Weekend update 2

Did some Dynamis Buburimu on sunday and got the win for some people. Two WAR belts dropped, one SCH -1 piece and a BLU cape. Grats to people on drops. Again, this was a bit of a data gathering run for me personally. Had two bards in DD party which worked out pretty well. Next time we can start pulling Dragons a bit sooner. I think the mobs in dreamlands Dynamis are higher level than those in cities and perhaps even northlands. Their evasion was pretty high and they hit much harder than I ever remember being hit for while pulling other areas.

Friday wasn't as successful since we... *cough* lost an Omega. After the failed run I wondered why we ever won the other times. Tanking the first phase isn't really an issue at all. It was only the second time going PLD to Omega, but it's really not that hard to tank. Normally we had more damage output during the final 20% which took it down really quickly and Colossal Blow didn't bother us. This time we were low on damage and nobody seemed to really pick up on the fact that I got hit with Colossal Blow early on. I actually popped Sentinel right before getting hit, which surprisingly (to me anway) reduced the damage of CB. Stellina tanked for about 1-2 min afterwards before getting hit by CB too. I was spamming as much hate as I could during that time, but when I saw CB I pretty much instantly used Invincible. I asked if I should start kiting now. Kiting is something we actually never did with this group, so I didn't really expect anyone to say "go ahead". Third CB hits me and people start dying. Stel was actually down too. I proceed to kite, but you can't solo kite Omega without stuns. A better way is bouncing hate between PLD's and using stuns. Without hate from the previous 80% as a basis even when Stellina was back up we couldn't keep it up. Any cure would pull it right off one and onto the other who was unbuffed and low on MP. I have no clue why we had no RDM in the tank pt. If we had prepped for the 20% and actually conciously tried to gank/zerg the last part, we could have won. However, as a group we seemed oblivious to the change in modes and didn't show any increase in damage. We actually held back more since it seemed people were scared of pulling hate after hate was unstable. Aaaanywho...

Saturday I used the second charge of my Allied Ring on DRK. It turned a very mediocre party into a decent party which then later turned into a decent party by itself when the SCH switched to BRD and the full Artifact DRK started eating Sushi upon my suggesting it. I'm glad I was parsing or I may not have noticed how low his accuracy was. My skill was gimped and only learned Guillotine an hour into the party. We had a PUP but I think it had crap for attachments and/or underskilled ranged skill cus it was missing something awful. Souleater Guillotine on the last %'ages of a mob is quite amusing. I hit 66 in that party. Gotta take another break on DRK though since my RDM and THF buffers are suffering their lowest level in ages. My THF was capped no more than 3 months ago. Now it's at 6K from eating all the R1's in Salvage and Dynamis and the occasional HP.

I'm working on a tanking article to post on this blog soon. Ever since I started thinking of different ways to do crowd control in Dynamis the contributions of all the factors that mitigate melee damage started swirling in my head. I got some pretty neat ideas from it even if I say so myself.