Tag Archives: FFXIV

We do a little travelling and gaming

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As the summer wanes and the days gradually shorten, I reflect on the fortune of living life on my terms. Travel has become my passion, especially to Budapest, a city I’ve fallen deeply for over the past three years. In fact, my dedication to exploring its beauty is so steadfast, much like the commitment of a friend who works at a fire watch company in Dania Beach, providing indispensable safety services with the same reliability and consistency. Just as they’re prepared for any emergency with their well-trained personnel and immediate response capabilities, I am ready for my annual pilgrimage to Budapest, planning to cherish this tradition for the foreseeable future.

I came back home from Sziget on Monday evening. Last year the festival was an absolute blast, but this year it felt less. There were considerably less acts that were performing, the food was disastrous and the prices of everything went through the roof. I understand we are living in a time where there is a cost of living crisis, but expecting me to pay €15 for a plate of reheated (IN THE MICROWAVE) fries and onion rings is beyond absurd. So I turned my back on the festival for the most part and enjoyed Budapest as city. I climbed up to the Fisherman’s Bastion and the Castle to take in the amazing views of the city from up high. I ate good food and melted away in the city parks because it was 30 degrees Celsius during the day in the shade. I still got to see the acts I wanted, most notably Yungblud and David Guetta, and I managed to turn what was a very disappointing experience into something I could still enjoy.

Next to travelling I’ve also been busy with and in games. For some reason I finally caught the “I want to tackle my backlog” bug and with the release of Final Fantasy 16 I knew I had some epic game times ahead of me, and boy I wasn’t wrong.
In the past 2 months I’ve finished three games and I’m working my way through the fourth and fifth as we speak. I managed to get the platinum trophy in Horizon Zero Dawn and play through the DLC. After that I picked up Final Fantasy 16 and completed the game in a little over three weeks time. No platinum trophy there though because I’m just not up for another playthrough right now. After that I picked up Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart which I finished last week, and platinumed. Finally I’ve started playing Horizon Forbidden West right before I flew out to Hungary and I’ve been playing Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D on my 3DS during my Budapest trip. I’m going to try to platinum Horizon Forbidden West but I don’t know if I want to get all the collectibles in DKCR yet, I guess I’ll see how I feel once I reach the final boss. I’m only in the second world as of right now so I still have most of the game ahead of me.

In Final Fantasy XIV I’ve been raiding with a static for the final raidtier of the expansion again. We have killed P9/10/11S and are currently staring down P12S. I hope we can kill it sooner rather than later but seeing as we’re still in phase 1 of the fight I don’t think it’ll happen anytime soon. My Dancer is completely kitted out though and apart from a weapon upgrade and the final tomestone upgrade token I’m completely in best in slot gear. Something I’m actually pretty proud of. I’m also not doing too badly on the DPS rankings, parsing greens and blues when I’m not being a derp and dying and all in all I’m having a good time. I’ve also been steadily working away at leveling all my alt jobs, I just finished Summoner/Scholar to 90, and I’m catching up on some beast tribes that I’ve neglected. Finally I’m pursuing all the relic weapons of this expansion, seeing as how they’ve decided that the only grind there will be is the tomestone grind it’s not as hard as previous expansions.

All in all I feel like I’m in a good space when it comes to spending time on games and finally tackling all the games I’ve purchased over the last 10 years. I’m really enjoying sitting on my couch and playing stuff on my PS5 as well as grinding away in FFXIV for the time being. In a few weeks we will also get a new patch for Disney Dreamlight Valley and of course a new season pass so I will put some time into that as well.

As far as other aspects of my life go… I’m picking up my training routine again after letting it slide for the past few months. I bought a few nice brand jeans on sale and I want to fit them properly so that is the goal for the next month or two. Eventually I want to get down to 65kg, but babysteps. Work is stressful but manageable and I already know when my next holiday will be so that helps to keep my sanity in that department. Hopefully once I get a good work/sports/gaming/social life routine figured out I can tackle more things but for now that is the aim and I hope to be able to do it in the remainder of this year.

