My days on FFXI are winding down. I don't think there's much left in this game for me (except possibly bst). With the departure of one of my best friends, it's sad to play without him. (At least we are neighbors and I can still see him IRL.) So here is quite possibly my last funny death story. I'm going to give you a pretty good setup and make it worth your while. (Note to party involved, if I forgot if you were a he or she, I apologize.)
My last party was in.... crap I forget where we were. I had no idea where we were. But it's one of the few places at my level where you can kill gobs as well as crabs. It looked like Kuftal, but it wasn't. Anyway the party was set up right next to a room with 3 gobs, a leech, and the most evil freaking crab on the face of whatever planet this world is on.
So we killed the stuff in that room next to us. The crab was the hardest of the bunch. Gobs were committing suicide with their bombs pretty early. We must have been very intimidating. Great XP on mobs that kill themselves at half HP within a minute. Nice. But there was that @%#!ing crab. I hate crabs. That guy would take everything out of us. Needless to say, if we were going to chain, pull the crab last because we needed some serious downtime after that little @%#!er.
When our room would empty, I would have to go further out to pull. (Now I'm good at pulling, I just don't like doing it. I hate when there are no mobs and someone in the party is saying "pull! pull!" That's just rude. And I don't like competing with other people to pull because I sub thf and provoke is quicker than my bow.) There were a couple other parties in there, and I'm sure the one closest to us was pretty ticked I would be pulling past them. Especially when their puller would come right behind me and try to take what I was aiming for.
So I run back to my party with a goblin in tow, and run past the other party and their puller is behind me, coming to look for pops. Sure enough, there is a goblin pop in the room next to my party. I tell the other puller "you can take our link if you want it." He/She decided to just let us deal with it ourselves. I got nervous. My party says, "We'll just sleep it." And we did. My blm had a pretty damn good sleep II. When the first gob died, he had us stop attacking the second and sat there casting every enfeeble possible without waking it up. It was a damn fine show. When he was ready, we killed the second gob in seconds.
Well, pulling across a room with pops is a bad idea in the first place, and your luck is bound to run out sometime. I'm running back to my party with another goblin, when they all say "pop!" So having a ton of faith in my blm, I get cocky. "Just sleep it." Wouldn't you know it, the pop was that @%#!ing crab. The crab resisted sleep II like it was a light breeze. And coincidentally, this was not the easiest of goblins either. When the goblin died, everyone started throwing out their 2 hour abilities. The white mage went down first. I think the RDM raised him, or he had reraise on, because suddenly he was alive again.
I started my 2 hour. Just my selfish little pet peeve, I hate when people either do a weaponskill, teleport, or escape when I blow my 2 hour because I will grab hate and die for everybody while they have a chance to get away. And the samurai 2 hour is hot. I wish I got it every 2 minutes. Well, I see "gather for escape" and I say "wait". Dumb move on my part. The blm actually listened to me and waited. I got the hate temporarily, but I also screwed everyone's chance of getting out alive. Mages went down next. The crab spotted our newly raised, mostly weakened white mage and attacked him next. Down he goes again. I quickly did a search of the area's white mages. Only one. I sent a tell asking if he/she was available for a raise at <pos>. No response. Before I could even check for another job that could raise, I was dead. That @%#!ing crab killed my entire party. Ok, I killed my party. I pulled the damn crab link and I made them wait for my selfish 2 hour. I did apologize profusely though. I think 4/5 of them accepted it.
And, a couple people had warned before the fight that they had to leave soon. They could eat the XP and home point, but didn't really want to. So I had to call my neighbor, who was at Disneyland, and ask him to come home and Raise 2 my party I killed. (We live down the street, so it wasn't a long trip.) Thank you Niekon for raising my party. Most of the party had a good time while dead. We talked and joked. I think only one person was not amused. He/she didn't talk practically the entire time we were dead. This was only the latest in the comedy of errors that was our party that night. I left out the rng/thf puller with no AF and not even a key for any of it. Or the rdm that took half an hour to get to our party when he left.
Lessons learned:
Don't @%#! with that crab.
Regardless of how good the blm's sleep II is, if that crab pops, the puller dies. (Goblin links are okay!)
Just because you find a place where you don't need to kill crabs to XP at the mid to high 50's level, a crab is still going to be the one to @%#! up your night.
Sometimes mithras have no sense of humor.
I didn't really take the party seriously that night. It was more comedy to me than a serious party, and I think most of the others felt the same. Sometimes, it's just nice to have a party that isn't too serious. I'd take a fun party over a psycho controlling party filled with drama. (If you run a parser, you are psycho. Get a life you killjoy.)