Category Archives: Gaming

Sunday Summaries #5

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Wow. I can’t believe it’s September already. Time really is flying the last few weeks and I’m struggling to keep up with it all.
First off, let’s start with some good news! I passed my first Web Specialization course: Introduction to HTML5. I got a shiny certificate from Coursera and I’m quite happy with my progress overall. I’ve started the second course now, which is an introduction into CSS and I hope it goes as fast as the HTML one. I’m really motivated to finish this specialization, mostly because I know it will give me a little boost on the job market. Which I’m starting to need because my current contract only goes untill the end of the year.

I”m still struggling with my thesis. It’s hard to sit down and work on it while being very tired. I am making some progress and I hope to be done very soon. In the meantime I’m plowing along at work and at life. Health wise I’m actually starting to slowly feel better. I have a bit more energy and I’m planning to spend my weekends trying to get some exercises done. We have a hometrainer upstairs and I have a few weights lying around so apart from feeling very dead there’s nothing really stopping me to start working on getting back in shape again.

Games wise I don’t actually have much to tell. I’m playing FFXIV still and had gotten my Bard to level 70. I’m working on leveling my White Mage in the battle class department and I’m leveling up Botanist and Miner together. All these classes are coincidentally at level 56. It will be nice to finally see a bit of “endgame” on my gatherers early on in the expansion. It’s nice to just run around and mine things when I don’t really feel like doing anything else and, aslong as I’m still leveling, I’m slowly working towards my goal of getting every class to level 70.
I am looking forward to the Destiny 2 launch on Wednesday. I can’t really play due to having to raid but I have Thursday off and I will have the entire day to dive into the game and play the sequel of the only FPS that actually ever got me hooked hard.

So yeah, for the next week next to FF raids I will probably spend most of my time in Destiny 2, playing the story and leveling my warlock and exploring endgame.
I know it’s a bit of a short post this way, but I don’t really have much to talk about.

Screenshot Fiesta

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It’s rather odd for someone who owns a blog to write so little. I’m not really sure what goes on that I can’t really push myself to jump on and write but I just don’t. It’s not that I don’t do anything in my games, to the contrary, I’ve been doing plenty.
However it feels like I can’t convey my thoughts into words or I just can’t find the motivation to sit down and write a proper piece. I’ve been taking screenshots of my adventures in FFXIV and GW2 and I’ve been meaning to post them so maybe I’m just going to make this post a sort of screenshot dump to show you guys what I’ve been doing over the past weeks, because I’ve certainly not been sitting still.

First off a few screenies of the Fireworks during the Moonfire Faire event. I did it on both my characters but took the screenie on my Au’Ra.

Moonfire Faire Fireworks Moonfire Faire Fireworks Moonfire Faire Fireworks

There’s also some pics of Costa del Sol daytime that I took during the event. I really like the tropical vibe.

Costa Del Sol daytime Costa del Sol sea daytime

And then ofcourse I did the Rising event as it was available where I got to meet up with Yoshi-P again and unlock a neat little game called the Cheap Dungeon. I think Square Enix did a wonderful job this time around with the event. It wasn’t terribly long but nice to see the devs thanking us again for our continued support of the franchise.

Found a bug! Me and the Minstrel The Rising Fireworks

As bonus some GW2 screenshots I’ve been taking as I’m leveling up.

Cya next time!

Sunday Summaries #4

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Hmm. I skipped my weekly sunday post last week. I had a terrible weekend where I was feeling absolutely crap so I couldn’t get myself motivated to do anything, let alone write a blog post about what I’ve been up to.
So instead I’ll just continue telling you about what I’ve done this week, in games and in real life and what I’m planning to do the next.

So first off… Life
Yeah I normally rather talk about games but right now I’m going to take the chance and talk about some IRL stuff. I’ve been having a bit of a hard time the past two weeks. I’m in one of my more depressed moods and thus I can’t handle a lot of things very well. Part of it is caused by continuously feeling tired/sick and part of it is caused by stress over my thesis. I’m still not done yet although I have been taking some steps towards finishing it off. Tonight I’m going to send my final research proposal and then turn my attention to the beefy stuff: results. I downloaded and installed SPSS and it really shouldn’t take me more than a day to grind the numbers.
Next to my thesis I’ve also started an online course teaching me the basics of HTML5, CSS and Java. Seeing as I’m somewhere in no man’s land concerning work and I’ve always had some sort of attraction to IT I decided to bite the bullet and just enroll. It’s a five course specialization that in theory takes place over about 6 months time. However you can work ahead if you want and finish up the courses faster, earning yourself an official certificate from the University of Michigan. Which in turn looks good on my resumé and linkedin. I really feel like I want to head more in the direction of IT and being able to understand atleast the basics will help me with this. I’m not sure if I’d want to be a full time programmer, but it’s nice to know how stuff works atleast. I might even experiment with some things on my blog, who knows.