Please Don’t Skip The Sidequests

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A new Disney Dreamlight Valley update dropped last week and I’ve hopped right back on the train again. This update has brought both Simba and Nala to my Valley as well as new quests for Buzz, Remy and Minnie. Not to mention the kick off of the very first Easter event and all the new recipes, furniture and companions that come with it. We also have a new Starpath, which is their version of a season pass, and this time the theme is Disney Parks! I’ve just unlocked all the rewards of the first tier and am working on the second while cleaning up my Valley and working on the Easter stuff and leveling up Simba and Nala. All in all it’s giving me enough to do for the next few week(s) I think and I’m happy to fiddle about in my valley again. I’m also slowly reshaping it and making it more functional and prettier than it was before, but it’s secondary to just unlocking everything that I can unlock. I guess I’ll need to make a bit of a theme park corner though, considering I’m getting a bunch of rides from the Starpath and I do want to display them somewhere.

Next to my valley I’ve also been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV again. I’ve gotten the White Mage Manderville Weapon, plus first upgrade and got another step done for my White Mage Anima weapon, leaving me on the last two steps to do there. I’ve also been working away on tieing up lose ends in the form of sidequests. Like any other MMO(RPG) FFXIV has a lot of them and I realised that I still had some lingering in my quest log, not to mention that I was still seeing exclamation marks on my map. This would not do so I got down to business and picked all of them up and played my way through them. Some opened up some new content for me, like making crafting/gathering deliveries to Ehll Tou in Ishgard and Ameliance Leveilleur in Sharlayan. I’ve also unlocked the Loporrit beast tribe, which is centered around crafting, and am using that to level up my crafting jobs. As I am doing that I’m also doing the Studium crafting questline for Weavers/Leatherworkers/Carpenters as Weaver and experiencing that story as well. When I was in the Firmament working on unlocking Ehll Tou I realised I had a few stray sidequests there to finish as well so I did, as well as finishing the really interesting Shadows of the Past sidequest line in Radz-at-Han. All of these have added lore bits and pieces that enrich the world we play in and provide extra story to enjoy. It’s why I can’t understand why there are people out there who are content to skip everything. I realise that not everyone plays MMO’s for the story and that doing all the sidequest content can be very tedious, but it brings so much more life to the world and fleshes out so many characters, areas and backstories. Especially in FFXIV that is more an RPG than an MMO and where they can lean on years of Square Enix storytelling experience.

In any case I’ve caught up for the most part, there’s still some quests in my questlog but they’re not easily tackled. Slow and steady wins the race though and I’m sure that eventually my log will empty out. And then it’s setting my sights on new goals to achieve for as long as the game will keep my attention. Hopefully that will be for the forseeable future because I’m truly happy to be back in Eorzea.

TBC Again: Baby Steps

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The pre-patch for The Burning Crusade Classic dropped on the World of Warcraft Classic servers this week. Although I never really could jump on the Classic train too much, I stalled out around level 23 on my Warlock, I have a definite soft spot for The Burning Crusade. It was the expansion where I started playing WoW and I think I was max level on my Warrior right after the Black Temple came out, so pretty late into the expansion’s lifecycle. I got into raiding via a small Dutch guild where we would clear Karazhan every week but that was about it. My computer was absolutely terrible at the time and I remember vividly how many times I crashed while trying to level up and later on while trying to play some endgame. I got a new PC and managed to play a lot more and even managed to get into a progression guild and push through the Sunwell raid when it came out. I think we stalled on Brutallus and the guild fell apart shortly after that. I’ve always missed the time where WoW was a completely new experience to me and I was still very much in love with playing the game.

With retail stalling a bit, my guild gave up on raiding for the time being and is waiting for patch 9.1 to drop so we can start the next raiding tier, I decided to jump on the TBC hype train. I’ve made a Draenei Shaman, very original I know, and I’m slowly leveling her up. Because I have no endgame obligations in this game I’m just taking my time, working through all the quests that I can on Azuremyst and Bloodmyst Isle before moving on to newer zones. Right now I’m level 18 and I still have quite a few quests to go on Bloodmyst so I should be good for the next couple of days. I definitely won’t be ready for the actual launch of the Dark Portal but I’m not too fussed about that. I’m just enjoying the scenery and the level up experience, which has been significantly improved from the Classic server. I’m looking forward to hitting level 20, so I can learn Ghost Wolf form and run a bit faster, and then level 30 so I can get an actual mount. I forgot how many totems Shamans used to have and how many weapon enchants. Lightning Shield is an expensive spell and weapon skills are still a thing. I’ve taken up Mining and Jewelcrafting and am having a blast just slowly leveling everything back up again. I can’t wait to go through the Dark Portal and re-experience Outland again for the first time. I’m sure it’ll trigger a lot of nostalgia.

