Archive for January, 2010
Last Sunday we had our second Sea run. We killed our very first Jailer (Faith) and Ix’Aern MNK. Grats Vivinite on Merciful Cape!
I don’t know why that is, but for some reason I find myself doing the same CoP missions over and over again. Last weekend I did all the promyvions for the billionth time and then I did the pot fight and Promathia fight with another group. The third CoP static in our LS just started their way through the missions last week, and they did Minotaur yesterday. Now almost everyone in our whole LS either has Sea or is in a CoP static.
Congratulations on finishing CoP to Ethalio, Athlir, Ciro and Vivinite!
Have done some dyna runs, but no luck with SCH drops. Alix and Pyth have dropped a lot though, which has made me happy:
Had a Nyzul boss run without a THF again yesterday. Three tags, no drops. Sucks.
I haven’t really done much aside from normal events: Nyzul, Assault, Limbus, Dynamis. We did finish the mini avatar battles for Shantotto expansion with Alix, though. We did a few prime avatars at the same time because Alix needed the whispers and I’m greedy for gil. Ashmedai joined us for a couple of fights because he needed the whispers as well.
We had very detailed strategies for each of the fights:
Today we’ll have a Dynamis-Xarca and next week we’ll do some more Shantotto missions and Ultima, at least. Unfortunately I don’t have much time for playing since I have an exam on Friday.
A couple of words about good playing and good leadership
Posted by: Evyen
January 21st, 2010 >> FFXI
Last night me and my husband got into discussion about FFXI elitism and what do we expect from other players in our events / missions / EXP parties etc. Neither of us really considers themself as an “elitist” – whatever that means – and I can pretty safely say none of our LS members think that about us either. However, there are some things I expect from other players:
1. I expect everyone to carry some standard items with them at all times. These standard items include at least appropriate food for your job, a form of sneak and invisible and echo drops if you play a job that casts anything from ninjutsu to white magic (this includes melees with /NIN sub aswell). Nothing sucks as much as a WHM who can’t cure you because they’re silenced, or a tank who can’t keep their shadows up because they’re silenced. Carrying food and standard medicines is an important part of playing your job right, and shouldn’t be ignored.
2. I expect everyone to have read about the event / mission / NM we’re doing and know what they’re expected to do, which items are needed etc. I don’t mean everyone should spend 5 hours googling about different strategies and experiences, but at least read mission walkthrough and NM TP moves from wiki. If you’re doing a mission, don’t expect the leader to hold your hand and drag you through it step by step, but rather be prepared and make sure you always know what you’re expected to do next and why. It doesn’t really take that much of your time, but it will save a lot of your event leaders time, not to mention nerves.
3. I expect everyone to have standard subjobs for their job leveled. Of course it’s a different thing if you’ve just hit 75 on the job, and I don’t mean you have to have all the possible subs leveled. But after you’ve been 75 for a while, I expect you to have at least two different subs for your job. For example, if you’re a RDM, you should have at least /WHM and /BLM leveled and if you’re a MNK, you should have at least /WAR and /NIN leveled. There are some jobs that can get by with only one sub leveled (for example WHM or THF, as long as it isn’t WHM/THF and THF/WHM as one famous example 
), but most jobs need at least two subs.
4. I expect everyone to have functional gear for their job. And by this I don’t mean you have to have a full salvage set and all possible HNM gear, but gear that actually boosts your performance instead of making you weaker. You should always aim for the best gear you can afford in gil or time. I understand not everyone want to spend all of their limited play time farming for gil and not everyone can dedicate hours of time for end game events. But there are some standard pieces of gear which are required, for example a Light Staff for WHM (yes, I’ve seen a WHM curing a Dark Staff equipped…on purpose…because he “couldn’t afford” Light Staff) and so on.
Now these are the things I expect from everyone, and neglecting them will make you…if not a bad player, at least sub par. Of course there are exceptions, mainly players who have recently hit 75 for the first time, and mistakes happen to even more experienced players (it’s not like I’ve never forgotten food / echo drops / sneak and invis items etc). But in my opinion, these things are something every player should consider as their responsibilities as EXP party / mission group / event members. It’s a totally different thing if you’re just playing solo, but as soon as you’re playing with others, you should do your best to fill your role as well as possible.
