Tag Archives: FFXIV

Gaming Goals: 2018

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I’ve been mulling about this post for a while. 2018 is three weeks old and I feel like I want to make a certain road map for myself with achievements that I want done this year.
I already started off well with leveling my Miner to 70 in FFXIV and completing my Class Hall campaign on Demon Hunter in WoW today. I’ve also completed my first Steam game of the year and I hope many more games in my backlog will follow suit.

So yeah without further ado let’s look into some of the goals I have set for myself for the coming year gaming wise.
First off: World of Warcraft.

I’ve been slowly getting back int WoW since about november/december and seeing as I no longer raid there I want to take the time to do other things. I’m a sucker for lore and collecting and I really enjoy the class campaigns so I’ve decided to spend the remainder of Legion finishing those off. I have done 5/12 classes so far: Warrior, Hunter, Paladin, Druid and Demon Hunter. The rest of the classes I will have to level to max and then trudge through the Class Hall campaign. Luckily for me of the seven classes left, four are already sitting at level 100 or above (Mage, Priest, Shaman, Monk). I have a Death Knight and Warlock sitting in the level 90-100 range and then I have a Rogue who is level 81. I know that Blizzard has changed how leveling works so I will probably save the Rogue, DK and Warlock for last.
I also want to get all the Class mounts after that. With only the Warrior and Hunter one done currently that will probably take a while but we’ll see.
Finally I want to chase weapon skins, specificall on my Warrior. I know that Blizzard will remove some Artifact skins with the launch of BfA and I really want to get my hands on the Challenge skin on my Warrior and the +15 mythic colour. I imagine I still have about half a year to go for that so I hope I can manage it.
So more than enough to do in WoW and I will have to set aside specific nights just to be able to do all of this. I don’t mind though, I will enjoy all the lore and will probably get my money’s worth from that playtime alone.

Secondly: Final Fantasy XIV
Now that I feel like I’ve found a steady and permanent home in this game I want to plant some roots for real. I want to get all my classes to level 70, this is both battle classes, crafting classes aswell as gathering classes. I have been making some effort on two of these fronts at least. I already have five battle classes on max level (Astrologian, White Mage, Ninja, Bard, Red Mage) and seeing as the rest is all level 50 or higher I don’t foresee too much issues doing this. On the gathering front I’ve made progress in leaps and bounds. Both my Botanist and Miner are already level 70 and I’m currently working on getting Fisher up there aswell (currently level 41). Even though I hit the part of leveling for Fisher where it tends to slow down, 40-50 really is a drag, I feel that if I can just keep on dedicating some time to this I will be level 70 in no time at all.
Crafting classes are a bit of a different story and will probably be the biggest challenge. I’ve never really picked up crafting properly except for Weaver, which is sitting at level 60. The rest of my crafting classes are a lot lower however. They’re varying in levels from 20 to 37 or so and even though I’ve gotten tips on how to level them fastest I’m still not really looking forward to it. Ideally I want to level all the classes together so I would start out with getting everything to 25 and then everything to 30 etcetera. It’s going to be a bit arduous to do it like that but I don’t have that much of a choice.
I predict that this will actually take me a lot of time but in the event that leveling goes faster than I anticipate I want to work on knocking out achievements to earn me some titles and some shiny glamour gear. But the leveling comes first.

Lastly: The Backlog
Oh boy. The Backlog is a thing. You see I really enjoy collecting games but I have an abominable track record of actually playing said games. I don’t finish that many at all and seeing as I want to use my funds towards my house this year will be the best year to actually start working through all the games I have accumulated over the years.
I have a ton of RPGs, a decent amount of platformers and then there are different types of games like Visual Novels, Point & Click puzzle games and “endless” games like city builders, the sims and stuff like FIFA 16 that I’ve bought but never actually took the time to play. I feel like I owe it to myself to play through atleast a few RPGs this year, most notably Horizon Zero Dawn, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Final Fantasy XV. I’ve started all of these games quite enthusiastically but never got around to actually dive deep into them and play untill the credits roll. Because that is my ultimate goal with this backlog playthrough: See the credits roll for as many games as I can. This means that sometimes a game will only last about 3 hours to play through but that’s not that important. I can always come back later to mop up trophies/achievement/completionist stuff when I want to.
It also doesn’t mean I’m going to rush these games. Especially RPGs are games that are slow going for me because I want to explore every nook and cranny, talk to every person and run around a lot in the game world. This will probably slow me down considerably completing the games but I don’t really care.
The same goes for platformers. I enjoy finding a lot of secrets on my first playthrough of a game and I will probably go out of my way to get some stuff when I can, but I’m not going to chase silly achievements that take specific actions to complete when they’re too complicated or when they slow me down to a standstill in the game.
I have made a start in this effort by slowly going through my Steam library. I’ve finished Botanicula and I’m going to start working my way through Castle of Illusion again (I really enjoy that one, it reminds me of my old Sega!) and then just drop down the list of games. Child of Light is on there and Ori and the Blind Forest but also the likes of Final Fantasy XIII and Stardew Valley. And even though a game like Stardew Valley doesn’t really finish well I feel like I want to give it some love and time and say that I atleast played it for a while.

On all of these things I hope to be posting more regularly than I’m doing right now. I currently have a Thursday & Sunday posting schedule and I will try to keep that up atleast and maybe squeeze in a Saturday post every now and then. This is because Thursday is my day off and Sundays are usually chore days for me so these days are perfect to use for blog posts. I hope I can keep up the trend of using more screenshots in my posts aswell, seeing as I can take seriously pretty ones on my PC again.

