Month: January 2005

How could I have forgotten the +10 Accuracy Bonus of the Jack-o-Lanterns? Good thing I picked up cooking when I started this game.

Back during the Halloween holiday event in 2004, those things went as low as 50gil on the Auction Houses (AH). I bought a few for my EXP PT, but stopped when the prices went back up to 2000gil. Currently 2500gil in Windurst’s AH and 3000gil in Jeuno’s AH.

With cooking at level 30, to successfully synth Jack-o-Lanterns (JoL) safely, I need to have it up to 37. So I begin with skilling up my cooking skill with Black Bread, then tried synthing JoLs at 34, successfully synthed 12 of them without a break and got 0.9 skillups.

The recipe for a JoL is 1x Fire Crystal(380gil), 1x Beeswax (1250gil) and 1x Ogre Pumpkin (100gil), prices rounded. A production cost of 1730gil. As long as I sell them in my Bazaar, I could save up on the tax costs in putting them up on the Auction House. There’s 10% tax automatically imposed on Bazaar stuff. But it’s the buyer who pays the tax and where that tax goes to, I have no freakin clue. And so I put them up in my Bazaar for 2700gil. With tax, the buying price is 2970gil. At least 30gil cheaper than what’s on the Auction House.

I estimate the profit from selling all 12 to be at 11,640gil. At the speed these things sell, I figure this could be my new gil-making scheme. I could even save up some gil cooking them for my own use at EXP PTs.

Now armed with JoLs, I have more confidence in joining an EXP PT again. Well, hopefully someone invites me tonight. Until I reach level 65, it’s gonna be hell of a tough time getting invited into EXP PTs.

God damn gil farmers! God damn expensive accuracy gear! God damn Square-Enix for giving exp monsters such insanely high evasion!

I miss playing DRK in an EXP PT. It requires lots of concentration; Timing my weaponskills for skillchain, watch out Berserk for recast, keep an eye on the monster and stun him when he readies his area-of-effect attacks, stun the monster when the NIN tank is casting Utsusemi, stun the monster when the PLD is casting Cure magic on himself, make sure everyone else’s health is high – Souleater + Blood Weapon when things look bad. It’s fun when everyone does their part well.

My recent EXP PT was terrible. Even though I was able to hit well enough to gain TP, the whole session sucked because of the other members. Firstly, the DRK who invited me. He subbed THF at level 56. He left his scythe in his mog house and used great sword. Nevermind that, not critical. He could still do some damage with Sneak Attack + Hard Slash, the worse thing about him is he was the puller and always returned to camp with dangerously low health. I was never there to witness how he pulled each monster. But he really sucked at pulling. I suspect he did a Sneak Attack on the target.

We had no BLM to magic burst Freeze. Only a RDM with Blizzard II. RDM’s Gravity would rarely go through. Most of them, resisted. Gravity lowers the target’s evasion, enough for me to hit well.

The worst was the RNG. The first I’ve seen to deal less than 100 points of damage with Barrage. We were doing Sidewinder > Vorpal Scythe for Distortion. But 3 out of 5 times of his Sidewinder would miss.

Camping at the tunnels next to the beaches of Cape Terrigan sucked. There were 3 other PTs in the same tunnel. Occasionally someone would zone a raptor-type monster and everyone else had to zone because that monster aggros by sight, and is a lot stronger than us. The next worse thing that happened is we waited 30 minutes for a replacement PLD. He came, fought 2 battles, and left saying he had something to do. The JP WAR/NIN was pissed at this point. So he left too and went back to Jeuno with his Looking for Party flag up and “English PT:X” in his search comment. (meaning he doesn’t want to play with english players anymore.)

POINT OF THIS ENTRY: IF YOU CAN’T STAY IN AN EXP PT FOR AT LEAST 2 HOURS, DO NOT PUT UP YOUR SEEK FLAG! {/fume} [>(]

Eventually, I suggested that we disband, despite the fact I only needed 480 more experience points to get to 57. Everyone else agreed with disbanding, thank goodness. For this EXP session, I gained 3000 experience points over 4 hours. An average PT does 2000/hour. A good one can go from 3000-4000/hour. Do the math!

Falling asleep is a common thing in FFXI. Because the North American players are about 16-18 hours (guesstimate) behind Singapore/Japan time, when it’s evening in SG/JP, it’s late night in NA. Thus, some players who refuse to logout but continue to play in an experience points PT(party) tend to fall asleep.

I’ve come across such players before. A black mage in my PT suddenly stopped casting magic and he was just sitting there not responding to our calls. I admit falling asleep once [X|]. But it was at a coffer key PT where we’re all fighting skeletons hoping they would drop the keys to treasure coffers. I fell asleep on my chair and woke up to the familiar BGM of Jeuno. The japanese were kind enough to give me Warp II.

Last night I got invited by a Japanese player to form an EXP PT at Yuhtunga Jungle. It was fun playing Thief and somehow I enjoy taking hate off the tank, even when playing Dark Knight. Not through Provoke but by simply dealing lots of damage. As a Thief, I relied on Sneak Attack + weaponskill to deal enough damage for the damn goblin to keep hitting me.

This is where a Ninja subjob comes in. With Utsusemi:Ichi, I could absorb up to 3 hits. Time it well and I can recast it and absorb another 3 hits. Hopefully during these 6 hits, the tank is able to regain enough hate to have the monster start hitting him back.

I digress! [X|]

Anyway, it was clear to the rest of the JP players that I could read a bit of Japanese. After we killed a goblin and was resting, one of the JP player (hereby referred to as JP-A) said:

Rough translation: “Since he knows Japanese, teach this foreigner neochi lol”

Obviously, I was the only foreigner in the PT. I knew it was directed at me. And I admit I even thought neochi (I read this as “neo-chi”) was some kind of program to assist me in FFXI, haha. So I asked the leader, the JP player who invited me and knew some English.

To which he replied in PT chat. (I guess it’s kind of rude to speak to a person through private message. Somewhat like talking behind someone’s back.)

Shock! [8|] Did they think I was falling asleep? This is where I assume I must’ve been playing badly or JP-A said that because I missed a skillchain with him. (T_T)

The party carried on till 12.30am SG time, 1.30am JP time. At this point the JP-A began to stop moving when our puller pulled monsters to camp. He would start moving in 1 or 2 minutes later. This was when I suspect he was “neochi”. w

Then his friend began joking and said “JP-A=neochi w”. We laughed and I joked about casting Barsleepra (a spell to increase resistance against sleep magic/attacks).

All in all it was a fun party. Before disbanding, leader said it was good and he’s happy. We played for 4-5 hours and everyone levelled 3 times. I played around with my IME at work and got the words “寝落ち” (neochi, which I now understand as “ne-ochi”). Did some babelfishing and got the translation “Falling asleep”.