Author Archives: sandrian

Gaming Goals June 2020

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No MMO Sunday today but instead my gaming goals post for June. Since you know, the new month actually starts tomorrow. I have a lot of expectations for this month, especially since I’m starting my Summer of Platformers this week and I’m finally finding the time to play more than just World of Warcraft again. Lots of exciting stuff happening next month, but first, a look back at May.

World of Warcraft (Warrior)

  • Get the following reputations to Exalted: Waveblade Ankoan/Rustbolt Resistance/Storm’s Wake/Champions of Azeroth/Tortollan Seekers/Rajani/Uldum Accord
  • Finish all quests in Drustvar and Stormsong Valley
  • Kill Rakhastan and finish the associated quest
  • Level Blacksmithing to 175
  • Level Cooking to 175
  • Finish miscellaneous quests in my questlog
  • Bonus: Level my cape to rank 15
  • Bonus: Work on getting all my Essences to rank 3/unlock all my Essence

Final Fantasy XIV

  • Finish Eden
  • Level the following jobs to 80: Machinist/Dark Knight
  • Finish the shared FATEs in Ahm Araeng/The Tempest

Other Games

  • Finish atleast two chapters per weekend of Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I will be at chapter 13 then by the end of the month. Anything more is a bonus ofcourse.
  • Get 10 villagers on my Animal Crossing island and work towards getting terraforming.

All in all it’s been a good month in my MMOs. I managed to get all my WoW goals done except for getting the 8.3 reputations to Exalted. I’ve kind of underestimated what a pain in the ass that actually is. Basically you get your weekly assaults which give 1k rep respectively to both factions per week. Next to that you have dailies that give between 375 and 500 rep on average per day. Although this isn’t actually that bad the grind is just awful. You can rack up around 4k rep per week per faction and honestly doing both is just mind numbing. So I’m going to chart a new course and work on one rep at a time. I will do the assaults every week but I just can’t deal with the dailies. They’re just so slow and time consuming and ugh. Yeah no fun to be had there. Otherwise I’ve managed to do everything I set out to do and the only other thing that is left open is to work on getting my final few Essences and level those up.

In FFXIV I had a bit of a surge with the Moogle tome event. I managed to get my Machinist to level 80 and finish the shared FATE stuff in Ahm Araeng. I’m halfway done with the Tempest aswell on that front so that is nice. Instead of Dark Knight I opted to start leveling my Warrior though and she is sitting on level 73. I finished all wings of Eden at the start of the month so I can stripe that off my list aswell.

Single player games seem to have fallen to the wayside a bit. I actually haven’t touched either FF7R or Animal Crossing in a few weeks. I just couldn’t find the time/energy to start up the games and play just like in theses new games that allow you to take advantage of sports betting legality. Hopefully I can combine FF7R with my Platformers, I think I’m just not gonna look at AC for a bit because I’ve just bounced hard off the game in general

Now… What are my plans for June?

World of Warcraft (Warrior)

  • Work on getting up reputation with Rajani and Uldum Accord
  • Work on Mythic+ keystones. Get everything on a +10 and try to push for a +15
  • Work on unlocking/upgrading my final Essences

Not that much for WoW this month. Dailies will be a thing and I want to run a bit more Mythic+ dungeons. I’m comfortably pushing up untill +13/+14 but the +15 remains a challenge. I really want to break that boundary though and just do them. For the Essences I will essentially have to bite the bullet and do PvP. How much I’m willing to do I don’t know yet but we’ll see.

Final Fantasy XIV

  • Level my Warrior and another class to level 80
  • Get Ixion mount from Moogle Tome Event

Not many goals in FFXIV either. I want to keep on leveling and I want the Ixion mount from the Moogle Tomes event. Not much else to see here

Other games

  • Start Summer of Platformers
  • Finish FF7R
  • Get daily rewards in GW2 and try to level up my character a bit
  • Explore Phantasy Star Online 2?

