Category Archives: Gaming

Druid Shenanigans and Destiny Time

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I’ve been searching as to what I want to do with my free time lately. I’ve been watching the Good Wife religiously next to going to the gym four times a week. This means that my Tuesday and Wednesday evenings are taken, as are my weekend mornings. I tend to not really feel the need to game during those weekdays, so I either play some Mario on my 3DS or just lay in bed watching Netflix untill it’s time for me to sleep.

Mondays and Thursdays are my regular raid nights for the moment. We’ve been pushing through heroic Nighthold and are close to downing our fourth boss: Krosus. I’m kind of getting the hang of Fury properly now, especially on single target fights. I do however need to improve on add fights, but that’s something I want to tackle later on. I’m done with my Arms weapon for now, after having reached rank 35 and I’m not really interested in persuing any additional points in my Prot weapon either so I can finally devote all my AP to Fury again. I’m currently on Artifact rank 39 so I still have some way to go. I guess not participating in that much Mythic+ content or pugging stuff seriously hampers your AP gains, but well. I kind of decided that I don’t want to make that big of an effort.
In the meantime I felt that familiar itch that something was missing. I have always had a max level healing character throughout every expansion, mostly it’s been my priest, but I don’t really enjoy playing Holy right now so I’ve looked around to other classes. Mistweaver Monk is quite a pain to learn. It’s completely different from any other healing specialization I’ve played and seeing as she’s Horde on top of that I quickly dropped that option. Not enjoying Shaman healing in general and not really knowing if Holy Paladin would be a viable option for just running Mythic+ content I decided to transfer over my little Druid and level her instead. I’ve always enjoyed playing Resto and the playstyle itself hasn’t changed significantly over the years, which is a plus. When I transferred her over on Friday she was level 91 and yesterday night I dinged 100 by just casually going through content. I picked up the Resto artifact first so I can start filling that up and taking a leisurely pace to 110. I enjoy healing again so I hope to get her to 110 in the not too distant future so I can tackle some content on her. We are really lacking healers for our Mythic+ runs so it’s going to be nice to be able to fill that slot. As long as I’m having fun doing it.

The Iron has Risen
I’ve been doubting to get back into Destiny for a while now. I know Destiny 2 is coming and I feel like I need to “finish” up the first game atleast before it comes out. So after a bit of a hassle I was able to buy the Rise of Iron expansion and reinstalled the game on my PS4. I had gotten a level boost with the xpac which I used on my Hunter. I’ve played Warlock throughout most of the game, but I feel like it’s time for something fresh. I used the previous level boost on a Titan (the one that came with Taken King) so Hunter was really the only character I hadn’t levelled yet. So with that I want to start the game anew, with a fresh character and a fresh outlook. Hunter time it is.
I’m not really sure where to start and I’m not really sure how much time I can devote to Destiny as a whole, but I do want to experience this latest expansion and all the things that have changed since the last time I’ve played the game. With the Rise of Iron book though I atleast have some goals to work towards. And I had a nice exotic helm at the ready for my Hunter so I’m all ready for that progress to max light level, while also finishing up the many questchains I still have left.

January Wrap Up and February Goals

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We’ve entered February so I thought it was time to look back at January and see what I’m happy with and what I need to improve.
I’ve had a few odd weeks where I’m trying to fit my life around a new schedule. I’ve been going to the gym 4-5 times a week and it has been heavily impacting my time spent behind the PC or any gaming device really. I don’t really mind that much because I find my health to be more important than the games I play, but it’s gotten me into a bit of an awkward position where I really have to plan everything I intend to do. On top of that I’ve been having some issues surrounding finishing up my master’s degree. Things have gotten a bit complicated and I am forced to redo a part of my thesis again thus delaying my graduation. I’m working hard on this though, but it means even less time to devote to games in general.

