Settling On A Routine

After a crazy week last week, I’m trying to settle down in my normal work routine. I don’t have that much IRL appointments coming up so I can start putting some more time into games again.
I am hitting a wall in the sense that first off I really need to unlearn the habit  of lying on bed after dinner. I often fall asleep for an hour or two, causing me to wake up groggy and deciding to either go to bed completely at a very early hour or it makes me awake for the rest of the night which causes me to have issues falling asleep later on. I also feel like I’m wasting my evenings doing this and I have so much to do in so many games that I don’t want to feel like I’m wasting even a minute of my time.

Yoshimitsu Zenith

Last weekend I’ve been mostly consumed with playing FFXIV. I pushed through my Ninja 2.0 relic quests and obtained the Yoshimitsu Zenith in about two hours of work. Immediatly after I picked up the White Mage quest for Thyrus, which I plan to complete today. It’s really not that much work to do and it gives me a sense of completion, so I’m happily ploughing away at the quests again. It also helps there’s an achievement for getting all the relics done, and seeing as I’m a completionist… It’s right up my alley.

Next to doing the old relics I’ve been doing some work on the new relics too. I’ve tried my best to do my beast tribe dailies every day, which makes me able to obtain a few more of the items I need today. I tend to skip FATE dailies though because either they aren’t up or people do them so fast I can’t even participate to get the item I need. The “spare” quests this leaves me with I’m using to level to the last rank I need with the Ixali… Which in turn benefits my crafter levelling. It’s a nice routine that I’m easily able to keep up after work. Doing all the beast tribe dailies takes me about 1-1.5 hours, it’s relaxing and rewarding and it doesn’t involve me having to wait in queues for god knows how long.

Valentione is Here!
Events Everywhere

It’s that time of year when most games turn their attention to Valentine’s day, and the Valentione Event has come around on Eorzea again aswell. I don’t remember previous years, but this year requires you to party up with someone to complete the quests, which is both fun and mildly frustrating. On Moogle I have a friend I can party up with to do the quests, on Cactuar however not so much… And I want to complete the event on both my characters. I could probably make a Party Finder party for it and complete it that way, but I’ll see what I do over the course of today or maybe the weekend.
I decided that the best times for me to do these events, or anything not daily related, on any of my games is during the days I have off. Then I don’t have to rush stuff and can focus on one thing at a time without feeling so tired. I hope to atleast finish the Valentione event on Moogle today, as I do like the rewards that are obtainable.

On another Isle in MMO land, Blizzard has released the Lunar event for Heroes of the Storm this year. It comes with being able to obtain a special ingame portrait and a 50% chance to spawn an Elder Monkey every game, that drops an envelope with 100 gold if you kill it. It’s a nice little way to get an extra 100 gold every day and I’m always a sucker for obtaining new portraits, so I’m definately partaking in the event this year.  Coinciding with the Lunar Festival, Blizzard has introduced a new hero: Li Ming the Wizard from Diablo 3. She came with an awesome skin/mount bundle… And I caved and bought it.

Li Ming the Star Princess

I tried her out a bit last night and my god is she fun to play. Her gameplay reminds me a bit of Lux in League of Legends. She has a talent that makes it so that one of her damaging spells “marks” people for extra damage. Like Lux’ passive. And would you look at the amazing skin? I literally get to play as Sailor moon. I love it so damn much and she’s so much fun to play that I see myself spending more time in Heroes of the Storm than I have been spending for a long time.

World of Warcraft will swing around with their usual Lunar and Valentine’s event. I don’t think they added anything or much new to these, so not going to discuss that in detail. What I do however want to bring up quickly is the recent Hearthstone changes that have been announced by Blizzard.
Personally I can see the pro’s and con’s of Standard Mode. For someone like me, who has been playing catch-up since last year, it’s nice to be able to “skip” the old adventures now. I don’t have any of the OP cards like Dr. Boom anyway so I really don’t care that much that they are leaving them out. On the other hand I can empathize with the people who feel like they are pulled out of their niche decks and that they will become impossible to play, even in Wild Mode. Assuming Blizzard will no longer balance the old cards with the new, it feels like a lot of people will have invalidated collections which they may have paid a lot of money for. And it sucks for them. I guess we’ll see how it works out when it actually goes live. For now I’m still truding through the Adventures, purely for completionist purposes.

