Ah, the life of a loot hunter. I'm sure all of you MMO players rock that title in some shape or form. Doing dungeons for loot... Raiding for loot... Begging for lo -- erm you get the idea. While the experience of obtaining the virtual item you desire most is so grand, one cannot explain the sense of jubilee that explodes on your innards, sometimes... The hunt can make you me want to strangle even the cutest of rare exotic birds (I've already used "puppies" today).

In Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, there's a 24-man, duty-findable raid mission called "The Labyrinth of the Ancient." I guess you could closely compare it World of Warcraft's LFR in that the system pits you with up to 23 random players you've most likely never met before. Now, the way the drop system works is you can only roll and obtain one item per week which is fair because the items themselves aren't too bad and there are other methods to get some sweet gear in a given week. However, with 24 players and one drop per boss per party, the odds are against you, or me... mainly me.

See here, I've been busy this past week so I had to try and obtain the item I want before Monday 8am, which is when the loot-lockout resets. Of course, as a professional crammer, I was sitting there trying to get my drops from 5am to 7am.. a few hour(s) before the actual reset (I'm a genius). Mind you, 90% of these runs typically go very smoothly but this time, the dungeon masters were against me and my very very tired self.

First go around, we had a few leavers, which is fine. One group, who apparently had the all-knowing tank decided, through his infinite wisdom, that it was in the best interest of the alliance to not wait almost literally 45 seconds to re-fill the group and pull right away with less DPS players. On most bosses that's fine but on Atomos, the alliance is split into three sections so every group has to hold their own weight or a giant golem spawns and kills the other parties. Well we wiped, to no surprise despite a valiant effort and after a few explicit words, tank almighty and his entire party left the raid. Well, gee I'm all up for new things but leaving after a 50/50 shot at failing or winning? Not sure what he expected.

Second go around, was better but what are the odds that both of the entire other parties were new to the run. Though, I'd rather have new than douche'. While the run itself was successful, we pushed the timer on both the run and the reset (7:55am) down to the last few minutes which means I spent more than 120 minutes in one run with my eyes on fire... The things I do for gear, heh. Though, on the last boss, I ended up rolling on something, for the heck of it, that I would never ever ever use. Ended up rolling a 98 (out of 100) on a sweet body for my non-existant Monk class. Hoo-rah. A few days ago, I rolled a 10 on the item that gives this run any meaning to me and losing to a healer that broke all of his gear mid-run and was essentially dead weight /cry.

Yea, it all seems like a sob story but it's the truth and those are my woes of the week. Have any of you had epic, crazy, sad, or silly experiences attempting to gear your virtual avatars?