Silent Reflections

I haven't posted in awhile. My last post was made in anger, and haste. I had seriously wondered about quiting either dynamis, or the game entirely. Between time issues, and getting upset about events ingame, it was starting to wear on my nerves. ( See the Tuufless post which sums up my feelings in this department well: http://tuufless.blogspot.com/2007/06/disgruntled-taru.html )

But, I thought about it, and I always felt I took more good from the game than bad. So I kept chugging along. A lot has happened since my last post. I have gotten my Homam Hat, Valor Gauntlets +1, Loquacious earring, Hrotti, and Aegishjalmr (Fafnir was good to me on Memorial Day). I've also finished all the current ToA missions, beaten Bahamut v1, capped Great Sword at 250, gotten Parrying 208, capped Enhancing Magic at 210, and helped with various events and missions.

I've been a busy bee I guess. There are some issues which have been annoying me lately. Dynamis runs never seem to be the ones I want to do, a few people in my Sky LS have been causing issues, wouldn't mind being higher on the Limbus item lists. You know, the usual things. People bitching, me bitching back, them getting offended. Good Stuff. ^^

I know Goroaki always regretted complaining in his blog, since it burned alot of bridges for him. I generally don't like to specify names, but on this one occasion, because the event that I have never laughed harder at (or been more pissed off at), I'll break my rule:

I realize not everyone in the Res endgame LS is a badguy. I realize Hex and a few of his leaders cause most of the shit. People follow their leaders, and don't want to rock the boat, or be left out. Let's be honest though, there is no reason to screw a different shell just for kicks. They had MPKd our alliance on the Jailor of Justice by DoTing the tanks when they were charmed (effectively slowly wiping the alliance) just to try to steal claim. They stole it, but ended up wiping due to its special moves and adds in about 15 seconds. (Which really, really, really made my day.)

Needless to say, I butt humped Hex for a good 10 minutes and made some sarcastic comments while the alliance got back on its feet (See picture above). I am usually one of the first people to complain about childish antics, but you know what? He deserves anything he gets, so I wasn't too heartbroken over any embarasment or hard feelings. He is an ass to people, he can deal with it.

My advice to the rest of the Res people: get him to clean up his act. You guys get a reputation for being assholes that never seems to go away. Refusal to help or participte with Res members in any way because of the endgame idiocy is a strong stigma. Don't be those guys. Tell the people causing trouble to shut the fuck up, and be real leaders. I'll leave it at that.

To be honest though, most of my nights have been doing endgame shit. Dynamis on Saturday, Limbus on Tuesday and Saturday, Sea/Sky Monday/Wednesday/Thursday/Friday. I haven't been able to really merit or anything. Kinda bothers me; people always want a PLD to tank shit for them, but ask for an EXP invite and that love dies really fast.

I was going to make some comments about the new endgame event Einherjar, but a post on KI sums it up pretty well ( http://www.killingifrit.com/forums.php?m=posts&q=155446&d=150 ):

Bjond wrote:

IMHO, you were more lucky than smart. Which spawns you get and how many you get seems to overshadow strategy on Einherjar. That's a real shame, because I hate events where it's more luck than strategy.

There seem to be two basic "strategies" for Einherjar: bring a lot of bards, bring a lot of blms. No one really does anything special. BRDs sleep. BLMs stun and nuke. This is an oversimplication, but it's what things seem to boil down to at present. If your shell has enough with those jobs available, you can do well. If you don't, your chance of just dying is near certain.

If you're lucky, you get a low critter count, multiple critter types (thus all don't come at once), and a manageable boss. If you're not, you get 24 of a single hard-to-sleep critter along with the Marid boss. Waaaaay too much variance there on difficulty, imho. You could keep sacrificing 180k and mules to get a good chamber, but that's hardly what I'd call "viable strategy". It's more like a "clever exploit for a poor design."

Nail on the head, I don't need to say anything more. People in my shell want to keep at it, and I will assist them, but I can only throw myself at the wall so many times before looking for a way around it. I've been mocked for claiming its too hard or rather claiming the variance of difficulty is too severe. Some people like asinine challenges, and that is just what this ends up being sometimes. Bad mob selection? Bad boss? Not enough BRDs? Not enough mages? You lose, good show chap, now make sure to use more lube next time... I am sure we can eventually brute force our way through it where we win more than lose, but that doesn't equate to less disappointment. Yeah, we were like the first (one of the first? I really can't be sure) groups to clear it on Odin, but the drops were shitty. I'm just hoping there is a catch, or a trick I just don't see yet. Something to redeem this lackluster 30 minute clusterfuck.

...alright, I'm getting upset again. I'll tone it down. In the future, I'll try to post more and have some more pictures. Other blogs have seemed to die off, and that kinda bothered me. There used to be a ton of awesome blogs, but most people have stopped updating. I figure at least I can keep contributing on some small scale for the Odin players. Until then, toodles.~