For Glory and Land Besieged updates - Assault Missions!Follow

After over six months of no updates, I’m pleased to announce that I have both returned to the game and am resuming frequent (read: whenever I get bored enough to) updates on both the For Glory CoP guide and the Land Besieged ToAU guide. In particular, I’m happy to announce right now that the ToAU guide has detailed strategies for all twenty assaults in the first four ranks and that I am actively ranking up and continuing assault so there will be many more to come.

For Glory – the CoP guide
A Land Besieged – the ToAU guide

Why am I writing this now, over a year after Aht Urhgan’s release and the creation of other guides on the same topic? Be warned; it’s a pseudo-speech. Update info at the bottom.

Partly because it’s a question that people keep asking me about. One of the first things they tell me, right after the usual “Holy crap, I thought you quit six months ago!!” is something along the lines of “Are you going to update the CoP guide?” or “You should finish the ToAU guide!” It seems there is a demand for me still, so I might as well do it.

Partly because, almost every day, someone tells me they recently used my CoP guide for a mission. Not last year, not months ago, this week. I haven’t even updated it in six months! But clearly I did something right there, so why not keep going!

Partly because, even after a year, I’m not too threatened by existing guides on the subject. FFXIcyclopedia covers things in far more detail than I (I’d hope so; they’ve got thousands of members to my one person!) but their guides lack the coherence of a single person’s work. Not to mention the witty commentary and of course the lovely screenshots. Celeste’s Gates of Aht Urhgan site and Farl’s pdf file successfully stole my thunder; the knowledge contained in those documents far exceeded my own findings at that point, but both really failed to develop largely into covering the expansion as a whole a year later. Slow and steady wins the race, guys.

Partly for selfish reasons. Writing is one of my hobbies and I find the guide creation fun. And I’ll admit I like the spotlight more than may be healthy. Though you should know that, despite hundreds of tells and emails I still haven’t been given one gil or free item for the guide. So it may be vainglorious, but it sure isn’t a quick-rich scheme.

But mainly because I feel that ToAU needs me somewhat, much like CoP needed me. Assault almost immediately stagnated into spamming private second class assaults. Salvage, Nyzul Isle, and Einjerjar aren’t done regularly by any linkshell I’ve found on Sylph and private groups do them irregularly with no real emphasis. Dynamis, sky, Limbus… heck even sea gods seem to be more popular. Why? A bit of ignorance on the challenges and rewards, an unhealthy dose of job-ism, but mainly probably just inertia from events that people have done for years and want to keep doing since they know exactly what to do.

I’m not a grinder; never was. I love a good challenge. Not something stupidly hard and frustearting, nor something time-consuming but easy, but a solid, approachable fight. There are those in ToAU that are untapped. I want to help the playerbase break free of too-familiar ground. I’m only one person, but I feel that if one person could pull this off, with the help of the community, it just might be me. Gotta try, ya know?


Anyway, I’m back. The ToAU guide, even the assault part, is hugely incomplete. A computer crash destroyed all my Private First / Second Class screenshots and I don’t have a good image editing program to make my maps. But it’s coming. I’ll post here when I add more information.

The CoP guide will also be revised to reflect SE’s changes. The CoP guide, for all its usefulness, was designed for a group of players doing missions with no real help. For people with maybe not even 1 75 job and certainly no merits. Clearly it’s a bit dated in that regard so I hope to update it to help both newbies and people trying to lead others through. In particular, the mission times need to be changed: they’re all many times higher than it takes to complete the missions nowadays.

Who knows, maybe I’ll even complete that Limbus guide? I already have a few shots.


But yeah, it feels good to be back. Let’s do this! And when the Wings of the Goddess rolls in, hopefully I'll be more on the spot ;-)

Edited, Jul 1st 2007 5:14pm by Erecia

Welcome Back Erecia!

We on Cerberus have put your guides to great use.
The next group in the Linkshell doing COP are putting your guide to great use. Keep up the awesome work and enjoy your time back in game.

This couldn't make me happier to hear (of course I already knew it was happening but I can pretend), I always enjoy that tongue in cheek aproach you take to everything.

WB erecia! Your guide was my group's bible, lol. Which nearly got us killed, and ruined our record, at the tonberry NM's in carpenter's landing, but we still pulled through, so who cares, lol.

One selfish thing I have to ask, is, do you plan on including the quests that get added, not just the missions and assaults? I've had a HELL of a time finding info on a lot of the damn things. Just finding out about the existence of the quests is hard enough, but nobody ever seems to actually DO the quests and write up how it went >_>...

Ericia,

I just want to say [Thank you] for your game time, xp loss. gil loss on meds and RR and for the time you take to put together your guides.

Thank you for allowing me(and many others) to not only get sea but to finish CoP back in the day when it wasn't nerfed and when we lost real xp in the process.

Your efforts significantly improved my game experience and contributed greatly to "sticking with it" for "one more pass" at battles where we had already lost 15k xp and literally millions of gil.

[Welcome back] and if you ever get bored with Sylph or can't get peeps to help out over the idea of loosing a few measly xp, come on over to Seraph... I've got a few million xp between jobs and I'd love nothing better than to donate them to the cause of exploring new mobs/areas/missions.

I'm always willing to lend you a hand erecia, you should know that, my problem is I never seem to be logged on when you are ;p But drop me a line in game if you need a hand with anything, I'm willing to bet that there's a lot of things we could do with my BST around.

A big welcome back Erecia =]
Your guide has been a huge resource and reference point to all my CoP needs which I've just starting trucking through a little less than a month ago, and I've began ToAU.
Thank you, Erecia.