Tag Archives: WoW

I Set Goals… And Never Came Back

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So. I realized that my last post was setting goals for February. And then I never came back.
Kind of funny how those things go. A lot has happened in the past three and a half months. Work has been extremely overwhelming. I didn’t get the job that I applied for at the end of January, much to my dismay, and in the meantime lockdown due to COVID has been dragging on and on in the Netherlands. We’ve finally had some rules loosened and vaccinations are progressing rapidly so maybe there’s a bit of light at the end of the tunnel.
Next to a lot of disappointments there has also been one big bright point. I guess people driving home the idea that you “shouldn’t look for love because it will find you” scored a point with me this year. I’ve met someone very special, after a long time of being single and basically giving up on the idea that I would meet someone that would love me for who I am. But I’ve met that someone and he’s been brightening my days for the past three months. I’m so incredibly thankful that he came into my life and I hope we can build something that will last for a long time.

As for the gaming front. Well. I guess a lot has happened and not happened.
The World of Warcraft guild I’m in has moved to Horde side. Unfortunately recruitment on Alliance side seems to have completely bled dry so they made the hard decision to swap over to Horde so Mythic raiding can happen in patch 9.1.
I moved with them and rolled a new character and am currently raiding a bit again as Elemental Shaman. I’m having a decent amount of fun although I’ve not really touched Mythic raiding yet and I’ve not really found the time to do Mythic+. I’m hoping with my workload dying down a bit I can spend a bit more time in WoW and push to get some achievements done.

Next to that I’ve been catching up in Final Fantasy XIV. I was a few patches behind and worked my way back up to the patch 5.5 content when it comes to main story. My current goals are getting the final raid of Eden done, the final Nier raid and get completely caught up with the mainstory. I’m also still leveling my crafters and almost have my Alchemist at level 80, which means I only have a few more to go after. With Endwalker getting a release date I have around 5-6 months to get caught up on everything, which should be more than enough time. I just need to remind myself to log in and actually play.

As far as League of Legends goes… I basically stopped playing somewhere in February and I’ve been struggling really hard to get back into the game. I’ve been playing ARAMs and a few normals here and there and participated in some Clash but otherwise I’ve not touched ranked in months. I’m really soul searching on what I want to play and if I still want to make the push towards Gold or not. It also hasn’t helped that I’ve been duoing with people that make me tilt. I think I’m better off staying solo and look to grind up on my own. I’ve been asking for some tips and tricks and once I can settle on a role and a champion I’m going to just start pushing again.

All in all it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster in my life the past few months but I’m finally feeling like I’m landing on my feet again. Let’s hope it will give me enough headspace to do more than just work, sleep and eat.

February Goals: Shaking Things Up

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January passed like the freight trains passing my house at night. Quietly and fast. I feel like 2021 so far is just a continuation of 2020, but with more riots everywhere. And with everywhere I mean everywhere, including my own country. It’s been an interesting time, compounded by a lot of real life things not really going the way I hoped they would. I’m lowkey hoping that February will bring a bit more calm and stability back into my life, mostly so I don’t feel so stressed out all the time anymore and I can actually enjoy my time off with more than feeling pure exhaustion all the time.
I guess one of the things I should start doing is going to bed earlier (11 instead of 12) because I’m already noticing the major improvement in my mood from that extra hour of sleep I’m catching.

Anyway. I figured I’d give the whole “goals post” another try since I managed to use it succesfully before and also to give a bit of an insight into what I’m up to this month. As usual this post will be mostly gaming focused, I will discuss my real life goals in a broader post somewhere at the end of March. It needs less checking up on because they are less concrete than my gaming ones.

What do I want to achieve in February?

League of Legends

  • Transition from Support to ADC. I’m not enjoying myself playing Support right now, but I’m enjoying myself a lot as ADC. In the end I should play what I enjoy. Right?
  • Get my ADC account to level 30. I made an account to just play ADC specifically. It’s level 11 at the moment and I want to get it to level 30 and make it my “main” account for the time being, mostly so that I have two accounts to my disposal. One where I can test new things on and fuck around in solo Q and another where I can “try hard” and actually climb the ladder.

MMO’s

  • Gear up my Mage in Mythic/Mythic+ in World of Warcraft. I’ve been sneaking some time on WoW again here and there and I’m mostly playing my Horde Mage. I’m at the point where I can’t really get that much gear from doing Heroic dungeons anymore so I’m wanting to make the tradition to Mythics and Mythic+.
  • Catch up on the mainstory in FFXIV. I’ve not properly played the game in forever and there’s a lot of story to go through, aswell as the final part of the Eden raid. I want to see this and will take a few evenings just playing the game and catching up.