Here is where things get interesting. I want to finish up FF7R this month and start my Summer of Platformers. I actually cheated a bit and started one of my Platformers today. I will probably do a write-up about that later in the week. Let’s just say I’m pretty rusty so I wil expect a lot of deaths in this first game before I find my groove again.
I’ve also gotten into the habit of logging into Guild Wars 2 for the daily reward and, since I’m logged in anyway, I’ll do a heart or two when I’m there. It’s short relaxing fun and something I want to keep on doing.
Finally I’ve installed Phantasy Star Online 2 and I want to run around in it and see what it has to offer. So far I’m not very much blown away by the game but that’s mostly because I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m on Ship 1 if you’re interested!

So that’s it. Keeping my MMO goals for June pretty light and instead want to focus on my single player games. I’m really curious how I’ll enjoy my Summer of Platformers aswell. Let’s find out together!

Sandy’s MMO Sunday: May 24th Tomestones Galore

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A still of Thordan fight

It’s been a rather eventful week in MMO land for me. We’ve had some guild drama, which I’m not going to expand further upon but it happened, the Moogle Treasure Trove event started in Final Fantasy XIV and Blizzard announced changes to Corruptions, Visions and Cloak leveling. Especially this latter news was music to my ears. Getting my cloak to rank 15 on my Warrior suddenly became a much more obtainable goal and one that I plan to grind out before reset because we’re currently on the vision of Orgrimmar… And that’s the easier of the two.

As for last week. I kicked my ass into gear when it came to farming tomes in FFXIV. I’ve chosen to mainly focus on making sure that I run the Main Scenario Roulette every day since it can either contain the Praetorium or Castrum Meridianum which are good for 10 or 7 tomes respectively. So far I’ve been “lucky” and I’ve been getting the Praetorium constantly. Sure it takes a while to complete but afterwards I get out with 10 Tomestones and a big chunk of experience towards my next level. With this tactic I’ve managed to push my Machinist to level 80, finally, and started working on my Warrior next. I know I was planning to do Dark Knight but for some reason I felt like picking up Warrior and I need to level both anyway so it doesn’t really matter which one I pick up first in that regard. So far I’ve managed to get my Warrior to level 72 and I picked up the Susano Ex mount, the first one of the dog mounts that I own. I remember lightly farming it in Stormblood together with the one from Lakshmi Ex but I never managed to obtain them. So now I’ll just grab it with this event! The next mount on my list to get is the Ixion mount and after that I need to see what else the Moogle has on offer with it’s Tomestones. I may pick up some Orchestrion Scrolls or alternatively some MGP cards so I can start getting mounts from the Gold Saucer. Anyway I’ve been dutifully running this content and I’m quite happy so far.
In other news I’ve also been pushing FATEs like a madman last week. I managed to finish up the Rank 3 FATE step in Ahm Araeng and am halfway through finishing the Rank 3 FATE step in the Tempest. Which means I’m 30 FATEs off of doing the lot. Not that bad for a week of gaming!

In the World of Warcraft it’s been a lot of the same stuff I’ve been doing the past few weeks. I’m still ranking up Essences on my Warrior and I’m still doing dailies and still raiding and attempting to do Mythic+. For some reason though I’ve gone into a bit of an alt frenzy because I want to experience something else than just Protection Warrior tanking all the time. So I rolled up a new Demon Hunter on my server and I picked up my Paladin on the Horde side again to see if I can get a kick out of that. Otherwise I’ve been poking around on my Hunter, getting her cloak ranked up and running Mythic+ with friends who play tanks themselves. I’m starting to do some mean damage on said Hunter and I’m really enjoying the gameplay. I also realized it was a pretty overpowered class to run Visions on and I’ve been pushing it to the limit when it comes to cloak upgrades. I’m only on rank 6 but I can comfortably do two bosses and kill Thrall with no real issues. The more I rank up, and unlock usefull skills with Mementos, the more I can push on that character. If this keeps up I will probably be able to solo the 5 mask stuff on my Hunter easier than on my Warrior. But we’ll see when the time is there.