In addition, there are some things that make you a so called good player, at least in my eyes:
1. Before doing an event / mission / NM, you have read the setups, strategies, TP moves etc. and prepared for them according to your role (for example, if you’re a tank, you know if you should come as /RDM, /NIN, /WAR or /whatever, you know if you need some magic defence gear and so on). In other words, you know which main and subjobs are most useful for your group, what kind of gear and food to use, which items are needed, what kind of magic and / or TP moves to expect from the mobs and how to react to them etc. without having to be told so by the event leader.
2. You carry extra items with you to make things go smoother. Simple things like reraise items on melees and yagudo drinks / ethers on mages can save the day.
3. You can react fast and adapt to changing situations. When planned strategy fails, shit hits the fan and people start dying, you don’t panic but do your best to help the group to recover – even if it means sacrificing yourself so that for example tanks or healers can get up safely. You are able to think of the group rather than just think of yourself.
4. You know how to utilize your main and sub job to their full extent (and have many useful subjobs leveled). If most of your job abilities are more or less useful, you really should use them all, not just one or two. If you’re a melee using /NIN, please learn how to count those goddamn shadows – there’s no point of using that sub if you can’t keep your shadows up. And if you’re /WHM, for gods sake use those spells you have! I’ve seen way too many BRD/WHMs, BLM/WHMs etc. just standing there and watching while the tank is in desperate need of paralyna, erase or cure and WHM is otherwise busy. In short: if you have a useful spell or ability, use it!
5. You know how to communicate with your group and adapt to different play styles. By this I mean that you’re not just standing there doing your own thing, but you’re working as a part of the group. For example, if you’re a healer, you know how to react to tanks needs fast, and also know if the PLD in your group likes you to give him space to get hate from curing himself and the others. If you’re a melee or a BLM, you know how to walk that fine line with hate and still do as much damage as possible. You understand that you need to play differently with different people. This goes for strategies aswell: if you see someone filling a certain role in the strategy, you’ll support him or fill another role. Of course it’s nearly impossible to work well together as a group with people you don’t really know, as it takes time to learn each others play styles. For example, when our Nyzul group started it was…well…chaotic. These days we barely have to speak to each other about strategies because everyone knows what is expected from them and what they can expect from everyone else.
6. You commit time to making yourself a better player and try to learn from experiences. You want to understand your job and everything it can do. You are familiar with your limits but constantly try to push them farther.
As you probably noticed, none of the things that make you a good player have much to do with gil. Well, of course eating good food and having medicines with you cost, but if affording them is an issue, there’s most definitely something wrong with your money making strategies. Anyway, my point is, gear doesn’t make you a good player. You can have all the best gear in the world, but if you fail in the points I’ve made, you still suck. Being a good player is a lot more important than having a good gear. But, it has to be said, good gear makes good players even better.
I’ve been lucky to have many excellent players in my Linkshell. We’ve experienced many different kind of fights together and all of us have learned a lot during the time we’ve played together, I think. At least I have.
How about good leaders then? I’ve been in a few different mission / end game / event groups and learned something about good and not-so-good leadership. In my opinion, there are several things that make a good leader:
1. They know what they’re doing. This one is kind off self evident, I think. I don’t mean that the leader has to have personal experience of the event they’re leading (it helps a lot, though), but they should at least have done their research well.
2. They can give clear instructions and aren’t afraid to give them. People can’t know what you expect them to do if you don’t tell it to them.
3. They know the basic abilities of all jobs and know how they can be used. And when I say “all jobs”, I don’t mean “NIN, PLD, RDM, BLM, WHM, BRD, SAM, THF, MNK, WAR and RNG”. I really mean all jobs. Many leaders seem to be stuck at CoP time and are afraid to try anything new.
4. They know how to work with what they have. Some leaders look at the mission, decide they need certain jobs and refuse to think any other options. Good leaders first consider which jobs their groups have and then figure out a way to make them work. They know how to be creative.
5. They know how to give feedback. I’ve seen some leaders throw a tantrum in linkshell or party chat because someone makes a mistake. That only makes people nervous because they’re so afraid of making mistakes and turns group atmosphere negative. It’s much better if the leader just /tells the person what they could do better next time. A good leader also gives positive feedback and shows their appreciation when things go smoothly.
6. They know how to take feedback. Kind of self evident again, but important. Good leaders do their best to make their group members feel that their comments and suggestions are appreciated.
I don’t know where this post came from and it certainly became a lot longer than I expected it would. Feel free to comment and post your own opinions, I’d love to hear what other people think!
