Last week I decided that the time had finally come to pick up Dynamis again.
Yesterday was my first visit to one of the outland dynamis though…

Dynamis-Buburimu

After a nice cutscene with Diabolos I Found myself in a not so sunshiny Buburimu peninsula.
I personally feel that these new dynamisi (or however you call them) are much more fun, because you not only fight different kind of mobs instead of all orcs, yagudos or quadavs, but also because it takes much less time to complete these dynamisi in general (you have only one hour).

I also enjoy going to dynamis as ninja much more than as Red mage, since then there is really no problem if my connection R0s from time to time, the mages have it covered

I don't care if I have to stay up this late to attend Dynamis,  I can always fall asleep with other fellow Europeans (read: Italians) in the middle of the event :D  

P.S That's btw my head on the picture that is getting eaten by the Apocalyptic beast (The Dynamis-Buburimu Mega Boss)

P.P.S.  RDM AF of course did not drop at all, it's the famous Red curse I have to live with :) I must be 0/2323873297 on AF2 by now ^^/

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Please take some time to watch this video…
For me, it brought back so many memories~

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The (Shi)Van_economy has come to a point that I can barely sell my Aristocrat Coats anymore…

*
Hmmm…

Perhaps there are too much level 100 crafters out there now
Perhaps there are a lot of players who don't have 4 million gil anymore
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps it is far more complicated

I am starting to grow very weary of the crafting game. Everybody knows how it works:

• You look up the recipe,
• Calculate the costs of the materials and deduct them from the AH price,
• Calculate your HQ odds,
• Check the current stock of the item and the frequency of its selling at AH,
• Be patient and make sure that YOU are not the one who's flooding the market.

I hardly ever started a craftingsession with as goal to get a HQ item.

To this day people still don't agree on how the HQ thingie works.
the only thing of which there seems to be consensus about is that HQ' go in Tiers,
which means your HQ rate will go up the more your craftingskill exceeds the item level cap.

About the Vanaday you craft on:

Some say you have a bigger chance on HQ if you craft on Darksday or the day your crystal is weak to and less chance on HQ when you craft on Lightsday or the day your crystal is strong to. Others state the opposite or the same day as your crystal. And yes, of course there also people that claim that it doesn't matter at all on which day you craft.

Everybody is just telling what he or she claims to know, but frankly it's nothing more than "in my experience" of which they don't even can comprehend. Hell, there are even people who say that:

• Equipping an Apollo staff on lightsday to make light crystal items results in a guaranteed HQ1.
• Using the barspell of your crystal ups the HQ rate
• Wearing only Rare/EX items or nothing at all improves your HQ rate.
• Having a four-leaf in your inventory helps 10% of the time.
• Talking to your best in game friend during the actual crafting does miracles.

Whatever…

Yesterday the Clothcraft guild item was a Scarlet Ribbon, which has a level 52 cap.
Since I am a level 99 + 6 clothcrafter, this is a tiers3 craft for me, which schould basically mean that I have 50% chance of crafting a HQ. Since the HQ version has +CHR on it, I took this opportunity to craft a signed one for Les_Bard.

These were my results:
Out of SEVEN which I crafted on Windsday, Waxing moon, facing East -> I crafted 0 HQs, 7 NQs and No breaks
Out of SEVEN that I crafted on Iceday, Waxing moon, facing East -> I crafted  6 HQs, 1 NQ and No breaks

What does this tell me?
Actually completely nothing at all, this doesn't prove or say anything.
In the end I got 6 HQs out of 17 crafts, which is basically 50%, exactly what Tiers 3 is supposed to stand for…

This is why I always have been mainly focused on getting money off NQ items and before even realizing it, *poof* , you crafted a HQ version.

But now with only a few people farming or sometimes monopolizing some ingredients, sellers are having an easy time in boosting the AH price of these ingredients, because there is always someone of the five billion high level crafters, who will pay the newer high price and will on his turn have to sell his crafted item at a much lower price, because the demand for the item is too low or people just don't have the money to buy it, which make it hard to find a NQ item that actually still gives you some small amount profit. The market becomes flooded, because with the high number of crafters out there, there is always someone who's looking at the same recipe as you to make money on and now with FFXIAH.COM out there, it's childplay to check what craft should give you some profit.