As for next week there won’t be many changes. I’m still raiding on my Warrior and I will still be pushing for Tomestones on FFXIV. I hope I can get my cloak to rank 15 sooner rather than later and I hope my Warrior will be a lot closer to level 80, if not there, by next weekend. After that I need to start thinking about my MMO goals for June and how I’m going to let them exist next to my Summer of Platformers challenge. For now though I’ve got a whole week of MMO madness ahead and I can’t wait to dive back in.

Summer of Platformers

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I am an avid Reddit browser. I enjoy the petty drama over at some subs and I think some of the gaming subs are okay aswell. As such I can keep myself entertained for hours on end just scrolling through hundreds of posts in the evening. It’s also the reason I shouldn’t take my phone to bed with me anymore because this is simply what keeps me up at night.
Anyway. On the Nintendo Reddit someone wrote a post about wanting to do a Summer of Nintendo challenge where they would tackle their Nintendo backlog this summer and it would span every Nintendo console they owned. This looked like a really good idea to me but looking at the games I own for all my Nintendo consoles (WiiU/Switch/3DS) I would never be able to fit all of that in a single summer. I have multiple long RPG’s to play through and those alone would take me forever to finish. Case in point me taking months to finish up the Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

However I did want to start tackling my backlog and as such I was suddenly inspired to tackle one of my favourite gaming categories: Platformers. I own a lot of those. It was what I grew up with on my SEGA when I was little, and I enjoy the genre till this day. I have numerous platform games both physically and digitally and for now I want to focus on completing my physical games. There are some that I have completed (and with that I mean I have seen the credits roll) and as such I have excluded them from this challenge. I purely want to focus on all the games I haven’t completed yet and bring those to a credit roll. Again, I’m only tackling my physical games for now since they’re just easier to keep track of than all the stuff I own digitally. So without further ado here’s a picture of all the games I’m planning to tackle.

This may not seem like that many games but according to Howlongtobeat completing all these games will take me roughly 200 hours in total. For this estimate I’ve used the metric of Mainstory + Extra’s since I do like to go off the beaten path and grab all the extras in a level when I can. It’s not a priority and I’m not going to go back specifically to get coins or crystals or whatever when it takes too long or is too frustrating but I do like to find most of the hidden stuff when I can. My main objective in all of these games is to defeat the “final” boss and see a credit roll. For some games it means that the game actually ends there but for some games it means bonus worlds are opened up to conquer afterwards. Depending on how much time that takes and/or how difficult it is I may tackle those aswell.

For now the plan is to start going through this backlog once I’m finished with the FF7R. I expect this to be somewhere in June which is also when summer starts. My goals is to get through all of these by the end of summer, which is September 21st. All in all this would mean I would have to complete a game per week. With the average game time per game being somewhere around 12 hours that’s not actually too bad. Furthermore there are a few games here that I already started to play and, if I still remember enough of the game, will pick up where I left off. Most notably these are Yooka Laylee and New Super Mario Bros U. Thus shaving off a bit of gametime there. For the rest I will probably start fresh and work my way from there.
Together with playing the games I will also aspire to make a blog post about every game I’ve beaten. They probably won’t be professional type reviews but mostly posts about what I thought of the game and if I enjoyed it and how long it took me to beat it. So I will have something to look back on later!

So yeah, this is my plan for this summer. Let’s see how it turns out!

Moogle Treasure Trove is back!

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Afbeelding kan het volgende bevatten: mogelijk herkende tekst: Moogle Treasure Trove The Hunt for Law From Monday, May 18, 2020 at 1:00 a.m. (PDT) until the launch of Patch 5.3

Another round of the Moogle Treasure Trove has kicked off in Final Fantasy XIV.
Once again you are rewarded for doing low level dungeons, especially Castrum Meridianum and the Praetorium. Queueing up for main scenario roulette as DPS during this time isn’t nearly as painful as other times and I’m definitely taking advantage of it on my Machinist this week.

As for what I’m chasing personally. I think I definitely want to get the Ixion and Susano Ex mounts. The shiba necklace looks super cute aswell.

