Playing FFXI is a nice way to decompress from my real life of looking at and fixing other people bad code, or creating some myself.

However, the day-to-day life of Suquamish can get a little hum-drum.  Offing Puks is great fun the first one hundred to one hundred-fifty times, but after that the excitement wears off a little.  Plus, there is only so much of time wasters one can take that supports life in Vana’diel.  Farming, Crafting, Harvesting, Fishing, Logging, Minning, Clamming, all get a bit grindish.

So a couple weeks ago I decided to book Brenner match.  The allure to Brenner was that it had no arbitrary limits set on it, no silly side quests to complete, thus allowing anyone in the LS to join [if they Chains of Promathia installed].  Most of us (including myself) had never done a PvP tourny inside FFXI.  Our collective knowledge about Brenner ended at knowing it as a complex version of capture the flag.

There are some nice nuances that PvP allows for.  For example, moving can cause your opponent to not be able to hit you, or not allow that Thief (or /thf) to be able to SA you.  Likewise, if your opponent moves, you can still strike him given he’s not to far away and there’s not any terrain blocking you.

Since it was PvP and we had a blast killing one another while figuring out the game. We had SO much fun, in fact, then and there we unanimously decided that it should be a regular fixture of the lolCats LS.

Last night was our second Brenner night.  A few new members came along, and were struggling to figure out the gist of the game, but with a core group the knew how to play and what to expect, Brenner took on a whole new level of excitement.  Not only was it a blast putting the smack-down on fellow lolCats, we had a few close games where the score was decided in the last several seconds.

Lessons learned:

• Damn those Paladins and their high DEF.. they’re impossible to kill quickly.   That is, unless..
• Samurai/thief with SA+WS can ruin any job in a terrifically short amount of time, unless…
• A level 75 Thief/ninja is just this side of impossible to hit.

I have to hand it to SE on this one.  Brenner is great fun. It both enforces the team-oriented spirit the game tries to foster, and allows for some seriously great head to head fun.  I’m already looking forward to our next Brenner event.