Daily Routines

I’ve come to the point of my relic that is basically a massive grindfest. You need to get 80 items that you can get into a myriad amount of ways plus another 16 crafted items that will probably cost me a fortune.
One of the fastest ways to get those 80 items is to do beast tribe dailies… Every day. So for the past few days I’ve religiously logged on and did dailies for the Vanu Vanu, Sylph, Kobolds and Sahagin. In a way it’s nice to see all these “familiar” faces again, but at the same time I’m quite bored having to do all these dailies every single day. It’s 12 dailies and they take me about an hour to do… Travel times and killing stuff and not being able to fly in the old zones slows things down massively, but atleast it’s nice for getting experience on my Bard, who dinged level 55 today.

Another thing that I have picked up is my collection habit. I realize I’m still missing a lot of mounts and minions and I’m trying to figure out how and where to collect the ones I still need. A few are relatively easy to get and involve me doing a FATE in the South Shroud and make an effort to complete all my sightseeing logs. I also still have two pets left from one of the Grand Companies so I might switch over to that after I get bored with being an Immortal Flame.
I’ve also set my eye on all of the Gold Saucer pets and mounts I’m still missing. I’ve decided to do atleast the Mini Cactpot once every day to rack up the MGP I need. I’m currently sitting on about 4.5k MGP so I still have quite a way to go.

Other than my FFXIV adventures I got very little done in my other games this week. I was planning to do the Cataclysm Timewalking event but real life stuff happened and I spent a lot less time behind my computer than I thought I would. I’m happy I’m making some progress on my relic though. I have 16/80 items so I’m almost a quarter of the way done. I hope I can put in a bit more time this week and not only run my beast tribe dailies, but also some roulettes to be able to buy the items with tomestones to speed things up.

As for now I’m looking at a four day work week which I hope won’t make me too tired to game, because I really need to escape from reality for a while.

 

Exhausting Days

The past week has been slightly crazy for me. I’ve had a lot of IRL obligations, that were all fun, and worked for four days non stop. Right now I’m looking back and wondering how the hell I managed to get through all of it. Even now I still feel tired, even though I have had today off. I haven’t done much besides lying on bed, drifting to sleep every  now and then and just feel tired and slightly miserable in general.

All in all I did have an awesome week though. Monday was mostly a blur since I slept badly due to still having some pain in my toe. I could walk, but not that fast, and I was happy to be home and go to bed super early. I don’t think I’ve been to bed at 21.00 in a very long time, but boy it did wonders for my mood on Tuesday.
Which was very necessary since on Tuesday I attended an Ellie Goulding concert, one I had been looking forward to for a few months. I went with one of my best friends, who had never been to a concert before, and we had a ton of fun. I walked a lot that day and that was very noticeable on Wednesday as I got up to get to work. Due to getting home late after the concert and my foot/toe acting up again I really had a shitty day at work. And again I went to bed very early, at 22.00 this time.

Party Hardy
Yesterday evening was almost the culmination of my week though. One of my coworkers is getting married and since she is of Turkish origin she is celebrating it Turkish style. This means that there is a “henna” evening which is women only. It’s almost like a bachelorette party, but much more official with some traditions and lots of dancing. This night was yesterday and I attended with all of my other coworkers… And it was an absolute blast. We danced, we ate good food, we saw our colleague looking beautiful in her dress and took a few really cool pictures in the process.
Tomorrow (saturday) will be the actual wedding party and I’ve been warned already that I need to prepare… Because she is expecting about a thousand guests. This is a scale that is seriously unheard of in most Dutch weddings, so I hope I can cope with all the people there. Luckily we have a table reserved for us, so atleast we will be sure we can sit down during the night. I’m really curious and very excited to be part of this all, it’s probably something you only live once in a lifetime if you’re not from that culture.

Games?
I haven’t really felt motivated to do any games at all the past week. After I’ve come home from work I either went straight to bed or was out of the house for the rest of the evening. Even on my day off today I barely touched any game, except for some games of Hearthstone to secure my January card back. And honestly I have no idea or motivation what game to play at all right now. Due to me not really logging onto Diablo for a while I’ve fallen behind on all my friends. In FFXIV I don’t really have a goal except level my Bard and Botanist and work on my Anima relic. In WoW I logged in briefly today to do some Garrison stuff and I’m half planning to do the Timewalking event over the weekend… But that’s mostly it. I’m staring at my games on Steam and the ones lying infront of my on my PS4 and just really don’t feel like playing anything at all right now. This will probably change tomorrow or Sunday when I don’t feel like I’ve walked a marathon anymore. But for now I think I’m just gonna watch some League of Legends and relax.

