Author Archives: sandrian

Sunday Summaries #3

Posted on by
Reply

Hello everyone and it’s Sunday again! My time really does fly doesn’t it?
It’s been a really busy week for me. Work has been kind of crazy, I played a lot of FFXIV and I did a lot of stuff around the house. I also took my time shopping again, seeing as one of my bras snapped and I needed replacement ones anyway and I picked up some new jewellery and for the first time in ages Pokémon cards.

So, what have I done?
In the world of gaming I’ve been mostly focussed on FFXIV. We raided two nights of Omega Savage and got turn two down and are slowly working our way through learning the mechanics of turn three. Although I’m really enjoying the raids I’m really struggling to get my Ninja going properly. I have my opener down and most of my rotation but somewhere halfway through fights I seem to fall off quite a bit and I’m not really sure why. I’ve also realized that trying to time skills together is probably detrimental to my DPS so I’m going to try to be less rigid about it and see if my DPS improves. I have mastered Ten-Chi-Jin a bit better so there’s that.
I keep saying that I’m going to work on my gathering classes but for some reason I just really can’t be arsed. It’s not really in line with my roadmap to Stormblood but I’m just not really feeling the need to spend my time on my gatherers or crafters when I’m too busy working on my battle jobs still. This is also in combination with having less time to play overal seeing as my Friday evenings are mostly taken by either watching series or sleeping early. I’m really tired the last few weeks so it impacts my game time enormously.
I have been leveling my Bard and she’s currently sitting on 66. The queues for roulettes aren’t that horrible anymore, I average about 15-20 mins wait time per queue, and I’m filling my time inbetween with hunt marks, FATEs or doing some IRL stuff while waiting for my queue to pop. Things have actually been going so well that I think she might be level 70 by the next time my summaries post comes around. I’m also taking my White Mage through some Palace of the Dead to get her to level 60 so I can start leveling her to level 70 properly aswell. I hope it goes faster than on my Bard, mostly because I predict I will have shorter queues.

In real life my life is a bit odd right now. I’m waiting for results from varying lung tests (which I’ll get tomorrow) and for the rest I’m spending most of my time being tired. We went into town for some shopping on thursday and I could barely stand on my feet during the evening. I have made some progress in clearing out our attic again. My mom had obtained quite a big ministeck collection when she was still alive but it was spread out everywhere. It took me about 7 hours yesterday but I managed to get all the pieces into one place and neatly tucked away. I’m not planning on touching it soon to do some ministeck myself but it’s nice to have everything in the same place. It helps when you’re looking for something to know where it is. I’m also struggling what exactly I want to do with my Switch/WiiU. I don’t really use my Switch much on the TV but it’s nice to have the option for when I want to. My WiiU is currently boxed under my bed, but I have so many games to finish on it that it feels bad to let it just lie there. I may just set it up again in a few weeks so I can properly work on my backlog. I say this now however but I know most of my time will be swallowed by FFXIV anyway so don’t pin me down on this.

What do I have planned for next week?
It really depends on my results tomorrow. I hope there’s nothing serious but you never know. I want to get my Bard to 70 and put some time in on my White Mage. I also feel like I should spend some time on one of my single player games or my backlog will never go away. I’m not really sure which one I’ll pick but I’ll probably post about it when I do. There’s many games that are competing for my interest and I have a really hard time choosing what I want to do.
I hope I can continue cleaning up the attic aswell. I feel like I’m finally making some progress, there is more space and I can store some stuff that have been put down randomly everywhere in one place. I also hope I can find the remainder of my Pokémon cards. I found my big folder with most of them in but I’m pretty sure that I have more than that and I have no idea where it has disappeared to. All in all I’ll have enough to do, assuming I can do it.

FFXIV progress: Statics and Levelling

Posted on by
Reply

Today I’m proudly showing the video of our first Omega 1 Savage clear as header. We’ve started up raiding as a static and we have been slowly progressing through the content. It started with some ex-primal farm (untill everyone had their weapons and accessories) and now we’re tackling the current hardest raiding difficulty bit by bit. Now honestly I have to say that O1S isn’t the hardest fight out there. They added maybe one or two new annoying mechanics but overal it’s mostly knowing about when to slide to the sides and when not to. It’s a great fight to get you warmed up for the harder content later on and even though I died in a very silly way here I’m still proud of my part in the play.
We cleared this last week and recleared it again last night where I didn’t die and pulled much better DPS than I did before and afterwards moved on to O2S. We had been struggling with O2S on our first night of trying it mostly because people kept on dying. It’s a lot more complicated a fight than it is on the normal version and if you don’t really get the “dance” you will die to silly mechanics. Last night however things started to click together and we killed it on our 5th or 6th pull of the evening. On our kill we actually only had one death if I recall it correctly and the rest of the run was done perfectly. We cheered, the beast was dead. I also got lucky with winning 3 pieces of loot from that particular boss. The Ninja headpiece dropped (yay!), I won the Dragoon boots for my offspecc (yay?) and I won the token that will allow me to purchase my 330 weapon the moment I manage to scrape together 1000 Creator tomes. All in all I was pretty content. Then we peeked into O3S and all the sense of achievement kind of fell away as we got obliterated. Hard.

