It’s been a while I know. I’ve been busy and then the blogging get’s chucked to the background unfortunately.

I haven’t sat still during the time I wasn’t posting. I’ve been playing Diablo and Final Fantasy 14 a lot, and finally found a nice static raidgroup for the latter.
We’ve tackled turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut and are now struggling our way through turn 6. I also picked up my lovely ilvl 100 Soldiery Chest, that doesn’t look to bad from the front…

But rather horrible from the back… Really SE? What were you thinking when designing this!

I was very very excited to finally get Twintania down with my new group though. We had been struggling for a while, our tank kept dying, and at some point we had to make a decision to either replace the tank or one of our healers. Luckily for us, and unfortunately for him, the healer we wanted to replace decided to announce that he would retire from the game due to lack of fun. We got a new healer in, an amazing Scholar, and downed Twintania, and turn 5, in less than an hour of trying. So happy faces all around!

I’m trying to take more screenshots of my adventures in FF14 so expect a bit more picture posts from me. I’ll take a screenie next time we enter Turn 6 so you can see the horror that is Rafflesia. But I’m also planning a little scenery post because gosh, even after playing for almost 10 months the scenery in FF14 still impresses me.

On another topic, I’m probably getting a 7 day trial pass through Wabby for Wildstar. I’ve been very undecided if I actually want to play the game and this is the perfect mid ground. I can try it out for 7 days and then decide if I’m getting it or not. Win/win no?

Expect a few more posts coming from me soon! For now I just wanted to let everyone know I’m still alive and kicking…

I’m writing this after recovering from a massive headache yesterday, something that has been the story of my life for the past few weeks.
I think I have the wrong posture when I sit at my pc at work but also at home. I wake up with headaches frequently, actually more often than not, and it seriously disturbs my normal daily routine.

Due to this I’ve been trying to bring down my game time, I notice that trying to game with a lingering headache will only make it worse and that on it’s own isn’t something very enjoyable. When I do play I divide my time between FFXIV and Diablo III. I’m really excited for the D3 expansion that is coming out very soon (actually in about 25 hours from when I’m writing this) and I really got back into FFXIV after finding a new home on a new server.

I shouted out on Twitter at the start of January in search of a new home for FFXIV. Everyone I knew in the game had left and the new little guild I started up with them had utterly died out. Partially it was my fault for not being around as much as I hoped but I heard from a lot of people that they were bored with the game and would have left anyway no matter what guild (or free company as they’re called) they were in. So there I was, stuck in a dead guild on a dead realm and desperately searching for a new home, mostly because I didn’t want to quit the game.
Queue a friendly guy from the Free Company called Cookie Monsters who play on Moogle EU responding to my tweet in January and I was sold. The FC is a very large and friendly one who runs multiple progress groups in the Binding Coil of Bahamut and also has Extreme Mode Primals on farm. I instantly felt like home when I joined them on a newly made character. I really really wanted to bring Sarella over from Shiva but unfortunately I have no credit card and thus no means to pay for a world transfer and so I had to start over again.

Fast forward a few weeks and my new character, Sandrian Noble, is level 50 on 3 battle classes and gearing up nicely to start doing some Coil runs of her own. This time I decided to level a Tank and DPS class, namely Paladin and Summoner and because I levelled Summoner I got Scholar to 50 aswell for free. I consider Summoner to be my main job but when needed I also make a very nice Paladin tank. I have my relic weapon on both of them and I hope I can play more endgame after patch 2.2 hits, which is only 4 days away aswell.

I’m really excited for the changes and added features that patch 2.2 bring like Glamours, Gardening and easier profession levelling and I don’t see myself quitting FF anytime soon. I had some posts queued up about it but since I went through some drastic gaming changes I decided not to publish them. They’re still around as concepts so maybe I’ll get to publish them some day, but right now it just doesn’t feel right.

As far as my other games go, I let my sub from World of Warcraft run out. I have no interest in the game right now, mostly due to my last guild falling apart and not wanting to roll Horde fulltime to play with some people who do still play.
On my PS4 I purchased Thief which seems to be an awesome enough game, I just didn’t have much time to play it yet. Knack I actually finished. I really loved that game and spent a lot of time on it, unlocking many trophies in the process.

And I just can’t hide it…. Or not.

Alternate title: Why No MMO Is Good Enough.


I’ve been having a lot of discussions lately with people I’ve met through my games about the MMO’s we play. Some discussions have been constructive while others were just disheartening. They all boil down to the same thing though: No MMO out there seems to be good enough according to the people who actually play  them.