So if you’re playing FFXIV please check out what the Moogle Treasure Trove has to offer and get queueing for those dungeons!

Sandy’s MMO Sunday: May 17th I Need New Goals

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I really like taking screenshots of my mount collection. I have more than enough to show off and the one I’m using in this screenshot is the one you get for collecting 300 mounts so I guess you can see where I’m at with my collection. I didn’t even make a concious effort to get to that 300 mark. It kind of happened naturally. I realized I was only three mounts short yesterday and bought them off the reputation vendors in Stormsong Valley, Drustvar and Tiragarde Sound. Of course I’m well away from the next two achievements for obtaining 350 and 400 mounts respectively. I don’t think that will change anytime soon since hunting down mounts is not really high on my priority list right now.

What is high on my priority list is the fact that I need to find new goals in the World of Warcraft to tie me over untill the end of the month. I have actually completed almost all goals on my list I made at the start of the month. Mostly because I’ve been no-lifing on WoW way too much this past week and dropping whatever else I intended to play. It tends to happen that when I get back into “serious” MMO mode I get sucked into the game and then suddenly spend most of my waking hours outside of any real life obligations in said game. I guess there’s worse ways to spend your time but it also means that my progress in Final Fantasy XIV and 7R has kind of stalled and I haven’t touched my Animal Crossing island in about two weeks. Oops. Oh well. It is how it is. As such I need a few new goals to focus on so I don’t get overwhelmed.
As of right now I have a few goals left that I’m still working on that I can’t really speed up because they are mostly tied to doing dailies and/or World Quests. This mainly concerns the reputations that I still have left to do. Another is battling my questlog which I’m doing slowly but steadily. I’ve killed Rakhastan in LFR, completing the associated quest, and my guild as a whole managed to kill N’Zoth on heroic difficulty this week effectively having us “beat” the current raiding content. I got my achievement and mount and I could stripe off the final quest of the Black Empire campaign aswell. So when I look at my WoW goals list it kind of looks something like this now:

  • Get the following reputations to Exalted: Waveblade Ankoan/Rustbolt Resistance/Storm’s Wake/Champions of Azeroth/Tortollan Seekers/Rajani/Uldum Accord
  • Finish all quests in Drustvar and Stormsong Valley
  • Kill Rakhastan and finish the associated quest
  • Level Blacksmithing to 175
  • Level Cooking to 175
  • Finish miscellaneous quests in my questlog

The reputations and quests will disappear organically. It’s just a question of doing dailies, World Quests and the assaults in Uldum and Valley of Eternal Blossoms. Nothing new there and it will keep me on the daily cycle for a bit. Seeing as you can get 500 rep per day with Uldum Accord and Rajani for doing dailies, plus bonus rep for completing an assault. It’s around 4-5k rep per week. I’m honored with both factions as of right now so I think I will hit revered by the end of the month. And then it will take me roughly another month to get to Exalted. It’s a really slow burn. As for the Tortollan Seekers. I’m around 1k rep off hitting exalted with them and I’m pretty sure that if the double reputation buff is still up tomorrow I can hit Exalted from doing 3-4 World Quests for them. So yeah. That basically gives me a ton of “free” time apart from doing dailies. So to fill that up I want to add the following goals to my list:

  • Level up my Legendary cloak to rank 15
  • Obtain and rank up Essences for my Heart of Azeroth necklace

Yeah it’s only these two. However these goals cover a bigger area than one might think. The Legendary cloak one is pretty straight forward and just involves me putting time into running Visions of N’Zoth. I’m currently able to solo 3 chest runs without masks and I hope I can get up to 4 chests now that my cloak has hit rank 15. Eventually I want to start doing runs with masks aswell but for now I’m not feeling that confident yet. Getting my cloak to rank 15 will be time consuming enough.
As far as the other goal goes. There are a lot of essences to obtain that one can slot into their Heart of Azeroth. I obtained a lot of them but not all. Especially the PvP related ones I’ve not bothered with yet but I would like to. Of the essences that I have obtained the majority is only rank 2. They become the most powerful once they hit rank 3 so I still have a bit to go to rank all of them up. Some again will come more naturally from doing Ny’alotha raids, Visions and Mythic+. I think I’m pretty close to unlocking the rank 3 from Island Expeditions one aswell. Others are harder to get. They require you to run dungeons, (outdated) raids or straight up grinding materials to obtain them. So yeah. It’s actually a bit of a meta-goal and one I’m pretty happy to tackle.