It feels like the ramp up in difficulty of Savage is quite steep. Where we killed O1S in about 3 pulls we had been struggling on O2S for almost 4 hours of pulls over 2 nights before it finally went down in the end. While in theory O2S isn’t actually that hard it’s just the damage that is punishing and any mistake made will immediatly result in death. Have too many people die and you will eventually hit enrage due to lack of DPS. It was hard to figure out and we had to replace a few people in our first week but eventually it seemed to come together. The new challenge, O3S, is a gigantic ramp up again. The first phase alone is riddled with mechanics and we’ve seen up untill she summons the dragon in the second phase. It’s a mess really. There is so much to remember. Stack, stand away, sprint to corners, stand on the right tiles, kill adds. We barely made it to 75% health on her and I was already overwhelmed with the complexity of the fight. It takes me back to raiding days in Coil where learning mechanics and timings was the most important thing you’d do in progress and there was almost no way you could brute force through stuff. They’ve brought that back in Creator Savage and I can’t wait to learn the rest of the O3S fight before advancing onto the big boss: Exdeath. We’re raiding again tonight and although I don’t expect us to down O3S I do hope we will progress farther into the fight while also perfecting the mechanics of earlier phases.

Next to progressing as a static I’m also learning to be a better Ninja. For the first 50% of the O2S fight all of our DPS were over 4k. For someone that’s barely played Ninja and is still perfecting her rotation and timings it’s a grand feat. I’m still miles away from the best of the best but I’m slowly climbing up getting better at my class as I play it more. Ten-Chi-Jin is still an ability that I need to get used to but I’m learning to incorporate it into my rotation better and my DPS is going up for it. I still have some issues timing TA/Bhava right but I’m getting there. I had briefly thought to give up Ninja and go back to Bard instead now that the class is actually fun to play again. But persistence and the fact that I’m completely in love with how Ninja looks while you play it (seriously it has the best battle animations) I’m sticking to the class and will aim at improving myself as the expansion goes on.

Another type of progress that I’ve been making is in leveling my alt jobs. I have gotten Red Mage to level 60 and am now turning my focus on White Mage. I’m not sure what happened to my love for Astrologian. It’s still there, I still think it’s a great job, but for some reason I’m enjoying White Mage a lot more right now. She’s currently sitting at level 53 and I’m mostly running roulettes for the experience instead of spamming PotD like I did on my Red Mage. Instant queues help a lot with that and it’s less boring than running the same 10 floors of PotD over and over. I’m in no real rush to level either since I met my goal of atleast one level 60 battle job per month. However if I could get her a few more levels over the coming days that would be nice.

All in all I’m content with how FFXIV is going now. I’ve set clear goals for myself and I’m hoping I can stick to them. Breaking them down into weekly chunks has been nice because I don’t have to look and plan ahead that much. It also means that I’m putting less pressure on myself to actually attain stuff. It mostly helps me focus on doing one thing at a time. Static raiding will take away some of that time but it’s time well spent. I really hope we will down O3S soon and that we all get a little better geared so that we have an easier time clearing and reclearing the content.

Sunday Summaries #2

Posted on by
Reply

Another week has flown by and we find ourselves again on a Sunday. This week I’ve not gamed  as much as I thought I would. I did however manage to get my Red Mage to level 60 so that’s a goal I can cross of my list! Next to getting Red Mage to 60 I have also picked up White Mage again. This was my original first class to max level and from playing it a bit again I can remember why I chose it. So simple and elegant and yet so fun to play. I will be focusing on getting her to 60 next and maybe all the way to 70 as a sort of queue booster. I’m not sure yet.

I finally caught up to Game of Thrones aswell and am now waiting for the new episode to be released tomorrow. However seeing the catastrophe that was the release of the first episode of the season I’m not getting my hopes up on being able to watch immediately. Still it feels nice to be on par with all the friends that watch aswell and I am really curious to see where the story is headed.