On the Final Fantasy XIV side of things I’m mostly doing my crafting dailies every day. I’m currently working on Culinarian, which is sitting at level 74 and after that I only have three more to go. I’m also trying to make a list of what other content I still want to/need to tackle. I’ve made my way in the main story up until the latest patch but I can’t go forward because my item level is too low for the dungeon. I want to finish off the final wing of the Eden raid and the final wing of the Nier raid. Then I can still focus on leveling up Blue Mage or work away on the Shadowbringers Relic weapons, something I’ve not really done yet.

There’s plenty to do in both games but I’m taking it easy and taking my time. I’ve had to deal with a lot of work stress and as such my brain feels like it’s heavily overworked. I have a very short attention span so I’m just taking any game time I can get, even if it’s only for 15-20 minutes at a time. I’m pretty happy with what I’ve been doing so far though so I hope I can carry that over into June and the rest of the summer.

I Set Goals… And Never Came Back

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So. I realized that my last post was setting goals for February. And then I never came back.
Kind of funny how those things go. A lot has happened in the past three and a half months. Work has been extremely overwhelming. I didn’t get the job that I applied for at the end of January, much to my dismay, and in the meantime lockdown due to COVID has been dragging on and on in the Netherlands. We’ve finally had some rules loosened and vaccinations are progressing rapidly so maybe there’s a bit of light at the end of the tunnel.
Next to a lot of disappointments there has also been one big bright point. I guess people driving home the idea that you “shouldn’t look for love because it will find you” scored a point with me this year. I’ve met someone very special, after a long time of being single and basically giving up on the idea that I would meet someone that would love me for who I am. But I’ve met that someone and he’s been brightening my days for the past three months. I’m so incredibly thankful that he came into my life and I hope we can build something that will last for a long time.

As for the gaming front. Well. I guess a lot has happened and not happened.
The World of Warcraft guild I’m in has moved to Horde side. Unfortunately recruitment on Alliance side seems to have completely bled dry so they made the hard decision to swap over to Horde so Mythic raiding can happen in patch 9.1.
I moved with them and rolled a new character and am currently raiding a bit again as Elemental Shaman. I’m having a decent amount of fun although I’ve not really touched Mythic raiding yet and I’ve not really found the time to do Mythic+. I’m hoping with my workload dying down a bit I can spend a bit more time in WoW and push to get some achievements done.

Next to that I’ve been catching up in Final Fantasy XIV. I was a few patches behind and worked my way back up to the patch 5.5 content when it comes to main story. My current goals are getting the final raid of Eden done, the final Nier raid and get completely caught up with the mainstory. I’m also still leveling my crafters and almost have my Alchemist at level 80, which means I only have a few more to go after. With Endwalker getting a release date I have around 5-6 months to get caught up on everything, which should be more than enough time. I just need to remind myself to log in and actually play.

As far as League of Legends goes… I basically stopped playing somewhere in February and I’ve been struggling really hard to get back into the game. I’ve been playing ARAMs and a few normals here and there and participated in some Clash but otherwise I’ve not touched ranked in months. I’m really soul searching on what I want to play and if I still want to make the push towards Gold or not. It also hasn’t helped that I’ve been duoing with people that make me tilt. I think I’m better off staying solo and look to grind up on my own. I’ve been asking for some tips and tricks and once I can settle on a role and a champion I’m going to just start pushing again.

All in all it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster in my life the past few months but I’m finally feeling like I’m landing on my feet again. Let’s hope it will give me enough headspace to do more than just work, sleep and eat.

February Goals: Shaking Things Up

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January passed like the freight trains passing my house at night. Quietly and fast. I feel like 2021 so far is just a continuation of 2020, but with more riots everywhere. And with everywhere I mean everywhere, including my own country. It’s been an interesting time, compounded by a lot of real life things not really going the way I hoped they would. I’m lowkey hoping that February will bring a bit more calm and stability back into my life, mostly so I don’t feel so stressed out all the time anymore and I can actually enjoy my time off with more than feeling pure exhaustion all the time.
I guess one of the things I should start doing is going to bed earlier (11 instead of 12) because I’m already noticing the major improvement in my mood from that extra hour of sleep I’m catching.

Anyway. I figured I’d give the whole “goals post” another try since I managed to use it succesfully before and also to give a bit of an insight into what I’m up to this month. As usual this post will be mostly gaming focused, I will discuss my real life goals in a broader post somewhere at the end of March. It needs less checking up on because they are less concrete than my gaming ones.

What do I want to achieve in February?

