Wednesday, April 11, 2007

To be an Interloper.

FFXI post, so ignore at your own expense, if you must.

So I went to my first Dynamis today. For those of you who are still new to FFXI, Dynamis is a special battlezone that high level players can enter, provided someone pays the 1,000,000
gil entry fee.

On a side note, Goblins can be greedy bastards. I'm surprised there isn't one called Moneybagsnix.  Monopoly, I tells ya.

Anywho, the gist of it is that the zone is filled with these walking statues that you are supposed to kill. If they were alone, great.

Too bad they spawn helper mobs when they decide to fight you. So not so great. These helper mobs do drop items when killified, though, so it's not as if they are that pointless to fight. Of course, one could say that it's that it's not pointless to fight monsters that want you dead, but you get what I mean.

So, the main goal of Dynamis is to kill some specific mobs, which serve as the keys to spawning the grandaddy statue of them all. That statue is your primary target. Kill him, and you get a funky key item with which will help you get access to all the dynamis areas, since you can only go  to 4 areas at the start.

Of course, what's a giant undertaking like this if not for some kickass rewards? Those helper mobs I talked about drop a few different things. They drop crappy weapons, which can be turned into the most powerful weapons in the game(Provided you get enough ancient currency and supplies to upgrade them, which both drop from said helper mobs).

Then there's the armor. High level, job-specific equipment that is, for the most part, some of the best damn armor in the game. Unlike the weapons, which take forever to upgrade, and cost hundereds of millions of gil(IF you buy all your currency and supplies), these pieces of armor, known as Relic Armor, are as-is. If they drop, and you win the lot, they're yours, and ready to use as soon as you get it.

You can understand that everyone and their brother wants these. BADLY.

Anyways, back to my first run(Dynamis - San d'Oria, if you must know). We all went in, got prepared and junk, and started pulling the statues one at a time, taking care of whatever helper mobs popped. We did pretty good for nearly the first half of the run.

Then we ended up pulling a statue, and about 24 of his friends decided to join his cause, including the first mob we needed to kill to pop the grandaddy statue. Thankfully, everyone was on the ball, and we managed to hold them all(IE: put them all to sleep) while we picked them off one by one. There was one death, but we handled it all pretty well.

Then we met the summoners.

One thing about summoner mobs in Dynamis. If you don't keep their avatar buddies asleep at all times, they tend to murder a ass-load of people in one hit.

That pretty much was what happened to us. Except it wasn't all of us(more like me and every other Red Mage and Black Mage), and we thankfully managed to kill all the summoners before we all had our faces in the dirt.

Too bad, 15 minutes later, we all had our faces in the dirt. Joy.

Remember that small army of 24 that we managed to handle without much of a problem? Well, it happened again.

Except there were Black Mages and Summoners this time around.

And all our sleepers got killed.

I, myself went from full HP to nothing in about 3 seconds. It's a new record for me. I should be proud.

So we all managed to get back up, recover and whatnot, and decided to try and pick them off without making a bunch of us-corpses again. We did all right at first.

You know where I'm going with all this, right?

Black mages and Summoners, blah, blah, blah, Black mage didn't get slept, we all die, etc, etc.

We decided to try a different approach. We cleared an area of mobs, away from the giant army of death, and such, and thusly had someone drag the entire death army in one direction, taking a death in the process, while one of our tanks picked out the 2nd mob that we needed to kill to spawn the grandaddy statue.

Somehow, we managed to kill it, despite the fact it was a Summoner mob, and as a result, spawned the grandaddy statue.

Now, we had a problem. Grandaddy statue had a lot of help. Too much for us to take on normally, and we had a few people who had to leave during the run.

Once again, we had someone take one for the team(You know, dying?), and brought over Grandaddy Statue over to us.

Yes, I capitalized that. Shut up.

We had a small problem, though. He had two Summoners backing him up. So we slept them all.

And I got a face full of mad Grandaddy Statue fist, since my sleep spell hit him, too.

However, through some miracle, we managed to defeat Grandaddy Statue and his cronies.

I was still dead, but hey, I won by association.

Anywho, got raised, got the funky key item saying I won, and we decided to continue to hunt down mobs for junk.

Up to that point, we had a few Relic Guns, as well as a couple Relic Great Axes.

But only one piece of Relic Armor.

For WHM.

When we only had two of them on at level 70+. Ugh.

We didn't have much time left, as you can only stay in Dynamis so long, but we got to farming some mobs. We had two Relic Armor's drop. One for Warrior.

And one for Red Mage. I was happy. I had 3-4 other people to compete with on the lot, but I didn't mind.

I was beat out by one person. 2nd place. No biggie. There's always next time.

But then our guy handling all the treasure said that the dude who beat me in the lot was marked for receiving currency. We had a "Armor or Currency" system, as a measure of fairness to all.

While the dude who out-lotted me was arguing he didn't mark himself for currency, it started to sink in.

I'm supposed to get that armor. Of course, that's if the guy who was still arguing about the whole thing decides to pass on the armor.

Oddly, enough, he left the area.

While arguing, still.

After passing on the armor.

If I had urine in my bladder, my pants would be wet right now.

I got the armor. I am the proud owner of a shiny new pair of Duelist's Boots.

Just in time, too. 5 minutes or so later, we get booted from Dynamis, and I feel like I'm on top of the world.

Currency was handed out to those who opted currency(Oddly enough, I had to pick some up on behalf of my White Mage friend who had to leave after our first full wipe), and we all went our seperate ways.

All in all, an excellent first run of Dynamis. I do feel for the guy who passed on the armor, but honestly, I can't say I saw him say he wanted the armor(Before it dropped and he lotted for it, obviously). From the looks of it, neither did anyone else.

Still, it's not like this'll happen again. Right?

.....right?

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