Anyway that’s a look in what I want to do gaming wise in 2018. I hope I can reach all the goals I’ve set for myself and maybe accomplish even more. It’s not the same as climbing Mount Everest or learning a new language but I enjoy playing my games and I enjoy setting goals for myself in said games. It might make me a bit boring but that will have to be that way then. All in all I’m quite happy with this. It gives me something to work towards and something to grasp when I feel like I’m lost with what to do.
See you next Thursday!

 

Gathering for Glory (and Gil)

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I’ve caught the gathering bug quite hard these days in FFXIV.
After getting my botanist to level 70 in December I’ve thought long and hard about what I wanted to do in the game. My static seems to have mostly fallen apart so I have no idea if I will be raiding in the new patch. I’m kind of worn out from leveling battle classes after pushing up AST and WHM very fast with the Alliance roulette, beast tribe dailies and just grinding roulettes in general. I’m not really in the mood to level another DPS right now and I despise Scholar as class which leaves me with leveling a tank. Which under normal circumstances would be fine but all my tanks are in the level 50 range and it would mean that I would want to run a lot of Palace of the Dead to maximize my experience gained. All in all I’m just worn out of it all so I wanted to turn my attention elsewhere.
I picked up my miner last week and just ran through a ton of leves and weekly handins to get her to level 70 as soon as I could. I actually don’t mind the whole mindless leve grind aslong as I can see some progress from it. And with the buffs to levequests, and the Stormblood ones being much less painfull than the Heavensward ones, I got to 70 in what felt like the blink of an eye. Ofcourse the handins from both M’naago and Zhloe helped a lot here and me being tired and thus being unable to focus on anything else also helped.

Now I just need to unravel the mystery that is Yellow scrips. I’m not going to aim for an entire set of gear for my Botanist or Miner yet but I do want to get atleast the weapons from Yellow scrips. It seems like I will have to farm collectables to stack up on them and then just spend them. Seems easy in theory but a lot harder in practice. I guess I will have to look up optimal rotations to get the right amount of collectability so I can hand in stuff for 23 scrips a piece, atleast that’s what I’m aiming for. I also want to unlock the Stormblood fokelore books and hopefully later on the Heavensward ones I missed aswell. I’ve already gotten both Fokelore books from Stormblood for my Botanist so now I just need the ones for Miner. I’m not sure what they do exactly nor am I really sure how I can start making money of off this but I will get there eventually.

Another thing I enjoy dearly when gathering is that you get to see great scenery and it offers up ample opportunity to take screenshots like the one I took above. Being a tough Miner staring out at the rock formation in the Steppes. I especially adore the cloud formations in the sky and the slight hint of sunglare in my screenshot. Stuff that I’ve not seen as much on my old PC thanks to the fact that I had to turn down all my settings to even be able to play.
Another thing I found on this new PC with gathering is that I have almost no lag. Normally there’d be some time between actions and I was so used to it taking a long time to hand in levequests that I was quite surprised with how smooth and fast everything goes now.
This has made leveling my Miner a breeze and an enjoyable breeze at that. However even though I’ve leveled Miner and Botanist relatively quick and together the last remaining gathering class had fallen a bit to the wayside.

Fisher is a bit typical in the Gatherers section. I’m only level 33 on it right now but unlike other Gatherers it doesn’t really use GP for instance. I feel like I also have no influence over the actual fish that I catch and whether or not they turn out to be HQ. I guess perception still somehow plays a part here as attribute that influences the catching of HQ fish but it’s still somewhat of a mystery to me. Especially considering that for mooching other fish you first need to catch HQ ones, making the whole mooching thing quite an unpredictable event. I now understand why people can spend hours and hours trying to catch a certain fish, especially if it involves double mooching which sounds really like my biggest nightmare. However I want my “Goddess of the Hand” title so I will have to bite the bullet and level up that Fisher whether I want to or not.
Luckily for me I do enjoy the leveling process itself. I like just going from questhub to questhub and fish up a plethora of fish. I get especially happy when I can get my hands on some HQ fish as I’m doing my quests since it means I can get double XP from the leves. I guess I could also fish up some stuff for my Grand Company but seeing as spamming leves is just super fast I feel like it’s a waste of time to do that.
I’m not really sure how long I can stay hooked on this whole leveling game but I hope long enough for me to get Fisher to level 70 this month aswell. This means I can finally convert/sell all the Gathering gear I kept a hold off for the past few months and ultimately empty out my Armoury chest and retainers a bit more. Because that really is my overarching goal with getting everything to maximum level: get rid of all the crappy low level gear that is now taking up space on my Retainers and in my bags.

I want to end this post witha  screenshot of me fishing in my most beloved zone: Eastern La Noscea. I love the sandy white beaches and the azure blue ocean. It reminds me of holidays, relaxation and fun. If I could book a flight to a location just like that I would be extremely happy. But for now I’ll just have to make do with the location ingame.

New PC, More Gaming?

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Botanicula Moon wish

Last Thursday I picked up my new PC. My old one was completely and utterly done after five years of abuse. It worked marvelously in the beginning, letting me play WoW on High settings again (after playing it on the lowest for ages) and enabling me to play games like Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed III and IV. However everything deteriorates over time and I had come to a point that I once again played all my games on the lowest settings and with some effort besides. I’d dip down below 20 fps frequently and even though I could still play games like WoW and Heroes of the Storm I would notice huge rendering issues and simple animation lag caused by the fact my PC couldn’t really handle things anymore. I think the real final straw was when I couldn’t play Diablo III after buying the Necromancer pack. My old computer simply couldn’t handle the armies of dead I was summoning and it put me off playing the game alltogether.