Now to the more interesting part… Games
This week has seen a mix of various games on my part. I played FFXIV and raided on Sunday and Wednesday. I also committed myself to Bard and finally managed to get her to 70. Due to the class sharing accessories with Ninja I instantly reached ilvl 320 as I dinged, which is quite nice. I also won the Susano bow yesterday evening in an FC event so I’m all ready to play Bard! I really like the AF3 gear so I’m totally going to use it as glamour. I may default to Bard a bit more for my roulettes aswell since I really miss the ranged gameplay and the class is just seriously fun.
Next to FFXIV I also reinstalled Guild Wars 2 this past week and got playing. Due to me being completely out of the game I rolled up a new character, Norn ranger, and just headed off into the Wayfarer Foothills. Which by the way is a really pretty zone. I think this is an ideal game to just run around in a few hours a week for some casual and story driven gameplay when I get overwhelmed or bored with FFXIV. A post with some GW2 screenshots and a post with my Bard to 70 screenshots will probably appear later this week.
On the non MMO front I’ve finally finished Ducktales Remastered and I’ve started a new adventure in Pokémon White 2, which I talked about a bit already yesterday. It’s probably going to be my go-to game on the train next to some fiddling around in the Pokémon Moon postgame. I also jumped in on the I am Setsuna sale for the Switch and may break that out after I finish the whole Pokémon grind. I’m not 100% sure though but we will see.

All in all I’ve done a lot of gaming related stuff this week, which mostly revolved around FFXIV and GW2. Next week I don’t plan to deviate from this a lot except I will have to find a new class to level in FFXIV. I’m doubting between Dragoon and Red Mage purely because I’ve been getting Dragoon gear from my Savage runs and Red Mage is just an exceptionally fun class to play. I know it’s another DPS after I’ve already leveled two, but I don’t really care anymore at this point. The queues are manageable and during the time inbetween I can easily farm FATEs and hunt marks for additional experience. It’s how I did it on Bard and it worked out just fine.
I will also poke around in GW2 a bit to get my ranger up. I want to finish atleast the Wayfarer Foothills this week, which shouldn’t take me too long. I also want to make some progress in Pokémon White 2. Not sure how much time I’m going to spend on it but I hope to be able to beat atleast the first gym there.

In real life I’m going to focus on my thesis and on the IT course. I’m not sure how much time I will actually spend on it but the pressure is starting to really turn on to get this stuff finished and I’m really motivated to do so. It’s about time I’d be done with Uni once and for all.

A Skipped Generation No More!

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So, I may have talked about the fact that I’m a huge Pokémon fan before but if you haven’t noticed it, I really am. My first game was Pokémon Blue and I have atleast one game of every generation that has ever come out, bar one: the Black & White 2.
At the time I thought it was nonsense to get a game that was in fact the same as another one with maybe a new legendary Pokémon so I never looked much at the generation. Over the years I heard that there were some significant differences between the original B&W versions and the V2 ones and slowly I started to wonder if I did the right thing by skipping this generation entirely. Fast forward to the present and GameFreak is going the same thing to a new series with UltraSun and UltraMoon. I figured that if I was going to pick one of those up out of curiousity I might aswell go back in time and pick up the one generation I skipped in the form of Pokémon White 2. After a bit of searching I had one of my coworkers pick up the game on Wednesday from the town where he lives and I got it delivered to me on Friday.

