Screenshot Spectacular: I Can't Remember The Number
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is a terrible thing kids. You know how a three day weekend usually gets you all excited because it means three days of uninterrupted adventuring? Yeah, this weekend that turned into three days of not playing so my hands can have some time to heal before work starts again.
So instead of venturing forth it's time to slow down and have a screenshot recap of where I've been wandering off to without any adult supervision.




We had some new members joining the Linkshell recently. Here they are being initiated and taking an oath about punching bunnies, or maybe that's just how I like to remember it.


I spent a lot of time taking pictures of all the fireworks this summer. There's something about it that just makes me feel really settled into the world.


I can't help it guys, I just really like the way some random shots come out. This one is from Port Bastok.


We decided to take the Tarus for a walk and also to kill a Notorious Monster for some Artifact Armor in the Citadel.



Our Linkshell had a night of BCNM runs. Much fun was had by all. Loot...not so much, but it was a lot of fun trying to keep track of eight monsters at once and keep them all pinned down.


*shakes head sadly*
At least I had the sense to not use my standard online handle in-game. It just makes you look like a fool. I've never really understood the desire to mimic the franchise while within the franchise itself. Just seems silly to me.

This is about par for the course when my friends and I go trioing.



Here we are waiting on a new person Lies had recruited to the game. I think we were waiting for the better part of four hours and they didn't show up. Finding new folks to adopt is difficult these days.


This is what happens when people from Windurst try to fish.
*ducks incoming shoes and vegetables*


Low level Linkshell party...Assemble! There was much fun rampaging through Korroloka Tunnel that night. It's always fun to take some friends and head out to non-standard locations. I'd take that over another generic round of Qufim and the Jungles any day.


Carbuncle is awesome. Summoners who know how to actually use him are also awesome. Go go radioactive squirrel crowd control!


Against my better judgement I wandered back to the Windurst side of the world and headed underground, where I found the Three Mage Gate. It's an intoxicating atmosphere.


Bored and restless, a few folks in the linkshell decided it would be a brilliant idea to trio an avatar fight. I think it went well.



Another victim...er, recruit to the Linkshell. We sent this one into the Oubliette.


Once again it's up to the Doctor to clean things up.


After the initiation adventures in the oubliette it was time for some good old fashioned bunny punching.


We went to Tavnazia for some CoP missions, but more importantly: Taru Bongos!

I also managed to lose some gil betting on sheep pit fights.



The closest thing we had to a group photo that night. I really must go back there some time and poke around the scenery.



In unrelated news, I'm now crafting Holy Water for pure profit. One step closer to financial independence.


This frightened me enough that I had to take a picture.



Lies is responsible for this project. We're experimenting with crawler go-karts.



The linkshell went around mugging people until they gave us slave NPCs. Now if I could just figure out how to get them to stick around longer...*schemes*



Wardrobe change courtesy of the Linkshell. This'll do 'til I get my Warlock's Tabard. Still not chucking my Baron's Saio though, that thing is stupid useful.



Of course there was fishing. How could there not be fishing? What there hasn't been lately, is a good haul of Moat Carp however. I'll need to work on that.

Until next time children, remember not to punt the Tarutarus in Jeuno, the guards don't like that much.

I feel tonight marks my undeniable descent into madness.
I purchased my first HQ Elemental Staff.
There is no turning back now.
God help us all.

Aquilo's Staff. I guess I'm a career mage now.

Well you were fucking wrong.
My linkshell did some CoP tonight.
We did the Mammet fight.
I didn't even get to finish watching the cutscene before they had cleared the battlefield.
Minotaur was similarly trivial.
This is not making things more accessible, this is blatantly removing content by making it trivially easy.
I'm so angry I don't even have a screenshot for you. God damn!

This weekend I picked up Scholar again. My friend was going to bring a new person into the game and we had this elaborate plan to have a rad party starting as a level 1 White Mage, Samurai and Summoner. That fell through, so instead I ran around hitting things with a stick on Scholar.

Once I got to level 10 I decided it might be a good idea to actually put together a macro palette.

This is always a defining moment for mage jobs I've found. Putting together a functional macro palette and planning it so that you have room to expand is a bit of an art form. For Damage Dealing jobs it tends to be a little easier since you aren't weighed down with countless spells and abilities, and it can all fit into one line early on without any difficulty. Mage jobs on the other hand require a bit more finesse and planning.

Over the course of leveling a few different mage jobs I've found there's a routine evolution of macros I keep using.