This should also hold me over untill the end of the month and it should allow me to put more time into FFXIV and my single player games. I’m still leveling up my Machinist and I should be done with the Ahm Araeng FATES this week aswell. As for FF7R I’m still at chapter 8 and I know it’s a bit of a freeroam chapter with a lot of side content and I really need to take some time to sit down and play through it properly. With a four day weekend coming up I think I will do just that and hopefully earn a bunch of trophies along the way. I’m still aiming to get the Platinum trophy for FF7R because I think it’s an awesome game and deserves all the time I can sink into it but for now I just need to find a moment to just sit down and play.

Let’s hope that happens next week.

Sandy’s MMO Sunday: May 10th progress, progress, progress!

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Two posts in one day? Why not! I feel the writing bug so I may aswell take advantage of it. Plus my earlier post was supposed to go up yesterday but I forgot to hit the publish button so… Whatever I guess.
I rebranded my older “Sandy’s Sunday” to “Sandy’s MMO Sunday” since MMO’s are still my most played genre and I want to have one day a week where I specifically talk about my (personal) progress on that front aswell as talk about what I’ve been struggling with the past week, if there have been struggles or anything else I need to get off my chest.

So first off, I have made a ton, and I mean a ton, of progress on my World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV goals the past week. I’ve gotten two reputations to Exalted, Storm’s Wake and the Waveblade Ankoan. They were both surprisingly easy to get and I even managed to three Paragon chests for both reputations together already. Mostly because next to getting Storm’s Wake reputation up I also finished the zone quest wise. I also finished off Drustvar so I can stripe that goal off of my list. I can’t say how soothing it is to get rid of all the quest markers on a map and slowly emptying out my questlog as I go through a zone. Right now I only have one questchain left in Stormsong Valley and two Dungeon quests that are related to the zone stories so I may tackle those next week.
On the profession front I’ve been able to get Kul Tiran Blacksmithing to level 175 with a little help from the Darkmoon Faire. I’m also well on my way to crafting the 455 ilvl belt, I need like 9 more Expulsom or so, after which I unlock the 470 recipe which is something I aim for! After that I’m probably going to focus on doing the same for the pants seeing as the chance is slim I’m going to get 470 ilvl gear from anywhere else.
Next to my personal progress we also managed to down two more bosses in Heroic Ny’alotha bringing us to 10/12 bosses downed total with a 10%ish wipe on Carapace of N’zoth. I’m pretty sure we’ll get to 11/12 heroic next week, maybe even 12/12 if we don’t wipe too much on bosses that we’ve already downed. All in all a pretty good week in WoW!

In FFXIV I’ve taken last Tuesdays’ reset to finish off Eden. I had three fights left and even though I managed to die in all three of them I did clear the instance, so I can scrape that off my list aswell! Leveling on my Machinist has been steady and I’ve hit level 75 today. I’m also slowly whittling away at FATEs in Ahm Araeng and only need to do 14 more of them to get to that rank 3 FATEs cleared. I’m pretty sure I can bang those out the coming week and hopefully get my Machinist a lot closer to level 80 aswell. After that I can set my eyes on FATEs in the Tempest untill my Machinist is level 80 and I can get rid of all the sub level 80 Aiming gear and start working on the final cluster of jobs that I need to level: my tanks. I figured I may aswell start with Dark Knight first and then pick up Warrior after before unlocking and leveling the final job I need: Gunblade.

