I'm tired, but I'm 62

With 14k experience points to go, I put up my flag in Whitegate around 9:30PM and began preparations for fishing in the Jugner lake again for more Moat Carp and some skillup fish. As soon as I gathered bait ingredients and was ready to taru-warp to Jeuno, I received an invitation from a party in Wajaom Woodlands. They were camping at the south section of H-11 there, killing Puks and the occasional Aht Urhgan Attercop. It was nice to see a Paladin tank for a change, since I've grown so accustomed to Ninja tanks.

However, I've discovered that I need to exercise a bit of restraint as a pure damage dealer in these situations. Poorly timed Rampages made it difficult for the Paladin to immediately get hate back under control. And if my damage filled the mob's TP, the massive knockback AOE from the Puks would lead to a bit of chaos without a firm tank. So I had a few moments where I decided to just turn away from the mob & let hit me a few times (with Defender up, and some meager tankish gear swapped in) until the Paladin's flash or voke or cure timers were back up. I only had to do that once before in Kuftal Tunnel.

The party ended around 11PM due to sleepiness (east coast players), so I returned to Whitegate and put my flag back up. I felt I was ready for a 3-hour session or so (and the punishment I would feel the next day) just to see the remaining 10k trickle in and give me my level. The next invitation, to my surprise, came very quickly. But the party wasn't yet formed, so it took about 30 minutes to get underway and decide upon a camp. They opted to go for VT mob chains in Gustav Tunnel, H-10 on the lower floor: Goblin Alchemists, Shepherds, & Mercenaries, and... more Robber Crabs.

The mobs were a bit too low in the VT spectrum, but the party seemed relaxed about it and proceeded to exp-chain as best they could. Having a MNK, NIN, THF, and WAR in the party and no skillchaining was driving me nuts, so after pulling a few teeth I convinced the THF and MNK to at least set up Distortion on the crabs once the thief learned his Dancing Edge. I initially tried to get a Fusion SC underway for the goblins, but people weren't up for setting up two different skillchains. So they set up distortion on the goblins too. EXP was slower than it needed to have been, but not bad, and the party was very relaxed and upbeat (I'll take slow EXP in a pleasant party over faster EXP in a bitchy party any day). Since my Rampage didn't factor into any skillchaining, I was able to swap in my Great Axe, which capped on a Raging Rush right before I got my level... around 2:15AM. The party ended around 2:30, so I don't quite have a full buffer yet, but I'm happy.

Hunter slept in until a little after 7:00AM. Yes, I'm a bit of a zombie today.