Minor rant ahoy!

It’s been several months since I had some emo Salvage posts, so now’s as good a time as ever!

I’ve missed, seriously, like *6* pairs of freaking [Enlil's Brayettes] in the last 2 months. I was trying really, really hard not to let it get to me (I think the FFA [Enlil's Gambison] made me angrier, to be honest), but last night I missed 2 pairs dropping, 1 of which went FFA, and it’s really starting to piss me off.

Since the start of July, the run breakdown I’ve been on has been this:
Bhaflau: 4
Arrapago: 2
Zhaylom: 3
Silver Sea: 7

Yes, I understand and sympathize that Silver Sea Remnants (particularly Powderkeg Yanadahn) has incredibly shitastic drop rates, but really? In the last 2 months I’ve done almost twice as much SSR runs than any other zone, and I’m getting burned out on it similar to the Zhaylom burnout I was feeling a few months ago. I recently swapped my priorities on [Marduk's Shalwar] and [Marduk's Crackows] (Legs were 2 and Feet were 5, now they’re swapped, plus bumped up a slot each to 1 and 4) BECAUSE we’ve been doing so much shitty Silver Sea. Not that it matters, since 95% of the time we’re passing on Dekka and doing Powdernodropkeg anyway.

Still. Bleh. I think the thing that makes it more frustrating is the *only* freaking piece I’ve had upgrade materials sitting in my d. box for over a year now is for legs. Everytime I pass that stack of silk in my d. box, it makes me want to kill kittens. I told Falc if he gets the 25 for his pants (which would complete them) before I get *either* of my 35 pants I’m waiting on (frogs are whores too, we will never forget this…), then he could have my upgrade stuffs. Because you know as soon as I do that, one of the 35 legs I’m waiting on will drop, maybe even both.

On non-Salvage pants related rants, Targeting the Captain needs to drop some [Barabrossa's Zerehs] for Trey soon. We’re all getting a bit frustrated (though we are 2/25 or something, which is really good). We have a set-up for 6 people again for the bc, and good lord, the difference one person makes! With 6 people (PLD, 2 MNK, BLU, RDM, WHM) it was not only much faster and smoother, but I didn’t even have to 2-hour and no one died! Huzzah! Now we just need some pants…

Maybe I’ll stop wearing pants irl when I do these events. It worked in Dynamis when I wanted [Bard's Cannions] to drop…

You know its been too long for a blog post when people send you /tells at random as you zoom through Port Bastok…

I have like, 8 bazillion screenshots to post, most of which I’ll probably just dump in one big post tomorrow with a witty caption for each one (it’s my last quiet week at work before the kiddies return next week- have to take advantage of it!).

Before we get into all that FFXI jazz and little bit of WoW flavor thrown in, let’s talk about the blog. If you’re not reading this on LiveJournal or through an RSS feed, you can see it has a brandy new, shiny layout. The cool thing about this theme is it has like 6 other color options, so theoretically I can make all my holiday banners that I want to and just easy swap between them. I digress.

You’ll notice in the middle column here where all the content goes, in the top right hand corner of each post are these little funny looking things. Well, this new layout uses javacript and its pretty damn spiffy. If you click on triangles, it expands the content column to the width of the screen, click it again and it returns to 2 columns. Clicking the little rectangle to the right of it collapses the post all together, clicking it again re-expands it. Pretty neat, no?

The last spiffy thing I added, which I wanted to do on the last layout but didn’t have a chance before it went boom, is adding in the AH script.I believe Maiev loaded it on his blog, and you can see the original post over on the FFXIAH blog. I’ll be using the roll-over links instead of posting the huge image caps from FFXIclopedia like I was before. Should make things a tad more cohesive.

Now, onto the meat!

It’s probably easier to work backwards.

This past Sunday saw the Einherjar LS Falc and I belong to, Zantetsuken (not to be confused with the one that was posted about on BG!), cleared our first tier 3 wing! Which means most of us are cleared for Odin, and some of our mules only need 1 or 2 more chambers til we’re ready to spam. Very exciting. Not as exciting, though, as the fact our win gave us ~1900 ampoules of therion ichor- which put me over the 15000 mark and I was able to snag an item I’ve been drooling over for quite some time: [Omega Ring]! I’ve already reworked my BRD and WHM macros for it, and this means I’m one pain in the ass drop from my goal set-up on BRD- [Astute Cape]. I’ll worry about the logistics of doing Sea crap at a later date…

Thursday was Salvage night, and what a doozy! I got to go THF, and our target zone was Bhaflau Remnants. I was hoping some pants would drop for me, but seeing as we’ve had like 4 pairs drop in the last 3 weeks, it clearly was not meant to be. However! We popped the 2nd floor rampart, and the bee god was on our side or something, because we had *6* Skirmish Pephredo pops with *4* of them actually dropping something! We exited the zone when we ran out of time 3 pairs of [Hikazu Sune-ate] and 1 [Freya's Mask] richer! Yours truly snagged the mask, but only because I was the only one to lot it (it was FFA for any job able to wear Skadi). :S

Wednesday was Dynamis-Qufim, and while it started off good, we tried a new pull path to get to tigers and it ended in a holy disaster. As in, go ahead and home point because the run is over. :\ It’s crappy, because it was basically 30k down the drain to lose a whole lot of exp. Ah well, on the bright side the update will being bringing cheaper Dynamis fees, so it shouldn’t hurt as much. In theory, anyway.