That being said, here are some things I always keep follwing things in mind when crafting:

1. Try to keep wasting money to a minimum

• Be patient

If some ingredient is too expensive, just wait a few hours to buy it. Most of the time there is an up and down cycle on the price of the items, especially on the lower valued items. But buying 10 gold ores at 5K or 10 gold ores at 9K each, will save you 40k of gil on this ingredient alone. Otherwise it's overpaying 40k here 25k there, you'll be out of money before you know it… Same goes for skilling up on your crafts, you really don't need to gain 30 levels, I used to be like this and lost a lot of money this way. As for today I only try to skill up my subcrafts when I can gain a profit. 

• Shop around for cheap prices

And always check if a NPC isn't selling the ingredient for a much lower price than the AH is !
Actually, the latter doesn't only count for ingredients but for ALL items. As a test I put up a scroll of Light threnody for sale on the Sandy auction house last week. In nearly one week I have been able to sell it three times at a price of 5000 gil. Pretty insane if you know that if you take two steps to the right from the S.Sandy AH, there is a npc named Lusiane of whom I always bought the scroll for a mere 110 gil. This means that 3 different people succeeded in needlessly paying 45 times too much for an item. Do this 45 times at this level and you will have wasted over 225k for nothing… How hard is it to check npc prices online? or AH? 

2. Mules

I have 3 different mules in each of the three cities and a mule (whose identity until today I kept well hidden) through which I most of the time sell my items. Furthermore, if have crafted too many items, I never put them all on sale at once, but do so gradually through my mules.

3. Don't ever throw any of the (rest) ingredients away

Even better, don't ever throw anything away at all, even if it's just one lousy beetle jaw, I will always at least sell it through a NPC. For the more expensive crafting ingredients, I never sell the leftovers, but send them all to one centralized mule.    

4. Don't get greedy

I most of the time sell my items at the same price as its last auction sale price, sometimes a little higher, but never exaggerated. I never fully understood why so many people bazaared their goods at almost double of the current auction house price. Do these people ever manage to sell these goods? Give a few weeks and bearing "the light threnody" story in mind, they probably can, but I always settled for the ongoing current price.

5. Never be disappointed

• Breaks inevitably happen from time to time
• The market doesn't always react the way you had hoped it to
• You win some you lose some
• More than half of everything is luck
• Drink some alcoholic beverage while crafting, it helps you make cry harder

Woaw, this turned out to be a much longer blogpost than I intended it to be,
full of stuff that I never really meant to write in the first place.

Oh well, that's how it usually goes…
Anyway, I hope I didn't bore you too much with all this blablabla (in case you would have read it all)

V~

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Alternative Title : *Puffing around in the Windurstian Zoo* 

After the latest version update, a completed Lure of the Wildcats quest makes it possible for you to get teleported from the Nation (where you did the quest) to Aht Urhgan for a miserable 300 gil, so I decided that it was time to finish up this quest in that last nation standing. Windurst…

I guess you could say that, I almost literally dropped and lost my mind doing the Windurstian part of this quest. Even with ranger subbed and a printed list of NPC names that I had to talk to, it still took me nearly two hours to finish this quest ! (While the Sandy' quest barely took me 10 minutes)

Not to be a racist here, but if you TaruTarus look very much alike in appearances, then you should at least try to differentiate by being a little more creative in naming each other.

I mean: Chewbime kiba, Chewmebi kebi, Chewmemi kebab …
Scrolling through my widescan alone gives me a terrible headache >_<
and if you really have a hard time being original, there is nothing wrong with names like Plop, Stimpy or even Josh.

Furthermore, I don't care if you are a NPC or not, but if you know that you are a little Taru, do you really find it necessary to go hide yourself in some dark hole or duck behind some sinister wooden crate ? You are doing it on purpose, aren't you?