I also picked up Splatoon 2 for my Switch and have to say that my first impressions are decent. I just really need to adjust to the controls and that might take me a while. I also started a Necromancer in the new Diablo 3 season. I’m sitting on level 30 currently and am taking my time exploring the class. So far I really enjoy the corpse explosions and summoning armies of dead.

Lastly we cleared omega 1 savage with our static tonight and we got to 10 procent on omega 2 savage. I still have a lot to learn on Ninja but so far the fights are fun and interesting.

As for next week…

I intend to devote a few hours to Diablo to get my Necromancer to max level and slowly work my way through the season.

I’m going to be spending some time on my White Mage and Botanist in FFXIV and make sure my Ninja is properly melded before we continue savage progress on Wednesday.

I also hope I can find some time to play Splatoon and learn the controls properly. It seems a very fun game and I want to make sure I get my moneys’ worth.

In the real life department I have a big lung test day coming up on Tuesday and I need to devote some time to my thesis. I might post on Tuesday after I get all the stuff done because I’m quite nervous about it and I probably need to get it off my chest. Next to this it’s a normal work week so I hope I have enough energy to game in the evenings.

Shopping day!

Posted on by
Reply

Ingame I’m often known for my collections. I like collecting things. Be it gear sets, mounts, pets, weapons or achievements, I always want to get the most things out of everyone. The same goes for collecting Platinum Trophies and temporary items. This has led me to a very big collection of mounts and pets in WoW and I’m aiming to get all mounts available in FFXIV aswell.

Next to ingame collecting I like collecting stuff in real life aswell. I like looking at my shelf full of physical game copies, my books and my various plushies and statues. I mostly enjoy Blizzard related things, I really love their franchise, but I also have some League of Legends statues here and there. My plushies are mostly from the Final Fantasy franchise though but equally loved.
Yesterday I went to pick up Splatoon 2 for my Switch and at the store they had “Cute but Deadly” mystery figurines. These figurines come from the Blizzard world and were picked from Diablo 3, Overwatch, World of Warcraft and Starcraft. There were 12 different ones to get, including two treasure Goblins that I’m pretty sure no one really wants to have. So I said, why not. I enjoy getting a collectible here and then, mostly because I really don’t have the room for more than a few right now. After that I went into town for a bit more untill my train departed and enjoyed walking in the sun and letting the workweek slip away from my conciousness.

So after I came home from shopping my haul looked something like this:

I bought a daycream aswell since I have very problematic skin and I had tried almost every cheaper brand of cream in existence. Rituals is more expensive as a brand, but has less artifical ingredients and a bit more natural ones that agree with my skin better. So far I’m quite pleased with the stuff and I hope it will last me a while. As you can see I opted to get Splatoon physical due to liking to collect and wanting to support my usual Game store.
Lastly there is the cute but deadly box. What was in it?
The silvery cellofane didn’t give away much. I could feel the shape of the figurine inside though and it didn’t feel like a treasure goblin. Which was the figurine I wanted to avoid.
It ended up being Pharah. Not the figurine I necessarily wanted (I could get Tyrande, Tracer or Nova) but also not one of the ones I desperatly tried to avoid (I’m looking at you Treasure Goblin). All in all I was happy with the end result. You never really know what comes in these mystery packages and they’re quite rare as it is here in the Netherlands. I was quite excited that my usual shop had ordered a box of these things and I hope that they will still have them when I get there next time.

For now I’m going to spend most of my evening playing FFXIV while my Switch charges and then dive into Splatoon 2 tomorrow and learn to be the freshest Squid in the city.

Sunday Summaries #1

Posted on by
Reply

So yeah. My official first Sunday Summaries post. I’m gonna look back on what I did during the week and what I have planned for next! My life is ever so interesting ofcourse.

First off, I’m still struggling with some health issues. My usual doctor has kind of given up on trying to find a cause and has sent me to see a specialist, specifically one that concerns the lungs. I’m still wheezing on many occassion when I exert myself and my cough is back in full aswell. This has caused me to feel absolutely horrible over the past week or so and honestly I’m kind of done feeling this way. So off to the specialist I go. My first appointment will be July 25th for another lung capacity test, after that we’ll see.
I’ve also been hard at work on my thesis, testing my cowokers and trying to get my approval for real. It’s all been a little chaotic with lots of things happening simultaneously but I think I can pull it off and be done with this major source of stress for good.
In the work department I’ve been asked to explain how our systems work to the new IT support team. We had a first meeting last week and a second meeting tomorrow. I’m sure they’re lovely people but they’re from India and I’m having real trouble understanding their accent. I’m not sure what’s up with that but not only do they have a difficult accent, they also tend to mumble instead of speak. Really annoying but the meeting was productive nonetheless. I had gotten some praise from some of my coworkers on the other teams afterwards so that’s really nice aswell.

