Honing the Rampager and Defeating Diabolos

I've continued my usual pattern of skilling my Great Axe (and simultaneously burning the latent on the Rampager), hanging with Feon and the gang for some Assaults, and working on NPC related quests with Lexxi. She and I did a brief run this week to Promy Mea once our NPCs hit the bond level requisite of 33 and finally started talking about "the Emptiness." Getting the Tactics Pearl was pretty painless, although my MH is once again cluttered with 30 cap equipment now.

I've reached level 275 with my Great Axe, 1 level away from cap. Totally lost count on the Rampager WS points, but I figure I'll eventually burn it with enough merit parties.

The fishing bug has bitten me once again, so I'm working on fishing up some bait for Marlins for the Inside the Belly quest, if only to have an excuse to fish & do something interesting with it... with the added possibility of a Pirate's Chart of course. I really want the Lu Shangs and I'm tempted to push my way to 2 million and eventually just buy the rod for 1.5 million, since the cumulative value of the carp I'm fishing up actually exceeds the market cost of the rod, by roughly 1 million.

On a random note, I found someone shouting for a CoP 3-5 run a couple of nights ago and joined up. After waiting for 2 hours for someone who ended up flaking on us (/fume), the leader called an LS favor and brought a 6th member in. Everyone was prepared and the fight went exactly as planned. We pulled Diabolos to the center tile under the ledge and the mages stood on the center tile on the opposite side. Diabolos only managed to pull off one Nightmare, which I'm assuming the mages took care of since it wore off so quickly. We killed him right as he knocked me back into the Diremite pit ^_^.

I can't wait to do this again with the Roughnecks group, now that I'm a little less apprehensive about the fight. We really just need 2 mages and 4 DD, which might take awhile with our fluctuating roster of active players with varying degrees of progress on our last CoP mission (at least one hasn't scaled the mountain yet), but the fight itself is totally feasible for us.