Tag Archives: World of Warcraft

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.

Shameless Stealing: Ranking the Races

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So Syp over at Bio Break did a post a few weeks ago where he ranked all the races in World of Warcraft. I am shamelessly stealing this idea and will present my own ranking from best to worst in this post. Just as sidenote, I don’t play male characters in MMO’s so all these opinions are based on the female models that are in the game. 

Best: Night Elf
Anyone who has followed me for an extended amount of time knows of my love for the Night Elves. I like the original lore, portraying them as badass matriarchal society where the women did the fighting where the men stayed at home. My main has been a Night Elf Warrior for years and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. They also have a good dose of the pretty, I like looking at the pretty, and in general I’m a fan of how armour and weapons look on them aswell as their combat animations in general. They also make the best Druids without any race even coming close.

Blood Elf
Yes, I like elves. Sue me.
Blood elves were the first and only attractive race to play as Horde for a long time. It’s my default Horde race and I enjoy everything about them from armor looks to their sassy jokes. It’s too bad that they can’t be Shamans or Druids or I would have an entire army of Elves on both Horde and Alliance side. As it should be!

Draenei
Ahh the spacegoats. I can’t say why exactly I take a fondness to Draenei but after the Elves they are my favourite race. I especially enjoy the Lightforged ones but the original Draenei kick ass aswell and I’ve played a Draenei Priest for a very long time because of it. Their passive is great (selfhealing for the win), I like their Russian/Greek oriented accents and Velen seems to be one of the few leaders who actually does something. All in all a great race to play and the reason why I have not one but two Draenei Shamans, a Draenei Hunter and a Draenei Paladin.

Trolls
Now we come to a bit of an odd one. You see when I rolled Horde back in Wrath there weren’t that many options to choose from when you were a Warrior. I would absolutely never go Orc and I didn’t like the way armor looked on Undead and Tauren so Troll was, back then, my only option. The funny thing is the race grew on me. You could pick a pretty face and small tusks and have this amazing tomahawk type hairstyle in bright red, blue, green or pink. I loved it and I loved my Warrior. Right now I have a Troll Druid Horde side that I enjoy and I think I’ll make a Zandalari Shaman when I can.

Humans
I know that Humans tend to be the standard, run of the mill, type characters, it’s why they start off the middle of the pack for me. The only really awesome thing about female Humans is that for some reason weapons are grossly oversized looking on them, making my Warrior dualwielding Armageddon an absolute hilarious thing to see. I still have a Human Mage, who is a nice tribute to Jaina, but I doubt I’ll make any more Human characters.

Pandaren
I’m mostly putting Pandaren over Gnomes/Worgen because I just love my baby Monk. It’s literally the only class they look right as for me and if Blizzard had decided only Pandaren could be Monks I would be happy. I have no issues playing her for long periods of time. I love everything about her. But don’t roll anything that isn’t a Monk. Just doesn’t work.

Gnomes/Worgen
I couldn’t really decide here so I tied them. I like Gnomes. They’re cute, they have pigtails and pink hair and they’re sassy. What I don’t like however is the fact that armor just doesn’t look right on them and that, for a very long time atleast, the game perspective was odd. I’m tiny in real life and playing a tiny character grates my gears. So yeah.
Worgen had so much potential when they were introduced and I still think my Worgen Warlock is an absolute badass but Blizzard essentially screwed up Female Worgen faces and voices. I can’t really stand to play her too long unfortunately. Maybe after a makeover they so deserve.

Dwarves
Dwarves suffer from the same things as Gnomes for me. They are just too small and armor just doesn’t look right on them. Maybe the Dark Irons will redeem them a bit but rolling a female Dwarf? No thanks.

Goblins/Tauren
Again a tie. Goblins have interesting customization and I’ve made a Goblin more than once intending to play it for a longer time. But alas. The “tiny race” issue pops up again and I tend to not log in anymore. Maybe I should try again at some point.
Tauren are on the opposite spectrum for me. I find them too big/bulky and their customization lacking. Armor doesn’t really look right, I don’t like their voices and I have a hard time just playing what is essentally a straight up cow.

