A Fading Shadow

As I had the week off work this week, I had plenty of FFXI time to do stuffs. Chinchii and I decided to press on with CoP and ran up to Pso'Xja to farm coloured chips (Grey, Carmine and Cyan) to get the Pso'Xja Pass for access to The Shrouded Maw. We must have been there for an hour, killing Diremites and Maze Lizards but no drop. We got a bit bored and left, hoping to come back with a THF at some point.

I'd been reading up on the rank 5.1 Lich fight and had noticed that a SAM61 had been able to solo it. With me as a L60 PLD and Chinchii as a L55 SAM I thought we could give it a go whilst in the Beaucedine Glacier. We ran our little legs down to Fei'Yin and made our way to the Qu'Bia Arena (noticing the Shadows had been repositioned to make room for higher level mobs, grr). Inside the Qu'Bia Arena we buffed up, popped food (I ate a Tav Taco and gulped down a Yagudo Drink, Chinchii ate a Meat Mithkabob) and ran in.

There were two Skeleton Sorcerers (one to the left and one to the right), and Archlich Taber'Quoan in the middle. One oppened with a Thundaga, one with a Blizzaga and one with a Sleepga. Fortunately, the Sleepga landed first so the other two woke us up, and hardly dented us. In fact, the fight was a doddle! I opened with Invincible, so Chinchii popped Meikyo Shisui and began obliterating the Archlich. She took hate instantly, which leads me to question Invincible's ability to keep hate, but it was manageable. The only difficult thing about this fight was that as PLD, and therefore getting wailed on by the adds, it was difficult to main heal. Somehow I managed to get the majority of Cures off, and kept us going. Finished the fight on around half life, but it was still relatively easy. Taking buffing and prepping out the equation, we beat it in four minutes, not bad for a L60 and L55!

Knowing we couldn't duo the Shadow Lord and that we couldn't be bothered with CoP at the moment, we decided to unlock Dark Knight. You get given Chaosbringer, a cheapy 3 damage weapon with 666 delay (LOL), and the only two jobs that can use it are WAR and DRK. Naturally this meant using Chaosbringer as my L37 WAR (and Chinchii's L30 WAR) to kill 100 mobs. Neither of us had used a greatsword before, not even me as PLD, so we had to face lots of misses as we began killing in West Ronfaure. It took almost an hour to get 100 kills with Chaosbringer!

After that we headed to Beadeaux (why, I don't know but apparently that's where we had to meet Zeid) and unlocked DRK. We logged there for dinner.

In the evening we met up with Teila and Sirdante to do Chinchii's L55 LB2 and to go kill the Shadow Lord! We met in Xarcabard and funnily enough everyone was ready to go at 7pm on the dot! We ran around Xarcabard and found the three NMs and with two level 99s, killed them pretty quickly. I'm still not sure how a party of L55s could do these considering how hard they hit, but hey, didn't matter.

Then it was straight into Castle Zvahl Baileys where we soon got lost trying to find the correct route past the beastmen and up into Castle Zvahl Keep. It took several Silent Oil / Prism Powder uses to do it, but we made it. The journey through the Keep was much quicker and before long we'd got through the teleporters and out onto the battlements where the Throne Room was. Inside the Shadow Lord rose from his Sarcophagus (what timing), and froze Zeid to the spot, challenging us to a fight.

We buffed up (not that we needed it!) and like the brave PLD I am, charged in and engaged the Shadow Lord. His first phase went down pretty quick, but with Teila on MNK, she had Formless Strikes to get through his physical barrier. After a quick cutscene, the Shadow Lord rose up to full health again, turned a black colour, and stomped over to us to begin using his nasty AoE, which took Chinchii and me down quite a bit, and even knocked Sirdante into yellow health.

But he was no match for us and we brought him down in no time, to watch as he exploded in spectacular fashion as we ran from the Throne Room, having saved Vana'diel from the Shadow Lord's tyranny. Triumphant we returned to Bastok where Chinchii and I ranked up. Straight away I bought the Republic Mantle from the gate guard with the +2 VIT and +2 DEX on it, as I'd had my eye on that for awhile. Granted the Knight's Mantle is now better, but hey it's a cheap and free cape.

After that we changed to DRK and got to L6 in South Gustaberg before logging out for the night. A successful day, yet again!