World of Warcraft is ofcourse bashing choice number one. Everyone likes to complain about “how it was so much better in Vanilla/TBC and how the game has only steadily been declining since then.” The arguements people use for this can differ quite a lot. Some say they miss the effort that went into the game at Vanilla times where you had to grind your way through everything and getting your Epic Riding mount actually still meant something. From others I hear that they miss the old talent system where you could completely break your class with picking the right talents and thus ensuring your OPness. Another point that people try to make is that the WoW community had gone to pieces. Apparently it’s more casual now with more “noobs” and “kids” that want free epics for every button they push. Up to a point I have to agree with this one, WoW has become more casual and it’s easier to get entry raid gear now than it has ever been.
My personal pet peeve with WoW has not much to do with the game itself but the whole attitude when it comes to Addons. Especially DPS meter Addons. They’re almost mandatory to see how you are performing relatively to others and thus taking the focus away from what’s actually important: killing the damn boss. Who cares if you’re below that Hunter? The boss is dead no? Unfortunately that’s not how it works in WoW and that’s also the major reason I feel more comfortable playing anything on say FFXIV or GW2 because you can’t see how you perform there. Succes is measured by bosses downed or events completed. Not by how high you are on a meter.

But WoW isn’t the only MMO that has it’s flaws. There are many many out there and they all have an aspect that apparently turns players off. There hasn’t been a single MMO that has been as succesful as WoW, even though many got hyped up to be. You see that some games start out great but that numbers decline as the novelty of the game wears out. People don’t know what they want and when they want it and we all want something different. So in a sense no MMO will ever be truly good enough to please the entire MMO community. And that’s fine.

Personally I’ve tried Neverwinter, Dragon’s Prophet, Rift, SWToR, GW2 and FFXIV. Out of all the games only GW2 and FFXIV have stuck around on my computer. I didn’t like the targeting system in Neverwinter and because I was unfamiliar with the Dungeons & Dragons franchise I didn’t really bond with the game as a whole. Dragon’s Prophet was just confusing to say the least. I dabbled in the beta for a few seconds but got out as fast as I could and never looked back.
I could see the potential of Rift although personally I still find the game to be confusing as hell and SWToR just isn’t my cup of tea. I absolutely love the Star Wars movies, but the game feels meh. It felt very clunky and just not that epic.
Almost all games felt like they missed something I had in WoW, which was my first and only MMO experience for a long time. So even I can’t escape complaining about games.

The last two MMO’s that have stuck around for me are FFXIV and GW2. Especially FFXIV I enjoy a lot next to WoW. I like the simplicity of the classes. There are no talent trees. When you’re a Gladiator you tank, when you’re a White Mage you heal and when you’re a Monk you DPS. Wanna switch things up? Switch your armor set/class and you can perform any role in the game on the same character. Sure it takes a while to get to that point but the idea is good. No fiddling about with talent trees, no reforging your gear. Hell you can use the same gear set for Scholar and White Mage and also the same gearset for Paladin and Warrior. I like this simplicity a lot, mix it in with the prettieness of the game and you have a mostly satisfied customer. I say mostly because I absolutely hate levelling professions in FFXIV. They’re tedious to level and take forever.

The other MMO that’s stuck around has been Guild Wars 2. I haven’t played it as much as I’ve wanted to but I still find it very enjoyable. You can pick whatever class you want and still be able to heal yourself. There aren’t really any set roles for anything and you’re very free to do what you want. Which is also a major downfall. I’m so used to doing instances that the complete lack of them in Guild Wars untill you’re level 40 or something just makes the game repetitive. Although the scenery is amazing and they try to keep the game interesting by making lots of events I just get bored. Bored from doing the same thing over and over again. Doing hearts, doing skillpoints, visiting vista’s and doing your personal story somewhere inbetween. Professions wise it’s kind of fun. You get to discover new recipes by combining existing materials which grant you lots of skillpoints and also levelling XP. But I think the tediousness of only open world questing/grinding/events makes me not play this game as much as I would’ve liked.

What the moral of the story is here is that there are always some negatives about a game. People expect games to please the majority. You can’t. Everyone has their own wishes when it comes to an MMO and if you ask someone to come up with a concept for one you will get 1000 different ideas and people will disagree on most of them.

Personally I try to enjoy my games as much as possible, with all their perfections and imperfections, and just avoid the things that I don’t like. I think this is the wisest attitude, one that I have seen people express more than once. If you don’t like an aspect of the game, then just not participate in it. And if that doesn’t cut it, maybe it’s time to move on to another game before frustrations take over and you might start to hate the game that you once so enjoyed.

Recently I’ve been playing a Holy Priest as main again. I haven’t picked this particular class up in a long, long time and had good reasons of doing so. Holy Priest has always had a love/hate relationship for me.