League of Legends

  • Transition from Support to ADC. I’m not enjoying myself playing Support right now, but I’m enjoying myself a lot as ADC. In the end I should play what I enjoy. Right?
  • Get my ADC account to level 30. I made an account to just play ADC specifically. It’s level 11 at the moment and I want to get it to level 30 and make it my “main” account for the time being, mostly so that I have two accounts to my disposal. One where I can test new things on and fuck around in solo Q and another where I can “try hard” and actually climb the ladder.

MMO’s

  • Gear up my Mage in Mythic/Mythic+ in World of Warcraft. I’ve been sneaking some time on WoW again here and there and I’m mostly playing my Horde Mage. I’m at the point where I can’t really get that much gear from doing Heroic dungeons anymore so I’m wanting to make the tradition to Mythics and Mythic+.
  • Catch up on the mainstory in FFXIV. I’ve not properly played the game in forever and there’s a lot of story to go through, aswell as the final part of the Eden raid. I want to see this and will take a few evenings just playing the game and catching up.

Other games

  • Finish Crash Bandicoot
  • Finish Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

Pretty ambitious goals but, with the pandemic still raging, I don’t really have much else to do in my spare time next to gaming. I have enough time for all of it, if I keep a decent sleep schedule. When I’m not terribly exhausted I should easily be able to get a few good hours of gaming in every day. I also realise that February is a tad shorter than other months, but I’m sure I can make it work. It’s time to get myself out of the stressy and depressed month that is January and look forward to fun times in February. I hope I can take all of you on that journey with me!

2021: A Brighter Future Thanks To Goals

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I guess I’m a bit late to the party, but I would like to talk about my goals for 2021, both on a personal level aswell as gaming related.
I had a bit of time to think about it the past week, seeing as I finally had some time off, and I think I’ve managed to formulate some decent goals to work on. The focus this year will be mostly on personal non-gaming related goals, but as always some gaming has snuck it’s way in because it’s my biggest hobby.

So what do I want to achieve in 2021?
I think the most important overarching goal is get to a better physical and mental health level. Both of those have suffered considerably in 2020 and I don’t think I can sustain how I’m living right now and come out good at the other end. So I’ve set a few goals to help me get back on track. In no particular order they are:

  • Establish a healthy sleeping pattern
  • Exercise every day
  • Work on losing weight, dropping below 70kg is the goal
  • Take better care of myself personally, both inside and out

I was on track with these goals at the start of 2020 but the pandemic threw me back a lot. I’m at my heaviest point right now and I’ve had weeks where I would barely leave my house. It’s been very unhealthy and it’s been causing me both physical and mental issues. As such I really want to take better care of myself. Get myself on a healthy sleep schedule so I’m not exhausted at work every morning and feel like I need hours and hours of sleep once I have a few days off. I’ve noticed that getting some sort of exercise in every day helps with sleeping at night, so I’ve been making an effort to go for a walk every day. Atleast 30 minutes but I’m up to 45-50 most days now. When the weather is bad I’m planning to use my Ring Fit Adventure that I bought on release but barely used. I just need to keep my body moving and this is the perfect way to do it.
Next to exercise I also want to take better care of myself in other aspects. I’ve been very lazy when it comes to some personal hygiene and care and need to fix that. Stuff like picking up flossing again instead of only brushing my teeth. Take better care of my skin. Keep an eye on what I eat, meal plan in advance and stick to it. I’ve been eating way too much junkfood and need to get to cooking more healthy things. No more skipping meals. No more eating breakfast 3 hours after I started working. Just keep a healthy food rhythm going.

Additionally I want to establish/achieve the following:

  • Plan my weeks every week and stick to my planning.
  • Get a cleaning routine going in the weekends
  • Learn to cook more/healthier dishes

Next to not really taking care of myself properly on a personal level I’ve also let my house cleaning slide. I don’t want to say that it’s unliveable here, because it’s really not, but I notice I get lazy and then don’t clean for 2-3 weeks at a time. I let the laundry pile up, and dishes, and I don’t think I’ve cleaned my windows in months. That’s going to change. Sunday is my designated chores day and I’ve made a list of everything that I need to do weekly, bi-weekly and monthly. On Saturday morning I look at my list and plan my chores accordingly for Sunday and actually do them. I started doing this last weekend and I notice that I feel much better once my house is decluttered and cleaned. It also massively helps with my allergies so that’s an extra bonus.
Setting structure in general is going to be important to me, aswell as sticking to said structure. I have a weekly planner that I’ve started using to plan what I do in my weeks outside of work. This covers weekly meal planning, task planning, when to blog, when to call people to make appointments and what games I want to play on which days. It helps me with not just lying down on the couch after work and then doing absolutely nothing but wallow in misery all night. I don’t plan everything into detail but I do write down the things I want to be doing during the evening and try to stick to it. It’s been working so far.

