Category Archives: Gaming

Accidental Azeroth Progress

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After me complaining two days ago that progress was going very slowly in World of Warcraft when it came to the reputation grind, I apparently completed a quest that opened up a very long and interesting questchain. It culminated in the picture shown above where Jaina and First Arcanist Thalyssra open up the way into Aszhara’s Eternal Palace and give me the quest to go and kill her. Because of this, and because of all the World Quest and dailies that I did on the side, I’m suddenly finding myself only 100 reputation away with Revered when it comes to the Waveblade Ankoan. Which means I only have to do two more WQ’s to get there.

I feel like a bit of a weight has lifted off my shoulders here. Grinding for flying is sucky enough but since I gave myself the deadline to obtain it before WoW Classic launches it meant I had to spend a lot of time playing WoW the past few weeks. More than I had anticipated and it was starting to make me resent logging on. Knowing that I’m basically only a few days away of unlocking flying, I’m currently also almost 9/12k into Honored with the Rustbolt Resistance, has made me much more relaxed with my time spent here. All in all it means that I should be soaring over the Battle of Azeroth zones by Wednesday, assuming I play enough every day to get the Mechagon stuff done aswell. Coincidentally this occurs together with me finishing off the Mechagon spider mount, which is only three quests away for me aswell! It will be nice to add another mount to my collection. I’m definitely planning to do the Eternal Palace raid somewhere next reset aswell since I think all wings should be available in Looking For Raid then. Or perhaps I should do the Zuldazar raid first since I completely skipped that…

All in all I’m quite happy the end is in sight for my flying in Azeroth goal. Of course the next step is to get my reputation up to Exalted with both factions, and earn my 90 reputations Exalted achievement, but that should be much easier when I can just fly from quest to quest instead of making my way to flight points and then barreling past mobs hoping they won’t daze me off my mount. I also may want to dabble in leveling up my Engineering more seeing as I got my mining to 175 skill, which is the current maximum, but my Engineering is stuck at 131. It probably has something to do with the fact that Engineering as profession just majorly sucks to level up. You don’t really get many useful things from it and everything just takes so much materials to craft that I’ve kind of thrown my hands in the air at some point after I made myself the helmet/goggles, which weren’t even upgradeable at the time. But I digress. Let’s see if the final two WQ’s I need for the Ankoan spawn somewhere before I go to bed so I can finish off that reputation today and otherwise I will definitely finish it off tomorrow.

First level 80 gatherer achieved!

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I’ve been ticking off a lot of boxes in Final Fantasy XIV over the past few days. I’ve gotten my Culinarian to 50 and caught up on job quests. After that I got my Alchemist to 70 and caught up on job quests there. Today I sat down for a few hours and decided to grind out the final few levels I needed for both Botanist and Miner. As of right now my Miner is a little over halfway to level 80 but my Botanist made the finish line and is now max level! The Crystarium hand-in quest at level 78 helped a lot with that, seeing as it propelled me all the way to 79 after hand-in. This meant that I had an entire level difference between Botanist and Miner but oh well. I bought a few scrolls to help me level faster and after 2-3 rounds of levequests I finally hit that sweet maximum level, meaning I have one less job to do. I’m fully intending to also get my Miner to level 80 tomorrow… Which should be doable in 4-5 levequests.

Unfortunately I’m now on the gearing part. Seeing as I don’t have any max level crafting jobs (yet) and I’m a poor poor little lass, I own barely 5 million gil in FFXIV, I’m kind of relegated to farming white scrips to gear my Botanist/Miner up with. I can easily get the 240 scrips per week from the weekly turn-ins at Zhloe but, as I found out today, my gear is woefully inadequate for regular white scrip farming. It may have something to do with the fact that I’m still rocking an entire level 70 accesories side… That I can only upgrade with crafted gear. So I may just take it easy and farm the scrips via weekly turn-ins… Which would only take me 10-15 mins each week to do.

With ticking off these two jobs at 80 I’m actually quite close to completing the goals I’ve set for FFXIV this month, not counting the weekly tomestones and relic one. Grabbing them from my initial Blaugust post I really only have one left.

  • 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

So with FFXIV I’m mostly turning my attention to leveling my Red Mage, which is sitting at level 72 at this moment, and capping tomestones on my White Mage. I actually got all the upgrades I need from Eden when it comes to healing gear so I can now freely roll on every item when it drops again so I can start gearing up my casters. I picked up healing boots and a ring from the new tomestones and I think I’m going to keep on picking up the smaller pieces of gear first, just to boost my item level. I’m not sure if I want to get the weapon yet since it will cost me 1000 tomestones and I’m not sure if it’s worth it seeing I already have the Titania EX weapon. Once my Red Mage is 80 I need to decide what class I want to level next… I’m leaning heavily towards Monk because I’ve always loved the playstyle of the class and I really want to level something melee based after leveling only casters for the first few months of the expansion. I’ll see. For now the goal is Red Mage and White Mage stuff.

