Originally published at Still Xerlic. You can comment here or there.

The filters ate some anonymous comments from actual people, so I figure I’d reply to them in a post so they might actually see them!

From Hirameki:

Hi Xerlic. This is Hira, we were in the same linkshell for a while. I’m glad that you got back on track with your life. I know that some people were very off track from the linkshell and sometime I wonder what ever happened to those guys. Did asdrabael ever got better? Did nicblue go to college? Did insoluble stop cutting himself? How is nugget’s kid? How’s normina? How’s madmax? Did blackhatchy get back to real life? Did komoko get off the game? Did itchyos become the head of MIT engineering department? All and well, I hoped them the best. I feel the same way as you do but with some differences. I wish I was less of an asshole and better yet could be have been better. All that can be said about the past, lessons learned and never will forget. I remember itcthyos, you, and (God, I forget the taru SMN’s name who sucked at the game) were among the most genuine people in Titan. And that in itself worth something.

Hey man! Of course I remember you. Thanks for the comments. How are things with you? Do you still play? I think you went to Ifrit or something..? I think Aurara mentioned to me that you were in his shell.

Asdrabael – From what I recall, he was really sick for a while but eventually got better. His wife Asdragirl actually divorced him while he was ill, but he eventually got married to someone else. If Vilhem sees this post, I’m sure she can tell you more since she is (or was at one point) good friends with him.

Nicblue – He’s currently in college.

Insoluble – He’ll never stop cutting. He actually bounced around servers for a while before quitting and then he came back to XI post-Abyssea. He came back to Titan, but I think he quit again.

Nugget’s kid – Doing well, I hope. This is assuming Nugget hasn’t dropped him. I didn’t see Nugget much during the end of my FFXI days, unfortunately.

Normina – No idea what happened to her. She disappeared around the time of the Salvage bannings. :(

Madmax – For a while, BH didn’t have internet and Madmax became the impromptu leader of Karasu. AFAIK, he disappeared during the downtime related to the Tsunami and Karasu disappeared after the server merge.

Blackhatchy – Last I spoke to him he was off to join the Navy.

Komoko – He went to Bismarck and is now with Twix’s shell on Leviathan last I spoke to him.

Ichthyos – He’ll probably see this since he still reads my blog from time to time! But, he seems to be doing really well. He’s working and also does competitive swing dancing and, from what I understand, is pretty good at it.

The Summoner you’re thinking about is Euriko. Thanks a lot for your comments. It means a lot. I think we all would have done some things differently over the years, but that’s life I guess.

From Wolfegang:

Hey xer, wolfe here. hope you’re doing good. “the people are long gone but the evidence of their passing remains” couldnt agree with you more there. You always wrote exceptionally well imo, I hope you keep updating the LJ.

Thanks man. I’m doing well. How are you? I’ll keep updating, but I’m having problems finding things to write about haha.

If you guys, or any old Titan people, are on facebook let me know so we can add each other.

Originally published at Still Xerlic. You can comment here or there.

Despite having quit FFXI and not playing any MMOs, I still read BlueGartr on a daily basis. I mainly hang out in the Gaming and General forums now. Yesterday, a thread popped up to discuss 9/11 since the 10 year anniversary is coming up next week. People were talking about where they were when 9/11 occurred and what memories they had of that day. I thought it was a bit fascinating since a lot of people were stepping into the minds of themselves a decade ago. I never realized the age spread of BG. You had people who were posting their thoughts as an elementary school student all the way through high school, college and beyond. If you read the thread you run through the whole length of reactions that people of all age demographics would have about an event of such a high magnitude from people who were barely old enough to comprehend what the gravity of what 9/11 would mean for years to come all the way to people who were profoundly and possibly even personally affected.

I’m trying to think of a way to segue from 9/11 into FFXI without making me look like an insensitive jackass who thinks that a video game and a national tragedy are comparable, but I’m coming up short. So please forgive me if I come across that way.

