About four years back I was feeling very stagnant in my life. I tried to find some new outlets and hobbies but I eventually went back to my old love, Final Fantasy XI. At the time I was on the Ramuh server, but had taken a break because of college. I quickly found that most of the friends I made on Ramuh had gone their separate ways. I decided it was time to try out a new server so I posted on a familiar message board and asked for help on finding Rubicon a new home.

I soon got a response from someone I now consider a good friend, Unctgtg. Unctgtg was a resident of the Ragnarok server. In response to my forum post, he gave me an idea of what the server and the social linkshell he belonged to were like and invited me over. I decided to go all in, paid Square Enix the money, and made the move to Ragnarok. And here I am today, years later, still friends with Unctgtg and still hanging out with the linkshell I was first invited to the day I moved servers: ItsAllGood.

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First of all, I apologize my updates are very sporadic. I haven’t updated in awhile and it hasn’t helped that most of the time I have been busy with other things. Hopefully things will level out by the start of September when things start to settle down a little bit for me. Sort of. Eep!

Playtime has been, unfortunately, been as sporadic as my updates because of my schedule and not being able to clearly focus on scheduling events properly. Despite that Team Derp has moved on and we have managed to pull through with podcast recordings and also playing a bit of XIV together this past week. Part of the reason is two fold: as it stands FFXI isn’t that interesting to me at the moment. The updates are lack luster and the sheer amount of time needed to put into things at this very moment is something I am lacking at the moment. The other reason is that updates and news for XIV HAVE picked up a lot of steam as noted in the recent podcast episodes for Go Team Derp! If you haven’t already heard/read about the upcoming changes to Final Fantasy XIV, I highly encourage you to check out the last Letter from the Producer or simply check out the updates posted on zantetsuken.net. Also listening to our podcast is a super bonus!

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Hello, my name is Calaera and I have an addiction to blowing things up. I wasn’t always this way. In fact, in many MMOs (including XIV), I have played predominately as a healer or support class. I used to love healing and supporting my party, but that was then. Before I found out just how gratifying it was to blow something up and see fireworks of gore and blood all over the place.

Believe it or not, if I were role-playing, that would most likely be a solid confession of mine. During beta and the earlier months of XIV’s retail release, I had wanted to play a support class. I had leveled THM to an extent but my previous recollections of the job wasn’t something that stood out to me. In fact the only note worthy experience was being able to kill things with Punishing Barbs and regain lost MP with Siphon MP. Did Banish or Scourge stand out? Hell no. Maybe I’m remembering things wrong, but it just wasn’t as spectacular to me then to convince me, “Hey, I can stay as THM and kick ass as a wannabe BLM!”

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With the change of times means a change of servers and a change of pace. I’m still going to pick up my bow and play with it. Who doesn’t love jumping into the air and unleashing arrows from the sky!

Since I jumped to a new server, I decided to actually try Lancer for more then a few levels. It’s a change for me since I was playing ranged for most of my time on Final Fantasy XIV. For one thing, you hit much harder then an archer would at this point and it’s very easy to build up TP which is good considering your bread and butter are your weapon skills that deal lots of damage.

Still, running around Blackbrush outside of Ul’dah is rather scary when most of the monsters there, even though low in level are huge! Seriously the Coblyns are taller then I am! It’s like someone fed them miracle gro!

So far I’m liking it though soon my speedy climb to a decent level will get checked with the upcoming 1.18 patch. That alone will change the way I’ll be playing. The introduction of auto-attack should make things more interesting in my opinion. For one I’m not trying to mash 1 and 2 keys to attack normally to build TP. I’m sure the keys will be thankful for that so they won’t worn out that I’ll need to get a new keyboard. Another change will be the way certain abilities work. For one thing, lancer has an ability that effects stamina gain. That will change to effecting attack speeds similar to haste which is cool. I’m curious to see what the changes will bring for us.

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First of all, thank you to all the kind people that sent in birthday wishes to me when the clock dinged midnight on the 17th! You guys are awesome! Also been really great just getting continual birthday wishes throughout the day, even though I am (sort-of) not really thrilled over the idea of birthdays. Maybe I’m just getting old? Well, that’s not true. Because I do want to be pampered and was saddened when I wasn’t pampered for awhile by the boyfriend! So, yeah. I won’t be celebrating it until next weekend though, because of things that just went on and poor planning. So… yeah. But! Despite that, I think that a good week was had mostly!