So now I have a new PC. Specs wise it’s not super top notch. With me buying an apartment I can hardly afford a top of the line €3000 PC so I put my budget around €1200 and see what it would net me. I decided on buying the thing locally and had it sort of custom made. I say sort of because you would pick out a base model computer and then added components as you went. So right now I’ve ended up with a PC with an MSI motherboard, I5-7500 CPU and an Nvidia GTX1060 (which was a huge upgrade to the GXT650 I had). I have 8GB ram, a 256GB SSD and another 1TB HDD. I changed the power supply for a more powerful one and I got Windows 10 along with it. All in all I’m quite happy. I’ve never had my PC or my games boot as fast as they do now. I decided to put both WoW and FFXIV on my SSD and all my other games on the regular HDD. This is because I don’t have that much space and it’s really the two games that I spend the most time on. I’ve already been taking more screenshots than I’ve been doing the past few months and I’m really enjoying the fact that I can play with pretty graphics again.

To celebrate this newness of computer I have started to go through my Steam Library, starting at the top game in my list, which also happened to be a gift: Botanicula. It’s a bit of a silly game and it’s mostly point and click. You guide a set of five little creatures around a tree to save it from dark spider like things that are sapping the life out of it. There is quite a big map to explore and a lot of strange things to encounter (see screenshots above). The game encourages wandering about and discovering as much of the map as you can, which I’m doing gladly. It’s one of those games where you have to click everything you can just to see what it does. I’ve only done two levels of the six available and it’s really a game that you can play through on a rainy afternoon given that it takes about four hours to complete. It’s whimsical and silly and the sound are amazing. I can’t wait to finish it and then tackle more of the games I’ve accumulated over the years in my Steam Library. Now that I finally have a decent PC again I may even want to take another jab at finishing ACIII or Tomb Raider.

Next to picking up my new PC I also got to pick out my floors, bathroom stuff and a kitchen for my apartment Thursday afternoon/evening. Because it’s a part of a project and because they will built the apartment in such a way that I only really need to move in furniture and hang up curtains they want to know what we want in advance. This also means that options to choose from are limited (unless you want to pay a shitton more money). In the end I managed to settle on floors and tiles and bathroom equipment. I also got a kitchen designed and it’s all coming together. Too bad the actual building of the apartments will still take a year and a half or so but still. It was a really nice experience and I’m happy with what I picked.

As for the rest. My weekend is booked. I’m off to a birthday in about 45 minutes or so, taking my 3DS with me for the car ride there (it’s about an hour) so I can get some Yo-Kai Watch playtime in. I managed to finish reading “The Wise Man’s Fear” today and will probably read “The Slow Regard of Silent Things” next and then I will have to wait for the final novel in the Kingkiller series like everyone else. I have to say though, Patrick Rothfuss tells a really damn good story. I’ve been sucked in by it and enjoyed it a lot. I can’t wait to see how Kvothe fares in the last book and I sincerely hope that he won’t be killing him off or having him die an old man. I hope he goes back to Felurian in the end like he promised, but only the author knows.
I’ve also finally managed to reach rank 2 Prestige on my Warrior, opening up another Artifact skin. I’m quite happy witht his because I think the PVP skin for Fury weapons look amazing and I hope I get to unlock a bit more colours before the next expansion drops. As far as FFXIV goes… I’ve picked up Miner and am sitting on level 62 right now, a level I don’t really enjoy purely because of the fact that leves are in Ruby Sea and they are super annoying to do. I hope I can get past that part fast and bump her to 70. Other than that my gaming has been rather quiet over the past week. I’ve been tired because of work and stress about the whole apartment thing so the moment I get home I really just want to sit or lie down and do as little as possible.
As an ending to this post though I’ll leave you with a picture of the Warrior and her seriously awesome new weapons.

New Year, New Theme

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I figured it was time to throw a new theme on my blog. The one I had was nice but it didn’t really give me many options in relation to the header and for some weird reason it wouldn’t let me choose where to place images in my posts. This is reflected by the fact that everything that wasn’t a fullscreen sized screenshot just defaulted to the left, something that annoyed me very much. So now I have a fancy new theme with a fancy picture of my FFXIV character at the top (I really love that screenshot of her) and I’m hoping I can take my blog in a more active direction with this. I also really want to start posting more screenshots on here, especially now that I’m getting a new PC on Thursday… I should be able to snap some pretty pictures.

I’ve been trying to make notes in my planner every day with the activities I’ve done for the day. Be it gaming related stuff, reading, watching TV or simply just sleeping a lot. I do this so I can have a look of all the stuff I actually do during the week and what are really bad days for me to plan things because I know I will be super sleepy or unmotivated to do things. So far I’ve been making some progress in various areas when it comes to games, reading and watching shows.
I’ve done the entirety of Tomb of Sargeras in Looking for Raid in WoW on Sunday on my Warrior. Kil’jaeden wiped our group three times before we got to finish him off and I was rewarded with the epic cutscene where Illidan basically transports Argus to Azeroth, or was it the other way around? I’ve also dabbled in Antorus but I feel like I should finish off the story on Argus before I move on in that raid. It would probably make more sense to do that so I’m hoping I can stick to that plan. I’ve also been doing my Honor dailies every day. This has accumulated in me only needing 2 more ranks until I hit Prestige rank 2 and finally unlock that damn skin for my weapons. Especially the Prot Warrior skin is cool for PVP so I definately want to unlock it as soon as possible.
I’ve not really touched my Paladin yet this month, focusing completely on my Warrior for the time being. This is also due to time restraints and the fact that I’ve been taking care of a lot of IRL stuff instead of gaming.