Now onto gaming.
I’ve actually taken it easy this week. Work had gotten me really tired plus I felt like reading more than I did gaming. We did Omega with my new FC static and got everyone their loot for the week plus I think everyone has the Exdeath minion now, so that’s good. I’m rocking ilvl 317 average on my Ninja now and the only gear I can replace still are gloves, boots and chest. Seeing as Omega Savage launches next week I hope I can get some of that sweet loot aswell. We’ll see.
I do have to say that playing, and perfecting, the Ninja has been challenging this expansion. The Ten-Chi-Jin mechanic is not one that I really enjoy and I find it hard to incorporate it in my gameplay. I finally managed to nail my opener though, so that’s a thing. Now I just need to work on my Bhavacakra timing. It’s supposed to be always done during a Trick Attack window and I’m noticing that I’m not really handling that part very well yet. So I still have tons of room for improvement.
As far as leveling goes, I’ve mostly focused on the Red Mage and have gotten her to level 55. This is done via Palace of the Dead which is the fastest level method by far. It takes 3-4 runs of floor 51-60 per level so I could just sit down for about an hour and get a level done. It’s been really nice. I’ve opted to not do the job quests untill I’m level 60 and in full level 60 caster gear. I don’t want to buy things during a time where I know I won’t touch the class outside of Palace of the Dead anyway so that will save me some gil. I’ve also realized that I’ve held on to the HQ healer gear that I had gotten leveling up during Heavensward. I think I’m going to get rid of that aswell seeing as I’m taking the only healer I have left sub 60 (White Mage) through the PotD route aswell. I don’t think I’ll need any of the gear I’ve been saving up there. Plus as added bonus it frees up a ton of space on my retainer. As far as glamour purposes go, I can always get the gear again if I want to. For now I’m just settling on not getting any “new” gear untill level 60 where Palace of the Dead becomes moot and you have to actually grind your way up again through other means.

Next to FFXIV I’ve been poking around in Diablo 3 again after buying the Necromancer pack. The new Diablo season is starting this week so I might just poke my head in for that and play Necromancer for a change. See how the class feels and if it makes the experience fresh enough again for me to stick around.

Next to all the gaming I’ve been reading a lot as I’ve mentioned earlier. I finished off the last David Eddings book that I have in my possesion and started the Lies of Locke Lamora.

Next week…
I will have another busy work week. I hope to finish my testing for thesis and I have atleast one important meeting scheduled. There’s also the standard stuff that needs to get done so those will be four days well spent.
I really hope to finish the Lies of Locke Lamora. The book has me hooked, I really enjoy the story buildup and I want to read more! The only downside to finishing it will be that I will have to look for the second part, which I can obtain in various ways.
I want to get my Red Mage to level 60. It really only takes an hour of grinding Palace of the Dead per level or so, so it should be doable. I also want to focus on Miner a bit and get her to 50 and maybe beyond. We’ll see.
I’m going to dive into the new season of Diablo as Necromancer and probably make some sort of report of my journey along the way. I’ve not touched Diablo for quite some time now, enough to feel like I can sink a few hours in again without feeling the burn and frustrations that I’ve been feeling when I did the last few seasons.

All in all a very busy week for me! I hope to be able to tell you guys that I’ve met all my goals next week.

Reading Habits

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve recently picked up my e-reader again. I have a red Sony one that is about 4.5 years old but which still runs absolutely fine with no hiccups and a very long lasting battery.
I’ve always liked reading. I was a bright child and I read books that were meant for twelve year old kids by the age of six. I’ve always been an avid reader and I can’t really count the amount of books I’ve read. I read all the important ones. The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, although not the Silmarillion since it was too much of a hassle. I grew up reading the Harry Potter books and enjoyed the Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larsson. I have a few mandatory psychology books laying around and I’ve also read the Twilight series.
Then there are the Warcraft lore books and tons and tons of childrens’ books that I’ve read aswell. I had a Virginia Andrews phase and I started to get more into Fantasy after reading some of the books by Maggie Furey.
Fast forward a few years later and I still really enjoy reading mostly Fantasy novels but also Thrillers. I’ve just finished the last book of the Tamuli trilogy by David Eddings and am now starting “The Lies of Locke Lamora”. I find that reading makes me more peaceful than gaming, especially on high stress days or days like today where I’m just exhausted and want to lie down and sleep. I like being transported to another world and feeling like I’m not home for a bit. Books do that and if it’s a good book they do it well.
I have many books ready to read aswell. I have the novels by Patrick Rothfuss, the entire series of the Sword of Truth, the entire series of Percy Jackson and, if I ever feel up to the task, all the 40 odd books in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.