The Zodiac Journey Ends

Yesterday morning I was finally able to complete the last few Mahatma’s I needed for my Zodiac Zeta Dragoon Weapon. Granted they have nerfed the quest of this weapon by quite a bit. But I’m still superhappy about the end result!

My lovely lady with her Zeta!

All in all it has been a great journey and I hope the new Relic Weapon will be just as awesome.

Blade and Soul: First Impressions

Sandrianne, the Force masterIntroductions need to be made! I installed and started to play Blade and Soul yesterday. I made two characters over on the Hao District server.. Which was one of the recommended ones at the time. As I log in today there is an 800 people queue and I more or less gave up on logging in at all. Mostly because dinner is due to arrive at any minute, but also because I really don’t want to wait that long to get into the game at the moment.

Anyway, the moment I started looking at this game I fell in love with two races. The Lyn and the Yun. I made a Yun Blademaster at first, but didn’t like how she turned out so she is pending to be deleted. On my second character creation try I made this cute little Lyn Forcemaster and am absolutely loving her. It’s probably the least sexualized race in the game, which also helps. I guess Korean gaming standards are a bit different than the ones we have in the west… Because man, bouncy boobs everywhere! Also seriously out of proportion characters. It’s a bit wacky to see here and there, but I guess everyone is happy with this.

First Glances
My initial impression of the character creator is very good. There’s lots of options and you can really customize your character a lot. I think you can easily spend an hour or two tweaking away untill you have the perfect representation of you. I don’t really have the patience for this so I stuck to changing mostly the coulors, bodytype and ears/tail etc. I’m a bit sad you can’t change ear/tail colour on Lyn to match the haircolour, I hope they change this in the future.

After making my character I was able to immediatly hop into a server to play. The combat strongly reminds me of Neverwinter, which I spent about an hour playing before I gave up. It’s much more dynamic than I remember Neverwinter to be though, so that’s a very good thing. I have to say, it really takes some getting used to the mouse essentially being a fixed point on your screen. It changes the entire way the MMO plays, but not necessarily in a bad way. I got used to it really fast anyway and am taking down enemies and talking to people without any issues at all.

I haven’t played enough to really grasp the atmosphere of the game well, although the NPC’s so far are quite cliché. Also the amount of ridiculously big bouncy boobies or, for the men, overly muscular dudes is kind of annoying. I couldn’t stand looking at one myself, hence I opted to create a Lyn. Graphics wise I’m pretty sure my PC doesn’t do the game justice. I’m sure it can look much prettier than it actually does with my PC, although even for me it doesn’t look that bad and I seem to have no major FPS drops.

The Queue Thing
The one major downside to this game is that the queue times are seriously ridiculous. Even on a low pop server like Hao District (or well it was when I made my character) I was faced with an 800+ people queue during primetime. I can only imagine the already highly populated servers being much worse. Today NCSoft announced they are adding more servers to lighten the queue load, but honestly the two that the EU region has gotten is not nearly enough. I hope this doesn’t cause people to stop playing, because this game has it to actually be a decent MMO.

Final Verdict (for now)
A fun and different MMO to stick your nose into. The character creator is awesome, the gameplay is different but not bad. If you’re into KungFu and like the Korean MMO style this is definately something to consider playing, especially with it being F2P.
The only major downside I see for now is the annoying queue times, I will probably do a follow up on this post after I’ve been able to play more and can say more about the content itself.

Welcome To The Show!

Hello everyone and welcome to my brand new website!

I’ve spent quite some time fiddling around with my blog, and I’m not quite done yet… But I finally found the right plugin that would transfer over all the content from my Blogger blog. So there’s that. I’m still fiddling around with my theme and widgets. I’m superhappy I can finally use the Warcraft one, although it hasn’t been updated in ages… As the rest of the week passes I think I will add more stuff to my blog, especially to the sidebar. Keep an eye out for my social media buttons, I will be way more active on Twitter and Instagram aswell as getting active again on Anook and maybe Player.me.