In FFXIV I took to finishing the Heavensturn event. It’s a cute little quest and on my alt (pictured above) it’s the fifth consecutive Heavensturn I’ve participated in. I was a little disappointed with the rewards this year, two dog helmets and a stuffed dog housing items, but the quest was short and charming and a little perverted as usual. I’ve ressed a few people doing the Mochi Pounding FATE who didn’t figure out fast enough what they were supposed to be doing so there’s that. I’ve also dinged my Botanist level 70 earlier and am slowly working my way through the 61-70 part on Miner. After that I guess I’ll have to figure out what the best way to earn Yellow Scrips is so I can atleast replace my main hand weapons with more decent ones than I have right now. All in all I’m enjoying a leasurely pace in FFXIV and it’s suiting me well. I get to make up my own little goals and work towards them and this is something that makes me extremely happy.

As for other things. I’ve watched a few more episodes of “Lie to Me” and have finished season two which leaves me with only season three left. I also got some time into watching Black Mirror. Even though I enjoy the episodes and they get me thinking about stuff I’ve noticed it’s not really the show you want to watch when you’re already in a negative mood, something I had a little exchange on Twitter about with Jaedia. So instead I’m focusing on watching Lie to Me and reading “The Wise Man’s Fear”. I’m already halfway through that book aswell. As it stands right now my e-reader is my faithful companion to and from work every day and it’s astounding how much reading you can get done in about 15 minutes time. The story is still gripping me and I’m severely disappointed that the third book is taking so long to come out. Then again I’m also still waiting on the sixth book of A Song of Ice and Fire so meh. If all else fails I can fall back to the Gentleman Thieves series which I enjoy a lot aswell.
I also managed to grind out the remaining rewards of the Winter’s Veil event in Heroes of the Storm yesterday evening. Inviting a friend and just battling the AI on Beginner level was something I really needed. It makes the game light and easy and you can try your hand at champions you’ve never played before to see how their kit works and how they handle in general. I played a few games as Sylvanas, Zagara and Li Ming. Mostly to get the level ups but also because of quests and, in Li Ming’s case, because I really enjoy playing the character. This resulted in me going to bed a bit later than I had planned but atleast I had a fun evening.

Even though I’ve had an absolutely terrible day at work I feel happy to come on to this blog and write about gaming related stuff. It helps me take my mind off things, even though I technically don’t have anything interesting to say and most of my posts seem like rambling. I just don’t want to have a constant negative mood and writing always helps. I really hope I can take more screenshots from now on and tell more stories as to why and how they were taken. It’s just a real shame I can’t take screenshots on my 3DS since it seems to be my favoured system to play on outside of my PC. I’m really deep into Yo-Kai Watch and am enjoying it way more than I thought I would. I may actually finish it before the month is over… But that is something for another post.

Gaming Goals: January 2018

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First off all I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year and hope that 2018 will be 100% better than 2017 for everyone. I spent my New Years eve celebrating with one of my best friends. It was a day and evening filled with games, good company and nice food. Ofcourse I went to bed a bit too late which means I’m going to bed nice and on time tonight to be well rested for work tomorrow. I’m also happy I decided to clean my room before leaving. I’m now home and have a bed with freshly washed sheets and an empty desk to look at, which makes me happy.

Now before I want to start talking about my plans for January I want to look back at December and what I’ve accomplished.

  • In World of Warcraft I managed to get my Paladin to level 110 and completed the Class Hall Campaign pre Legionfall. I decided to stop there and focus on gearing up and clearing out the remaining quests that I had before pushing on to Argus and eventually my Class Mount. She’s sitting on ilvl 850 now and I’m slowly whittling down my quest log. I’m quite happy with the progress I made considering I was sick in bed for an entire week. I really have to mention that I enjoyed the Paladin Class campaign like no other campaign so far. I like how it tied in with the Priest one and how everything played out. Next to working on my Paladin I’ve also picked up my Warrior again. I finally finished the Legionfall campaign, got Exalted status with them and got my Class mount. I’ve decided to slowly work through Argus on her and do some LFR to experience the story of Tomb of Sargeras and Antorus but that’s it.
  • In FFXIV I managed to get my Astrologian to 70 early on in the month and had my Miner ding 61. I’ve stalled on my Botanist however, she’s currently sitting around halfway to level 68. I do want to make the push towards 70 asap on that and my Miner so I can clear gear from my bags and maybe so I can start making some money. I’ve also casually been leveling my Machinist, it’s 61, and I’m quite happy with that. Ofcourse I’ve also done the christmas Event on both my characters so I now own my very own flying bear!
  • In non MMO games I’ve not made that much progress. I’ve played a bit of Xenoblade Chronicles, some I am Setsuna and Puyo Puyo Tetris but otherwise I’ve not really touched any games. It’s a bit disappointing but inbetween the stress from work and buying a house and feeling sick it really can’t be helped. I did manage to level another hero to level 5 in HotS so there’s that.
  • On the non gaming front I read the book I wanted to read in less than a week. I really enjoy this series by Patrick Rothfuss and I’m planning to read the rest of the series aswell. In series country I just couldn’t get into the Punisher. I don’t know if it’s just Marvel overload or if I just can’t watch another action packed series but instead of watching that I’ve delved deep into the serie “Lie to Me”. I’m currently halfway through season 2 and I’m sure I’ll watch the rest by the end of January.

Looking ahead to January I still want to keep my goals small. I will have a very tough month ahead of me work wise and I’m still not quite over my cold so I don’t want to plan too much while I know I probably won’t be able to do what I said I would. But this is what I’d like to accomplish the next month.

