*grumble grumble*

ah ha! And you may have thought I'd forgotten this Blog. Well I haven't! (clearly). It's been 3 months that I've been in Qatar now and I have 3-ish more to go. When I come back, I'll have my son, my wife, and a new daughter there to greet me. I of course will have FFXI to come back to. I've been able to play a little bit out here, but the connection is so bad and Odin's server is so over-populated that I have a hard time being able to do anything. So the quick fix? I moved to Garuda. I will be there for about three months. I didn't want to follow my friends that were formerly of Valefor because as I recently noticed, they've moved servers again... and I didn't think it would work trying to move back to Ifrit since Leenk recently had a baby with his girlfriend and probably won't be finding much time to play in the very near future (for the next three months that is). So... Garuda... I know a couple of people over there. I really know nothing about the server honestly. It seems alright so far. Instantly, I noticed the lag there wasn't even close to what I had in Odin. My first disappointment there though? Camping Carnero for 3 hours. Ugh. What a pain in the ass.

Once I'm back home, I'll be trying to get back to Odin I think.
More later...

involuntary break

I'm not really sure who actually reads this journal. I keep it more for myself than anything else.

I'm sitting in an airport right now on my way out to Qatar... just kinda testing the wifi to see how that's going to work while hopping from air port to air port until I get to my ultimate destination. Seems this will work for now.

Leaving right now is hard. I not only said goodbye to my wife, but to my son on his 2nd birthday. I'll miss holidays with them, birthdays, and the birth of my daughter. Leaving this time compared to others is a little harder than it usually is.

As far as the game goes (since this is my FFXI blog), I got NIN up to 36 the other night. Not all the way to a Subjob level but it's getting there. If I can log on downrange, then I'll be able to round that out. It's not really a huge concern of mine at this point. If I log on while I'm "gone" it'll be more for the social aspect than anything else. I'm sure the lag I'd experience would be horrible. Anywho, just saying that I'll be around and wanted to update one more time before I head out.

you know you've been a pld too long...

A little old...but amusing. :)
originally from here: http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/db/jobs.html?fjob=5&mid=10868711959521955&num=107

You know you've been a pld too long when...
- you know exactly how long 30 seconds is without having to actually count.
- you hit the provoke macro upon engaging someone in Ballista.
- you cannot understand what is so scary about having red hp.
- you have mysteriously grown addicted to the colour white.
- you have mastered the art of engaging, provoking and flashing a mob within 1/100th of a second.
- any other job has too little defense for your taste.
- you feel natural getting hit when you draw aggro while levelling your blm.
- you've become used to seeing a rdm farm faster than you do.
- intimidating an undead creature gives you an inexplicable surge of delight.
- tanking 3 mobs at 30 hp while the blm casts escape feels fun.
- you feel sad whenever you don't die in dynamis.
- you start getting depressed if a mage dies before you do.
- you fall in love with the rdm in your party.
- the Rampart/Savage Blade animation sends shivers down your spine.
- you walk in dark places and gleefully note how well you show up in them in your AF.
- you walk in Valkurm and and revel in the fact that you almost match the sand.
- the sound of your armour when it clinks on hard surfaces is music to the ears.
- you spend time in your moghouse just walking around admiring your armour.
- anything with VIT or Enmity beside a large number makes you start grinning :DDDDD
- you /salute a fellow paladin friend and neither of you think it's corny.
- you feel like buying the Ritter Shield just for that 'big shield+paladin' goodness.
- and you have a Koenig/Kaiser Shield.
- you level pld to 75 and feel like levelling it all over again on your mule.
- you used Holy Circle while levelling in Valkurm just to show you were a paladin.
- you cried in happiness upon holding off your first Benediction without using Invincible.

Elita in Color and Back to Odin!

Finished Elita here. She's a little shinier than her armor really should be. Granted, it's leather armor... it just looks duller in the game. :D I'm happy with how it came out though. Probably should load this up to http://ffxionline.deviantart.com/ ... I haven't really checked on that community for a little while...

