End of Year goals

Mechaspider mount

The weather has turned here in the Netherlands and Summer is officially over. Where last weekend we still had 24-25C degree weather we’ve had a week full of rain wind and cold last week and it seems it will be like this for the forseeable future. We are slowly moving towards the “dark days before Christmas” as we say in Dutch and this has gotten me thinking about what I want to achieve before the year is over. I know we are still three months out but time moves very fast so it’s Christmas and then New Years before you know it. As such this is really my last “chance” to set some more long term goals.

It’s been an odd year for me so far. I’ve moved out into my own home at the end of April, although I began moving at the start of that month, and I’m still trying to find my routines for many things. Adjusting to living alone has gone more smooth than I hoped although sometimes I do miss living with my dad and just the general company of having other people around. At the same time I got a steady contract and, a few weeks ago, a promotion to a more demanding position at the company. This has left me with less energy the past few weeks but I’m slowly getting settled again and I’m not as exhausted anymore as I have been.
Due to this I’ve not really played as many games as I would have liked to this month. When I do my goal post for October you’ll notice that I’ve barely met any goals I set for myself in September, but as the French say “c’est la vie”. With this post though I want to outline my future gaming (and real life) plans untill the end of the year to provide myself with a roadmap for the coming time and something to look to when I’m in an indecisive mood.
So without further ado, let’s set up my End of Year Goals!

Final Fantasy XIV
I’ve actually not spend as much time in FFXIV as I hoped this month. I’ve barely leveled anything except maybe Culinarian and a bit of Monk. Last year I had a massive race against the clock to get as many classes to level 70 before the New Year. This year I’m actually not setting the bar as high. These are my plans for FFXIV untill the end of year.

  • Level Monk, Samurai, Dragoon and Ninja to 80 and complete associated Job quests
  • Level Blacksmith, Leatherworker and Armorsmith to level 70 via Beast Tribe quests.
  • Level Fisher to 80
  • Complete the White Mage Animus step for the ARR relic
  • Clear Innocence Ex and maybe farm for mount from both that and Titania Ex
  • Clear out remaining quests from my log

I think all of this should be doable in three months time. All the battle classes I’m describing are level 70. I’ve chosen to just level up the Melee group next because I already started Monk and I would be doing Samurai next any way. I might aswell get Dragoon and Ninja out of the way then aswell and close that part of leveling. After that I only have the ranged jobs and tanks left. I’m currently nudging Blacksmith through the Ixali dailies while my Culinarian is about to enter Namazu territory. If I just keep doing Ixali dailies on the regular I don’t see how I wouldn’t be able to get my three remaining crafters through this part and into the easier zones that are Moogle and Namazu dailies. As far as Fisher goes.. It’s sitting at level 48 and is the only gathering class not at max level. I just have to sit down and get to it.
The rest of the goals aren’t that big. I’m already doing Animus books on my White Mage. I don’t think I will have much issues clearing Innocence Ex when I just sit down and find a group to do so. I have a few outstanding quests that I want to tackle, and a ton of sidequests still left in Shadowbringers. Ideally I want to just get them all out of the way so my maps don’t have any quests left on them.

World of Warcraft (Classic and Retail)
With Classic launching a few weeks ago and me going back into Retail a while back WoW is fully on my radar again. I foresee myself spending time in Classic mostly during the weekends when I feel like it and more time in Retail because there is specific stuff I actually want to get done there. Here are my end of year goals for the World of Warcraft!

  • Get a character to atleast level 40 in Classic
  • Do all the raids/dungeons I’ve not yet done in Retail, this being the Battle of Dazar’Alor, Mechagon, The Eternal Palace and Crucible of Storms
  • Level my Warrior to 120 in Retail
  • Level my Void Elf Hunter to 120 in Retail
  • Finish all the Rare killing and Treasure achievements in BfA
  • Get Exalted with Mechagon and the Nazjatar faction

In Retail my main focus will be catching up with content. Even though I’ve done the War Campaign I’ve actually not touched a single raid after clearing Uldir. I really want to do the raids just so I can see the fights and cutscenes I’ve missed. I will also be able to clear those quests from my questlog (yay) and feel like I’ve truly caught up. I’m also still needing to do Mechagon as a dungeon so I can finish off that questchain.
After that I want to turn my attention to leveling some characters. My poor Warrior has been glossed over for this expansion and she needs some love. I also want to unlock the Void Elf heritage gear so that means I should pick up my Hunter again and level her up. Other than that I want to chase some achievements and work on reputations.
On the Classic side of the coin I want to get atleast one of my characters to level 40. This is basically the mount level and it would be awesome to get there. Why not push for level 60? Maybe I will but for now I’m just not feeling Classic that much and I can only take it in small amounts or whenever the mood to play it strikes me.

Other Games

Of course I don’t want to spend all my time in just FFXIV and WoW. There’s other game to play that deserve playtime aswell. I’m still determined to get through my backlog aswell so I want to focus on single player games next to my standard two MMO’s.

