Blowing on Dice

That's what all of my gear swaps feel like after quite a bit of experimentation tonight. The massive numbers from the night before were clearly the result of frequent crits and enhanced accuracy from the COR BRD combination. The best I could do tonight was land 500-600 Rampages more consistently during the last couple of hours of my 5 hour session when I gave up on meddling with accuracy and only swapped in STR on the head, hands, and sometimes the legs (if it seemed like I was connecting adequately with no Life Belt). Anything else would either cause misses during the weapon skill or low enough Atk to essentially negate any STR modifier that might be happening.

I'm already starting to covet that Optical Hat... and I appreciate all of you BRDs and CORs more than ever.

I spent tonight in a largely Japanese party that launched around 9PM and disbanded around 2AM. The setup was initially SMN (the same leader who put together the Bibiki Bay party a few nights ago), RDM, WHM, NIN, WAR, WAR. We camped a bit further north in Caedarva Mire tonight, on the southern end of the alley at J-7. Well, I wouldn't call it a 'camp' exactly since we seemed to roam quite a bit, but we hovered around that area, killing flies and imps and the rare Jnun when we would drift far enough south.

I was fortunate that the fellow Warrior, Steelreserve, was a US player and an acquaintance, so I didn't have to party in complete silence. He was chomping at the bit to get to 70 since he had a Rune Axe and Juggernaut waiting for him.

Since the zone was crowded (as usual), the SMN puller Bubukitty was ambitiously setting up mobs in the queue by sleeping them and/or sicking Titan on them while we killed the current mob. Sometimes she would do this within seconds of pulling the first mob, which surprised me. The Ninja also roamed and pulled imps as he found them. I dinged 70 sometime within the first half hour of the party.

There were deaths, including my own, due to linked imps. Handling these was a bit of a crapshoot since Amnesia can completely destroy hate control in these situations. Sometimes we would come out unscathed, sometimes the NIN would die, sometimes I would die, and the party wiped once.

When we wiped we were around the 2.5 hour mark and the WAR had to get to bed, so we took a breather in Whitegate to refresh supplies and Sanction while the leader found a replacement.

He was a Ninja, US player by the name of Tekmo, who had just picked the game back up about a week ago after a long hiatus. He didn't have the Azouph staging point flagged, so it was a long ship ride for him to Nashmau. The party decided to continue killing mobs with just the 5 of us, and we were still hitting chain 5 somehow (I suspect the SMN was pretty active). I gave Tekmo directions to camp and he joined us shortly after getting off the boat.

The Ninja died once during an Amnesia attack (so excrutiating to watch helplessly), but otherwise the killing continued unabated until the crew got sleepy and disbanded, showing Tekmo to his staging point along the way.

5000 Experience Points until level 71.