Saturday, June 14, 2008

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.

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