Now let’s look at my gaming goals for January:

FFXIV

  • Gear up AST with Lore gear
  • Level MCH to 60
  • Gear up NIN with Scripture gear
  • Do the Heavensturn event on Sandrian and Sarella
  • Work on Ninja relic

I’ve gotten a few of my FFXIV goals done. I managed to gear up my Astrologian really fast and she’s now sitting on 232 ilvl. I did the Heavensturn event on both my characters so that’s nice and I’ve managed to get 3 parts of scripture gear for my Ninja aswell as the first 10 Umbrites needed for the relic. All in all some decent progress. Unfortunately my Machinist is stuck on level 57. A loss of game time combined with a lot of real life obligations meant I couldn’t spend as much time on FFXIV as I would have liked.

WoW

  • Level up Arms Artifact weapon to level 34 on Warrior
  • Max out Fury Artifact weapon on Warrior
  • Max out MM Artifact weapon on Hunter

Unfortunately only one goal that I have been able to cross off. I’m really close though with my Arms artifact sitting at rank 32. My MM hunter artifact is rank 35 and I think I kind of want to stop it there. I’m happy with the 5% extra damage that it gives me but I think I want to focus on bringing up Beast Mastery now since it’s gotten a lot of love and seems to be doing better damage wise. As far as my Fury artifact goes, it’s almost rank 39. Again RL hindrances have kept me from playing so I’ve not really been grinding AP.

Other Games

  • Finish Pokémon Moon

To put it blunt: I’ve not played Pokémon at all this month. I just couldn’t put myself to playing it. I’m unsure why, maybe it’s because I’m a little bit burnt out with everything that’s going on that I just can’t seem to find the time to play an RPG. I did however make my way through the first regular 8 worlds of Super Mario 3D Land and have found myself really enjoying the game so I might switch my focus to finishing off that one. I’m currently at Special 3 and I’ve only missed 2 coins in all the levels so far, which isn’t too shabby.

Now.
Looking ahead to February there is a few game related things that I still want to do.

In FFXIV

  • Work on Ninja relic
  • Gear up Ninja with Scripture, Dun Scaithe and possibly Alexander gear
  • Clear Alexander normal
  • Kill Sephirot, Sophia and Zurvan (all non-extreme)
  • Level MCH to 60
  • Level MNK to 50
  • Level DRK to 50

I will still keep on working on gearing up my Ninja and her relic so I will devote all my Loretomes to that. I have a sufficiently geared offclass in my AST now that I can switch to if I want faster queues or if I want to play a different class. Next to that I can run Dun Scaithe for gear plus I want to clear Alexander normal and they drop items that can get me gear aswell. I also want to clear out my questlog and some of the quests remaining are the ones to kill the Warring Triad. I really want to clear them so I will focus on that. I also want to level more classes before Stormblood hits, so I will put Machinist back on the list together with Monk to 50 (I’m 46), DRK to 50 (32) and Warrior to 50 (35). It should be doable if I just focus a bit more time into FFXIV as a whole.

In WoW

  • Get my Arms artifact to 35
  • Work through the Illidan quesline
  • Work through the Artifact questline

I’m really close on my Arms artifact, currently sitting at rank 32 and about 80% to 33, so this should definately be doable. Ontop of that I’ve been slacking on two big questchains that I do really want to finish so I will probably focus on that. Our guild is making their way through Nighthold heroic aswell right now so I will also spend some time theorycrafting and trying to obtain all my BiS items.

Other Games

  • Finish Super Mario 3D Land
  • Get all the coins in Super Mario 3D Land
  • Finish 3rd island in Pokémon Moon

I really want to finish Super Mario 3D Land. The game is really interesting and well made and I hope to be able to get it done by the end of the month. I also want to get all the coins in all the levels which means I will have to go back to atleast two right now. That should be fine though. As for Pokémon. I really feel like I should make some progress in there. However instead of wanting to finish I want to play through another island. It’s a more realistic goal with my current time schedule and maybe I will get hooked again and play more after.

Not Switching… Yet

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I know I’m a bit late to the whole Switch hype, but I needed some time to get my thoughts in order and be able to really express what I feel about this new console, the games that Nintendo announced for it and whether or not I would want to buy it at launch.

