Author Archives: sandrian

Sandy’s Sunday: Pokémon time

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Last Friday Pokémon Sword and Shield finally launched worldwide. I had pre-ordered the dual pack version which contains both games, a steelbook and apparently a special code together with a friend. I already picked Sword, he picked Shield and we did a coinflip for the steelbook case, which I won.

So far I’ve been having a blast. I’m about 4 hours into the game and am on my way to the first gym. The Wild Area is amazing and terrifying. I wandered a bit too far and suddenly got matched up with Pokémon way beyond the levels of my own team. The Dynamax encounters are actually pretty neat and they drop a lot of useful stuff like experience candies. The story so far is okay I guess, but that’s never really been the highlight of Pokémon games. My rival, Hop, is annoying as usual and the game is still quite hand-holdy but you can opt out of a lot of explanations and just progress through the game at quite a nice pace.
The region is set in Britain this time and it shows. From the absolute weird Pokémon names, a fox called Nickit, to the generally British terms for things that are quite obvious. Hell even team Yell, who are sort of the bad guys?, are a sort of punk-rock style opponents that you can only expect in a British themed game. You can cook curry’s with your Pokémon at your campsite and the towns have a thorough British feel to them. So far I’m really enjoying this, more so than X and Y or Sun and Moon who were supposed to mimick France and Hawaii respectively.

Apart from latching onto Pokémon Sword for the last two days I’ve been feeling a bit detached from gaming. I’ve still not explored everything patch 5.1/5.11 have to offer in Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve not touched anything Warcraft related except to pick up the anniversary pet. The only game I’ve been putting time into has been League of Legends. I’ve been playing a lot of ARAM’s so I can complete the Worlds missions that are still open. I have been having a blast doing this so I guess I can’t say it’s a waste of time.
I have been putting a lot of time into re-reading the Harry Potter series however. This was mostly spurred on by the fact that they’re showing all the movies on TV here and I’ve been watching those on Monday evenings. Tomorrow they’re airing the seventh movie or the first part of book seven. Coincidentally I’ve just started reading that so I’m in full Harry Potter mode for the time being.

So yeah. I’m still feeling very detached from the whole blogging stuff right now. I can’t seem to get myself to write anything besides these weekly mini-updates. I’m also still very much not reading other people’s blogs, sorry! I really should get back into that but I’m just not in the right mindspace right now.
As far as games go, I really should start checking out the Ishgard content for crafters because apparently it’s an amazing source of experience. I’m sitting at all my crafters at level 70 right now, with only Leatherworker at level 50. On the gathering side only Fisher isn’t 80 yet so I hope that Ishgard can assist in that. It would be so nice to just get everything to level 80 for completion purposes. I also really need to do the mainstory content… I may just hop on today and make my way through that.

Sandy’s Sunday: November 10th 2019

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A lot has happened since I posted my November goal post. Blizzcon has come and gone, patch 5.1 has launched in Final Fantasy XIV and I’ve made the decision, and started the process, to buy myself a car. I’ve been pretty busy with real life stuff so gaming has gone onto the back burner a bit right now. Having said this, I still managed to find time to churn through tons of crafting dailies and take advantage of the hefty experience boost that Square Enix has implemented with the latest patch. As such I’ve gotten both my Blacksmith and Armorer to level 70 and my Leatherworker is currently somewhere in the 40-50 range. I’ve also managed to get my Monk to level 80 the past week so I’ve been dutifully working through my FFXIV goals. Instead of picking up Samurai straight after I decided to level my Paladin instead, purely because I want to see the tank story line from Shadowbringers. As a friend of mine put it I’m “bumrushing” the process and am currently sitting at level 73 after two days of doing the new Pixie beast tribe dailes, a ton of FATE’s and roulettes which provide me with very nice instant queues. I may even push to 74 after this post goes live and I do Mainstory roulette.