My first impressions of B&W2 are positive. Even though it’s a 5 years old game the graphics still hold up quite well. It’s the familiar Pokémon recipe and so far the hand helding has been quite minimal. The game really plays into the whole “you need to have played B&W before this” theme with references to two years ago from the moment you start up this game. Unfortunately for me my Black playthrough has been so long ago that I barely remember it. For instance I had forgotten how much of a futuristic/technical vibe they were trying to go with this generation and after the silly island stuff from Sun and Moon this is quite a nice difference. I do realize that all the online features have closed but f or me it’s not really about the cutting edge, I just want to play through the game for the story and to experience the one generation I’ve not played. So if I can do that in the form of beating the Elite 4 and do the postgame content I’m happy. I chose Oshawott as starter this time seeing as I chose the grass starter in my original Black playthrough and I really dislike Tepig and it’s evolutions. Oh as starter it’s a cute little piggy but I really dislike his final evolution and the one from Oshawott is quite doable. This game really wastes no time to get you going either. Your mom is a very proactive person at the start. Apparently she’s friends with Professor Juniper and gets’ a phonecall that she sent her assistant your way with a Pokémon and a Pokédex. Mom then tells you it’s time for you to start your journey. Well okay then, it’s not like I have a choice here?
You meet your rival at the start and you get your Pokémon and the Pokédex from Bianca, who apparently did something in B&W aswell before you’re sent out to catch your first Pokémon and head to the next town. That’s the introduction really. Not as hand holding as X&Y are or SuMo. Obviously you battle your rival at the start but from there you’re on your own.
I made it to the second city, catching a Furrloin and a Patrat along the way and promptly I got ambushed by Alder (who is also from the original B&W) who wants to “train” me. Oh boy. This is kind of where I stopped with the game. It was late and I wanted to think if I really wanted to start this game properly now when I was actually focused on doing the postgame content in Moon. However since I need some inspiration for my blog and I can do a main Pokémon game and the Moon postgame at the same time I’m just going to go ahead with this White 2 playthrough and hopefully make some nice to read blogposts about it, even though the game is old and most people have probably beaten it by now. I still like to talk about it though.

So yeah going to poke around in Pokémon White 2 and talk about it here while also finishing the post game in Moon, and maybe talk about that here. All in all I gave myself enough to do for now and next to FFXIV and my recent return to GW2 I’m pretty sure I’m saturated when it comes to games.

 

 

Sunday Summaries #3

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Hello everyone and it’s Sunday again! My time really does fly doesn’t it?
It’s been a really busy week for me. Work has been kind of crazy, I played a lot of FFXIV and I did a lot of stuff around the house. I also took my time shopping again, seeing as one of my bras snapped and I needed replacement ones anyway and I picked up some new jewellery and for the first time in ages Pokémon cards.

So, what have I done?
In the world of gaming I’ve been mostly focussed on FFXIV. We raided two nights of Omega Savage and got turn two down and are slowly working our way through learning the mechanics of turn three. Although I’m really enjoying the raids I’m really struggling to get my Ninja going properly. I have my opener down and most of my rotation but somewhere halfway through fights I seem to fall off quite a bit and I’m not really sure why. I’ve also realized that trying to time skills together is probably detrimental to my DPS so I’m going to try to be less rigid about it and see if my DPS improves. I have mastered Ten-Chi-Jin a bit better so there’s that.
I keep saying that I’m going to work on my gathering classes but for some reason I just really can’t be arsed. It’s not really in line with my roadmap to Stormblood but I’m just not really feeling the need to spend my time on my gatherers or crafters when I’m too busy working on my battle jobs still. This is also in combination with having less time to play overal seeing as my Friday evenings are mostly taken by either watching series or sleeping early. I’m really tired the last few weeks so it impacts my game time enormously.
I have been leveling my Bard and she’s currently sitting on 66. The queues for roulettes aren’t that horrible anymore, I average about 15-20 mins wait time per queue, and I’m filling my time inbetween with hunt marks, FATEs or doing some IRL stuff while waiting for my queue to pop. Things have actually been going so well that I think she might be level 70 by the next time my summaries post comes around. I’m also taking my White Mage through some Palace of the Dead to get her to level 60 so I can start leveling her to level 70 properly aswell. I hope it goes faster than on my Bard, mostly because I predict I will have shorter queues.