First up: What do I think of the Switch as a whole?
So far it looks to be a good console. Nintendo needed innovation and something to compete with the PS4 and Xbox One and I think they may have hit the right angle with the Switch. Not because performance wise it’s better, but mostly because they are making console games mobile. They have tried this with the WiiU aswell, but unfortunately the concept kind of failed. Now with the Switch there’s no more need to turn off a game because you have to travel somewhere… You just take the game with you! I loved this concept the moment Nintendo showed us at first and I’m still in love with the concept as of now. The only thing I really wonder about is if Nintendo will do away with the 3DS because of the Switch… But that is something they need to decide on their own. Personally I’m still in love with my 3DS and I hope they can let the two things co-exist for a while yet.
Onto some other details. I think the price tag is too high to warrant buying a Switch at launch. It’s €309-329 here, and then you only get the console with no games. Obviously the same was the case for the PS4 and Xbox One launch. And if I didn’t already own a WiiU and a PS4 with an enormous backlog to work through I probably would have taken the bait and bought a Switch at launch (with the new Zelda game). Right now though I just can’t justify to myself to buy one so I’ll probably hold out untill the after the Summer or around the Holidays of 2017. Seeing as my plan is to make a big dent into my gaming backlog this year, I feel like I can’t invest into a new console when I barely touched it’s predecessor in the year that I’ve owned it.
The amount of games at launch is also kind of disappointing. They really hope Zelda will carry the system long enough that people will invest in it. It’s a gamble, but I hope it pays off for Nintendo. I do realize that PS4 and X1 didn’t have many launch titles either so I can’t really say something about Nintendo not having that many titles at launch either.
All in all I think this could be a succesfull console, provided Nintendo makes a steady stream of first party games for it. I could do with a new Donkey Kong, Kirby or even a cool Disney title to make this console interesting for me.

The announced games
As far as first party games go, I’m mostly excited for the new Zelda game, the Super Mario Odyssey and Splatoon 2. I’m doubting if I want Zelda on my WiiU or the Switch though. I really need to know the differences between the games before I decide. Super Mario Odyssey just looks cool. Mario sandbox games have been quite succesful so far so I hope Nintendo makes this one just as good as Galaxy was. I’ve never actually played Splatoon but maybe the Switch will draw me into the game.
Now as far as third party games go. Hell yes Dragon Quest! I fell in love with the series after purchasing DQ7 for my 3DS and I will definately purchase DQ11 for the Switch. Next to that Square announced a new RPG especially for the Switch which is always something to be excited about. I also know Yooka-Laylee comes out for the Switch and the makers promised Nintendo players something extra over the other platforms so I’m actually brought to doubt whether I want that game on my PS4 or on the Switch. There are definately some things to look forward to on this console, but I’m unsure if I will buy games for the Switch when they also come out on the PS4 which, by all means, probably has better performance.
I am kind of disappointed by the Mario Kart 8: Deluxe. It really is just a port of MK8 with some added tracks and characters and I’m not sure if I want to invest in that, owning the original one on the WiiU.

So will I buy a Switch?
Eventually, yes. I think I’ll hold off on buying a lunch model. I rather wait untill bundles appear or when it might lower in price a bit. If there’s anything I learned over the years the prices of consoles and games drop really fast so it’s probably better to wait a bit. I also want to see the library Nintendo builds around the Switch over 2017. I really hope they have more games planned than they initially let show, but I guess only time will tell. Next to that I already stated that I have a huge backlog to work through, so I can’t justify to myself to buy a new console anyway. Not when I have so many unfinished games lying around. But maybe around the Holidays… maybe I will get a Switch.

 