Last night our Limbus group finally beat Ultima! I can’t describe how happy I am we finally won this fight after many failures. Our last try was so close, I was 99,9% sure we’d win this time, but I was still nervous as hell when I logged in for the fight last night after work. For this run our setup looked like this:
Tank party: 2 x NIN/WAR (would have wanted them /DRK but neither had it leveled), 2 x WHM, RDM/NIN and BRD/WHM
BLM party: 4 x BLM, BRD and COR (the COR was level 52 but what the hell, he had all the needed rolls!)
Melee party: 2 x SAM/THF, BLU/THF, SMN/WHM, RDM/NIN and WHM
The strategy was to have 2 x NIN/WAR tanks (and 2 x RDM/NIN backup tanks in case the NINs go down, as they did), SAM/THFs doing Fragmentation SC and BLMs MBing Thunder III and IV on it. One of the SAMs got DC pretty early, so luckily we had the BLU/THF to replace him as a SC partner. This time damage wasn’t a problem at all, but next time I’ll most likely have 4 x SAM/THFs and also a couple of more BLMs if possible. I’m still not sure about which tanks to use, at the moment I’m thinking RDM/NIN might actually work best, since they can survive any of Ultimas TP moves, even Citadel Buster.
The biggest problem we had this time was people not following instructions. My plan was that we would hold Ultima at 81%, 61% etc. so that we could control when it uses Dissipation. Because Dissipation is a hate reset move, my plan was to have BLMs do timed AM2 to trigger Dissipation and stun immediately after (when everyone else but one tank had ran out of Dissipation range, of course) so that with luck we could avoid the whole move, and even if it would be used, only one tank would get hit. Unfortunately, people weren’t really good at holding Ultima at certain HP and Dissipation hit us by surprise many times. We also had some problems with Stun cycle (for some weird reason, at least one of our BLMs couldn’t see any of Ultimas TP moves in his log before he took spam filters off etc.) and rebuffing tanks after Dissipation / death. But all these are small problems which will be fixed when people will get more experienced in fights like this.
In the end we won relatively easily, with 20 minutes left. Good job guys, you rock! Congratulations Brevalaer on Nashira head and Vivinite on Nashira feet!
Last Friday we had our first ZNM run with SF. We had tons of tier I pops and we had 12 people attending the run, which meant we could easily kill all the tier I NMs. The run went really well, we had a good time and before I even noticed, it was 1AM and we decided to call it a night. We got 13 drops in total, I think. Congratulations guys!
Me and Alix started doing A Shantotto’s Ascension missions. We’re currently on the Avatar fights part, and we decided to duo the primes while we’re at it. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a lot of time for playing lately, so for now we’ve only done Ifrit. We’re planning to continue those today when I get off work, though.
So the holidays are over and it’s back to school and work with me. During my few day vacation I spent so much time playing FFXI I came dangerously close to getting an overdose of it. I started camping Adamantoise on xmas day and have been there every day after that. Unfortunately, I soon noticed I wasn’t only one with the same idea. Here’s a pic from one day 2 Ada camp:
Adamantoise = SERIOUS BUSINESS. We have only gotten 2 claims and decided to give up with it for now. No point wasting our time when the zone is full of people. It’s funny though, I was sure Adamantoise Egg would be the easiest BB item to get but as it turned out, everyone seems to want to camp the turtle for whatever reason. I’m getting so desperate I’m actually considering using my seals for the KSNM…
I only found one screenshot taken from Ada camp… And yes, we messed up the pull big time and didn’t get it to a corner. Was really messy.
As I wrote earlier, we have recently started to do some NM events with SecretFellowship. We camp some NMs, do Sky and Sea and ZNMs, pop NMs etc. Pretty much anything people want to do, assuming we have enough people for it. But it’s really casual, meaning all events are 100% voluntary and you don’t even have to attend them if you’re online if you just don’t feel like it etc. It’s all about having fun together, getting experience from fighting new NMs and helping each other to get some nice pieces of gear.
Making a balanced lotting rule system for a social LS like us has been pretty challenging. At first we had a very simple system: you get 1 point / hour for any NM event and 2 points / hour for any pop item farming. All items costed 5 points to lot. Person with most points and the said item on wish list had the lotting priority (and you could only put stuff you can wear on your lot list).
