It feels like forever since I had a chance to properly sit down and write up a blog post. With work being busy and me being upped to work 40 hour weeks I tend to neglect a lot of things I would otherwise spend time on. Blogging is one of them. But today I felt relaxed enough with my time to carve out a chunk of my evening to write a nice post that is actually longer than 200 words and mostly screenshots.
First off: I’m skipping the Gaming Goal list for July. Honestly I’m just working way too much to realistically set goals for a lot of games. Add up that in the weekends I’ll mostly be busy with either social activites and/or clearing out the house (oh my lord we have so much junk) and you can see how it seriously eats away at my already limited free time. Even though I might not formally make a gaming goal post I do have some things I want to have achieved by the end of the month, most notably upgrading my Ninja relic on Sandrian and getting my Monk on her to level 50 in FFXIV. I’m only 14 items away from upgrading the relic as of today so it should be easily doable. As for the Monk, she’s sitting at level 41 now so that should be doable aswell. Other than that this month is a complete free for all. I’ve recently started playing The Secret World and I really want to keep doing that for atleast one night a week so there’s that and in the meantime I guess I’ll be spending most of my time on my 3DS since it’s really the only gaming device I can pick up and just play. Oh and Pokémon Go… When it ever rolls out here in the EU. I will probably spend a lot of time on that.
Now what HAVE I been up to the past few weeks?
Crafting, Crafting and more Crafting
Since I get home really tired and often am not finished with dinner and everything surrounding it before 8pm I’ve resorted to doing stuff in FFXIV that is relaxing to play. So instead of stressing out over capping my Lore, gearing my characers or all that nonsense I decided to turn my attention to Gathering and Crafting on both my characters. Sandrian already has Weaver at 60 and all the other crafting and gathering classes above level 20 atleast. Sarella however was a different story. I never really got into crafting on her so I either had to make do with having to level from scratch or somewhere in the level 5-10 range. I can proudly say that all my Crafting classes are atleast level 15 now with some of them already being 20 aswell. The Ixali dailies have been most helpful with this and I’m enjoying myself, which is what matters most. Although the leveling goes in a fairly slow pace I’m still happy with the progress I’m making and I’m not worried about pressure at all. I know I’ll get all these classes to 50 and then 60 eventually, it will probably just take a bit more time than someone who pursuits the game in a more hardcore fashion.
Next to Sarella I’ve also been busy on Sandrian. As I’ve mentioned before I pushed Weaver to level 60 with the help of the Moogle dailies that were introduced with patch 3.3. As much as I hated doing the Moogle quests the first time around in the Churning Mists I have to say that the Moogle dailies aren’t a problem at all. They take about 5-10 minutes a day to do and they give a lot of experience to leveling crafters… plus a ton of items you can trade in for either Relic items or the old Blue Scrip gear to boot! With me being in relatively bad crafting gear the level 58 gear has been a real big upgrade. So much that I can actually start crafting up collectables so I can upgrade my gear even further to the Red Scrip level.
I’m not an expert crafter at all and I don’t know much about what the ideal path to gearing up is, but I would like to delve a bit deeper into the Crafting world so I can make myself nice outfits, pets, mounts and other goodies. Maybe if I learn to play the market I’ll even start earning enough gil to buy my own house! Instead of just owning a room in the FC house.
Plus, doesn’t my little Miqo’te look incredibly cute with her oversized crafting hat on?
World of Warcraft?
I have been playing a bit of WoW on and off the past weeks. I made sure I got both the toys from the Midsummer Fire Festival, moving my achievement up to 117/150 toys collected now. I know there are a lot of easy to get toys out there still but my focus hasn’t really been on there. I do want to get to max rank with atleast the Brawler’s guild though since I want that mount… And Blizzard will be shutting it down for a while, probably with the pre-Legion patch. I’ve also broken 100k gold for the first time since Cataclysm. I’m at 120k now and still steadily going up. I’m not sure if I want to use this eventually to buy game-time again or if I want to use it to buy ingame exclusive stuff like expensive mounts. For now I’m just saving up so I can start off in Legion with a decent amount of gold on my name. I can’t believe the launch is in less than two months already!
Lastly I’ve been spending most of my time on my 3DS. I have finished New Super Mario Bros 2. and am working my way through several other games. In Donkey Kong Country Returns I’ve killed the second boss and arrived at world 3: Ruins. In Pokémon X I’m well on my way to getting the thrid badge and I’ve added Mario Kart 7 to my collection where I’ve completed the 50cc races and am now slowly making my way through 100cc. And boy that is a leap up in difficulty. I really can’t wait to start doing 150cc and unlocking characters. But all things in time.
As you can see/read I am working on enough projects when it comes to gaming. Progress isn’t that fast as it could be, due to my limited amount of time, but I do get some things done and even get to finish games! For someone who has a huge backlog, that is mostly unfinished, finishing any game right now is a real achievement. Especially considering the amount of time I have to spend on games in general.