Trying to think back to the me of ten years ago made me once again reminisce about FFXI and just how long I ended up playing it. I started playing in December of 2003 and quit in March 2011 which equates to a little over seven years. I began to put it into perspective. When I started playing FFXI –

George W. Bush was still in his first term of office. 9/11 was still fresh in the minds of Americans and the Iraqi War had just started that year. Nowadays it’s become standard daily headlines to read about soldiers in Iraq.

AIM, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ were very widely used to communicate. I remember constantly having a maxed out buddy list on AIM and having to remove someone every time I wanted to add someone new. Now my buddy list sits at less than 40 people. I don’t remember texting being popular, though I could be wrong. I didn’t even have the first inkling of what a smartphone was, though the first BlackBerry was released in 2003 and the only thing I knew about Apple was that my roommate loved their computers for some reason. Myspace and Facebook were unknown to me at least for a few more years.

The Xbox had come out the prior year, and people joked about its size and Microsoft’s attempt to break into the console market. To be honest, I was really skeptical of it and never owned an Xbox, but I will say that my 360 gets the most use out of all of my consoles.

The Harry Potter series was only on Order of the Phoenix which came out in 2003. I remember going to a midnight release during the summer and not being able to get a copy of the book.

Bittorrent was just picking up steam as a file sharing utility. Prior to that, I mainly used a Direct Connect hub that was a network of several colleges.

Kind of surprisingly, a lot of the webcomics that I used to read are still being updated although I don’t keep up with most of them anymore.

Throughout the course of playing XI, I finished my bachelor’s degree, started working, quit my job because I hated my boss, was unemployed for a year and played XI for almost every day, went back to school for a 2 year nursing degree and started my current job almost 3 years ago. Hindsight is a beautiful thing. I’m not usually one of those people who likes to play the should have could have would have game, but I definitely would have played my cards differently now than I did back then. For example, during the first week of my unemployment we had claimed a Nidhogg and it dropped a Dalmatica which I ended up getting. At the time I was pretty happy and I remember telling my linkshell that was I “lucky” that I had quit my job since I wouldn’t have stayed up to camp Nidhogg if I was still working. That thought would never have crossed my mind nowadays since I wouldn’t be camping Nidhogg since I’d be sending out resumes non-stop.

Along this line of thought, I often wonder if it was really worth it. I don’t mean just the one isolated incident above, but moreso the entire FFXI experience. I know I’ve sunk a lot of hours and days into FFXI. A lot of us have. We’ve all met people in game. We’ve all quested together, camped NMs together, done dynamis together, hung out in Jeuno then Whitegate then back to Jeuno together, and more recently done Abyssea and Trials of the Magians together. We’ve clocked the hours levelling our characters, doing genkai, questing AF armor, doing missions to get Sky and then Sea and if you’re really dedicated grinding out a relic or a mythic. But after it’s all said and done, and you hang up the towel. Can you look back and say that it was time well spent?

If you can truthfully say yes, then I applaud you. Honestly, I don’t know how I would answer that question. My time in FFXI had a lot of highs and I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot in game, but now that I’ve quit I can’t really say that I still feel accomplished. One of my fondest memories from FFXI was grinding out AF armor in the summer of 2004. Our linkshell spent many late nights in Eldieme and Garlaige and the beastman cities grinding out coffer keys for all of our members and we had a lot of fun doing it. Not even a year or two later, the linkshell had split and many of us went our separate ways. Several had quit the game and had already fallen out of touch. Should something like this mar the memory?

Often times when I walk down this road of FFXI nostalgia, I liken it to a ghost town. In many cases, the people are long gone but the evidence of their passing remains. I stumbled upon this KI thread and was reminded of many of the linkshells from Titan’s haydays. I spent some time reading over the thread and was kind of amazed at how many people that I knew that I had forgotten.

Even my Livejournal feed has gone down this road. I used to read my friend feed on a weekly basis, but nowdays the only person who updates with any frequency is wiccan who doesn’t even play XI.

In short, I don’t think I regret playing XI but I regret playing it for as long as I did. To invest so much time into something, it’s hard to not feel some sense of attachment even though you no longer are involved.

Originally published at Still Xerlic. You can comment here or there.