In real life my life is a bit odd right now. I’m waiting for results from varying lung tests (which I’ll get tomorrow) and for the rest I’m spending most of my time being tired. We went into town for some shopping on thursday and I could barely stand on my feet during the evening. I have made some progress in clearing out our attic again. My mom had obtained quite a big ministeck collection when she was still alive but it was spread out everywhere. It took me about 7 hours yesterday but I managed to get all the pieces into one place and neatly tucked away. I’m not planning on touching it soon to do some ministeck myself but it’s nice to have everything in the same place. It helps when you’re looking for something to know where it is. I’m also struggling what exactly I want to do with my Switch/WiiU. I don’t really use my Switch much on the TV but it’s nice to have the option for when I want to. My WiiU is currently boxed under my bed, but I have so many games to finish on it that it feels bad to let it just lie there. I may just set it up again in a few weeks so I can properly work on my backlog. I say this now however but I know most of my time will be swallowed by FFXIV anyway so don’t pin me down on this.

What do I have planned for next week?
It really depends on my results tomorrow. I hope there’s nothing serious but you never know. I want to get my Bard to 70 and put some time in on my White Mage. I also feel like I should spend some time on one of my single player games or my backlog will never go away. I’m not really sure which one I’ll pick but I’ll probably post about it when I do. There’s many games that are competing for my interest and I have a really hard time choosing what I want to do.
I hope I can continue cleaning up the attic aswell. I feel like I’m finally making some progress, there is more space and I can store some stuff that have been put down randomly everywhere in one place. I also hope I can find the remainder of my Pokémon cards. I found my big folder with most of them in but I’m pretty sure that I have more than that and I have no idea where it has disappeared to. All in all I’ll have enough to do, assuming I can do it.

FFXIV progress: Statics and Levelling

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Today I’m proudly showing the video of our first Omega 1 Savage clear as header. We’ve started up raiding as a static and we have been slowly progressing through the content. It started with some ex-primal farm (untill everyone had their weapons and accessories) and now we’re tackling the current hardest raiding difficulty bit by bit. Now honestly I have to say that O1S isn’t the hardest fight out there. They added maybe one or two new annoying mechanics but overal it’s mostly knowing about when to slide to the sides and when not to. It’s a great fight to get you warmed up for the harder content later on and even though I died in a very silly way here I’m still proud of my part in the play.
We cleared this last week and recleared it again last night where I didn’t die and pulled much better DPS than I did before and afterwards moved on to O2S. We had been struggling with O2S on our first night of trying it mostly because people kept on dying. It’s a lot more complicated a fight than it is on the normal version and if you don’t really get the “dance” you will die to silly mechanics. Last night however things started to click together and we killed it on our 5th or 6th pull of the evening. On our kill we actually only had one death if I recall it correctly and the rest of the run was done perfectly. We cheered, the beast was dead. I also got lucky with winning 3 pieces of loot from that particular boss. The Ninja headpiece dropped (yay!), I won the Dragoon boots for my offspecc (yay?) and I won the token that will allow me to purchase my 330 weapon the moment I manage to scrape together 1000 Creator tomes. All in all I was pretty content. Then we peeked into O3S and all the sense of achievement kind of fell away as we got obliterated. Hard.

It feels like the ramp up in difficulty of Savage is quite steep. Where we killed O1S in about 3 pulls we had been struggling on O2S for almost 4 hours of pulls over 2 nights before it finally went down in the end. While in theory O2S isn’t actually that hard it’s just the damage that is punishing and any mistake made will immediatly result in death. Have too many people die and you will eventually hit enrage due to lack of DPS. It was hard to figure out and we had to replace a few people in our first week but eventually it seemed to come together. The new challenge, O3S, is a gigantic ramp up again. The first phase alone is riddled with mechanics and we’ve seen up untill she summons the dragon in the second phase. It’s a mess really. There is so much to remember. Stack, stand away, sprint to corners, stand on the right tiles, kill adds. We barely made it to 75% health on her and I was already overwhelmed with the complexity of the fight. It takes me back to raiding days in Coil where learning mechanics and timings was the most important thing you’d do in progress and there was almost no way you could brute force through stuff. They’ve brought that back in Creator Savage and I can’t wait to learn the rest of the O3S fight before advancing onto the big boss: Exdeath. We’re raiding again tonight and although I don’t expect us to down O3S I do hope we will progress farther into the fight while also perfecting the mechanics of earlier phases.