So... I got PLD all the way to 75. Since last time I had one good party and then just campaign battled my way to 75. I don't have much of a buffer as of yet, but I'll work on that soon. Before I get real worried about that, I'm going to try to get NIN up to 37 so I can blink tank. I lvl'd nin from 26 to 28 yesterday, but right now I can't get on because of all world maintenance. Pt'ing with nin is odd... I feel helpless tanking without being able to heal myself. Sure, my evasion is high enough that mobs miss a whole lot, but... knowing that I can cast cure on myself as PLD is reassuring. Sometimes I just don't trust people playing support jobs.

I did finally transfer back to Odin. Got back into both of my old linkshells (sorta... Odinartists is now by a different name) and met up with most of the people I left over there. I've gotten a couple of "you grew up!"/"75 finally!" comments. XD Yeah... only took me 3 years to get there. ugh.

campaign ftw

With my main (Beamr) still on Valefor, and me not really wanting to look for help or a new LS (that i'd be active in for all of 2-3 weeks), I started doing campaign battles and ops to lvl... In reality, this is probably a bad idea. All I get out of campaign battles are XP and allied notes... so no skill ups and no item drops. For now though I can live with that. I have thus far lvl'd from 72 to 74 with maybe 1 or 2 pt's in the middle of that. so... that's a very large amount of XP I've solo'd pretty much. It's odd but for now it seems to be working.

LFP'ing would be alright if I were able to get on a busier time of day or able to stay on longer. I'm still only logging on for about an hour or maybe two before I go to work in the early morning. Until I get back to a server with an LS I don't have to work my way into, this will work. Aside from lvl'ing, I'd like to be able to get some of the Iron Ram armor.

Did a sketch of Elita a couple of weeks ago. She doesn't really have a specific job I'm concentrating on for her now (though I did lvl her to 18RDM to get her subjob) so figured a sword and shield with leather armor was a good generic outfit for her to wear for now. Poor mithras don't wear pants often do they? lol I've been working on thf with her lately. Rdm was good for getting her pt's fairly quickly to start off, but I generally dislike mage jobs. I don't know that I could keep interested enough to play her on rdm at least to 37 for a subjob. Maybe if I get more time later on I will... though I'd rather focus on Beamr getting rdm up that far first. (PLD/RDM = brickwall yay!)

I've got a couple of weeks left before I deploy and once I get there I'll either be able to play on my time off or be taking a 6 month break from the game. It all depends on how well the WiFi connection is in the building I'll be staying in. Playing would be sweet as hell while I'm there, but if I can't, I don't think i'll be TOO heartbroken.

secondary

i started off with a secondary character (a mithra named chromia) on asura, and since i decided i'll be back on odin anyways, i went a head and used an open content ID to make one on odin too. weird thing about mithra's... ppl always asume their females. granted... i named her elita (giving her a gender neutral name would have been a great idea. oiy). yesterday, i had at least three people walk up to me and make some sort of pass at me. i can't believe this character even got a "hey good looking"... who the heck does that in a game? seriously.

Anyway, at the suggestion of Screamer, i'm lvling her as a rdm first. This works well for me... i'll skill up magic skills as well as melee abilities. When I'm finally able to move my other characters all to the same server, I'm going to give her all of Chromia's armor and gil and let her run with that. (Chromia actually has some decent low-lvl gear)

Being back on Odin is kinda nice. The social aspect of the game has actually returned since there are a few people i know on this server that actually play when I'm usually on. An MMO really isn't massive multiplayer without the social part of the game. I'd been missing that on my other two servers. I'm back in HeartofSword and as soon as I find someone from the linkshell, I'll be back with OdinsArtists too. I read that last weekend, Kiela accidentally broke the LS. XD

ooOOOOOOoooo

Now THIS is nice. It'll take me awhile to get around to all the rest of the stuff in the version update put in recently (well... aside from it loading right now and taking forever), but as soon as that's done, i'm going to go get this pld spell. I was really hoping pld's would get this from the time they started talking about it when the WotG expansion first came out. I'm a happy boy.

