06-30-06 Blix and Carrie!

Blix is just too cute!

I know I've been slacking on posting this week... but I've been busy at work and didn't have time to post at lunch. Hell, I've barely had time to actually eat lunch during lunch lol.

Anyway, Sean has been working on Merc's WAR and now has it at level 32. He is making the big push for level 37. I have been working on restocking our gil and leveling BRD on Bliss just to break things up a bit. I can only farm but so much before I start to lose it.

I should be able to keep things more up to date during and after the holiday weekend :)

06-24-06 Jungle Fun!

06-22-06

We didn't do a damn thing on the game. I feel asleep shortly after coming home from work, and according to Sean, I didn't wake.

When I talked to him in the morning, he said he didn't do anything ingame... mainly watched T.V.

I think the week just caught up with us :(

06-21-06 Low Level Fun!

06-19-06 Happy B-Day Tac!

06-18-06 Bliss: Cooking Skill 30 - Mercury: Level 22 WAR

Spent most of the morning breaking water crystals and dontating pineapples to the roaming Opo-opo on the docks of Kazham. I didn't feel too bad about it though, I farmed all of the water crystals so I leveled from 1-30 at just the cost of the fruit which was all purchased from a NPC. Yup I reached level 30 cooking. Now Bliss can make Pineapple Juice "on the fly" when we don't have a RDM giving us refresh. It really feels good to achieve a goal.

Being able to make juice on demand presented a new problem... how am I going to hold all of this crap O.o ?!?

Goobie Bags to the rescue! With Sandy and Windy fame capped, opening each of the quests was easy. I was able to complete all but the last one. Just missing one item :( Oh well, not really the end of the world. Bliss now has 55 slots which is a vast improvement from the 30 she had previously

Sean, Bob and the rest of our strange and large family, went to eat dinner at a local steakhouse for Daddy's Day :) I came home a little tipsy and decided to call it a night. Meanwhile, Sean was able to get to level 22 on Mercury! Yay! He told me in the morning that he had to teach the black mage how to MB, but that at least the person was open to his suggestions and learned how to do it. Good job Sean!

Bob said that he made a new mule in Sandy named Kingdhamel. I worry about that boy, really I do :P

I woke up early (even for me!) and decided that I was going to test out how much Bastok fame I could get from doing the Millioncorn quest in Selbina a few dozen times. Turns out that you can get quite a bit. When I logged out to go to work I was able to get to level 7 Bastok fame.

06-17-06 Iron Chef!

What are the odds that the same charater models are working on the same synth at the same time?!?! The picture was too cute to pass up :)

Bliss made it to level 20 cooking! 4-20 in one day is pretty good. And that was farming the crystals and buying the fruit. 10 more levels to go before I can stop, so I parked Bliss in Kazham and started farming for water crystals in La Theine.

Sean made it to level 21 tonight... but it was in a party that was terrible. They started to shape up towards the end of the night but you could tell that there were several party members that did not know how to play the game.

Sean is great about that though. He will take the time to explain what they need to know.

Bob spent the night working on his NIN. Not sure what level he made it to but I think he is still in the second jungle.

Last I heard from Annaka, he was working on COR in Qufim Island and was level 23.

Flick spent the evening trying to convince us that it would be cool to have a lvl 12 with no subjob and Rank 5. Ha! LOL get over it!

06-16-06 Welcome back Flick!

Our old buddy Flick made his way back to the game... and decided to stay on Odin! He was on a little over a week ago but was going to play on a different server with his real life friends. Glad to have him back!

Bliss finally reached level 9 fame for Sandy :) I was tempted to start on Bastok fame, but decided to go with leveling cooking to 30. Bastok fame is such a pain in my opinion. But I guess it will have to be done sooner or later... just wasn't in the mood tonight.

I did manage to get Bliss' cooking to level 4!

Sean tried to work on Mercury's WAR last night in Qufim Island.... but it was bad. The party was poorly set up and they took forever to kill anything. He did reach level 20 and was able to equip a new axe so it was not a total loss.

