After that was done I received confirmation that FFXI hates me. I attempted 3 Nyzul Assault runs in an attempt to get floors 41-45 cleared. I have floors going up to 60 out of the way except for that little gap. I was considering logging off for the night when I saw the shout and was overjoyed to finally be able to get those floors out of the way. We had two members who said they hadn't done assault before so I was a little worried but things seemed to be going fine. We didn't have any lamp floors and we were clearing things pretty well up until floor 44. It was a gear floor and there was a lot of aggro and time wasted but we still managed to get to floor 45 with enough time to clear. Unfortunetly it was a Soulflayer floor and there were gears on that floor too boot. We took out the first flayer pretty easily but while we were looking for the next, Silrye, aggroed a bunch of stuff and was running around the stage. She managed to locate another flayer (possibly the only other one) and we dashed over to take it out. That plan fell short when it opened with Blizzaga III and took the WAR and myself down to almost dead in the first seconds of the fight. To make matters worse, there was a gear right next to the flayer, so the WAR went down fast. I tried to move back a bit and fight the flayer but the gear came around the corner after a few seconds and we ended up wiping.
At this point I was only slightly annoyed. I still had 3 tags left so we all went back in to give it another try. This time we only made it to floor 43 because the WHM was busy polishing her nails instead of curing the WAR and he died needlessly on the NM we had to kill and it was downhill from there. Attempt three was even more of a waste of time. We ended up replacing a couple of members and trying again. This time however we did get a lamp floor and we ended up wasting a huge chunk of time due to someone not finding the 5th lamp in the stage. When we finally got passed that with not nearly enough time to clear, Square Enix decided to slap us again by giving us a NM that is immune to Slashing physical attacks (Energetic Eruca), making the WAR and myself (SAM) useless. The only one doing any damage was the Pup...after awhile the RDM ended up just kiting it around to burn time and we got kicked from the assualt.
This is really pissing me off. It shouldn't be this hard to clear these floors. I always get terrible luck or terrible players. Why does Altana hate me? I also did Limbus for the first time. I've had Sky access for almost a year but for every reason I never tried Sky before. It actually went pretty well, we got the clear and I received one of the items need for AF+1 and a couple of beasts coins. I was a little surprised at how easy Limbus was but we probably just did an easy one.
After limbus was done a few members members wanted to go farming organs for a Shadow Gorget. I had no idea was a shadow gorget was but I figured what the heck. That didn't go so well, the first UFO we tried to grab turned out to be a NM and with only 7 of us it ended in a wipe. After everyone got back up I logged and went to play the Resident Evil 5 demo, lol.
I think I'm done with my Dynamis shell. Didn't take me long, a couple of months maybe but like every endgame shell I've joined before it, I think I'm quitting CrystalGuardians. No real "good" reason but I'm a little tired of being berated after every run and we are always failing which doesn't help matters. Today we did Dynamis Jeuno, which we had done before, and failed. It started off pretty darn sloppy and ended the same way. I came as THF to be a support puller of sorts. Pretty much my job was to pull a mob after the main THF aggroed the big statues. Simple enough except that the tank who was supposed to voke the mob off of me, Swiss, never would. Half the time he didn't ever get a chance to because Derond (a PLD for a different party) would pull his mob anyway. After a little while the ls leaders caught on that there was a problem and then the MNK in my party started tanking instead of Swiss the PLD. This worked out much better because Ukiyasan is a competant player and he would grab the mobs off me when I pulled them back. I still had to worry about Derond grabbing mobs he wasn't supposed to but not much I can do about that.
Things go from bad to worse a short while later as we are getting close to the auction house portion on Dynamis. All of a sudden Raizen announces that each party is going to have a camp/spot to stand on and mobs will be pulled directly to them. That way all the different groups weren't fighting on top on each other. A sound strategy but it seems a little odd to do this now when we had tried a different strategy last week that seemed to work but were ignoring it this week. Unfortunetly Raizen didn't account for the shear stupidity of the shell. People were totally unable to follow even a simple instruction like, "stand here" and every time a mob was pulled the chaos of people running all over the place and ganging up on one mob instead of fighting separate mobs continued. Gameplay wise we didn't have too much drama after that. Surprisingly ls members have actually learned some things and we were on the ball mostly except for some bad pulls. But the thing that really irks me about the shell members is their seeming inability to pass on the items that drop. I boggles my mind that after all the weeks we've been doing this that people still won't pass on the currency when it drops (In Dynamis everyone is supposed to pass on the ancient currency that drops and it goes to the linkshell leaders). Having to hear Shadoe, Raizen, and co, shout every few minutes for people to pass currency is extremely annoying and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that people can't take 5 seconds inbetween fights to pass on items. What blew my mind the most about this was that a piece for relic gear dropped and everyone passed on the relic who wasn't able to lot it, but some people IGNORED all of the currency sitting in the treasure pool. Okay, so you can pass/lot on relic no problem, but you're unable to pass on the currency that the linkshell leaders have been telling you to do so for weeks? Unbelieveable. So many people in that shell either don't even try or are just incapable of following basic instructions.
That leads into the LS leaders bitching at everyone after each run over and over again. It's just so annoying and honestly I don't think this LS will get any better. It doesn't matter how good the strategies get, the members just don't posses the basic skills or mental comprehension to get the job done. I believe that in time the LS can become good but if it takes 6 Dynamis runs just to train people to not use weapon skills on Ninja mobs, I shudder to think how long it'll take before people learn the advanced stuff. Even then when we go to Northlands, people will have to learn stuff all over again. We have a Dynamis San d'oria run this Friday but I'm on the fence. I know that it'll be another piss poor run in which we may get the clear (which we don't need) but there will be plenty of needless deaths. It's frustrating because Dynamis Windurst is the last city I need to get Northlands access which makes me wanna stick with this shell at least for that but I know in my heart of hearts, that they will just fail the run.