Next to progressing as a static I’m also learning to be a better Ninja. For the first 50% of the O2S fight all of our DPS were over 4k. For someone that’s barely played Ninja and is still perfecting her rotation and timings it’s a grand feat. I’m still miles away from the best of the best but I’m slowly climbing up getting better at my class as I play it more. Ten-Chi-Jin is still an ability that I need to get used to but I’m learning to incorporate it into my rotation better and my DPS is going up for it. I still have some issues timing TA/Bhava right but I’m getting there. I had briefly thought to give up Ninja and go back to Bard instead now that the class is actually fun to play again. But persistence and the fact that I’m completely in love with how Ninja looks while you play it (seriously it has the best battle animations) I’m sticking to the class and will aim at improving myself as the expansion goes on.

Another type of progress that I’ve been making is in leveling my alt jobs. I have gotten Red Mage to level 60 and am now turning my focus on White Mage. I’m not sure what happened to my love for Astrologian. It’s still there, I still think it’s a great job, but for some reason I’m enjoying White Mage a lot more right now. She’s currently sitting at level 53 and I’m mostly running roulettes for the experience instead of spamming PotD like I did on my Red Mage. Instant queues help a lot with that and it’s less boring than running the same 10 floors of PotD over and over. I’m in no real rush to level either since I met my goal of atleast one level 60 battle job per month. However if I could get her a few more levels over the coming days that would be nice.

All in all I’m content with how FFXIV is going now. I’ve set clear goals for myself and I’m hoping I can stick to them. Breaking them down into weekly chunks has been nice because I don’t have to look and plan ahead that much. It also means that I’m putting less pressure on myself to actually attain stuff. It mostly helps me focus on doing one thing at a time. Static raiding will take away some of that time but it’s time well spent. I really hope we will down O3S soon and that we all get a little better geared so that we have an easier time clearing and reclearing the content.

Sunday Summaries #2

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Another week has flown by and we find ourselves again on a Sunday. This week I’ve not gamed  as much as I thought I would. I did however manage to get my Red Mage to level 60 so that’s a goal I can cross of my list! Next to getting Red Mage to 60 I have also picked up White Mage again. This was my original first class to max level and from playing it a bit again I can remember why I chose it. So simple and elegant and yet so fun to play. I will be focusing on getting her to 60 next and maybe all the way to 70 as a sort of queue booster. I’m not sure yet.

I finally caught up to Game of Thrones aswell and am now waiting for the new episode to be released tomorrow. However seeing the catastrophe that was the release of the first episode of the season I’m not getting my hopes up on being able to watch immediately. Still it feels nice to be on par with all the friends that watch aswell and I am really curious to see where the story is headed.

I also picked up Splatoon 2 for my Switch and have to say that my first impressions are decent. I just really need to adjust to the controls and that might take me a while. I also started a Necromancer in the new Diablo 3 season. I’m sitting on level 30 currently and am taking my time exploring the class. So far I really enjoy the corpse explosions and summoning armies of dead.

Lastly we cleared omega 1 savage with our static tonight and we got to 10 procent on omega 2 savage. I still have a lot to learn on Ninja but so far the fights are fun and interesting.

As for next week…

I intend to devote a few hours to Diablo to get my Necromancer to max level and slowly work my way through the season.

I’m going to be spending some time on my White Mage and Botanist in FFXIV and make sure my Ninja is properly melded before we continue savage progress on Wednesday.

I also hope I can find some time to play Splatoon and learn the controls properly. It seems a very fun game and I want to make sure I get my moneys’ worth.

In the real life department I have a big lung test day coming up on Tuesday and I need to devote some time to my thesis. I might post on Tuesday after I get all the stuff done because I’m quite nervous about it and I probably need to get it off my chest. Next to this it’s a normal work week so I hope I have enough energy to game in the evenings.

Sunday Summaries #1

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So yeah. My official first Sunday Summaries post. I’m gonna look back on what I did during the week and what I have planned for next! My life is ever so interesting ofcourse.

First off, I’m still struggling with some health issues. My usual doctor has kind of given up on trying to find a cause and has sent me to see a specialist, specifically one that concerns the lungs. I’m still wheezing on many occassion when I exert myself and my cough is back in full aswell. This has caused me to feel absolutely horrible over the past week or so and honestly I’m kind of done feeling this way. So off to the specialist I go. My first appointment will be July 25th for another lung capacity test, after that we’ll see.
I’ve also been hard at work on my thesis, testing my cowokers and trying to get my approval for real. It’s all been a little chaotic with lots of things happening simultaneously but I think I can pull it off and be done with this major source of stress for good.
In the work department I’ve been asked to explain how our systems work to the new IT support team. We had a first meeting last week and a second meeting tomorrow. I’m sure they’re lovely people but they’re from India and I’m having real trouble understanding their accent. I’m not sure what’s up with that but not only do they have a difficult accent, they also tend to mumble instead of speak. Really annoying but the meeting was productive nonetheless. I had gotten some praise from some of my coworkers on the other teams afterwards so that’s really nice aswell.

