Smile!

[Hyperguy]

I haven't seen a veteran's helm any of the days of the sale.  Items must be randomized from a pool.  I did find plenty of sage gear, wizard and priest hats, and some veteran's gloves(DQ3 warrior's costume is almost complete! )

Starting to feel like there's not much to do in the game now, but...

There's all those downloaded quests to do, some of them being story quests! O_o

I haven't even started on them.  I suppose I have a reason to adventure now, instead of just hang around Stornway, do the occasional grotto, and to the ear cosy route for $$.

[JG]

Yes, DQVC items are randomized.  That became obvious to me the second week when they had the Summer Fayre advertising Sharp Shades which never came up for me.  Didn't come up last week during the Spectacle Spectacular either.

Yeah, post-game is a little bare except for the grottos.  I finally got a Silver grotto yesterday so I've been able to advance the post-game quest storyline up to this week's point.  It's pretty good, seems like it could make its own chapter in the game, except you gotta wait two weeks for each part.  Unfortunately, not much experience to be gained by these quests so far.

So now I only have 5 outstanding quests - the three Luminary quests, the Metal Slime Sollerets needed quest, and the Bling Badger stolen letter quest, for which I don't have grotto maps to unlock these yet.  The big problem of course is having to level up from the level 40-50 you'd be at upon beating the game (I was actually about level 52) to 99 to get really good maps (and then revocate and level up again 10 more times to get the very best maps.)  After 3 weeks I'm only up to level 73 and my maps go as high as level 51.

I have somewhere between 750,000 and 800,000 gold, so I dont need to do the Ear Cosy trick anymore (I did it maybe 6 or 7 times)

Speaking of DQ3 items, I've started working on Baramos to get him leveled up to get his rare items, since the normal grottos are kind of boring.  He dropped me a pair of Aliahan boots already, but I wish he'd level up more than 1 level each time you fight him.  Seems like a lot of unneccesary work to get the legacy bosses up to high levels.

[JG]

Yo Hyperguy, your gal Debora is today's new special guest at the Quester's Rest.

Plus, Dragonlord Claws if you're lucky enough to draw them in DQVC.  Its the first Rank 10 equipment I've gotten ahold of.


And for an update, my characters are now 88 Minstrel, 92 Martial Artist, and two 78 Sages (Cobra Cardinals run away from me on sight, so that's telling you something).  Wearing Sacrosant armour, a life bracer, and pair of Celestria's Raiments to regenerate health I've been knocking out Fowleye and Sir Sanguinus without the need for normal healing.  My treasure maps go up to level 66 Gold now.  I topped 1 million gold for a few days but have since sunk back under.  Of the original 120 quests only the pesky Metal Slime Solleret and Bling Badger letter quests remain.

[Moge]

Hyperguy has moved on to a better (worse?) place: Final Fantasy XIV

[JG]

Could explain why he's gone AWOL for the last few days.

[Hyperguy]

Yo Hyperguy, your gal Debora is today's new special guest at the Quester's Rest.

When I logged in on Friday to see this, I did air punch IRL.  Three times.  Then I contemplated posting up a big announcment and changing everyone's avatars to Debora.  Then I just quietly received the cosplay items from the Debora NPC to add the finishing touches to the Debora I made for my party.  Joy!

Plus, Dragonlord Claws if you're lucky enough to draw them in DQVC.  Its the first Rank 10 equipment I've gotten ahold of.

The ones sold in the postgame shop in Stornway have higher attack power.  Actually, a lot of the dragon items are already sold in Upover.

And for an update, my characters are now 88 Minstrel, 92 Martial Artist, and two 78 Sages (Cobra Cardinals run away from me on sight, so that's telling you something).  Wearing Sacrosant armour, a life bracer, and pair of Celestria's Raiments to regenerate health I've been knocking out Fowleye and Sir Sanguinus without the need for normal healing.  My treasure maps go up to level 66 Gold now.  I topped 1 million gold for a few days but have since sunk back under.

Goldwise I'm close to broke now, as I've only been logging in to check DQVC exclusives and check if Debora's arrived.  Now that she has, I'm going to try to level my Debora character to 100.

I haven't tried any of the downloadable quests yet, but I should.  I'm starting to get tired of nonstory quests, or quests where you get a lesser item than the one you give away to complete the quest.  Those types of quests are the most annoying, since sometimes an NPC will want an item that's difficult to acquire or alchemize, and they'll give you something common in return.  Makes me wary of completing all of the quests.

Hyperguy has moved on to a better (worse?) place: Final Fantasy XIV

I have stopped playing Final Fantasy XIV.  For good.  I'm not going to pick it up again until after they fix the game's issues and until after they switch the game's engine to utilize DirectX 11.  The game's in such shambles right now that as a way of apology Square Enix has actually given players an additional free 30 days of game time as an apology, but in the game's current state I'm not sure who'd want to play for another 30 days.  Seriously, fuck FFXIV.

And these days I just haven't had the time to play MMOs.  I'm busy enough with school and work that any time I do have time for myself, I will play games that I can play in bursts, like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead.