A Decline of Interest

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With patch 7.1.5 dropping yesterday and Nighthold on the horizon I’ve not had such a low point of interest in WoW since the launch of Legion. I’m only logging on to stay up to par for raids with flasks and food and to make sure I get my emissary quests done on my Warrior and that’s it.
Obviously it’s not really helping that Blizzard managed to utterly destroy the only other class I was interested in playing this expansion so far. I’m probably one of many that is joining the outrage of the Hunter community in WoW. I really don’t understand what the devs were thinking with this last round of class “balancing” but next to basically decimating the numbers of all three Hunter speccs they’ve also made Marksmanship totally unplayable. I had issues with the specc since the start of Legion, it’s never been this dull and clunky to play in the almost 10 years I’ve played Warcraft, but this patch is just a slap in the face. Beast Mastery is still a laughable specc. The many issues surrounding Hati have still not been fixed and the DPS, even with all the buffs, is still abyssmal. Don’t even get me started about Survival. I play a Hunter because I like the archer type in games. I don’t feel the need to equip a spear, stab monsters up the ass with it while tracking about 8 skills while doing so, making the specc uneccesarily complicated. No thank you. If it was godly on the DPS meters I would have considered it, but even with all the complications that come with the specc you’re still only pulling bottom tier DPS. Not really something you want to invest your time in.

Speaking of alts. I don’t think I’ve had a worse time with alts than during this expansion. Even though Blizzard has introduced a lot of QoL improvements, especially on the Artifact front, it’s still tedious to level any alt. The Class Hall story, even though interesting, gets old fast. Doing the same zones when leveling constantly gets boring. Oh and don’t get me started on the silly grind that is profession quests. All of this is fun if you do it once or twice. But after the third time you wish professions quests weren’t a thing anymore and you could just go back to buying all the recipes and be done with it. Especially the Alchemy questchain has been a lesson in patience. And I’m still not done with that one.

All in all it just makes me want to log less. Only play one character. And not put any effort into anything else. I’m not sure if there’s other factors at play next to a general loss of interest. Work has been demanding so I prefer to spend my time less on games when I’m off and more on just relaxing. I’ve spent many an hour in bed watching Netflix on my tablet instead of starting up any kind of gaming device and I’ve been perfectly fine with that. But I think logging into the game and just feeling like there’s nothing to do besides running dungeons and trying to fill out my Artifact weapon is turning me off logging into the game at all.

Maybe with the Nighthold release, some actual fresh content, I’ll get my interest back. It’s the first raid with actual tier content. It continues the Suramar story. It’s just something interesting again.
I guess only time will tell.

The Magic of FFXIV

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Back in August 2013, when I first learned about the FFXIV MMO, I was intrigued. I had seen some advertising online, some trailers and I had downloaded the character creator just for fun. Back then it struck me how pretty a game it was. I was having a major WoW lull and was looking for a new game to play. I had played some of the Final Fantasy games and thought Square Enix was a decent publisher, so why not take the plunge?

We are now 3.5 years later and I’m still absolutely captivated by the game that is FFXIV. Of course I’ve had moments where I played less or where I unsubscribed. But they have been rare. So rare even that I actually have my rank 13 veteran reward coming up. A feat I’m quite proud of.

At the time of the above screenshot I was about to ding my Machinist level 54. I’ve made an effort to level a lot of classes on this character and am quite proud that I have a few level 60’s under my belt already. For someone who has been playing casually ever since my raid team broke up during Turn 9 of Bahamut (has it been that long?) I’ve made some progress here and there. Of course if I’d played more I would have much more classes to 60 by now, but I’m nonetheless happy with the few that I have gotten there and the ones that I’m working on levelling up. I also need to say Sandrian isn’t my actual original character. There is another, Sarella, who I started playing on at launch and who resides on a different server. She is the one that has my first level 50 (White Mage) and my first ever relic. Although I’ve not really been playing her actively I make sure I do all events on her to a degree and when I need some time away from the Moogle folk I flee to her on Odin, levelling away on the Warrior or tinkering around with my crafting classes.
It’s really what defines the magic of FFXIV for me. The ability to play every class and to have every profession condensed into the same character. For someone who has been an altoholic for much of her wow career, being able to do everything on one character meant no more heartaches of having to swap due to bad balancing, changing gameplay or guild needs. I’ve always been flexible, but I’ve never loved it since it meant having to give up something I loved. Here it doesn’t matter. The only sore spot is having to gear all of your classes to a degree. Something that proves to be easy for lower ilvl tiers (mostly Lore and Midas gear) but challenging voor the higher ilvl tiers (Scripture and Alexander). But gear is secondary. The real love is being able to play tank, healer, dps… Anything really and still get to do all the content you love doing without feeling locked out somehow. It took me a while to grasp the idea. When I levelled my first class to 50 I only understood that you need to have one class at level 30 and another at 15 to unlock something called a “job”. It’s been a long road since there. Even though I think the game is overdue for a bit of an ability overhaul, combined with a clearer explanations of what jobs are to new players, I still think the system is great and such a relief from something like WoW.