The makings of a new Exarch!

The makings of a new Exarch!

Warrior Times
I’ve been poking my nose into WoW quite actively again for the last few weeks, mostly focussing on Sandrian, the Warrior. I’ve had a ton of quests still lying around, so I’m slowly working my way through them. I finished off the Garisson Campaign quests for Tanaan and am currently working my way through the original questline for that aswell. I helped Yrel become an Exarch this morning. I forgot about that little quest and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed doing it again. Blizzard has made some awesome lore bits and pieces in this expansion… Too bad it didn’t save the expansion as a whole.
For now the plans remain to finish off the quests I still have and start working towards completing achievements. I’m also almost on the final stage of my Legendary Ring, so it would be a shame not to push for that either.
All in all I seem to be able to play casually and still have some fun while doing so. My guild has ceased raiding after they killed Archimonde HC again on monday evening, people couldn’t be bothered to show up anymore, myself included. The only thing I would still like to do that is raiding related is to get the raiding achievements done. I hope I can find or make a PuG for this myself, but that’s something to worry about later.

Toes and FFXIV Woes
As I’m writing this my toe is actually healing quite well. I got to take the bandage off last night, and even though it was partly stuck which caused my wound to reopen a bit again… It’s been healing up nicely. I barely have pain at all anymore, except when I try to walk on it like I would do normally. It looks like when I just stay clear of putting pressure on my foot I’m mostly fine, so that’s what I’m doing. I have a “pajama vacation” and am just sitting around in my pajama’s and a bath robe, gaming all day. It’s a really nice break from work, although being sick means I won’t get paid for this week… Which does kind of suck.
In FFXIV I feel like I’ve been hitting a bit of a brick wall. I’ve been farming hard for my Dragoon Zeta yesterday afternoon and am now on 4/12 Mahatma’s completed. It’s not really a hard grind, it just requires some patience… Which I obviously don’t have. If I can focus enough I do about 2 Mahatma’s per hour, which means I have 4 hours of farming to go still. I really want to finish it off this week, and if I can just motivate myself to keep on running Garuda and Shiva HM I’m sure I’ll get it done in no time. It’s just the motivating part that’s hard… I’m not having an easy time just getting absorbed by the game anymore, like I used to, and although I have a huge list of things I want to achieve… Actually doing all of that has become much more of a chore than I thought it would be. I’m still determined to see it through though. I just need to get out of this little slump I’ve been finding myself in after I dinged my Ninja 60…

As far as my new website goes. If you have any feedback, please tell me! So far I’m happy with the theme since it’s quite clean. I just need to decide on a proper background picture to go with it… And most likely look at a new header picture.
This also means that my old Blogspot address will no longer get updated with posts! So if you have me in your RSS feed, change it to this website, or you will be left wondering why I won’t be updating my blog anymore.

Sunday Morning Musings

Actually by the time I’m writing this particular post it’s already past 2 in the afternoon here, but what the heck, it’s morning somewhere in the world right? So I’m just going to go with Morning muses…

Sunday is a weird day for me. I’ve turned it into my chores day for the week, since it’s usually the day that I know I will be at home to get stuff done. This means that for a big part of the rest of the week I let my room become this huge mess, which I then clean up on Sundays. This entails folding away a few days worth of clean laundry, taking all the dishes downstairs and clean them, dust and vacuum my room and changing my bedsheets.
It’s also the day I consider my “offscreen” day. Because I plan all my chores on this day, and because I spend enough time staring at one computer screen or the other the entire week, it’s nice to look at something else besides pixels on a screen.

This week I find it even more important to just stay away from using my wrist/mouse too much. I’m not sure how I did it, but I’ve hurt my wrist somehow with either sleeping on it the wrong way, or making a wrong move with carrying my bag. I know what RSI feels like, and this isn’t it. It just feels like a muscle pulled the wrong way at some point, and when I make certain movements it kind of hurts… Which also limits the time I’m able to use a mouse. Which is incredibly sucky seeing as I’ve been playing Diablo 3 a lot the past two days… Which you largely navigate by using your mouse.