For the better part of the past decade, FFXI had been my game of choice to fill gaming craves. Whenever I was going to play a video game, that was XI for the most part. There were a couple times where a game would come along that I would get so engrossed in, that I would temporarily play it over XI. I remember this was the case with FFXIII, which I had clocked well over 100 hours into. But these games that grab my attention to such a degree are fairly few and far between, and I have a tendency to leave games unfinished because I usually find my way back to XI.

I’ve had a Wii since launch and one of the first games that I bought was Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I have tried multiple times to get into this game over the past few years. Based on what I saw in the save files, I would start a new file, play it for a few days, then stop playing it for whatever reason. Then I would start the game up again in a few months or years, load my latest file, realize that I have no idea what I’m supposed to and start a new file. My latest attempt at finally completing this game came earlier this month. I really got into it this time, and my efforts were helped by the fact that I had gotten pretty bored with XI.

I was actually toying with the idea of seeing how long I could stay off of XI while I was playing TP when the tragic earthquake in Japan occurred. Shortly after that S-E decided to shut down the servers for 2 weeks, which forced me to stay away from the game even longer. This wasn’t such a big deal as I was playing through TP. Plus, as I said before, I was getting pretty bored with XI. Once I finished Kannagi, we began working on the last Empyrean for our group: Evan’s Twashtar. Once that was done, I found myself facing the wall of “What do I do next?”. Do I level another job so I have a new job to gear? I didn’t really want to, and don’t have the stomach to Abyssea leech, honestly. Do I work on another Empyrean such as Masamune? Well, this isn’t really a bad idea. While SAM is kind of bottom tier in Abyssea, who’s to say what will happen after the next major update if/when S-E gives the players a reason to leave Abyssea. But, I didn’t really want to go through the grind of another Empyrean weapon. So I started gearing my WHM mule. I’d gotten him several +2 pieces, +22% cure potency staff before realizing that I was gearing a mule whose sole purpose was to cast Cure spells and Haste. So I resolved to play through at least one console game which happened to be TP.

I read a lot of forums at work. I spend a lot of time lurking at BlueGartr. Now, there were a lot of people hitting up the forums to discuss the downtime. A lot of them, while completely understanding of the situation over in Japan, were upset over the downtime. I saw a good number of posts seeking ways to cope with this forced exodus. For the most part, the response from BG weren’t ones of anger, but rather people making comments of having a lot of free time and being unsure on what to do now. I also saw a lot of posts over at the official FFXI forums that were downright disgusting. There were some people that were unabashedly hostile over the downtime and were trying to rationalize that the downtime was unacceptable and S-E should have a backup plan for the non-JP playerbase. So this made me realize 2 things. One, playing an MMO, at least at the level that I was playing it, is very engrossing and time-consuming. Two, MMO addiction, like any addiction, can cause people behave irrationally.

Long story short, I made the decision to stay off of FFXI, at least for now. I don’t want to say that I quit because if I do decide to go back, I don’t want to look stupid haha. I did finish TP while completing most of the optional objectives, and I found it to be really enjoyable. On some levels, I enjoyed it even more than Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time which is considered by many to be the best iteration of the series. I’d say in terms of my blog, Still Xerlic will not see any more XI related posts. (Note to self: Take blog off of TTTO). I might make more personal posts or just post about whatever game I’m playing or series I’m watching. We’ll see.

Originally published at Still Xerlic. You can comment here or there.

On January 3rd 2011, Nicblue decided that he was going to level his WHM to 90 through the almighty power of the dominion op. RDM had had its day in the sun, and it’s now become a washed up has-been of a support job that reminisces about the days when you couldn’t get Refresh from a subjob and MP was actually scarce.

He said that he would let people leech since it had no affect on his own exp, so I joined the masses that hung out by the NPC and spammed my enter key every 5 Detectors along with 6 of my fellow naked linkshell members. I got it from 57 to 86 on that first night, and a few days later on Jan 12th, 2011 I dinged level 90.

Hello, meet my Ninja.