06-15-06

06-14-06

06-13-06 PL in the dunes... again

I didn't have a headache when I came home, but I quickly developed one after powerleveling Mercury in the dunes. Truth be told it went really well. The puller respected the Black Mages MP (since they were the primiary damage lol) and I was able to keep my MP high with the help of my Vermy Cloak.

That cloak is the primary reason I was out there in the first place. Oh course I wanted to help Sean and keep him from whinning... but we all know I had to break it in :P

Mercury went from a few hundred over level 14 to halfway through level 16. Not to shabby. I promised Sean that I would help him again this evening and we should be able to get him out of the dunes.

But I've warned Sean that I will not powerlevel him in Qufim... I have to draw the line in the sand sometime. If you are not able to function as a party at that level then you really have no business progressing. I just can't help someone skate through those levels.

06-13-06 Bliss now has level 9 Windy fame!

I came home from work feeling pretty bad (damn sinus headache) so I wasn't on much. Let me correct that, I was logged in but I took a really long nap. Sean did his best to wake me after 30 minutes like I asked, but I decided to keep on snoozing.

I finally woke up around midnight so I really have no clue what happened ingame. Sean mentioned that he made it to level 14 WAR on Mercury but that was about all the details I got out of him before he crashed.

While wired I decided to work on Windy fame for Bliss... buying all the cornettes from Bastok on a mule and sending them to Bliss to trade to the little Taru in Windy Walls.

It was shocking how fast I was able to go from level 1 fame to level 9 fame. I was kicking myself for not going this route on Jenmist. Oh well, the Star Brigade quests were worth it :) That has to be my favorite story line in the game. I may do it on Bliss just to watch it again lol.

I think I will work on Sandy fame this evening, using Jenmist to farm bat wings in KRT while working getting Bliss' cooking up since she is already in Windy. This is all subject to change if I come home with a headache like the one I had last night.

06-12-06 Woooohoooo!! I own a Vermillion Cloak!

Someone pinch me...

In the 2+ years that I have played FFXI, never once did I think it was possible for me to get my hands on Vermillion Cloak. There have been times where I have been close to quitting beacuse I just couldn't see a way to raise the funds to buy one.

I have always farmed for gil and made everyone elses armor more important than what my character needs... and for the first time ever Sean has everything he wants for his NIN and the focus was put on my WHM.

I know it seems like I'm making a big deal out of it. And honestly I don't care what anyone else thinks... this is all about me :P It is the most gil I have ever spent on a single peice of armor or equipment and masses of bees have died raising the 9.5 mil in gil for me to wear this :)

I'm tempted to level my WHM on Jenmist just to get to wear the cloak while Sean is working on Mercury.

Or I will just run around town in it enjoying the auto-refresh :)

06-11-06 Bob finally poses for a picture!

06-10-06 Happy B-Day and Conga Rats on Dragon Harness!!

Annaka has been on a roll getting things done in the past 48 hours!

First beating Rivine site # A01 on Friday night with Jakir. He said that the glitch still works!

Then he decides to do a KS30 with Bob's old crew and dies due to a late Sleepga II >.< They still managed to pull off a win and get a V-Claw!! Conga rats!!

Using the gil made from selling the V-Claw, Annaka bought the Dragon Harness (see picture above!). His character looks awesome!

It's almost like the game knew it was his birthday.... even though he told none of us on the LS >.<

06-08-06 Pretty rainbow!

While power leveling Mercury in La Theine, a rainbow appeared and being the amateur in-game photographer I could not resist the opportunity to get a really cute picture of Bliss! Funny part is that Sean was still fighting an Orc while I was posing for this shot :P No he didn't die... and even if he did it would have been worth it in my opinion. I'm sure he would feel differently about it.

Mercury made it to level 14! Yay! Only 4 more levels until MNK is done and we can work on his WAR.