Other games

  • Finish Crash Bandicoot
  • Finish Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

Pretty ambitious goals but, with the pandemic still raging, I don’t really have much else to do in my spare time next to gaming. I have enough time for all of it, if I keep a decent sleep schedule. When I’m not terribly exhausted I should easily be able to get a few good hours of gaming in every day. I also realise that February is a tad shorter than other months, but I’m sure I can make it work. It’s time to get myself out of the stressy and depressed month that is January and look forward to fun times in February. I hope I can take all of you on that journey with me!

World of Warcraft: A Mood

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Shadowlands. Since I’ve not really used my blog since September last year I’ve not gotten around to do a post about it yet. And even though I realize the expansion has been out for almost two months now, I still feel like I want to say something about it and my current state of playing WoW.

Originally I took time off at the end of October so I could enjoy Shadowlands launch and don’t get too far behind with leveling compared to the rest of the guild. Unfortunately with Blizzard pushing the release date back I had to cancel that free time and wasn’t able to take it off for the new launch date. As such when I finally got around to playing a lot of my guildies were already max level and gearing up while I was still struggling to get to level 60. I made it eventually and started to slowly tank things on my Warrior when I realized that, once again, Blizzard had decided that Protection Warriors had too much fun in Battle for Azeroth and completely broke the spec. I don’t think I’ve felt like this much of a paper tank since the launch of Mists of Pandaria, another infamous stroke of Blizzard nerfing Prot Warriors genius. I struggled a lot, didn’t like my class and didn’t enjoy tanking because I felt I was more of a burden than a tank.
As such I wasn’t online nearly as often as I intended to be. I wasn’t there to tank Mythic and later Mythic+ and as such I lost my tank spot for raids. A part of me understands but I was gutted. I don’t like playing DPS Warrior and there was apparently no way I was getting my tankspot back for this raidtier. So after a lot of agonizing and feeling like shit I decided to take a step back from raiding after we cleared normal. I play this game to have fun and if I don’t have fun and only feel frustrated then what’s the point in playing? So I stepped back and tried alts and just poking about in different things. For now I’m mostly trying to keep up with the bare minimum in content and it’s been quite liberating. I have a lot of time to play other games now and it’s really nice. Now that I’ve cleared up I’m more or less a casual player for the moment let’s get down to what really matters.

What do I actually think of the expansion itself?
Honestly, I’m very 50/50 about it. The zones are once again well made and, especially in case of Bastion, stunning. The covenant stories are fun and make me want to play through all of them atleast once. I’ve finished the Kyrian campaign this week and am slowly working on the Night Fae one on my Horde Mage. I have a Monk that I went the Maldraxxus covenant with so that only leaves Revendreth. The stories are nice and I like that they spaced it out so you had something to look forward to every week.
Overall I’m enjoying the lore. The raid lore, the dungeon lore, the Maw and Torghast lore. Blizzard never failed at making stories interesting so there’s that.

But honestly that’s kind of where my excitement ends for the moment. I really, really, dislike Torghast. It feels forced and unfun and it’s horrible to play solo. I only go there for the weekly quest and then make sure I get the hell out again. It’s not my cup of tea and the only way I’ll run it is if I do it with others while talking on Discord because I need the banter as distraction.
Endgame in WoW is still the same as it was in BfA. There is PvP, there are Mythic+ dungeons to run and there is raiding. I’m currently not doing any of that. I do want to get into Mythic+ again at some point, even if it’s just to get the reward for doing everything on +15 and I may even want to dabble in Arena to earn that mount but otherwise the endgame for me is a bit of a no-go right now. Alternatively Professions have been a bit of a bust aswell. There is no Archaeology in Shadowlands and I’ve already maxed out Cooking, Mining and Blacksmithing. They removed the star system for recipes and by the time you unlock the good stuff you’ve already outgeared it.

All in all, as much as I do like casually putzing about and leveling alts and other shit, the expansion hasn’t been able to fully grasp me so far. It kind off feels like a rerun of BfA to me and that expansion in my eyes failed terribly. Maybe I’m slowly getting to the point where I’m able to let go of WoW and move on to other things. But I have said this before and I always seem to come back. Who knows, maybe I’ll get gripped by the sudden urge to play in a few months and will pour all my time into it again. Only time will tell.

2021: A Brighter Future Thanks To Goals

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I guess I’m a bit late to the party, but I would like to talk about my goals for 2021, both on a personal level aswell as gaming related.
I had a bit of time to think about it the past week, seeing as I finally had some time off, and I think I’ve managed to formulate some decent goals to work on. The focus this year will be mostly on personal non-gaming related goals, but as always some gaming has snuck it’s way in because it’s my biggest hobby.