On the flipside there is the World of Warcraft where I’ve basically stalled out the moment I got my Mechagon rep to Exalted. Right now the 15 year celebration is going on ingame and I will probably poke my nose in and get the nostalgic raids done, purely so I can get the mount and then scoot out of there again. I may also do the PvP event but I’m not sure about that yet. As far as other WoW news goes… I’ve seen the trailer that announces Shadowlands and I should be hyped but for some reason I really am not. I guess Battle for Azeroth kind of soured my enthusiasm for WoW and I’m pretty skeptical about what is going to happen next. Sylvanas being the big bad isn’t surprising but I really wish Blizzard didn’t go that route. I will most definitely get the expansion, seeing as I’m still a big enough fan to play the game but I’m noticing that I’m enjoying myself more in FFXIV right now than I do in WoW.
In related fashion I’m also not terribly hyped for Diablo 4. I mean, I poured a lot of time into Diablo 3 when it launched and through all the changes and the expansion and DLC but for some reason I just can’t seem to get back into the game on my PC or my Switch. The “looter” genre isn’t really appealing to me right now so maybe when we get closer to launch I start feeling a bit more hyped but for now I’m not even sure if I want to get the game to start with.

As for my blogging right now. I’ve not really felt the urge to write or read anything for the past few weeks. My Feedly is kind of exploding with unread posts but I’m mostly just scrolling through them and not really reading what they say. I’m not sure why it’s like this and it’s probably a temporary thing but for now I’m not that engaged with the blogging community as I would like to be. I’m also a bit sad after seeing the League of Legends World Finals today. G2 has been the team I’ve been rooting for the entire season and it seemed like they were well on course to grabbing that very sought after World Cup. Unfortunately it wasn’t meant to be. I can’t imagine how devastated these players must be feeling right now and I can only hope the team will take this as a learning experience and come back stronger next year.

Next friday the new installment in the Pokémon series comes out, I hope that will trigger my need to blog a bit because I will probably be all over that game. Untill then… Stay tuned I guess?

Gaming Goals: November 2019

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October has come and gone and with it my Dad’s birthday, Halloween and a pretty big cold at the start of it. I head really big plans for the month of October but unfortunately I managed to way less than I set out to do. Let’s take a look shall we?

MMO Goals

  • Level my Monk and Samurai to level 80 in FFXIV.
  • Complete the level 80 job quests on Botanist and Miner
  • Level Culinarian and Blacksmith to level 70 + Job quests. Level Armorsmith to 50.
  • Finish atleast three Animus books on my White Mage.
  • Get Exalted with Nazjatar and Mechagon in WoW
  • Level my Warrior to 120 in WoW
  • Defeat Aszhara in the Eternal Palace LFR on my Rogue
  • Complete the zone my Ranger is in currently in Guild Wars 2

Non-MMO Goals

  • Finish Link’s Awakening

So I’ve been pretty busy in FFXIV and WoW but didn’t really play a lot at the same time. Usually I would just log in to do my dailies and then log back out and do something else instead. As such I’ve not done that much besides level my crafters and get exalted with Mechagon and Nazjatar. As sidenote, my Blacksmith is sitting at level 68 today and my Monk on 78 so I did come close to atleast striping those two goals off.
I’ve actually not spent that much time playing Link’s Awakening, something I want to rectify in November. I also didn’t touch Guild Wars 2 but instead played a lot of League of Legends during Riot’s 10 year anniversary celebration. I still log on every day to do an ARAM for fun and World Championship coins. All in all it was a bit of a weird month with some progress on some fronts and 0 progress on other fronts. As such I’m going to port over some goals to November, where I’m sure I’ll get them done, especially with the implementation of the new Beast Tribe dailies and the boost to crafting experience.
As far as my WoW goals.. My Warrior is currently sitting at level 115 so I did do some levelling, just not enough to push to 120. I haven’t touched LFR though and I do want to get that out of the way, even if it’s only to unlock the Wrathion questchain

