All over the place

Dune Widow

I spent a couple of evenings in Eastern Altepa Desert as WAR/THF, farming webs for a change and camping the Dune Widow on the off chance that I could get a claim & drop. The Spider Torque currently goes for around 300k on my server, and the camp didn't seem all that painful since I could always run over to the oasis and steal Mythril Beastcoins during the down time. I did eventually get a claim, but the NM only dropped webs (3 of them). Better luck next time.

While I was camping, Atrenore mentioned that she was working on the Sahagin Key quest in preparation for her Impulse Drive WSNM fight. Apparently a few members of the LS had made a prior attempt the night before which had ended badly, and Atrenore wasn't really expecting another attempt that night. When more people started logging in, we threw the idea around some more and decided to give it another go.

An Undying Pledge

While we were sightseeing in Sea Serpent Grotto & waiting for Atre to get her key, we stumbled across the ??? that spawns Glyryvilu, a Sea Monk NM that must be killed to complete the Norg quest. It was a pretty painless battle and we hiked back to Norg to claim our Light Buckler. I'll never use it, so I'll probably just take the measly 3k and run.

Impulse Drive

We all made our way past the Ornamented Door and found the ??? near the entrance to the first room beyond the bridge. We had to pre-emptively clear a few Sahagin and Mindgazers, and decided we would pull the NM into the tunnel to avoid pops.

The Water Leaper Pugil NM had quite a few HP, but with solid tanking, DD, and nuking, we took it down without incident, despite a last-minute Mindgazer link (those things like to roam apparently). One of our cleanest NM fights.

Rank 7

I expected to go meriting on the following night, but instead received an invitation to complete Sandy mission 6-1, Leaute's Last Wishes. We trio'd the fight as WAR, WHM, RDM, and I won't lie... It was a close fight, especially when Sabotender Enamorado's 1000 Needles went into overdrive at the end of the battle. But we pulled through, and made our way back to Sandy for cutscenes.

Since we were on a roll and the night was young, we decided to go for 6-2, Ranperre's Final Rest. Helping Lifthrasir with this fight had been my first event with them and we had killed all 3 mobs without too much fuss, so I wasn't too worried about this run.

We sneak pulled and killed the Warrior NM first, then grabbed a second NM, and the third de-spawned while we were fighting. Voila!

The most annoying thing about this mission was all the running back & forth from Sandy to KRT to Sandy, and back to KRT on the next day (JP time) for another cutscene... aaaand back to Sandy to actually get the Rank. -_-

Merits

On the following night, I joined up with a merit party in good old Caedarva Mire. The zone only had a population of about 40 players (icecicles must have started forming somewhere in Ifrit's Cauldron), so keeping a steady stream of pulls was pretty easy. My only challenge lied in keeping the hate off of a MNK named Killmer, an old friend of mine. It was an entirely self-imposed challenge, since we were really supposed to be joint-tanking, but... I'm a WAR. You know how that goes.

At the end of the party, Killmer extemporized a bit about the strengths of the MNK job, making me want to level that as my next DD job when the time comes. But I want to merit the hell out of WAR first, and at least get my WHM up to 37 before thinking about leveling another melee DD job.

I spent a merit on upgrading my Axe skill. The full upgrade path will add 16 to my skill cap, bringing Axe up into the A+ skill rank. I'm not sure what the equation is for determining the Attack boost, but Accuracy would be increased by 14 with this setup (assuming they round down from 14.72). I like those numbers.