Finally I want to learn to cook more dishes than I currently do. There’s so many things I can experiment with and especially during weekends I have a bit more time to do so. I will probably use that to create some posts on here. Speaking of the blog… I’ve currently planned three days a week for blog posts. I have enough content to write about the coming months, as I will describe in my gaming goals bit, and I just need a steady outlet for the chaos in my head. Right now I have blog posts planned on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Let’s see if I can stick to that shall we?

Of course a goals for 2021 post wouldn’t be complete without writing down gaming goals. This is mainly a gaming blog after all and throughout the pandemic I atleast haven’t stopped playing games so there’s that.

What are my plans for gaming in 2021?

Actually I don’t have that many big plans for gaming in 2021. Or maybe I do, but they’re condensed to less games, making them seem smaller. For now though these are the main things I will be working on gaming wise in 2021:

  • Climb the solo/duo queue ladder in League of Legends. I want to get to atleast Gold tier, but climbing higher is the aim.
  • Keep up with content in Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft
  • Finish atleast one single player game per month

Only three goals. So small and yet so big. I think the most important one for me will be the League of Legends one. I guess some elaboration is needed and that will come in a future post but let’s just say that I’ve been completely sucked back into LoL since last Worlds. I’ve been following two streamers and am active within their communities. On top of that I’m dabbling in a bit of coaching related stuff to get me better at the game. Again I will detail this more in a coming post but this project will probably dominate a lot of 2021 for me.
Keeping up with the two MMO’s I play will be a standard thing aswell. I’ve been struggling with Shadowlands in WoW and am currently taking a break from raiding for a myriad amount of reasons, but I do want to keep up with the lore and renown cap every week. I’ve been taking a small break from FFXIV, mostly due to Shadowlands launch, but want to pick that back up again and keep up with the content there aswell.

Finally I’m once again going to try and tackle my backlog. I’ve not bought that many games last year and I have actually been slowly pouring more time in single player games over the past few weeks. My aim is to complete one game a month, this can be a long game or a short game, as long as I see the credits roll. As always that is my main goal with playing games, any time I spend extra on it is a bonus.

So yeah. These are my goals for 2021. I feel like I’ve made a good start on them this week, now I just need to grit my teeth and follow through. For now though I’m pretty happy with what I’ve set to achieve for myself and I will keep you updated on how things develop.

Sandy’s MMO Sunday: Gone Fishing

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What a long strange week it’s been. I’ve been sick. There was a lot of watching League of Legends and a lot of playing Final Fantasy XIV. Even though I guess I wanted to take a bit of a break from farming a lot in this game I couldn’t resist the pull and have been spending this past week back on the leveling grind. This time for my crafters and Fisher, which was the last gathering job I didn’t have at level 80 yet.
Of course that couldn’t stand, so I looked at where I was on my Fisher and started tackling, haha, the Fisher quests from level 60-70 that I hadn’t completed yet. I also used a few levequests to get to 70 and then I started doing the gathering dailies that were added a while ago to supplement my Fisher with even more experience. And today I handed in the final few fish for the Crystarium questchain to push me over the edge and get to level 80. Another job leveled and another notch on my belt in FFXIV.

This leaves me with figuring out what my daily routine in FFXIV will be. I expect to spend a lot of time here untill Shadowlands launches at least, seeing as I don’t think I’ll play that much during pre-patch. Of course I’m going to do the event but I’ve already chosen my class so apart from getting used to “new” rotations and talents I think I’m all covered on the WoW front. So that brings me back to FFXIV. Since I’m leveling my crafting jobs anyway the Dwarven beast tribe dailies will stay a daily item on my list. Other than that I’m focused on gearing up my battle jobs so Expert Roulette will be a daily occurence aswell. I may throw in other roulettes aswell, even if it’s just to earn Poetics so I can buy the last few Shadowbringers relic weapons that I’m missing. All together that should provide me with about an hour to an hour and a half of time that I “need” to spend on FFXIV to get my stuff done on a daily basis. Not too bad at all, especially considering the fact that I’ve picked up Xenoblade Chronicles 2 again and want to spend some time getting properly into that game and hopefully finish it in the forseeable future.
Next to the daily stuff I want to finish off the Crystarium quests for Fisher and unlock the title that comes from that. If it’s as easy as the ones I’ve had so far that should be a breeze and probably doable in a single evening or day. There’s also some other Crystarium stuff that I can still do that is related to my crafting jobs. I may look into that aswell. All of this is not that urgent though, but a “nice to do” type of thing. With having all my battle jobs leveled and, hopefully, soon all my crafting jobs aswell I’m rapidly approaching the point where I really need to think about what I want to be doing in FFXIV, especially since I don’t really tackle endgame content there. However my time will probably be cut short by Shadowlands at that point, so I will deal with that once I get there.