We should be able to get him to 18 and his subjob quest complete this weekend. Please note that I said "should" because it takes everything in me to power level after working a full 9 hour day. I swear if Sean wasn't so appreciative of my help I wouldn't do this and make him suffer. Damn me for being nice :P

06-07-06 The Game Plan remains the same!

So far so good! We are still focused on leveling Bliss and Mercury while farming for gil. Honestly, I'm a little shocked we have stayed with this plan for more than 2 days. But I haven't logged in yet (still at the office) so who knows what we are doing this evening :P

I do know that we will not be on until sometime after 9:00 PM EST. Our daughter has a school musical this evening and we are going to suffer thought it... I mean watch it and try to avoid the PTA pushers that are hidden strategically amongst the other parents that were suckered into attending.

06-06-06 Bravo Annaka! Level 75 THF!!!!

I really need to get a better picture of Annaka... but this will work for now!

Grats Annaka!

Tac sent me a classic FU picture (just proves that we were always NFoD!)

I forget what we were doing out there... but whatever it was, it ended poorly as you can see :P

Today we an eventful, yet lazy kinda day in game. I came home from work to find Sean and Bob camping Lizzy. Despite what Bob thought, Lizzy does spawn for him and even dropped a pair of Bounding Boots. Grats Bob-O!

Since they had the Lizzy camping situation pretty well covered, I went farming for slime oil and continued that until after the boys dropped Lizzy.

Then Sean and I moved to Giddeus and farmed a little bees... trying to catch up on stacks of wax to the slime oil that I farmed. While I was there I noticed a 2 man party in the key dropper area and I just felt sorry for them. They were trying to get 2 keys... the hard way. One was a WAR and the other was WHM. It just brought back memories of how Sean and I did that so I sent a tell to one of the guys and asked if they needed help.

The response was similar to "Hell yes!" :)

Being a 75BRD/37THF the two keys dropped really fast. We only had to kill the room once to get the two keys. So that was my random act of kindness for the week. I can resume my normal bitch mode :P

Sean and I are trying to keep ourselves from getting burned out on farming and powerleveling so we are alternating between the two. We invested about an hour on Mercury and he hit level 12.

06-05-06 More PL and farming -.-

Sean and I are constantly trying to find new ways to make the game more interesting... so we revise our "game plan" almost on a daily basis.

This week we are stuck on the idea of making new characters that will one day replace our main characters. For me, that character is Bliss. For several reasons Bliss (being a Taru) would be a better character for the jobs that I like to play. For Sean, that character is Mercury (Elvaan). He loves to either play the tank or some sort of damage dealer.

Could we level with the Humes that we have already built? Sure. But that really is not the point of our leveling the taru and elvaan. Bordom? No, not really. It has more to do with liking the character that you selected for the jobs you like to play. If I had known when I started that there would be a drastic difference in mp at the later levels and that it would take millions of gil to equip my hume WHM with mp gear, I would have started out with taru. If only SE would make it possible to change the race of your character with a quest or even by allowing you to purchase the ability with gil. But they don't. So this is the only thing we can think to do.

On the positive side, Sean and I are much more careful about the choices we are making for our new characters. Not to mention we are much wiser about the game. Over time I think the choice to start over with new characters is the best one we have ever made.

One additional perk is we will only level one job at a time. Sean wants to take his Elvaan to 75 as a NIN. I really want to get WHM to level 75. I could have done it on Jenmist, but I always felt that my character was lacking. I know that I played WHM well but I always felt like a failure when the party had to wait on my mp.

What will we do differently this time?

