Tag Archives: Goals

The blog is dead: long live the blog!

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I’ve thought about sunsetting this thing. I’ve not been keeping up with it regularly for ages and let’s face it, blogging as medium is dead. Especially when you compare it to the likes of TikTok, Instagram and countless other social media outlets where content spreads to everyone in sub 30 second chunks which are easy to digest. I find myself scrolling Instagram Reels for hours on end if I let myself and even though I’ve not installed the clock app, I know it’s what everyone is using these days.
So why still write something here? Because personally, I’m kind of tired of all the information thrown at me at breakneck pace through social media. It’s just brain stimulation for hours and what do you actually get from it? A wasted day. There is a reason why I still enjoy coming back to certain parts of Reddit, even if the medium itself is also a toxic cesspool. There’s a reason why I prefer reading the news instead of watching it. There’s a reason why I prefer following written game guides over Youtube videos. And it’s because at the end of the day, reading text is still my preferred medium of getting information. And if it’s that way for me, I’m sure it’s that way for a lot of other people as well.

So why not? Why not try to breathe some life back into this shell of a blog and see if I can actually get myself to stick to a somewhat okay schedule when it comes to posting. Being more organised and able to stick to plans has been a mayor lifegoal for me for years, why not try to implement it here. Not that I want to write daily, I think that’s a bit of a tall order but I would like to be able to drop two posts per week. One on Wednesdays where I will talk about my love for games and other nerdy things and what I’ve been up to all week in that regard and one on Sunday where I will talk about random topics that have kept me busy over the week. I’m planning to start dancing in 2024, 2-4 nights a week depending on how well I’m getting on, and I’m going to get back on track with my weightlifting as well. With a big trip to Japan coming up in the spring I feel like I want to be the fittest I’ve been so I can enjoy myself to the fullest. Maybe I’ll talk about a new meal I’ve learned to cook or a movie I’ve seen or a day or evening out I’ve had that was a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll talk about my stress at work and how it’s making me feel and use this medium to vent a little and write down my frustrations. I’ll find something to write about, I just have to sit down and do it.

For now though I’m wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas, I hope you’re all having a good one!

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!

The League Project

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I have alluded to this project in my 2021 year goals post but I guess it’s time to spill the beans and fill you guys in on why I suddenly have League of Legends related goals on my yearly list, what exactly it entails and how it’s been going so far.
So let’s start at the beginning…

Renewed interest in playing League of Legends
Somewhere during worlds, I think at the beginning of October or at the end of September, I stumbled across a LoL stream of a pro player that had made his debut casting as guest this year. The last time I really followed individual streamers on Twitch has been years ago but this guy had something about him that made his streams very nice to watch. I kind of got sucked into his Discord community and, because I was enjoying the content so much, I decided to sub to his channel. He was experimenting with coaching subs on his channel and after he announced not being a pro for the next split he decided to set up a program via Patreon to coach amateurs in LoL solo queue.
At first this didn’t interest me. I hadn’t played LoL seriously in over 7 years, my last ranked game being somewhere back in 2013. I didn’t know if I had the time, and energy, to commit to grinding solo queue. Being on his discord though had reignited the will to at least try. Not in last place fueled by a small Discord tournament that was held, in which I participated, and where I managed to reach the “finals” with our roughly thrown together team. So I signed up on a whim to see if he could give me some tips to get started again and then we would see what happened from there.