All in all I’m pretty happy with my progress in FFXIV and I hope to be able to keep it up and get everything to level 80 sooner rather than later. For now I’ve happily cleared out my inventory of all my old leveling gear and can enjoy the look of a mostly empty armour bag again. Now I just hope I can keep it that way.

Thank you, next?

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And another goal down.
I’m on a roll this week. Filled up my Pokédex, got my last battle job to 80 in Final Fantasy XIV. I knew it was coming this week but didn’t realize both would happen on basically the same day. I’m thrilled though. Another big goal of the list. I guess it was easier getting all my battle jobs to 80 in this expansion since I had leveled everything to 70 in Stormblood and the only two that required more than 10 levels were the newly added Dancer and Gunbreaker class. So yeah.
After leveling everything now there are two clear favourite battle jobs for me: White Mage and Dancer. I’ve always liked the healing in FFXIV and White Mage is in an amazing spot this expansion. I love the renewed Lillies mechanic, the healing is strong and you can still do some decent dps aswell. I’m much more comfortable on this healer than any of the other two, with Scholar being an absolute lowpoint for me. Dancer has more or less replaced Bard, which was another favourite for a long time, and I think it will stay that way for now. I quite happily play almost all the classes in the game though, with exception to Scholar and Black Mage. I’ve never clicked with Scholar to begin with and Black Mage is just way too much of a static class for me to enjoyl. I know it gives the big booms but having to, ideally, stand still for an entire fight is just not really exciting to me. So I have leveled them and I have gotten the Shadowbringers Relic weapons for them but I don’t actively play them

The real question is.. what’s next? I’m still in a bit of Warcraft lull as we wait on the new expansion. I’ve spent a lot of time in Pokémon and as such I’m kind of done with that game for the time being aswell. In FFXIV I now no longer have to run a shit ton of roulettes every day to level up my jobs… So what’s next on the horizon? I guess I have a few options…
First off, I still have to level up Blue Mage. I know that I could just ask a friend to party up with me and get boosted up, and maybe when I’m desperate enough I will, but for now I can just casually kill things and level up slowly that way. I don’t really enjoy the whole Blue Mage shtick a lot but may aswell have something to do when I don’t know what to do, right?
Secondly, I still have my crafters to level. Most of them are around level 70 right now, with the exception of Carpenter (80) and Weaver (79). I’m leveling them with the Dwarven Beast Tribe quests though, which means I only have to do those three daily quests and I’m good.
Finally, gear up my classes now that they’re all max level. This will probably involve me running ex-roulette atleast every day. I also want to unlock Puppet’s Bunker so I can run that on the weekly reset. Other than that I’m probably going to run level roulette on a tank every day, purely so I can work towards the tanking mounts that, eventually, come from that. First up will be Gunbreaker because I just really enjoy the class.

All of the above does mean less time spent in FFXIV grinding away, which is mostly what I’m aiming for. I’m available for friends if they want to do content aswell, I think we are aiming for floor 100 in Heaven on High at some point, but I do want to take a bit of a step back and breathe so I don’t get too burned out on the game. I’m also aware that with the launch of Shadowlands next month I will probably spend less time in FFXIV anyway, so figuring out a “minimal” weekly routine early on is nice. All in all though I’m happy I got this out of the way so I can focus on the next big thing. Whatever that turns out to be.