Slow goings: Azeroth Edition

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I’ve been slowly picking away at my dailies in World of Warcraft. Overall I feel like Mechagon is easier than Nazjatar but I’m starting to see some progress on both sides. I’m sitting on 7.6/12k towards getting Revered with the Waveblade Ankoan right now and roughly at 5/12k towards getting Revered with the Rustbolt Resistance. It’s not fast going at all and I don’t do everything I should be doing every day but I’m slowly getting there nonetheless. If I keep this up I may actually unlock flying before Classic launches!

I’ve been really trying to make this grind less painful. It’s just doing the dailies every day plus Worldquests gets really boring fast. Catch up mechanics in WoW suck so bad compared to Final Fantasy XIV that it’s not even funny. When I was actively playing WoW I could log in and play for 30 mins to get my stuff done and log back out. Maybe a bit longer if I wanted to do Looking for Raid or a dungeon or battlefront. Now however I’m spending 1.5 to 2 hours per evening just poking away at quests and it’s just not that fun. I know it’s worth it in the end because it means I will unlock flying for all the characters on my account and I will have a much less painful time leveling alts like my Warrior, who I’ve put off leveling because I want flight. So I know what the cake is at the end of the road but I’m really resenting Blizzard for making the road a viking race where I’m way behind the rest of the group.

Honestly there’s nothing much else to write about. My WoW dailies are on track. I actually fixed my sleep schedule, yay and life goes it’s normal way.

Indecisions in games

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Names reserved

I’m starting to find it increasingly hard to keep writing a blog post daily. Mostly because I’ve come to the point that I simply don’t know what to write about. I know I can turn to other people’s blogs for inspiration, but right now I’m just not in the mood.

I’ve been struggling with the “schedule” I set for myself for during the week. Mostly because I come home and am really tired. Work is slightly soul destroying at the moment and the only thing I want to do when I get home is sit infront of the TV and vegetate or just straight up head to bed. Most of my gaming “plans” are falling through because of this. Logging into Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft seems like a chore, unless I actually sit down and start playing. Then it’s fine. It’s more the whole having to sit down and actually start playing part that is bothering me. I have the same when it comes to single player games. A few months ago I managed to (finally) finish Kingdom Hearts 3. The reason I managed to do it was because I forced myself to just sit down and start playing. The moment I did that I had trouble putting down the controller and would clock in 6-8 hour play sessions at some point because I just wanted to see where the game went. But just sitting down, starting up my Playstation 4 and start playing for some reason just took me so much effort… And I may think I have found the cause (besides the obvious being too tired to want to do anything).

I’ve been stretching myself a bit thin when it comes to gaming and gaming goals. Not only am I trying to actively keep up with two MMO’s right now, WoW and FFXIV, I want to casually get back into Guild Wars 2. I want to play two single player games at the same time and am actually playing a third on my way to and from work (Final Fantasy IV on my modded Gameboy Advance). Not to even start about the shows I’m trying to keep up with and the reading I’m trying to get done. Every time I try to decide what to do I’m kind of overcome with this “decision anxiety”. Because if I do my dailies in WoW I probably won’t have the time to do anything else for the rest of the evening. The same goes with pursuing leveling in FFXIV or GW2. When I pick up FFIV or Spider-Man I won’t get any progress in anywhere else, especially my MMO’s. As you can see I’m going in circles. I do X and then I can’t do Y. It’s why I try to set up goals for myself on a monthly basis and then need to step away from said game. Right now I’m doing this with FFXIV. I’ve gotten my crafters to the level I want. I leveled my Black Mage to 80. I’m not touching any new crafters for the time being. That leaves me with doing ex-roulette five times a week and half an hour of leves on my Botanist/Miner when I get round to it. If I want I can just set aside a day and powerlevel those to 80 in an afternoon, reducing the time I need to spend on FFXIV even more. I’m working hard to get into this mindset, that it’s okay to roulette in and out of games. It’s okay to put things aside once I met my goals for the month.