So what do I want to achieve in 2021?
I think the most important overarching goal is get to a better physical and mental health level. Both of those have suffered considerably in 2020 and I don’t think I can sustain how I’m living right now and come out good at the other end. So I’ve set a few goals to help me get back on track. In no particular order they are:

  • Establish a healthy sleeping pattern
  • Exercise every day
  • Work on losing weight, dropping below 70kg is the goal
  • Take better care of myself personally, both inside and out

I was on track with these goals at the start of 2020 but the pandemic threw me back a lot. I’m at my heaviest point right now and I’ve had weeks where I would barely leave my house. It’s been very unhealthy and it’s been causing me both physical and mental issues. As such I really want to take better care of myself. Get myself on a healthy sleep schedule so I’m not exhausted at work every morning and feel like I need hours and hours of sleep once I have a few days off. I’ve noticed that getting some sort of exercise in every day helps with sleeping at night, so I’ve been making an effort to go for a walk every day. Atleast 30 minutes but I’m up to 45-50 most days now. When the weather is bad I’m planning to use my Ring Fit Adventure that I bought on release but barely used. I just need to keep my body moving and this is the perfect way to do it.
Next to exercise I also want to take better care of myself in other aspects. I’ve been very lazy when it comes to some personal hygiene and care and need to fix that. Stuff like picking up flossing again instead of only brushing my teeth. Take better care of my skin. Keep an eye on what I eat, meal plan in advance and stick to it. I’ve been eating way too much junkfood and need to get to cooking more healthy things. No more skipping meals. No more eating breakfast 3 hours after I started working. Just keep a healthy food rhythm going.

Additionally I want to establish/achieve the following:

  • Plan my weeks every week and stick to my planning.
  • Get a cleaning routine going in the weekends
  • Learn to cook more/healthier dishes

Next to not really taking care of myself properly on a personal level I’ve also let my house cleaning slide. I don’t want to say that it’s unliveable here, because it’s really not, but I notice I get lazy and then don’t clean for 2-3 weeks at a time. I let the laundry pile up, and dishes, and I don’t think I’ve cleaned my windows in months. That’s going to change. Sunday is my designated chores day and I’ve made a list of everything that I need to do weekly, bi-weekly and monthly. On Saturday morning I look at my list and plan my chores accordingly for Sunday and actually do them. I started doing this last weekend and I notice that I feel much better once my house is decluttered and cleaned. It also massively helps with my allergies so that’s an extra bonus.
Setting structure in general is going to be important to me, aswell as sticking to said structure. I have a weekly planner that I’ve started using to plan what I do in my weeks outside of work. This covers weekly meal planning, task planning, when to blog, when to call people to make appointments and what games I want to play on which days. It helps me with not just lying down on the couch after work and then doing absolutely nothing but wallow in misery all night. I don’t plan everything into detail but I do write down the things I want to be doing during the evening and try to stick to it. It’s been working so far.

Finally I want to learn to cook more dishes than I currently do. There’s so many things I can experiment with and especially during weekends I have a bit more time to do so. I will probably use that to create some posts on here. Speaking of the blog… I’ve currently planned three days a week for blog posts. I have enough content to write about the coming months, as I will describe in my gaming goals bit, and I just need a steady outlet for the chaos in my head. Right now I have blog posts planned on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Let’s see if I can stick to that shall we?

Of course a goals for 2021 post wouldn’t be complete without writing down gaming goals. This is mainly a gaming blog after all and throughout the pandemic I atleast haven’t stopped playing games so there’s that.

What are my plans for gaming in 2021?

Actually I don’t have that many big plans for gaming in 2021. Or maybe I do, but they’re condensed to less games, making them seem smaller. For now though these are the main things I will be working on gaming wise in 2021:

  • Climb the solo/duo queue ladder in League of Legends. I want to get to atleast Gold tier, but climbing higher is the aim.
  • Keep up with content in Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft
  • Finish atleast one single player game per month

Only three goals. So small and yet so big. I think the most important one for me will be the League of Legends one. I guess some elaboration is needed and that will come in a future post but let’s just say that I’ve been completely sucked back into LoL since last Worlds. I’ve been following two streamers and am active within their communities. On top of that I’m dabbling in a bit of coaching related stuff to get me better at the game. Again I will detail this more in a coming post but this project will probably dominate a lot of 2021 for me.
Keeping up with the two MMO’s I play will be a standard thing aswell. I’ve been struggling with Shadowlands in WoW and am currently taking a break from raiding for a myriad amount of reasons, but I do want to keep up with the lore and renown cap every week. I’ve been taking a small break from FFXIV, mostly due to Shadowlands launch, but want to pick that back up again and keep up with the content there aswell.

Finally I’m once again going to try and tackle my backlog. I’ve not bought that many games last year and I have actually been slowly pouring more time in single player games over the past few weeks. My aim is to complete one game a month, this can be a long game or a short game, as long as I see the credits roll. As always that is my main goal with playing games, any time I spend extra on it is a bonus.

So yeah. These are my goals for 2021. I feel like I’ve made a good start on them this week, now I just need to grit my teeth and follow through. For now though I’m pretty happy with what I’ve set to achieve for myself and I will keep you updated on how things develop.