Next to all this nice progress I’m also struggling a lot with the overwhelming amount of content that is available to do in, mostly, WoW. Right now I’m focusing on the goals that I have set for myself and I’m pretty good at keeping myself restrained to them for now but when I look at all the activities I can partake in the situation just gets to be a bit overwhelming.
There’s obviously the two raid nights per week where I’m logged on and all the dailies I’m doing every day to get up reputations and earn other things. Then there’s Mythic+, Visions of N’Zoth to level up my legendary cloak, chasing the rank 2 and 3 upgrades for the essences in my Heart of Azeroth necklace, which come from a lot of different sources. The weekly assaults in Uldum and Vale of Eternal Blossoms. And don’t even get me started on chasing mounts, pets and achievements. Something I love to do but need to put on the side for a bit so I can focus on the more “important” stuff that needs doing. It’s really hard to be able to do everything given the limited amount of time I have to spend now that I’m an adult with a full time job. I really don’t want to invest every waking moment that I have into WoW and as such I’ve had to make decisions on what I really want to do. Setting goals for myself has helped enormously but seeing the speed at which I’ve been fulfilling said goals I may need to find another set of goals pretty soon before I become directionless and start doing more than I should and burn out.

All in all though I’m pretty happy with my progress. If I keep up this pace I may even need to set some new goals for myself by the end of next week. For now though I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing and hopefully not get too sidetracked with shiny content.

Scheduling The Daily Grind

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Trying to keep up with multiple games at once can be quite a challenge. Especially when juggling MMO’s. I have the utmost respect for anyone who manages to do more than two at a time since that is my absolute maximum and even then I’m struggling hard to not put too much time into one thing that will take away from something else. MMOs tend to suck you in, especially at endgame level, and then when you look up you realize that you’ve been playing this single thing for the entire day or evening while you wanted to do more or different things instead.
So to combat me spending all my time on a single game I’ve been trying to set up a bit of a schedule when it comes to my playtime and the activities that I do in my games. I have reserved certain days for certain games and I have spread out my gametime a bit more to include the morning before I start working and my lunchbreak somewhere in the middle of the day. This is also helping me to kind of not go insane with working from home all the time so that’s another plus!

Right now my pattern looks something like this:

  • Mornings before work on weekdays
    Log into FFXIV and do my beast tribe dailies and Trial roulette for leveling
    Play a bit of Animal Crossing, mostly digging up my fossils and harvesting fruit/plucking weeds etc
  • Lunchbreak on weekdays
    Log into WoW and do my BfA Emissary Worldquests. Do Nazjatar Ally dailies and/or Mechagon dailies.
  • Weeknights:
    Monday = whatever I feel like playing
    Tuesday = FFXIV reset so time for Eden and some extra playtime in general
    Wednesday & Thursday = WoW raid nights
    Friday = whatever I feel like playing

This gives me one night specifically for FFXIV and two nights specifically for WoW during the week. It helps me structure my weekdays, since I have things to look forward to, and it helps me get the more grindy daily stuff out of the way earlier on the day, freeing my nights up for other activities in both my MMO’s. In theory atleast. In reality I’m spending almost every waking minute on WoW playing catch up on my Warrior because there is just so. much. to. do.
Right. I hope that will slowly settle down and that I can actually incorporate some of my single player games into the weeknights instead of keeping those for the weekends.

As for the weekends.. I’m trying to figure out a schedule for that. I’m still reserving my mornings to get dailies done, only this time I do both FFXIV and WoW. After that it’s a random free for all to be honest. Seeing as the weekends are (normally) for socializing and doing chores, playing games kind of takes a second seat here to everything else. I do try to reserve a few hours per weekend to work away on whatever single player game has my fancy at the time so that I don’t forget where or what I was doing and, more importantly, actually finish damn games instead of throwing them on my anxiety inducing backlog pile.

So roughly the schedule for my weekends looks like this:

Mornings: Do WoW and FFXIV dailies.
Afternoons: Play single player game untill dinner time
Evenings: whatever I feel like playing/doing.

