The Gration Marathon

It's been over a week since my last update, I've been a bit too busy with my latest addiction of watching the entire second season of Grey's Anatomy that I downloaded (just finished last night). I watched all 27 episodes in 4-5 days, so I haven't had much time for the lowest priorities (like this blog).

So last Sunday we spent a short time in Sea in the afternoon and got ourselves a Jailer of Temperance pop, unfortunately the Virtue didn't drop.

However, right after Sea I asked Cami and Minas to help me get a Yovra Organ to complete my 3rd Gorget, they were happy to help and although the first Ul'Yovra didn't drop we went and made shorter work of the second one and got the organ. Thanks again for the help with that, now I need to get organs for an Snow Gorget so I can use it alongside Great Axe when my WAR is finished leveling.

I also spent some time early in the week leveling my WAR (dinged 67 today). I experienced my first low level PT in Caedarva Mire and it was pretty disappointing because of all the issues with links and such but we did break my record for highest XP in a single kill.

Both those screenshots came in the same experience chain. I also leveled in sky on flamingo's at Lv66 for a couple hours and was happy to see you could still get 7-8k/hr up there, which to me was much better then competing for camps in ToAU areas.

After these parties I spent a few days getting Bloodthirster Madkix to spawn in Kuftal Tunnel. This goblin notorious monster drops a Lv68 axe called Acha d'Armas. The first time I spawned it in only about 45mins of killing placeholders, I tried to duo it with Kakomei on RNG but we died with the NM around 30% because of all the 300 dmg bomb tosses. So Kakomei brought her brother Makaw on WHM and we trio'd it down, unfortunately without getting the drop.

The next day I camped it for about 4hrs and got it to spawn again. This time Kakomei came out to help with assistance from Klank on THF and Thelema on BLM. We made short work of it, but again the NM did not drop the axe. So once again the next day I spent about 2hrs camping and a couple people showed up to counter-camp me, personally I saw this as being in bad taste as it's such a lowly NM that's not competed for and can be camped solo many times throughout the week, so I took off and came back a day later. On this 4th time camping it I only spent about 3hrs killing placeholders before it spawned and was happy to have Kakomei come out again to help. This time I really wanted to get the axe to drop so I called on Lionsheart whom is an old friend from earlier years, and when he arrived we killed Bloodthirster Madkix for the final time because he dropped his axe!

Friday I went out drinking with some friends and missed out on fighting my first Amaltheia, apparently Element had no problem with him though.

And finally, last night was our epic Gration fight. Yes I know Gration is normally not a NM you would find with the word epic preceding it but because of some complications it became that way. After leaving Dynamis-Beaucedine where we only got Duelist Tabard to drop I came back into Element LS to find Deuce saying that he had popped Gration with only 3 people and 2 of them had DC'd, so he was perpetually kiting Gration, losing hate and letting him wander back to pop spot and then kiting him again. So I told him I was on my way to help as I hadn't fought Gration in about a year and we have never attempted him even once yet in Purpose/Element as no one was interested in it. Flamey and Barbiechic were also quick on the scene and all of a sudden we had enough people to slowly whittle away at Gration's HP bar. After doing several 700+ dmg Spirit's Within I decided to switch back to Katana's hoping that maybe 100% Jin's could do more damage over time then Spirits Within. I was right, my Jin's were doing between 300-500 dmg so this sped things up quite nicely.

At about 1.5hrs in we had Gration to about 18% HP but everyone was off getting TP for WS's that somehow Gration had lost hate on everyone and wandered back to his pop point. When I got to him I saw he was back to 48% and was pissed! So I voked him quickly and began kiting again. Cami showed up about 10-15mins later and Flamey went back to city to change jobs. With Cami's added damage we started making quicker work of him and shortly after that Minas showed up on WHM. At this point we have done the entire fight with only 1 healer and no gravity or dispel. Unfortunately I was spending most of the time kiting instead of getting TP to WS which made this fight take longer then it should have if we had a reliable PLD kiter. At just over 2hrs into the fight, longer then it took us to kill Jormungand the bastard finally fell.

For the majority of the fight our setup was NIN, THF, WHM, SAM. Cami on MNK and Minas on WHM showed up for the final 20-30mins. This is not something I want to do again, especially with a NQ pop item that doesn't even guarantee a drop!

I will probably be making another update today or tomorrow which will address a few things people have been asking me lately. One of them being the famous question "was goldsmithing worth it".