Undead
I would put Undead higher on the list if I was able to somehow get rid of all the body clipping through armor. Or the fact that they don’t stand up straight. Or the fact that they’re basically rotted and I like the pretty and It’s. Really. Hard.  to make an undead pretty. 

The worst: Orcs
I hate Orcs. You know how Syp is not shy about sharing his hatred for Elves? I’m pretty sure my hatred for Orcs rivals it. I dislike their lore, I dislike their race and their looks. If Orcs were deleted from the game I wouldn’t shed a single tear. Even the Magh’ar ones won’t save this one. No Orcs for me! And this transcends to any other game including Orcs of some variety.

Bonus: Allied Races
A small list of my ranking of the Allied Races!
1. Void Elves: Hello, more elves! Yes please.
2. Lightforged Draenei: More Draenei, more kickass. I’ll take it.
3. Nightborne Elves: See number 1.
4. Dark Iron Dwarves: I made one on the beta and she looked amazing!
5. Zandalari Trolls: I like Trolls, I’ll make another one.
6. Highmountain Tauren: Again, it’s still a cow.
7. Kul Tiran Humans: Humans, but fat. Not a fan. Not even for the awesome wicker Druid forms.
8. Magh’ar Orcs: Do I even need to explain this one?

BfA prep: What do I still want?

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So the battle for Azeroth is upon us in less than three weeks and I can slowly feel the hype building up towards a new expansion. With the Burning of Teldrassil event coming this Wednesday (I’m in Europe so we get it a day later) the real catalyst for the whole Horde versus Alliance War will start ingame. I have to say that due to reading “Before the Storm” I know that another major event happened before this one but I won’t spoil. It just made things a lot more interesting on the Horde/Forsaken part of the deal.

Going into Battle for Azeroth I have decided to reroll to the Horde side of things. Most of my friends are currently playing over there and I really like having people to play with so it was only a natural choice to go to the Red side for this expac. My main will be my Paladin Fiorentin and I am planning to tank on her.

Red shield prot paladin

Doesn’t she look badass? I’m quite happy with my decision and going protection means short queues and probably early Mythic + spots. I’m not really aiming to raid in BfA but if I can get into a PuG here or there I’m quite content. I do however want to try and push Mythic + a bit more for myself. I never quite got higher than M+13/14 or so and I do want to atleast get the +15 done, even if it’s only to unlock an extra artifact colour.
Speaking of those, I am immensly sad to see them go. It’s why I devoted almost all my gaming time into getting the Mage Towers done so I can have ALL the Artifact variations unlocked and ready for transmog. In the picture however I’m rocking the red version of the Hidden artifact appearance for Protection Paladin, mostly because it fits my transmog well.

Anyway, now that you all know what I’m going to main in BfA I also want to talk about what I want to do in the time leading up to release.

1 Class mounts! I still need class mounts on the following classes:

  • Shaman
  • Rogue
  • Mage
  • Warlock
  • Demon Hunter
  • Death Knight

I’m not sure if I can get all of them before BfA launch but I’m trying to tackle as much as I can during the evenings. I’m probably going to start with Rogue since I’m about to finish that Class campaign and this ties into it nicely.

2 Professions/Profession Quests. This mostly concerns my Paladin but I want to get her Legion Herbalism and Alchemy to 100/100 and clear out all the remaining profession quests that I have. I may look at some other characters aswell but for now it’s just the Paladin.

3 Emissary WQ’s and Honor grinding. I’m planning to do my daily Emissary quests still on Paladin and Warrior. Mostly because on Sandrian I have chances of getting the extra caches and on my Paladin I just want the extra rep and materials that can drop from these. Next to that I want to do as many Honor Worldquests as I can to up my Honor level. I’m currently sitting on 17 and the next reward is level 20. Because I know I won’t have the time to do it all every day I’m planning to tie them in with my Emissaries on Paladin/Warrior and then tackle more during the weekends on my other characters.

