Entry 1 - 11/07/2009
Welcome to my (Vawn - Lakshmi server) Final Fantasy XI website. I created this site because I wanted a place to organize my FFXI goals and accomplishments. It will also serve as a journal of my adventures in Vana'deil (FFXI) and perhaps into Eorza (FFXIV) in the future.
Thanks for visiting.
About Vawn (and "friends")
When I started this game, like many, I had no idea what I was stepping into. In fact, I bought the game for the PS2 over a four-day weekend while my girlfriend (now my wife) was out of town thinking I would finish the game during that time. That was close to seven years ago.
My career started pretty normally. I played around with a few jobs with the intentions of unlocking and leveling Paladin. I even went through the phase of WAR/WHM with sword and shield, thinking this would be good practice until I got high enough to unlock the advanced job. Once I finally achieved level 30, I was excited to finally unlock the PLD job. Once I did, I was taken back to suddenly be level 1 again and started to realize how much time this game was going to take. Still even as I was leveling PLD I viewed the trip from 1 to 75 as the entire game. I took it fairly slow, trying to enjoy the journey because I saw reaching the ultimate goal of 75 as the end of my journeys.
During the trip up I made friends, joined a new linkshell that I am in still to this day. I learned the ropes of the job and quickly found myself at top level long before most of my friends in-game. At which time I joined a group to unlock Sky and joined the two end-all, be-all endgame events at the time: Sky and Dynamis. In a rush to get gear quickly, but with no progress to show, I started to tire of the game after a few months. "Having" to be at events when I didn't feel like it was also a culture shock. I've never had responsibilites in a video game and it started to feel like a job. After some thought, this led me to quit FFXI.
After a few months I decided to come back, as I started to miss the game. I didn't however, really miss end-game and made the decision to return but only do the activities I really enjoyed. If I was told my PLD was gimp for not having Koenig and Valant gear, then so be it. I came back and decided to level a new job. After some though, I decided on a job that few seemed to ever play, but people always wanted in their parties: Bard.
My second trip up to 75 was much faster than my first. In fact, even with my three month break from the game I was hitting 75 on my second job around the same time as the rest of my linkshell was hitting 75 on their first. Again, I still had no real desire to deal with the hassle of end-game activities and was tired of the experience grind and left the game once again.
It didn't take long to start missing the game and I came back once again. I alternated between two jobs to fill in the roles I did not have yet to 75. I leveled WAR and WHM, taking both to 75. This was during the release of Treasures of Aht Urghan. By this time, leveling up was significantly faster than in the past. Experience points rings, lowered xp between levels from 50 to 74, squishy mobs t hat gave high xp in ToAU areas and the overall skill of the playerbase made leveling up seem incredibly fast. This was addictive how fast I was leveling and I found xp parties more fun.
One day my real-life friend who also plays FFXI came to hang out. We went out to eat and drink beer and talked about FFXI. We ended up hooking two tvs up and playing low level beastmasters together. It was pretty slow. After he went to sleep I decided to level MNK and try using his 75 BLM/WHM to power level myself. It took a few minutes to get use to, but then I started to realize how fast I could level with this. I was sad to have to go back and eventually decided I really wanted my own PL.
Somehow I talked my wife into letting me start a second FFXI account and buy a second PS2. Using the split screen funcationality of my television, I was able to start leveling my new character. Latch was born. He was to become a Red Mage, which at the time I thought would be the ultimate power leveler. After a few days I got his RDM to around 30, powerleveld by my newly 75 WHM. Things were going slow and I decided, just for fun to try MNK. It was fast and fun. I thought it would be fun to try powerleveling him on my BRD/WHM giving him ACC/ATT songs and dropping party. I was shocked at how well it worked. At low levels the songs were flat out broken and I was flying through levels. I had no real plans for a MNK, but it was too much fun to I kept going. I ended up powerleveling Latch's MNK to about 55 just using my BRD/WHM. Soon mp became too much of an issue and I decided to stop. I was still enjoying MNK so I decided to play MNK the normal way from 55 to 75 on Latch. He hasn't been on RDM since.
It wasn't I had planned to do with dual-boxing, but I quickly found my MNK very useful. I would do lots of things on my PLD + MNK combination. Farming, AF fights, etc. A lot of stuff I couldn't solo on PLD I could handle easily with my MNK partner. Things that went slowly (farming, coffer keys, etc) now went much faster with my "attack dog". And MNK worked perfectly. I could have a macro saying "attack what I attack" and do a lot of damage without having to worry too much about MNK except to hit my weapon skill macro at 100% tp.
