Monthly Archives: March 2008

Summoner Performance in Campaign, Post Update

As a summoner, one of the changes in a recent patch was one of the first changes for the positive the job has seen in a long time.

The change is that in campaign, any AoE buff hits everyone in range with tags on.

smn_aoe1

12 people hit with a Healing Ruby II.  And I was not in a party.

smn_aoe2

14 people hit with Ecliptic Growl.

The obvious advantage is that the exp a summoner can gain is greatly increased.  All of these count as a buff to a non-party member, which is 10 per buff, max of 300.  Plus, I think it counts as a self buff, which is 20 per buff, cap of 150.  So while avatar damage will never quite reach that of a heavy DD class, especially in a longer fight where MP becomes an issue, there are ways to even it out.

From this Campaign Battle, I got.

smn_campaign_exp

This is solo.  Summoner is a great job for solo exp in campaign now.  Sub White Mage, and you can even raise/reraise.

*grins*

-pyra

Exploring Grauberg [S]

Some of the new zones are quite amazing.  In some ways, SE really outdid themselves.  Then they forgot the content, but hey, its pretty.  That makes up for it all, right?

Grauberg [S] is one of the more amazing areas.  So here is the first in a series of 1 or more that just explores a zone.

grauberg1

grauberg2

grauberg3

From this overlook, you can see the Crag of Dem.  Maybe this will connect to the highlands someday.  And maybe there will be a patch where Samurai doesn’t get a buff.

grauberg4

Look at that view, just breathtaking.  Well, as breathtaking as a computer game can be.

grauberg5

-pyra

Apocalypse Nigh CS

Quickie update.  Here are a couple pics from the CS that begins Apocalypse Nigh (which means, I’m all set for the fight, yay!).

apoc_nigh_cs1

apoc_nigh_cs2

apoc_nigh_cs3

Yes, it is a good one.  Go, quick, finish missions, kill baddies.

-pyra

Dancer AF1 and Campaigning

I’ve been working on my Dancer.  When the AF was finally released, and I heard the weapon was in Grauberg, at the Witchfire Glen, I wanted to get it done as soon as possible.

Witchfire Glen is a really unique place where a handful of VT to 75 Pixies reside.  It is also where you go to reset ‘Pixie Hate’.

witchfire

If you’ve never been, I suggest going there, especially at night.

The Dancer AF1 quest CS shows the Dancer in Upper Jeuno as a child, with her mother.

dnc_af1_cs1

She is performing for the Pixies, and learning the “Spirit of the Dance” or some crap like that, I wasn’t really watching.

Then, for some reason, you fight a Hippogryph.

dnc_af1_nm

This NM was a complete joke.  My white mage could have soloed it, and hexa strike was just decimating.

dnc_af1_cs2

Awww, I love happy endings.  FFXI has so very few happy endings.

In the spirit of the dance, here’s a little /dance4 off.

dance_off

Well, moving along, Campaign has been interesting since the last patch.  The beastmen are more or less destroying the players.  But now, we can whack away on walls for lots of easy exp, so its not a total loss.

campaign_wall_wacking

And with the new summoner AoE buffs, ohhh the lag I can cause.  Its wonderful.  More on this in an upcoming post.

Complete with the glitch that was just fixed last week.

campaign_glitch 

I’m sure the Fortifications are at 1008/100 strength.  Really, I am.

And finally for campaign, here’s a good pic of Miz (we tend to campaign together a lot).

miz_rawr

That’s all for today!

-pyra

New News! Only a Month Late

I’m so far behind, where to start

Did a Proto-Ultima at the end of February.  It went well, and I got to play with some of my new chi blast gear.

pyra_mnd_gear

Yes, I know I was /drk, but I’m more focusing on the +80 part (with a mushpot on of course).

Which got me this nice blast.

pyra_chi_blast_ultima

It also got me dispelled, but c’est la vie.

There were also some really good drops!  I blame my 707 Chi Blast for them.

ultima_drops

The next day, I went and did Shadows of the Departed, in order to get ready for Apocalypse Nigh fight (soon I hope).

sotd_dem

It was a lot of fun, even with a lolPUP. 🙂

And, um… crap.

stod_delevel

I deleveled my whm 🙁 to 36 even.  Stupid job, about 200 shy of getting my level back too.  Oh well, its only a chi blasting sub.

I also finally, after about 2 years, turned in my magic trash.  Here’s a pic from the back room in Garliage.  If you go there in the past, bombs aggro you through the door (but it may be openable with the key, I didn’t have one to try).

backroom_garliage

Sometime later, I did a couple avatars with Miz.  We do a bunch of avatar fights to help pay for our limbo runs.

And I noticed something.  The background that looks so neat in the cloisters, is a weather effect (same as the sky in the [S] areas, try it yourself, turn off weather and look at all the stars disapear).

Anyways, with weather:

garuda_w_weather

And without weather:

garuda_wo_weather

More to come!  Pics from the Cut Scenes leading up to Apocalypse Nigh, Dancer AF1, Cut Scenes, Exploring the [S] areas, Campaign, and the likes!

-pyra

Welcome to the New Pyra’s Party Place

The move is mostly complete, just a handful of links to update.

I chose to not go with wordpress.com for a simple reason: There was no simple way to move all my pictures. So, I moved it to here instead, since I had to move all the images anyways (in reality, its on the same physical machine as the previous site). Also, its easier to move at a later date now 🙂

-pyra

Wow, I need to make more real updates. Hopefully, I’ll have time this weekend. Boo life, its been way too busy lately.

