My holiday to Uleguerand Range

How the hell do you pronounce that anyway? Oh-lay-goo-rand? Oh-lay-guer-and?

So, I'm slowly but surely leveling my PUP. Last time I took a break from FFXI I had PUP at 72 and was determined not spam it right up to 90 in Abyssea. That's going very well so far. I've taken it up in steady increments: first stop was 75 and all my hard earned relic gear, then 79 for Shaolin Belt and then 83 for some AF3 +1 Leg action.

When I exp I usually switch to merit mode once I get to the level I want and leave once I get 20 merits (still capping the largely redundant Group 2 merits for BLM and NIN), if not before. All that time in merit mode is essential for skill ups for the automaton.

It's been good taking it slowly. PUP is really quite hard to play well and a lot of the gear is very situational, so you want to optimize. I still think I have a lot to do, though.

I also worked very hard on my macros this weekend. Previously I had all 8 maneuvers in "elemental order" on alt+2 to alt+9. That put a light maneuver at alt+8 and that was useless for Soulsoother. So, I had a serious rethink. It was also time to setup macros to equip my automaton cure potency and MAB gear. Something I should probably have done a while ago but, hey, when you're a social pariah you're not under much scrutiny! TBH, with the MAB gear, you can't really stack it up until you hit 75 anyway. Really noticing that dmg boost now!

The other thing I did was put some solid work into some MAB Taipan Fangs. It was much, much easier than I expected too. I guess staff trials scar you for life. Only trial I slowed down on was ghosts. Had no-one to level sync to so had to go to Fei'yin with it's evil repop times. All done up to 85 with geodes on standby!

Going to stay at 85 until I cap magic and melee, dunno about ranged, it's grossly unskilled.

All good :-)