Sandy’s MMO Sunday: FFXIV Galore, August 30th 2020

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Newest Yo-Kai mount

Whew. A lot of stuff has happened over in MMO country the past few weeks. The new MMO from Amazon is being tested as we speak but for me the focus always lies on my main two MMO’s, so those are the only things I’ll focus on in my blog posts. I mean, I can’t write about something I have no interest in, right?
We have gotten a release date for Shadowlands in World of Warcraft, October 27th. Final Fantasy XIV had patch 5.3 drop, aswell as the Moonfire Faire and Rising events and the Yo-Kai watch event renewed.
Since I’m more or less on a break from WoW, after basically gaining all the stuff I wanted to before pre-patch would hit, I’ve gone straight back to playing a lot of FFXIV. It also helps that my WoW guildies have more or less moved there aswell for the time being so I have more people to play with again but I’ve always kept up with FFXIV on the side, especially when the newest patch would hit. So this was no different with 5.3

First thing’s first: I finished the 5.3 mainstory. I’m not going to spoil anything about it here because I would hate to get spoiled myself so I won’t do it unto others. The only thing I have to say, once again, is damn you Square Enix for getting me to care about this world and the characters inhabiting it. On more than one occassion FFXIV has managed to make me cry and the latest patch has not been an exception to that. What kind of tears they were I’ll leave up to you to find out yourselves if you play the game and have yet to go through this part of the story.
Next to the mainstory there were a plethora of other things to unlock, with the most important for me the new “beast tribe” in the form of the Dwarves. It feels kind of weird to see them as beast tribe since they are basically the mirror race of Lalafells but in a way it makes sense. I’m in love with the music that plays in their little area in Lakeland and I can’t wait to unlock the mount you get from them: an actual battle tank. It’s also helping me to level up my crafting jobs since I bounced kind of hard off of the whole Ishgard restoration. I’m not sure why but I just really didn’t enjoy it. Maybe I’ll get into it again at some point but for now I’m happy to level up my crafters with these dailies and so far it has gotten my Carpenter to level 80 and my Weaver to level 75.
I have yet to unlock the new 24 man raid, Puppet’s Bunker, but I’m sure I’ll get around to doing that next week.

As mentioned there were also a few events going the past few weeks and I’ve partaken in all of them. The Moonfire Faire has gotten me a lovely outfit, as seen in the screenshot above. The Rising gave us the Wind-up Ardbert and the Yo-Kai event came back with a vengeance with new minions and weapons to get for the classes added in Stormblood and Heavensward and, after getting all of those, a new mount also pictured above. I decided to try and get this done as soon as I possibly could seeing as the first two weeks of an event like this the FATE farm trains are going strong and the longer you wait the bigger the chance that it comes down to having to solo the lot which isn’t something I would recommend.
It’s really nice just getting these things done, especially events like the Rising that come with a message from the development team every year. For now though I will have to wait untill the next event which will probably be in October around Halloween.

Level 80 Dark Knight ding

Next to doing the new 5.3 content and the various events I also doubled down on leveling up the last remaining battle jobs I have left. As of this morning I managed to ding level 80 on my Dark Knight, as pictured above, and now I only have Gunbreaker left. I unlocked the job and did the level 60 beast tribe dailies aswell as the level 60 job quest so far. I have to get used to Gunbreaker a lot after playing Dark Knight. There’s more buttons to press for damage since you basically have two single target and one AoE rotation with their respective cooldowns. Then there’s the whole ammo mechanic that I’m still learning but all in all I can see how people like this class and I can’t wait to get it to level 80 and finally get that coveted Amaro mount afterwards. If I keep on playing FFXIV like I’ve been doing for the past weeks I won’t have any doubts that I will get to that level 80 within the next two weeks.

Together with getting level 80 on my Dark Knight I also finished off the final 15 FATEs that I needed in the Tempest to hit rank 3 FATEs with all the zones. I now have access to all rank 3 vendors in the zones aswell as the special vendor in the Crystarium. I see that they sell a lot of stuff that I still want and for that I will need to farm more FATEs, but for now I’m content with not doing any untill my Gunbreaker gets into Shadowbringers content. It’s been quite a dull grind and I’m happy that I was able to complete it. Another notch on my belt so to speak.

Other content consumption
Next to dedicating a lot of time to FFXIV I’ve also been busy with consuming other types of content.
Lucifer dropped the first part of season five last week and I’ve been slowly going through that. I only have about two episodes to go now untill the mid season break and there have been a few interesting plot points so far. Tom Ellis is putting on a top notch performance and I’m happy to see it back on screen and I hope the second half will come out sooner rather than later.
I’ve been reading a lot of Robin Hobb books, that centre around the realm of the Elderlings, the past months and I’m finally down to the last book of the entire series. This means that I’m basically on book 16/16 right now. It’s been quite a ride and honestly the worldbuilding she does is amazing. I really want to know how the series ends but also don’t want it to end at the same time. It’s quite a conondrum. Right now I’m reading 2-4 chapters per day and I’m about 1/3rd of the way into the final book.
Finally my time has been consumed by watching a lot of League of Legends. All of the big regions are in play-off mode right now and I feel like my TV has been on with LoL for the past 48 hours. I’ve been catching games from Europe, North America, China and Korea. It’s a great way to spend time but also nice to have on as “background noise” while doing other things. Next week are the finals everywhere and I can’t wait to see how things play out in both Europe and North America specifically.