The First Appearance of the Homam Princess

Its late, I’m exhausted, but I wanted to post this.

trading_hind_leg

 

homan_pants 

Woot!  More pics coming soon, I’ve got to get everything organized, been a couple weeks of a picture backlog to sort through.

-pyra

After Much Thought, I have Decided to Discontinue This Blog

It is very bitter sweet that I have decided to no longer update blogs.ai-ls.com/pyra . This will be discontinued shortly and moved to a new site which I have not yet found, possibly wordpress.com .

After an event last night, I wish to distance myself as much as possible from all that once was the American Idol linkshell, including turning over the domain to someone else. If no one takes it over, it will be allowed to expire when the registration runs out in January 2009.

Edit: No, not this one, this is the new version. The one that was discontinued was the original site.

The Why of WP

Every so often, I get asked why I chose WordPress (and in this case, WordPress MU) for blogs.ai-ls.com .

There are other options out there.

The why is easy.  I was trying to integrate the blogs into the already existing forums.

There were basically 2 choices, WordPress, and The Blog Mog.  If you’ve used the FF Wiki, you know what the blog mod is like.  Eventually, I just decided that the PHP Nuke was getting too overloaded and started from scratch.  I like the results.

It is what it is, but it lacks a lot of features that are awesome — such as having your own url (in the case of this site, it would be something like www.ai-ls.com/modules/forums/blogs.php?blog=1234).  I guess you could book mark it, but it loses some of the appeal of a simple URL, such as blogs.ai-ls.com/pyra .

Well, this past week there has been a small battle in the ongoing fight of WordPress vs. Movable Type.

It all started with this post in the MT blog — http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/03/a-wordpress-25-upgrade-guide.html , which was quickly followed up in one of their dev’s blogs http://sippey.typepad.com/filtered/2008/03/were-here-to-co.html , which was followed up in ma.tt (one of the primary authors of WordPress) http://ma.tt/2008/03/wordpress-is-open-source/ .  All links have been removed b/c I don’t feel like getting drawn into this mess.

However, in the interest of fairness, I decided to test out Movable Type.  I set up mt.blogs.ai-ls.com/pyra as a temporary MT test site.  I will make posts to both blogs to really try to understand how MT works.

Installation was not hard.  There were a handful of extra steps beyond what WordPress MU/WordPress require, but nothing more than expected.  It was painless, with the only troubles being a typo I made with the MySQL DB name.

Then came some challenges.

First off, I chose as my name “Pyra’s Testing Place”, because this is “Pyra’s Party Place”.  I wanted the URL to be the same, so I changed it to just /pyra.  However, MT uses generated HTML for everything, instead of dynamic PHP (like WP), and it installed everything to /pyras_testing_place .  I’m also not used to having to hit publish and waiting more than about 10 seconds for the new post to show up.

But its a different program, I shouldn’t expect Mac OS X to work exactly like Windows just because all I’ve used is Windows.

If you visit the sites listed above, you will see both sides telling you why their product is better.

As far as I can tell, they are basically the same.  MT gives you more options, WP makes some things easier.  Personally, from an admin point of view, giving the users less options is a good thing.  I really don’t want 99% of the visitors choosing their own upload path, then asking me why nothing works.  Maiev I know would know what he’s doing, but many others?  Probably not.

All of the advantages of MT (OpenID, can handle huge load, etc) don’t really apply.  No one uses OpenID (aside from LiveJournal), and with akismet + open comments, anyone who wants to can just post with the now common format of “CharacterName of Server” or “CharacterName (Server)”.  As to huge loads?  This site gets maybe 1000 hits per day, so honestly, who cares.  Oh noes, my pages loaded in .89 seconds instead of .72 seconds.  It doesn’t matter.  MT makes extensive use of the file system, while WP uses .htaccess and ModRewrite.  MT includes a handful of items as standard that WP requires a plugin for (for example, the stats, and any MT install can be turned into a multi-user install).

But MT does some dumb things too, like not creating a blog at the install root by default, even on a multi-user install.

Since both products are basically even, and I’m already running on WordPress MU, I see no reason to change.  I’m sure if I were running MT I would say the same thing.

For the time being, the MT site will remain up.  I can’t figure out how to enable user-created accounts, so send me a message if you want to test it out.

This is my stance.  If anyone really wants their own MT install, it can be arranged.  As can <charactername>.ai-ls.com if you really want.  Otherwise, as far as I’m concerned, WPMU is how this blog site will stay.  For what this site is, I feel it is the better choice.

-pyra

Edit: Bleh, looks like MT doesn’t work with Windows Live Writer, which is what I use for all of my posts anymore. That… just… sucks.

Edit 2: Jim Ramsey (lead designer for Movable Type) posted a link in my comments on how to make the Live Writer work w/ MT. I take back edit 1, it does work.

Back with a Vengeance

And I am back!

Its been too long without a real update, so here is a good one.

About 2 weeks ago, KillerInstinct fought Dynamis Lord again.  This time for some good drops.

DL_Drops

Yeah, full drops from a DL, a very rare occurrence.

But the most important part is this–

dk_on_dl

Yeah, 548, one of my highest weapon skills on DL to date.

But the best part is this.

pyra_defeats

That DK was the kill shot.  For full drops.

Which of course has one obvious conclusion.

pyra_4tw

Anytime you want drops, just bring more Monks.

-pyra