So without further ado here are my gaming goals for November 2019

MMO Goals

  • Level Monk and Samurai to level 80 in FFXIV
  • Start leveling Dragoon to level 80 in FFXIV
  • Level Blacksmith, Armorer to level 70 in FFXIV and do Job Quests
  • Finish atleast three Animus books on my White Mage in FFXIV
  • Level my Warrior to 120 in WoW
  • Defeat Aszhara in the Eternal Palace LFR on my Rogue WoW
  • Do the Wrathion questchain in WoW

Non MMO Goals

  • Finish Link’s Awakening
  • Finish the mainstory in Pokémon Sword

This month Pokémon Sword and Shield come out and I’m getting Sword. I really want to play through the “mainstory” and defeat all the gyms to become the champion of the new region. I always really like the Pokémon games and franchise so I don’t doubt that this will be an easy goal for me. Before that though I need to finish Link’s Awakening so that is exactly what I’m going to focus on for the next few weekends.

As far as the MMO goals go, they should be easily doable. My crafters are rocketing through the levels since the 5.1 boost to experience and my Monk is as good as 80 aswell so that just leaves Samurai and Dragoon for this month. In WoW I just really want to finish leveling my Warrior and see more of the content on my Rogue so I’m going to be focusing on that.

What does your November in gaming look like?

Mental Health Day?

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I called in sick to work today. Not because I was actually sick but because I desperately needed a day off to retain my sanity. I’ve come home every day of the week with stress induced headaches and it looks like it won’t let up for a while yet. So I texted my boss that I wasn’t coming in today and that I would be back on Monday and went promptly back to sleep. I slept in untill around noon and then got out and sat down to play some games and think about why I picked today especially to have a small mental breakdown. In truth I’ve had a bit of a mental breakdown earlier but powered through it, going to work and just acting normal while trying not to fall apart. Today I couldn’t so I decided to stay home.
It has mostly resulted in a day where I was able to relax and create some headspace with cleaning up the house. I’ve gone through a lot of my clothes and prepared two big bags to be donated to goodwill. I rounded up all the paper and trash and took those out. I vacuumed and did laundry. As I was organizing the house I slowly felt the rest return to my mind aswell. I’m not done yet, there’s still some stuff I want to sort through and throw out and I still need to do some additional cleaning, I feel like it has helped me get back into a more stable mood. Plus having a three day weekend is extremely nice aswell in the middle of all the chaos that is going on at work.

Next to cleaning I also took the time to sit down and enjoy my gaming sessions today, instead of mechanically doing 2 hours of dailies. I did some leveling on my Warrior in WoW and ran around doing job quests in FFXIV aswell as taking the time to do Mainstory roulette among other things. Level 80 on the Monk is starting to get very close and I’m happy to have another job to max level, especially a DPS job that normally has to deal with very long queues for roulettes. The Moogle tome event seems to have made things slightly better though, my average wait time for a Mainstory roulette has gone from 30 minutes down to about 15 now. I have been wondering though, once I have all my battle classes at level 80 and all my crafters and gatherers at level 70 and above what I’m going to do in the game. I don’t actively raid. I don’t really feel like pugging Savage content although I’m fine with Extreme primals. Right now I have a reason to log on every day while leveling, but I’m a bit scared that once that goes away I won’t feel the pull to log on as much anymore. Of course there is a ton of content to do besides leveling, I just have a hard time imagining what I would like to do when I don’t have a steady “schedule” to adhere to anymore. I know these are worries that are premature, I’m still smack dab in the middle of levelling all the things, yet I can’t seem to keep this off my mind.

All in all taking the day “off” has really calmed me. I got some stuff done in real life aswell as in my games and I’m feeling extremely relaxed as I’m writing this blog post. Maybe this will be the trigger for me to recognize the signals of overwhelming stress earlier and some days off ahead of time instead of calling in sick last minute.