Speaking of Diablo… I realize how much of a love/hate relationship I really have with that game. I always love the new Season starts, only to be disappointed about a week of playing in. You see, when I picked up this game at the inital launch we had a little group of friends that would play with eachother. That group of friends is still there… Only whereas they still play together, I feel like I’m being left out. I know that I can come across as whiny in all my posts about my friendships lately, but I’m just really sick of how things are going and have developed over the last year. I don’t always want to be the one to start things up anymore, or the one to stay in touch. And it’s affecting my gameplay and the enjoyment of some games, but most of all Diablo 3.
So for this season I’ve set my standards quite low. I just want to play my monk and unlock all the chapter rewards. I’m not aiming to be the best on the Greater Rift ladders (because honestly I really can’t be arsed to put in the time) but I do want to experience all the new stuff Blizzard has added. So doing atleast one Class Set Dungeon is quite high on my list. As of right now I need to complete about five more challenges to finish up my last chapter, all of which are tied to playing more so I can earn rewards to tackle content. This Season I don’t have to worry about gear, because Blizzard has been nice enough to hand you a full set for completing challenges in the chapters. So I’m rocking a 4/6 Sunwuko set with a really disgusting build. And loving it… For now.

Weekend Entertainment
A thing that has rolled around again is LCS or League Championship Series. Although I haven’t played League of Legends in forever, I love watching the various series in the weekends. This year I prefer the NA scene over the EU scene, simply because the players I cheer for and enjoy most are playing in that region at the moment. I’m cheering extra hard for Renegades this split, since they are the first team to have a girl on the starting roster and I’m damn proud that she made it up to that stage.
Other than that I’m still cheering my butt off for Doublelift, who should be able to become a formidable force down in the botlane now that he has Yellowstar as support. Although my heart broke when Doublelift left CLG and “Rush Hour” botlane was no more, I’m sure he can make it work with his new Support. So yeah, suddenly I became a TSM fan after being a CLG fan for many seasons.

I don’t actually actively follow all the games. There are a select few I will watch, the rest I listen to while playing FFXIV for instance. It’s nice background “noise” for my Botanist leveling. I have to say my hour per day approach is seriously working for that. With the GC manuals, the GC daily turn-in and just doing leve’s I’ve already managed to get to level 43. I think I’ll be 50 soon enough, especially if I keep on doing about 2 levels a day.
The only thing I need to motivate myself for now is farming my Dragoon Zeta…

The Elephant In The Room

As I got home on Wednesday evening I browsed Steam for a bit. I always check out what games are on offer, even though most of them are really not my thing. Whilst doing this a game with a rather peculiar title caught my eye: Tembo the Badass Elephant. It was on sale for €3,24 and it looked to be some sort of silly platform game. I went to check it out for some fun and giggles, looked at some screenshots, looked at the trailer… And was hooked.
This game essentially brings me back to the 16-bit console days that I experienced as I was growing up. I had a Sega Genesis (called Mega Drive here in Holland) as a child, a present I got for my sixth birthday. My dad has always been a bit of a technology geek and he had seen the rise of video games early on. I’m pretty sure we still have a very old Atari game system in the attic somewhere… My mum wasn’t very much an avid gamer but she liked puzzles and eventually got one of those wannabe Gameboy type things that only had Tetris on it, which she was actually quite addicted too (and quite good at aswell I might add). Anyway, they decided to gift me a Sega which at the time came with the first Sonic the Hedgehog game. I’m not really sure how many hours I spent infront of this console, but it must have been quite a lot. I had a few Sonic games, a ton of Disney games and even a Jurassic Park game. My heart broke when eventually you couldn’t get any new games for the console anymore, even though I’ve only really finished a few of them.
Looking at Tembo, and the developing/production companies (SEGA and Game Freak, yes that company that developed the Pokémon franchise, that Game Freak) I felt like I needed to have this game, even if only it was on sale now so I could get it cheap.
The story of the game is simple. You are a Rambo type military elephant that needs to save Shell City from an organisation called Phantom. You do this in a platform type, sidescrolling game setting where the companies have tried their best to combine a lot of fun 16-bit game mechanics. It has the speed of Sonic, there’s some Donkey Kong and Yoshi’s world elements in it… And it’s just overall seriously hilarious. A level takes about 5-10 minutes to play through, depending on if you just want to finish the level or also want to complete all the objectives for that level. It’s simple fun, the style used in the game itself is very colourful with a lot of comic book elements (see picture below).
All in all I only have very good things to say about this game, except for the one flaw that is resolutions. In settings you can’t go higher than 1920x1080p, which is fine for me… But for people with higher resolution screens it obviously isn’t. Personally I would recommend just playing windowed, since fullscreen can be a bit buggy when shutting down (ie. I had it crash on me a few times) but if you’re looking for a fun sidescroller with a lot of 16-bit elements, this might just be the game for you.
MMORPG shenanigans
Season 5 of Diablo 3 has started yesterday and for the first time since the first season I’ve immediatly started to play at launch. I rebirthed my existing Monk and am well on my way to 70 already. If I didn’t have to go out today I would’ve been 70 before dinner easily, but alas. My monk is “stuck” on level 61.5 and I’m having a blast so far. You can notice Blizzard overhauled a lot of things with the latest patch and so far I’m having fun playing.
I’ve also been poking about in FFXIV a lot, leveling my Bard, my Astrologian and since Friday my Botanist. Endgame Gathering and Crafting has been the one area in FFXIV I haven’t poked my nose into yet and I really want to with this expansion. Seeing as the only crafter I have on 50 is Weaver… And the mats I need are gathered by Botanists… I figured why not just level that up and start working towards that level 60. So right now I’m doing about an hour or less a day of BTN leveling. It’s quite soothing in a way. Doing levequests to just gather things, doing a “get me X materials” quest every 5 levels. It allows me to zone out a bit and still feel useful. I hope I can get my BTN to 50 by the end of this week atleast, but seeing as I’ll be having a lot of free time, that shouldn’t be too big of a deal. Especially considering that my only other goal ingame right now is to finish my Dragoon Zeta. Which shouldn’t take very long either.