4 The Chromie scenario. I’ve never paid much attention to this one but it seems like a nice filler. I’m probably going to do this on my Warrior given that I’ve already started on her and I’d like to see where this takes me.

5 Level an Allied Race. Even though I’ve already given myself plenty to do the coming few weeks I’d like to chill down a bit and start leveling an Allied race. For now I have my eyes set on a Nightborne Warlock, seeing as I only have one Warlock now and she’s Alliance. It would be cool if I could get a few levels going but nothing too fancy. I know the level grind is rather slow these days so I’m not setting as goal to reach 110 before BfA hits.

There are a ton of other odds and ends that I can still do, but these are my main goals and guidance as we head into BfA. I hope things will go smoothly and faster than I think they will and I can just breeze through all of this. The only real returning grind is the WQ one since I’m quite far into my Profession Quests on my Paladin and the Class mounts should be doable quickly aswell. All in all I think I set some decent goals for myself that shouldn’t be too hard to obtain. I hope to go into BfA with a nice sum of gold (I should be up to about 100k on Alliance side) and well prepared enough to get a few levels in on launch day.

Mage Tower Madness

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Draenei Hunter with MM challenge bow

I’ve had a post about my Mage Tower shenanigans coming down the pipe for a very long time. For those of you who have been following me on Twitter this whole blogpost shouldn’t really come as a surprise but I want to get it out anyway.

Somewhere earlier this year I had this grand idea to start chasing the Mage Tower challenges. With patch 7.3.5 gearing up had become really easy and with every Mage Tower I tackled I found the next (same) one on a new class to be easier and easier. Where I’ve taken between 20 and 30 tries to down some of my earlier ones I can now proudly say that I have oneshot multiple ones over the last few weeks, including the cheese that is Affliction lock.

I’m not really sure what attracted me in doing all the Mage Towers. Maybe it was the idea that the skins would become permanently unavailable or it was the idea that these were solo challenges that I could undertake by myself without having other people involved. They felt like a “true” test of skill to me, moreso than any raid or dungeon has been.

As of right now I’m down to my last three Towers: Outlaw, Assassination and Subtlety Rogue. I’m in luck because the Command Center is up, effectively buffing my Agatha attempts even more than I can already do. I also don’t predict any problems with the Assassination challenge but I do hope I can luck my way through the Subtlety one.

All in all it’s been a rather long strange trip. The Artifact boost came at a perfect time and even though I had my doubts that I would complete this journey I’m very proud to be able to call myself a member of the “club 36” at the end of the day.

 

Why’s My Life So Boring?

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Retribution Challenge Weapon

I’m having one of those weekends where I feel like my life is going by too fast and I’m wasting my time doing useless stuff. And with useless I mean lying on bed or spending a lot of time dallying in a game while not really making any progress anywhere.
Which is odd because I’ve been slowly ticking off goals for World of Warcraft (see the above screenshot of my proud Paladin and her Retribution Challenge Weapon) and managed to actually finish a game within a week of buying it. And yet I feel useless and bored, not to mention fat and ugly.

I think my depressive mood comes down to my less than ideal living situation and the fact that I lack the motivation to change anything about my life right now. My house is being built and I can’t move out untill next year. I’m still quite overweight but I can’t seem to get myself to start working out seriously and working on losing that weight. I’m also staring at a contract deadline which basically means I should find a new job by October 1st. Something I really really want aswell but I can’t seem to motivate myself to do anything. I feel mentally exhausted and I’m not sure how to turn it around right now. I think the best thing I can do is focus on tackling one thing at a time and right now my health, and the slow deteriation of it, is my number one priority. Because next to being simply overweight all that extra cushion I’m dragging around is causing me other issues. I’m short of breath, my feet constantly hurt, my back hurts and I honestly look ridiculous in any clothes I’m wearing. Looking at myself in the mirror becomes harder by the day and I’m desperately finding a way to get motivated to lose weight.

