Tag Archives: GW2

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!

Pokémon Sword “Finished” and January 2020 Goals

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I figured I would start the New Year with a bang and as such have spent some time grinding away on the Pokémon storyline untill I saw the credits roll. Spoiler, it happened after I won the championship (shocker!). It took me about 22 hours to get through the story and when I was finished I had 86 different Pokémon species registered as “owned” in my Pokédex. I managed to do almost all of the content with a team of Galar only Pokémon but I have to admit that I had to swap in an Ice-type not from Galar at some point to defeat the Dragon Gym-leader, since I didn’t have anything that was effective against Dragons before I captured one of the two Legendary Pokémon that you can capture in Pokémon Sword/Shield.
I’m pretty happy that I’ve managed to finish this game in under two months from getting it and for now the focus will go out to completing the post game storyline so I can get the other Legendary Pokémon and slowly filling up my Pokédex. I’ve actually started that part already and I am now up to 106 Pokémon registered. Only 294 to go!

I also took the time today to finally do the World of Warcraft anniversary raid event before my sub would run out (it has less than two days to go at this point). I did the raids, they were fun, people suck at the Plague Dance for Heigan and then I got the Deathwing mount so all is right. I know that I could run the raids more often so I can get some gear from them but for now I’m satisifed. I think I’m going to let my subscription lapse for the time being, seeing as how I’ve not really touched the game ever since I unlocked flying and got Exalted with the Mechagon and Nazjatar factions. Maybe I’ll come back when they release the next patch or a bit before Shadowlands so I can gobble up a bunch of the story content that I’ve not done yet but for now I’m taking another hiatus.

So, with that information out of the way let’s look at what I want to do in the first month of 2020! I predict Final Fantasy XIV to still be my main MMO so I will set some goals there first. I think it’s the game where I will put most of my time so I want to set a generous amount of goals!

  • Get more battle classes to level 80. I have 6 to go, with Ninja currently being 77. I hope to get Ninja and atleast two others to 80 by the end of the month.
  • Work on getting my first crafting classes to 80. With Ishguard restoration this shouldn’t actually be too hard. My Carpenter is 77 as we speak so that should be able to get to 80 fast. Ideally I want 3 Crafting classes to 80 by the end of the month. Let’s say Carpenter, Weaver and Leatherworker?
  • Level up Fishing. I’m currently sitting on level 64 and I want to get atleast to level 70 this month.
  • Level up Blue Mage. I want to hit atleast level 20 by the end of the month.
  • Complete all the side quests that are still up in the First
  • Work towards rank 3 FATEs in Ahm Araeng and the Tempest. Preferably I’ll have both done by the end of the month

In other MMO’s:

  • Make progress in LOTRO. I’m level 3 and at the absolute beginning of the game. I have no idea about the layout of this game yet and how zones and other stuff works so I just want to head out and explore and see where that ship strands.
  • Finish off the current zone I’m in on my character in Guild Wars 2.

In single player games:

  • Finish the Pokémon post-game questline
  • Get 200 Pokémon registered in my Pokédex (atleast!)
  • Pick Spider-Man back up for my PS4 and play through/finish the game

All these goals should be easily doable. Especially the FFXIV ones. One of the things I want to (again) start doing is pick a game from my massive single player games backlog and just play through it in a month’s time. Some games are shorter or longer than other games but I want to start making a dent in my massive collection. I also don’t have any plans to pick up full games this year for now. I’m probably getting the Kingdom Hearts 3 expansion and the new expansion for World of Warcraft but other than that I have nothing on my radar that I desperately want to get. But let’s start with Spider-Man for now!

Hello Blaugust and gaming goals

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So we’ve finally made it to what is offically the first day of Blaugust this year! July has been a bit of a wild ride for me with time off, Shadowbringers launch and hosting a friend for a week. It’s the reason why I didn’t really want to tie down on a “goals for the month” post. However August should be calmer and thus I feel like I can actually devote some time to setting goals for the month.

MMO Goals

  • Cap weekly on the new tomestones in FFXIV and get healing gear upgrades
  • Level my Black Mage to 80. Level my Red Mage to 80
  • Level my Alchemist to 70. Level my Culinarian to 50. Level my Botanist and Miner to 80
  • Poke away at the ARR Relic chain for the White Mage weapon. I really want more transmog options… I’m currently at the Atma step.
  • Play through Nazjatar and Mechagon content in WoW and unlock flying
  • Play some GW2

Non-MMO Goals

  • Play through and write about FFVIII, not necessarily finish it though
  • Play through and write about Spider-man on the PS4

So as you can see for August my main focus will still be on FFXIV and getting stuff done there. Otherwise I want to put some time in the new WoW content and some time in general playing Guild Wars 2. Finally I already announced I wanted to be playing FFVIII and Spider-man so I will be doing just that. I’m hoping to finish Spider-man this month, I’m not aiming to finish FFVIII but I do want to make some decent progress.