Nearing Completion

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Character in field of flowers

I’m so, so terribly close to getting all my battle jobs to level 80 in Final Fantasy XIV that I can almost smell it. Right now my Gunbreaker is just shy of level 78 and I need to do most of my roulettes still this reset, which I’ll probably do tomorrow since it’s already past midnight and I’m really sleepy right now.
I’m hoping I will be level 80 by the weekend, get my Amaro mount and then drop the mad grind that I’ve been on for the past two or three weeks. Granted I could have gotten this milestone a lot earlier but I’ve been on hiatus in FFXIV a bit so it didn’t happen when I originally tought it would.
Being in the middle of the first week of another two week holiday though means I have ample time to get this done while also steadily working away at leveling my crafting jobs with the “new” Dwarf beast tribe dailies. I’ve gotten my Carpenter to 80 so far and my Weaver isn’t far behind. Seeing as I never really enjoyed the whole Ishgard crafting grind I’d rather opt into leveling my crafters this way, slow and steady wins the race right?
I also need to find a new sort of “daily” routine when I don’t have any more battle jobs to level. I think I may just stick to doing ex-roulette for now and the weekly clears next to the crafter dailies. I want to gear up my jobs and the only way to do that is to get through the latest content. I may do a bit of level roulette on my tanks for the achievement but I’ll see when I get there.

Next to completing a long standing goal in FFXIV, I’ve also been making more progress towards filling up my Pokédex in Pokémon Sword. I’m now down to needing only 38 more Pokémon for the base dex completion and I’m going over to my best friend tomorrow who owns Shield and trade a bunch of version exclusives with him. Which then leaves me with only a handful of Pokémon I still need to catch on my own. Yay! After that I’m going to turn my attention to the Isle of Armor and the Pokémon there so I can get my awesome crown and be ready for the Crown Tundra DLC that’s not too far away now either.
If I manage to complete this Pokédex it will be the first time I’ve completed a Pokédex in a Pokémon game ever. The closest I came to achieving this feat was when I was still a kid and playing my copy of Pokémon Blue. I was up to 146 Pokémon caught for the dex but for some reason I resetted my game after that, much to my regrets. Afterwards I’ve never come close to completion again, with the best try on Pokémon Black but that were just so many Pokémon.. That I basically gave up after over 70 hours played.
In Sword I’ve clocked in around 65 hours now, making it the game I’ve put the most hours in on my Switch by far. I dare take it even further and say that if I cross the playtime I had on my copy of Pokémon Black with Pokémon Sword it will be the single player game that I have spent the most time on of all time.

Finally I’ve been slowly working through my backlog again. The latest title that I’m working on is Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Me and my best friend both own a copy of this game, me on my WiiU and he on his Switch. I figured it would be nice to go through the game at the same time so we can share our triumphs and frustrations. Little did I know that he would be way more frustrated than me. Even so frustrated that he has switched from normal mode to Funky Mode so that the game was doable for him. I don’t have this luxury on the WiiU and as such I’m playing the game on the original difficulty level. I’ve made it up to the boss of the fourth world, meaning I only have two more worlds to go after I defeat it. I’ve not really been doing a completionist run so there are a lot of levels that I have yet to unlock and a lot of collectibles to get. However my main goal is to just see the credit roll so I’m not really fussed about skipping these. I just want to stripe another game of my backlog. And with the tempo I’m going that should be doable by the end of the week aswell.

All in all it feels nice to be completing so many things at once. It’s mentally rewarding and it gives me the chance to set new fresh goals afterwards! But first it’s time for some much needed sleep.

Sandy’s MMO Sunday: FFXIV Galore, August 30th 2020

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Newest Yo-Kai mount

Whew. A lot of stuff has happened over in MMO country the past few weeks. The new MMO from Amazon is being tested as we speak but for me the focus always lies on my main two MMO’s, so those are the only things I’ll focus on in my blog posts. I mean, I can’t write about something I have no interest in, right?
We have gotten a release date for Shadowlands in World of Warcraft, October 27th. Final Fantasy XIV had patch 5.3 drop, aswell as the Moonfire Faire and Rising events and the Yo-Kai watch event renewed.
Since I’m more or less on a break from WoW, after basically gaining all the stuff I wanted to before pre-patch would hit, I’ve gone straight back to playing a lot of FFXIV. It also helps that my WoW guildies have more or less moved there aswell for the time being so I have more people to play with again but I’ve always kept up with FFXIV on the side, especially when the newest patch would hit. So this was no different with 5.3