All in all I’m pretty happy with the progress I’ve made in FFXIV and I hope I can continue this streak next week. Maybe I’ll hop back into WoW again aswell, even if it’s just to clean out inventories in preparation for the pre-patch and maybe run some old raids now that we’ve not all been scaled down to level 50 yet. I guess we’ll see. For now though the match between Rogue and Mad Lions is only 30 mins away from starting and that will probably keep me occupied untill well in the evening.

Sandy’s (non)MMO Sunday: Melting Melting Melting!

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There’s a heatwave absolutely terrorizing northwestern Europe. It’s one of those things that has become the new “norm” with climate change but unfortunately my country especially isn’t trained enough yet to deal with this. We’ve been so used to having a mild climate, cool summers, gentle winters, that these obscenely hot temperatures are throwing everything into disarray. The worst part isn’t even the fact that it’s 30+ degrees for over a week, it’s that our houses are built to keep the heat in. So once they heat up, they’re almost impossible to cool back down. It’s horrendous and one of the reasons I’m keeping most, if not all, of my electronics turned off. My computer and consoles all just generate way too much heat to use and with this heat lasting atleast another 3-4 days I think the only times I can get a bit of MMO time in is either really early in the morning, or not at all. I’m blessed enough to be spending a few days at the office while enjoying airconditioning, so there’s that, but otherwise it’s grin and bear it and wait untill the heat breaks.
On top of the heat it’s also prime insect time and there are way too many flying bugs in my house right now and it’s giving me the creeps. I have had to catch and release atleast two moths that made their way in and I’ve been trying to chase out flies and other winged insects while trying to keep as much as I can out. I’m doubting if I want to install some screens in my windows to keep everything out, but outside of a few weeks in summer I don’t really have that many insects around so I’m still doubting whether or not I should.

Anyway, that’s the current state of things and as such I’ve had to rethink how I spend my free time. Obviously playing a lot of World of Warcraft and/or Final Fantasy XIV is out of the question since I’d either have to use my PC or PS4, both of which generate a lot of heat. Added on top of that I’m kind of burned out on WoW anyway so I don’t really feel like logging more than two times a week to keep up with emissaries on my Warrior. FFXIV is releasing patch 5.3 next week though so I may jump into that, once temperatures have come down again (hopefully) at the end of the week.

So instead of playing MMO’s I’ve been reading a lot and playing on my Switch. Book wise I’m working my way through the Rain Wilds Chronicles by Robin Hobb and I’m at the final book now. Games wise I’ve been putting a bit of time in Fire Emblem: Three Houses and finished off the first official mission. There’s a lot of things to take into consideration by playing this game, especially with the whole “daily life” aspect that happens in between the battles. It feels like there’s always so much to do and not enough points to spend to do everything. Of course this will change the further I get into the game but for now I’m slightly annoyed that I can’t do everything I want… But oh well.
In Pokémon I finally picked up where I left off on the Isle of Armor and took my Kubfu to the Tower of Water so it could evolve into Urshifu Water form. I’m kinda sad to see the cute little fellow evolve but I know it was one of the big goals of this DLC so I did it anyway. Now I’m working on the questline to unlock Dynamaxing for it, but I kind of abandoned that for a bit to chase more Pokémon to fill up my Pokédex with. I’m currently sitting on 330/400 Pokémon caught for the Galarian Pokédex and I made a list for my friend who has Shield, I have Sword, of exclusives that I still need. Those add up to about 18 Pokémon which means I still need to catch around 50 on my own. So I’ve been working on that and it’s slightly annoying since most of the Pokémon that I still need now are either a very low encounter chance, 1-5%, or only appear during certain weather types. I’m super close though, I’ve never been this close to completing a Pokédex since I was a kid and had 146/150 caught in Pokémon Blue.

All in all I foresee a lot more reading and playing Switch games this week aslong as temperatures stay the way they are. As for the rest of today… The final regular week of the League championships in Europe and North America are happening this weekend and a lot of things are still at stake so it’s a really good weekend to watch. I need to do some light chores still, folding some laundry, taking out the trash, cleaning up my tables and of course there’s the matter of cooking dinner while trying not to melt.
So yeah, this is what my days look like right now. What are you guys up to? Let me know in the comments!

