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.

Early days in the Zeruhn Mines

It has been almost a year since the crazy idea to try being a noob on another server began - why don't I go back to the beginning and show you some of our earliest adventures?

Those days when the only spell a WHM has is Cure 1 and RDMs are stuck with nothing but Dia. With 2 mages and 4 MNKs, and 2 whole spells among them, what does a party do? Everyone melees, of course!

Of course, being level 1 on completely new characters means that you have 0 skill in everything. We could kill everything well enough, but it meant resting after every 1-2 mobs, and sitting on TP for a long time until someone got to level 10 skill.

Thankfully, low levels go by quickly! We got to see the following scene repeatedly, until we were level 5 or 6, when deaths and exp loss created some gaps in the party's exp.

We were living in our own little self-contained world up to this point. Sure, we'd see others in town, but since were leveling down in the mines and not really venturing out and around into the wider reaches of Vana'diel, we didn't really interact. After level 5, we started to leave town and accomplish some goals outside. Next time I will tell you about some of the people we have encountered on our adopted server. Some have been good, so not so good - but all of them have made an impression!