Sandy’s Sunday: EUphoria

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This past week has been dominated by two games for me. For the people who don’t follow it, two weeks ago the League of Legends World Championship started and today is the final day of the group stages. I’ve tried my best to follow most of the games, especially the ones with European teams and I’m quite pleased that all three EU teams managed to make it out of group stage and into the quarterfinals. They actually made it out in such a way that it’s impossible for them to see eachother in said quarter finals, setting up for quite an interesting rest of worlds. In theory, if they all win their QF we can have a 3/4 EU semi-finals. Which would be amazing considering the World Championship is held on EU soil this year. So my TV is on and showing League for most of the time that I’m home.
Next to that Riot Games has it 10 year anniversary celebration right now and next to announcing a ton of new games there’s also a ton to do in League because of it. So I’m doing an ARAM (all random all mid) game every day so I can pick up the loot that comes with the anniversary. It’s been nice to play again and even though I don’t think I will play anything but ARAMs I’m quite happy to play for a bit every day.

The other game that has been getting my attention is Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve been doing a lot of crafting dailies and right now I finally have Culinarian at level 70 and Blacksmith is well on it’s way to level 55. I also managed to get Armorer to 36 so there’s progress on three jobs. Doing all the job quests associated with these jobs have taken all morning this morning but I’m happy to have knocked them out. In the spirit of job quests I’ve found out that there is no specific level 80 job quest for Botanist or Miner, unfortunately. So I will be dropping these from my goals list and focus on other things like leveling my Monk (who dinged 76 today) and grinding more beast tribe dailies. All in all I’m quite happy that I have Culinarian finished and can turn my attention to Blacksmith and Armorer now. I’m quite certain Armorer will be level 50 before long, but I’m not sure if I can get Blacksmith to 70 before the end of the month. I guess we’ll see.
Next to my own progress, Square Enix finally announced the 5.1 patch date: October 29th. I’ll be happy to finally get some new lore to devour and the Nier themed raid looks amazing. I also definitely want to take a jab at Hades EX. The one thing I’m really missing is the announcement of this expansion’s relic weapons. I really hope they go back to the old form they were in Heavensward and A Realm Reborn and not the silly subzone they conjured up for Stormblood. I really hated that grind and if it’s going to be something similar I will definitely skip out on relic weapons for another expansion.

All in all I’ve had a nice productive week when it comes to, especially, FFXIV. Next week my focus will still be on that but also on Ring Fit Adventure that I bought for the Switch. I will keep you guys updated on how I find that game and if it’s actually a decent workout. For now I’m looking forward to the final day of Worlds group stage and a Sunday filled with gaming and relaxation.

Sandy’s Sunday: Picking up the pace

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As you can see in above screenshot I’ve obtained the Alabaster mounts that Blizzard made for WoW’s 15th anniversary. I got the code with the 15th anniversary collector’s edition box which I pre-ordered the moment it was announced. It was a bit unfortunate that it arrived right around the time Blizzard made a fool out of themselves with the whole Hong Kong controversy but alas. I hadn’t really foreseen this and I wasn’t planning to cancel the purchase since it was already paid in full.
The box is sitting in a corner of my room next to my tv and everything is still neatly boxed up except for the mount code and the mousemat. All in all I’m happy with this box although I don’t really have the room to display the massive Ragnaros statue just yet.. It’s pretty heavy and takes up more space than I thought it would.

