Boom! Shake, Shake, Shake Ta-ru!

Wasn't looking forward to Chapter 8 of CoP, mainly because I remembered it took hours getting round the Grand Palace of Hu'Xzoi and the Garden of Ru'Hmet with a party back in the day. But I thought I'd give it a go as my L90 PLD and brought along my Trust companions, Luzaf, Ovjang and Kupipi. Thought I'd bring Ovjang because of the buffs many of the Sea mobs have as he can Dispel them.

There was something strange about exploring the Palace without quivering in fear at lots of IT mobs - they were only EP to me allowing me to look around a bit. I couldn't be bothered to Sneak/Invis past them all, and if I remember, many of them are True-Sight/Sound? Anyway, fought my way past those that aggro'd and activated the Quasilumins to open the doors when it was safe. At the end I had to fight the Ix'Ghrah, who was a really easy boss to fight. Went down very easily.

The Garden of Ru'Hmet was harder. There were some DC mobs in here and, of course, the infamous Zdei gauntlets. Zdei are urn-like mobs which rotate. They have two eyes on them (a small and a large one at opposite sides) and you must run past whilst the eyes can't see you or get aggro'd. They're not hard, but just an inconvenience. However, it wasn't until getting aggro'd by the zillionth Zdei that I really got annoyed and looked them up. Amidst the many different opinions, someone had left a gem of knowledge: there is a tiny eye at the top and bottom of the urn - this is it's "true" eye. Lo and behold, there was a tiny eye that you'd never see unless looking for it. This made it a little easier to get past them, but the Zdei gauntlets still caught me out. I had to kill the Zdei, wait for them to respawn and quickly head out the doors.

The 8-2 fight was insane. Going from the Ix'Ghrah to the blue Zdei mobs (2x BLM and 2x RDM) was a steep difficulty curve and I only managed to get one Zdei killed before wiping - I can only stun one mob at a time! That's going to be one for L99 or one to do with a friend. Still, now that I've got my key items, I should be able to go straight to this fight next time I come.

After doing that for a few hours, I returned to Aht Urhgan to participate in a Besieged against the Undead Swarm. We saw them off very quickly and then I decided to go exploring for a bit before logging out. I went into the Alzadaal Undersea Ruins and quickly came across an NM called Boompadu, an Acrolith. I engaged him and managed to get him to around 50% before just running out of MP from his Sinker Drill and Earthshatter (or something). I used a Warp Scroll and left to go fight Bloodsuckers.