First thing’s first: I finished the 5.3 mainstory. I’m not going to spoil anything about it here because I would hate to get spoiled myself so I won’t do it unto others. The only thing I have to say, once again, is damn you Square Enix for getting me to care about this world and the characters inhabiting it. On more than one occassion FFXIV has managed to make me cry and the latest patch has not been an exception to that. What kind of tears they were I’ll leave up to you to find out yourselves if you play the game and have yet to go through this part of the story.
Next to the mainstory there were a plethora of other things to unlock, with the most important for me the new “beast tribe” in the form of the Dwarves. It feels kind of weird to see them as beast tribe since they are basically the mirror race of Lalafells but in a way it makes sense. I’m in love with the music that plays in their little area in Lakeland and I can’t wait to unlock the mount you get from them: an actual battle tank. It’s also helping me to level up my crafting jobs since I bounced kind of hard off of the whole Ishgard restoration. I’m not sure why but I just really didn’t enjoy it. Maybe I’ll get into it again at some point but for now I’m happy to level up my crafters with these dailies and so far it has gotten my Carpenter to level 80 and my Weaver to level 75.
I have yet to unlock the new 24 man raid, Puppet’s Bunker, but I’m sure I’ll get around to doing that next week.

As mentioned there were also a few events going the past few weeks and I’ve partaken in all of them. The Moonfire Faire has gotten me a lovely outfit, as seen in the screenshot above. The Rising gave us the Wind-up Ardbert and the Yo-Kai event came back with a vengeance with new minions and weapons to get for the classes added in Stormblood and Heavensward and, after getting all of those, a new mount also pictured above. I decided to try and get this done as soon as I possibly could seeing as the first two weeks of an event like this the FATE farm trains are going strong and the longer you wait the bigger the chance that it comes down to having to solo the lot which isn’t something I would recommend.
It’s really nice just getting these things done, especially events like the Rising that come with a message from the development team every year. For now though I will have to wait untill the next event which will probably be in October around Halloween.

Level 80 Dark Knight ding

Next to doing the new 5.3 content and the various events I also doubled down on leveling up the last remaining battle jobs I have left. As of this morning I managed to ding level 80 on my Dark Knight, as pictured above, and now I only have Gunbreaker left. I unlocked the job and did the level 60 beast tribe dailies aswell as the level 60 job quest so far. I have to get used to Gunbreaker a lot after playing Dark Knight. There’s more buttons to press for damage since you basically have two single target and one AoE rotation with their respective cooldowns. Then there’s the whole ammo mechanic that I’m still learning but all in all I can see how people like this class and I can’t wait to get it to level 80 and finally get that coveted Amaro mount afterwards. If I keep on playing FFXIV like I’ve been doing for the past weeks I won’t have any doubts that I will get to that level 80 within the next two weeks.

Together with getting level 80 on my Dark Knight I also finished off the final 15 FATEs that I needed in the Tempest to hit rank 3 FATEs with all the zones. I now have access to all rank 3 vendors in the zones aswell as the special vendor in the Crystarium. I see that they sell a lot of stuff that I still want and for that I will need to farm more FATEs, but for now I’m content with not doing any untill my Gunbreaker gets into Shadowbringers content. It’s been quite a dull grind and I’m happy that I was able to complete it. Another notch on my belt so to speak.

Other content consumption
Next to dedicating a lot of time to FFXIV I’ve also been busy with consuming other types of content.
Lucifer dropped the first part of season five last week and I’ve been slowly going through that. I only have about two episodes to go now untill the mid season break and there have been a few interesting plot points so far. Tom Ellis is putting on a top notch performance and I’m happy to see it back on screen and I hope the second half will come out sooner rather than later.
I’ve been reading a lot of Robin Hobb books, that centre around the realm of the Elderlings, the past months and I’m finally down to the last book of the entire series. This means that I’m basically on book 16/16 right now. It’s been quite a ride and honestly the worldbuilding she does is amazing. I really want to know how the series ends but also don’t want it to end at the same time. It’s quite a conondrum. Right now I’m reading 2-4 chapters per day and I’m about 1/3rd of the way into the final book.
Finally my time has been consumed by watching a lot of League of Legends. All of the big regions are in play-off mode right now and I feel like my TV has been on with LoL for the past 48 hours. I’ve been catching games from Europe, North America, China and Korea. It’s a great way to spend time but also nice to have on as “background noise” while doing other things. Next week are the finals everywhere and I can’t wait to see how things play out in both Europe and North America specifically.

All in all I’m pretty happy with the progress I’ve made in FFXIV and I hope I can continue this streak next week. Maybe I’ll hop back into WoW again aswell, even if it’s just to clean out inventories in preparation for the pre-patch and maybe run some old raids now that we’ve not all been scaled down to level 50 yet. I guess we’ll see. For now though the match between Rogue and Mad Lions is only 30 mins away from starting and that will probably keep me occupied untill well in the evening.