Random update

Been away from FFXI a lot lately...still mostly due to Fallout 3, but also had a fun snowboarding trip to Mammoth over MLK holiday weekend that went from Friday-Sunday. Drove up Friday, and boarded Sat-Sun, with a small group of guys from work. It might be the only trip I make this year... :( unless I get my passport and hope someone follows through planning a Whistler trip. I'm too lazy to organize a trip myself so meh, if no one does oh well.

So today we started to do a new event instead of the usual Nyzul since most of my crew got what they wanted out of it, and more importantly we all have our Runic Keys! =D At Wu's suggestion we decided to check out SNMs (Stronghold NMs). Basically this seems to be another version of ZNMs... but instead of collecting Zenis to pop the NMs, you camp the NMs as they are on 2-6 hr timers. These are NMs that appear in the beastmen strongholds in WoG areas and drop some lootz as well as some Rare/Ex items eventually used to get access to SCNMs (Seal Container NM) which is a BC fight up to 18 ppl. At first I wasn't too happy to hear this would be NM hunting with stupid pop timers, but we decided that we'd check out the zones, and if NMs were up, we'd kill them and if not we'd move zones to another beastmen stronghold and see what's there.

We haded off to Beadeaux [S] and with Dexi on RNG, were able to locate some NMs right away. First up was a gob Blifnix Oilycheeks. He seemed like a pretty standard Gob NM, doing regular gobs stuff... until he started to spam mines similar to Cheesehoarder ZNM mob. Unlike Cheesehoarder, he didn't run away after setting a mine, but he did set ~4-5 mines at a time. The mines would blow up in succession and did about 100-200 to each person with Shell V and barfira up. Ended up killing him without much problems with the exception of Wu going down near the end. He dropped this:


We went on and spotted quadav NM Di'Zho Spongeshell... and was it an annoying fight. Every so often he would do a 2hr animation and switch between 2 modes. In one mode, he would absorb all physical attack and be vulnerable to magic and in the other mode be vulnerable to physical and absorb magic. Fight ended taking over 20 mins and he wasn't terribly hard, just had a nasty AoE move a la NM quads in dynamis. The switching of the modes was the annoying part. No gear drop from this guy :(

That's all the time we had before it got too late for some. We'll see how this event keeps up in the weeks to follow...

Tune of the Moment: Morgan Page feat Lissie - The Longest Road (Deadmau5 Remix)