Sessions and struggles
So what happened next? Well I signed up for his Patreon in December and managed to get two coaching sessions in. Basically these coaching sessions entail that I play a game of LoL in ranked solo queue and he watches and comments. Afterwards we go over the VOD of the game together for more tips and tricks and additional questions that I may have. Next to that I’m free to DM him with any LoL related questions as well as having access to tier lists per role and other content on his Patreon.
We both recognize that I’m basically a beginning player again and even though I may know a lot about the game by just following the e-sports side of things for years that doesn’t mean I’m automatically good in solo queue. He coached me through my very first placement match in 7 years and then another session where I was slowly climbing out of Bronze tier in pre-season. Both games were a bit of a stomp but I got some nice pointers nonetheless. Learning to work with the map and watching what happens in teamfights. Where to place down wards. When to engage and when to back off. It was fun and he’s a very good coach.
I’ve taken what I’ve learned so far with me into solo queue and even though I’m back in Bronze after season start, I managed to climb my way up to Silver 3 in pre-season, I feel like I’m already leaps and bounds ahead of where I was at the start of December when it comes to certain in game things. However I’m also noticing that there are things I struggle with. A lot of it will probably get resolved with playing the game more and getting more practice in on various champions but there are other things that I would like to discuss with him in our next upcoming session.
Due to solo queue being solo queue there is no perfect coordination with your teammates. You do what you can in game but it’s not the same as having everyone on voice chat and arranging things that way. As such I had to make a very big mental adjustment when it comes to losing games. I would get really upset and frustrated at first but I’m at the stage where, even though I still can get frustrated, I learn to accept a loss and move on. I’m mostly struggling with expanding my champion pool, I’m only really comfortable on two champions right now, and what to do when my lane falls behind. I’m also trying to find a schedule to play since I have a fulltime job and especially during the week finding the time to play is a struggle.

So where am I heading with this?
After a lot of thinking the past few weeks I realized that I don’t want to do something like this on a whim. I have shied away from many opportunities and commitments in life because I’m afraid to fail. It has led to some of the biggest regrets about things that I unfortunately can’t change anymore. So I want to use this project to break that cycle. I want to commit fully and wholeheartedly, not just to prove to others that I can do it but to also prove to myself I can do it.
I have a notebook in which I’m writing stuff down. I’m planning to download some VODs from games to analyze. I’ve been scheduling nights/days to play LoL and just grind. I take regular breaks tough and if I lose two games in a row I shut down the client and go do something else for a couple of hours or the rest of the day so I can shake it off and start fresh again later.
I have a clear first goal I want to reach, getting to Gold Tier, and I want to expand on that further once I get there. Because I know I will get there with time and coaching help.
I also really want to keep my readers involved in this journey with me. The successes, the frustrations. I plan to use Sundays to give a League update, whether or not I had a coaching session, what rank I currently am and anything I may have been struggling with the past week. I’m excited to tackle this the coming year and I hope it will help me break out of a vicious cycle I’ve found myself in since my teenage years.

For now it’s back to the grind. I’m currently in Bronze 2 but I have my eyes set on getting back into Silver. Let’s see how that goes shall we.

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.

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.

Gaming Goals June 2020

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No MMO Sunday today but instead my gaming goals post for June. Since you know, the new month actually starts tomorrow. I have a lot of expectations for this month, especially since I’m starting my Summer of Platformers this week and I’m finally finding the time to play more than just World of Warcraft again. Lots of exciting stuff happening next month, but first, a look back at May.

World of Warcraft (Warrior)

  • Get the following reputations to Exalted: Waveblade Ankoan/Rustbolt Resistance/Storm’s Wake/Champions of Azeroth/Tortollan Seekers/Rajani/Uldum Accord
  • Finish all quests in Drustvar and Stormsong Valley
  • Kill Rakhastan and finish the associated quest
  • Level Blacksmithing to 175
  • Level Cooking to 175
  • Finish miscellaneous quests in my questlog
  • Bonus: Level my cape to rank 15
  • Bonus: Work on getting all my Essences to rank 3/unlock all my Essence

Final Fantasy XIV

  • Finish Eden
  • Level the following jobs to 80: Machinist/Dark Knight
  • Finish the shared FATEs in Ahm Araeng/The Tempest

Other Games

  • Finish atleast two chapters per weekend of Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I will be at chapter 13 then by the end of the month. Anything more is a bonus ofcourse.
  • Get 10 villagers on my Animal Crossing island and work towards getting terraforming.

All in all it’s been a good month in my MMOs. I managed to get all my WoW goals done except for getting the 8.3 reputations to Exalted. I’ve kind of underestimated what a pain in the ass that actually is. Basically you get your weekly assaults which give 1k rep respectively to both factions per week. Next to that you have dailies that give between 375 and 500 rep on average per day. Although this isn’t actually that bad the grind is just awful. You can rack up around 4k rep per week per faction and honestly doing both is just mind numbing. So I’m going to chart a new course and work on one rep at a time. I will do the assaults every week but I just can’t deal with the dailies. They’re just so slow and time consuming and ugh. Yeah no fun to be had there. Otherwise I’ve managed to do everything I set out to do and the only other thing that is left open is to work on getting my final few Essences and level those up.