  • In WoW: Get Prestige rank 2 on my Warrior, finish off Argus on my Warrior and clear out any remaining quests that linger in my questlog. Do Tomb of Sargeras and Antorus for story on both Warrior and Paladin.
    On Paladin, push through the Legionfall and Argus story and get my Class Hall mount.
  • In FFXIV: Level my Botanist and Miner to level 70. Fiddle around on Machinist, no real level goal there, if I make it to 70 it’s nice, if not then no harm done.
  • Other games: play more Xenoblade Chronicles. Any progress is nice but I’d like to see a considerable part of the story before the month is over.
  • Non-gaming: Read “The Wise Men’s Fear” by Patrick Rothfuss. Finish watching “Lie to Me”. Watch the new season of “Black Mirror”

All in all this should be obtainable goals for the month. I have many more planned for the rest of the year and I’m planning to do a “goals for 2018” post somewhere this week. I don’t have big “real life” things to consider this year except for getting my apartment built so nothing should interfere with finally playing some of my backlog and having fun in MMO’s in 2018.

Things go faster than they seem

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It’s funny how much stuff you can get done in limited time. If you plan well and stick to your planning you can get miles ahead on what you thought you’d be doing.

Yesterday I came home from work and felt exhausted. This is nothing new for me on Fridays. For some reason they hit me harder than any other day of the week and often I find myself sleeping my Friday night away. Normally I would be pissed at myself for falling asleep but by now I’ve recognized that I need that to preserve my energy so I just let it happen. This allows me to wake up relatively on time on Saturdays and start getting stuff done.
Did I mention that I got a new curtain fitted and that my room is dark again at night? Holy moly it has done wonders for my sleep. I can’t even describe the feeling of not waking up the moment the sun rises anymore. I’m lucky that it’s winter and that sunrise is relatively late but still. Not waking up early in the weekends is a blessing and I’ve noticed my sleep improving by leaps and bounds.

What I really wanted to talk about in this post is how fast the progression of the goals I’ve set for myself seems to be going. My Astrologian is just shy of level 69 in FFXIV. I’ve finished my book. My Miner and Botanist are both sitting above level 60. My Paladin is level 103 soon and steadily advancing all her quests aswell. I’m five hours into Xenoblade Chronicles and I’ve been watching some Punisher again. It’s really nice and smooth sailing.
As it stands now I predict my Astrologian to hit level 70 somewhere this week. I’m so close now that I really just want to get it done with. The real question is, what am I going to do afterwards. A part of me wants to keep pushing up new classes but I’m really wondering which ones. I’m obviously going to focus on both Miner and Botanist but if I keep going the way I do they should both be 70 well before the month ends. I want to get the Goddess of Magic title in FFXIV and as such I’m eyeing my Summoner/Scholar already. The class is level 58 and would be a logical choice to level up after I’m done with Astrologian. However I’m also feeling very partial towards Monk right now and I’m pretty sure I can use the diversion from playing healers/ranged to a melee again. Mostly so I can pick up my Ninja easier as well. Another thing that’s been eating at me is the scope that FFXIV has as an MMO. I’m already considering what I want to do when I get tired of leveling and gearing. There is so much to do in this game. I’ve barely touched Gathering and Crafting as it stands. There is the Chocobo racing, the card game and the Pokémon wannabe minion battles. A part of me wants to dabble in all of it and a part of me warns me that I don’t really have the time. It’s a struggle and one I want to put off untill next year. I mean, I’ve kept my December goals to a minimum for a reason.

In WoW I’ve been spending the time I have on my Paladin. I’m noticing that after an hour or so of playing I tend to get restless and shut down. I’m not forcing myself to do anything anymore and an hour of play is fine for me. Obviously it slows my whole level proces down but it’s surprising how much you can get done in an hour. I’ve picked up the quest to get the Protection Artifact weapon and I’m planning to go do it the moment I unlock Halls of Valor in Stormheim. Having to queue for dungeons as DPS is really shitty and I enjoy playing Prot Paladin so there’s that. I remember doing the quest on my Draenei and I remember it being a huge pain in the butt so I’m curious to see how well I fare on my Bloodelf. I should also do the quest for my Holy weapon but it’s not really on my radar yet… Even though it is a barrier that must be overcome if I want to advance in my Class Hall quests.

I’m also noticing that I’m much happier just doing my own thing and not being constantly asked to do stuff by guildies. I’m having a real “einzelgänger” phase now and I just want to be left to my own devices when I’m online. I guess in a way it’s lucky than that I’ve not pledged myself to any groups outside of my FFXIV raidgroup. Maybe this is also why I can finally enjoy some single player games again. No one bothers you when playing them and I can get really submerged, even if it’s only for an hour or so. This has made it much easier to sink some time into Xenoblade Chronicles. I know I’m still only 5 hours in but I’m really enjoying myself. The system is a bit complicated and the quests are hard, after dying 3 times I realized that I probably should makes some more way in the mainstory before I could complete a certain sidequest, but the entire game so far has been amazing. I love JRPG’s and I feel like I can finally sink my teeth into one and finish it.