I know NIN has become quite a bandwagon job nowadays. It’s for good reason, though. I initially had a lot of fun using NIN. Hell, I still do. With the staple atmas, you attack fast, hard, and often multiple times per round. Not only that, but you have survivability since you have shadows and enough evasion to actually make a difference to most mobs. It was a far cry from what my SAM had become in Abyssea. I was able to do things solo on NIN more efficiently than on SAM, BLM or RDM. One of the first things I did was farm one of these.

My freshly dinged 90 NIN was pretty awful, to say the least. I used a lot of hand-me-downs from SAM, which is actually pretty bad for NIN as there are very few pieces of gear that are considered optimal for both jobs. On that first night, I TP’d in something like 2x Fudos, WTurban, PCC, Brutal, Bushi, Usu Body, Dusk Gloves +1, Rajas, Sniper +1, possibly a Foragers(?), VBelt, Byakkos and Usu Feet. My Jin set didn’t exist. I kind of wish I took more screenshots of my NIN as I made progress, but Guildwork’s automatic updating of character equipment in addition to the ease of getting +2 gears made me pretty lazy about doing this.

I knocked out a lot of the straight drop items that NIN can use like Hochomasamune, Kamome and Loki’s Kaftan. I also had to work on some more remedial stuff like questing AF1 body and building somewhat passable sets for TP and Jin. I also dropped Bushi in favour of Suppa.

After getting the quick stuff out of the way, it came time to work on Empyrean Armor +2. Thankfully, when Mog Sack was implemented, I had started to horde seals for jobs that I was considering playing in the future, and NIN was one of them. So, I had a pretty good head start in getting my NIN up to snuff having 4/8 Head seals, 3/10 Body seals, 8/8 Hand seals and 5/8 Leg seals ready to go. I finished up head and legs first since those are really useful pieces of gear and got 8 feet seals.

Getting the upgrade items for the +2 pieces went super fast. Nic needed Cards of Balance for his WHM mule’s legs, so we farmed up 4 sets for Sobek and I got my 6 stones. I also lotted all the skins just in case since at the time I was considering Masamune… insert forshadowing. The pieces for the head were a joke as Ulhuadshi only takes 2 pop items and I knew a lot of ppl who had the Worm KI from random gold box farm sessions. I then farmed up 2 pop items for Ketea in Vunkerl and was lucky enough to get 3 cards from each pop. One grellow proc came from switching jobs to BLM/BRD and Esealing a threnody. Unfortunately, my luck with getting the NQ feet was a polar opposite. I spent several days trying to farm the feet and literally got every single feet that Vunkerl had to offer except for NIN. My SAM feet count alone was at 7.

Ironically, I ended up getting the feet by pure chance. I was vacuuming my apartment one night and happened to look at my screen. Apparently, my LS was doing Bukhis and happened to get a NIN feet from a random box and were telling me to come on LS and on tells. I couldn’t hear the chimes due to the vacuum and it was only by some stroke of luck that I happened to look at my screen. Much thanks to them for enabling me to get, in my opinion, one of the most useful pieces of Empyrean +2 in the game.

So, after a couple of weeks of work, my TP/WS sets looked like this:

These screenshots are pretty old, and I ended up swapping Iga Ninga +2 for Loki’s and Cavaros for Atheling for Jin, but that’s the general gist of my gear.

Satisfied with my NIN, I returned to the idea of upgrading an Empyrean weapon. I was previously working on Masamune and was almost finished with the NM trials that lead up to the Gem/Lantern stage. But, I was having a lot of fun with NIN, plus I had 8 skins from a bunch of Sobeks, and SAM has become pretty disappointing in Abyssea. Plus, Fudo is a very boring looking WS.

So, I decided to work on Kannagi and on January 24th I began to farm Briareus. It started off a bit slow. I started off mainly solo after reading Mojo’s guide on BG before remembering that I had an alt account that I had deactivated a while ago. He’s appropriately named.

I was pretty rusty at dualboxing since I hadn’t done it since before I got banned on original Xerlic, but I picked it up again pretty quickly. Having a second monitor to watch both screens and using FFXISwitchmonitor to bind swapping windows to my controller so I didn’t have to alt/tab helped a lot.