 

 

Chasing Completion

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I’ve alluded to it multiple times but I feel like I’ve done pretty much everything I wanted to do in the World of Warcraft. As such I’ve been trying to come up with new things to keep me occupied in the game, rather than taking an (extended) break. So when all else fails, or better when I don’t want to do challenging group content, I return to my completionist roots and start working away on earning achievements again. One of the more notable ones that I was close to was to get 100 reputations to Exalted. I think I only needed 5 more before the weekend. I found out that I could get two “free” reputations to Exalted by going back to Desolace and finish a, for some reason, resetted questline involving two centaur clans. After completing said questchain I got awarded with both their reputations being set to Exalted. The next reputation that I managed to get up, with the help of Timewalking, was the Sha’tari Defense reputation from Warlords of Draenor. For some reason though that one didn’t count towards my 100 so I had to think of other reputations to grind.
And that’s how I spent two to three hours of my Sunday grinding out Gadgetzan, Ratchet and Everlook reputation by committing pirate genocide in Tanaris. I got lucky with another player seeking to do the same and we grouped up, making the farm twice as fast. At the end of that grind I walked away with all those reps to Exalted, the achievement completed and a mount and title earned. There’s not many reputations that I’ve not touched now. I think three PvP ones are most notable, Silverwing Sentinels from Warsong Gulch, League of Arathor from Arathi Basin and Wrynns Vanguard from Ashran. I doubt I’ll ever get those to Exalted since I’ve not been interested in running battlegrounds for a long time now.
As far as PvE reptutations go… I still have Ravenholdt on Neutral and if I really wanted to I guess I could go for Insane in the Membrane, but I’m not that crazy yet. There’s Chromie rep to get and a variety of fishing reputations aswell as Draenor Garrisson bodyguard stuff. Nothing that is very appealing to me right now. I’m also still steadily working away on getting Exalted with the Rajani, I’m done with Uldum Accord, but that rep is limited to the assaults and dailies that I can do. I’m currently sitting around 17.5/21k though so I think I should be done with them around the weekend.

I’ve also started to do achievements that are specifically tied to Battle for Azeroth. Killing all rares in the various zones. Finding all treasures. Read scrolls and ride rickety planks or find grey items that are hidden in plain sight, if you know where to look. Eventually I’ll get to the harder to get ones and back to Nazjatar and Mechagon meta achievements, if I can keep interested until that.
There’s also some older “group” achievements that I’m eyeing to do. They mostly evolve around raid/dungeon achievements that also give a mount and I see that I’ve basically stopped doing them around Mists of Pandaria. Since that is all outdated content now I’m going to try to do as much as I can on my own and maybe ask a friend or two to assist me with the rest. That should keep me busy for a while atleast.

I’m also maybe planning to casually level up some Allied Race toons, if only to unlock their respective heritage armours and get those achievements out of the way aswell. Leveling is pretty braindead right now and fast enough to keep me entertained while also getting reasonable progress when I play for an hour or so. I’ve been poking around on a Lightforged Draenei Paladin and a Zandalari Troll Monk. Seeing as how I play tank and healer respectively I get pretty fast dungeon queues and when I don’t feel like doing dungeons I can just switch to a dps spec and quest my way up. By no means is this a big time consumption for me and I’m not going to make it some sort of “must do” goal but it’s nice to sometimes play a lower level toon and not have to think about too much.

Anyway, before this post turns even more rambly that’s what I’m mostly up to in WoW these days and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. I’m also still playing FFXIV and leveling my Dark Knight there now, but that also limits itself to doing the pixie dailies and a random dungeon when I feel like it. I feel like summer is kind of taking away my will to game and instead I’m trying to be more outside. Be it in an active way or just lounging on my balcony while reading a book, it feels good to be in the fresh air and about instead of staying cooped up in my apartment the entire day. Especially now that my vacation is over and I’m back to work I feel like I need to make use of my free time to get away from my house, before the walls start closing in on me.
And inbetween that I’m satisfying my completionist urges. Let’s hope those can tie me over untill the Shadowlands prepatch.

End of Vacation

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They say that time flies when you’re having fun. It’s not a wrong saying but time seems to fly by in general these days. I blinked and my two week vacation was done. I went to my cabin in the woods. I’ve relaxed. I did a small project that was sort of related to work but not really and I’ve slipped back into the habit of reading a bit every day.
I managed to get my Warrior to level 80 in Final Fantasy XIV and I’m turning my attention towards leveling Dark Knight now. Being a tank aswell I’m sure I’ll have that up to 80 in no time and then it’s just Gunbreaker left.
I’ve been poking about in World of Warcraft the most on my Warrior. I’ve been diligently doing my dailies on her and managed to get the Uldum Accord reputation up to Exalted, which means I can drop doing those dailies (yay!) and only have the Rajani reputation left to get to Exalted… I’m only 5k reputation off that so I think I can get to it next week maybe.
With working on these reputations I realized I wasn’t too far off the 100 reputations to Exalted achievement. I went back to Desolace to bump up the centaur reputations to Exalted there and I’m working on the Sha’tari Defense reputation now that we have Warlords of Draenor timewalking up. If I can finish that up and get Exalted with the Rajani I only have one more reputation left. Unfortunately that one will require some grinding on my end since it’s one of the goblin town reputations (Gadgetzan) and I’m about 5k off there aswell… And the only way to get that up is to repeatedly kill pirates in Tanaris that give 5 reputation per kill. I kill them pretty fast but it’s 200 kills for 1k rep so that means that I’ll have to kill around 1000 mobs to get where I need to be. I could sit down for a day and grind it out but I’m not that masochistic so I’m taking 30 minutes here and there to dedicate to that grind.