Typically you start with just one line of macros. 20 slots is usually all you need for the very early levels so this works out well. This serves to build the foundation of your most commonly used spells. I generally split mine in half, CTRL for things that get cast on the party and ALT for offensive spells. Since there are a few select spells that you end up casting very frequently it's useful to have one macro line set up as what I internally term a "resting palette". It's the macro line I keep defaulting back to because it holds all the spells I need to cast at the drop of a hat. It always ends up being macro line 2.

Alas, the leveling process dictates that you will eventually amass more spells than can fit on a single macro line. So we must expand if we want to be able to sling spells without losing time fiddling with a menu or mispelling spells manually in the command line. This takes us into the realm of more specialized and comprehensive macro lines. Two new lines to be precise.

Above the resting macro in line 1, I tend to put all my miscellaneous Black Magic. Normally this consists of 6 nukes and various other goodies that expand upon what could not fit in the ALT section of the resting macro line. The CTRL/ALT split isn't as important here beyond keeping the 6 nukes in a row on the same section. I'm just a tad OCD about that, but the rest gets filled with Sleeps, Drain, Aspir and whatever else I could conceivably need. It's also a haven for any Black Magic related job abilities when there's extra slots not taken by spells.

Beneath the resting macro we have our White Magic on line 3. This has our full set of cures, because while typically you'll alternate between two tiers in a party it's still worth being able to call up any of them at any given time. Here's where the barspells and status-curing spells go as well. Not much to say about it really, it holds the White Magic that doesn't fit in our resting macro line.

"But wait," you cry, "where are all the equipment swapping macros?"

Do not fear dear reader, they have not been forgotten. Macro line 4 houses macros for various gear-stances, like INT and MND builds or your hMP(healing MP) set. While I imagine this can get quite crowded for some folks, I haven't hit a level of gear saturation that makes this section overloaded just yet. There are still plenty of free slots and I've taken to filling some of them with job abilities simply for convenience. Once I hit gear saturation though, the whole macro system I've built up to this point is going to dissolve anyway, so I try not to think about it too much.

Macro line 5 has ended up being a wild-card section. It holds things that aren't used that often or aren't exactly critical but still need a macro, like Sneak and Invisible.

So, to summarize:
Black MagicDefaultWhite MagicGear/Job AbilitiesMiscellaneousFishingYes, this was a boring post for most of you but I needed to get this out of my head.



Fireworks over Bastok.



This shot amuses me for some reason. I think it's the Tarutaru.

I'm so badass that I craft standing up.

I have no idea how this happened.
The last time I tried fishing was last Summer back when I first joined the game and was looking for a way to make gil. Back then it was frustrating as hell. I hated it. Rods breaking constantly, lines snapping, running out of bait without catching anything. It was utterly unappealing.
But for some reason I picked it up again and it has taken hold of me by the teeth and dragged me into its lair. I can only assume a club over the head and an unpleasant night are in store for me, but for now it's not so bad.
Something tells me it's the fact that this time around I started with a Halcyon Rod, which tends to not break on everything with gills or oxidation on it. The other thing that's made this bearable is that I recently made my first mule, so I now have somewhere to put this mountain of fish.
Even with all that going for me, it still doesn't make sense to me why I got drawn back in. The gil so far hasn't been worthwhile, as farming and gardening still pay better and more consistently. It's like some bizarro craft where the crystal and synthesis requirements are all warped and inverted. Instead of melting everything down into profitable slag, I'm forever expanding my inventory with NPC fodder.
There's this fantastic myth that's been perpetuated for years that Moat Carp are some sort of awesome reliable income for new players. I'm calling bullshit on that right now. The Auction House has been flooded with Moat Carp and we haven't seen a sale in days. At the rate any new fisherman can land them, the supply quickly outstrips the demand leaving many high and dry. You're better off spending your time farming something like beehive chips that rush out the door as soon as they hit the AH, never lingering more than a day unless you've been trying to jack up the price.
So fishing hasn't exactly been a gold mine. In fact I dare say I've sunk more money into it than I've made back at this point and if I keep losing lures that may not even change.
It makes no sense, but I completely and totally enjoy it.
Seriously.
You think I'm joking, but I've done nothing in the last two days except fish. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if I hit the 200 fish per day limit tonight with all the fishing I did. It's nuts!
Now I have a mountain of fish sitting on a mule that is going to take forever to sell. Or I might just go with my friend's suggestion and start making workbenches out of the fish.