Now onto gaming.
I’ve actually taken it easy this week. Work had gotten me really tired plus I felt like reading more than I did gaming. We did Omega with my new FC static and got everyone their loot for the week plus I think everyone has the Exdeath minion now, so that’s good. I’m rocking ilvl 317 average on my Ninja now and the only gear I can replace still are gloves, boots and chest. Seeing as Omega Savage launches next week I hope I can get some of that sweet loot aswell. We’ll see.
I do have to say that playing, and perfecting, the Ninja has been challenging this expansion. The Ten-Chi-Jin mechanic is not one that I really enjoy and I find it hard to incorporate it in my gameplay. I finally managed to nail my opener though, so that’s a thing. Now I just need to work on my Bhavacakra timing. It’s supposed to be always done during a Trick Attack window and I’m noticing that I’m not really handling that part very well yet. So I still have tons of room for improvement.
As far as leveling goes, I’ve mostly focused on the Red Mage and have gotten her to level 55. This is done via Palace of the Dead which is the fastest level method by far. It takes 3-4 runs of floor 51-60 per level so I could just sit down for about an hour and get a level done. It’s been really nice. I’ve opted to not do the job quests untill I’m level 60 and in full level 60 caster gear. I don’t want to buy things during a time where I know I won’t touch the class outside of Palace of the Dead anyway so that will save me some gil. I’ve also realized that I’ve held on to the HQ healer gear that I had gotten leveling up during Heavensward. I think I’m going to get rid of that aswell seeing as I’m taking the only healer I have left sub 60 (White Mage) through the PotD route aswell. I don’t think I’ll need any of the gear I’ve been saving up there. Plus as added bonus it frees up a ton of space on my retainer. As far as glamour purposes go, I can always get the gear again if I want to. For now I’m just settling on not getting any “new” gear untill level 60 where Palace of the Dead becomes moot and you have to actually grind your way up again through other means.

Next to FFXIV I’ve been poking around in Diablo 3 again after buying the Necromancer pack. The new Diablo season is starting this week so I might just poke my head in for that and play Necromancer for a change. See how the class feels and if it makes the experience fresh enough again for me to stick around.

Next to all the gaming I’ve been reading a lot as I’ve mentioned earlier. I finished off the last David Eddings book that I have in my possesion and started the Lies of Locke Lamora.

Next week…
I will have another busy work week. I hope to finish my testing for thesis and I have atleast one important meeting scheduled. There’s also the standard stuff that needs to get done so those will be four days well spent.
I really hope to finish the Lies of Locke Lamora. The book has me hooked, I really enjoy the story buildup and I want to read more! The only downside to finishing it will be that I will have to look for the second part, which I can obtain in various ways.
I want to get my Red Mage to level 60. It really only takes an hour of grinding Palace of the Dead per level or so, so it should be doable. I also want to focus on Miner a bit and get her to 50 and maybe beyond. We’ll see.
I’m going to dive into the new season of Diablo as Necromancer and probably make some sort of report of my journey along the way. I’ve not touched Diablo for quite some time now, enough to feel like I can sink a few hours in again without feeling the burn and frustrations that I’ve been feeling when I did the last few seasons.

All in all a very busy week for me! I hope to be able to tell you guys that I’ve met all my goals next week.

Mapping the Future

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Afbeeldingsresultaat voor planner

Yesterday a plan started to slowly take shape in my head. I’m really bad when it comes to planning things and when it comes to MMO’s I’m usually very overwhelmed with all the things I can do that in the end I mostly end up doing very little or unsubscribing.
I really don’t want this to happen with Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve found an amazing free company and some of my oldest friends are still playing the game. I want to make this my permanent new main MMO and I want to be a bit more serious about the way I play it. To make sure this happens I have come up with a “Roadmap for Stormblood.”