I’ve only recently begun to play seriously again, and in that time I’ve gotten my Astrologian to max level and almost fully geared (I’m lacking 4 more Lore items). Geared up Ninja a bit, together with Dragoon and Bard and pushed my Machinist up almost three levels. And I’m thrilled every step of the way. I really hope I can get all my battle classes to level 60 before Stormblood hits. But with WoW raids, work, social life and hitting the gym that might be a bit of a stretch. I guess we’ll see when June comes around.

Full Speed Ahead

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Surprisingly I’ve been having an easier time gearing up my Astrologian in FFXIV than I thought I would. I’m already fully kitted out in Lore accessories and am now working towards a full Lore left side aswell. If I just keep on pushing my roulettes, and catch up to Alexander, I should be up there in no time at all. I wish I could say the same thing about my Ninja and her Scripture gear, but unfortunately due to the enforced tome cap it’ll take me a while to get that far. It’s easy to cap Scripture though and I should have my first two pieces of Scripture gear next reset (them being the pants and an accessory). All in all stuff is proceeding easier than I thought, and that’s very nice.
My Machinist is level 54 aswell, even though I’m only doing daily quests, level roulette and PotD on her. I really want to milk every other roulette for Lore, both for the gear for my AST and the Lore I’ll need to buy Umbrites for my Ninja. It also helped tremendously that I’ve finally worked my way through Midas normal with a friend. I do like all the sidequests and the stories Square Enix has going on, and being able to close out another chapter is nice.

On the WoW side things have settled down a bit. I’ve done a mythic+10 on my hunter, so that should be a nice reward waiting for me at the start of the next reset. I’ve raided on my Warrior and we’re currently very close to downing Helya on heroic mode. Seeing as how Nighthold will come out next week already though, I doubt that we will kill her before. We’d need a full focused raidteam on Monday or Tuesday with people wanting to commit to bringing her down. I really hope we can do it though because it would be such a shame to not have killed Helya before we set foot into Nighthold. I guess we’ll see next week.

On the personal front I’ve been quite thorough with my new years resolution. My room isn’t cluttered at all anymore and, after rearranging my clothes closet this morning, I feel like everything is much more organized and clean than it has been in a long while. I still have too much stuff in my room that I should take up to the attic… But for that I need to start organizing the attic. It’s just such a huge mess up there and I’m quite lost as to where to start. There’s one corner that’s more or less “mine” where a lot of my old toys are. Barbies, Lego, old Donald Ducks. I don’t actually want to get rid of that, but maybe I can see if I can rearrange some stuff over there and create some space where there now is none. A lot of other stuff can honestly just be thrown out but that’s a project for when I have more time to myself than just the two-day weekend. I know I’ll just have to start somewhere and be happy with small victories, and I’ve already thrown out atleast one trash bag full of old broken junk, but we’re still a long way off. Especially since my dad is a bit of a hoarder and has a hard time saying goodbye to anything… It makes wanting to clean only more difficult. He’ll have to get to work at some point though, since he’s old and wants to move to a house without stairs… And he can’t possibly bring all the junk we have lying around.

Procrast—stop!

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I’m a notorious procrastinator. I put things off untill the very last minute and then either come up with an excuse as to why I haven’t done what I should be doing or I’ll go into a panicked frenzy to complete the task just before the deadline.
Although this has worked for me throughout most of my school career I’m noticing that it’s a really hard pattern to keep on following throughout adult life. It’s not fun to be off during the weekends and have to work your way through a mountain of laundry, where you could have just done the small piles they initially were during the evening as you got home. The same behaviour follows me into games where I tend to save events, weekly quests and roulettes (in the case of FFXIV) untill the last possible moment to do them. This has cost me atleast a few Yo-Kai weapons to name an example but also caused me to not get the maximum out of my characters in World of Warcraft.