I guess it’s still a small part of me that struggles with MMO addiction in a way. I kind of envy the people who just play one game and are perfectly happy doing so. At times I curse the day I got introduced to WoW because it’s sucked me in to a gaming genre that just consumes so much time… And it’s caused me to grow my backlog of single player games significantly. I’m still trying to find balance in these things and although I’m much better at it than a few years ago, I still feel like I’m quite far off the mark.

Heavensward Mount Bonanza

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Gobbiewalker!

Last weekend a friend asked if people were interested in farming some of the Heavensward primal and raid mounts. I jumped at the chance and said yes because I still miss quite a lot of mounts from that expansion. Other people said they’d come as well and in the end we had a party of 4-5 people to tackle old content with.
We did both Alexander part 4 Savage mode and part 12 Savage mode and killed it as often as was needed to get everyone their mounts. This didn’t last that long luckily since for both wings the mount is a guaranteed drop when you kill the boss. There were a few one-shot mechanics that we needed to deal with but once we figured out those it wasn’t to difficult to get some kills in.

Next to the savage Alexander raids we also tackled a few primals and I walked away with the Bismarck ex bird (dropped at the first kill and I was the only one who needed it) and the Sophia ex bird (again dropped on the first kill). We kept farming Sophia and Zurvan ex for mounts for other people but unfortunately nothing else dropped for the evening. All in all I only need two more bird mounts from Heavensward primals now: the Nidhogg ex one and Sephiroth ex. Maybe we will do another farming party later on this week or in the weekend and be a bit more lucky with mount drops from people.

In other news I’ve managed to crank my Culinarian up to level 50 yesterday and I will probably get my Alchemist to level 70 tomorrow after reset. I’m also fully decked out in Eden healing gear for my White Mage so I can start rolling on tokens for caster gear. It feels like I’m getting my goals in Final Fantasy XIV completed much faster than I do in World of Warcraft. I guess because the grind is a bit different and I’ve figured out an optimized route to do most things with. As it stands now I’m going to take a bit of a break from the Ixal daily quests for the coming week and probably only do ex-roulette and some leves to get my Botanist and Miner leveled up. The rest of my evenings will be spent in WoW doing all the dailies to unlock flying.

Speaking of WoW, in about an hour and a half you can start reserving names on the Classic servers… I’m going to roll Alliance on the EU Mirage Raceway server so if you want someone to talk to when Classic hits you can find me there!

Underestimations in Azeroth

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When I decided to go back to World of Warcraft somewhere at the end of July I figured I’d sit down for a couple of nights and just grind out the whole flying thing. You see, I’m so used to the Final Fantasy XIV way of doing things that I may have completely forgotten how utterly annoying it is to unlock flying in WoW. I much prefer the system that Square Enix implemented where you sort of organically unlock flying for all the new zones of an expansion as you do the main story. It gives you access to easier travel way earlier on and makes things like Hunts, FATE farms and the like much more beareable.

Cue Blizzard and their approach to unlocking flying. As they’ve done since the Warlords of Draenor expansion flying is tied to achievements. Before that you just had to obtain enough gold to buy flying from a vendor. Now it’s tied to a grind that comes naturally as you keep on playing the game, especially the achievement part, but can be quite frustrating when you are a returning player. I was lucky that I finished off the first part of the achievement pretty early on after expansion launch so I just have to focus on the two new zones now, but I don’t want to think about what a nightmare it would be if I still had to grind out starting Battle for Azeroth reps on top of the new ones. I would drive me quite insane I imagine.

So far I’ve managed to more or less keep up with doing dailies in both Mechagon aswell as Nazjatar. I find Mechagon to be a bit more doable due to it being a smaller surface plus, if you’re lucky, you can pick up a jetpack on certain days that allows you to fly for 20 minutes at a time. This is huge to someone who hasn’t unlocked flying yet because it means I don’t have to pull half the island to get to something and instead can just fly over it. Unfortunately Nazjatar doesn’t have something similar but I have unlocked all the flying points there, allowing me to cross from one end to the other end of the zone pretty “fast”. Still it’s pretty annoying to have to cross all of it on a ground mount. As Rogue I can dismount and stealth past a lot of the mobs but that slows me down even more.

Nevertheless according to my calculations I should be hitting the flying unlock right before WoW Classic goes live. You get around 1-1.5k reputation per day per faction if you do all the dailies and world quests. I need 11k untill I’m Revered with the Ankoan Waveblade and about 17k untill I hit the same with the Rustbolt Resistance of Mechagon. If I manage to find time to do the dailies every day, without it hampering too much time for other games, it will take me a maximum of 17 days to get flying unlocked. Obviously I hope that it will be sooner than that, especially since the Ankoan are on the roulette for WQ completion bonus, which in itself nets 1.5k rep alone. Plus if I can drop having to do dailies in Nazjatar and only have Mechagon left it’s much less time spent so there’s that. All in all I’m still on track to unlock flying before Classic so here’s keeping my fingers crossed!

