashing and whatnot to keep hate on me. I pumped up my +Enmity gear and managed to successfully keep hate 99% of the time. It turned out to be quite an easy and safe method just taking a while to kill, and we were lucky enough that the meat dropped on our third mob avoiding us from spending gazillion years farming there.

So I got my Adamantoise Soup and then the LS finally decided to do Kurrea last Saturday. As a PLD, obviously I would be tanking this Kurrea, and boy oh boy it was a fun and funny fight. We popped Kurrea by trading the Adamantoise Soup to the ??? as per usual. Now once spawned, Kurrea would chase whoever has hate up to a certain time (guessing around 20-30 seconds) before he would come back to the ??? location to drink the soup again. Rinse and repeat. Everytime he drinks the soup, he got a certain boost which can be Magic Attack Up, Immune to Ranged Attack, Physical Attack Up, Cure Tons, etc. On top of that, he has Auto-Regen which is quite massive. However, after a while, when he drinks the soup, he can become "sick" (text will mention about his face turning into green). Being sick stopped his Auto-Regen permanently.

So our strategy was to hold him while he's not sick, buying us time to survive just until he gets sick. Once he's sick, then we'll unload all of our damage as soon as we can. Eventually, he'd die. However, the fun begins when we started our first Kurrea (we did 4 runs). I was co-tanking as PLD/NIN along with a NIN/WAR. We tanked and it was quite easy and no problem until suddenly Kurrea cast Aeroga III. As we know, -ga spells would remove and penetrate shadows so there's no way for us to avoid the hit. BAM! 2300 damage ... both tanks died and Kurrea went back to drink his soup. The NIN and I then went back to rest while another PLD and NIN took our place to tank Kurrea's second visit. BAM! Another Aeroga III and they both died. We put in an emergency WAR/NIN to tank the third visit and BAM BAM! WAR/NIN died. By this time, I was unweakened and ready for second round. I tanked again, this time alone because hate was not too hard to hold, not requiring a second tank.

Kurrea came again and I kept up all of my shadows perfectly (note: Kurrea can Fast Cast his spells, making it quite difficult to interrupt his casting) and luckily, he didn't use any Aeroga III on me. I survived that particular trip but not keeping up hopes for the next trip. Trip after trip I survived and felt lucky. After seeing how devastating the -ga spell damage, I opt to have Wind Carol rather than other songs to stack with the Baraera on me. I thought that there's no avoiding that spell, so I'd have to stack whatever I can to help reduce the damage taken. And it finally came, Kurrea starts casting Aeroga III, I saw that and popped my Rampart for the extra Magic Shield bonus to go on top of Wind Carol and Baraera. I survived with around 200s HP left. Quickly recast my shadows as the WHM spammed Cure on me to get my HP up again.

Eventually, Kurrea did get sick and it was history from then on. He was destroyed in around 3 trips after that. The next 3 fights weren't as fun because we already went through the initial "oh shit it's Aeroga III coming" phase (and then we realized that it was Windsday too) and casualties were low. I died twice when Kurrea decided to Double Attack and ate up all my shadows to quickly follow up with Fast Cast Tornado for 3k+ damage. Obviously his Fast Cast Tornado is quicker than my Utsusemi: Ichi/Ni casting. >.>

Anyways ... here's how Vaagan looks like when I was messing around with Lesser Colibris to farm some KS just outside Al Zahbi in Bhaflau Thickets. I love how it's a proper "pants" that actually cover my pimpin white PLD AF boots. ^^


2. Monk Journey
There's not really much to report here, but now my MNK is level 70 with around 9.7k to 71. I'm hoping to get to 71 in the near future so that I'd get to learn Asuran Fists. But I'm not in any hurry. Not sure if I've mentioned it before or not, but I've also obtained Shura Togi which is obviously the best body armor for MNK. Sadly that came at a costly price of 1.4 million gil. Now I have like 800k left in my wallet which I use conservatively as I haven't been making money lately.