I absolutely love healing as the class. I’ve started healing as Holy way back in TBC when Circle of Healing had no cooldown and my first raiding guild brought three Holy Priests along to every raid because of the amazing raidhealing spam, mind you this was before the rise of Restoration Shaman and their damned Chain Heal. I’ve healed for a long time on my Priest, carried her over to WotLK and healed all the raids there up to Icecrown Citadel. Fast forward to Cataclysm, I raided a few times on my Priest then for fun and again played Holy. This was during the Dragon Soul times where I could just fuck about in LFR and still do comparatively well as Holy compared to other Healers. They also introduced the new way of Holy healing then where you had to pick a “Chakra” that would decide whether you would be good at single target healing or at tank healing. I fiddled around with it, found it to be fun but since my Priest was Horde and I was maining as Alliance I didn’t pursue it any further.

Now I’m back on Holy Priest as my main once again and I still love the class. I have amazing raidhealing potential and I notice every gear upgrade that I get my hands on. However… I fall behind. Compared to our other healers I feel like I’m the weakest link of the raid. On meters they just jump ahead in every aspect. I oom during most fights, not probematically though since I always time my Shadowfiend well, heal my ass off while trying to stay alive myself and it just doesn’t seem to be enough to keep up with the rest on the healing meters.
And that’s exactly the reason why I hate meters so much. I feel like I’m doing much more/better healing than I’m actually doing. I save people from deaths, use my raidcooldowns in the best possible situations and in general try to get the most healing out of my character that I can. “But dear girl, why worry about meters when you feel like you’re doing fine?” Well as some of you may know, meters are everything when it comes to deciding who to take to what raidboss and when. As raid you rather have people that do consistantly well on the meters because you know they can put out a good amount of healing. So when you fall behind on the meters it’s a bad sign.

Even the DK Tank surpasses me on the Healing meters 🙁 This was on Paragons…

I’ve tried to think of reasons why I’m falling behind as Holy so much. The specc has gotten some love from Blizzard and is in the best position of the entire expansion so I don’t really understand why I’m not doing well. I have researched a bit, looking at what other Priesthealers have to say about this subject and a lot of it boils down to the amazing 2set (and 4set) bonus that is on the latest tier. I don’t have that. In practice this means that I lack +100% healing on both my Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing when I have two stacks of Serendipity. This is a lot. You can’t even begin to imagine how much healing power I miss on those spells. Doing double healing? YES PLEASE. But no I’m missing out on that.
Another reason could be that when it comes to gear I’m a bit behind on our other healers. They’re almost full flex-geared while I’m still running around with some Timeless Isle and Throne of Thunder items. It holds me back. I notice immediatly when I get an upgrade on my gear because my numbers go up. Furthermore they all have their respective set bonuses (be it only 2 or 2 and 4) while I lack on this part. Maybe when I get up to par gearwise I’ll get up to par healing wise. Who knows?
The last reason could be that I’m just really sucky on my Priest and doing everything wrong, which I doubt. I’ve checked some sites and I have the right talents and glyphs and seem to be using my cooldowns well. My gear is properly enchanted and gemmed and I even managed to get the 16.65% Haste breakpoint while still keeping more than enough Spirit and Mastery. I just don’t know and it’s frustrating me.

And the only reason it is frustrating me is because I can see my “performance”. If I had no idea about what number I was pulling healing wise I’d probably be much more relaxed playing the game, like I am in FFXIV where there are no meters and you succeed as healer when you can keep everyone alive. It doesn’t matter there as much as it matters in WoW and I sometimes wish that they would remove all sorts of damage and healing meters from WoW and just let us play the game and feel succesful when we down a boss and not when we’re number one on the meters while doing so.

Hey everyone!

It’s been a while since I got the opportunity to blog. It’s been a very stressful month for me and I really couldn’t set my head to writing about it, I felt really down.

There are numerous things going on in my real life that I don’t specifically want to get into right now but let’s just say that my mood has been bad since early October and over the past few months it hasn’t really improved. I have to deal with a lot of stress from my internship and from not being able to see the man I love. It’s driving me insane and it’s making me really sad. Hence the lack of posting happy/usefull posts on here.

The reason I’m posting now is that a lot has happened in the 4-5 weeks I was away from here. I rerolled on WoW (again), hoping that this will be the last time tho, picked up Guild Wars 2 again and most importantly I came into the posession of a Playstation 4, fulfilling one of my wishes of owning one.