For now I tend to do my reading on my days off or in the evening before I go to bed. Due to the lack of background light it’s much easier on my eyes to read the last 30 mins before I fall asleep than look at my phone, tablet, PC or one of my assorted gaming devices. I’ve noticed that I sleep much easier and faster when I read and that my eyes are a lot less irritated. I also believe that reading is good to keep my written language proper, be it in English or in Dutch. Involuntarily you get propper grammar and spelling pumped into your brain and it helps with composing rational sentences later on when writing. It’s why it’s so important for kids to read at least a few books per year. It helps with language development and understanding. I know that it’s not everyone’s forte, nor should it be, but I don’t think I could live in a world without books.

The only thing that bothers me is the price of ebooks. Here in the Netherlands the prices they ask for them tend to be kind of ridiculous. I can buy a paperback for the price of an ebook. For some authors, like Oliver Sacks, I was willing to cough up the prices of his books. Mostly because psychology and neurology are my favourite things in the world and he was an amazing writer. However daring to ask €10 for an ebook and the same price for an actual book? I’m not really sure what they’re thinking.
Ofcourse I know that the authors of the books need to make money. I’m not that dumb. And I’ll gladly pay what I think is fair for a <1MB file that contains the book they’ve written. And that’s not a double digit number. I’m pretty sure that if prices weren’t as steep as they are now they would sell a lot more books and ebooks than they are doing. I know I would buy a ton more.

Anyway. I’m not really working my way through a book list nor do I feel the need to review the books that I’ve read. I just wanted to share a bit of information about what I’m currently doing and it seems that I’m reading more books than I’m playing games. Which is a nice change.

Mapping the Future

Posted on by
Reply

Afbeeldingsresultaat voor planner

Yesterday a plan started to slowly take shape in my head. I’m really bad when it comes to planning things and when it comes to MMO’s I’m usually very overwhelmed with all the things I can do that in the end I mostly end up doing very little or unsubscribing.
I really don’t want this to happen with Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve found an amazing free company and some of my oldest friends are still playing the game. I want to make this my permanent new main MMO and I want to be a bit more serious about the way I play it. To make sure this happens I have come up with a “Roadmap for Stormblood.”

Now I’m not really sure how this roadmap will develop over time, but I had to start somewhere. Right now I made a two stage spreadsheet mostly involving leveling and gearing my battle and profession classes. As I’ve mentioned only my Ninja is currently level 70. I have a few other battle classes level 60+ (Dragoon, Astrologian, Bard, Machinist) and the rest is sitting somewhere between level 50 and level 60. On the gatherer and crafter side of the spectrum only my Weaver made it to level 60, the rest is below.

My first goals in Stormblood, and the first phase of my roadmap, centers around leveling all these various classes to maximum level. Initially my goals is to get everything to 60 but if I enjoy a class or if it’s already 60 I can take them to 70 aswell. For now the goals is to get atleast one battle class and one gathering/crafting class to 60 per month. I know that leveling sometimes goes faster than you know, hence the “atleast”. I’m not going to be so strict to myself that I have to attain this goal every month. I know that sometimes RL will get in the way or that I will have less time due to Savage and Ex-Primals raiding on my Ninja.
Seeing the queues as they are for mostly DPS classes I will probably abuse PotD for those that aren’t level 60 yet to get there. As far as Healers/Tanks go… There are enough roulettes to do that have quite low queue times and it will be a break away from the monotony that is PotD.
For gathering/crafting I mean to make full use of the leves, collectables and GC hand-in system, next to the beast tribe dailies that are available. I will probably focus on my gatherers first, mostly miner and botanist, before I take my crafting back up again.

The second phase of my roadmap will revolve around gearing all my classes. In a way with gearing Ninja I’m automatically also gearing Bard and Machinist up to a point. I want to have decent/BiS gear for as many classes as possible and the fact that a lot of gear is shared will probably help me a lot there. This gearing will most likely happen simultaneously to leveling any class. I will have more tomestones than I can use on my Ninja anyway (I’m already rocking BiS tomestone gear on her) so I will automatically pick up other things as I progress through endgame content.
Crafting and gathering gear are a different beast. I’ve always found crafting in this game to be very complicated, but I want to really make an effort this expansion. Again I will probably focus on gearing my gatherers first, they will be the first that reach 70 and work on scrips so my crafters won’t really be gearing untill I get one or two to max level to begin with.