Another reason for me to sink my teeth into games that I have is that I’m finally making preparations to move out of my Dad’s house. I got a call from a real estate agent about one of the projects I entered. Apparently someone fell through on financing their appartment and I was next on the list. I’m meeting with them next Thursday and then I can start getting my own finances in order. It’s a project that is due somewhere in 2019 so I’ll have an entire year to get the stuff I need for moving. This also means that I have to take a look at my current expenses and start cutting where I need to cut. On the gaming front it’s no more new games. I’m quitting my gym membership (seeing as I’m not going anyway) and no longer have to pay for University as I’ve finally graduated. This leaves me with my travel costs to work, phone bill, the monthly pay I make to my dad and my two MMO subs. All those costs come down to about €300 a month. I’ve reserved about €100 more for work lunches/other foods so that leaves me with about €1200 a month I can deposit into my savings account for my house. I have a big expense in January seeing as I am going to replace my PC (it’s just not working for games anymore) but other than that I should be fine saving up a storm. I’m really excited about this and feel in no way sad that I have to stop impulse buying things. I have everything I need and if I have to play all the games I own back to back I’m pretty sure that would satisfy me for a year anyway.

So yeah. There’s lots of things I’m working on and looking forward to. I really hope I can keep up my motivation to get both my real life and gaming goals done. Untill then I’ll update my blog regularly with news from my gaming adventures and probably also news about my first very own home.

Some progress to report

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Loading screen Paladin Class Hall

As I write this post I’m feeling much better than I did before. I finally have Thursday off again and the stress of work has left me completely. There’s still some things that need addressing on that front but for now I’m enjoying my free time and working on some of the goals I’ve set for myself at the start of this month. On a side note, it’s really unbelievable that it’s already December. 2017 has flown by and I’ll be happy to go into 2018 with a clean slate.

So what I wanted to talk about.
I’ve been making steady progress on my Paladin. I’ve landed in Legion and did the first few of my Class hall quests and started off in Stormheim as my first zone of the expansion. The choice to dive into Stormheim first basically came down to two factors. Overall it was probably my least favourite zone to navigate without flying mount and I want to get it out of the way as quickly as possible so it made sense to tackle it first. Secondly I’ve never done this zone from Horde perspective and I was really curious how the whole Sylvanas/Greymane story looks like from the other side, so there’s that. By the time of writing this post I’ve made my way to level 102, gone through the Exodar scenario and am neck deep into my Class hall lore. I have to admit I’m pleasantly suprised by the Paladin Class hall. The only lore I’ve actually finished has been Warrior, Hunter and Druid (and almost Demon Hunter) and nothing feels as organized and military driven like the Paladin story.  I like that I have Lady Liadrin as follower and seeing all these familiar faces from the past 10 years I’ve been playing WoW. The only character to fall out of theme for me is the Tauren Paladin representative simply because Tauren Paladin are still new to me and I’ve never experienced their lore.

Exodar Scenario

I’m also more fond of my Ashbringer than I realized I would be. I know that in Vanilla it was a thing (especially corrupted Ashbringer) and it’s one of the really fabled weapons in World of Warcraft lore. To me it’s just a really pretty sword and it suits my Bloodelf just fine.
Just as a sidenote, I’m using Retribution mostly to level. I am planning to go Protection for dungeons/mythics/LFR and the like. I’ve always been a Protection Paladin on this character, going so far as to tank Icecrown Citadel and I really enjoy the specialisation moreso than I do Retribution or Holy.
All in all I feel like I’m on schedule in my WoW adventures. If I poke in my head a few hours a week I should be level 110 in no time. Then it’s mostly gearing, making my way through the story and Class Hall stuff and eventually get my awesome Class mount.

Another thing I did today was finish reading “Name of the Wind”. I was pleasantly surprised by the book and found it hard to tear myself away from it’s contents. I’ve been reading a lot during the evenings and on the train and took a few hours today to finish up the last part of it. It’s a really well written book with an extraordinary story. Some things may be a bit annoying to grasp, the currency system still doesn’t make sense to me at all, but it’s a good fantasy novel. It has a form of magic, heroes and villains, and mystical creatures. The choice to bring the story in the form of the lead character telling his own history makes things interesting aswell and I’ve laughed out loud and teared up at some points in the book. All in all it means that it’s terrific to me and I can’t wait to start the second book “The Wiseman’s Fear”. However I didn’t plan on finishing so fast and now I’m a bit stuck with a hole in my planning. I still need to finish watching Punisher though and I’m sure I can use the extra time to make some progress in Xenoblade Chronicles or Pokémon.

As far as FFXIV goes, I’ve been running around on my Astrologian getting her to level 67. Only three levels off the mark now and I’m noticing that I’m mostly fine with taking an hour or two to play and then drift off to something else.  There’s not really much to tell there since the level routine mostly exists of doing my beast tribe dailies and some roulettes. It’s a bit boring and grindy but it’s also a nice distraction when I feel a bit down.

All in all I feel like I’m making some decent progress on the goals I’ve set for myself. I may even expand and do more than I originally planned to do, but we’ll see. Work is still being a major bitch with a lot of free days and people taking the holidays off. I’ll be working extra and even though it earns me some extra money to spend I feel like I can do with all the free time I can get right now to replenish my energy and start working on being healthy again.

Settling

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It’s odd how much peace of mind you can get from finishing something that has been looming over you for literally 3 years now. I feel like I can think again and function again like a normal human being. This allows me to set goals for other stuff easier and plan my days better now that I have no more obligations to anything than work. And ofcourse I leave that behind at 17.00 when I start clearing out my desk to go home.

Right now I feel like the two major MMO’s I’m playing are in maintenance mode for me. In FFXIV we’ve basically stopped raiding except for the weekly savage clear. As group we’re not attempting unending coil simply because we are not going to make it anyway. Part of that is on me because I’m nothing more than an average ninja who, for some reason, fails to perform in raids yet again. It’s probably due to me not playing as much as I should but well, there’s not that much to do in game anyway. When it comes to WoW I’ve ceased raiding after we killed Gul’dan almost a year ago. Right now I don’t feel the need to get back into raiding either so I’ve decided to set some different goals instead and just take things casually. I can see myself focusing on leveling one character of each class over the coming months and go through all the class related lore because that’s what I really enjoy.