Oh and if you all are supposed to be so intelligent,
then why does the infrastructure of your city appears to be one of the worst and most chaotic in Vana'Diel?
Please don't you dare giving me some explanation like:

1. "As Tarus we had to compromise with the Mithras about the City's layout and since Mithras are basically still cats (animals), Windurst had to be designed as frickin Zoology."
• Does this imply that you Tarus are animals yourselves?

2. "You're a just a stupid Hume, which is why you will never be able to comprehend the true ingenuity that lies within the infrastructure of our Capital…"
• Sure, building your city on the middle of some lake that would flood your entire city if some rain would start pouring out of the sky and letting Dhamels roam free in the middle of your city. You even had to employ some gimped Black mage Tarus to warp you from one part of the city to another, since the egos of some tarus required them to live on some separate islands of 500 square (enix) metres which made the city larger than it should have been in the first place.
  

3. "Nobody is forcing you to come to Windurst!"
• I know that, but unfortunately my employer resides in a Windurstian guild who still takes care of my source of income. However, I just got notice that I won the Aht Urhgan Green card lottery for the year 2008, so I am relieved to say that I won't be forced to renew my "Windurstian working visum". I can now just move my Clothcrafting business to Al Zahbi. /hurray for that
  

Oh and just to make sure that you don't get the wrong idea: 
I still love you little rascals 

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Three attempts at making a Noble's Tunic resulted me in getting 1 break and 2 HQs.
WooohoOooOoo and not to mention that I didn't forget to sign them. It is nice to know that two different persons are running around now in an Aristocrat's coat with my name on it. Don't you just love the Vanity ?!

But as the in game economy is acting more than just weird lately, prices can fluctuate extremely rapidly between very expensive and ultra cheap within two Vana'Diel Days… This way Shining Cloth was auctioned at astable price of 1.150.000 on Shiva, while Noble's dropped from around that price to 800k (with 16 tunics for sale right now).

Since Lestath is already in his sixties as Bard, I wanted to craft some signed Sha'ir Seraweels for him. You won't believe me if I tell you that the ingredients cost around 50k, while it's being sold at 300k a piece at the auction house. However, how nice and easy money making as it sounds, the main ingredient is a 40k worth square of Taffeta Cloth which can almost never be found at the auction house. In my eyes, the cloth is worth much more than its current price… 

According to somepage, this cloth is dropped by a level 72 NM ghost named Manes who resides in the dark and awful Bostaunieux Oubliette. This Ghost is supposed to drop a minimum of 1 square of Taffeta Cloth, but can drop up to 3 squares at the same time. As self torture lies in my nature, I geared up my RDM/NIN and went down there to check it out for myself. After 3 hours camping the first night and 4,5 hours camping the second time (where do I get the time nowadays >_<), it finally spawned.

Did I get a piece of cloth? No, but I did get a clean and fast death instead…  Crazy of me to think that this NM could be meleed, I think it would be if it wasn't so incredibly resistant to Silence. Silence got resisted every single time and not only is he in love with casting ice spikes over and over again, he also seemed to spam -ga III spells all the time. On top of that, some stupid barking Garm Hound decided that this was an excellent moment to attack me as well :/

Of course you understand this means war !

I am going back in as RDM/NIN but this time I will bring my entire enfeebling set, all my HQ staves, more remedies+holy waters and a full charged tactic pearl (Beatrice is there for the moral support). You can take my word for it that it WILL go down and drop the cloth I need to craft some fancy pants for Lestath. Don't you see? It is for the sake of the entire Shiva Server, if I don't, he might start wearing Subligar when he hits 72. NOOOOOoooooooooooooo !

P.S. "Gespenst" is German for Ghost. Although at first I thought: "SE never seizes to amaze us in being original", I noticed more German mob names down there. OMG The Germans have invaded the French Oubliette !! Somebody should go warn Curilla that San D'Oria might be next !!

P.P.S. I should definitely start considering going into therapy, while camping for Manes. I caught myself twice at talking to my NPC buddy Beatrice ((((゜д゜ )))

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