Ah, JG, I got you a copy of Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 on Steam(The gift code was sent to your gmail address).  Please consider installing it so we could play some time.  I know your computer can handle it as we have the same motherboard in our rigs.  My SteamID is jpsantiago.

[JG]

Actually, a lot of the dragon items are already sold in Upover.

You're thinking Dragon Claws.  These be Dragonlord Claws, which alchemize to Dragovian Claws, which in turn alchemize to Dragovian Lord Claws, or with an alchemiracle, Xenlon Claws, the best claws in the game.

I haven't tried any of the downloadable quests yet, but I should.  I'm starting to get tired of nonstory quests, or quests where you get a lesser item than the one you give away to complete the quest.  Those types of quests are the most annoying, since sometimes an NPC will want an item that's difficult to acquire or alchemize, and they'll give you something common in return.  Makes me wary of completing all of the quests.

The postgame quests keep things interesting.  They range from absurdly easy to incredibly difficult and frustrating.  The one that's hardest right now is probably the one requring you to show a pair of Beastmaster Claws to the ghost in the Stornway weapon shop.  Beastmaster claws can only be alchemized from Beast Claws, which are very rare (something like a 1% drop from rank 6 chests.) so you need to be able to clear level 60+ maps to have a good chance ot find a pair.  Fortunately I've been able to clear this quest.  Yes, in most cases you have to trade down your items to clear the quests but some quests are very useful.  Exterminate! is the most useful quest in the game: just beat 3 metal slimes in the same battle three times and you can get a mini medal.  Very nice if you don't have or can't beat the legacy boss maps as you'll run into plenty of metal slimes on slime hill as a consequence of searching for the liquid metals.  Plus, some of the quests complete a story arc that was started in the main quest, like the background on what happened to Brigadoom.  Plus, you can get Erinn, Patty, and Sellma as party characters.

Ah, JG, I got you a copy of Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 on Steam(The gift code was sent to your gmail address).  Please consider installing it so we could play some time.  I know your computer can handle it as we have the same motherboard in our rigs.  My SteamID is jpsantiago.

I know... I hope to get to it this weekend.  Autumn is a difficult time to introduce new activities into my schedule.

[JG]

Broke down and purchased an Action Replay device yesterday.  There's still excitement to be had out of DQ9, but my current maps have almost no new enemies and pose no challenge, and I now have all the equipment except the metal slime gear and the Boss drops.  Just got tired of spending three to four hours working a 16 level map and get nothing out of it but 3 or 4 level ups per character.  Besides, I had a $20 gift card from preordered Halo: Reach, and an extra $5 reward zone certificate so all I had to pay was a buck-eighty something in taxes.

Tried not to ruin the challenge too much with a 65,536x EXP multipler, so I went with 128x instead.  I was aiming for 30 to 40 level ups per character, but the map I tried was my first with Metal Slime Kings, and one of those babies knocked me up from 80 something to level 99 in one shot.  Going to scale back to 32x or 64x from now on, but I'm getting what I wanted out of it: leveling up enough to revocate a few times (ideally, about once a week) for the better treasure maps, ie, the ones holding metal slime and other four and five star gear.  I spent 330 hours getting my hero up to level 99 in one job, and less than 2 getting him from 50 to 99 in the next and up to 80 in the third.  Assuming I keep the ideal pace and don't level up faster than intended, I should start getting the very best maps around Thanksgiving.  I think that's fair and doesn't cost me another couple hundred hours.

On a related note, I don't like Square's revised schedule for quest releases at all.  Instead of two per week, they've scaled back to one.  Now, instead of all quests becoming available by February, we have to wait until May. (Granted, my AR can get around that but I don't intend to cheat except for making the level up grinding a little more tolerable.)

[Hyperguy]

Well JG, it looks like you got your wish.  King Trode is (alledgely) the guest for this week.  I haven't loaded him onto my game yet because I still need to save up for the wyrm staff that's in DQVC this week. X_o

Doesn't Action Replay support backing up game saves?  I personally use a Cyclo DS to load my games since it's a bit more convenient than having to lug around all of my games.  After Debora was released, I actually made a backup of my first save (something like 160 hours?) and have started up a new one with Debora as the main character.

Debora quest! :3

I'll round out the party with DQ3 warrior, but as for healer I haven't decided on making a Nera/Flora or an Ennis.  Maybe you don't know who Ennis is, so I attached an image.  She's the healer type character from Yusha, a 3D eroge by Illusion.

Most of the characters in that game are modeled after the classes from Dragon Quest 3. :O

[JG]

Trode is kinda lame actually. He doesn't do much except tag along for the ride in DQ8, and after a while fixes up the Alchemy Pot for you to use (but by the time you get it its lost alot of its usefulness).  Yangus or Jessica are much more interesting characters - they're the best two from DQ8 (if you don't count Morrie)

Yes, the AR can back up game saves, but only to a Micro SD card (it has its own slot).  It can't do a backup to the full sized SD card slot on the DS.  It says it can boot homebrew game, so I presume it could load full game ROMs too, but I haven't tried it (I dont have a Micro SD card to experiment with)