*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!