This mindset has caused me to start breaking up my week into planned days for certain games. I want to shove FFXIV to Tuesday evenings because it’s reset day there and play WoW on Wednesday because also, reset day. I am probably reserving my Friday nights for Heroes of the Storm and I’ve decided that Mondays are now used for reading and watching series. Obviously if there are raids happening in FFXIV they get precedence. If I can stick to this planning it’s nice to not really have to think about what I want to do each given evening. I tend to get overwhelmed with all the stuff I want to be doing and then just crawl into bed and do nothing… Which isn’t helpful at all. The December goal thing has already given me some guidance, breaking it up into certain evenings only adds to that.

So with my four working days settled I have the weekends and Thursdays to branch into other things. I don’t really want to assign anything to those days either simply because I never know what mood I’m in when I have time off. For instance yesterday I was feeling rather unwell and spent my time in bed for most of the day, thus not really getting anything done. Today has been mostly filled with chores. I find that I have a better start on Mondays when on Sundays I clean out my room. The lack of clutter makes me happy and helps me be more productive overall. Although I did manage to squeeze in som FFXIV time in the morning, finishing off my beast tribe dailies on my Astrologian and making the final push for Miner to hit 60 (yes I can actually already score that goal off!). Other than that I settled down and made a good start in reading The Name of the Wind.

It does feel odd to set goals for stuff like games that should be used for relaxation. But with so many games coming out these days and MMO’s taking up a lot of time it’s nice to just have something to aim towards and enjoy the process in doing so.

What I’m going to do for the rest of the day is unsure. I could throw in a load of laundry and I should probably put some stuff back on the attic but I’m feeling a bit lazy and unwilling to do to much in the way of chores. With vacuuming, dusting and putting away all the junk in my room I’ve done enough for today. All I know is that whatever it is I pick to do will be a nice relaxing experience and something that’s not riddled with “but I should be doing something else”.

Gathering up a Storm

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Since yesterday evening or so I decided it was time to start working on my gatherers and crafters in FFXIV to break up the monotomy of just running roulettes and doing beast tribe dailies. Since both my miner and my botanist were the most advanced in level (next to weaver) I decided to tackle them first. I had gotten both of them leveled up to level 56 somewhere before Stormblood hit and then kind of let them rot. I never really got into the crafting and gathering game and the whole scrip farm blew right past me. I have no idea what Fokelore books are or when to buy them, I have no idea about Best in Slot or whether or not to pentameld and I certainly have no idea how to combine everything into becoming a crafting and gathering “god”.

Gathering a spider?

Gathering a spider?

So yeah. I bit the bullet and started leveling both classes again and I have to say everything goes better than expected. I have already brought my botanist up to level 62 and my miner is sitting just shy of level 58. I really want to get this Heavensward part of the gathering process out of the way, mostly because it’s quite tedious and it’s old content. I know there are probably some materials still useful from there and if I would do a bit of market/markeboard research I’m sure both mining and botany can be turned into quite profitable jobs to have. But for now I do none of this, I’m focussing on attaining level 70 first and foremost and after that I’ll see. I still have all my crafting classes to get up and also fisher, but I don’t really want to think about that.

One of the ways that I’m making this leve grind, because that’s the route I’m taking right now just spamming levequests, bearable is doing it to good music and making sure that I take regular breaks. Repeating the same levequest 3-4-5 times over is really boring and I can notice I’m zoning out hardcore as I’m doing all this gathering… And that’s just the leves. The classquests that Square Enix throw at you at certain levels are an even worse nightmare. I have to admit that I bought the items that I needed for the level 60 botany quest off the marketboard. I really didn’t want to spend that much time waiting for a specific node to pop and then praying that I can get HQ items from said node, which is never a guarantee. Especially when you’re sitting in shitty gear like me.
The shitty gear is something that will be staying for a bit because I’ve never done endgame and I’m just really dependant on whatever happens to be on the vendors and at the mercy of the crafters in my guild. Luckily they’re nice people and they whipped up a few gathering accessories for me that should last me a while..

I’m really wondering how the gearing process looks like for gatherers at max level. I saw that you could essentially buy a level 70 set of the vendors but I’m sure that scrip gear is better. M’naago should really help with this seeing as she’s the new Zhloe. Not having a weekly cap on scrips is also extremely helpful so in theory you could be geared in “no time” when you ding 70. I just hope that I can stay interested in this gathering spree untill then.

Another thing that I would like to do (even though I’m waaaaay to late really) is work on the various gathering related achievements. The rewards may be outdated but a golden pickaxe and botany tool still look really pretty so I might just do it for the glamours. It really comes down to just doing the gathering log for both classes and spend a ton of time gathering in the old continents. At heart I’m a collector and achievement hunter and it would fill me with immense accomplishment to just start ticking off “easy” to obtain achievements. Because while logging 1000 times from 21-30 nods in the various regions seems like a huge task, it’s really just tedious. I can’t really be attacked by wildlife anymore because I simply outlevel them, it’s more a question of careful planning and executing. Going for 1000 gatherings in one sitting is pure madness so I figured I’d break it up in chunks of 40. The average amount of gathering attempts is 4 and you’d have to do 10 nodes to get to that number 40. This way I can just keep track of what I’m doing and decide when to take breaks. Every 10 or maybe 20 nodes. Just to keep myself from going insane.
Next to that I want to “complete” the gathering log for both miner and botanist. Again this awards with a slightly outdated primary tool, but it’s pretty and it’s an achievement to work towards. This one will be a bit more difficult seeing as some of the stuff is locked behind timed nodes and I will have to figure out how everything works exactly, but I’m sure I’ll get there.