This week I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV. Finally getting back into the rhythm of doing my crafting dailies every day and also doing some stuff to level up my Monk again it really feels like I’ve been picking up the pace there. My Culinarian is sitting at level 67 and my Blacksmith at 48. This means I will probably hit 50 around the weekly reset on my Blacksmith and can start Moogle dailies there and then start pulling Armorer through the Ixal ones. I forgot that as I get higher and higher in levels it’s not as easy to level up with beast tribe dailies anymore. I hope my Culinarian will be 70 before next weekend after which I can also do all the job quests between 60 and 70 that I’ve been neglecting for now.
As far as the Monk goes, she’s sitting at level 75 right now. I’ve been doing some FATEs in Raktika Greatwood as I’m waiting for queues and I actually got lucky and stumbled across my very first S-rank hunt: Forgiven Rebellion. As most hunts, or big FATEs it was extremely crowded in the zone and especially around the S-rank area. As we were engaging it my framerate dropped drastically and I was happy I could get a few spells out, I was on Red Mage, and I only died once. I wasn’t too impressed with the rewards from killing it but I think I have enough Sacks of Nuts, the current hunting currency, to get one of the two pets they have on offer for it. I’ve also been doing Main Story roulette where I can to get that chunk of experience but also the Moogle tomes. Even though I’m still undecided as to what I actually want to spend them on. I think I have two more weeks of this untill patch 5.1 hits and I can focus on all the new stuff that brings. I really want to continue the Shadowbringers story and see the Nier Automata based 24 man raid. I’m also really curious about the crafting overhaul and the New Game + thing so I think I will lose a lot of time there.

In World of Warcraft (retail, I’ve not touched Classic this week) I’ve been making steady progress on my Nazjatar (Waveblade Ankoan) and Mechagon reputations. I’m only 1.2k off Exalted with the Waveblade Ankoan right now and brought my first companion to level 10, Farseer Ori. I’ve chosen to once again focus on one or the other and not doing both in one day. So far it’s been working and I hope I can ditch Nazjatar dailies and world quests by Tuesday and then just focus on Mechagon. I’ve also put in some time on my Warrior and she’s sitting at level 114 as we speak. I’ve not finished Tiragarde Sound as zone yet and if I keep going like this I wonder if I will be level 120 by the time that I do. I don’t think so, but you never know.
It’s nice to go through the zone again and to do the first steps of the War Campaign again. After a while things tend to slowly fade from memory and it’s nice to get myself reacquainted with the quests and NPCs again.

Finally I’ve made the decision to buy Ring Fit Adventure for my Switch this week. I’m having a really hard time going to the gym, especially when the weather is as it is currently and I have to bike through the rain, and so I hope some home exercise will do the trick instead. I’m really curious about this game and I hope it lives up to the expectations I have for it.

All in all I had a decent week when it comes to gaming. I’ve made progress in WoW and FFXIV and am close to scratch off a few goals for the month October already. Now I just need to get back into Link’s Awakening..

The Blizzard Controversy

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I’ve been doubting if I wanted to write a post about this, mostly because my opinion on this whole Blizzard controversy feels trivial and maybe unecessary but since I wanted to write something and no other inspiration struck me I may aswell write about this.

I’m not going to do a neat breakdown post like Belghast did. Nor am I going to announce my immediate breaking away from everything that’s Blizzard related so if you’re looking for that you can stop reading this post right here. Instead I want to talk a bit about my personal views on the subject and how this may impact Blizzard as a company (or not).

First off I want to say I think Blizzard made a huge mistake in how they handled this entire thing. The banning the player and taking his prize money, the firing of the casters, the immediate Chinese back-up. But I do understand why they did it. Blizzard, like a lot of other companies, unfortunately has quite a big stake in the Chinese market. As much as we would love it if they made a statement to support Hong Kong or any anti-China sentiment at all it would be financial suicide. They’re not alone in that, plenty of other companies are in the same situation. They may not condone what China is doing on a political plane but they are dependent on them from a market perspective.  In the end Blizzard is a company that needs to make a profit if they want to survive and keep churning out new content and paying their employees. As much as we want Blizzard to be on the moral high ground, reality is just not working that way. Their employees may be sympathetic to the Hong Kong protestors, but above that they want to keep their jobs. It’s just the way the world works and I think a lot of people have this rose tinted vision of game developers like Blizzard and get irrationally angry when stuff like this happens. Again I want to reiterate that I don’t agree with how Blizzard handled this and I absolutely know that China is run by a horrible regime that is violating human rights everywhere they look. I’m not ignorant to what is happening on the other side of the world and I can only count my blessings when I realize that I live in one of the safest, most free countries in the World. I don’t have to riot for my freedom nor do I have to fear for my live because I have different beliefs than the people who are in charge. I also know that I as a single individual can’t change anything. It’s the government of the Western world that has decided to turn a blind eye to Chinese practices because money. And I don’t think anything is going to change there anytime soon.

