Elemmire said:
Hehe

ya.. I'd say RDM is the hardest job to really get good at. It requires tons of attention towards the game XD And it's good you are back

I forgot you got a Dalmatica before you left. That thing is pretty nice looking but with Nobles, Yingyang, and Sha'ir Manteel.. it's become fairly useless for most jobs XD RDM make nice use of it for curing and that's about it really.. BLM I guess could make use too for curing but I don't see why a BLM would use it much compared to their other bodies. Stupid SE... taking such a hard cool looking item to get in the game and making it fairly useless :|
Haha... funny story that Dalmatica... Only a few people know of it. ACtually, I didn't get a Dalmatica before I left. It was one loose end that I HAD to finish, just for the sake of finishing it. My old LS (now no longer an HNM LS) provided it to me a few months before I quit. Gil then was pretty hard to come by (still is to an extent these days). I had enough gil to buy 1 Behemoth Hide at the time and got it off the AH for 6 million. I gave it to a 100+3 Leathercrafter and he broke it. Ultimately discouraged... I went into a "hate FF" mode. Around that time Svina knew what happened and got people together to do a BCNM run so I could recoupe the lost gil. Well it ended up my drops were the luckiest of them all and I recovered 6 million gil. I was back to where I left off but was uncertain if I wanted to try again. I mean, if a 100+3 leathercrafter failed, he could fail again. Svina at the time was only 90 leathercraft. So I quit due to that as well as boredom. I mean... the now ever-famous LS Kaizen were still only doing Sky Gods then. They rarely went after any of the 3 land HNMs. I on the other hand, did those things for almost a year on a daily basis. I was there for nearly every Adamantoise/Aspidochelone/Fafnir/Nidhogg run for several months. I was capped at Promathia at the time so there really wasn't anything left for me to do. So you now know why I was bored out of my mind.
When I came back, the first thing I HAD to do was to get the Dalmatica. I don't really need it but it's something that I wanted for the longest time. Problem was that this time around, people rarely sold stuff on the AH anymore. They bazaar it up in Batallia. For over a week, I looked and tried to get one but I never found one. A friend who did sky offered me one for 6 million but I thought I could do better than that. Checking, I noticed they were going for 6.8 Mill on the AH (within a WEEK!) However, I could never catch one on the AH. Over the course of a few weeks, I then asked Kurei if he would sell me one and he told me 7.5. 7.5 was not something I wanted to pay since they were going for 6.8 on the AH. Eventually, someone sold one for 7.125 (I think). A friend of mine asked another friend if he would craft it into a leather for me. I offered to pay, he didn't accept. Very nice guy, I wish I knew his name. I do know he was Jonas' friend.
Then came the search to find a clothcrafter. Many people gave me names, but I didn't know anyone personally. I eventually relied on Akron since he sent me a /tell after finding out I needed one. Akron is a REALLY nice guy. He made my Macrame for me as well as the Dalmatica itself. I offered to pay him but he declined too. He got a 0.1 skillup off the Dalmatica and said that's all he needed.
You're right, the Dalmatica really is not that awesome anymore but it was a part of me that I needed to finish. It sure as hell beats the Vermillion Cloak though. You mention the Nobles as well as the Shai'r Manteel but I'm neither of those jobs (WHM or Bard). In addition, it's not something you can just outright buy of the AH like the Noble's or Manteel. It's something that can take as little as 1 HNM spawn or it could take months. So it's more of an accomplishment piece than anything really. The Yinyang is nice, but I"m not losing out on much. My SMN macros involve swapping the Austere Robe & the Dalmatica. I'm only losing -2 BP delay. If anything, it's that the Dalmatica is just hard to get (in general). I usually just swap between the Dalmatica, the Crimson Mail, and the AF on my redmage. So it all works out.