Friday 8 May 2009

Something Unexpected

There are always times in game where you do something that you aren't quite sure will work, and they do, but you are not quite sure why, and it exceeds all expectations.

I had one of those moments the other night.

Salvage time but most of the crew were either MIA, unavailable, dabbling in the heady world of real life or just not around so we went in with only 6 members, and a slightly inventive party.

Dragoon
Dragoon

Thief
Red Mage
White Mage
Bard

Both Dragoons were /SAM. We went and did Arrapago Remnants and took the Soulflayer route.

We killed every rat on every floor we could, we took down the soulflayer, chariot and the boss and we finished the entire zone with 16mins left on the clock.

Dragoons are devastating in Salvage. I had an ENORMOUS amount of fun as well, true this quite possibly could have been because I was one of the aforementioned dragoons, lol and I derive a great deal of pleasure from playing my favourite job but even hardened Dragoon haters like Iceblazek had fun. By his own admission he had to grudingly admit that as a job class the Dragoon has come a long way and no longer deserves or merits the lolDRG moniker of yore.

I guess some people would wonder how you would tank the chariot boss with just Dragoons, and this is one of those nasty bosses where Mortal Revolution can be easily absorbed by shadows that as /SAM we simply didn't have. Agreed neither of the Dragoons are what you could call gimpy, Qtipus is running around with a Gungnir, both of us have taken a lot of effort and time to strive for the best gear and equipment for our job but a lot of that can be removed from the equation in Salvage as gear particularly from Arrapago is slow and erratic to land.

We saved our jumps to serve as provokes for the bard pulling and rotated them instead of using them for tp build, which proved to be a surprisingly effective strategy save the occasional blip where we both went at the same time, although this didn't really cause any real upsets on the whole run.

And we bounced light skill chains back and forth between the Dragoons and the thief all the way to the top. If you haven't experienced it yet, well timed and effective skill chaining in salvage can have a devastating effect on the mobs, they just melt in your path as you push forwards. Of course you can't be sat around constantly waiting for skill chains, but a bit of communication and skill chaining when the tp is available and ready yields some fantastic results.