All in all I think all the goals I’ve set are doable, I just need to be smart with planning my game time to achieve all of them.

Blaugust prep!

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Today the first day of the Blaugust schedule started and we are calling it prep week. I know it’s not officially August yet but nonetheless it can’t hurt to start a few days in advance laying out what I’m planning to do for Blaugust exactly. Writing a blog post every day isn’t necessarily as easy as it may sound, especially when you don’t have a variety of topics to write about. So today I’m going to talk a little bit about how I want to tackle the every day blog posting and what kind of posts you can expect from me over the coming five weeks.

FFXIV progress posts. This will probably still be my main game over the coming weeks. With the new tomestones out on Tuesday and me wanting to atleast attempt to do some Savage content next to leveling up my jobs I will probably have enough to write about for a decent amount of posts. Most will probably be just a quick insight of where I’m standing at the moment progress wise but I may write about a questline or encounter here and there that I feel needs some spotlight.

WoW/GW2 posts. Now that I’m wanting to dedicate less time to FFXIV I can dedicate a bit more time to the other two MMO’s that I have installed on my PC. In WoW I’m mostly planning to explore the 8.2 content and earn flying aswell as catch up to the raid content that I’ve missed so far. In GW2 I want to continue leveling my Elementalist and hopefully push past the level 25-30 barrier that most of my characters seem to end up stuck on and hopefully be able to turn the adventures there into some entertaining posts about how much I suck at this game.

FFVIII and Spiderman posts. As I mentioned before I intend to play through FFVIII. I’ve never finished a mainstream Final Fantasy game and so I figured it was time to pick one at random and just work my way through it. Apparently I picked the one with the most convoluted battle mechanics out there but I’ll make it work. I’ll be taking notes and screenshots as I play through the game so I can make more indepth posts about the story, how far I am and what my opinions of the game are so far. I intend to do the same for Spiderman on the PS4, although that is a much shorter game so I’m probably not going to post about that one a lot.

General topics. I have a few gaming and non gaming related topics that I want to talk about aswell. I’ve taken the habit of writing my ideas down and then sitting down at a later moment to turn them into proper posts.

Next to topics I’m also working on a “posting schedule” so that I can sit down and write a blog post around the same time every day. I’ve also taken note of days where I won’t be able to post on my scheduled time or at all so I need to make sure I have a few extra posts lined up to post during that time. The big problem that I’m facing with here is that I’m horrible at sticking to schedules. Something I’ve been struggling with for a big part of my life and something that I’ve been meaning to change forever. So I’m using the Blaugust opportunity to do so and create some new, healthier, habits for myself so my days will maybe go a bit smoother and more enjoyable than they are going now.

All in all I feel like I’m more prepped this year to participate and succeed in posting every day than I have been in previous years, so let’s aim to make it work!

All settled in

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I really wish I could spend post after post telling everyone how happy I am with my own home and how I’m finally feeling like I can live my own life after living with my dad for so long. I’m truly settled in now and I’m slowly getting into new habits now that I have to do everything by myself. So far things are working out nicely. My house is tidy and clean, I try to not leave stuff lying around and I make sure I get all my chores done. My fridge and cabinets are stocked with food and drinks and I always am prepared for guests coming over. It’s nice having the freedom to decide when to come home and having the freedom to be able to write this blog post and watch football on a proper tv at the same time.
All in all I notice that I’m much happier now than I’ve been in a long time. I feel better mentally, I have less stress and I feel less depressed as a result. Not having to live with people that annoy me is helping me so much I can hardly believe how I managed to hold on for such a long time. The only thing I need to start working on for real now is my physical wellbeing. I need to lose weight, I need to start taking care of my teeth better and I need to get a healthier eating pattern. The one thing I am quite pleased with is how I’m handling my skin and keeping it clean and moisturized. I basically don’t have any flaws anymore in my face and it shows. No more pimples means a super confident me.

Anyway, enough about my personal life, I’m also here to talk about me settling into my trusted MMO’s again. I’ve been playing FFXIV throughout the time I was PC less because I have the game on PS4 aswell so it was my go-to MMO for the past few weeks. It’s helped me make a ton of progress there when it comes to leveling my crafters and getting other stuff done. I’ve picked up doing deliveries again and that has netted me the 350 Weaver main hand weapon and the 330 offhand. I’m working on getting the same for my Carpenter now as that is my only other max level crafter at the moment. My Goldsmith hit 53 yesterday and my Alchemist is sitting at level 34. I have pre-ordered Shadowbringers and I’m in a free company with people that are nice enough, that don’t require me to be very social with them when I don’t want to be. I’m plotting my own course and I don’t see myself committing to any raid or dungeon groups for the time being.