  • The big goal here is that I want to have finished 3 games before the end of year. These don’t have to be epic big games like Persona 5 but I would like to be able to scratch stuff off my backlog. If I’m able to tackle more than that fine but the minimum is three. This tallies down to one game per month. Right now the first game on that list is Link’s Awakening which I’m currently invested in. Another game will be Pokémon Sword since I’ve already have that on preorder and it’s a game that I’ve been actually excited for. The third game is undecided as of now but I’m looking at something to play on my WiiU since that has been my most neglected console and it deserves some love.
  • Guild Wars 2. I’ve logged it occasionally the past few weeks, mostly to get a ton of anniversary gifts on my older characters. Some have been around for 6 years already and if I didn’t go on a delete spree a long time ago I would’ve had an original old character aswell. Oh well. I’ve been logging my Ranger again since it’s the class that I enjoy playing the most. She’s somewhere inbetween level 25 and 30 and my biggest goal is to just start getting through zones and getting some levels. Maybe do a dungeon. But atleast make some sort of progress.

Offline Goals

Next to gaming stuff there’s a few offline goals I want to work on aswell. These mostly pertain to my physical health but I also want to get out of the house more. I need to be around people more than I am now and I just want to experience new things in general. So these are things I want to work on or get a start in before the end of the year.

  • Visit my cousins in their new homes. We’ve been semi close growing up but ever since we’ve gotten to adulthood we’ve drifted apart. I want to visit all three of them and just have a nice day to look back on.
  • Go to a city I’ve not visited before. Dutch infrastructure is great and it’s easy to get everywhere by train. I want to visit a city in the Netherlands where I’ve never been before and walk around and take pictures and have a nice day.
  • Set up a healthy sleep schedule. It’s still all over the place. I know that I will feel much better when I just get enough sleep so that’s quite high on my priority list.
  • Set up and maintain a gym schedule. I’ve recently bought new sports bra’s and sports clothes in general. Now it’s just to get my ass to the gym itself. I’m a candidate for breast reduction surgery that gets fully or mostly covered by my insurance but one of the stipulations is that I lose some weight since I’m currently on a BMI of 32 which is 2 points above what I need to be to qualify for surgery. In reality this means that I need to lose around 7kg atleast to get to that point. That will be my starting goal weight and I will see from there.
  • Finish decorating my house. There’s a few things that still need to be done and most of it is hanging up shelves and a coat rack. I want to get this done sooner rather than later.

So there you have it. My end of year goals. I will try my best to actually get most of them, if not all of them, done. It’s a nice roadmap for me to look at when I’m a bit lost and it helps me move forward. For now though it’s time for some Timewalking.

Homes, hacks, patches and funerals

As you can deduce from the post title I’ve had a very exhausting week. A lot of things happened that are gaming and IRL related and I need to get it all off my chest.

So let’s start with the good!
I had a look at my new apartment on Wednesday. It’s coming really close to being done at this point. My bathroom is as good as ready, all ceilings are ready, and it’s basically putting in the floor heating, floor, kitchen and painting the walls that needs to be done now. They suspect we can move in sometime during April, which is 5 months earlier than the initial date. I’m stoked! I am finally moving out into a neat little apartment and be a complete adult with my own life. Yay me.
I took lots of pictures and got to know some of the neighbours and it was all around good fun. I can’t wait to move there in a few months and I’m already picking out my furniture and making lists of everything I need to buy. I’ll probably do the same thing my coworker did and just take 3 weeks off to move and get settled in.
One of the things I had on my list I can scratch off because to day I picked up my Playstation Pro and traded in my old one. 4k games here I come!

In mentioning the Playstation I come onto my second subject of the post: hacking. More specifically people piggybacking on an existing Playstation Network account. They basically make use of your PSplus subscription and download the games you’ve bought. Apparently this has happened to me sometime during 2016 seeing as in my 5 year PS4 review FIFA 17 suddenly showed up as one of my top 3 most played games… While I don’t own it. After some digging I figured I’d been the victim of the specific type of hack I just described. There’s never been any purchases on my account that weren’t made by me but now with me getting a new Playstation I’ve taken a ton of measurements to make sure my account is freshly protected. I have had 2-step verification for a while but I specifically went into my Sony account and deactivated all devices, changed my PW and set up a new security question. I also took all payment details off the account. If someone tries anything funny now I’ll notice and hopefully this should keep my account safe for the future. It was kind of a scare to realize my account has been used by someone else but luckily nothing malicious every happened so there’s that.