When I was 69 partying to get to 70, I partied with another MNK69. Out of curiousity, I parsed our battle because I've never partied with another MNK before and I wanted to know whether I performed similarly to them or not. He was wearing pretty much similar gear with me with the most noticable difference of him wearing Fuma Kyahan while I was wearing Kung Fu Shoes instead. End result? I parsed around 3-4% higher than him. ^^ At least I know I'm not a crap MNK. List of wanted items for my MNK: Byakko's Haidate, Black Belt, Destroyers, and Dune Boots. Hopefully I'll get them someday.

3. Einherjar.
Well today was the version update's day. One of the additions is the new battleground called Einherjar that I briefly mentioned in the other post. No, I didn't get to meet the Vampyr, but I did get to participate in Einherjar for the first time. Due to them being "new", many people wanted to try it out today so we had to wait a bit before we got our turn to enter. The LS that went in before us had 16 people (Einherjar can be entered by 6-36 players). They went out mostly either facing up or facing down depending on their race. They failed to kill a single mob and they died numerous times in there.

My LS had 32 people going in, I thought, "well we got twice of their number and we're not exactly inexperienced about the game, so we should do better", and we actually did. We managed to kill 3 bomb-type mobs, and 1 single bat. Problem is, there are like 10 bombs and 10 bats in total. Pulling 1 bomb made all the other bombs came to you too after a while. We got raped in there. It's not exactly fun to "tank" and got hit by 10 bats depleting your HP from 1300s to 0 in a matter of seconds. And with only 30 minute time limit, we got destroyed wiping out twice before being kicked out.

Hopefully, there will be more information about it in the future as to what exactly need to be done. S-E wouldn't really make it 30 minute limit if it's a simple "kill them ALL one by one". So yeah, it's just a matter of time before it becomes more doable.

4. Misc Stuff.
I finally got to do ToAU mission 13 "The Lost Kingdom" and now up to mission 15 "The Black Coffin". After finding out that a LS member (from my social LS, not the end-game LS) is at the same mission, I just asked 2 other friends to help out with the fight. We did it PLD/NIN (me), PLD/WAR, BLM/WHM, RDM/WHM all level 75 except the PLD/WAR who is PLD71. It wasn't ridiculously hard and quite comfortable to be done by the 4 of us. Since it was a Fomor NM, it has all Fomor special attack. I don't care much about the AoE 0 TP move. I don't care about the Drown, Accuracy Down, and Bind status. But heck I do care about the Defense Down one. That move is just nasty and I'm lucky that I blink tank that mob. It would've been nasty if I tanked as PLD/WAR. I spammed "Erase please" and "Erase x2" because the NM literally spammed the special attacks like there's no tomorrow. But yeah, because the RDM/WHM is a really skilled player, it wasn't too difficult. His Slow II spell was effective in slowing down the NM significantly (I can actually feel how slow the NM was swinging at me), his Erase was quick, and his Haste was spot on too to reduce recast timers. I think overally I got hit about twice or thrice and everything else was absorbed by shadows.

Another thing to mention is the new Level 8 Besieged. Now I haven't experienced it myself, but boy oh boy is that hard or what? Besieged now last for around 2 hours and there are tons more NMs in there. The one that showed up today was Hydra-like NM on top of the many other NMs there. It was just ridiculous. All 5 Generals were defeated, and the big NMs were entering Hall of Binding. All 700 players were there too. I don't know how, but they ended up winning the battle. I can already sense that Astral Candescence would be lost way more often now than ever before. We rarely killed the Level 7 NMs (Medusa, Ja Ja, and co), and now they add more NMs in there? Hahahahaha. Square Enix must've wanted us to lose the candy a lot.

Anyways, that's about it for now. Hope you all still enjoy your adventure in Vanadiel too.
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~City-States of Jowston and Tinto Republic~
06.06.2004 - 20.01.2008

[Aurelien]

Wow, no one has posted for a month here now. I wonder if people are still playing Final Fantasy XI or not. I hope at least Arenegeth is still playing strong. I think I saw him once on my friends list there, but I don't quite know about the others. In the mean time, I'll share more stories about Vaagan's adventure since the previous post.