About a week ago, on another stingy, not-body-dropping Omega, I managed to get the coins I needed to get myself a [Brutal Earring] finally, and I am already in love with it! Now if that god damn heart/Corozza would drop for me… >_<

Let’s see… had some legs drop in Nyzul a week or two ago. Hurray for [Denali Kecks]! I now look like I’m wearing pajamas when I wear the set (well, 4/5 of the set. Still waiting on more hat farmage), but the pants have made their way into my Dancing Edge macro. Hard to say if they help at all, since I’m missing some key pieces to really make the most of my DE. Ah well, all in due time.

On the WoW front… I did my first BattleGrounds EVER this weekend. I wanted to do it for the free nifty tabard, and the chance at some cheesy pet. I was super nervous though, since I’ve *never* done one before, and I didn’t want to suck too horribly (I was also worried about catching flak for being Shadow-spec instead of Holy-spec). I did Warsong Gulch about 3-4 times, and holy crap, was it fun as hell! Alliance actually won a couple matches, too! Decided to spend some time doing them for a bit, since I also have to work on building my gold back up to PL my tailoring to 245 (I want to synth the Shadoweave set for my Priest while I can make good use of it :3). Be a nice break from the crazy grinding I’ve been doing.

Speaking of which… recently hit 44. 11 more levels to go before the new expansion is released!

K, that’s all for now. Expect some mega crazy screenshot dump later in the day tomorrow!

Since I was away on vacation, I’ve been putting a day or so a week into WoW. Mostly to get my Shadow Priest to 55 by the time the expansion comes out so I can be even more ADD than I already am in that game and play with a Death Knight. Whee!

When I was away on vacation, we pirated some unlocked wireless and over the course of 3 days I got my Shadowpriest from 37 to 41. Getting to 40 was a huge milestone- it meant I could *finally* unlock Shadowform in talents, and it’s definitely made soloing much faster/more efficient than it was before.

Last night I played for an hour or two. I’ve been questing/exp’ing in Stranglethorn Vale (my base camp being Booty Bay, since I had to head there anyway to finish a bunch of quests). While I was running around, some random Undead Mage came and whooped my ass while I was fighting a mob. >:( I ran back to my corpse, MGS’ed around and rebuffed, and then proceeded to whip her lame, Horde arse. I don’t really PvP (ironic, being on a PvP server…) but anytime my Priest has come across a challenge I’ve (mostly) been able to come out on top (unless it’s some level 70 guy ganking lower level charas away- then I lose). I’ve accrued 12 Honor points, hahaha. XD Much better than my crappy Druid, who continually got her arse kicked again and again.

Anyway, I managed to ding 42 last night. Really, levelling has been pretty easy on my Priest (compared to when I was levelling my Druid), and I think it’s because I was finally able to toss FFXI mentality to the wind and stop trying to grind on mobs and mobs alone. Now all I do is quest, quest, quest (QuestHelper is a godsend, btw), and it’s been exponentially easier! Maybe when my priest hits 70 (someday) I’ll go back and work on my Druid again. Maybe.

Anyway, I think I might want to try doing a battleground this weekend, even though I’m terrified of it (I hate feeling like a n00b T-T), but I’d like to snag the olympic tabard thing. I don’t have a guild, and my Tabard of the Hand needs a break. :3 We’ll see, I guess.

FFXI update incoming tomorrow or Friday- I started editing my 8 bazillion screenshots last night!

Super gigantic huge thanks to my server admin (and ex boyfriend D: ) who worked some magic and fixed the super huge wtf mess that was here!

Unfortunately, I’m leaving for vacation tomorrow, so there won’t be anything exciting here until I get back.

BUT!

I’m bringing my laptop along with me, along with a metric asston of screenshots that need to be edited, so expect some kind of super huge mega awesome update when I return on the 9th!

Gonna try to pirate some internets while I’m away too to make some tweaks on this site. Need to find a layout that I actually can work with…

Found this reading BG, and I thought it was a really well written article and really brought the point across. In lieu of an actual post right now (I haven’t edited my screencaps yet -.-), I figured I’d share this. The article focuses on the theft of one FFXI player’s account.