To The Bat Cave!

I received a phone call from the seller regarding the items I purchased from him. He got a hold of his friend, who owns a FedEx store and the seller uses for all his shipping. Apparently the box sat in a corner for a few days before getting shipped off. He gave me a tracking number and it was set to arrive this evening. Sure enough, when I got home there was a large, heavy box sitting on my entryway. It was like Christmas. I checked all the hardware to make sure it was all in working order, and organized the cords for later. Now I need to find a working machine with a serial port…

BusinessCasual static was tonight. Keri and I were on BLM as usual, and Amelisa on BRD. Talon was finally able to join us on his BLM. We decided to experiment with some of the BLM solo camps and reconfigure them to work with a small manaburn party. Our strategy was based on Goblin BST pets: Amelisa would pull the pet (in this case, a bat) to the group of waiting BLMs, who would blast it with ancient magic as soon as it was in range. Our first trip was to Pso’Xja, but a BLM was already there soloing, so we went to the next hardest camp – Newton Movalpolis.

I say “hard” only as a technicality: next to KRT and one or two insane imp merit parties, that had to be some of the best exp I’ve had. Certainly the best I’ve ever had on BLM. We were pulling 10k/hr experience at one point Goblin’s Bats. The only rough part of our strategy was when Amelisa would link the Goblin along with its pet. This caused several unfortunate deaths on her part.

About halfway through our party, a group of high-level players came through and trained most of the goblins to an area and held them there, trying to skill up on shield skill. Eventually, their train included our goblin and bat. Now, as a high-level player, I completely understand the frustration that is skilling up. Guard skill on MNK is one of the slowest, hardest things in the game to grind out, next to fishing. I imagine shield skill is not much better.

But it’s common courtesy (not to mention common sense) to skill up at a place that is unoccupied. Example: if I saw there was an experience group at a location in Kuftal, and I wanted to skill up club, I don’t want to cause them hardship at stealing their mobs or me hardship having to compete. I will go somewhere else in the zone, or to some other zone entirely, or skill up some other time. These jackasses not only ignored this bit of ingame decency, but they trained their angry mob right into our camp, making targeting difficult and stealing/holding our prey. After a few frustrated words to them in /say, they left us in peace to continue their shenanigans somewhere else.

The night ended with Keri, Talon and I at 55, with Ame trailing by about 4k. We may need to hold off on experience rings and help her get some experience scrolls done to let her catch up. Dynamis – Beaucedine is tomorrow night. We’re trying, yet again, to get Jevot her attestation for the relic horn. We’ve done this numerous times, and the odds are that the silly thing should have dropped long ago. I also need to complete my application to Alamo Community College, so I’ll probably be one distracted WHM tomorrow night.