1. End-game Scene.
Boy oh boy some things have sure happened. The first news is that I've managed to get myself Shura Haidate after uncursing the Dryadic Legs dropped from Byakko. That 600,000 gil was definitely an expensive price to pay, but it was worth it for Accuracy+7 which would hopefully someday allow my MNK to eat meat during merit parties instead of sushi.

Next up is the Kirin fight. We were fighting Kirin five times last week. The first four was MAGNIFICENT. It dropped Wyrmal Legs abjuration four times in a row. We usually didn't even get one for months. Four in a row!! The fifth one was going to be nice too if it dropped, but the fifth fight went to be quite annoying as one of the leaders accidentally call for help on Kirin. The mistake that I did when I was fighting my second Kirin. XD. It was quite funny to see, but it definitely made the fight ridiculously longer as everyone must die or logout to erase hate to allow Kirin back to not called for help status. Sadly, the fifth Kirin dropped crap stuff =(

Last but not least on this particular part of the game, the HNM camping. It sucked awfully. Ever since the server transfer is allowed, Pandemonium has received one LS from Hades by the name of Paradigm. They would place level 1 mule to claim-bot the HNM. So that even if someone is banned, it's going to be that worthless level 1 character instead of the LS who clearly support such cheat act. I wonder what would be done for this part. For all the HNM camping that I've gone to, it's them who always got the claim because of the botting. Dang cheaters.

2. Monk Journey.
As mentioned above, I've got my Shura Haidate for my MNK gear. But not only that, I've finally managed to get to level 73. And wow, looking at the previous post was made a month ago where I was close to level 71, I just realized how slow I've been leveling my MNK. But at least I'm slowly and surely getting closer and closer.

And of course, I've finally learned Asuran Fists too for a nice 8-hit weapon skill. It's very satisfying to see Vaagan punching eight times in a row like that. Also nice to have high damage WS for parties.

However, the thing that I was most estatic with is that I've finally got my Ochimusha Kote. It is only a level 34 hand gear, but it's Rare/Ex so I could finally sell my Ochiudo's Kote which is an exact same gear but not Rare/Ex. I've been frustrated by the Yagudo NM (Hoo Mjuu the Torrent I think if I remember correctly) as there were always like 5-6 people in there camping the NM 24/7. I managed to get claim twice during that period, but the mob didn't drop. The other 7582735932 times, the NM always popped far from me or right behind me that made me unable to see him as my camera didn't cover that part. So there was one day when I had like 2 hours before I had to leave for work and I thought maybe I should give that a shot just in case. I went to Castle Oztroja and head to the pop area. Would you believe it ... NO ONE was there. I was like, "please pop soon" and "please no one comes" all the time. After about 40 minutes. Hoo Mjuu the Torrent popped as I was killing another Yagudo nearby. I quickly switched target as I wouldn't want to risk it in case someone else came and claimed it while I was killing the other Yagudo. I killed Hoo Mjuu and he dropped the kote! Joy as I managed to sell my Ochiudo's Kote for 720,000 gil that was a good money to cover the cost for uncursing the Shura Haidate.

Now, my MNK still wanted Destroyers (still couldnt' find a group to do KS30 there), Dune Boots (couldn't get online at good time to get enough people killing it), and also Black Belt (still long time, but at least I'm 1/3 on the items needed, just need 2 more).

3. ToAU Mission.
As mentioned in the previous post, I was up to mission 15 before. I didn't really pay much attention to missions, but then last week I went to do the fight for mission 15 with 4 of my other LS friends as they were all also at that mission. It wasn't a difficult fight at all, so we won no problem. Party setup was PLD/WAR (me), RDM/BLM x2, BLM/WHM x2. Plus the NIN NPC that also fought there on our side. It was a bit too easy for my liking. But I have to say that the ship captain mob looks really cool.

Now, I'm up to mission 22 (mission 16-22 are mostly cutscenes and only 1 quest where I had to go to Aydeewa Subterrain for more cutscene) and hopefully going to do it tomorrow if we can spare some time. I find myself liking the ToAU missions as the story is interesting and the characters involved are also not boring by any means. They seem to have some nice characteristic that I can like.