In WoW I’m settling in to playing my Mage again. I’m going through all of the quests that I’ve not completed yet on her and I want to start running LFR aswell, seeing as I still haven’t done the Zuldazar raid. It would be nice to get that done before Nazjatar is launched so I can go into that fully updated on the story so far. I think I also want to start leveling my Void Elf Hunter again and get her out of Outlands and into Mists of Pandaria. I did Cataclysm on the last character I leveled so going to switch it up and go to Mists again for this one. I don’t have a specific goal in mind for her, I just want to get an hour of gameplay in here and there, get settled on playing the Hunter again and slowly push her up to 110 to get the Heritage armour.

The final MMO I’m settling into again is Guild Wars 2, as said in the last post. I made an elementalist because I honestly don’t know where I am story wise on any of my other characters. She’s a Norn, which in my opinion is the best race in the game, and currently sitting at level 7 as I am making my way through the Wayfarer Foothills. Here I’m not really aiming for anything either. I’m just doing the hearts, discovering the points of interest and vistas and try to 100% the zone in general before I move on to the next one. I know that at level 10 I can start playing through my personal story so for now the goal is to get to that and move on from there. I’m not really aiming to get into crafting or gathering just yet. For now I just want to quest and level up and stick my nose into zones and dungeons that I haven’t done yet.

I hope I can settle into a nice MMO routine where I get to play all three and make progress in all three. I’m not sure how I’m going to do that yet and it’s probably something that ties in to my mood. I notice that when I feel a bit down I tend to turn to WoW because it’s like comfort food to me. FFXIV is my MMO of choice and I play that the most and GW2 is when I’m bored with both and need something else to play entirely.
As usual I’ll keep you updated. For now though I’m going to watch the ending of the football game and then head to my very comfortable and big bed.

USB issues and back online

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After waiting on my table for 10 weeks it finally got delivered last monday. This means that I now have a proper place to eat aswell as having a desk for my pc. As I was setting up  my PC I realized that I didn’t have a network card installed that could handle WiFi. Seeing as how I really wanted to use my computer as soon as possible I ordered a WiFi adapter and had it delivered yesterday. At first it seemed to work fine but once I logged into World of Warcraft to play around a bit I noticed that I was getting frequent disconnects. At first I thought it was the adapter itself losing connection but then it seemed that my USB port was intermittently cutting power to the thing, thus causing my internet to disconnect.
After poking around a bit I realized my front facing USB ports seem to be the culprits. I’ve since moved the adapter to the back of my PC and it seems that has fixed the problem for now. I’ve not had a disconnect since so let’s hope that it will be working flawlessly for now.
Eventually I will probably get an onboard WiFi internet card but in the meantime this adapter will have to do.

What this all does mean however is the fact that I have my PC back in action and thus I can get back into Azeroth, something I immediatly did as you can see in the picture above. Unfortunately I seem to not be one of the lucky people to get access to the Classic beta so the goal of me playing a bit of it this month will probably go out of the window, unless I find an invite in the mail somewhere in the coming weeks.
It feels nice to be back and picking up my characters again. For now I’m going to focus on the Mage and getting her up to speed with all the new raids and other content. It’s really funny how, after almost 12 years, I feel like I’ve come full circle playing Mage now. It was the very first character I created when I got my hands on WoW and even though I found it to be extremely squishy, I always really enjoyed Mage throughout the time that WoW has been around. I’ll probably forego rolling one once Classic is out, I just can’t deal with the Vanilla squish but nonetheless I’m more than happy to play it on the regular servers.

Next to getting back into WoW I’ve also reinstalled Guild Wars 2. I’m not really sure why, I think it’s mostly to do with the morbid curiousity about the game that seems to surface every now and then. When I bought Guild Wars 2 I really enjoyed it for what it was but after a while I started to miss the standard MMO tropes that came with being a WoW player since forever. Not really having the whole tank/healer/dps setup was odd and the lack of dungeons and raids (at the time) was really frustrating aswell. The story was compelling, but just not compelling enough to keep me coming back. Over time I’ve reinstalled the game a few times and even though I would always tell myself that this time I wanted to stick to it longer and level up more I never did.
This time though I’m just gonna dedicate a few hours a week to just playing the game and make some progress towards higher levels. I may even pick up the expansions when I get towards the end of the “vanilla” content, but I’ll have to get there first.

All in all I’m quite content to have my PC back, mostly so I can sit down and use my own keyboard and mouse instead of a silly laptop plus it’s giving me incentive to sit down and blog a bit more again. So expect more posts to come!

Screenshot Fiesta

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

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

Moonfire Faire Fireworks Moonfire Faire Fireworks Moonfire Faire Fireworks

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

Costa Del Sol daytime Costa del Sol sea daytime

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

Found a bug! Me and the Minstrel The Rising Fireworks

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

Cya next time!

Sunday Summaries #4

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

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

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

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

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