I have considered tying gaming and working out together. Especially during weekends I just don’t get enough exercise/movement and so I’m thinking of a system to make sure I do not sit on my ass and game all day. I’ve been trying to apply it to my WoW sessions where I am taking breaks whenever I level up on my Rogue (which is rougly every 45 mins). During these breaks I either go get a drink, clean a bit of rubble from the attic or spend a few minutes just walking around, stretching and maybe walk up and down the stairs a few times just to get some movement in. I want to progress this further and stand on our crosstrainer or do some strength exercises inbetween my gaming sessions. Anything to start getting healthier again and be happier with the way I look and feel, seeing as this body has to last me atleast another 40-50 years.

In gaming land however…
I’ve been scratching off a lot of goals. I’ve completed 8/36 Mage Tower challenges now and I hope to be able to complete three more the next time the Tower rolls around. If I’m able to do that it means I have all the Mage Tower appearances for Monk, Paladin and Warrior and 2/3 for Hunter. Although the challenges still aren’t a walk in the park they’ve become significantly easier by gearing up my characters. I’m really close to getting the MM Hunter challenge done but I’m trying to get a better legendary than the ones I have in the hopes that it will help me actually kill off the stupid challenge. I’ve also picked up leveling my Rogue, who is my last class not on 110 yet, and I’ve made some pretty great strides today going from level 82 to almost level 87 in a few hours of play on and off. From level 90 onward I will be duoing up with a friend and we’ll make the final push to 110 together over a weekend, something we’ve been doing with a lot of our characters.
In terms of gameplay I don’t really enjoy Rogue all that much, there’s a reason why I’ve practically not touched this character since Wrath of the Lich King, but I want to get it to max level for completion sake so I will.
I’m also making a point to log into FFXIV once a week to do some beast tribe quests and to log into my house so that I don’t lose the plot. Even though my interest in the game has been waning a lot I’m not letting my sub lapse because I know I will get burned out on WoW at some point and will most likely return to FFXIV more fulltime then. In the meantime I’m super slowly leveling up my Machinist and just fiddling about getting my Beast Tribe rep up, I’m almost done with the Ananta now which means I can soon buy the pretty Gryphon mount. But since I’m only logging once a week or so it’s been going at a snail’s pace. Oh well.

In non MMO land I’ve bought Kirby Triple Deluxe on impulse Friday the 4th and finished it last Thursday. It reminded me of how much I love Kirby games and how nice and relaxing they are to play. I’ve yet to finish Star Allies on my Switch but seeing as I completely got sucked in by Triple Deluxe I’m taking a bit of a break and focusing on a game in an entirely different genre: Monster Hunter Stories. I’ve only started playing this game today so I’m not that far in but from what I’ve experienced so far it’s MH Light with a mix of Pokémon. It still has the Monster Hunting aspect, you still get a shitton of crafting mats and there’s a ton of sidemissions to do next to the main stuff, but this game actually has a story to follow and the gorgeous, colourful graphics had me hooked immediatly. I feel like this is by no means a simple game, but I’m determined to plant my feet in it and make progress this week and hopefully understand a bit more about how I have to actually play the game and if this may get me into other games in the Monster Hunter franchise.

For now though I’m going to sign off here and hopefully catch a good night’s sleep. I predict a ton of gaming and cleaning in my future tomorrow and I prefer not to have laid awake half the night before that.

The Goal is Set: Unlocking Skins

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Fury Warrior challenge skin unlock

I’ve been addicted to World of Warcraft again. After not playing for most of Legion I’ve jumped back in again for the past few months and started a grind that seems to be nigh impossible, yet I want it done badly.
It all started with me making an overview of the things I have already obtained in Legion, on what characters and what I’m still missing. As I write this post I am down to three classes left to level (Warlock, Death Knight and Rogue) and I have obtained a boatload of Artifact skins. Getting seriously back into WoW has been a mixture of circumstances. I’m currently playing a lot on the Horde side with one of my best friends aswell as trying to get that Mythic+ 15 done on my Warrior on Alliance side. I’m actually having a lot of fun again and only play with the people I want now. Couple this with a severe decline of interest in FFXIV, Eureka has been a serious disappointment for me, and I find myself on Azeroth a lot once again.