The problem was, I was getting way too many points for camping stuff for myself. I was on top of the point list, mainly because I had spend so many hours camping Behemoth and Adamantoise (for my Black Belt items). So I suggested we change the rules so that people won’t get any points if they’re camping NMs for themselves. At the same time, we also added a rule that when we start camping something, the lot priority for that NM will become locked until the person with highest lot priority either gets the drop or stops camping. We also changed point costs so that pop NM and ZNM drops are now 5 points / item, other NM drops and sea/sky drops are 10 points / each and some hard to kill or hard to claim NM drops are 20 points / item. This meant that I nuked 15 points away from myself and I moved from the top of the point list to 8. place. At least for now the new rules seem to be working well. Anyway, as we discussed about this in LS, people reminded me that we shouldn’t really need very strict rules anyway since we are a social LS, the point of our events is to have fun and help each other, and if someone even tries to abuse our rules they will be dealt with accordingly. ;D
On last Sunday we had our first Sky farming run with SecretFellowship. Most of the people attending the event had barely even been in the zone before so I was prepared for it to go pretty badly. Of course there were some aggros and deaths when people weren’t used to sneaking around the inner zones, but all in all it was a pretty good run for a first. We spent almost four hours there and during that time we killed Despot, Zip, MG, SC, Faust and BB. MG was a bit messy because the pull failed, as in BLMs did’t succeed to kill all the slaves at first and our only tank + some other people died. But Pyth started to kite MG as BLU, BLMs stunned -gas and rest of the melees killed the popping slaves, which gave us time to recover and finally kill it. After that run we have pops for almost all the gods (only missing half Byakko and half Genbu) and people got some valuable experience from popping and fighting almost every Sky pop item NM.
After the Sky run we had scheduled a Divine Might run, as pretty much everyone in our LS has Sky now but most people hadn’t done DM. I was pretty nervous about the fight because we don’t have an army of BLMs and I had never done it with a melee setup before. So I told everyone to have reraise earrings ready. 
We used the following setup:
Kiter/tank party: 3 x PLD/NIN, 2 x RDM/WHM, WHM
BLM party: 3 x BLM, BRD, WHM
Melee party: 2 x SAM/NIN, BLU/NIN, MNK/NIN, BRD, WHM
Our strategy was pretty simple:
1. BLMs start the fight with timed Burst II on the Taru. SAMs meditate and take the taru down with WS as fast as possible.
2. All PLDs take one angel: Elvaan, Hume and Mithra. RDMs assist the kiting PLDs and sleep the pets. WHM keeps the PLDs alive.
3. BLU pulls Galka to stairs and kills it with MNK with the assist of BRD and WHM.
As none of us had tried this strategy before, we decided to have one dry run first. To my amazement, before we even noticed, three of the angels were down, only Elvaan and Hume (+ 2 pets) still standing. A BRD kept the pets asleep while we gathered our efforts to kill the Elvaan at the stairs. In the end we wiped with the Elvaan still standing, but he had already used Benediction and we still had plenty of time left, so we reraised and rebuffed. Luckily the two pets also depopped after we all died, so we only had Elvaan and Hume left.
We killed the Elvaan first, started out with timed Burst II again and the SAMs used 2hr on it (well, tried, but didn’t have enough time before it died). After this we pulled Hume to stairs. I was just shouting “WHMs use Benediction if it uses Mijin Gakure!” in party chat when we got the message of victory. Awesome job guys, winning a fight like this on a dry run, I love you all! This is our amazing team after the fight:
Congratulations for all who needed the fight and a thousand thanks for Poty and Lary for your help!
After the DM we still had a dyna run, Xarca. I felt exhausted, it had been way too much playing for one day for me, but didn’t want to skip the run just because I had made some bad scheduling choises. In the end the run went pretty well and we even got to see 2 x THF hands in the treasure pool at once:
On Tuesday we had an Assault run with our static. We decided to start with the Lebros Supplies AKA The Worst Assault Mission Ever. Everyone I know either hates this mission with passion or has never even bothered to try it. We decided to go with the sleep / run away strategy with reraises up on everyone, and our strategy was SCH/THF (me), WHM/THF, BLM/THF, SMN/THF, BLU/THF and SAM/THF. In the end I died several times but at least we won with a few minutes left. I’ve said this before but this time I really mean it: I will never ever do this mission again!
I’ve also done some EXPing in LS parties. We’ve had some good time in the Dunes, Qufim and East Ronfaure S! I decided not to level another job anymore, but focus on keeping full buffer on my 75 jobs and finally meriting them.