So where does this leave me when it comes to Blizzard games? I guess I’m still playing them. I’m still logging into WoW (Retail and Classic) and my sub is still going for three months. Do I feel the need to boycott Blizzard? No. I know that the employees who work on these games don’t make these decisions. It’s corporate greed and that’s not going to change anytime soon. If I was going to boycott Blizzard over this I could boycott half the companies I buy stuff from for the same reasons. Most of the stuff we buy is manufactured in China, where we know human rights are tossed to the side.
Do I think this has damaged Blizzards’ already tarnished reputation? Absolutely. It was ridiculous to do this so close to Blizzcon aswell. But I know that collective memory is short and something else will soon happen to make people forget this, as sad as that may be. But for now Blizzard find themselves to be in the center of the outrage and in gaming circles hatred can hang around a little longer than normal. I’m curious to see how Blizzcon will turn out this year and how they are going to try to save face.

Anyway that was my little stream of conciousness about the whole Blizzard controversy. Hopefully I will have better material for my next blog post.

When things click

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I always really enjoy reading other people’s blogs. The way they passionately talk about their hobbies and games and make me feel I’m right there with them enjoying the same things they do. I’m not nearly as eloquent with my blog posts nor do I feel like I have a compelling way of writing but I aspire to be interesting nonetheless.

With my cold slowly going away, I only still have a nasty cough left, I’ve slowly gone back to normal life proceedings. Right now I find myself spending Monday evenings watching movies. A certain channel on Dutch TV has “magical Mondays” where the theme of the movie is Fantasy. So far I’ve seen Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Fabulous Beasts and Where to Find Them and tonight it’s the first movie of the Harry Potter anthology. It’s nice and nostalgic and even though the commercials drag this movie out for way longer than it should be I find myself not annoyed by them. Instead I use that time to get little things done around the house or, like right now, get a bit of game time or blogging time in. It’s nice to just sit on the couch and stare at the TV on a Monday, it’s usually a busy day for me at work and I just want to unwind and not think too much about things then.

On the topic of gaming I’ve found a nice balance between playing World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft Classic and Link’s Awakening. For some reason things just seem to click and I feel I’ve found a bit of balance doing what I’m doing. In FFXIV I’m focusing mostly on leveling my crafters right now. My Culinarian has hit level 64, which is pretty nice, and my Blacksmith passed the level 40 mark. I expect that to be 50 around the weekend and my Culinarian to be either just shy of 70 or at 70. Which means I can put that to the side and pick up Armorer to take through Ixal dailies. I’m not really focusing on leveling my Monk during the weekdays but I’m getting plenty done during the weekend. As such I’ve hit level 75 and have been raking up Moogle Tomestones by running Main Scenario roulette. I’m not quite sure what I want to buy with them yet but it’s nice to have them in my back pocket when I do decide what I want.