Normally I don’t really do New Years resolutions. Mostly because I know I don’t stick to them. If I want to lose weight I’ll do it immediatly and not starting January 1st. I do however feel that the procrastinator side of me deserves to die a slow death. It’s just so stressful for me personally to feel like I’m having to do everything at the last moment. At work I’ve noticed that I forget to do stuff when I don’t do something immediatly, sometimes to the detriment of the company. At home I let my room become a rather big mess during the week because I’m too lazy to clean up after I get home from work, so when Thursday or Saturday arrives I’m filled with a room that is full of clothes, both clean and dirty, dishes and other random crap. It’s not a healthy way to live.

I have made a small start with my new behaviour by just making sure I immediatly fold all the clean laundry that my dad deposits infront of my room. I make sure that all the dirty laundry is in the laundry basket before I go to sleep at night and that I don’t have any dishes left in my room either. It’s a routine that needs a bit of work, but once it becomes just that I’ll probably do all of it without thinking about it, and enjoy a cleaner, emptier room and as a result a cleaner and emptier head.

I will probably do the same with games. Tackle weekly quests early in WoW. Do the Worldboss the first day. Do Archaeology the first day. Make time for LFR on Thursdays (that’s my day off) when I have quests to go into there. Make sure I cap on tomes in FFXIV. It’s really not hard, it only requires me to do five ex-roulettes a week, something I can just sit down to do after dinner on nights where I don’t raid on WoW. On days off I can do a bit extra. Do a level roulette. Play some different games. Get stuff done the moment you see it pop up. And plan my gametime better.
I know how much time I need to do a roulette in FFXIV, including the wait for the dungeon queue to pop. I know how much time my emissary quests take in WoW. I can sit down and do those before dinner if I want to, under the condition that I’m not completely exhausted like I was today.

I may look into a reminder app on my phone that will just beep me at 23.00 to get me to start my evening ritual. Something where I can tap off the things I want to do before I close down the day. Which is mostly making sure my room is clean, making sure I’ve put on my lotions so I don’t wake up with a skin like sandpaper in the morning and the whole cleaning my teeth and taking my pills. It shouldn’t take long and it makes it so I’m properly closing out the day.

So yeah. Even though it’s not really a “new year, new me” type of thing… I do want to better my behaviour for my own good and make my life as stress free as possible.

Gaming Goals: January 2017

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Seeing as I’m finishing off some IRL stuff I can confidently start setting goals in games again per month. So let’s start with January for now.

I’m planning to play a lot of FFXIV and WoW so the biggest part of my goals will be tied to those two games.

First off FFXIV!

  • Gear up AST with Lore gear
  • Level MCH to 60
  • Gear up NIN with Scripture gear
  • Do the Heavensturn event on Sandrian and Sarella
  • Work on Ninja relic

My Astrologian dinged 60 today and I do want to be able to dungeons on her to shorten queue times and to have something besides DPS to play on. So my main goal is to get her into Lore gear atleast, before using said Lore to power up my Ninja relic. The scripture gear I want to invest on Ninja, since it’s still my main job. Next to that I’m focusing on my next class to level 60 which will be Machinist. She’s already level 53 so that shouldn’t take me too long.
Lastly I want to focus on doing the Heavensturn event on both my characters, which again shouldn’t take that long!

Then onto WoW

  • Level up Arms Artifact weapon on Warrior to level 34
  • Max out Fury Artifact weapon on Warrior
  • Max out MM Artifact weapon on Hunter

WoW is plain and simple and mostly about leveling up my Artifact weapons. I do hope to complete Trial of Valor heroic aswell before Nighthold comes out, but that’s more of a guild thing and not something I can do solo. With me getting Artifact Knowledge level 25 tomorrow on my Warrior leveling up my Arms weapon and getting close to maxing out my Fury weapon should be a piece of cake. I know I’m still quite far off, my Fury weapon is level 35 right now, but every point spent counts for something! I also want to focus on getting my Hunter’s Marksmanship weapon up to par. I’m sitting around level 31 now which is good, but not good enough yet. I do give this less priority than my Warrior weapon though, so I’m not too fussed if I don’t rank up that much.