• Level cooking on Bliss to the point of being able to make juice: This will take some of the stress away when leveling WHM.
• Don't buy +1 gear at the lower levels unless it makes a huge difference: Honestly, there are not many examples of when a +1 would make that great of a difference in the performance of our characters. The idea is to spend as little as possible on these characters until they are over level 60.
• Focus on skills: If there is a spell that WHM can cast, I'm going to cast it! My magic skills are just as important as a RDMs or BLMs but I always reserved my limited mp for healing and being able to keep the chain going. I'm hoping that because I'm taru I will be able to do that and not "feel bad" that I'm casting enfeebles. We shall see :P
• We will make the parties: This is my biggest problem. I hate to start a party, but I love to bitch about where we go to fight and who is in the party. No longer! Sean and I will be the core of the party and we can look up where to go to fight at the various levels. There are great reference sites out there so I really can't use ignorance as the reason not to be party leader. We used to just follow people to camp cause we really didn't know how to get anywhere... that isn't true anymore.

The only negative is the time that it will take to redo all of the missions, fame and quests that we have already done. But even that is not as big of a deal as it may sound. I can't tell you the number of times that we have "clicked" our way through cut-scenes and didn't pay one bit of attention to the story. We may actually get a chance to enjoy the RPG part of this game for once.

With all of this decided, Sean and I have started placing our humes in locations where they can farm... and leaving them there. I have started to sell off my gear for the milllons of jobs that I curently have open and settign aside all of the gear that our characters will need that we currently own. This is a long and boring process -.- I figure that we may have everything sorted by the weekend.

And even more boring is the process of power leveling -.- but it is really good for Mercury's skills and ironically also good for Bliss' healing magic. I don't really mind PLing... makes me feel needed and I love helping Sean. It is just sooooooo damn boring.

So that is where we are now: bouncing between power leveling and farming. Sounds like fun huh?

Liar :P

06-04-06 Damn! You are one tall Dhamel! o.0

As usual, our Sunday was pretty uneventful. We spent most of the day doing real life stuff... mainly shopping.

When we did play, we spent most of our time either farming or powerleveling Sean's new character Mercury. Darkbob took advantange of the free PL for his SAM.


Yeah, yeah, I know. Powerleveling is the work of the devil. Screw it! These boys know how to play the game. It's not like I'm doing it for a new player :P

06-03-06 Full NIN AF!

Back again!

Sean and I took a small break on a different server as new characters just to see how it would be if we had to start over.

We proved to ourselves that we would do well. We earned over .5 mil and made it to level 13. Also managed to get woodworking to level 15 and level 2 Sandy fame. Not too bad considering that we were only there for 7 days.

But we quickly decided that abandoning our characters in Odin would be a mistake. We have great friends there and we have invested in our characters too much to just let them sit.

One thing I love about this game is the flexibility that it offers... some nights I don't feel like doing much online and I can just "hang out in the mog house" or farm. Other nights we get stuff done. Either way we are not left watching t.v. all night like zombies.

Anyway...

Tonight was a fun night! Tac, Annaka, Sean and I went to take on the three NM sahagins (spelling?) for the last of Sean's NIN AF. Tac suggested that we Bind + Gravity them on the way to the Den of Rancor zone. The plan was to kill just one of them and the other 2 will despawn. It didn't exactly happen that way.

Everything went according to plan: Haul ass to the zone, pop out and kill the closest one to us. Ok did that. Ran back to the ??? Ok done. Oh crap! They didn't despawn!

Plan B (which, by the way, was never discussed!) was to fight them all. So we rinsed and repeated. Done!

All that was left was to run to Rabao and talk to the Elvaan NIN then pop a coffer in Kuftal. That part was cake. Sean popped the coffer and went back to teh Elvaan and got his body piece!

Wooo Hooo!

The night was still young so Sean decided to see if he could get a party. It didn't take him long to get an invite to Lab. of Onzozo. The party did really well. RDM, WHM, BRD, NIN, WAR and RNG. They cut through the cats like butter. I watched for a little while, just long enough to notice that the RDM/WHM was doing a great job removing stat effects. I was impressed.

Since Sean was leveling I decided to spend some time evaluating what I have on my characters and what I want to do while Sean makes his push to 75.

There are so many options... I'm sure I'll think of something to do.