So we’ve finally made it to what is offically the first day of Blaugust this year! July has been a bit of a wild ride for me with time off, Shadowbringers launch and hosting a friend for a week. It’s the reason why I didn’t really want to tie down on a “goals for the month” post. However August should be calmer and thus I feel like I can actually devote some time to setting goals for the month.
MMO Goals
Cap weekly on the new tomestones in FFXIV and get healing gear upgrades
Level my Black Mage to 80. Level my Red Mage to 80
Level my Alchemist to 70. Level my Culinarian to 50. Level my Botanist and Miner to 80
Poke away at the ARR Relic chain for the White Mage weapon. I really want more transmog options… I’m currently at the Atma step.
Play through Nazjatar and Mechagon content in WoW and unlock flying
Play some GW2
Non-MMO Goals
Play through and write about FFVIII, not necessarily finish it though
Play through and write about Spider-man on the PS4
So as you can see for August my main focus will still be on FFXIV and getting stuff done there. Otherwise I want to put some time in the new WoW content and some time in general playing Guild Wars 2. Finally I already announced I wanted to be playing FFVIII and Spider-man so I will be doing just that. I’m hoping to finish Spider-man this month, I’m not aiming to finish FFVIII but I do want to make some decent progress.
All in all I think all the goals I’ve set are doable, I just need to be smart with planning my game time to achieve all of them.
So I’ve been back at work and the first evening of falling asleep the moment I’m home has happened. It’s always a major struggle getting back into my proper work rhythm after I’ve been off work for more than a week but this time it feels even worse because I’ve had an exceptionally lazy vacation, meaning I’ve lost the tiny bit of stamina I had acquired with my normal schedule. So I’m rebuilding this, and more, and it’s making me very much tired. It also doesn’t help that I was up hunting mosquitoes untill 01.30 in the morning last night I guess but still.
It’s one of the few things I dislike about my job at times. When you get back from vacation it’s always a struggle to get to a point where you are all “caught up” on current work and circumstances. I’ve been dutifully slavering away at my slightly exploded mailbox since people figured it was okay to start mailing me again on Thursday/Friday to get things in motion on Monday. Next to that I have my regular tasks that need doing so I’ve been quite swamped with all of it. I managed to make it to about 50 “unread” mails though so I guess there’s that. I’m really hoping that I can get the last bit down tomorrow and be all where I need to be again.
In gaming news, the newest patch of FFXIV hit today, bringing with it the new Tomestones and the Savage mode of the Eden raid. The reward for defeating the final boss is an awesome four seater mount and I may actually want to try to clear it just for that, if I can get into decent PuG groups. For tonight though I think I’m going to stick to clearing the normal version of the raid and start doing expert roulette again for the new tomestones and not play my Black Mage for a night. I made it to level 75 on that playing yesterday evening, aswell as getting my Alchemist to 65 and my Culinarian to 41. Another good change was the rate that Trusts gain experience from the dungeons you do with them. It’s going to be a less torturous road to get them from 70 to 80 now and I may even use them a bit more as I’m leveling up the rest of my dps classes to circumvent queues and still get leveling done when I’ve exhausted my roulette options.
I’m still quite curious how the Relic Weapon grind will look this expansion. Square Enix hasn’t said a word about it yet, which is rather worrisome. It feels like they launch the weapon much later every expansion and if this one is going the way of Eureka in Stormblood it will mean that I’m probably once again going skip out on it. I really didn’t enjoy Eureka and I’m in no way up for the same sort of grind again. I rather go back to the ARR and Heavensward types of Relics but I guess time will tell how things turn out. I would be very disappointed if they didn’t do any Relics this expansion but with the ever growing amount of jobs it wouldn’t surprise me. I mean they already took job quests away… Maybe Relics are too much of a hassle aswell.
So today is officially the first day of my “new” schedule for Blaugust. I’ve roughly made up my mind and settled upon the following for weekdays after work.
17.30-18.00: Come home and wind down a bit. Maybe head over to the store for dinner or something else. 18.00-19.00: Dinner time! This spans cooking, eating and doing dishes 19.00-20.00: Blogging time. I’ve carved out an hour mostly so I can start a bit later if needed but mostly so I have enough time to sit down and write a proper post. 20.00-22.30: Activity for the night. This will mostly come down to gaming but I’m also planning to take more walks and get exercise so whatever goes really. 22.30: Shut down and get ready for bed.
By sticking to this time schedule I’ll get enough time in to play the games I want, have time to cook/eat and still have time to blog and go to bed at a reasonable hour. Let’s see if I can make this work!
All the pretty ponies!