I'm rather fond of my mule. Major bonus points for those of you who got the reference without looking it up.

I figured out what the litmus test for for finding a good Linkshell is.

If your linkshell organizes a party to Purgonorgo Isle and the primary concern is lotting on Pebbles then you have found a good Linkshell.

God damn was tonight fun.

On the way over.Expect more coherent postings when it isn't 4 in the morning.

Well it's happened again. I've run out of money.

On the bright side I now have 65 inventory slots, so it was totally worth it.

I guess now would be a good time to review how my last gil-making scheme has been going.

The goal was to get into gardening in order to avoid having to constantly farm every day to cover expenses. So far it has been working out. I found out some seeds can be harvested in just three days, so I was all over that like a cat on catnip. After spending a few months fiddling with growing elemental ores over the course of 3-4 weeks only to have the results be rock salt instead, this was a huge improvement for me. No more month long waits and disappointment, just a small steady stream of crops.

I may as well let you all know what exactly I used, no point in keeping it secret.

The secret formula is this: 1 pot + 1 bag of grain seeds + 1 fire crystal +3 days of waiting = lots of TaruTaru Rice.

Or if the random number generator feels fickle, you'll get a handful of ice crystals or a red rock.

It's not big money, but it's enough to get by on day-to-day expenses.

Funny story though; When I first got into the market, TaruTaru Rice was selling like mad and for 15k per stack. Holy money making agriculture Batman, I thought to myself, this is where I need to be. Well after a few weeks something in the market shifted and the price dropped to 10k. Alright, still reasonably profitable and the 15k was probably just a brief spike in price and this is the market stabilizing itself.

Well maybe not.

See, the price on my server hasn't stopped falling. From what I can tell we have about 7 stacks of rice on the Auction House for every one stack that gets sold. The market is in free-fall. Stacks are going for 4k and still dropping.

It's actually been pretty amazing to watch. At this point I just want to see how far it will fall before everyone bails on it entirely. I'll still be there though, since it hasn't hit the point where selling stacks of seeds is more profitable than growing them yet.

In the meantime, I'm still running low on gil though so it's probably time to go farm something. So much for not having to farm again, huh?





Who is driving these chocobos?

*sigh*
"Underwhelming" is the only description that springs to mind.
Tonight my Linkshell took it upon themselves to run me through my second Limit Break quest. This one involved defeating some Notorious Monsters in the frozen northlands of Xarcabard.
I had wandered up to one earlier in the week just to see how hard it hits and it floored me in less than a minute. It wouldn't even be worth attempting to solo, unlike Dark Spark where I could see a glimmer of hope poking up just beyond the horizon.
Stomping on them with three higher level players helping just didn't bring me any satisfaction. It made the whole ordeal trivial, a chore, a minor inconvenience. I knew this was going to happen too. Hell I didn't even have to properly research the NMs, we just wandered up there and slaughtered them.
This was not an adventure.


I really need to make a point of exploring the Shadowreign era. It turns up cool stuff like this.

It's true.

Worse yet I think Warrior is starting to grow on me, especially since I've started taking it to Linkshell parties.

I just spent the night in Spore Hollow and had a blast. We were syncing to 25 and our puller was clinically insane. At any given time we had two to four Funguar on top of us, and no one to sleep them so it was up to me and the Ninja to make sure they didn't eat the mages. I'm not sure the Ninja was up to the task when synced so low, but I sure as hell was. Firing arrows as two Funguars come in and provoking the third as our puller cackled maniacally, leaving the Ninja to hold the first one as the rest of the party wailed on it.

You know what gets a monster's attention better than insulting its mother?

Hitting it in the head with a gigantic axe.

At any given time I could wander up to a mob that wasn't eating the ninja, wallop it in the face and it would decide I was tastier. I'm not sure it quite counts as tanking, but I was eating enough cures that it kept me on my toes and I couldn't use Provoke carelessly. Heck, half the time I was switching to target a new mob just to make sure I kept hate until the rest of the party could start wailing on one of the held mobs.

I'm pretty sure we were making less than 5,000 experience per hour, but damned if it wasn't fun.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to go soak my head and put my head between my knees until the desire to abandon Red Mage and level Warrior goes away.





The new expansion is producing fashion disasters like this. I am displeased.



Some guy was shouting for mission 2-3, the one where you fight the dragon, tonight. I managed to rope most of the Linkshell into helping with the fight. Afterwards we adopted him and had an awesome party in Jugner Forest.