Up too late

So. One of those nights where it just got away from me, and here I am at almost 5am. Oh well.

Been thinking about where XI's gone in the past year, a la the "Year in Retrospect" blogs. A year ago, were we really in Kaizen? Jesus. We've grown so much in that time. I remember running into Sean's dragoon at one point last winter and he said something along the lines of "Wow, that's a lot of haste!" when he checked me. This was in... maybe 17%? 18 tops?

Flash forward a year. 25-26% is standard for WAR now. Before we were impressed when we would break 1000 damage on weapon skills. We were content to make 25k exp an hour. Tonight was ridiculous, averaging almost 3k on weaponskills and doing 670 exp per kill, doing 4-5 kills per minute.

Are we perfectly geared? No. Is the margin between "perfect" and what we have now very wide at all? No. At this rate, I'd say that Mai or myself would crush any Masamune SAM. We obviously beat any not-empyreal DD. The differences on how much damage we can do is reaching the upper echelon of possibility. The scary part is that we have room to improve, and working on bodies is a step in that direction. Kermie almost being done his Fudo katana is also obscene. I partially regret not having anywhere to spend merits on account of wanting to go show off in Abyssea PUGs. How egotistical of me.

Still. It is insane. This isn't the sort of game it was a year ago. I joked tonight that it was like playing WoW, and I think it wasn't that far off. Damage is done in huge spikes every six seconds, and healing has basically turned into "Cast healz on cooldown at tanks." I can't wait to see some higher-Echelon monsters give us a run for our money now; At this point we're just throwing so many weaponskills for so much damage its almost too easy. Ukko's to Smite makes Light. Smie to Ukko's makes light. Ukko's to Ukko's makes light. Smite to Smite makes Light, presumably. Add on our obscene white damage number, crit rate and ridiculous crit damage...

I want a rematch with that wyrm. Poison pots, Fury/Smiting. Final Destination. If channeling a lesser god couldn't do the trick, I guess we'll just have to become them ourselves, yeah?