Throughout my years playing FFXIV I’ve never managed to get any of the primal mounts when it was current content. I was really happy to land in an FC that did a few farm nights leading up to Stormblood and I got a few ponies and birds then but never really pursued it any further. While I was doing my crafting dailies yesterday I figured that now that we are level 80, soloing the original primals in A Realm Reborn content should be a piece of cake now and seeing as I only needed the Shiva and Ramuh ones I decided to set an hour aside to farm those. Shiva was peanuts for my Summoner. I barely took damage, especially with the shielding that the Titan egi provides and I managed to get the mount to drop there in two runs without dying. Ramuh was a bit trickier since he does the tankbuster move. Once I figured out how to survive that, it killed me two-three times, I managed to down him pretty easily and to my surprise the mount dropped from that first time I killed him. This meant that I finally had all the ponies and could do the quest to obtain the Kirin mount, earning that achievement in the process. The quest itself was okay. You go to the Yoshida guy in Mor’Dhona who has a quest for you once you obtain all the primal mounts. He then gives you a whistle that only one worthy can blow and asks you to do this at an overlook so you can make pretty screenshots as Kirin appears before you. It was simple and short and you walk away with a badass looking mount in the end. I think the scene I captured above was one of the better ones I could get with all of the ponies gathered around.
I’m quite happy that I finally got all the mounts with all their awesome primal music. I think the Shiva one will be my go-to for a bit now since I absolutely adore the music from it, but really I could put all of those mounts on my favourite roulette and not be disappointed by whichever would come out. The next step will be figuring out how many people you need to get the birds from the Heavensward fights. I’ve already obtained a few there but still need the ones of Bismarck, Sophia, Sepiroth and Nidhogg. If it’s doable with two or three people I may just convince a few buddies to tackle those fights in the coming weeks.
Tonight I will probably turn my attention back to leveling though. My Black Mage hit level 74 yesterday and I want to get it to level 80 as soon as I possibly can, purely so I don’t have to play it anymore. I honestly really don’t enjoy myself on this job and I want to be done with it sooner than later. I just don’t understand how I can fit in Flare and Freeze in my rotations, not now I’ve barely figured out how Blizzard and Fire 4 work. The numbers are pretty but I’m way to distracted with not letting Enochian fall off and having to move in the middle of my casts to really enjoy it. So I’m gonna just grind through the levels, do the 80 quest when I get there and then call it a day and start leveling my next job.
Today the first day of the Blaugust schedule started and we are calling it prep week. I know it’s not officially August yet but nonetheless it can’t hurt to start a few days in advance laying out what I’m planning to do for Blaugust exactly. Writing a blog post every day isn’t necessarily as easy as it may sound, especially when you don’t have a variety of topics to write about. So today I’m going to talk a little bit about how I want to tackle the every day blog posting and what kind of posts you can expect from me over the coming five weeks.
FFXIV progress posts. This will probably still be my main game over the coming weeks. With the new tomestones out on Tuesday and me wanting to atleast attempt to do some Savage content next to leveling up my jobs I will probably have enough to write about for a decent amount of posts. Most will probably be just a quick insight of where I’m standing at the moment progress wise but I may write about a questline or encounter here and there that I feel needs some spotlight.
WoW/GW2 posts. Now that I’m wanting to dedicate less time to FFXIV I can dedicate a bit more time to the other two MMO’s that I have installed on my PC. In WoW I’m mostly planning to explore the 8.2 content and earn flying aswell as catch up to the raid content that I’ve missed so far. In GW2 I want to continue leveling my Elementalist and hopefully push past the level 25-30 barrier that most of my characters seem to end up stuck on and hopefully be able to turn the adventures there into some entertaining posts about how much I suck at this game.
FFVIII and Spiderman posts. As I mentioned before I intend to play through FFVIII. I’ve never finished a mainstream Final Fantasy game and so I figured it was time to pick one at random and just work my way through it. Apparently I picked the one with the most convoluted battle mechanics out there but I’ll make it work. I’ll be taking notes and screenshots as I play through the game so I can make more indepth posts about the story, how far I am and what my opinions of the game are so far. I intend to do the same for Spiderman on the PS4, although that is a much shorter game so I’m probably not going to post about that one a lot.
General topics. I have a few gaming and non gaming related topics that I want to talk about aswell. I’ve taken the habit of writing my ideas down and then sitting down at a later moment to turn them into proper posts.
Next to topics I’m also working on a “posting schedule” so that I can sit down and write a blog post around the same time every day. I’ve also taken note of days where I won’t be able to post on my scheduled time or at all so I need to make sure I have a few extra posts lined up to post during that time. The big problem that I’m facing with here is that I’m horrible at sticking to schedules. Something I’ve been struggling with for a big part of my life and something that I’ve been meaning to change forever. So I’m using the Blaugust opportunity to do so and create some new, healthier, habits for myself so my days will maybe go a bit smoother and more enjoyable than they are going now.
All in all I feel like I’m more prepped this year to participate and succeed in posting every day than I have been in previous years, so let’s aim to make it work!