So yeah. It has some rough edges and I’m sure that my schedule will change over time I’m pretty happy with what I’m doing right now. Of course there is always room for improvement and of course some things that take up a lot of time right now will probably stop taking up that time after certain grinds come to an end.

How do you handle playing multiple games? Do you schedule them or does it come more natural? Let me know!

Gaming Goals: May 2020

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I realised that I’ve not done a Gaming Goals post in a while. Mostly because I’ve been in a funk and didn’t want to set expectations for myself that I couldn’t adhere to so I let it slide for a bit.
With the current upswing in my mood though, and the fact that I’m finding a lot of fun in World of Warcraft again, I figured I set a few goals for May for myself. I guess most of them will be WoW related, since that is my main game right now, but I will branch out to a few other things aswell.

World of Warcraft (Warrior)

  • Get the following reputations to Exalted: Waveblade Ankoan/Rustbolt Resistance/Storm’s Wake/Champions of Azeroth/Tortollan Seekers/Rajani/Uldum Accord
  • Finish all quests in Drustvar and Stormsong Valley
  • Kill Rakhastan and finish the associated quest
  • Level Blacksmithing to 175
  • Level Cooking to 175
  • Finish miscellaneous quests in my questlog

A lot of goals here. Most of them will come organically via dailies, emissary quests and finishing off zone questing. I put the 8.3 reps there because I will have time to do dailies for them once I finish off Nazjatar and Mechagon. Blacksmithing is currently sitting at 156 and with the Darkmoon Faire starting this weekend I’m sure I can get to 175 in the rest of the month. Cooking is currently sitting around 100/175. I’ll just need to farm the mats a bit more so I can level that up aswell. Other than that it’s just tying up odds and ends.

Final Fantasy XIV

  • Finish Eden
  • Level the following jobs to 80: Machinist/Dark Knight
  • Finish the shared FATEs in Ahm Araeng/The Tempest

A bit more modest goals here. I want to pick up leveling again on my Machinist and then start working on Dark Knight. I also want to finally finish off the shared FATE stuff for Ahm Araeng and The Tempest. Which is perfectly easy to combine with leveling up a class.
Finally I want to finish the second installment of Eden. I’ve done the first wing so there’s only three more to go.

Other Games

  • Finish atleast two chapters per weekend of Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I will be at chapter 13 then by the end of the month. Anything more is a bonus ofcourse.
  • Get 10 villagers on my Animal Crossing island and work towards getting terraforming.

I’m taking my time with both Animal Crossing and the FF7 remake. I’m enjoying both games in a casual way so I don’t feel the need to set more ambitious goals than these to be honest.
So yeah. There you have them. My gaming goals for May. What are your goals this month?

Tiny update: (raiding) progress!

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This week me and my guild in World of Warcraft decided it was time to start tackling Heroic Ny’alotha. Most of the people in the guild have been playing the game throughout the expansion and came from various other raiding guilds and as such were pretty much overgeared for normal raids to begin with.
We have established our raiding days to be Wednesday and Thursday. Which means that, even if it’s two nights in a row, I will be free to do whatever the hell I want for the rest of the week. Which is fine by me. Especially since I’m still trying to play another MMO (Final Fantasy XIV) and a single player game on the side.

We didn’t expect to get very far in the raid this week. I think our aim was 5 out of the 12 bosses. To our surprise though we managed to get 8 out of 12 down, with a sub 10% health wipe on number 9. It all went much smoother than we initially thought it would and the only bosses we really struggled on were Raden, which we killed after a few tries, and Vexiona which we didn’t manage to down unfortunately. I personally got a few upgrades and mostly I got to learn the fights as tank so next time we go in I will be better prepared on what to do and when.

