Tag Archives: Stormblood

Mapping the Future

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Afbeeldingsresultaat voor planner

Yesterday a plan started to slowly take shape in my head. I’m really bad when it comes to planning things and when it comes to MMO’s I’m usually very overwhelmed with all the things I can do that in the end I mostly end up doing very little or unsubscribing.
I really don’t want this to happen with Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve found an amazing free company and some of my oldest friends are still playing the game. I want to make this my permanent new main MMO and I want to be a bit more serious about the way I play it. To make sure this happens I have come up with a “Roadmap for Stormblood.”

Now I’m not really sure how this roadmap will develop over time, but I had to start somewhere. Right now I made a two stage spreadsheet mostly involving leveling and gearing my battle and profession classes. As I’ve mentioned only my Ninja is currently level 70. I have a few other battle classes level 60+ (Dragoon, Astrologian, Bard, Machinist) and the rest is sitting somewhere between level 50 and level 60. On the gatherer and crafter side of the spectrum only my Weaver made it to level 60, the rest is below.

My first goals in Stormblood, and the first phase of my roadmap, centers around leveling all these various classes to maximum level. Initially my goals is to get everything to 60 but if I enjoy a class or if it’s already 60 I can take them to 70 aswell. For now the goals is to get atleast one battle class and one gathering/crafting class to 60 per month. I know that leveling sometimes goes faster than you know, hence the “atleast”. I’m not going to be so strict to myself that I have to attain this goal every month. I know that sometimes RL will get in the way or that I will have less time due to Savage and Ex-Primals raiding on my Ninja.
Seeing the queues as they are for mostly DPS classes I will probably abuse PotD for those that aren’t level 60 yet to get there. As far as Healers/Tanks go… There are enough roulettes to do that have quite low queue times and it will be a break away from the monotony that is PotD.
For gathering/crafting I mean to make full use of the leves, collectables and GC hand-in system, next to the beast tribe dailies that are available. I will probably focus on my gatherers first, mostly miner and botanist, before I take my crafting back up again.

The second phase of my roadmap will revolve around gearing all my classes. In a way with gearing Ninja I’m automatically also gearing Bard and Machinist up to a point. I want to have decent/BiS gear for as many classes as possible and the fact that a lot of gear is shared will probably help me a lot there. This gearing will most likely happen simultaneously to leveling any class. I will have more tomestones than I can use on my Ninja anyway (I’m already rocking BiS tomestone gear on her) so I will automatically pick up other things as I progress through endgame content.
Crafting and gathering gear are a different beast. I’ve always found crafting in this game to be very complicated, but I want to really make an effort this expansion. Again I will probably focus on gearing my gatherers first, they will be the first that reach 70 and work on scrips so my crafters won’t really be gearing untill I get one or two to max level to begin with.

I know that there are meriad other things to do in FFXIV besides leveling and gearing my various classes. I will probably expand on my roadmap as the expansion goes on and the focus on leveling is less. There are a ton of mounts and minions that I still want to get. I’m also eyeing the possibility to slowly work my way through all the relic weapons from Heavensward and get the last three I need from A Realm Reborn. These are all minor things that I still need to shape into a proper mold for planning and they’re all projects that I can pick up at a later time when I feel like it.

For now my plan is to focus on doing small weekly tasks, and incorporate these into bigger monthly goals. Taking things one step at a time and making sure I don’t burn out and feel accomplished is my major goal here. Due to the shift in focus from monthly to weekly I will try to make a post every Sunday evening with what I have planned for the week as whole (inlcuding IRL things, work things and game things) and then at the end of the month I can see how far I’ve gotten. It’s a bit of a different format than what I’ve been trying to do earlier on the blog and I’m quite excited to try it out. I hope you guys enjoy going on this journey with me and I hope it will make me blog more regularly.

Now seeing as I’m already writing anyway, my plans for the week looks as followed:

  • Work on Miner in FFXIV. I’ve started to level it before I left on vacation and got my miner from level 30 to 47 in about 4 days time. I’d like to continue this growth and see how close I can get to 60 over the course of the week.
  • Work on Red Mage in FFXIV. I’ve picked up the class and am quite enjoying it. She’s level 51 at the moment and I will do PotD when I feel like it. I’ve gotten an offer to do roulettes with someone who is leveling a tank so I might just take advantage of that and see how far it gets me.
  • Work on my thesis. I need to test a few more subjects, churn results and hand in my first version. I also need to hand in something else which I need to work on today so I will get little game time in.