I know that there are meriad other things to do in FFXIV besides leveling and gearing my various classes. I will probably expand on my roadmap as the expansion goes on and the focus on leveling is less. There are a ton of mounts and minions that I still want to get. I’m also eyeing the possibility to slowly work my way through all the relic weapons from Heavensward and get the last three I need from A Realm Reborn. These are all minor things that I still need to shape into a proper mold for planning and they’re all projects that I can pick up at a later time when I feel like it.

For now my plan is to focus on doing small weekly tasks, and incorporate these into bigger monthly goals. Taking things one step at a time and making sure I don’t burn out and feel accomplished is my major goal here. Due to the shift in focus from monthly to weekly I will try to make a post every Sunday evening with what I have planned for the week as whole (inlcuding IRL things, work things and game things) and then at the end of the month I can see how far I’ve gotten. It’s a bit of a different format than what I’ve been trying to do earlier on the blog and I’m quite excited to try it out. I hope you guys enjoy going on this journey with me and I hope it will make me blog more regularly.

Now seeing as I’m already writing anyway, my plans for the week looks as followed:

  • Work on Miner in FFXIV. I’ve started to level it before I left on vacation and got my miner from level 30 to 47 in about 4 days time. I’d like to continue this growth and see how close I can get to 60 over the course of the week.
  • Work on Red Mage in FFXIV. I’ve picked up the class and am quite enjoying it. She’s level 51 at the moment and I will do PotD when I feel like it. I’ve gotten an offer to do roulettes with someone who is leveling a tank so I might just take advantage of that and see how far it gets me.
  • Work on my thesis. I need to test a few more subjects, churn results and hand in my first version. I also need to hand in something else which I need to work on today so I will get little game time in.

For the rest of the week I have 4 days of work planned and two nights of going out to dinner. My father and his partner (I refuse to call her his wife) are celebrating their partnershipday on Wednesday with going out to dinner with me and one of my uncles. Saturday evening I have another dinner with work colleagues to say goodbye to one of them who is starting work at another company. I’m also hoping to make a bit more progress of rearranging our attic over the weekend but I’m not making that a “must do” thing because I’m honestly not sure how my time will be spent. So yeah. I have a busy week ahead of me with proably not as much gaming time as I’d like to have. Nonetheless I want to progress as much as I can in FFXIV and take it from there.

Cleaning House

Posted on by
Reply

I’m sitting here staring at my blog, wondering what to write. It’s been a while and even though I have a lot of things to discuss I’m not sure where to really start.
Maybe I’ll start with telling you guys that I just came back from a wonderful 8 day trip to Mallorca. I’ve been needing a vacation for quite some time now and flying off to the sun for a full week was something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. I managed to get some relaxation time in and tanned a little bit. I’m really white skinned so getting any sort of tan takes me a while, especially having to prevent turning lobster red instead. I’ve done a lot of things, visited a water park, aquarium and midget golf, but mostly I took the time to destress and relax away from home.
I had my 3DS with me and I managed to finally sit down and play a few games that I’ve been meaning to. I’m about 4.5 hours into Bravely Default now, playing through Chapter 1. I never got past the intro first so it’s a milestone! I also spent about 5.5 hours total playing Ever Oasis and I’ve fallen in love with that game. The combination of having to maintain a town and also dungeoning is quite refreshing and the whole atmosphere of the game is insanely cute. I might dedicate a post to it later.

Next to going on vacation I’ve been using my free time to work through the mess that is my room and the attic. My room is more or less empty right now and I’ve thrown away about 3 trash bags worth of stuff from the attic. I’ve also been giving away a lot of my old children’s books which frees up even more room. During my cleaning I’ve stumbled across my old Sega Mega Drive (Genesis in the US) and all of its’ games and the two nintendo mini classics you see on the picture at the start of my post. I’m fully intending to put batteries in atleast one of these and hang it on my bag to play. I remember having a very good time as a 9 year old with these games and I’m sure if they still work they’re still a blast to play. The silver one is Super Mario Bros. and the green one is Donkey Kong jr. It made me insanely happy to find these because well, I like my game collection and these two were “missing” for quite a while.
It feels nice to get rid of things. I’ve never been a hoarder, but a lot of my stuff got chucked up on the attic out of habit. It was and still is quite full with tons of things that I need to sift through, but for now I’m happy with my progress and I will continue a later time. Ideally I want the shelves that now hold old toys and books to be reserved for my older gaming gear, mostly so I know where it is and it’s easy to pick up whenever I would want to play it.