Then as final goal..

  • Finish Pokémon Moon

As of writing this post I’m at the last trial of the second island. I really want to make some progress in this game and defeat the Elite Four and whatever postgame content there is before I turn my attention to filling up the Pokédex. For now I’m happy to just defeat the Elite Four though, so that is what my aim will be for this month.

I’ve tried to keep it light and easy on myself. It’s going to be a busy month and I want realistic goals that I can actually obtain.

It’s 2017?

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It’s really odd coming back to my blog after this long of an absence. I’ve not really been in the mood to write for a long time now. Mostly because I feel I don’t really have something to say. But I guess I’ll take up my pen (well technically my keyboard) and start some writing again, because it’s 2017 and I get to start fresh!

I remember making a huge list of gaming goals for 2016, one that was probably a bit too enthusiastic. Mostly because it entailed finishing about 6 very long RPG’s while knowing that I can’t manage time for shit. So I want to throw that list out and start anew for 2017. No more year lists. Instead I want to draw off of other people’s blogs and make a monthly “to do” list for my games, something I have done in the past.
If you are curious about what I did manage to accomplish in 2016…

On the MMO front I have gotten three classes in FFXIV to max level. Almost four. My Astrologian is about 1/4th off a level off dinging 60. I’ve gotten all but three 2.0 relics and I do plan to go back to those and get them, but right now I want to focus on getting all my battle classes to max level. In August my FFXIV routine got severely disrupted with the launch of Legion. I’ve been immersed into WoW ever since and my Warrior is geared up nicely and has two Artifact weapons sitting at rank 35 (Fury) and 34 (Protection) respectively. Speaking about weapons… I am working on the current Ninja relic. The Umbrites and Sands step is taking quite a while though, but I am slowly progressing through. Seeing as how I’m planning to play more I should be able to make a lot of headway on gathering those materials.
I’ve also dabbled a bit in the Secret World, something I want to continue doing about once a week or so. I really like the different style of MMO that it represents and I hope that I can run it even better once I am able to obtain the new PC that I’m planning to buy around my birthday in March.

On the other games front I’ve played a little bit of everything. I’ve spent a lot of time on various platformers on my 3DS and also playing Pokémon. I’ve finished Kirby: Planet Robobot, New Super Mario Bros. 2 and the 50 and 100cc championships of Mario Kart 7 on my 3DS. Next to that I’m slowly working my way through Pokémon Moon at the moment, and have just arrived at the third island. After I finish up the mainstory of Pokémon I’ll probably pick up a game on my PS4 to play, most likely FFXV, while I’ll fall back to a platformer for my 3DS. I’ve realized I can only handle one RPG at a time, while I can play platformers to keep myself busy.

So yeah. I have been playing games, just not writing about them. I have been taking a lot of screenshots aswell, especially in WoW so I will share them when I have the chance. I want to take a lot more screenshots in general, so look forward to that!
And maybe, just maybe, once I start writing a little bit more again, I’ll start producing some better content. For now though I wish everyone the best for 2017 and let’s make it count gaming and blogging wise.

I Fucked Up

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Sunday evening as I was frantically running around Eorzea trying to get my Yo-Kai medals I realized I had fucked up. And not just a small fuck up. No a big one. Huge one. A fuck up that hasn’t happened to me in a very, very long time.
What am I talking about you mean? Well, I’m talking about the fact that I cannot, for the life of me, manage my time correctly.

I was super excited about the Yo-Kai event. Even though I’ve not played the games themselves (I tried, but felt too much like a Pokémon ripoff), I think the pets and the weapons that you could get were very cute. Being the collector that I am I set my mind to get all the pets, weapons and both the mounts on not one but two characters.
Boy did that turn out wrong.
I made a decent start with farming. I had gotten my first three weapons on Sandrian really fast. I was working on my second weapon on Sarella and everything seemed to be going fine. But then Legion launched and I completely lost track of anything else I was doing. In the back of my mind I knew the Yo-Kai event needed to be done at some point, but Legion has been all-consuming for the past month so I kept postponing it, like I do with almost everything in my life. Untill last weekend panic struck. I only had three days left to farm 9 weapons on Sandrian. I had given up on the notion of getting more than the two weapons I had obtained on Sarella.
In truth I was slowly getting back into FFXIV earlier. I had farmed a bit here and there and played with the idea to log a few nights, farm medals and breeze through the event in the last week. It should have been easily doable, were it not for the fact that I chose to sleep or play WoW instead.

