Friday, June 11, 2004

 

Tarutaru Wizard Caught Juicing!!!

I'm still playing Final Fantasy XI a little bit almost every day. Recently I've been concentrating on diversions that I can easily do by myself. For instance, Gryffyn has spent quite a few evenings practicing his cooking skills. Cooking is very important for characters of all types, because you get real performance enhancements from juices and foods. That's right, in Final Fantasy XI, not only is juicing legal, it's expected! If you don't juice up, you're not considered to be fulfilling your potential. Or maybe you're just too cheap to shell out a few hundred gil for apple juices and meat mithkabobs.

I've also been fishing a lot. Yeah, fishing on a computer. Sounds lame as hell, but I like it for a couple of reasons. First, I can cook up my own insect paste very cheaply now. So when I sell the fish I catch, it's almost all pure profit. It takes me about an hour to catch a dozen moat carp, which I can sell at the Auction House for 5000 gil in no time. That's pretty decent. The other reason I like fishing is because I can do that and paint miniatures and the same time. Fishing only requires me to hit a button every 10 seconds or so. I don't really need to look at the screen much. Fishing and painting at the same time makes me feel extra productive, in an unproductive way.

Now I'm ready to resume the levelling grind; I need to raise my white mage job from 13th level to about 20th. Well, I don't *need* to, but it'll make some of my future plans a lot easier. Anyway, if I were to do the usual and expected thing, I'd make my ways to Valkurm Dunes, where everyone levels from 10th to 20th level in a full party of six.

The thing is, I'm getting tired of the lockstep conformity that plagues this game. There's apparently only one way to play it, and if you don't follow it, you're lame. To heck with that. I want to do different things, and not just sit around in a camp for hours hitting the same macro over and over. So my friend Hugo and I decided we would make a party of two characters, and hunt in Tahrongi Canyon instead. We didn't camp, we roamed around hunting dhalmels and other monsters. In about 2 1/2 hours, we each went up one level and got loads of treasure.

Sure, maybe if we'd gone to Valkurm and done the usual thing, we might have levelled up in only 2 hours, but it would have taken 20 minutes to get there and maybe another hour to find a party and then start playing. So I think we came out ahead, especially in entertainment value. Since it was just the two of us, I was able to experiment with non-standard white mage tactics. Like fighting in melee, or using summoned monsters to help fight. Not all the experiments worked, but it was nice to have the freedom to try.

From here on out, I will continue to find non-standard ways of playing whenever possible, and report on them here. Maybe I can help free my fellow players from the rut of Valkurm-Qufim-Kazham-Crawlers Nest etc.

Jefferson 8:05 AM

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