Now I’m not really sure how this roadmap will develop over time, but I had to start somewhere. Right now I made a two stage spreadsheet mostly involving leveling and gearing my battle and profession classes. As I’ve mentioned only my Ninja is currently level 70. I have a few other battle classes level 60+ (Dragoon, Astrologian, Bard, Machinist) and the rest is sitting somewhere between level 50 and level 60. On the gatherer and crafter side of the spectrum only my Weaver made it to level 60, the rest is below.

My first goals in Stormblood, and the first phase of my roadmap, centers around leveling all these various classes to maximum level. Initially my goals is to get everything to 60 but if I enjoy a class or if it’s already 60 I can take them to 70 aswell. For now the goals is to get atleast one battle class and one gathering/crafting class to 60 per month. I know that leveling sometimes goes faster than you know, hence the “atleast”. I’m not going to be so strict to myself that I have to attain this goal every month. I know that sometimes RL will get in the way or that I will have less time due to Savage and Ex-Primals raiding on my Ninja.
Seeing the queues as they are for mostly DPS classes I will probably abuse PotD for those that aren’t level 60 yet to get there. As far as Healers/Tanks go… There are enough roulettes to do that have quite low queue times and it will be a break away from the monotony that is PotD.
For gathering/crafting I mean to make full use of the leves, collectables and GC hand-in system, next to the beast tribe dailies that are available. I will probably focus on my gatherers first, mostly miner and botanist, before I take my crafting back up again.

The second phase of my roadmap will revolve around gearing all my classes. In a way with gearing Ninja I’m automatically also gearing Bard and Machinist up to a point. I want to have decent/BiS gear for as many classes as possible and the fact that a lot of gear is shared will probably help me a lot there. This gearing will most likely happen simultaneously to leveling any class. I will have more tomestones than I can use on my Ninja anyway (I’m already rocking BiS tomestone gear on her) so I will automatically pick up other things as I progress through endgame content.
Crafting and gathering gear are a different beast. I’ve always found crafting in this game to be very complicated, but I want to really make an effort this expansion. Again I will probably focus on gearing my gatherers first, they will be the first that reach 70 and work on scrips so my crafters won’t really be gearing untill I get one or two to max level to begin with.

I know that there are meriad other things to do in FFXIV besides leveling and gearing my various classes. I will probably expand on my roadmap as the expansion goes on and the focus on leveling is less. There are a ton of mounts and minions that I still want to get. I’m also eyeing the possibility to slowly work my way through all the relic weapons from Heavensward and get the last three I need from A Realm Reborn. These are all minor things that I still need to shape into a proper mold for planning and they’re all projects that I can pick up at a later time when I feel like it.

For now my plan is to focus on doing small weekly tasks, and incorporate these into bigger monthly goals. Taking things one step at a time and making sure I don’t burn out and feel accomplished is my major goal here. Due to the shift in focus from monthly to weekly I will try to make a post every Sunday evening with what I have planned for the week as whole (inlcuding IRL things, work things and game things) and then at the end of the month I can see how far I’ve gotten. It’s a bit of a different format than what I’ve been trying to do earlier on the blog and I’m quite excited to try it out. I hope you guys enjoy going on this journey with me and I hope it will make me blog more regularly.

Now seeing as I’m already writing anyway, my plans for the week looks as followed:

  • Work on Miner in FFXIV. I’ve started to level it before I left on vacation and got my miner from level 30 to 47 in about 4 days time. I’d like to continue this growth and see how close I can get to 60 over the course of the week.
  • Work on Red Mage in FFXIV. I’ve picked up the class and am quite enjoying it. She’s level 51 at the moment and I will do PotD when I feel like it. I’ve gotten an offer to do roulettes with someone who is leveling a tank so I might just take advantage of that and see how far it gets me.
  • Work on my thesis. I need to test a few more subjects, churn results and hand in my first version. I also need to hand in something else which I need to work on today so I will get little game time in.

For the rest of the week I have 4 days of work planned and two nights of going out to dinner. My father and his partner (I refuse to call her his wife) are celebrating their partnershipday on Wednesday with going out to dinner with me and one of my uncles. Saturday evening I have another dinner with work colleagues to say goodbye to one of them who is starting work at another company. I’m also hoping to make a bit more progress of rearranging our attic over the weekend but I’m not making that a “must do” thing because I’m honestly not sure how my time will be spent. So yeah. I have a busy week ahead of me with proably not as much gaming time as I’d like to have. Nonetheless I want to progress as much as I can in FFXIV and take it from there.