So Many Deaths

I wanted to blog about a completely different topic today, when Alan Rickman’s death suddenly popped up in a Whatsapp group chat. I couldn’t believe it, immediatly opened my news app on my phone and was sadly confirmed that he had indeed died at the age of 69.
With losing David Bowie earlier this week and Lenny of Mötorhead it feels like the start of 2016 has been a really bad one, in terms of celebrities dying. Although all deaths are tragic and to be mourned, especially by their loved ones, the Alan Rickman one hit me a bit harder than usual.

I grew up reading and watching the Harry Potter movies, and I hold the firm belief that he was perfectly casted for the role of Severus Snape. Snape had always been my favourite character in the books, way way back to when I started to read the first one and when I saw which actor portrayed him… I was so happy. He played him so well.
Ofcourse Snape isn’t the only big role he played. I especially enjoyed him as Metatron in Dogma and also as his role of Alexander in Galaxy Quest. Hell the only reason I knew who he was in Harry Potter was because I had seen him in these movies before. He was one of my favourite British actors and personalities, right up there with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Alan has always struck me as a kind and friendly man, even though he has portrayed a lot of villains in the movies he was in. He was a brilliant actor and I hope he is now free of the pain that his disease must have caused him.
He will be missed dearly by a lot of people.

Half a toe
I haven’t really been online over the past week in general. Work has been busy and I’ve been feeling exhausted when I got home, so mostly I spent my evenings staring at my PC and not getting much done of anything really. Going out to dinner last night kind of ruined my plans for the entire evening aswell, but did make me realize I had to go see my GP. You see I have a very painful spot on my pinky toe, I think the correct English term is a “corn”? Not sure, The skin is hardened anyway and it hurts and no matter what I do… It doesn’t go away. I can’t really be comfortable in any of my shoes anymore so I had to face reality last night as I was walking to the restaurant… And was almost crying because it hurt so much. Seeing my GP in the morning we both came to the conclusion that it needs to be cut off… Which will mean I will roughly get half my pinky toe cut off on monday (yes the spot is THAT big). Which also means I can’t go to work after seeing as I got the advise to let my foot rest as much as possible… Which is kind of hard if you have to get to work 3 days after you get a surgical procedure like that done.
So next week I’ll be sittting at home, with my foot up on a stool, hoping my toe will heal correctly and that I’ll be rid of it forever. This will also probably be the ideal time for me to catch up on a lot of things… Including some university stuff that I’ve been waiting to wrap up forever.
Although I’m happy I’m getting some time “off” I’m bummed I can’t go to work. It’s less income for me that way… And I can really use the money. Not to mention I’m majorly stressing out about the healing itself since from the 25th till the 30th my agenda is absolutely swamped. I’m going to an Ellie Goulding concert (luckily with tickets for seats) and I have two wedding parties to attend. And I really don’t want to cancel all of that because of a stupid thing on my foot.

