[grunion]

part I: http://ffxionline.com/forums/showthr...threadid=35368

part II: http://ffxionline.com/forums/showthr...threadid=35694

midgardormr, snickers started telling everyone he was setting up a dynamis run.

dynamis is an area with very tough monsters set in one zone of the 4 cities (jeuno rulude, windy waters, south sandy, bastok mines) plus beucedine and xarcabard were added in the latest patch. minimum level req. is 65 but really 70+ is necessary to have a chance of winning. you can take up to 64 people at once, and everyone can help each other with attacks and everyone can lot on all the drops. it has other rules you can read up on somewhere else, but there's not much player info on it (except a good article on ffxi vault) because it's new and requires high levels.

the way you get in is one person buys an hourglass for 1 million gil in the beastman area near the city (davoi, oztroja, beadeaux) and then he can split it into infinite other hourglasses. ONCE YOU SPLIT IT, THE CLOCK STARTS! we didn't know that and spent 20 mins getting everyone hourglasses when we should have been going in. you have 1 hour to clear the zone (nothing respawns) and you can get time extended by killing the 5 bosses (i think).

for anyone who hasn't tried to organize an online-only event, let me tell you IT'S A NIGHTMARE. due to limited methods of communication (text via LS only, really, and forums/email ahead of time) it's REALLY hard to organize more than a few people. you've probably even seen 18-person alliances that were chaos - imagine 64 people and the only way anyone can talk to each other is via LS. ugh.

anyway snickers worked his ass off to make it happen. he set up forums, bought a LS, dealt with constant emails and tells and we all managed to get there in jeuno at roughly (people still showing up, up to 3 hours late) noon yesterday.

from there, we all went to bastok while snickers went to get the davoi hourglass. some of us didn't have the key item you need to get into dynamis so we got that. then we waited and waited and tried to get everyone in parties but as i said it's hard to organize. we ended up with 43 people roughly and i dont know how many had a solid strategy or plan but snickers had tried to have a practice run the day before and done his best ot make things run smoothly.



we lined up to make it more orderly as we waited for snickers to get back and start handing out the hourglasses.



meanwhile there was SO MUCH SPAM in the LS that nothing serious could be talked about. people spammed the LS with questions, jokes, conversations, junk, and people spammed the screen with hundreds of /randoms. it was kind of annoying and next time we will want the sackholders to start kicking people who spam.

when snickers got there, the line dissolved and everyone mobbed him. he started splitting the hourglasses and a time appeared on them. some people thought this meant the clock had started but no one was sure, and it seemed to most people logically the clock shouldn't start til someone actually entered. so we spent 20 mins waiting for stragglers and distributing the hourglasses. also everyone was supposed to give snick 25k (roughly 1 mil/43 people) to cover the hourglass purchase but he ended up being 100k short ; ; so i magnanimously gave him an extra 25k :D

anyway we got in and ... the clock hadn't changed. the time on it was 40 mins in the future so we had wasted 20 mins already, another lesson learned.



we quickly grabbed the first dude standing near spawn



and killed him, and he added 20 mins to the clock :D we pulled the next bit of guys standing outside the chocobo rental building.




there was a bad ass wyvern summoned by a dragoon orc



one nasty surprise was the beastmasters summoned scorpions which did a gnarly Breakga - AOE petrify. here you can see a lot of us just standing around petrified while they kept attacking.




that led to a few deaths but the scorps were pretty weak and once people started attacking them they died fast.

i'm a 68 BRD with a lot of good gear (+51 CHR) and my sleeps got resisted almost every time on the monsters but never on the scorpions. i assume if i was 72+ i could sleep them more regularly, but really all i could do was backup heal, sleep the scorps, and stack ballad 1+2.

we cleared that batch and the time wasn't going up. we had about 35 mins left and pulled the next guy sort of east and north of the AH, near where the HP is.



and he trained a good 5-6 guys with him. that went badly very fast. we all ended up dead within a few minutes. the problem was that the last 4-5 guys kept running around, a few people got raised, and basically the battle lasted an extra 3-5 minutes with no point.



in retrospect it would have been better to admit defeataru, wait for them to clear, and start raising as fast as possible.




another problem was that many people had whm subbed and could raise I but obviously most people level 70+ dont want a raise I (i didn't want one either) so that led to some contention because some people ate a raise 1 multiple times to help the group, while other people selfishly canceled the raise 1 and waited for the raise 2 or 3. i admit that i got a raise 1 and cancelled too, which was selfish but in my defense i was one of the last people raised and someone else was ready to cast raise 3 on me anyway so i didn't delay the group.

we rested up as much as we could but we were really feeling the time crunch. we had about 10 minutes left because after the initial guy added 20 minutes, we hadn't added any more time to the clock.



we ran out and tried to kill a few more but far too soon we saw a message like "your time is up" and we were teleported back to town.

overall i think it was a success. the drops were negligible (about 15-20 bills, 3-4 gems, a couple relic sickles, a wootz ore worth 1+ million that thebruce got) and most people got nothing. many people lost quite a bit of experience (2-3 raise 1's). however it was really just to learn and to prepare for a future, more serious trip.