In FFXIV I had a bit of a surge with the Moogle tome event. I managed to get my Machinist to level 80 and finish the shared FATE stuff in Ahm Araeng. I’m halfway done with the Tempest aswell on that front so that is nice. Instead of Dark Knight I opted to start leveling my Warrior though and she is sitting on level 73. I finished all wings of Eden at the start of the month so I can stripe that off my list aswell.

Single player games seem to have fallen to the wayside a bit. I actually haven’t touched either FF7R or Animal Crossing in a few weeks. I just couldn’t find the time/energy to start up the games and play just like in theses new games that allow you to take advantage of sports betting legality. Hopefully I can combine FF7R with my Platformers, I think I’m just not gonna look at AC for a bit because I’ve just bounced hard off the game in general

Now… What are my plans for June?

World of Warcraft (Warrior)

  • Work on getting up reputation with Rajani and Uldum Accord
  • Work on Mythic+ keystones. Get everything on a +10 and try to push for a +15
  • Work on unlocking/upgrading my final Essences

Not that much for WoW this month. Dailies will be a thing and I want to run a bit more Mythic+ dungeons. I’m comfortably pushing up untill +13/+14 but the +15 remains a challenge. I really want to break that boundary though and just do them. For the Essences I will essentially have to bite the bullet and do PvP. How much I’m willing to do I don’t know yet but we’ll see.

Final Fantasy XIV

  • Level my Warrior and another class to level 80
  • Get Ixion mount from Moogle Tome Event

Not many goals in FFXIV either. I want to keep on leveling and I want the Ixion mount from the Moogle Tomes event. Not much else to see here

Other games

  • Start Summer of Platformers
  • Finish FF7R
  • Get daily rewards in GW2 and try to level up my character a bit
  • Explore Phantasy Star Online 2?

Here is where things get interesting. I want to finish up FF7R this month and start my Summer of Platformers. I actually cheated a bit and started one of my Platformers today. I will probably do a write-up about that later in the week. Let’s just say I’m pretty rusty so I wil expect a lot of deaths in this first game before I find my groove again.
I’ve also gotten into the habit of logging into Guild Wars 2 for the daily reward and, since I’m logged in anyway, I’ll do a heart or two when I’m there. It’s short relaxing fun and something I want to keep on doing.
Finally I’ve installed Phantasy Star Online 2 and I want to run around in it and see what it has to offer. So far I’m not very much blown away by the game but that’s mostly because I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m on Ship 1 if you’re interested!

So that’s it. Keeping my MMO goals for June pretty light and instead want to focus on my single player games. I’m really curious how I’ll enjoy my Summer of Platformers aswell. Let’s find out together!

Sandy’s MMO Sunday: May 17th I Need New Goals

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I really like taking screenshots of my mount collection. I have more than enough to show off and the one I’m using in this screenshot is the one you get for collecting 300 mounts so I guess you can see where I’m at with my collection. I didn’t even make a concious effort to get to that 300 mark. It kind of happened naturally. I realized I was only three mounts short yesterday and bought them off the reputation vendors in Stormsong Valley, Drustvar and Tiragarde Sound. Of course I’m well away from the next two achievements for obtaining 350 and 400 mounts respectively. I don’t think that will change anytime soon since hunting down mounts is not really high on my priority list right now.