First off I’d like to introduce you to Sarelly, my priest. There was a lack of healers for my guild and I got tired of playing a Hunter pretty fast. Maybe I’ve played/levelled too many I don’t know but I settled onto a Holy Priest and am raiding on her now, and enjoying it deeply. To the left you see her in her old transmog, but she looks a bit different now.
I managed to get my hands on my old T6 set which I owned way back in TBC and am quite happy to use it as transmog for a while. Being back on a Holy priest has really lifted my spirits, I have a history of being Holy in TBC and WotLK and I basically quit being a healer since I got quite pressured by the last guild I was in to conform to their rules so I left my Priest behind, not wanting to play it anymore because of bad memories.
The cool thing I get to do on this Priest now is not only raid but I also stream the raids, which are currently only Flex. The raidtimes of my guild are Wednesday and Sunday from 20.00 till 23.00 and I usually have my stream on so if you feel like watching a tiny nubish guild raid you can hope over to: http://twitch.tv/sandrian and follow our progress!

Secondly I picked up Guild Wars 2 again. I’m not playing it much at the moment, just trying to squeeze in moments of playing it without me burning out on it (again). I’ve made a new character who is a Norn Thief and am playing with a few friends I met in my WoW guild and so far I’m having fun. We’re doing the quests and all of the exploring together and it relaxes me.

My tiny Miqo’te is also still going strong on FFXIV. I’m now a level 43 Monk and I plan to get her to 50 over the coming few weeks. Due to all my levelling in WoW, and gearing, and obtaining a PS4 I realized that FFXIV isn’t that high on my priority list anymore. I got the rank 4 veteran rewards for buying more gametime but I think I might take a hiatus once that runs out, which ironically should be around the time the Diablo III expansion comes out.

As for my PS4… I am absolutely in love with the system. I only have one game so far, Knack, but I’m enjoying it immensely. I’m trying to get all the trophies, achievement whore that I am, and am currently on 20/42. If you’re really fanatic (which I am) you can download an app for your iPhone or Android phone and play a minigame that’s similar to Candy Crush/Bejeweled that lets you win items you can send to your Knack game on the PS4! It’s really convenient and it’s gotten me to the point where I have almost all gadgets and am about to complete my first improved Knack form. Yay!

So that’s kind of what I’m up to. I am playing a bit more than what’s mentioned above but these are the most important things at the moment. If you’re really curious about what I’m playing, I made a little picture of all the games I’m currently investing time in. The only one that is lacking is World of Warcraft because I couldn’t find the box 🙁

It’s been a while! I haven’t found much time to blog, unfortunately, but I feel like sharing my thoughts about gear design in World of Warcraft.

A lot of time the complaints of the female community are that female characters are often depicted as sexy and as such gear looks much more sexy on them. To an extent I agree. When it comes to low level gear both WoW and FFXIV respectively have some armor sets which make me want to raise my eyebrow. It barely covers the body of the female character in question and appeals very much to male players.

HOWEVER…

When it comes to endgame sets, especially in WoW, the genderdifferences are mostly gone. Female characters and male characters are getting the same gear, both clad from head to toe in cloth, leather, mail or plate. There is less and less sets where the female version is much more “naked and sexy” than the male version and I think it’s a good sign to give to the community. Just because a character is female doesn’t mean that she needs to show off her body.
For WoW this hasn’t been anything new. From The Burning Crusade on you didn’t really have gender differences in gear anymore and if you had, they were minimal. My warrior as female Nightelf looks as much an impenetrable wall in tier 6 as she would have been a male.
So for this I want to give the developers at Blizzard a big thumbs up! Thank you for not portraying our female characters as “sexy” and just give them the same badass gear as the males.

On another point I have recently begun streaming my games. Mostly World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy. If you want to follow me or watch me stream you can find me via this link: http://twitch.tv/sandrian

I hope I’ll have the time to write a more elaborate post soon but I’m still alive! Don’t worry!

Right now we’re in the middle of the Lightning Strikes event on FFXIV. I believe all the stages are unlocked now and people are able to get the entire outfit and weapons from the event. If you’re curious as to what the event is, here is a link: http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/special/2013/Lightning_Strikes/

I’ve been thinking a lot about wanting a fresh start on World of Warcraft for Warlords of Draenor. I want to raid again but I feel like I can’t really leave Aeternus without hard feelings so I decided to take part in a reroll project that currently is taking place on the Stormrage EU server. A lot of people were enthusiastic about the idea and we already have about 40 members in the guild. The project took of on Thursday evening at 19.30 server time and from then untill I logged off today I managed to get my baby Hunter up to lvl 30 without any help from RAF or looms.

I finally got my first relic weapon on Final Fantasy! It’s Thyrus, the White Mage relic. I worked hard for it, finally managed to down Titan HM after two weeks of wiping with random groups and now I have my pretty staff on Sarella! Mission accomplished. Now to just find some way to get into Bahamut’s Coil…