Dynamis - Bedroom

On the one hand, lots of stuff happening, but then it doesn't feel like too much for some reason. This weekend actually should be rough since I have plans to leave my house twice within two days (amazing!). Other than that though, just a nice relaxing week or so getting some important things done.



Got my second to last drop for the Opo-opo crown a few days back. We got it on the first kill, amazingly. The reason this was particularly note-worthy was we got Draco's on the first kill as well.



Did my NPC's G1, though I have another one I have to do for her now. Honestly its a bit of a pain, takes a while to get these quests done.



I got an O-hat! Ok sweet my Thief is ready to exp-wait fuck Sirocco. Dammit. I need to convince myself to forget about all this R/E junk that would make my Thief great and just level the damn thing to 75.

For now at least, its Paladin time though.

Pictures, with a side of lulz

If you only care about the comedy, scroll down until you see the screenshot that consists of a whole bunch of orange text, that'd be it.



Unfortunately this ones already out of date. My PLD is nearly 29 now, can't wait to put on my eisen/kampf gear.



Got one of the more useless pieces of relic on Thursday. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have it and appreciate the drop, but. . . lets be honest. Its not exactly something most people would be happy to catch a WHM wearing in a party.



Got my first level of Devotion, mostly for Draco. Its pretty fun, I don't regret picking it up. I need to cap it off now unfortunately. . . oh well at least I have SAM to do that with now.



75 SAM! That makes two.



I also got Diabolos randomly, which means I have all summons. Ironically, like the day after or two days after I picked Diabolos up they announced the Ixion thing, and even though I know now that he isn't a summon (yet), I still cried.



Got my Minstrel's finally! I think I mentioned it, but Saruka helped me get the drop. Draco also camped it with me quite a bit. Go go BRD end-game gear at 62!



I also picked up an Assault Jerkin recently, which I really don't deserve. This should be Draco's or Saruka's. But we should be remedying that shortly. . .



Ah the lulz. Anything more I could say about that conversation will only detract from the hilarity, so please, enjoy.



Ah, Cutaru. I just thought this seemed appropriately. . . cute? With her (his?) ass up in the air like that. Ironically, soon after taking this screenshot I found out that Cutaru is in my Dynamis shell. What a tweest!

Wait, what?

So I finally got around to installing photoshop and cropping up all my screenshots into what I want posted. I even organized them all so they're nice now. I go to upload them and. . . what? Photobucket got hacked?

So I can't upload them for the moment. Honestly I'm not sure what exactly happened to photobucket, I had JUST gotten a party on PLD as I noticed so I couldn't look into it much.

Anyway, improving Dynamis runs like I promised. Chat. Talk to everyone, get them mentally involved. If they're thinking about chatting with you and still doing their job, they're not thinking about whatever drop they haven't gotten yet or the fact that they've been there for 3 hours. Doesn't matter what you talk about, make a stupid joke. Just get a chuckle out of them or something. If your members are feeling good and not getting angsty over a mistake someone made or the drops or some other retarded drama, Dynamis is a lot more tolerable. The most important thing is to try to involve everyone unless they repeatedly act as though they don't want to be. Make them feel like they're part of the group even if its their first run. ESPECIALLY if its their first run. Get to know them all, even if only just a little.

You want people to have fun attending your runs, and lets be honest the game doesn't really facilitate that on its own most days.

Anyway, thats about it until photobucket comes back online.

PS: STOP FUCKING UNDERCUTTING KAGINAWA, FUCK

Thievery, Merits, and a second 75

So I want to post screenshots, I have a ton of them, but theres just one hitch. No photoshop. I have CS2, and I can install it any time, but I'm like. . . . I think 1 gig away from a full hard-drive at the moment and I'm too lazy to find stuff I want to delete/put junk on a DVD. Too busy dinging 75 Samurai I guess. Whoops, that was for later.

Saruka got 75 Thief though, which is awesome and I feel great for him because hes pretty much in the same situation I am. We've both been Thief for about the same time period (5 years) and are only just now close to capping it, and in his case, finally capping it. I actually hadn't realized that I have as much in common with him as I do until recently, its been a lot of fun screwing around killing stuff with him.

I've also worked on merits some, and thought about what I want to get. Until the last few days, I had only ever gotten one merit, and it went right into Regen. However I got three in the last few days and picked up the first level of Devotion, which Draco has wanted me to have for quite a while.

However the real interesting thing that I was thinking about was what I was going to do overall with my merits in the short term, and specifically how I might use them as a tool for improving a job as I'm leveling it. Namely, Paladin. The main thing that I have thought about improving is HP or MP, because those would be pretty much universally useful. However what I was thinking was, in the interest of Paladin, going full 8/8 on MP. I know, I know, most full-time Paladins reading this are probably thinking I'm nuts or stupid. There are a few factors here. First, I don't plan on tanking in end-game. I have White Mage and probably Bard as well for doing any of that junk, and I don't think I'm a particularly good tank as a player anyway. I am better suited for a support role. Second, looking at Paladin from the perspective of someone who more or less intends to use it only for leveling up, and then random raids or missions where my friends need a tank, HP isn't that important. Point for point, in that situation (to me at least) it makes more sense to go after MP. On top of that, I look at how most of the jobs I level and enjoy are mages (I know two of my three highest are melee, but overall I'm a mage player), and from what I can see it makes the most sense to go after MP.