One of the things that has me pulled back into WoW, next to playing with the right people and an immense collectors’ drive, is the fact that I can make progress towards something on any character I happen to log and don’t need to spend a lot of time doing it. Aside from the Mythic+ madness I’ve been solely focused on leveling all my classes to max level, do their class hall campaign, unlock the class hall mount and grind out Hidden Artifact skins. On top of that I finally managed to get my first two Challenge skins (the Fury Warrior one pictured above) and I feel like I can actually get done what I want to before Battle for Azeroth hits. In FFXIV if I want to level my Machinist I will have to queue up for roulettes because doing only the six available Beast Tribe dailies every day is too slow. In WoW I’ve been doing invasions, which grant atleast a level and take about 15-20 mins to do, aswell as just doing the main story line in the zones. I can literally play for 30 mins and make progress. In FFXIV that’s usually the time it takes for me to even get into a dungeon.
Even though WoW is a bit more chaotic at endgame, seriously Blizzard needs to stop throwing all these quests at me as I ding level 110, it’s also somehow less time consuming to get what you want, granted you need to plan very carefully so you don’t get sucked into the game and waste three hours doing nothing, which is something that tends to happen in MMO’s.

I’m chunking up my WoW time effectively, dividing it towards what I want done for the day and making sure I get it done aswell. Sometimes this entails running a Mythic+ or two for gear and progress towards getting the +15 on all my characters. Sometimes it’s doing a few quests in the Legionfall campaign so I can unlock another Class Hall mount. On my Warrior I’ve been diligently doing all my Emissary quests for the caches, but also all the PvP World Quests to edge closer to that new Prestige level. I plan to take my Paladin and my Priest through the Argus campaign in the near future so I can get proper gear and maybe start working towards tackling the Mage Tower challenge on them aswell. I can make this progress in tiny amounts, usually I don’t have more than 2-3 hours of game time a day anyway, and still slowly tick goals off my spreadsheet.

Compare that to running Eureka for three hours and maybe advance an elemental level or two… I feel like I can get more out of my limited game time in WoW right now.
It’s not to say I’m abandoning FFXIV outright, it will probably be my weekend MMO, but I will be playing it a lot less than I was a few months ago. I still plan to get all my classes to level 70, eventually.

For now though I’m working on a rather prestigious WoW project that I hope I can see through to the end: Obtain every Mage Tower Challenge skin in the game and do M+15 on all 12 classes. Why? Because those are the only skin variants (MT base and +15) that Blizzard will remove with BfA. And so I am going to work my butt off to get them all before that happens.

Current status: 0/12 M+15; 2/37 Challenge skins. Wish me luck!

 

Crafting Fever

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It feels like forever since I had a chance to properly sit down and write up a blog post. With work being busy and me being upped to work 40 hour weeks I tend to neglect a lot of things I would otherwise spend time on. Blogging is one of them. But today I felt relaxed enough with my time to carve out a chunk of my evening to write a nice post that is actually longer than 200 words and mostly screenshots.

First off: I’m skipping the Gaming Goal list for July. Honestly I’m just working way too much to realistically set goals for a lot of games. Add up that in the weekends I’ll mostly be busy with either social activites and/or clearing out the house (oh my lord we have so much junk) and you can see how it seriously eats away at my already limited free time. Even though I might not formally make a gaming goal post I do have some things I want to have achieved by the end of the month, most notably upgrading my Ninja relic on Sandrian and getting my Monk on her to level 50 in FFXIV. I’m only 14 items away from upgrading the relic as of today so it should be easily doable. As for the Monk, she’s sitting at level 41 now so that should be doable aswell. Other than that this month is a complete free for all. I’ve recently started playing The Secret World and I really want to keep doing that for atleast one night a week so there’s that and in the meantime I guess I’ll be spending most of my time on my 3DS since it’s really the only gaming device I can pick up and just play. Oh and Pokémon Go… When it ever rolls out here in the EU. I will probably spend a lot of time on that.
Now what HAVE I been up to the past few weeks?

