Hello, fellow players, Kawigi checking in. You may remember me from my briefly maintained summon simulator, or the time I pointed out that the Great Raven Cape increased the average drops from King Mog events.

As a player, I'm one of those people who don't mind grinding. Not claiming to be the #1 most insane person here, but I crafted four Shining Splendors (if you missed that event, I recommend reading the flavor text for it). I actually enjoyed the Mog Cakes event, and I managed to buy everything minus a couple mini burst pots. That was also when I started crafting some Hero's Rings, which were actually good at the time. When we had the Nian Beast event, I saw the opportunity to go hard on Megacryst farming, knowing that second-tier rings were coming soon, and I was able to instantly craft at least 10 of each when they were released, because of course I had all the trophies to unlock their recipes. Instantly wasn't exactly instantly, though, because crafting times were a thing. I had all my equipment crafting slots doing that for at least a week (I don't remember for sure if I had all four, thinking back, but I'm positive I had at least 2).

When the Bahamut exploration arrived, I went to significant effort to tame it, to find ways to avoid the several ways preemptive attacks could wipe your party, and to have a system where I could quickly kill everything I ran into. That process has only gotten easier over time. I analyzed the encounters, what kind of preemptives they had, what elemental resistances they had (fun fact - there are monsters that are 100% resistant to each element, except for Light). I even observed that the monsters that drop Hard Pebbles and Pure Stones never do preemptive attacks, and determined pretty conclusively that the math on the wiki about how encounter reduction stacks clearly doesn't explain everything, and are probably completely wrong.

Some of you might be like me. More of you might know someone like me. But even I stopped doing the Bahamut exploration very much over time. I'd do a run whenever there was a daily quest to run an exploration. Maybe I'd do an extra 5 or 10 runs when we had 1/2-price story missions. I always went for Megacryst maps from King Mog events and tended to use them rather than hoard them. But ultimately, I've been close to half way on my long-term quest for the Exceed Ring Ring of Dominion for a long time. I'd craft another 3 of each periodically, and then add one to my Genbu ring collection (29 of those now), and I've long felt like it would come eventually, I just wasn't making it happen quickly.

So when the news for the February special login bonuses came in, and I saw that a Koltz Star, Hope Diamond and Flaming Blood were going to be arriving for free, it was more than just vaguely interesting, and a precedence that might mean more of those materials coming in the future. I don't care if more come in the future. I checked my stash, and realized that I had one Koltz Star, two Hope Diamonds and two Flaming Bloods, and that at the end of the month, I was going to be one Koltz Star away from the prize.

So, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and arguably having a behavioral addiction issue, I verified which ring I had to craft to get Koltz Stars again, and proceeded to craft all the Monarch Rings I could with the materials I had (thank goodness it wasn't Ruler's Rings). Then I used all the Megacryst Maps I had, and crafted more Monarch rings. And then I started doing an increasing number of Bahamut Exploration rotations (Reef counterclockwise to the Pass, for those who know their way around) every day, until doing enough runs to craft 10-12 more rings was just normal. Then on Monday night, I finally generated that last Koltz Star, while crafting 10 Monarch Rings. I did one last "victory lap" around the exploration (in reality, I was just a couple fire megacrysts short of making the three Hero's Rings for the final craft). I made 83 Monarch Rings in the last 2 weeks, plus 156 of each that had been crafted over the last few years. Now I'm just waiting for maintenance to end tomorrow to get that final Flaming Blood, and the longest-term goal so far in this game comes to a close for me.

Does anyone else have a similar story? Did the giveaways motivate anyone else to finish the job? How's everyone else's RoD progress?