In the realm of gaming I’ve not been able to put that much time into games this week. My warrior is level 68 in FFXIV and slooowly going towards level 70. I’ve been meaning to pick up the second game of Spyro but really couldn’t be arsed to sit down and play. I’m also aware that patch 8.1 is out in World of Warcraft and honestly I’ve not even been interested in logging on and seeing what Blizzard has added for the patch. I will probably poke my head in somewhere around Christmas because I have a week off then and enough time on my hands to play a few more games than just FFXIV and Spyro. Square Enix released the 4.5 patch site for FFXIV so I guess that’s a thing aswell.

Finally some sad news. I’ve been having a few ill family members, some more serious than others. One of them was one of my aunts who has been fighting a lung disease for most of her life. Unfortunately during Friday night she passed away while being surrounded with loved ones. The funeral should be either coming Friday or Saturday. If it’s Friday I probably won’t be able to make it due to work, Dutch time off around funerals is surprisingly strict and will completely depend on your manager when it comes to funerals of non-immediate family. I hope I can make it so I can say goodbye but I’ll guess I will see once the date for the funeral is set.

My Own Plan

Looking out over Tiragarde Sound

It’s been a bit of an odd week for me. I found myself slipping back into casual raiding on my Paladin. At the same time I’ve been trying to take a bit more distance from WoW and immerse myself a bit more into FFXIV, single player games and making sure that I have a healthy sleep schedule. I’m aiming to be in bed by 23.00 every night except Saturday because obviously I have a bit more time to sleep in over the weekend and as far as things go I notice that It’s having a good effect on my general mood.

The lack of clear focus in my MMO’s has me reconsidering what I want to do in them for the rest of the year. In FFXIV I’m quite certain that it boils down to leveling as many classes as I can. I’m slowly bumping up my Black Mage, while also catching up on gear with my White Mage. Unlocking Heaven on High, the Stormblood version of Palace of the Dead, will help me a lot with my leveling ambitions and will provide me with decent weapons for all my jobs. Being able to tick of level 70 on my remaining jobs will be very satisfying and I’m not really looking into doing anything else there right now.
Well that’s not completely true. I’m also busy unlocking any content that I may have missed from this patch and the last while supporting Doma with the rebuilding of the Enclave. Seeing that city grow and getting all the cutscenes has been very fun and satisfying. Plus it’s a gil income that I can definitely use.

In WoW my focus is slowly shifting away from traditional progress (raids and dungeons) and more to personal progress. I’m working on getting the BfA reputations Exalted on my Rogue while also completing the Battle for Azeroth achievements that are easy to obtain. This means I’m wandering around the world a lot looking for items, treasure chests and creatures to kill. I’m also slowly picking up the transmog farm again and have been running the T11 and Wrath of the Lich King raids to complete or start working on transmog sets. This has led me to discover that the Legacy Loot rules are atrocious and I’d much rather Blizzard reimplement the old way of running outdated content with group loot and a need/greed system for when you buddy up. Nonetheless I’ve been able to obtain a complete T11 set on my Paladin and one of the pets from the Raiding with Leashes IV achievement. I’ve stated earlier that I want to make an effort to level up one of the Allied races but for now that’s a weekend only project. I want to narrow my scope to my Paladin and Rogue mostly so that I don’t get overwhelmed with content and to make sure that I don’t spend too much time playing this game when I could be doing something else. This also means putting my Mythic+ ambitions on the backburner, but honestly with how the game plays right now I’m alright with that. Trying to get a weapon upgrade for my Protection spec has been atrocious and I’m not really content with the whole way Azerite Gear works either. So I don’t want to put too much energy into it where I can use it on things that are more important.

In real life I’ve gotten some very good news from my job. Up untill now I’ve been working as a “temp”. The rules are a bit confusing here in the Netherlands but it boils down to whether the company you work for wants to hire you on their own or via a temp agency. A lot of companies work with the latter because it’s easier to fire people that way and because it’s limited. You can only work a maximum of five years for a company via a temp agency after which you’re usually dismissed and have to look for a new job. I’m in my third year right now and didn’t have that much hopes on obtaining a normal contract but my boss surprised me last Friday with the announcement that they are working on it. This means a much better contract for me with a lot more vacation days that I have now (45 vs 20), a bonus that’s decided on how much profit the company makes, an extra month of salary paid with a 1099 nec form generator. Seeing as my current temp contract runs until April 1st next year I’m hoping they’ll transfer me then which would be perfect because it lines up with me moving to my new apartment around that time aswell.

All of this has inspired me to pick up the slack in other areas of my life. I’m eating more healthy (no more candies and crisps) and trying to be more active when it comes to exercising. I’m picking up the courses that I started ages ago again and I’m generally in a more stable and happy mood than I’ve been in a very long time. I’m also trying to be less chaotic at work with how I do my job and be a bit more organized in my private life aswell. I’m going out more and planning a lot of fun things for the coming few months. I’m not quite where I want to be yet, I’m still full focus on losing weight, but my life finally seems to come together slowly. I can’t wait for 2019 and all the amazing things it will bring. I just need to make my own plans and stick to them and I’m positive that things will then work out in my favour.