For the rest of the week I have 4 days of work planned and two nights of going out to dinner. My father and his partner (I refuse to call her his wife) are celebrating their partnershipday on Wednesday with going out to dinner with me and one of my uncles. Saturday evening I have another dinner with work colleagues to say goodbye to one of them who is starting work at another company. I’m also hoping to make a bit more progress of rearranging our attic over the weekend but I’m not making that a “must do” thing because I’m honestly not sure how my time will be spent. So yeah. I have a busy week ahead of me with proably not as much gaming time as I’d like to have. Nonetheless I want to progress as much as I can in FFXIV and take it from there.

Cleaning House

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I’m sitting here staring at my blog, wondering what to write. It’s been a while and even though I have a lot of things to discuss I’m not sure where to really start.
Maybe I’ll start with telling you guys that I just came back from a wonderful 8 day trip to Mallorca. I’ve been needing a vacation for quite some time now and flying off to the sun for a full week was something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. I managed to get some relaxation time in and tanned a little bit. I’m really white skinned so getting any sort of tan takes me a while, especially having to prevent turning lobster red instead. I’ve done a lot of things, visited a water park, aquarium and midget golf, but mostly I took the time to destress and relax away from home.
I had my 3DS with me and I managed to finally sit down and play a few games that I’ve been meaning to. I’m about 4.5 hours into Bravely Default now, playing through Chapter 1. I never got past the intro first so it’s a milestone! I also spent about 5.5 hours total playing Ever Oasis and I’ve fallen in love with that game. The combination of having to maintain a town and also dungeoning is quite refreshing and the whole atmosphere of the game is insanely cute. I might dedicate a post to it later.

Next to going on vacation I’ve been using my free time to work through the mess that is my room and the attic. My room is more or less empty right now and I’ve thrown away about 3 trash bags worth of stuff from the attic. I’ve also been giving away a lot of my old children’s books which frees up even more room. During my cleaning I’ve stumbled across my old Sega Mega Drive (Genesis in the US) and all of its’ games and the two nintendo mini classics you see on the picture at the start of my post. I’m fully intending to put batteries in atleast one of these and hang it on my bag to play. I remember having a very good time as a 9 year old with these games and I’m sure if they still work they’re still a blast to play. The silver one is Super Mario Bros. and the green one is Donkey Kong jr. It made me insanely happy to find these because well, I like my game collection and these two were “missing” for quite a while.
It feels nice to get rid of things. I’ve never been a hoarder, but a lot of my stuff got chucked up on the attic out of habit. It was and still is quite full with tons of things that I need to sift through, but for now I’m happy with my progress and I will continue a later time. Ideally I want the shelves that now hold old toys and books to be reserved for my older gaming gear, mostly so I know where it is and it’s easy to pick up whenever I would want to play it.

Speaking of games…
Ofcourse I have played the shit out of Stormblood. My Ninja is currently sitting on level 70 with a full Lakshmi Ex kitted right side and waiting on her Susano ex weapon. I am going to do Omega Normal tonight with my Free Company, something I’m quite looking forward to aswell. Leveling a DPS hasn’t been the easiest this expansion, mostly due to insane queue times. I think the longest I’ve had so far has been an hour. And that’s not even counting the queue times to get on the server itself. I really enjoyed the Stormblood story, especially the Doman part. My Ninja plays really nicely if we forget about Ten-Chi-Jin for a minute and my static will be starting up Savage raiding soon. I’ve really enjoyed Lakshmi ex aswell, although the Bollywood music tends to get kind of annoying after two straight hours of it.
As far as the new classes go I’ve mostly been exploring Red Mage. The playstyle is very refreshing and fast once you get the hang of it and I’m pretty sure I’ll level it up fast after Bard and Warrior. Samurai right now just feels very complicated. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it once I start playing properly but for now I’m leaving the class alone. Bard is a different story. I really like that they removed the casttimes and what they did with the songs. It’s my second favourite class after Ninja and I’m slowly leveling it up, being stuck at 63 right now.

I’ve also been grinding out my crafters, kicking my miner up to level 50. I notice that the game as a whole is taking up a lot of my time so I might take a bit of a step back, map out what I want to do exactly and invest a bit less time. There’s a lot of other things that need my attention right now so I want the time that I do put into FFXIV to be useful, be it through leveling another class, working on my gatherers or getting my Ninja in the best gear. I may actually make a “roadmap for Stormblood” in which I put weekly, monthly and yearly goals. I know it sounds like quite the project but it’s something I’ve been thinking about longer and I may actually just go forward with it.
Ofcourse I’ll share this on the blog aswell, hopefully somewhere the next week.

All in all the vacation time has done me good. I’m more relaxed and focused and ready to take on everything again. I hope this also means I can get a bit more structured with my routines and include blogging more again. For now though I will have to finish here and head to bed… Seeing as I’m more tired from the vacation than when I flew off to go there!