Valkurm? No, this is hell with sand. And subjobs.

At 75, in merit parties, the big, exciting way to form a party is 1 healer + 1 support + 4 DDs. I've been in those parties, and 20k/hr+ is amazing.

Would you believe that this sort of set-up does not work quite as well at level 12? I mean, seriously, what noobs decided that 4xMNK + 1 WHM + 1 RDM was a good idea - particularly when the 2 mages are both Elvaan and have about as much combined MP as you can squeeze out of a Tarutaru's shoe?

Oh. Right.

Well, it can't be that bad, right? They're MNKs, they hit hard and they have Boost - that should keep the mobs off the mages, right? We have what, Cure II?

...sigh.

Someone want to tell me how the taru survived that?

Oh yeah, as Geni tells us all the time, "I'm too cute to die!"

We would have skipped this special hell altogether if it weren't for the fact that we needed to eventually get subjobs. As a party of 6 noobs, we thought it best to go the Crab Apron / Damselfly Worm / Magicked Skull route - we had 4 MNKs, and the thought of trying to take down enough bogies or banshees to get Bloody Robes for everyone was a bone-chilling thought. Next time, I'll tell you more about our adventures in acquiring subjobs and the players helpful and not that we encountered along the way.

It's not the level, it's what you do with it

This game would be pretty boring if all you had to do was gain experience points and level up. I like exping with friends as much as anyone (and sometime I will post some of my favorite exchanges from party chat), but I need more than that to be fulfilled in my gaming experience. I need storylines - quests, missions, battlefields!

Since we started exping in Zeruhn, we were able to get the first Bastok mission out of the way early on. That left a quick trip to Dangruf Wadi, and then some farming of fetich parts in the Palborough Mines.

Those fetich parts that seem to drop off every other kill when you are just jerking around in Palborough on your way to the BCNM area? They don't much like to drop when you want them. Or maybe they just don't drop well for low level parties who are farming exclusively for them. I don't know.

I re-learned a valuable lesson while farming for those fetich parts though. Rarabs have a 36 mile link radius, and they will all rip your face off if you attack just one of them.

Ow.

I think we farmed for 2 weeks (that is, 2 static sessions - 1 per week) before we finally got all the pieces for everyone. But we prevailed, and ultimately we all saw this:

Being low level meant that we had the chance to do some quests that we might never have completed on our main characters. Do you remember that quest The Gustaberg Tour? You have to be level 5 or lower to complete the quest, and in a full party of other level 5 or lower players. I have had this quest in my log on my main for years, I've never completed it, and at this point I likely never will. Walking from town to the NPC you need, getting the full party of people together, making sure everyone is the right level - it is all too much hassle for a paltry sum of 500 gil.

But not if you are actually level 5, on a new character, and scraping to get every single gil you can! We didn't even need to go out of our way - on our way to Konschtat to exp one night, we found the NPC and collected our gil. It is little things like that quest, and experiencing parts of the game we may have missed the first time through that I am enjoying so much with this experiment.