Grind vs Grind

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As I’m easing back into WoW the two new zones, Nazjatar and Mechagon, kind of highlight the major difference with endgame grinding in WoW and FFXIV for me. As we all know FFXIV endgame is based on running dungeons for tomes, raiding and ex-primals. This is all group content. Once you’ve played through the Mainstory and completed all the sidequests you’re basically out of quests to do. Of course there’s the challenge log which I kind of count as “weekly quests” and of course we have daily quests in the form of beast tribe dailies but most of the endgame stuff revolves around group content. I’m not going to tackle crafting and gathering here as I feel those systems are so resoundingly different in both games that they deserve their own post.

In WoW however a lot of “endgame” content revolves around doing quests. Nazjatar and Mechagon emphasize this even more than usual. To unlock flying and to move through the story you’re required to do a ton of questing. This involves one time quests that advance plot points, world quests that were newly introduced in Legion that give you items and rep with factions to now a ton of daily quests to again advance your reputation and level up your companions. Dungeons are fun to do and WoW has it’s own challenges in the form of Mythic+ dungeons and high end raiding where, on both occasions, you pray for a piece of loot to drop. Therefore you’re reliant on way more sources to gear up and tackle more difficult content than just running dungeons over and over. Also when it comes to unlocking features like flying you’re basically confined to doing dailies and world quests otherwise you will never get the reputation needed to unlock this among other things (like recipes and items).

A lot of people don’t like this questing to progress. Especially people who are more into raiding than anything feel like that being forced to do this many quests to unlock stuff is a damper on their fun. Personally I can see the positives in tieing progress to more solo oriented and quest content as opposed to raiding and running dungeons. It gives people like me time to sit down, unwind and do stuff on my own pace that doesn’t necessarily need the involvement of other people. I don’t mind doing quests. I just sit down and get into the zone and grind away.

Conversely I also don’t mind the current endgame progress in FFXIV. I do my ex-roulette every day untill I’m capped on the newest tomestones. I do the 8-man raid so I can get gear upgrades on normal mode and when I feel like a challenge I will pug an ex-Primal or, when I’m feeling exceptionally well, a Savage raid. I don’t mind having to group up with other people to get stuff done and in the FFXIV community I’m much happier to be running dungeons than everywhere else. Usually people are quiet outside of saying “hi” and we have a fast and efficient run. Sometimes you get more talkative people. Sometimes you get a bad player. But overall the FFXIV dungeon and raid (non Savage content) experience is quite relaxed and doesn’t feel like a chore at all.

All of this has put me in an interesting decision state. Do I want to kick back in WoW with some quests and minimal social interaction as I work towards my personal goals? Or do I pick up my controller, nestle on my couch and start up FFXIV and embrace the social experience as I queue up for various dungeons, trials and even raids? It all depends on my mood and what goal I want to attain. Both have their pro’s and cons. Both represent a grind in some form. And I’m perfectly happy with the difference that’s there.

Ubisoft Summer Camp 2019 Dutch edition!

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A few weeks ago one of my best friends took part in a Facebook giveaway to win entrance to the Ubisoft Summer Camp 2019 at the Dutch Ubisoft offices. To both our surprises he won and I was the lucky +1. So last Tuesday we made the journey towards the Ubisoft offices that were located near Utrecht.
I left work early because it started at 18.00 with a walk-in from 17.30. After traveling for a bit and searching an industrial area we managed to locate the building where Ubisoft was located. Due to the Dutch division being relatively small they had a small office space. Something we like to call “drie hoog achter” in Dutch to signify the relatively small and well hidden location of said office space. Then again, no development takes place at the Dutch offices. It’s really just customer service and social media management so you can’t really expect a full building like their HQ in France.

We were greeted by a few Ubisoft employees and entered what could only be their break room. They had setup about 15 PC’s and various Playstations, a stocked fridge with tons of drinks, a popcorn and cotton candy machine and enough chairs for everyone to sit on. As people were slowly trickling in we were told the purpose of the evening. Basically we got to sample a number of games that hadn’t come out yet, we were going to have a small competition, lots of pizza and just gaming fun in general.