Speaking of games…
Ofcourse I have played the shit out of Stormblood. My Ninja is currently sitting on level 70 with a full Lakshmi Ex kitted right side and waiting on her Susano ex weapon. I am going to do Omega Normal tonight with my Free Company, something I’m quite looking forward to aswell. Leveling a DPS hasn’t been the easiest this expansion, mostly due to insane queue times. I think the longest I’ve had so far has been an hour. And that’s not even counting the queue times to get on the server itself. I really enjoyed the Stormblood story, especially the Doman part. My Ninja plays really nicely if we forget about Ten-Chi-Jin for a minute and my static will be starting up Savage raiding soon. I’ve really enjoyed Lakshmi ex aswell, although the Bollywood music tends to get kind of annoying after two straight hours of it.
As far as the new classes go I’ve mostly been exploring Red Mage. The playstyle is very refreshing and fast once you get the hang of it and I’m pretty sure I’ll level it up fast after Bard and Warrior. Samurai right now just feels very complicated. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it once I start playing properly but for now I’m leaving the class alone. Bard is a different story. I really like that they removed the casttimes and what they did with the songs. It’s my second favourite class after Ninja and I’m slowly leveling it up, being stuck at 63 right now.

I’ve also been grinding out my crafters, kicking my miner up to level 50. I notice that the game as a whole is taking up a lot of my time so I might take a bit of a step back, map out what I want to do exactly and invest a bit less time. There’s a lot of other things that need my attention right now so I want the time that I do put into FFXIV to be useful, be it through leveling another class, working on my gatherers or getting my Ninja in the best gear. I may actually make a “roadmap for Stormblood” in which I put weekly, monthly and yearly goals. I know it sounds like quite the project but it’s something I’ve been thinking about longer and I may actually just go forward with it.
Ofcourse I’ll share this on the blog aswell, hopefully somewhere the next week.

All in all the vacation time has done me good. I’m more relaxed and focused and ready to take on everything again. I hope this also means I can get a bit more structured with my routines and include blogging more again. For now though I will have to finish here and head to bed… Seeing as I’m more tired from the vacation than when I flew off to go there!

Status: Happy

Posted on by
Reply


I have gotten into a new FC on my main character a few weeks ago to properly prepare for Stormblood. I didn’t want to go into another expansion without a group of people I could do content with so I made it a priority to find a group and so I did.
I’m super happy I’ve taken this step. It’s a very active FC that organizes a lot of events for their members. I’ve seen a grand FC lottery so far, an evening of pony farming, clearing old coil synched, clearing A10S and much more. There’s always friendly people online to help with things and I’m more than happy to help these people myself aswell. It feels nice being able to log on to this type of community after trying to find one for a very long time. Hell it’s made me think of my old World of Warcraft guild of ages past where being in a guild actually meant that you had people to play with and do content with. Where helping eachother out was normal and you would always be doing something with someone and enjoying yourselves.

All of this has made me really eager to start up Stormblood. We are less than two weeks away from early access now and I can’t wait to jump into all the new content. I’ve settled on playing Ninja as main. I know some people are disappointed with the Ninja design in Stormblood so far but I’m actually quite happy that not too much is changing. The class really needed a pruning of some abilities that, honestly, were never used. From what I understand we’re losing smokebomb and silhouette together with dancing edge and sneak attack. All for the better. Poisons will now be a standard passive buff, so you can’t forget to apply them, but we will lose the Mug heal as a consequence of this. Unfortunately mutilate has also been put on the chopping block meaning that, with the changes to the rest of the skills, ninja will just have all three step combo’s from now on. One for armor crush, one for spinning edge and one for shadow fang. I’m not too thrilled with this (they could’ve kept shadow fang a two-step combo) but I guess this is the direction they wanted to go in. Luckily for me switching to any other class is not really a hassle in this game so I’ll just wait and see how things will work out.

