Went on vacation/college stuff for two weeks there. Had to go to orientation, get stuff done, etc. Not much of a vacation, but whatever.

Haven’t been doing much in FFXI till I got back two days ago. Last night we hit up the last two Promathia BC battles to finish the storyline. To be honest, I didn’t like the ending as much as I did like Zilart’s. Not quite sure why, but probably due to the extremely slow pace at which Square released the updates. Because of that, I felt as if I had forgotten most of the storyline and found myself more often than not button bashing through cutscenes due to time. Spoilers galore.

The LS was helping people finish up getting their Brands of Twilight/Dawn so I went along for that since I hadn’t yet. I swear, I don’t get how anyone found their way around this area. All the rooms look exactly the same minus the fact that the mobs occasionally change. Another testament to Square’s extreme laziness. The most startling thing was we eventually got to a room where the Garuda looking mobs conned IT+. I haven’t seen an IT regular mob since LV74. Perhaps a good leveling area in the future?

The first of the BCs was rather easy. I forgot exactly what it was, but it had four of those egg-shaped monsters. Two of which are BLMs (The smaller two) and two are RDMs (the larger ones). We had our PT setup as BLM/BLM/WHM/RDM/PLD/RNG for the first run and for the second run we had BLM/BLM/WHM/RDM/NIN/MNK. Arguably pretty easy honestly. Won the first time for both. Had one of our BLMs rush in and ES+Sleepga2 the group, took out the BLMs first. When the other three woke up, we had the second BLM ES+Sleepga2. After they woke up the third time, we had the WHM (since I was /WHM at the time without ES) ES+Sleepga. Worked out pretty well. By the waking of the third ES set, we had two eggs left, which went down pretty easily.

The second part consisted of walking up to a BC which has probably the coolest looking arena ever. Coolest, but laggy. My poor graphics card was taking a beating and netting me 8FPS for most of the fight due to all the effects and the like. After a lot of talking that I seriously beat my enter key through, we got to fight Promathia. The first form was incredibly easy in that he doesn’t really do much of anything seriously damaging. As a matter of fact, Prishe can almost kill the thing herself during this form. We spammed whatever spells we had with it and then, after the first form’s death, healed to full to start the second part, which isn’t as easy as the first, but still isn’t very hard.

The third form consists of Promathia getting these pretty orbs around him and he gets a lot stronger. He casts Comet (A one hit version of Meteor) and casts Meteor, exactly the same as King Behemoth does. This required a lot of running around since the battlefield is huge (making refreshing people fun) and making sure the tank doesn’t die. At one point, Promathia does an AoE Silence attack that isn’t curable with Echo Drops. You are stuck silenced for about 30seconds~1minute. We had our tanks spam Hi-Potions at this point and during one run, we were a bit unlucky since the silence was immediately followed by a Meteor. Even if people die, winning this BC isn’t hard. Our last run consisted of me, a blm, and the tank being dead and Prishe tanked the thing herself. Prishe, being a MNK/WHM interestingly enough, can tank the thing as long as you keep her healed. You can even Raise her. She uses her Hundred Fists at a various point in the battle. Also, the other NPC (Shi…whatever, the boy with the angel wings) flies around the arena. You can’t cure him, but he will take dmg if he gets stuck in an AoE. If he dies, you get booted from the BC. Which is kind of lame since that happened to us once.

After a few other cutscenes, you have finished Chains of Promathia! It feels strangely unrewarding. The only cool bonus are the three stat rings you can choose from after completing some more cutscenes, which I didn’t have a chance to do yet due to 18hr maintenance. I have not been able to decide between getting the melee based ring or the mage based ring. They are both obviously very nice pieces of equip, but I can’t make my mind up yet. I’ll probably go for the mage ring and have it replace a snow ring, but I do really want the melee one for my Samurai. Hrm. Choices.

Also when maintenance is over, I’m going to try to get my swimsuit before the event ends. I have to pack up my desktop for about a month to ship it to the USA to my college, but I have my laptop and it has FFXI on it, if it would ever damn patch since Square’s update servers are shit no matter what time of the month you’re trying to update.

Edit: As my good friend Della would say…. “What now, bitches?!” Tamas ring, get.

Tags: gear, missions, promathia, screenshots