A busy day in FFXI

I’ve been spending even more time in FFXI than usual, but I’ve been getting even more things accomplished.

Woke up today and headed to Kirin again. We beat two in less than three hours, which is pretty darn good. It probably had something to do with the large number of Black Mages we had up there. But hey, Red Mages can nuke, too:

(Of course, that was right as it died, and immediately afterwards, Scionith Mijin Gakure’d and made it go boom.)

The big thing to come out of the fights (at least for me) was that a Wyrmal Abjuration: Legs dropped, and I had the winning bid. I was pretty sure I was ahead of everyone on points that was interested, so I was so happy when it dropped.

Of course, I now have 10 points left… I bid myself down to 0, and got the 10 points for the two Kirins today. It’s a good thing there isn’t much left I want… until I get BLM up to the high levels… oh, wait. That’s right, Black Mages get even less from Sky mobs than Red Mages.

Parallel to this, waking up today, I noticed that, for the first time in a long while, San d’Oria was in first place. What did this mean? I spent all 78,000 of my Conquest points. (A Kingdom Aketon, a Royal Knight’s Belt and a Signet Staff) I did this right before I got my Cuisses, so running around San d’Oria with both the Aketon and the cuisses on for 24% movement speed was fun. But anyway, I wandered down to the Federation of Windurst and submitted my application for citizenship.

So I lost all my outpost warps, and I had “memories sealed away.” (The game’s way of explaining away how you can manage to do the same bit of overlapping storyline twice.) I waltzed my way through the first 2 ranks’ worth of missions, then came to the big stumbling block: The rank 2-3 dragon.

It’s a level 25 capped fight, so even though I’m level 75, I can’t overpower my way through like I’ve been doing and am likely to do for another 3 ranks. But I’d seen a video online of a RDM25/NIN12 soloing the fight, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I bought a bunch of top-notch level 25 gear and consumables and went into the fight…

And proceeded to run out of time because I didn’t damage it fast enough, got petrified twice and paralyzed once.

I grumbled and watched the video again. That person didn’t get hit by petrify or paralyze! I must have had some dumb luck. I tried again, this time with more mp regen instead of ethers, nuked more…

Victory in 7 minutes 30 seconds… half of the allotted time. And I didn’t even need any ethers or potions… the food was enough. I went back and got my Rank 3, and now I need to get store all this gear and consumables… and slyly slip ‘s Emperor Hairpin and Winged Boots that I borrowed for the fight back into his account.