To top it all off, I finally got Samurai to 75 in this ridiculously fun party that I got to sub Dancer in. We had three Samurai, a Thief, a Red Mage, and a Ninja, and the Thief only ever got to engage the mobs when they pulled a link, because we were killing so fast. We got a good 30k, which allowed me a healthy 10k buffer, which I'll probably be too lazy to extend. So now I don't have to merit on my White Mage, and a shell member (Djohn) is slowly nearing 75 with his own White Mage, so its great that I have another option.

I'd go into detail about what I want to merit on Samurai but the only real interesting dilemma I've thought of is Meditate versus Third Eye. Everything else seems pretty obvious to me, and thus not very interesting. At the moment I can't really decide between Meditate and Third Eye because on the one hand Meditate turns into more hate generation, which I don't really need, and I'm honestly not very good as using Third Eye all that often, even though I have toyed with the idea of tanking with Samurai rather frequently, especially after Dancer was introduced. At any rate I'll probably do Meditate simply because its more useful than only five seconds off of Third Eye, and coupled with Shikikoyo its reasonable to see myself using and wanting even more TP than I already get.

Anyway, I'm either going to nap or go walk to an awesome family owned donut place near my house for breakfast, but the next entry will be something that at least interests me; a way to improve your shell's Dynamis runs without making any in-game adjustments.

Dynamis - Kitchen

Joined another Dynamis shell. . . Elminster runs it, its pretty cool. Aside from a blatantly obvious gilbuyer (SH+1 + a key ring belt full time in dyna windy after not knowing if the airship in sandy went to windurst as a level 70 THF - oh and he got a relic drop) and some people who say things they shouldn't / act like they're on a power trip most of the time, its a great shell. Excellent PLDs, and a number of cool people.

I WHM'd of course, which was a lot of fun since the first party I was in (5 DDs and me) was very relaxing and enjoyable, and then they threw me in the tank party which at first was scary as hell since I wasn't quite ready for it, but once I figured out how things were going mostly it was easy. The PLDs did a wonderful job and made it quite easy for me to keep them alive.

I've also been doing ZMs, I never really realized how freaking easy they are. In the last little while we knocked off ZM4 and ZM5, kicked the crap out of both of them despite getting slapped around by the zi'tah headstone NM a bit. Can't wait to get sky access, there is a particular shell I would like to join, though I'm going to have to be careful about my work schedule and joining various shells like the dynamis one and this one.

Anyway, SAM partay. Maybe I can get 75 this weekend.

Lolwut

Yea I left for a while, more so this blog than the game. Left the game for a month or two to do better in classes, did worse, so. . . I don't know.

Anyway, update day. Pretty sweet, lots of stuff, but most of them are things I want to see in game or screenshots of before I really form an opinion so not too much to comment on beyond feeling as though my SAM likely has some different goals now gear-wise.

SAM is 73. THF is 70. DNC is 37. RDM is 4. . . 43? Either 43 or 42, I don't remember.

SAM has actually been a lot of fun. I don't know what is up with the missed WS crap but for some reason its been happening less despite no gear changes, but when it does happen its like 3-4 in a row and then no misses for a while. Not really sure whats up with that, but I can only really move forward at this point.

Some douchebags jacked the price up on Shinsoku randomly, I've been trying to pick one up but I'm not paying 200k for something thats been 110k for a long time.

Lastly, I started making egg fried rice. This is excellent food and any retard can cook it easily, heres how you make it:

- Make some rice (I prefer brown personally, healthy), and refrigerate it the night before if you can though I don't think its completely necessary.

- Prepare the vegetables/meat you want to use. Personally I like to go with broccoli, carrots, and corn but red bell peppers and pretty much any meat work well too. cut them up fairly small, its best to be able to get a little of everything in most bites.

- Throw the rice in a wok or large pan with high sides, add some vegetable oil, maybe like 4 tablespoons or something, I just pour a bit in. the idea is to get it on all of the rice

- You have two options with the eggs: you can either do them separately (what I prefer because I make a big batch and my wok isn't all that huge) or you can do all of it in one pan. If you do it separately, just make scrambled eggs with salt/pepper and whatever else you'd like to add to them in a separate pan, and when they're more or less solid throw them in with the rest and continue to cook them. Try to get the individual pieces of egg relatively small. If you're doing it all together, at some point during the cooking, whenever you're most comfortable (I go shortly after I've put all the other stuff in) move everything but the eggs off to one side of the pan as best as you can and pour the eggs in, just make 'em scrambled right there. You might be able to just dump the eggs in without moving anything aside and cook it all together but I've never tried it and it might be kind of difficult.

- For the rice and vegetables, just stir fry them pretty much (which is to say heat the pan they're in and move them around with a bamboo or wood spatula until they're cooked). You'll want a little bit of soy sauce, depending on how much stuff you throw in other than the rice it will vary. Try to experiment with how much you use. You can also use other sauces, I'd imagine teriyaki or oyster sauce would work but I've never tried either personally.

tl;dr: Stir fry rice, meat and vegetables. Make scrambled eggs. Mix together.