This here is my new all time high, previous was in somewhere below 150.
Well, taking a somewhat conservative estimate, with birds giving 193-217 xp each... I'll say avg 205 xp per mob. To maintain a chain beyond chain 5, a mob must die within 1 minute of the last one, so in this case we have 275 mobs killed to establish this chain, with 1 dying per minute. In 60 minutes we have (205x60) 12300 xp/hour. Not too shabby. Again that's a somewhat conservative approach, due to lack of a parser. I know I wasn't meriting for over 4 hours, though over 3 sounds reasonable, but still a decent amount of xp and beats FoV or Campaign.
When it comes to merit parties, I don't bother seeking on anything other than BRD. From the past few days, it seems the parties that do the best consists of RDM, BRD, 3x DD, and either a 4th DD or another BRD. I should note that DD doesn't mean any DD, but rather either SAM or DRG. Those two jobs just tear through birds like there's no tomorrow. Drg obviously have polearm to help them, 1.25 the damage to birds, and their mythic ws Drakesbane does awesome dmg to birds. SAM can use polearms too, though their cap is 36 points lower, but they shine because of their tp gaining abilities, which help them overcome TP reset moves of birds. WAR and DRK do ok, but every single highly sucessful party I've been in has had the majority of DDs eithing being SAM or DRG. Chains seem to fall apart with other setups. I don't have DRG, and my SAM would probably one of the gimper ones w/o Haidate and/or Ace's Helm, not to mention lack of meditate merits and overwhelm merits.
So I started to do some FoV lately to buffer my other jobs. New zones were given FoV training manuals and now Cape Teriggan is always busy with ppl. It used to be my hangout spot to skill up, break latent, and level npcs and now I gotta fight for mobs ; ; The thing I like about Teriggan is that I can OP to it and start working on ws points right away with my npc. No other travel time needed. And with it being an outdoor area, mobs respawn pretty quickly. With page 1 of the training regiment, you get 1300 xp for completing the task which consists of killing 4x bunnies, and 4x lizards. It's like an added bonus for stuff I'd be doing anyways in Teriggan.
And now I've also started to experiment with augments earned via FoV. There are now new 'elite training' you can do which are fights against NMs. I've been playing around with the highest level one available, which is in Behemoth's Domain. It spawns an NM behemoth and augments up to a level 50 item. This is the result of my 2nd augment:
My first one was of the same item, but with worse stats. It had +2 INT, -1 MND, -1 AGI. I ended up npcing it and buying a new one. Augmented items cant be resold on the AH. This one was a little more bearable but still nothing to write home about. It's still fun to see what kind of random augments I might be getting.
So next up, I'm looking at finishing up either THF (61) or MNK (65) as my 8th job. I want THF mainly so I can go out farming and have TH support. And if I can get it to 75 and cap out evasion, I'll go attempt to 2box myself a Joytoy. I've wanted one of those since back on my old char as a RDM, but at the time I was in an HNM shell, and only PLDs got to have one. Well now I have PLD, and I still want it! MNK I just want because it's another type of specialized DD, and I have gear that I share with my SAM. Costwise, it'd be be pretty cheap to level.
Tune of the Moment: Steve Porter - Rap Chop (You'd have to youtube this to get an appreciation for it >.> or maybe not! lol)