Around this time, Ijin, a linkshell member (73 WHM) quit the game and gave his account to another linkshell member, Demin, a friend of mine. Demin allowed certain linkshell members access to this WHM for teleports, etc. Soon I started using this WHM to level a lot my DD jobs. My goal was to get every job to 37 so I could never worry about not having a sub ready to go. For the DD jobs this went well. It was nice not having to deal with bad Dunes/Qufim parties and still make more xp/hour solo. When I got around to leveling some mage jobs, I really did not want to have to go back to standard parties. I thought "I wish I could level these jobs like I leveled WAR or MNK". And then I started to wonder if I could manage playing MNK on one character and in the same party play another character AND powerlevel myself up.
I wanted to try, but this was long before Level-Sync so I purchased a third PS2 and started by doing some high level mobs with a 75 WAR 75 MNK and 75 WHM. With the right macros, this wasn't nearly as difficult as it might sound. I quickly started thinking I could level every job in the entire game to 75 if I just had MNKs to duo with. I started considering the unthinkable - purposefully deleveling Latch's MNK, by killing myself over and over. For a few weeks, I kept trying to talk myself out of it, thinking as soon as I did it, I would regret it. Eventually, I decided, 'what the hell' and started the journey back to level 4.
It wasn't as easy as I had hoped. I first tried, going to high level mobs in Aht Urgahn zones to die and then R1 myself with Vawn's WHM. This was painfully slow. Every time I finally lost a level, I thought to myself 'dude what the hell are you doing??'. I was soon at the point of no return though and wanted a faster way to delevel. I remember posting on Allakhazam on suggestions on where to do this. One person said set your homepoint in Cape Terrigan. About 200 other people said things along the line of "that's the stupidest thing I have ever heard, quit this game, etc etc etc".
So.... I set my homepoint in Cape Terrigan. I used Latch's WHM sub he had from his previous life as a RDM for diaga. This worked well and I quickly found myself losing my hard-earned experience points at a rapid rate! I went all the way down to level 4 and started triple boxing various jobs with Ijin as the outside healer. I continued this process to take all my jobs to level 40, at the end of each job deleveling Latch's back to whatever level the next job I was interested in leveling. After taking each to 40, I did the same cycle to 50, then 60, then 66 (Maat's Cap) and finally 75. Some jobs were better suited for this than others, but overall it went really well. On DD jobs at the Aht Urghan levels, I was pulling off chains 10+ for 250-300 xp a kill, and leveled faster than 90% of the parties out there. Sure, people still thought I was stupid, but I was able to play when I wanted, log out at camp and wasted very little time. It took a while, but eventually I had 15 of the 18 jobs to 75. I decided to take a break from this for a while and left the Aht Urghan jobs behind.
Soon, Wings of the Goddess was released along with SCH and DNC. Now I had 15 75s and 5 level 1s. I decided to finish what I started and once agian put Latch's homepoint in Cape Terrigan and start the backwards journey from 75 to 4. Very long story short, I eventually reached my goal of taking every job in the game to 75. Many wanted to believe this method of leveling meant I didn't know anything about the jobs I leveled, but truth is I learned all that can be learned from normal parties this way. I read guides about each job before leveling them, and made use of all the benefits of each job. A few months after accomplishing my goal of taking every job in the game to top level, SE slapped me in the face by introducing "Level Sync".
Soon I found myself top level at every job in the game, but have missed out on a lot of activities. I decided to try Dynamis again, this time with a linkshell that had many members of my social linkshell. It was fun, but I wanted another big goal. Something I can work on a little bit each day I play and I decided I would love a relic weapon. My desire for a relic started as more wanting another goal to work on, something to keep me busy and interested in the game when I play. I didn't even decide which weapon to go after when I started collecting currency.
I had been using my Samurai to merit and enjoyed it a lot and eventually started to working on Amanomurakumo. I joined a second Dynamis shell (on Latch) to sponsor runs while still staying in my main Dynamis shell. In the end, this was probablly a waste of time. There just weren't enough runs to sponsor and I got burnt out on Dynamis. At least 90% of my currency was bought at the expensive Rolanberry Fields prices.
For the next nine months, if I was in-game I was either in Dynamis or I was farming. I found some good farming ideas, but to make them work I need my PL. To make them work well I needed to triple box THF MNK WHM. And then I thought of a way to make more gil/hr but it would require a 4th character. I had access to my friends 75 account and now had 3 PS2s, a 360 and a PS3, but I was out of TVs. That's when I completely lost it and completed my ultimate FFXI gaming setup.
It set me back four grand, but I loved it. I could play four characters and still watch the football game. Or three characters and two different football games, etc.
With this setup, I eventually completed Amanomurakumo.
My method of playing was like a drug. I started to come up with more ideas to make gil and it required five characters - two healing mages. Recently, I started my third character - Boko. This time using level sync, I quickly took him to 75 WHM. Today, I am using anywhere between one to five characters at once to accomplish my FFXI goals.
I might be "doing it wrong", but that's ok, I'm having fun and plan to continue my journey until FFXIV if not beyond. Who knows what crazy stuff I'll try to pull off in the future.