I’m not sure how to feel about these two weeks off. I did what I wanted to do in regards to taking a weekend away from my house and I managed to read through two full books, but on the gaming front and on the relaxation front I’m not that happy. I do feel more relaxed than I have been in a long time, but I’m also still somewhat restless and dreading to go back to work on Monday. In the gaming world I’ve been mostly hopping back and forth between games but never sat down to play through something properly. I spent most of my time poking around on WoW and chasing silly goals and I did a light leveling bit on FFXIV but that’s mostly it. I didn’t touch Ratchet & Clank and I didn’t touch the Final Fantasy 7 Remake.
I didn’t even manage to keep up with my weekly planner, something I have been doing since I got it and it kind of stings. Luckily I’ll have a rematch next week which I will be planning out tomorrow.. But it still doesn’t sit quite right with me.
If anything it shows me I’m still far away from forming good habits and having a clear structure to my days. Going back to work may help a bit in that regard but I struggle with making “optimal use” of my free time. I tend to spend a lot of time just lounging on the couch and staring into the abyss or the tv while time ticks away and it annoys me. I want to be more productive and I want to have more fun doing things after work but I’m just struggling to motivate myself to get there.

For now though it’s time that I get a good night’s sleep and then have my final day of no work that’s probably filled with doing chores tomorrow… I can’t wait till my next two weeks off.

Cabin in the Woods

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Vacation has been treating me well. It’s taken a few days to wind down and not feel completely exhausted, 5 to be precise, and I’ve been enjoying the stress free life. A part of me is curious how my team is doing without me but I need to learn to let go, so I’m doing exactly that.
I’ve been spending a lot of time sleeping, doing as little as possible and gaming. Especially World of Warcraft has seen a lot of love the past few days with me kind of abandoning the gold grind for a bit and instead hunting achievements on my Warrior. The army of alts that I’ve been using to grind gold have kind of worn me out and as such it was nice to put that on hold and just play my Warrior and not worry about running EVERYTHING because I feel like I have to. We still do our weekly heroic Ny’alotha clear and I’m helping people with some Mythic+ keys but overall I’m noticing that my playtime has gone down significantly and my focus has shifted to other things.
Like playing Final Fantasy XIV! The next patch, 5.3, is due to land on August 11th. I managed to get the Ixion mount that I had been wanting from the Moogle Tome Event today so I’m essentially done with that for now. My Warrior is sitting at level 78 and I managed to unlock two more Relic Weapons for my Dragoon and Bard respectively. I love that they only take 1000 Tomestones of Poetics to unlock since you kind of get those passively if you do roulettes anyway. After my Warrior gets to level 80 I only have Dark Knight and Gunblade left and then I’m done with all my battle jobs. I may turn my attention back to crafting instead then to get all those jobs from 70 to 80 and then I really only have Blue Mage left before I’m officially done with leveling everything.

However those plans need to be put on hold for a few days since I’m leaving for a cabin in the woods tomorrow for a long weekend. I have my bag already packed. I’m taking my Switch and an e-reader and nothing else. I just have to check the air in my tires before I go tomorrow and do a few groceries and then I’m all set. It’s going to be so nice to escape my apartment for a bit and have a “vacation feel” for real, even if it’s only for a few days. I’m planning to keep my phone off for most of the time when I’m there since I just really need to disconnect from social media and everything related to that for a bit. I’m planning on doing some nice walks and maybe dip into the local swimming pool but otherwise it’s just relaxing to the max. The cabin I’m renting is a bit of a luxury one which comes with a bath that also doubles as jacuzzi and a sauna and I’m going to use both. I even finally get to use some of the bathbombs I’ve taken home with me from work!

I’ll come back on Monday afternoon and then I still have the rest of the week off to enjoy untill I go back to work. For now though I’m going to get a good night’s sleep before I do the final round of apartment cleaning tomorrow morning and head off for a few days.

What are you doing this weekend?

Sandy’s MMO Sunday: July 5th, Big Milestones Time!

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Warrior on Black Serpent of N'zoth

When there’s progress and you know it clap your hands!