What is high on my priority list is the fact that I need to find new goals in the World of Warcraft to tie me over untill the end of the month. I have actually completed almost all goals on my list I made at the start of the month. Mostly because I’ve been no-lifing on WoW way too much this past week and dropping whatever else I intended to play. It tends to happen that when I get back into “serious” MMO mode I get sucked into the game and then suddenly spend most of my waking hours outside of any real life obligations in said game. I guess there’s worse ways to spend your time but it also means that my progress in Final Fantasy XIV and 7R has kind of stalled and I haven’t touched my Animal Crossing island in about two weeks. Oops. Oh well. It is how it is. As such I need a few new goals to focus on so I don’t get overwhelmed.
As of right now I have a few goals left that I’m still working on that I can’t really speed up because they are mostly tied to doing dailies and/or World Quests. This mainly concerns the reputations that I still have left to do. Another is battling my questlog which I’m doing slowly but steadily. I’ve killed Rakhastan in LFR, completing the associated quest, and my guild as a whole managed to kill N’Zoth on heroic difficulty this week effectively having us “beat” the current raiding content. I got my achievement and mount and I could stripe off the final quest of the Black Empire campaign aswell. So when I look at my WoW goals list it kind of looks something like this now:

  • Get the following reputations to Exalted: Waveblade Ankoan/Rustbolt Resistance/Storm’s Wake/Champions of Azeroth/Tortollan Seekers/Rajani/Uldum Accord
  • Finish all quests in Drustvar and Stormsong Valley
  • Kill Rakhastan and finish the associated quest
  • Level Blacksmithing to 175
  • Level Cooking to 175
  • Finish miscellaneous quests in my questlog

The reputations and quests will disappear organically. It’s just a question of doing dailies, World Quests and the assaults in Uldum and Valley of Eternal Blossoms. Nothing new there and it will keep me on the daily cycle for a bit. Seeing as you can get 500 rep per day with Uldum Accord and Rajani for doing dailies, plus bonus rep for completing an assault. It’s around 4-5k rep per week. I’m honored with both factions as of right now so I think I will hit revered by the end of the month. And then it will take me roughly another month to get to Exalted. It’s a really slow burn. As for the Tortollan Seekers. I’m around 1k rep off hitting exalted with them and I’m pretty sure that if the double reputation buff is still up tomorrow I can hit Exalted from doing 3-4 World Quests for them. So yeah. That basically gives me a ton of “free” time apart from doing dailies. So to fill that up I want to add the following goals to my list:

  • Level up my Legendary cloak to rank 15
  • Obtain and rank up Essences for my Heart of Azeroth necklace

Yeah it’s only these two. However these goals cover a bigger area than one might think. The Legendary cloak one is pretty straight forward and just involves me putting time into running Visions of N’Zoth. I’m currently able to solo 3 chest runs without masks and I hope I can get up to 4 chests now that my cloak has hit rank 15. Eventually I want to start doing runs with masks aswell but for now I’m not feeling that confident yet. Getting my cloak to rank 15 will be time consuming enough.
As far as the other goal goes. There are a lot of essences to obtain that one can slot into their Heart of Azeroth. I obtained a lot of them but not all. Especially the PvP related ones I’ve not bothered with yet but I would like to. Of the essences that I have obtained the majority is only rank 2. They become the most powerful once they hit rank 3 so I still have a bit to go to rank all of them up. Some again will come more naturally from doing Ny’alotha raids, Visions and Mythic+. I think I’m pretty close to unlocking the rank 3 from Island Expeditions one aswell. Others are harder to get. They require you to run dungeons, (outdated) raids or straight up grinding materials to obtain them. So yeah. It’s actually a bit of a meta-goal and one I’m pretty happy to tackle.

This should also hold me over untill the end of the month and it should allow me to put more time into FFXIV and my single player games. I’m still leveling up my Machinist and I should be done with the Ahm Araeng FATES this week aswell. As for FF7R I’m still at chapter 8 and I know it’s a bit of a freeroam chapter with a lot of side content and I really need to take some time to sit down and play through it properly. With a four day weekend coming up I think I will do just that and hopefully earn a bunch of trophies along the way. I’m still aiming to get the Platinum trophy for FF7R because I think it’s an awesome game and deserves all the time I can sink into it but for now I just need to find a moment to just sit down and play.

Let’s hope that happens next week.

Sandy’s MMO Sunday: May 10th progress, progress, progress!