4. Ninja Journey.
No, no, no. I'm not planning to level up NIN to 75. I'm not that rich to get that far. But since my NIN was already 37, I thought I should level it up to 40 so I could do the BCNM40 Under Observation with it. So I soloed a lot and partied once. I'm now very close to level 40 with only 1.5k exp needed. I would get it by soloing once again for about 1 1/2 hour and then add a few exp from exp scrolls as buffer. Then I should be set to do the BCNM.

Since I solo a lot as NIN to get to 40, I've been very surprised by how strong NIN is in soloing. It seems ridiculous that I fought a mob that checked as {Tough} and I could still solo it while only getting hit once. Of course it's not always as easy as it sounds since doing it will cost me money as I would need to use more Ninja Tools than if I were to fight lower level mobs, but still .. the fact that I could kill a T mob comfortably like that surprised me a lot.

Anyways, that's about it for now from me. Take care and hopefully others are still enjoying their adventure in Vanadiel. Cheerios.
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~City-States of Jowston and Tinto Republic~
06.06.2004 - 20.01.2008

[Yvl]

Oh, I'm still playing.

I've given up on beating Maat with DRK, and I'm leveling SAM to 66 to kick his ass.
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[AA]

At the moment i am on an extended break from the game, since i never have the time to play and when i do find the time i can't find a party for two hours (even of White Mage) the not really having much time to exp because of the long wait.

I started playing BST and got it to 10, might start seeing if i can get into playing that, i have a plan to level it where the mobs drop good items for as long as i can, or maybe places where i can kill a lot of gobs get some masks so i can make some Glass Fibre to skill up Alchemy.

Might start playing again soonish.

Oh and the biggest drama queen on Fairy whom every one hates has left! Woo bye Poof! Sorry to Phoenix sever where she moved to though.

[Yvl]

The expansion is coming soon, right? Anyone have any guesses as to the new jobs? Everyone is saying Geomancer, and some are saying Chocobo Knight. But there should be one more, and SE leaked that one of the jobs would be a tank.
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[AA]

I have heard rumours that Time Mage is coming with the new expansion pack, it would fit quite nicely with the whole time thing that the new expansion is about.

As for a new tank... I'm glad, but people need to learn how to use the existing jobs as tanks instead of just labelling them DD, SAM can be an awesome tank, it holds hate with Weapon Skills and WAR sub and uses evasion to negate some damage, the equipment is there, but the players aren't. Also Red mage can be a great tank if geared right, but people aren't willing to try it.

Ninja was never meant to be a tank, it was designed as an enfebaling DD, but what ever it is a tank so we should live with it.

I'm trying to get a job to 75 in time for the new expansion, but i doubt i will (currently at 28 White mage).

[Yvl]

[Leb]

SAM and RDM don't dodge enough or soak up enough damage to be viable tanks. SAM was great for holding temporary hate when I played, but he'd get the crap pummeled out of him if the THF didn't get it off him quick enough. What they should be doing is tweaking PUP and COR more so people will finally start playing as those jobs. Usually PLDs and jobs like those outnumbered PUP and COR anywhere between 6:1 and 12:1!

A job I want to see is a Green Mage; master of buffs and debuffs. I'm not sure what it'd do to RDM in the pre-Refresh levels, but who cares. RDM will always have staying power when it learns it.

Another interesting thing would be perhaps a Fencer. Something that has lower attack power than most melee jobs, but could ignore mob defenses. Teach those fucking slimes a lesson.

[Yvl]

[AA]

Well Red Mage has some fencer elements to it, but i think it would be quite cool to have a full time fencer around, perhaps as a new tank that could hold hate through out damaging the rest of the party or having it's own form of provoke to play with. Of course being a Fencer it would have high evade to negate damage and not be a pure blood tanker.

Red mage with Phalanx and Stoneskin up can do quite well at negating damage with a WAR or NIN sub, it can hold hate with nukes and enspells, of course i know it isn't as good as PLD or NIN tanking, but if one isn't around it's nice to have the option.