As said earlier I’ve been working on a ton of stuff besides raiding in WoW. I’ve been focusing on upgrading my Heart of Azeroth Essences so that I can get the right ones slotted, and then get them ranked up. I think I have all the ones I need for raiding and Mythic+ tanking now which is nice. The only thing left is to get them all to rank four, which is still quite far away for most of them. I did however finish the Nazjatar zone story, and killed Queen Azshara in LFR, so the only thing left in that zone is dailies so I can get to Exalted reputation rank and getting my Nazjatar Essences to rank up. I’m diligently working away on Mechagon reputation aswell and I managed to get two more launch reputations to Exalted: Proudmoore Admiralty and Order of Embers.

Overall I’m making great strides to satisfy my inner completionist. The next thing to tackle is to kill Rakhastan in LFR so I can get that quest out of my quest log and then continue the zone quests in Drustvar so I can get that part of the map cleared out of quest markers. And then hopefully next raid reset we will be able to down more bosses in heroic Ny’alotha.

Battling The Questlog

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Portal Room Boralus

About to zone into Nazjatar, one of the banes of my existence

Coming back to WoW, and especially on a character that I haven’t been playing since the launch of the latest expansion, has been a bit of an overwhelming ride. And that’s putting it mildly.
I kind of forgot how much content there is to catch up on when you haven’t played for a while. Even on my Rogue, who I’ve been diligently playing for most of this expansion, I suffered from getting fatigued with everything that was going on. Trying to keep an empty questlog, doing tons of dailies to get Exalted with certain reputations. Work on leveling up my Heart of Azeroth essences. It was all a bit much. Atleast on my Rogue I finished all the zone quests in both Kul Tiras and Zandalar and the War Campaign. On my Warrior I had to do it all over again. And that’s not even counting all the other random quests that you get from picking up items or leveling up your professions…

I guess it comes with an MMO like World of Warcraft that has been around since forever, but sometimes it’s so hard to catch up on content. Even when it’s only the most recent stuff. To give an idea of what I’m working towards right now:

  • Daily Quests: Doing them for four factions right now (Nazjatar, Mechagon, Rajani, Uldum Accord). Mostly so I can get my reputation up and buy fancy things from the vendors aswell as being able to upgrad my Heart of Azeroth essences.
  • Heart of Azeroth Essences: A thing to get in their own right. I need to do dailies, Visions of N’Zoth, raid, do dungeons, do Island Expeditions and PvP, all to just get the right essences to the right ranks.
  • Emissary Quests and Assaults: At four Emissary Quests per day and three Assaults per week that takes up a lot of time.
  • Raiding and Mythic+: Raiding is two nights a week. Mythic+ is another night, depending on how far we want to push.

And this is just the endgame stuff! Next to that I also want to tackle all the zone quests on my Warrior, level up Blacksmithing (I’m on 155/175 skill points), do the weekly events, hunt for mounts and pets. Basically do all the things. Oh and did I mention I’m doing a lot of this stuff on a few alts aswell? Yeah, I know I’m insane.

With all of this stuff going on it’s easy to see how an MMO completely swallows up your time, especially when trying to catch up on content or when new content is released. I guess I will get a bit more breathing room when I’m Exalted with all the factions I’m working on, since it means I can drop doing dailies for them, aswell as stop doing the assaults in Uldum and Vale of Eternal Blossoms. The Emissary quests can be done in 10-15 minutes when you just do them every day. At some point I will have obtained and ranked up all my essences so there’s nothing to do there anymore either. The Visions of N’zoth also have an endgoal and when I can get to doing a Mythic+15 on time I’m done with that aswell. Raiding wise I think we will be aiming to clear Heroic Ny’alotha and then call it a day there.

So as overwhelming as things may seem to me now, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. I’m taking stuff one thing at a time. Setting priorities and choosing what to work on, on a daily basis. Right now I’m prioritizing catching up on the Nazjatar and Mechagon zones and their associated quests and dailies. Assaults and Rajani/Uldum Accord dailies are things I do on the weekends when I have a bit more time. The same goes for running Visions and Island Expeditions. Excellent stuff to do on the weekends where I have more than a few hours to spend.
Slowly but surely I’m getting there. And I’m doing it without driving myself nuts in the process. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to kill some Naga on their home turf.

This post was the 5th of Blapril