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Two posts in one day? Why not! I feel the writing bug so I may aswell take advantage of it. Plus my earlier post was supposed to go up yesterday but I forgot to hit the publish button so… Whatever I guess.
I rebranded my older “Sandy’s Sunday” to “Sandy’s MMO Sunday” since MMO’s are still my most played genre and I want to have one day a week where I specifically talk about my (personal) progress on that front aswell as talk about what I’ve been struggling with the past week, if there have been struggles or anything else I need to get off my chest.

So first off, I have made a ton, and I mean a ton, of progress on my World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV goals the past week. I’ve gotten two reputations to Exalted, Storm’s Wake and the Waveblade Ankoan. They were both surprisingly easy to get and I even managed to three Paragon chests for both reputations together already. Mostly because next to getting Storm’s Wake reputation up I also finished the zone quest wise. I also finished off Drustvar so I can stripe that goal off of my list. I can’t say how soothing it is to get rid of all the quest markers on a map and slowly emptying out my questlog as I go through a zone. Right now I only have one questchain left in Stormsong Valley and two Dungeon quests that are related to the zone stories so I may tackle those next week.
On the profession front I’ve been able to get Kul Tiran Blacksmithing to level 175 with a little help from the Darkmoon Faire. I’m also well on my way to crafting the 455 ilvl belt, I need like 9 more Expulsom or so, after which I unlock the 470 recipe which is something I aim for! After that I’m probably going to focus on doing the same for the pants seeing as the chance is slim I’m going to get 470 ilvl gear from anywhere else.
Next to my personal progress we also managed to down two more bosses in Heroic Ny’alotha bringing us to 10/12 bosses downed total with a 10%ish wipe on Carapace of N’zoth. I’m pretty sure we’ll get to 11/12 heroic next week, maybe even 12/12 if we don’t wipe too much on bosses that we’ve already downed. All in all a pretty good week in WoW!

In FFXIV I’ve taken last Tuesdays’ reset to finish off Eden. I had three fights left and even though I managed to die in all three of them I did clear the instance, so I can scrape that off my list aswell! Leveling on my Machinist has been steady and I’ve hit level 75 today. I’m also slowly whittling away at FATEs in Ahm Araeng and only need to do 14 more of them to get to that rank 3 FATEs cleared. I’m pretty sure I can bang those out the coming week and hopefully get my Machinist a lot closer to level 80 aswell. After that I can set my eyes on FATEs in the Tempest untill my Machinist is level 80 and I can get rid of all the sub level 80 Aiming gear and start working on the final cluster of jobs that I need to level: my tanks. I figured I may aswell start with Dark Knight first and then pick up Warrior after before unlocking and leveling the final job I need: Gunblade.

Next to all this nice progress I’m also struggling a lot with the overwhelming amount of content that is available to do in, mostly, WoW. Right now I’m focusing on the goals that I have set for myself and I’m pretty good at keeping myself restrained to them for now but when I look at all the activities I can partake in the situation just gets to be a bit overwhelming.
There’s obviously the two raid nights per week where I’m logged on and all the dailies I’m doing every day to get up reputations and earn other things. Then there’s Mythic+, Visions of N’Zoth to level up my legendary cloak, chasing the rank 2 and 3 upgrades for the essences in my Heart of Azeroth necklace, which come from a lot of different sources. The weekly assaults in Uldum and Vale of Eternal Blossoms. And don’t even get me started on chasing mounts, pets and achievements. Something I love to do but need to put on the side for a bit so I can focus on the more “important” stuff that needs doing. It’s really hard to be able to do everything given the limited amount of time I have to spend now that I’m an adult with a full time job. I really don’t want to invest every waking moment that I have into WoW and as such I’ve had to make decisions on what I really want to do. Setting goals for myself has helped enormously but seeing the speed at which I’ve been fulfilling said goals I may need to find another set of goals pretty soon before I become directionless and start doing more than I should and burn out.

All in all though I’m pretty happy with my progress. If I keep up this pace I may even need to set some new goals for myself by the end of next week. For now though I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing and hopefully not get too sidetracked with shiny content.

Gaming Goals: May 2020

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I realised that I’ve not done a Gaming Goals post in a while. Mostly because I’ve been in a funk and didn’t want to set expectations for myself that I couldn’t adhere to so I let it slide for a bit.
With the current upswing in my mood though, and the fact that I’m finding a lot of fun in World of Warcraft again, I figured I set a few goals for May for myself. I guess most of them will be WoW related, since that is my main game right now, but I will branch out to a few other things aswell.