Crafting, Crafting and more Crafting
Since I get home really tired and often am not finished with dinner and everything surrounding it before 8pm I’ve resorted to doing stuff in FFXIV that is relaxing to play. So instead of stressing out over capping my Lore, gearing my characers or all that nonsense I decided to turn my attention to Gathering and Crafting on both my characters. Sandrian already has Weaver at 60 and all the other crafting and gathering classes above level 20 atleast. Sarella however was a different story. I never really got into crafting on her so I either had to make do with having to level from scratch or somewhere in the level 5-10 range. I can proudly say that all my Crafting classes are atleast level 15 now with some of them already being 20 aswell. The Ixali dailies have been most helpful with this and I’m enjoying myself, which is what matters most. Although the leveling goes in a fairly slow pace I’m still happy with the progress I’m making and I’m not worried about pressure at all. I know I’ll get all these classes to 50 and then 60 eventually, it will probably just take a bit more time than someone who pursuits the game in a more hardcore fashion.

Next to Sarella I’ve also been busy on Sandrian. As I’ve mentioned before I pushed Weaver to level 60 with the help of the Moogle dailies that were introduced with patch 3.3. As much as I hated doing the Moogle quests the first time around in the Churning Mists I have to say that the Moogle dailies aren’t a problem at all. They take about 5-10 minutes a day to do and they give a lot of experience to leveling crafters… plus a ton of items you can trade in for either Relic items or the old Blue Scrip gear to boot! With me being in relatively bad crafting gear the level 58 gear has been a real big upgrade. So much that I can actually start crafting up collectables so I can upgrade my gear even further to the Red Scrip level.
I’m not an expert crafter at all and I don’t know much about what the ideal path to gearing up is, but I would like to delve a bit deeper into the Crafting world so I can make myself nice outfits, pets, mounts and other goodies. Maybe if I learn to play the market I’ll even start earning enough gil to buy my own house! Instead of just owning a room in the FC house.
Plus, doesn’t my little Miqo’te look incredibly cute with her oversized crafting hat on?

World of Warcraft?
I have been playing a bit of WoW on and off the past weeks. I made sure I got both the toys from the Midsummer Fire Festival, moving my achievement up to 117/150 toys collected now. I know there are a lot of easy to get toys out there still but my focus hasn’t really been on there. I do want to get to max rank with atleast the Brawler’s guild though since I want that mount… And Blizzard will be shutting it down for a while, probably with the pre-Legion patch. I’ve also broken 100k gold for the first time since Cataclysm. I’m at 120k now and still steadily going up. I’m not sure if I want to use this eventually to buy game-time again or if I want to use it to buy ingame exclusive stuff like expensive mounts. For now I’m just saving up so I can start off in Legion with a decent amount of gold on my name. I can’t believe the launch is in less than two months already!

Lastly I’ve been spending most of my time on my 3DS. I have finished New Super Mario Bros 2. and am working my way through several other games. In Donkey Kong Country Returns I’ve killed the second boss and arrived at world 3: Ruins. In Pokémon X I’m well on my way to getting the thrid badge and I’ve added Mario Kart 7 to my collection where I’ve completed the 50cc races and am now slowly making my way through 100cc. And boy that is a leap up in difficulty. I really can’t wait to start doing 150cc and unlocking characters. But all things in time.
As you can see/read I am working on enough projects when it comes to gaming. Progress isn’t that fast as it could be, due to my limited amount of time, but I do get some things done and even get to finish games! For someone who has a huge backlog, that is mostly unfinished, finishing any game right now is a real achievement. Especially considering the amount of time I have to spend on games in general.

