Mapaholic

A couple of big accomplishments (but I forgot to take screenshots; I was too happy when it happened). My social LS wants to fool around in sky a bit to try and get items from the gods. Now I don't really have a huge urge for god gear, but I'm willing to go with them. Needless to say it's easy to get lost up there. We managed to do our business (more about it later) and I got a Ru'Ann Garden's key out of it. I had a key to the Palace in sky for ages but had never got around to finding it. I went searching for the coffer for the palace, but died when I wasn't paying attention to a nasty detector (I was BRD). Later that day I decided to give it another whirl and went as BLM/WHM. I managed to find the Ru'Ann coffer key fairly quickly which I was happy about. Then I went to look for the coffer for the palace. I figured I might as well look for the ??? for Curtana at the same time. OF course when I decide to do that I find the coffer in the 2nd place guarded by a weapon. So I elemental sleepII the weapon, grab my coffer, and escape out of there. Mission accomplished!

Emboldened by my luck in Sky, I decided to go after the Den of Rancor and the Oldton Movalopalos (sp?) maps since I had their keys rotting in my MH. The Den of Rancor wasn't that much fun. I ran all over that place without finding the coffer. So I had to exit to the jungle (and hopefully it was in the other pop place since I forgot my clubs to fight the Temple Guardian and was lucky that some people wer efighting it already the first time). Went in the other way to the Den of Rancor and behold found it surrounded by Opos. Waited for them to move away and got my map! Oldton was nice since I don't aggro anything there and I found the ma pin the 5th spot I checked. I love having maps!

Notorious Monsters

On our way to skill up/break latent weapons we came accross Aquarius. We had a WAR who was interested in the Franchescia so we went and beat up on it. First time I ever fought it. The only other time I saw it was when I leveled in the Tree with a static and our puller accidentally pulled it instead of a regular crab. Congratulations to Totalkaos on his new weapon.



As I mentioned before my social LS went up to sky. Now most of us are relatively new to sky (I've done a few farming sessions and god battles, but just a few). We made it to the Ulli camp without problems but after 2 or 3 hours of being there and him not popping we decided to try and life our morale with a forced pop. We went to fight Aura Pots to get a Ro'Maeve water. That took us forever. We had some people leave in frustration/boredom/late night. But we finally got the damn water to drop and got our pop item. I can see why people buy pop items especially when some NMs pop every 3-12 hours or so. Sky just isn't worth it, but I suppose if the social LS wants it, I'll go with them. At least I'm learning how to navigate through sky and with my maps it will be eaiser to compare to my printed maps. I did get about 3 stacks of light crystals which is a good thing ^^.

I managed to break my Dagger of Trials doing level 2 skill chains over the course of a few days which was nice. The WSNM fight for Evisceration is pretty easy.

Also helped Blueeyedbeauty get Black Halo (along with Fullen and Dukenukem). That NM fight was just as easy as I remembered.

Dynamis

We decided to try Buburimu again. Our first run we wiped to a dragon and wiped to multiple links. So it wasn't a success. This time we were better prepared. Killed the voidsong dragon without too much difficulty. Killed a few NMs (but wiped on a bad link of 4 statues). We regrouped and killed the NM, but ran out of time to kill a lot of dragons. So we fought the megaboss with him having quite a bit of tricks left (including heavy stomp, manafront, and bodyslam). Needless to say it was bad. But we got him down to 60%. So that was pretty good. Just need to get a feel for the place and how to pull the mobs faster and without links so we can get enough of the bad moves away from the megaboss.



Doing a dry run of Xacabard next.

Craftaruing

Smithing can be expensive. Decided to do a bit of leveling on Verrick. Buying Iron Ores for 600-800g a piece sucks. That's about 2400 to 3200 a synth. I can't sell them back because Iron ingots are used for like the next 10-15 level of synths. I might have to resort to mining to reduce costs. Got Smithing to 17.8 on Verrick before I called it a day on Smithing to get my 9K back on BLM.

Before the update I decided to go farm some sleepshrooms to get Verrick's Alchemy up to 56 and hopefully finish him to 60 on Venom Dust (caps at 61). Killed exorays in CN and got 4 stacks of shrooms. Plunking down about 500g per poison flour and about 132 g per chamomille per synth it came out to about 650 g per synth which isn't bad. What was frustrating was a string of breaks and a string of no skill ups. Managed to synth about 4 stacks of sleeping potions which are going for about 18K on the AH right now. That isn't a bad amount of profit I suppose but nothing staggering. I ended up buying a stack of shrooms for 5K hoping to cap out my alchemy but it didn't happen. So I'm stuck at 55.3 in alchemy. I forgot how horrible the skill ups can be in the 50s.

I don't think I'll be leveling a job much in the forseeable future. Crafting has taken hold again!