I’ve included an image of my BLU because I’ve decided to finally go after spells again. I know. Its been sitting at 85 for awhile now and I have been trying to go after spells for who knows how long. This time, however, I’ve managed to make headway and am now just 28 spells short of knowing all of the current spells out there. Lets hope I can continue this progress and ding 90 before Hiroshiko takes his month and a half long hiatus away from XI! Even though I prefer casting as BLM, I think it will be nice once I get my BLU up to speed and better geared. How? I don’t know. I’m sure it will happen somehow…

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That could sum up a great deal of how I feel about playing something not from the field of magic but that’s what I’m doing. Along with Calaera and Orophen, I returned to the world of Vana’diel after a hiatus of quite some time. Actually I ran into them back during the early stages of the Final Fantasy XIV open beta and we got to talking about Final Fanatasy XI and how the story was what drew me in. It was around that time I moved to their server so I could actually see the rest of the story.

I guess I’m both an old hand at the game mixed in with a bit of newbie since all I played was Red Mage. Not knocking the class, it’s a lot of fun but well. Every other game I played outside of the world of Final Fantasy usually involved magic after a short stint at something else. This time around I wanted to do something different. Initially i started as a Thief on the Lakshmi server before moving to our current location. Thief is a relatively easy job to play compared to some of the other melees though I did find it hard to find parties that knew how to work with a thief, mostly the off tank wouldn’t stay still. I then tried dancer as a sorta diversion with Reemi, a friend of mine who was a thief from our days on Cerberus. Dancer is a very easy and a very difficult class to play. There are elements that make it easy to play as a damage dealer however tanking as a dancer is taking me a bit to learn and prep. A lot of dancer’s tanking ability derives in not getting hit. High evasion with some small level of damage mitigation and a quick healing. This means weapon skilling is tricky to work in since that same TP is used for healing and other various abilities. Funny how that works. When I finally sat back from the keyboard I realized just what class I picked… Dancers are pretty much the red mages of the melee world. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

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These past few weeks have been pretty crazy busy that I’ve started to think I need to cut back in some areas of my online gaming (primarily XI stuff) to focus on other things. Trying to figure out what to nix, however, is the tricky part since I enjoy all of it… but it needs to be done since I do have other commitments to attend to.

Enough of my woes, however, and onto the meat of things!

Since there are more people in mreh (the XI linkshell name), I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed as to what to do and how to schedule things and decided to put up a poll. I wanted to cover as many things as possible that people were interested, but also keep in mind that we have other things to do to help a wide scope of my friends.

Sooooo… since the poll was leaning towards XIV earlier in the week, I decided to go ahead and schedule it in for Tuesday. Its been awhile since I had even touched the game and was a bit surprised at some of the changes. I don’t honestly keep up with all the news nowadays, because they aren’t the huge changes in game play and such I am hoping to see at the moment.

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Well, at least I think its take three… either way this time it was a little more productive than the last time we attempted seal hunting in Attohwa. The last time I believe everything BUT the seals we were looking for dropped. We still have had no luck at all with Sylvan seals dropping for Orophen, but we managed to finish off Mekare’s Estoqueur’s Chappel +1 and get myself all 8 Goetia head seals to complete this beauty:

Thanks to Orophen, Reiokyu, Mekare, and Hiroshiko for helping me getting the rest of the seals today! Also want to thank the other Linkshell there that allowed us to alternate popping Wherwetrice. It was mutually beneficial as we allowed them to lot on the WHM seals we managed to get, and they let us lot on their RDM seals for Mekare. Its more than what we can say for the other Linkshell that decided to just swoop in, take the pop, and proceeded to, well…

I was on Skype with Orophen and Reiokyu at the time, and was laughing my head off for a good while due to this. Now, I wouldn’t have laughed so hard if a.) they hadn’t had just swooped in without saying anything to either Linkshell b.) they had looked like they knew what they were doing (the BLM didn’t seem like he knew what he was doing to trigger yellow !! and they took an awfully long time just to kill the damn thing) and c.) they would have at least the sense to pull Wherwetrice in a less aggro prone area. They ended up having to let their RDM run off, and uh… I don’t know what happened after that. My party and the other Linkshell, however, managed to resume business as usual soon after the ordeal and thankfully (or sadly? I could have used more laughs) didn’t see the other party again after that.

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Anyone who had read my blog when it was known as doink! will probably remember the banners I used to have depicting my battles with giant Mandragoras. I LOVE Mandies. I love them to bits! I had always thought the best HNM that could ever exist would be a Mandragora. Just imagine if it kicked you in the face!? Or if it used Dream Flower to sleep half the zone? If anything, I think it would be the coolest thing ever to exist! So I was pretty stoked when Kyoshin invited me out with TTGL to kill Chloris. Although I mostly sat and watched, I couldn’t help but feel giddy and excited. Pink + Giant Flower + Mandy = LOVE Just thinking about it makes me extremely happy and excited, and just in absolute LOVE all over again. Thanks again to Kyoshin + TTGL for allowing me to watch Chloris fun! :3

Needless to say, I have already bugged Orophen/Derrick to make me a new banner with Chloris in it. I <3 epic battles with me and Mandy. If only they brought in the other varieties of Mandragora from FFXII. My world would be utterly complete then!

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