I’ll keep you guys updated on how things go… And spare you the nasty pictures.

Hunt(er)ing for Transmogs

I’m still playing World of Warcraft casually and have mostly put my focus into one Horde and one Alliance character for the moment. My Warrior (the Ally one) has been played for very long, has gathered many things and is just my veteran character overall. I have a lot of transmog sets on her, some more complete than others, and no problems switching them around. The Hunter however is a different story. Even though she is almost as old as Sandrian (the Warrior) she has much less in the way of cool sets to transmog. So today I decided to head out and get me some stuff to make my little Huntress look cool.
The first complete set I have gotten you can see above. It is kind of cheating since you can buy all this gear off of a vendor in Orgrimmar, but I’ve always been partial to the T11 hunter set. I like the bright green colours and, after leaving the vendor, I only needed the belt to drop from Cho’Gall in normal Bastion of Twilight. So I entered, wreaked some havoc, and got my belt to drop. First good transmog set: succes! Now I just need a bow to go with it…
Some of the other gear I’m chasing is the recolour of the Shaman T2 set. It drops in various Outland Heroic dungeons and I spent a good hour running them, hoping to see something drop. I managed to get the chestpiece from that set, but not much more. I did however get three items dropped from the Hunter T2 recolour, so there’s that.
All in all I’m happy to run my Murloc set until I can get my hands on the Shaman recolour. I will probably be farming those dungeons on a daily basis for that, but for now I don’t really mind.

All growns up!
I managed to finally ding my Ninja to 60 on FFXIV today, which means I can stripe the first thing off my huge gaming goal list for 2016. I had planned to do this earlier during my “holidays” but never really got round to commit myself to doing roulettes. So over the past weekend I just went full throttle and did all the roulettes plus Vanu Vanu dailies plus hunts. I also grinded some FATE’s for about an hour and a half to help a friend out for his crystal farm, which netted me a decent amount of experience aswell. Today after everything reset I finally managed to hit 60 and I’m very pleased with myself. I could immediatly equip a lot of level 60 gear that had been waiting for me and am now ilvl 164 on my Ninja. I’m being dragged down by the lack of proper rings, but that’s nothing a trip to Idyllshire can’t fix! I have enough Esoterics to buy atleast one ring and almost enough Law to buy the other. I should be able to run atleast expert roulette then and hopefully Void Ark so I can start gearing for real.
I also picked up the Anima relic quest again. Although this time I’m not really planning to farm FATEs for crystals, instead I am hoping to finish my Dragoon Zeta over the course of this week so I can hand that in and skip that grindy part… So I can go straight into the dungeons. Untill then I’m perfectly happy wielding the Law weapons… Since they look seriously awesome on a Ninja!

On what class I’m going to level next? Well for the moment I’m casually duo-leveling with a friend. He is a Dark Knight, I’m Astrologian. Sitting on level 35 at the moment, but not really planning to bring it up in a hurry. Instead I think I’ll focus on getting my Bard to 60 aswell. I miss being able to do some shooty from afar and Bard turned very interesting with Heavensward, so can’t wait to see what the level 60 gameplay looks like. For now though I need to head back into FFXIV and do my level 60 Ninja quest… I kind of forgot it existed!

New year, old friends
To end this blogpost I have been doing a little cleaning on my friends list for the New Year. I have so many people sitting on my Battle.net ID that I don’t actually talk to anymore… So I’ve started to weed through them and ended up deleting a few off my friends list. After that I jumped to FFXIV and did the same. I had so many people there who were either not playing anymore or that I don’t interact with anymore… It feels kind of nice, letting go of a lot of that stuff.
In line with this I’m also kind of done running after people to get their attention. I want 2016 to be a good year for me and I don’t want to spend my time wasting energy on people who can’t give the same back to me. I’ll probably come over as grumpy writing this, but it’s exhausting to always be the one that needs to engage in conversations or appointments. If you are truly my friend it would be no big deal to ask me how I’m doing for once. I might lose some people like this that I have known for a very long time, but honestly… I don’t want to be dragged down and feel like I’m not worth anything to people anymore.