With dedicating even more time into FFXIV I will probably not be working on my backlog after all. I’m making this choice conciously right now. I just can’t seem to find the motivation and time to really play anything else anyway and the only game I’m really enjoying besides FFXIV right now is Super Mario Odyssey, which has turned into a “find all the moons” grindfest aswell. Maybe the release of Pokémon Ultrasun next week will change my mind, but for now I’m 100% focusing on FFXIV and obtaining as much as possible in there.

Still in Eorzea

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Seeing as I’m having a mellow day today, I didn’t fall asleep untill 4 am last night, I figured I’d talk abit about my progress in FFXIV and how much hype I have for the stuff announced at Blizzcon.

So first up: FFXIV
I’m still firmly planted in Eorzea for the time being. My static has the Savage content on farm and we may be looking at doing Unending Coil, although the mere thought of having to go in there is already giving me anxiety. Not because I don’t think I can do it, but more because I’m worried it might kill my static alltogether… Although this is something for a different blog post.
When Stormblood launched I had set the goal of getting every possible class up to 70. I’ve never had everything max level before and I don’t plan to quit for most of the expansion like I did in Heavensward so here I am on the leveling bandwagon. With the addition of the Alliance Raid roulette and the new Kojin beast tribes it’s actually not very complicated at all to level your battle classes up these days. Especially when you’re focusing on your healers and tanks that get instant queues for everything… I’m pretty sure I can get a character from 60 to 70 every 2 weeks or so. So far I’ve brought up my Ninja, Bard, Red Mage and White Mage and my Astrologian is currently sitting on level 66. I’m really enjoying healing again and just casually running stuff as healer somehow feels very relaxing compared to doing it on a DPS. I really want to get the “Goddess of” titles and seeing as I only have Summoner/Scholar and Black Mage left after I finish leveling Astrologian I will probably go for the “Goddess of Magic” title first. After that I’ll have to see. I’m really enjoying Monk again so I may just want to pick that up, even if it means having to spam Palace of the Dead to get to level 60 first. The only downside to leveling DPS is that queues for roulettes are quite a bit longer than for healers and tanks but I can live with it.

Yesterday I also decided to start working on atleast my gathering classes again. My Botanist is currently sitting on level 58 and my Miner is level 56. The goal is to get both of them to 60 atleast over the coming two weeks and then hopefully do the final push to 70. Even though it’s quite tedious to level these gatherers, especially when you go the Levequest route as I am doing, it’s nice for when you feel hungover and don’t really want to think about playing much. It’s relaxing and you can just stop and take a break and do something else for a bit and come back and do the next Levequest without worrying if you might miss out on a queue pop or anything else. After I get my Miner and Botanist to 70 I may want to look into some crafting classes but I’m not sure yet how I’m going to tackle those. The majority are still below level 30 and spamming leves isn’t my favourite part of the game. But if I want to get into the crafting game I need to bite the bullet at some point… So we’ll see how it goes.

WoW BfA logo

Now to the second part of my post: the future of World of Warcraft.
I have to honestly say that I wasn’t very thrilled about Blizzcon this year. My interest in WoW has been waning for a while and I’ve not been subbed for a long time. I returned for 2-3 weeks to see the Argus content but after that I drifted back to FFXIV again with no real intent to return. After seeing the announcement for a new expansion, and the vanilla servers, I can’t say I feel motivated to return anytime soon. I think ideally I’d want to return at some point just to see Legion through to it’s end. I’m still a sucker for WoW lore and I do want to know how stuff ends so I will probably purchase atleast one month of playtime at some point to live through the final moments. After that I don’t really know. I’m not a proud player on any faction although I heavily favour Alliance and the whole Alliance vs Horde story doesn’t appeal to me much. The only thing I am quite pissed about is that they’re destroying Teldrassil. Night Elves are by far my favourite race and they better come up with a damned good incentive to why this happens.
As for the vanilla servers. I never played true vanilla WoW and I don’t think I could go back to something that has been dubbed a “grindfest” time and time again by the people who did play in that era. I feel like the nostalgia pull is very strong but only for the people who actually played back then and even then I think some caution is adviced. All the QoL stuff that we’re used to won’t be around there and I think that’s a harder pill to swallow for many people than they realize right now. If anything I’m staying away from the vanilla server alltogether unless they end up making it a sort of progress server after a while. I would like to live through the different expansions again, but for now I’m not hyped.

All in all this has pushed me even deeper into playing FFXIV, even though I can feel the burnout slowly coming there aswell. I need to start playing some other games because spending all my time in an MMO has proven to be bad for me before and I don’t want to quit and not come back for a year again. I am planning to start playing Horizon Zero Dawn, even though I’ve been saying this for a few days now, just to break up the leveling grind in FFXIV. Another game I want to play is Xenoblade Chronicles on my 3DS. This is mostly due to XC 2 coming out in less than a month and I do plan on picking that up at some point… It would be nice if I atleast knew what the story and setting is about before I commit myself to the sequel of a game that I’ve never finished in the first place.
Then there’s Pokémon Ultrasun coming out next week and I’m definitely picking that one up aswell. Luckily I don’t have to invest that much time into Mario anymore, now that it’s just the grind to get all moons and coins, which leaves me with an “open slot” for atleast one single player game. I just really need to learn to plan my time to accomodate all of this!