World of Warcraft (Warrior)

  • Get the following reputations to Exalted: Waveblade Ankoan/Rustbolt Resistance/Storm’s Wake/Champions of Azeroth/Tortollan Seekers/Rajani/Uldum Accord
  • Finish all quests in Drustvar and Stormsong Valley
  • Kill Rakhastan and finish the associated quest
  • Level Blacksmithing to 175
  • Level Cooking to 175
  • Finish miscellaneous quests in my questlog

A lot of goals here. Most of them will come organically via dailies, emissary quests and finishing off zone questing. I put the 8.3 reps there because I will have time to do dailies for them once I finish off Nazjatar and Mechagon. Blacksmithing is currently sitting at 156 and with the Darkmoon Faire starting this weekend I’m sure I can get to 175 in the rest of the month. Cooking is currently sitting around 100/175. I’ll just need to farm the mats a bit more so I can level that up aswell. Other than that it’s just tying up odds and ends.

Final Fantasy XIV

  • Finish Eden
  • Level the following jobs to 80: Machinist/Dark Knight
  • Finish the shared FATEs in Ahm Araeng/The Tempest

A bit more modest goals here. I want to pick up leveling again on my Machinist and then start working on Dark Knight. I also want to finally finish off the shared FATE stuff for Ahm Araeng and The Tempest. Which is perfectly easy to combine with leveling up a class.
Finally I want to finish the second installment of Eden. I’ve done the first wing so there’s only three more to go.

Other Games

  • Finish atleast two chapters per weekend of Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I will be at chapter 13 then by the end of the month. Anything more is a bonus ofcourse.
  • Get 10 villagers on my Animal Crossing island and work towards getting terraforming.

I’m taking my time with both Animal Crossing and the FF7 remake. I’m enjoying both games in a casual way so I don’t feel the need to set more ambitious goals than these to be honest.
So yeah. There you have them. My gaming goals for May. What are your goals this month?

Tiny update: (raiding) progress!

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This week me and my guild in World of Warcraft decided it was time to start tackling Heroic Ny’alotha. Most of the people in the guild have been playing the game throughout the expansion and came from various other raiding guilds and as such were pretty much overgeared for normal raids to begin with.
We have established our raiding days to be Wednesday and Thursday. Which means that, even if it’s two nights in a row, I will be free to do whatever the hell I want for the rest of the week. Which is fine by me. Especially since I’m still trying to play another MMO (Final Fantasy XIV) and a single player game on the side.

We didn’t expect to get very far in the raid this week. I think our aim was 5 out of the 12 bosses. To our surprise though we managed to get 8 out of 12 down, with a sub 10% health wipe on number 9. It all went much smoother than we initially thought it would and the only bosses we really struggled on were Raden, which we killed after a few tries, and Vexiona which we didn’t manage to down unfortunately. I personally got a few upgrades and mostly I got to learn the fights as tank so next time we go in I will be better prepared on what to do and when.

As said earlier I’ve been working on a ton of stuff besides raiding in WoW. I’ve been focusing on upgrading my Heart of Azeroth Essences so that I can get the right ones slotted, and then get them ranked up. I think I have all the ones I need for raiding and Mythic+ tanking now which is nice. The only thing left is to get them all to rank four, which is still quite far away for most of them. I did however finish the Nazjatar zone story, and killed Queen Azshara in LFR, so the only thing left in that zone is dailies so I can get to Exalted reputation rank and getting my Nazjatar Essences to rank up. I’m diligently working away on Mechagon reputation aswell and I managed to get two more launch reputations to Exalted: Proudmoore Admiralty and Order of Embers.

Overall I’m making great strides to satisfy my inner completionist. The next thing to tackle is to kill Rakhastan in LFR so I can get that quest out of my quest log and then continue the zone quests in Drustvar so I can get that part of the map cleared out of quest markers. And then hopefully next raid reset we will be able to down more bosses in heroic Ny’alotha.