What a long strange trip it’s been for the past few weeks. I’ve been writing drafts, deleting them and then starting new ones without actually finding it good enough to post. I don’t know how many semi finished posts have ended up in the trash but it’s been more than I intended to have.
As I’m writing this I only have one week of work left and then I’ll be away from having to work from home or in the office for two glorious weeks. I’ve been looking forward to this for quite a while now, I can feel it’s been a while since I had more than a long weekend off. It’s summer here in the Netherlands and as a good Dutch summer pertains we had a few days of seriously hot weather followed by rain, wind, and more rain. As I’m writing this post it’s sunny out but also very windy so I can’t really have all my windows open because the wind is making them slam shut. Instead I’ve opted to open my balcony door, which is pretty securely fastened, and then try to cool down my house a bit that way. So I figured now was a perfect time to attempt another blog post, in the hopes that this one will make it to published status.

So to start off: I’ve been extremely busy in the World of Warcraft. I’ve been working on many different things and am close to accomplishing a few of the bigger goals I set for myself in this game.
First off I managed to complete both a Stormwind and Orgrimmar 5 mask Vision run. Both were brutal in their own way but I’m glad I did it nonetheless. Since I completed them solo I got a nice Feat of Strength achievement, which came with a shiny title, and I was one step closer to getting the meta-achievement to get a mount. Today I managed to finally complete the last step I needed for that and obtained the mount as shown in the screenshot, the Black Serpent of N’Zoth. I’m so pleased! This means I don’t really have to do difficult Visions anymore but instead I can just relax and start grinding out currency so I can buy another mount and a backpack transmog item, the first one in the game. This was one of the things on my big “I have to complete this before Shadowlands comes out” so I’m happy to be able to cross it off the list.

Another big goal I was working towards getting is timing every single dungeon on a Mythic+15 level. For a quick explanation, dungeons in WoW are for 5 people. As you level up you unlock the “Normal” version and once you hit max level you unlock “Heroic” version. Things start getting interesting from “Mythic” version and upwards. Seeing as you can just queue up for Normals and Heroics they’re usually pretty fast and easy to use to gear and level up your character. For Mythic (and Mythic+) you need to assemble a group yourself, like in ye gooden olde times. You can still use the Looking for Dungeon tool but it’s not as easy as queuing up. Now the + in Mythic+ comes from the fact that you can “level up” Mythic dungeons by the use of keys. In theory these keys can level up infinitely but there are some major breaking points to be had. With every level the dungeon goes up the mobs in the dungeon increase in health and damage done. Next to that there will also be special affixes to the dungeons. The very first one is one that is active from Mythic 2 and up and it is one that boosts either Boss health or Trash health, then at Mythic 4, Mythic 7 and Mythic 10 another affix is added to the dungeon making it much harder to attempt. The affixes can be many things and for a full explanation of them I would like to refer you to this guide on WoWhead.
I’ve gotten to the point that I’ve been sort of smoothly tackling Mythic level 15 and above. I’ve done every single dungeon on level 15 except for one. Which is kind of a bummer since if you do all of them at level 15 or above you get a nice Feat of Strength achievement and a mount. Which is obviously what I’m after most. I’m hoping that I can get into a group for that final dungeon somewhere this week because the affixes are relatively easy so it shouldn’t be to hard to get. Once I do that’s another big goal striped off the list!

Warrior in Uldum for daily quests

Feeding a little monster

With the above two goals being (almost) completed it means I have to look for something new to keep me occupied in WoW. I’m still working away on leveling up my Rajani and Uldum Accord reputation, whenever I feel like doing the dailies. I’m also doing a daily quest chain in Uldum which will eventually reward me with a mount, but I’m not quite there yet. Other than that I’ve kind of given up on leveling more alts for the time being since I don’t want to burn myself out even harder on this game. Instead I’ve decided to be insane and try to farm enough gold to get the 5 million Brutosaurus mount before it disappears in the Shadowlands prepatch. I’m currently sitting on 600k gold so I still have quite a ways to go, but I’m hoping I can get there. I have 4 max level characters which I can use to farm old raids with, who I’m doing all Emissaries with and who I use for crafting various gear items to sell at the vendors. All in all I’m making around 50-100k gold per week just from “farming” gold. If I could start playing the Auction House in addition to that I’m pretty sure that I will be able to make that 5 million gold in time. But only time will tell.

All this focused attention on WoW has unfortunately meant that I’ve barely played anything else. I did a few sessions of FFXIV over the past weeks but didn’t really make any progress. I should really play a bit more though because I still want that Ixion mount before it’s gone. I have untill August 11th though but I don’t want to do it last minute.

As for the rest of my gaming time.. Well I have picked up a new hobby that has nibbled into that. I will probably do a blogpost on that somewhere this week so keep an eye out for it! For now I’m going back into WoW and grind out some more gold.