Sidewinder: Or How to Die Faster than an Overnuking Taru BLM

Ranger

Up to this point I had been having fun with Ranger. Something about shooting things to death appealed. One thing that was lackluster was the weaponskill. They were not all that impressive. With each increasing static, however, I inched toward that miraculous level 55 RNG where I could learn Sidewinder and Slug Shot.

Last night I finally made it. We decided to head toward the squishy and fast repopping birds in ToAU (yay for piercing damage bonus). Our core static of Badray, Lorddocster, Eckardt and myself were joined by Edmund and Cromax. Now Cromax I knew from our Dynamis days so it was fun. So the party of WHM (Badray), SMN (Lorddocster), Eckardt (NIN), Verrick (RNG), Cromax(RNG), and Edmund (BRD) headed out our merry ways. I couldn't seem to land acid bolts on the pink birds and the holy bolt added effect was quite meh. But we were steam rolling along with poor Eckardt trying to keep hate off the 2 RNGs. It all ended when Cromax and I learned Sidewinder and Slug Shot!



Now what was a little irritating was the birds somehow continually ate my food. So on top of struggling with taru's poor STR stat (I think I was at base 41 and Cromax was base 54) I had to be without food for a bit. That being said Cromax was hitting harder than me most of the night. He parsed about 40% of the damage and I did about 38%. But with minuet on us, plus Fenrir buffs, murdering the birds were totally fun. The most fun I had was Sidewinder, followed by Barrage, then another Sidewinder. Of course that earned me enimity fast and I did die 2x last night. But it was so much fun!

I did bow in deference to Cromax's lovely WS numbers though. Here's my best and here is his (which incidently closed Reverberation SC for 600 extra damage, curse him!).

Crafting

I spent a mini-fortune on Philosopher stones. And managed to craft my way to 98 alchemy. I have platinum nuggets to sell but someone keeps undercutting the prices. Earlier last month it was 28K a stack, now it's being down to 18K a stack which makes this a pretty nasty loss synth instead of a slight profit synth. I'm not too happy about that. SO there went about 800K of my gil.


I HATE undercutters.