Now I just hope it works as well as I think it will. At first I thought it would just be a magic reflecting spell, but "increases chance of blocking with shield"? Oh hells yes!

real friends suck

Well, not really... but I realize now I never should have started this server jumping thing. Initially I went to ifrit. that was a bad idea. then in early May I went over to Valefor to play with a couple of guys I work with only to find out that just a couple of days after I started on that server, they had moved to Asura. Had I known they were going there, I would have just moved to that server in the first place... So now my main is kinda stuck on VF with my two friends angry linkshell until I can move him again (coming in and saying "hey! i'm friends with ____" and then that person deserting the linkshell doesn't a happy group make)

So... Just for the hell of it I started a mule over on Asura and I've been lvl'ing her a little bit. It's weird starting all over. With the amount of experience I have had so far, I feel like I could probably lvl this character up better and faster than my main. (main = Beamr/hume, mule = Chromia/mithra... other character = Twinkle/taru). I like playing a mithra and kinda wished I'd tried before. Having better ACC and DEX is rather nice. I still prefer my hume though of course...

So in a couple of months (when my time to move comes up again) I'm heading back to Odin. I'm not sure how effective that will be because I'm going to be leaving on a deployment right around then. I've got ffxi loaded on my computer, but my graphics card sucks so it looks kinda funny. I'm not quite used to the PC controls either and... I have no idea how my connection will be over there. More than likely it'll be pretty slow and horrible if I have much of one at all. I guess we'll see. At least until then, my ps2 seems to be working so long as I don't play it too much. The thing is 8 years old now. lol

Beamr is currently at 72 pld. I don't have sky/sea, limbus, dynamis, or any of that yet. I should just go look for some shouts in whitegate to see if I can help someone/get help with doing it. I've found that relying on IRL friends to work on that doesn't work real well. bleh. I think to keep up with lvl'ing him, I'm just going to be sticking him in campaign as much as I can. Chromia at this time is sitting at 11 war with no subjob yet and I'm just about to finish San D'Oria rank 1. I started her 2 days ago so she's progressing well. I actually started lvl'ing her with axe/shield rather than sword/shield like i did with beamr when i started him out... I like how that's working too.

anyways... back to the game! /run *whoosh!*

Back in it

I really haven't played much for the past few months. I played a little bit in January and February, but I just kind burned out in feb. I had actually changed servers. I have a couple of buddies i work with that are on Valefor (currently) and then a couple of my friends from back home in Indiana are on Ifrit. Thinking it would be fun to play with my friends from back home, I went to Ifrit... Oh god...I had no idea how much this server sucked. Odin is the largest server on FFXI and while that's not great for hunting hnm's and stuff of that sort, it certainly makes it easy to form pt's. Ifrit on the other hand is probably one of the smallest servers so the change was pretty drastic... The friends I went to play with barely logged on or at least they were never there when I was on and this newbie (or rather n00b-e) filled server was extremely frustrating. I have spent most of my time lvl'ing lower jobs that I can probably solo (dnc is actually quite fun!) because otherwise, I'll have to deal with the actual ppl on Ifrit and that is frustrating as hell. JP players seem to hate the NA players more than usual and the NA players are somewhat ignorant of some basic things... I guess different servers are used to doing things a certain way? There was a guy in one of the linkshell's I joined that tried to tell me that the dunes used to go by a different name and they only changed the name in the past couple of months. *coughbullshitcough* Also something about GM's turning into raribs and running around the game spying on ppl. Yeah... I dunno.

Anyways... soon after that happened, my PS2 started to not work right. It was freezing up all the time, I couldn't log on and sometimes it wouldnt' even load up the game. So I just stopped playing all together for awhile. I tried the thing again last week and it seems to work fine again so I guess I can get back to playing. PLD is sitting at 70 right now so I've got a little ways to go still. I can change servers again on May 4th, so I'm going to go back to Odin or head to where ever my co-workers are going. They've been talking about leaving Valefor for Phoenix or Asura. I'd be ok with that. Visinshu and Raydin/Carmine usually start up a kick ass HNM/sky/sea/dynamis LS and keep telling me they'll get me up to speed with the lvl's and equipment they have. That and I always hear Visinshu come into work the next day and say how his LS "killed Kirin again last night!". Sounds like fun! Sign me up! :3

Odin I miss because it's my old server of course... so I miss all my e-friends there. I don't really know anyone there in person so it's kinda weird to say that. I was a little less than productive there. I spent a lot of time PL'ing and helping people with quests/missions only to see that person pass me up in lvl not long after that. It was pretty frustrating. Since my PS2 died not long after my server change, I didn't have much of a chance to tell most of the people there that I had moved. I may have pissed a couple of them off. oh well.

Anyways, I plan on putting in a pretty solid week of playing next week to try to get caught up.