Day 5:

Day starts off pretty good with people looking for more people for the kama I want.  I PM iMatrix who is looking for more for a 33/36  but I get no response back. Then I pick up a group with Sting3r and we have difficulties picking up a third player.  He yells in Dion while I go to Giran and Gludio with no luck. I ask if anyone uses party matching and he says he doubts that. We finally pick up LightofAka and head in.

Now I realize, as melee, why the mob buffing is a problem.  He’s hitting everyone with some kind of nasty AOE damage repeatedly and I die once because of this. The mob goes down quickly though and I receive Gloves of Knowledge, LightofAka receives a single EAD, and Sting3r receives nothing.  There is nothing to split, so there’s not much we can do there.  Everyone kindly says thank yous and goodbyes in this group.  I gain nearly 90% here and head off to exp to get 31. I have also earned another friend, LightofAka on my list. He was using an S grade dagger and shots, so clearly he is a twink.

In the interest of pretending to be new I ask about his weapon, since he linked S grade shots into the party list earlier, asked about his other characters, max level in the game, how long it took, and whether or not guilds take people just over 80 or what.  He says they take all levels and asks if I’d like to join them.  I say that would be cool. I hit 31 in the meantime.

I see a few of his chars.

I am invited to clan Devastators, leader Extinguisher, no base, level 7, which is at peace.  I’m in the Avatars academy.

He also transforms into Final Form for me and then goes and destroys two noobie guards, which is suitably impressive to show a “new” person.

I head back out to Breka orcs and realize without my jewelry, I take brutal damage from the shamans nukes. I hit 32, I’m at 107k adena and completely out of shots. I buy shots and jewelry then dump all my kama drops to the NPC and I’m up to 162k adena. I learn my skills,  and chat a bit in alliance with PureHeal who says he/she’s from Great Britain Wales.  I log out and back in and catch the clan message about their forums and ventrillo server.

They question why someone from the US would play on a euro server and I simply say I heard it was the busiest and other servers are dead.  They say they’ve heard the same and talk about the server merges.  I ask a few more dumb noob questions then say I need to eat lunch. I take a break.