The competition opened with a 20 questions quiz about Ubisoft related things, me and my friend ended 7th place, playing Trials Rising and playing a Trackmania Turbo track. Eventually two younger boys won the grand prize and they were really happy with it. As for the games they had on offer… We played some Trackmania, some Trials Rising and some Roller Champions which is probably going to be Ubi’s counterpart to Rocket League. I’m not gonna delve too much into detail about this game because they were pretty strict with us not being allowed to make recordings and stuff. In essence it’s a 3v3 game where you’re on rollerblades in an arena and it involves scoring points. That’s all you’ll get out of me.

All in all me and my friend had a nice evening. The Ubi employees were nice. We met up with all kinds of people who enjoy games aswell. We got to play some games, we had pizza and we ended up going home with a goodiebag. I’m not a huge Ubisoft fan, most of their IPs don’t really speak to me, but they are one of the nicer companies here in the Netherlands when it comes to social media presence so it was really nice to spend an evening there. They had nice decorations up with Rayman greeting all visitors that entered the 3rd floor where they were located. You could see that all the people who work there were passionate about what they do and it rubs off on the guests. It was a good evening out and I’d do it again next year, even if it means it will take me two hours to get home again (in Dutch standards this is a lot since you can basically get out of the country in 2 hours).

Finally a small FFXIV update. My Black Mage hit level 80 last Monday. I’m going to retire that for the rest of the expansion, I really don’t get along with the job, and this weekend I will start leveling Red Mage. After that I should be done and have the title “Soul of Magic”.

Catching up in Nazjatar

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As stated in my Gaming Goals post from August 1st I want to get back into WoW and work my way through Nazjatar and Mechagon and unlock flying. Like Syp over at Bio Break I’ve been on a hiatus from the game, although not quite as long as he has been. I think the last time I’ve actively played was when I was still living with my Dad and right before I moved so that would be the end of March. I’ve touched the game briefly here and then after that but nothing that really warrants the label of a fulltime return to form. Now that the FFXIV expansion hype has slightly died down and I’m settling back in a less time consuming routine there I can devote my time to WoW again, among other games.

I had already cleared my questlog and dove into the first tiny bit of Nazjatar earlier but yesterday I sat down and played the zone, and Mechagon, in earnest for about two hours. In that time I discovered the dailies/world quests system that make up these zones and was I reminded that I would need to put in a bit of work if I want to unlock flying in earnest. The whole idea of having a buddy in Nazjatar is nice and I’m happy that I’ve immediatly gone and explored the entire zone since it rewarded me with various flight points that I can take as shortcut to get stuff done. I think the zone itself is nice and I can’t wait to advance in the story and work my way up to the inevitable raid.
I also really like the Benthic gear system and how it allows me to catch up gear and itemlevel wise to other players. My Rogue, who I’ve picked to take through these zones, was hopelessly behind on gear but with the Benthic gear I already managed to drag my itemlevel up to 370. Not anywhere near the current “good” itemlevel but it’s a start at least.

Thematically I enjoy both Nazjatar and Mechagon, although I enjoy Nazjatar a bit more. The elven ruins littered here and there and all the outlandish underwater creatures mixed in with the overwhelming naga presence really sets a good atmosphere. The part where there are still elven ghosts has an amazing soundtrack. Everything really sets the stage for whatever big thing Aszhara has planned and I love it. I’m happy it’s not a truly underwater zone, like the Vashj’ir experiment back in Cataclysm, but I do think that Blizzard kind of missed an opportunity for some underwater content.. Maybe in the way that FFXIV has succeeded, but only with the ability to fight underwater. A girl can dream right?

I’m still settling into all the new stuff they’ve added, like the overhauled Heart of Azeroth system and both the new zones aswell as just getting reacquainted with playing WoW in general. I need to get used to my keybindings again after playing almost exclusively on a controller for the past month, aswell as the combat system and my UI. I also need to remind myself that the looting system is different and the community is very different from FFXIV and I have way more casual goals here than I do in FFXIV. I’m not really scared that I will get sucked back in again seeing as I have no active raiding group and none of my friends really play anymore so my ties to WoW have gotten significantly weaker compared to a few years ago.
The real big elephant in the room is that I hope to have my flying and all content done before Classic WoW launches towards the end of the month. I really want to peek my head in there, I will probably roll a Human Warlock, and I’m sure that I won’t have the “stamina” to play both Classic as modern WoW at the same time. This sets me on a bit of a timer to get stuff done so once my Black Mage dings level 80 tonight I will probably dial down on the playtime in FFXIV and up my playtime in WoW at the same time so I can get done what I want on time. I’ll keep you all posted how that works out.

Hello Blaugust and gaming goals

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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.