A Breath of Air

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Yesterday evening I had invited myself over to a friend’s house on a whim for today. We met eachother through gaming and it’s always nice to spend a day with a fellow geek that loves games and anything games related as much as you do. He asked me to bring over my copy of Bravely Default so he could see what it was about, seeing as he was thinking of picking up the sequel. In return I nabbed his copy of “Ocarina of Time 3D” so I can play even more Zelda games than I’m already doing.
Speaking of Zelda, I’ve been poking around in “A Link Between Worlds” and am currently at my second dungeon, the House of Gales. I saved just before so I haven’t really peeked in yet but so far I’m enjoying the game. I have a little witch who flies me everywhere and I can rent any weapon I want, which ofcourse is super neat. I’m also carrying around monster guts. No idea what purpose they serve but hey, I’ll figure it out sooner or later. I do like the Zelda games. I’ve never really been into them as kid, but now I can appreciate the line of games a lot. They all tell a nice story and the Action oriented RPG is a nice breath of relief after being used to playing games like Pokémon and Final Fantasy, which are all turn based when it comes to fighting stuff.
I hope I can push through on LBW so I can start OoT, which apparently is one of the better installments in the series. That will also probably help me understand Majora’s Mask better.

As me and my friend were hanging out at his room and PC he decided to fire up Witcher 1 and play some. Having bought Witcher 3 myself I do know the series, but I never played enough to really get into anything. Not long after playing we came to the conclusion that Witcher 1 basically evolves around having sex with people, getting drunk and killing stuff. Ofcourse this is more hilarious to play together while commenting on what decisions to take and to try and find out which ladies we could talk into bed. We managed to woo some kind of princess by feeding her raw meat but other than that no one seemed to be really interested.
We laughed hard though at all the options in the game, and although it may not look that good graphics wise it’s still a seriously good game, firing up the desire within me to pick up my copy of Witcher 3 again and give it another go. The problem is that right now I have so many games to divide myself between that I don’t think it’s the best idea if I do that, but my interest in playing is certainly back.

In other news. I’m back on Azeroth.
I had gotten my tax money back last week and figured ah what the heck, I’ll buy a WoW sub. With Legion coming out in about 3 months time I’ll have enough time to earn some gold before it actually hits. Or well “earn”. Basically abuse the Garrison mission system while it’s still in place. It’s nice to just log in and do my daily gold stuff and log out again. When I feel like it I log in for a bit longer and farm some old raids for mounts that I haven’t obtained yet (I’m looking at you Invincible) and sell the gear, which in turn makes me money. It’s a nice thing to do and WoW has been, and always shall be, my comfort game. I’ll mostly be online after work just sorting out missions etc, so I don’t think it’ll take away too much of time from FFXIV which I still see as my main MMO for now.
I do kind of feel like the spark to game and get stuff done is slowly getting back to me again and it’s a very nice mood to be in. Coupled with my team coordinator being back again at work and me starting a rigorous training this Thursday to finally lose weight I can only say I’m feeling really positive at the moment. And I hope I can hold on to this feeling for a while.

What Blizzard Does Best

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I have played World of Warcraft since 2007. I remember exactly how my adventure started: on a crappy computer making a mage on my ex’s account. I could barely play for 5 minutes straight without everything freezing up, but I played and I loved it.
Since then the Blizzard franchise has grown enormously, I got into playing Diablo 3 when it was released. And I knew about Starcraft (although RTS really isn’t my genre). Now next to those classic three titles we also have Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch. Blizzard’s empire grows.