lessons learned (off the top of my head) - these are not criticisms of snickers, because as i said this was intended to be an exploration and i dont think anyone really expected to clear the zone:

take 64 people, not 43
take people 70+ MINIMUM, and the more 73-75 you have the better
tell everyone to STFU on linkshell except 2-3 leaders - use PARTY CHAT only
get the hell in the zone ASAP after splitting the clock
practice on easy/decent mobs using no weapons (hands only) and level 1 BLM spells to practice getting 64 people oorganized. there's some good suggestions in the vault article about having a nuke party, a sleep party, a tank party, etc but people need to know exactly what the hell they are doing.
agree ahead of time on certain processes. e.g. if most people are dead, hide or suicide - dont dragon the fight or train stuff to an area where people are resting after being raised (some people died 2-3 times from that)
go a few times - we only saw like 10% of the zone and learned a little. it will probably take several more trips to really know what to expect, e.g. the breakga from scorps was a surprise.

a huge thank you to snickers, who probably needs a tropical vacation now. and here's a bunch of screenshots i took recently (see next post):

[grunion]

this is the area in dragon's aery where fafnir pops. it looks very nice


here's a bard who had everything i had ; ; and i thought i was so leet. he also had vermillion's ; ;


kuro messing with clippers in qufim


leveling at 60-ish with the leetest RNG on the midgard server, masachiyo (he has EVERYTHING):



helping someone with summoner AF - these were interesting battles because they were in the avatar cloisters.





camping for many hours to get minstrel coat NM:


woot it popped!


these are definitely the scariest things in the game


my ls has been getting Bune lately - this time a JP party got him and used an interesting tactic. only ONE melee, a MNK/NIN, and a few mages healing/nuking, and a bard stacking mambo (evasion).


genkei three UGH what a hassle (although not 1/10th asa bad an genkei 1)


i was trying to cut the string on his thong ... kept missing ; ;


i do so love a good train!


warrior af i think? you pop a couple goblins here. was easy.


then we went to do monk af i think. this guy does 100 fists so you have to use invincible or something


not sure if this was for AF or what. bad AOE ; ;


woot! i'm gonna solo a dragon!


lol not really :D these drop about 2k gil by the way. they are level 62-ish i think


good old miser murphy, who i have helped kill many times, has a very bad 600+ drain attack bonus he likes to use. whm AF i think, or maybe RDM


adamantoise, the best looking model in the game i think. really beautiful to look at up close but a pretty tough fight because there's tons of high level agro around




here we started ok ... then got an add, then 2 , then 4, then 6, then ...




here's a great pic :D one of my favorites


here's me flying through the air with magical superpowers!


a little concert in the park :D


the first hard NM (is roc hnm?) i ever saw in the game ... i never thought a few months later i would be a Roc Star


woot rank 8!


what's that in the chest??


why it's grunion! what a treasure!


here's us camping for a wyvern skull for my opo crown



killed serket a few times, so far only 1 good drop (the ring). man he is HUGE - a scorpion the size of behemoth!



an impromptu gathering of members of the board of feisty tarus


a hamasaki clone! gotta love a taru pld in full AF


ouch ... this guy really "bit the dust" BAHAHAHA

get it? see, he's underground so ... nevermind.

catfight! someone get a mop for all the drool from the onlookers


theres a bug so that you can walk around outside the airship ^^


another friendly visit from guivre while camping amemet ; ;


and a re-post of the pic from the 10,000gil reward level 1 xarca race i held last month (kuro made it from gate crystal to castle zone, level 1 no sneak or invis, in about 4 minutes).


and FINALLY ... a chair that fits!


til next time,
grunion

[Ghostraven]

best pics i've seen in a while.. i'm inspired /cry

[TTBM]

Hey do tarutaru Dark Knights get many invites at lvl 40+??? If so is BLM a good sub for them at those lvls(I've heard that Thief would be better but since they're mild nukers I was just thinking.):spin:

[Zynk]

Love the pics!

[grunion]

Originally posted by TTBM
Hey do tarutaru Dark Knights get many invites at lvl 40+??? If so is BLM a good sub for them at those lvls(I've heard that Thief would be better but since they're mild nukers I was just thinking.):spin:

tbh i don't know, i've only been bard and whm.

i think the DRK's job is really to do damage, and in all the parties ive been in, i've never seen DRK use MP to do damage - they use it to pull, to aspir, to absorb-vit or whatever, but not to nuke. as a taru, i think the best sub would be a class that compensates for your weaknesses as taru (str i guess?). but i dont really know.

glad you guys like the pics :D

[monkeyman216]

Hery Zynk, I've got the same name as you on lakshmi server, but with the same exact hume as well. Thats a freakishly weird coincidence.

[AtraposBLM]

sweet pictures grunion....really funny ^^

[Elaron]

awesome!

is that ps2 or PC shots? (I cant tell)

[grunion]

pc

[Somajan]

Go Cronoh and Ramzus!!!

Wow that's pretty much a cornucopia of All-stars from Midgardsormr and Cactaur.

[Malefas]

Man, I'm standing still in alot of those pics. Haha.

[TMan]

Great pictures.

[LunarGaze]

Nice journal always fun to see the adventures of Grunion. ^^ I need to get to your lvl i want to hunt HNMs that should be fun butm alas i am only lvl 59