Still, I felt that this stage was incredibly slow. There was a lot of running between pops since none of the 3 low tier Gigas NMs are near a conflux, plus Briareus/Sobek empyreans area popular weapon to do so there was often congestion waiting for people to finish their NMs. Once I got to Sobek, it was a lot faster. I finished getting 42 skins in about 4 days, even with the heavy competition at Gukumatz.

Blade: Hi set:

I’ve also gotten Epona’s Ring since taking that SS.

Just some quick thanks:

Evannnn, Nicblue, Livinlegend for helping along the way and for the final pushes on both Briareus and Sobek.

Raineh for helping out with the initial 8 Sobek Skins.

Nugget, Thuun, Fruitcup and Shadowkittie for random help at Sobek and helping claim in Gukumatz’s Aery.

Pierceddarkness for letting me come on his shout Sobek run and getting people to pass the skins to me.

Random groups that wiped to Sobek and providing me with free skins.

Everyone else I forgot for help along the way or just moral support.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with Kannagi. The WS looks awesome on Taru also.

To be honest though, I’ve kind of hit a wall. It’s so easy to make progress in FFXI thanks to Abyssea that it’s easy to get caught up in the rush. But, you reach a point where you’ve seriously completed every goal that you set out to do. So, what do you do then? Start another job? I mean, I can work on 90 Kannagi, but the jump from 85 to 90 is nowhere near as great as the one from 80 to 85. I can go back to working on Masamune, which should be easy to do with the dual box healer and an Empyrean weapon, but it’s sort of like restarting the process of NIN except with SAM.

I’ve been toying with the idea of giving FFXIV another shot and probably will this weekend, especially with the recent changes to SP gain. Oh well, we’ll see.

Originally published at Still Xerlic. You can comment here or there.

Heroes has been out for a few weeks, and my impression of it is much of the same as the previous 2 Abyssea add-ons. Dominion Ops add another easy mode way of getting exp, which has really become the norm in FFXI. I do like that exping has become so easy, but a part of me makes me want the days where being max level actually meant something.

I really don’t understand the mechanic of needing to max out enemy influence for certain mobs to pop. Part of my distaste comes from personal bias of contributing to and waiting for Jewel of Ardor dropping mobs to pop, but objectively I don’t see what having to spam lower tier NMs in order to pop higher tier NMs adds to the game other than another grind. Regardless, Titan has popped most NMs at this point. I believe we’re still missing Hedjedjet, the Omega clone and possibly Isgebind.

Superfriends has been doing pretty well. Most importantly, we finished Nic’s Spharai.

We’re currently doing Dynamis Beauc along with a bunch of other random NA relic holders for the level 90 trials. Do people still do relics? I’m having a hard time selling the currency that I’ve been winning.

We’ve also finished a bunch of random +2 bodies and hands already. Nic is 5/5 on MNK, and Evan finished THF body and I think hands. I know he also got RDM hands +2. Livin hasn’t gotten much in terms of SAM since he opted to focus on Masamune. We just finished his stage 1 yesterday and hope to finish by next week.

I’m 5/5 BLM and also got RDM hands +2. I haven’t started the RDM body, but it’s not too much of a priority for me since I’m on BLM a lot more these days than RDM. I’m really satisfied with where my BLM currently is in terms of gear. The only thing I’d really like is a Refresh hairpin.

Without getting into too much details, I’m taking a break from Karasu. I’m not quitting, as I’ve made that mistake before, but I definitely feel that I need some time away from the shell. Within the past few weeks, I’ve gotten into 2 verbal arguements which I really do regret. I do admit that I do more things with the “Superfriends” than with the LS, and I recognize that this definitely feeds any ill feelings. It’s just hard to balance all aspects playtime when it’s limited, and I currently feel more like an observer than a participant, by my own choice. Because of this, I’ve been trying to keep a lower profile and my words to myself regarding the direction of the linkshell, but I find it hard at times to just not say anything.

Switching gears, the phase 3 of the Rift Beta starts today. Merona/Grey has started a Rift faction of Impact Gaming and it seems to be picking up a lot of interest. I dabbled a bit in the previous two betas, but didn’t play it as much as many of the Impact Gaming Community did. This time around, I plan to devote most of my available time to it to hopefully experience the instance.