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One of the things that Blizzard has refined to an art is crossgame rewards. I don’t even know where it started exactly, but right now it’s perfectly normal to get items for all of your Blizzard games when you buy a Blizzcon ticket or a Collector’s edition of one of their games. Sometimes they will do promotions, and one of the last ones was getting a new hero portrait in Hearthstone for dinging a new character level 20 in World of Warcraft.
Being the collector that I am, I dusted off my World of Warcraft account and created a Warlock. It’s one of those classes I barely touched, and seeing as it was only level 20 I just picked up something new to keep the flavour fresh.
I think I started levelling on Thursday and I just dinged 20 about 10 minutes ago. It was fast and easy and it felt nice running around on Azeroth again, but it didn’t make me want to renew my sub.

I am happy with my reward though. Lady Liadrin is kickass and I much rather look at her as Paladin hero than Uther. Not to mention you unlock her as golden, animated hero which I just love to bits and pieces. This might actually make me play Hearthstone again, although right now I don’t really see where I can find the time to do so.

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I really hope Blizzard keeps doing these types of cross-promotions. It attracts new players to some of their games, or makes old players come back. It’s nice that you can earn stuff like this without having to pay for it (level 20 character is doable on a WoW starter account, meaning you play for free) and for someone like me who likes to collect and finish everything it really scratches a certain itch.

The next crossgame goodies I get are the ones that come with the Overwatch release… And I really can’t wait to get my hands on some of them.

Player Decency

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As I logged onto World of Warcraft today, I was poked by someone who I had played with in Cataclysm. This particular Resto Druid was once one of our core members, but he quit WoW to focus on his girlfriend and his studies on university and I haven’t really seen him back online, untill about two to three months ago.
He wanted to raid with us, but unfortunately he came in around the time we cleared Heroic Archimonde and basically stopped raiding… And let the guild die altogether. Everytime I would log onto my account for my Garrison stuff I would see him online and would feel guilty about him coming back to a dead guild. There was not much I could do about it though, I have tried to keep this particular guild alive for a very long time by myself and can just not invest more time in it without completely burning myself out.

So anyway, our Druid poked me and told me he was thinking about leaving the guild to join another guild which was made up of his IRL friends. I was kind of surprised he had waited that long, but as he explained he felt like he wanted to share it with me and our guildmaster before actually departing. He thanked us for the fun times in Cataclysm and we exchanged Battle.net ID’s before wishing him the best in his new guild and him departing.
It has been a very long time since I saw someone actually be so polite and nice when leaving the guild. Most people nowadays leave their guilds or clans without a word at all, or leave bitter with a post of resentment. To have someone be friendly and thankful for the fun times the guild has brought him honestly feels like a breath of fresh air. I know not everyone in the World of Warcraft community is toxic, and that there are enough decent players out there. But to finally experience one of them again has been amazing and I’m truly sorry I couldn’t provide him with a better experience in the guild than I had done.

In turn this has gotten me thinking about my own behaviours in MMO’s. In World of Warcraft, and FFXIV for that matter, I’ve become such a veteran that running any dungeon has become routine. I only say hi at the start and then continue to run the dungeon in silence untill the end. I don’t really get involved with community/server driven stuff anymore and I don’t really organize much myself. This is partly because I don’t have the time to do it but I guess the biggest reason is that I feel I don’t really have anything to offer. In WoW the content lull is kind of big, and seeing as I main DPS again it’s very hard to find/make groups for stuff, especially if your friends aren’t around anymore. In FFXIV all of my high level/max level classes are DPS. I haven’t really pushed myself to level a tank or a healer and I really want to, so I’ve been steadily leveling my Astrologian so that I may take part in stuff easier and quicker. On Cactuar I have decided to level my Warrior so I can provide my Free Company there (Greysky Armada) with someone who can tank content for them, but also so that it may be easier to organize stuff on my own.
I’m also trying to be more chatty ingame. I notice that if I’m focused I barely talk and sometimes feel like I’m in an FC just for being in an FC. I know that FFXIV has it’s content lull aswell and people are a bit bored by it, but socializing can be done anytime, with or without content and I want to try my best to do this more and better.

So instead of hoping to be more active online, I hope to be more engaged online, be more social and make stuff happen more. That’s eventually what MMO’s are about no?