Cleaning House

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I’m sitting here staring at my blog, wondering what to write. It’s been a while and even though I have a lot of things to discuss I’m not sure where to really start.
Maybe I’ll start with telling you guys that I just came back from a wonderful 8 day trip to Mallorca. I’ve been needing a vacation for quite some time now and flying off to the sun for a full week was something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. I managed to get some relaxation time in and tanned a little bit. I’m really white skinned so getting any sort of tan takes me a while, especially having to prevent turning lobster red instead. I’ve done a lot of things, visited a water park, aquarium and midget golf, but mostly I took the time to destress and relax away from home.
I had my 3DS with me and I managed to finally sit down and play a few games that I’ve been meaning to. I’m about 4.5 hours into Bravely Default now, playing through Chapter 1. I never got past the intro first so it’s a milestone! I also spent about 5.5 hours total playing Ever Oasis and I’ve fallen in love with that game. The combination of having to maintain a town and also dungeoning is quite refreshing and the whole atmosphere of the game is insanely cute. I might dedicate a post to it later.

Next to going on vacation I’ve been using my free time to work through the mess that is my room and the attic. My room is more or less empty right now and I’ve thrown away about 3 trash bags worth of stuff from the attic. I’ve also been giving away a lot of my old children’s books which frees up even more room. During my cleaning I’ve stumbled across my old Sega Mega Drive (Genesis in the US) and all of its’ games and the two nintendo mini classics you see on the picture at the start of my post. I’m fully intending to put batteries in atleast one of these and hang it on my bag to play. I remember having a very good time as a 9 year old with these games and I’m sure if they still work they’re still a blast to play. The silver one is Super Mario Bros. and the green one is Donkey Kong jr. It made me insanely happy to find these because well, I like my game collection and these two were “missing” for quite a while.
It feels nice to get rid of things. I’ve never been a hoarder, but a lot of my stuff got chucked up on the attic out of habit. It was and still is quite full with tons of things that I need to sift through, but for now I’m happy with my progress and I will continue a later time. Ideally I want the shelves that now hold old toys and books to be reserved for my older gaming gear, mostly so I know where it is and it’s easy to pick up whenever I would want to play it.

Speaking of games…
Ofcourse I have played the shit out of Stormblood. My Ninja is currently sitting on level 70 with a full Lakshmi Ex kitted right side and waiting on her Susano ex weapon. I am going to do Omega Normal tonight with my Free Company, something I’m quite looking forward to aswell. Leveling a DPS hasn’t been the easiest this expansion, mostly due to insane queue times. I think the longest I’ve had so far has been an hour. And that’s not even counting the queue times to get on the server itself. I really enjoyed the Stormblood story, especially the Doman part. My Ninja plays really nicely if we forget about Ten-Chi-Jin for a minute and my static will be starting up Savage raiding soon. I’ve really enjoyed Lakshmi ex aswell, although the Bollywood music tends to get kind of annoying after two straight hours of it.
As far as the new classes go I’ve mostly been exploring Red Mage. The playstyle is very refreshing and fast once you get the hang of it and I’m pretty sure I’ll level it up fast after Bard and Warrior. Samurai right now just feels very complicated. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it once I start playing properly but for now I’m leaving the class alone. Bard is a different story. I really like that they removed the casttimes and what they did with the songs. It’s my second favourite class after Ninja and I’m slowly leveling it up, being stuck at 63 right now.

I’ve also been grinding out my crafters, kicking my miner up to level 50. I notice that the game as a whole is taking up a lot of my time so I might take a bit of a step back, map out what I want to do exactly and invest a bit less time. There’s a lot of other things that need my attention right now so I want the time that I do put into FFXIV to be useful, be it through leveling another class, working on my gatherers or getting my Ninja in the best gear. I may actually make a “roadmap for Stormblood” in which I put weekly, monthly and yearly goals. I know it sounds like quite the project but it’s something I’ve been thinking about longer and I may actually just go forward with it.
Ofcourse I’ll share this on the blog aswell, hopefully somewhere the next week.

All in all the vacation time has done me good. I’m more relaxed and focused and ready to take on everything again. I hope this also means I can get a bit more structured with my routines and include blogging more again. For now though I will have to finish here and head to bed… Seeing as I’m more tired from the vacation than when I flew off to go there!