I fucked up and I have no one to blame but myself. I finished the Yo-Kai event with 11 weapons on Sandrian and 2/3rds of the way to number 12. If only I had gotten started sooner, if only I could have sat down to farm. If only my head wasn’t this chaotic mess that completely lacks any commitment to plans I make.
It sucks but it’s a learning experience. With all the ingame events going in WoW, FFXIV and others I will really need to learn to plan, prioritize, schedule and stick to it. I may let some things go because I’m not that invested into a game but FFXIV is special to me and I’m heartbroken that I let WoW take over my life completely.
It’s hard to manage so many things next to having a fulltime job. It’s hard being an adult. But I guess I’ll have to suck up and learn. The days where I could carelessly do what I want because I had seas of time are over. I work with way less hours than I’m used to and I’m letting everything slip because of it. Even my blog has been completely unused for the past month. I’ve just not had the time or inclination to sit down and write up untill now. I guess I’ll have to make some sort of schedule for that aswell seeing as raiding has started up on WoW again which leaves me unable to do anything but play that on certain nights after I get home from work. I have been trying to schedule more things in my agenda and installed the Wunderlist app to make sure I get certain tasks done on certain days. It has been a bit helpful, but for me the problem isn’t really scheduling my time, it’s actually sticking to that schedule…

The Good News
I haven’t been idle over this past month. As I said Legion has sucked me in completely. I think this is probably the best expansion Launch WoW has had in a while. We are now over 6 weeks in and there is still plenty to do. I’m finally able to start considering leveling an alt to max level (I picked my Hunter who is comfortably sitting at level 105 right now) next to keeping up with everything on my Warrior. I’m almost exalted with the Nightfallen, only 2.5k off actually, and then I can turn my attention to the other factions. Seeing however that I’m currently enjoying the first week of a two week holiday and the first weekly event in WoW happens to be increased faction rep I hope I can make quite some strides in getting my rep up with all the factions, but mostly Highmountain and Valarjar. Since they have the rank 3 Blacksmithing recipes I want. Next to that I’m still lacking all the level 3 mining recipes so I’ll be working my way through that aswell as trying to level up my Cooking, First Aid and Fishing AND getting that elusive Fishing artifact. Enough to do for now!

I have also changed my blog a bit. The purple was starting to hurt my eyes so I reversed it to plain black. I’ve also adjusted my sidebar to give an accurate view of what I’m playing right now. As you can see it’s only three games. WoW is sucking up the biggest chunk of my time, but I’m also planning to reserve atleast one evening a week to play some FFXIV. I really miss that game and I haven’t seen any of the 3.4 content yet so I feel like I should make some time for that.
As for other games.. I want to focus on completing one game at a time next to my MMO’s. I have so many games that I’ve started and never finished because I started another game halfway through. The only game I finished in one go lately has been Kirby: Planet Robobot and that’s probably because I actually didn’t let myself play anything else on my 3DS while I was playing that. It paid off though since I completed the main story + all the cubes in about 20 hours. I still think the final bossfight in that game was epic and I do plan to 100% it at some point… But not now. Seeing as Pokemon Sun/Moon are coming out somewhere in November I feel like I have to finish up the previous gen games atleast. I’m about 6 badges into Alpha Sapphire and 5 badges into X. I really didn’t care which one of the two I wanted to tackle first, but considering I know the story of ORAS, I own all the original GBA games from that gen, I decided to go with X and complete that story instead. After that I will probably pick up AS where I left off and finish that, including the Delta episode. From there I’m not sure what I want to play, but I’ll tackle that when the day arrives.

As you can see I’m full of plans again. I’m just hoping that I can stick to them this time.