In the World of Warcraft I’ve been spending my time making sure I do my Emissary quests every day aswell as trying to get my Mechagon dailies in often. So far I’ve been quite succesful and I think I only have about 7 or 8 days of Mechagon dailies to go untill I get Exalted reputation with them and can basically drop doing those dailies altogether. I’ve been logging into my Warrior during the weekend aswell and have gotten her up to 114. A Horde invasion was happening as I was leveling her up and to my surprise they give a nice boost of experience just like the Legion invasions did. Even better these invasions leave an hour buff which increases experience gained by 10% in Kul Tiras or Zandalar. It makes leveling a whole lot easier and faster and I hope next time I log my Warrior another invasion happens so I can partake in it again. With this I’m confident that I will be 120 in no time after which I have to decide if I want to gear her up and get her to the same level as my Rogue or be satisfied with getting to max level and then focus on something else. I doubt I will be able to do the latter though. I’ve missed playing my Warrior and I’m happy to be back on her so I think I will stick to her a bit longer and get her properly geared and work on various professions while doing so. Most notably Blacksmithing and probably Archaeology since I’ve not touched that this expansion yet.

On the WoW Classic front I’ve taken a decision that I think will give me more joy than anything I’ve done in the game so far. Initially I wanted to play the game on a class I don’t really play in retail to make the experience fresh and have a bit of a “what if” moment. However I soon found that I don’t really enjoy playing Warlock. The farming for Soul Shards is tedious and the standing still and casting, or wanding in most cases, while hoping my Voidwalker would retain aggro got dull fast. I tried a Druid afterwards and although I really enjoy playing Restoration, no matter what expansion or setting, it’s not a viable spec to level with. Thus I’m relegated to Feral which is less than enjoyable. I just want to heal. Let me heal!
As such I’ve done a bit of thinking and if I want to capture the nostalgia that many of my friends, and fellow bloggers, feel I should instead level up a class that feels like second nature to me. If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time the first class that would come to mind would be Warrior but I remember how absolutely terrible it was to level up back in the days so I’m going with my second big love in Azeroth: Hunter. On Retail I have three level 110 hunters with a fourth on the way, my Void Elf lady.
The moment I logged onto my Hunter in Classic something just clicked and felt right. Having my arrows back. Having a quiver again. Training Aspect of the Monkey, and later Aspect of the Hawk. Doing the level 10 taming beasts quests and subsequently taming my own pet for real. Hell even the dead zone inbetween shooting and melee all felt like a warm bath. I was instantly back in 2007, leveling up my Hunter and enjoying taming everything along the way. So now I’ve committed to my Hunter and am quite happily running along finishing off all the quests on Teldrassil. I’ve not been this happy in Classic since it launched so I know I made the right decision here and I hope to push my Hunter up to 40 as soon as I possibly can.

All in all I’ve quite found my groove and feel in a much more relaxed state of mind than I’ve been in the past few weeks. I’m happily bumbling through my MMO’s and playing Zelda on the side. I’ve found my “click” and I will do my best to hold on to it as good as I can.
Oh and as an aside. How on earth the ending of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone got approved as a kids movie is beyond me. He literally makes a guy turn to dust. What the hell parental advisory ratings?!

Down with the sickness

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Unfortunately I managed to get knocked out by a nasty cold virus this past week. It started on Tuesday and I’m still feeling unwell today. As result I’ve been going to bed really early all week and didn’t get much of anything done. It was kind of sad that I took Wednesday off and then woke up feeling like absolute crap. I canceled all of my plans and instead stayed home and sat in my pajama all day, shivering under a blanket and downing tons of tea while watching the first day of the play-ins for the League of Legends World Championship (go EU!).