In the meantime I’ve been on this rather weird levelling spree. I had gotten my DRK to 50 in my last blog post but since I’ve also levelled my Machinist to 60 and completed the questline on that. Running Palace of the Dead may be slightly mind numbing, but it’s by far the best way to level your classes right now and it took me about 2-3 hours to get the last two levels for my Machinist that way.
I’m not really sure where I want to focus on next. There is still the Relic Light grind looming over me that I will have to start doing at some point. I know that doing level 60 content fuels it and I know that farming A1S is the best and fastest way to get this step done but I just can’t seem to motivate myself to do it. I’m also a bit torn on what I want to level next in PotD. It’s either going to be Summoner or White Mage. The problem I have is that I have 0 casting gear for level 60 while I do have a full healing set ready. So both classes are doable if I intend to go Scholar at 60. Which I actually am trying to avoid. Seeing as the expansion is only 11 days away though it doesn’t really matter what I pick up at all since I won’t be bothering to level anything but Ninja for a while. That being said I will probably spend most of my time getting my classes up as high as possible through PotD so I won’t be too far behind come Stormblood.
Which means a lot of idle hours in Quarrymill… Shooting fireworks.

All in all the Stormblood hype is getting more and more intense. I really hope the expansion is good, the new relic weapon will be interesting and the new classes will find their niche in the raiding world. As for now I’m going to dive into some more PotD. Catch you guys later!

Ticking Off Goals

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been really busy over in FFXIV the last few weeks. Not only did I complete a ton of my relic, I managed to level both my Warrior and Dark Knight to 50. My goal of not having any battle classes below level 50 has been obtained! It was also the first time going through the Warrior story proper which means I’ve seen a few new things. The same goes for Dark Knight. I really enjoy these sidestories and I can’t wait what the quests from 52 untill 60 have in store for me. My focus will now turn to leveling my Machinist. She’s level 58 so I’m only two levels away from the current level cap. It’s an enourmous help that Machinist, Bard and Ninja share half their gear so those will probably be the first three classes I will focus on in Stormblood.. Together with Astrologian.

Next to leveling my tanks I’ve also been doing some Palace of the Dead on my Summoner for fun. I finally cleared up untill level 100 and upgraded my Astrologian weapon to a Kinna one! I’ve grinded my way back up after to 19/25 by running some level 1-50 stuff. It’s really not that bad and a nice distraction from the relic weapon farm. With a three day weekend inbound I will probably see PotD a lot as I level my Machinist and probably my Summoner after. I’m not sure where this enormous need to level suddenly comes from, maybe it’s because I don’t want to be majorly behind in Stormblood anymore. As of right now I have 4 jobs at level 60, one at 58, two at 52 (since I’m leveling summoner I’m automatically leveling Scholar) and the rest at 50. I hope to have atleast my Machinist and Summoner to max level before Stormblood hits. With the addition of Samurai and Red Mage I will have 8 classes at level 50 then, of which four share gear (Monk and Samurai/ Black Mage and Red Mage) so that helps aswell. All my tanks share gear aswell so the odd job out is White Mage, which apparently is getting changed for the worse in Stormblood.

As for my Ninja Anima relic. I’m on the Light grind stage right now and I’m pretty sure I’ll devote a few evenings to just farming A1S to get to the second to last stage of the relic. Unfortunately for Ninja it’s a downgrade looks wise. The Spurs just look amazing compared to the Lux… Oh well.

With Stormblood inbound in only two weeks I will have enough to do ingame… And outside of it. I caved and picked up a Switch after I got a call that my pre-order came in. I had been thinking of just calling it off and waiting to get it since I have a ton of WiiU games to play still but in the end I decided to get it. I’ve not regretted this for a minute. With Shovel Knight and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe I’ve spend quite some time playing already. These are both games that I want to get the max out of so I’m not really planning to get anything else anytime soon. Even though Arms looks really good, it comes out on the same day as Stormblood early access and I know myself well enough that I will be playing FFXIV over the weekend.

As much progress I’ve had in my games, I’ve not had a nice streak IRL. My health still isn’t what it should be. I’m tired a lot and my asthma is giving me a hard time. Especially now that I’m back to working full days again I notice that my days off are spent mostly in bed recovering. My body is just kind of done at the moment and I can’t do much more than just give in to it’s need for rest. I’ll have a checkup this Tuesday where they will look at my lungcontent and if I need to stay on asthma medication for a longer period of time. I really hope that isn’t the case but I’m fearing the worst. Next to my health problems I’m also seriously struggling with uni and the project I need to finish. People are not sticking to their word and things are being stretched out way more than I thought they would be. It has gotten me stressed out… which in turn exaggerates my already serious health issues. I’ll be so happy when I’m done with all that stuff so I don’t have to worry about that anymore ever again.

All in all I try to stay positive. I’m in a nice FC on FFXIV, I’m going on vacation at the end of the month and my work contract got extended till January. If I can just finish up this Uni business I will just have to deal with my health… and how to live with asthma.