Originally published at Still Xerlic. You can comment here or there.

Well, that didn’t last long. For reasons that can already be found on just about any FFXI/FFXIV forum, I’ve decided to throw in the towel on XIV. Grey gave me the go ahead to keep posting my FFXI-related stuff on here, so I’m gonna roll with that and cross post to Livejournal for my (few) readers on there.

My last blog update was pre-Scars which ushered in a whole lot of new gear that made plenty of the old top tier stuff obsolete after half of a decade. Empyrean armor broke Salvage set and Empyrean weapons made relic owners why they were doing their weapon skills on 1500 easy preys. Many QQs were had as people felt that their years of work went going down the shitter, but many more people embraced the new challenges and new life that was being put back into the game.

Personally, I was somewhat bummed that full Morrigan’s was no longer the be all and end all for BLM. I was certainly upset that 2 months after I finished usukane haramaki @1mil/ingot, it now costs less than a third to complete a salvage body. But, that’s the nature of MMO games. That’s why people play these types of games and this is what the developers do to keep people subscribed. Think about it though. At 75, how much level 50 gear did we wear? So, would it make sense that 75 gear is endgame at 99? This is the reason why I haven’t gotten a Yhel Jacket yet.

So, after Scars came out, Nic, Livin and I hit the ground running and started farming up seals for +1s. During the few months of level 80 and Visions we made quite a bit of gil doing force pop NMs, so working towards rare/ex gear in Scars was kind of a change in gears. Early reports from Scars led us to believe that the +1s were either soloable via quest or meant to be done in smaller groups via NM and the +2s would require larger groups. Well, it didn’t take long for the community to realize that a lot of these Tier 2 NMs were pretty damn easy and people began taking them down with 1 party or less.

We decided to try upgrading +2s with the 3 of us plus Nic’s RDM mule, and it turned out that we were able to take down just about any Tier 2 NM pretty easily.

We started off in Misareaux on Cirein-croin since both Nic and LL needed Jewels for SAM and MNK, and Stones defaulted to me for BLM. For reasons that I cannot comprehend, you can gravity and bind this mob. Oh, and it also moves at the same speed as a player, if not slower. And, like most other Abyssea NMs, it’s gigantic so it’s easy to abuse pathing. Nic and LL both finished up their +2s and I finished up BLM +2. Despite only needing 2 pop items, we spent a lot of time on this NM due to bad luck getting Key Items from the Tier 1s. The Masamune spam, and the knowledge of red !! forcing close to 100% drop on the Key Items going public, happened around the time we starting finishing up farming this NM.

We then moved on to Amhuluk for Coins for my RDM legs. We took him down, at first, by straight tanking him and just curing through his TP moves. We later found out that this mob is easily straight tanked by having a melee stand on the edge of a cliff nearby its spawn point and having the mob sit on the bottom. Doing this allows you to melee Amhuluk without getting hit by his TP moves making for a very easy fight, finishing my RDM legs in no time.

Next, we moved on to Attohwa. We needed 18 Jewels for MNK SAM and RDM. For some really stupid reason, we came to the conclusion that it would be faster to farm them from Ulhuadshi despite it only ever dropping 1 Jewel at not even 100%. So we spammed the hell out of him, getting Eradico Mitts for everyone in our group, giving them away to random LS members and people in the zone and trashing many more. The good thing about spamming this guy was we got a lot of coins that ended up being trashed so I was able to upgrade BLM hat.

At some point, we just decided to try Titlacauan and found him to be an absolute joke. After feeling like a bunch of morons, we finished up in Attohwa.

Last up was Vunkerl. Nic had gotten NQ MNK feet from an LS Abyssea Attohwa run, and I had gotten both NQ RDM and BLM feet. We farmed up an NQ SAM feet for LL, and Evannnn started coming along with us.