With all that going on I did manage to slip in some game time during the evenings before I went to sleep. I’ve mostly been poking around in World of Warcraft Retail to do World Quests and Mechagon dailies. I’m making progress there, albeit slowly. I’m almost halfway to Exalted with Mechagon now so there’s that. As for the Nazjatar rep… I think I’m on 12/21k towards Exalted there and I have been doing World Quests there when they were the Emissary. Unfortunately though I just didn’t have the energy to work on both reps at the same time so I just stuck to Mechagon, which was faster to complete to begin with.
On the Final Fantasy XIV side of things I’ve just been doing a lot of crafting dailies. I managed to get my Culinarian up to 63 as of writing this and finished off the Heavensward job quests chain. I really enjoy doing these and I’m more and more bummed that Square Enix replaced them with other stuff in Shadowbringers but unfortunately that is how it is. I’m waiting untill I’m level 70 to do the whole Stormblood chain for Culinarian since I will have good gear then and can just breeze my way through things. My Blacksmith is about to hit level 40 aswell meaning I’m not far off getting into Moogle dailies territory on that. Doing Ixal dailies is always a bit of a double sided experience for me. On one hand they’re quite tedious to do and I tend to skip the ones that involve fishing. On the other hand they do give a lot of experience to classes by using them and taking my crafters from 30-50 with those dailies never take longer than two weeks of just doing dailies everyday. It helps that they upped the experience from job quests aswell and that I tend to do Grand Company hand-ins for extra experience when the mood strikes me.

All in all it’s been a bit of an odd week. I’ve made some progress in my MMO’s which is nice. I went to see the Rasmus live on Tuesday evening, which was also nice but subsequently the rest of my week has been a mess due to my cold. I’m hoping that I will start feeling better over the weekend so I can pick up Zelda again, thinking about puzzles with a stuffed head is not ideal, and so I can catch up on all the house chores I’ve not done the past few days. I really need to clean…

Gaming Goals: October 2019

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September has flown by. I can hardly believe tomorrow is October first. Where did my final weeks of summer go? Fall has arrived and with it colder weather, the need for house slippers and blankets. It’s dark out much earlier and everyone is slowly looking forward to the holidays. The weather has turned aswell and it makes me feel way less guilty about staying inside and game and that’s exactly what I’m planning to do this month.
But first… How did I do with my September goals?

MMO Goals

  • Level my Monk to level 80 in FFXIV. Start leveling my Samurai afterwards?
  • Complete the level 80 job quests for Botanist and Miner
  • Level Culinarian to level 70 + job quests
  • Start taking either Leatherworker, Armorer or Blacksmith through Ixal dailies towards level 50
  • Work on White Mage relic
  • Work towards getting Exalted with the Nazjatar reps on WoW retail
  • Play some GW2
  • Play some WoW Classic

Non-MMO Goals

  • Play through/finish Oninaki
  • Pick another game to play on Switch

I’ve not done as well as I hoped. Even though I put a bit of time into both Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft Classic it has not been enough to really enjoy the games. I have made some progress towards reputations on WoW Retail but again not that much. I picked up Blacksmith to take through Ixal dailies but I’m only at level 35. As for the rest of the goals… I got my Culinarian to level 60 and my Monk to 73 but that’s it. I’ve not spent much time on games at all this month.
The only things I’m happy about is that I finished Oninaki, earlier than I thought, and I picked up a new game on my Switch: Link’s Awakening. I want to rinse away the taste of September and all the stress I had during that month and look to October to redeem myself. So here are my goals for October!

MMO Goals

  • Level my Monk and Samurai to level 80 in FFXIV.
  • Complete the level 80 job quests on Botanist and Miner
  • Level Culinarian and Blacksmith to level 70 + Job quests. Level Armorsmith to 50.
  • Finish atleast three Animus books on my White Mage.
  • Get Exalted with Nazjatar and Mechagon in WoW
  • Level my Warrior to 120 in WoW
  • Defeat Aszhara in the Eternal Palace LFR on my Rogue
  • Complete the zone my Ranger is in currently in Guild Wars 2

Non-MMO Goals

  • Finish Link’s Awakening

I’m going full force MMO’s this month. I’ve already picked my non-MMO game and I’m quite confident I’ll be able to finish that. Otherwise I mainly want to focus on levelling all the things in FFXIV and some WoW shenanigans. I also want to give GW2 a bit of love so I want to play through atleast the current zone where my Ranger is in and 100% complete it.

All in all I think these goals should be doable as long as I keep logging on to play. What are your plans for October?