Our snag for this zone was competition. I needed Ketea (Tier 3 VNM) for Cards for BLM feet, and people were camping the Tier 2 VNM around the clock. I guess for the ballad harp? Everytime we went to Div-e Sepid, it seemed that there were people there camping it. There was actually a 34THF/01RNG most of the time we went to check if it was up. I actually ended up getting the harp from the T2 VNM for my 76BRD.

We finished up Nic’s MNK Feet first making him 3/3 on MNK +2s. Sedna was kind of a pain, but no real difficulty. It took 5 Sednas to get his 6 Coins since we had a lot of difficulty proc’ing grellow, for some reason. Of course, we proc grellow on the very last one when we only need 1 more, so we ended up giving the extra coins to LS members.

Ketea was a joke. The hard part was getting the abyssite to pop him. We only needed 3 kills to cap out on Cards, making me 3/3 on BLM +2s.

We’re still working on getting Jewels from Durinn for LL, but we should be done by the end of the week. I don’t really get this mob since he’s so much easier than Dvalinn. When we fought Durinn for the first time, I kept expecting him to go crazy at some point since Dvalinn goes into periods where he does HELLSNAP > AGA 3 > HELLSNAP > AGA 3 > CACKLE > AGA3 and you’re spamming erase to get the Mdef Down off. Durinn was a lot tamer, and again you can grav him for some reason..

We’re pretty much ready for Heroes to come out, at this point. We’ll probably go back and get Evannnn a +2 or two since he kinda joined our party late. We also went back and worked on some Visions mobs, now that the formula for proc’ing blue !! has been discovered.

Not a whole lot has been going out outside of Abyssea. I’m still farming Krabkatoa Shells (now with Evannnn’s help since he wants a Karka Ring) for the OAT Great Katana. Still need 2 more shells, though. One Krab actually ended up being shadowed.

Finally, I finished up the Thunder MAB magian staff. I still need to work on Ice and finish up Cure, but doing trials is mind numbingly boring.

Holy crap this post is long.

Originally published at Still Xerlic. You can comment here or there.

Release day is finally upon us. Truth be told, for a while I wasn’t as excited as my new colleagues in Neutral Impact about release until about a week ago. I guess it’s because I still had FFXI to occupy my time, and with all the new Abyssea updates they’ve been throwing at us, I’ve had my hands full. I’ve thought about just sticking with FFXI, but I didn’t build a new computer to play a 9 year old game. I thought about where my future in FFXI would be once FFXIV came out, and as much fun as I had on XI, I probably won’t have the time to play both. Assuming XIV doesn’t suck, I think my career for playing XI seriously will be at an end.

Because of lack of interest at the time, and the fact that you don’t really get to keep anything, I didn’t play the Beta too much. Compared to some of my new linkshellmates, I’ve actually kind of shot myself in the foot for not really knowing what to expect from FFXIV whereas they’ve made some pretty decent headway into the mechanics of the game.

About a week ago I really started to feel the excitement of trying something new. Playing in a new game with a new environment with new faces (and some old ones of course). I’m really looking forward to MMO’ing again with some old friends.

I’ll be picking the game up as soon as I get home from work and beginning the install ASAP.

Originally published at Still Xerlic. You can comment here or there.

Let’s begin.

So, this is the new blog. Here’s the old blog

I still haven’t decided what direction I want to take this blog in. FFXIV will definitely be the main focus, but I haven’t decided if I want to sync this with my livejournal or if I’ll want to keep the two seperate. My blogging days of XI will mostly be a thing of the past as I will probably focus mostly on XIV once it comes out, I think. Perhaps. Considering I built a new computer to play XIV, I hope. I might even make some posts concerning real life. I used to have a blog related to my day to day adventures, but it’s been down for several years now and I kind of miss rambling about stuff that most people probably wouldn’t care about.

The theme needs a lot of work. I’ll probably make a new header image at the very least, and probably change some of these fonts.

Oh, and the name of the blog is a result of many of my FFXI compatriots changing their names from FFXI to FFXIV. I, however, am of the minority who decided to keep their FFXI names. In truth, I’ve been going by “Xerlic” long before FFXI, so it would be a bit strange to suddenly change that now.

Finally, I have to plug my FFXIV linkshell Neutral Impact. Hoorj.