Patch Days are so “Fun”

I was super excited about FFXIV’s new patch that arrived yesterday. As is often the case with FFXIV, there was so much new stuff that I couldn’t even remember everything that was coming. I ran home from work and hurried to get everything installed and ready so I could try out new stuff with a friend. And then I hit a brick wall.

I logged in and spent a few minutes unlocking the new raid first thing. I really wanted to see it, since I love FFXIV’s raids and this one has bosses based on one of my favorite FF games. Raids are also the only way I could play with my friend with us both in our preferred roles (we’re both healer mains). Unfortunately once I got it unlocked, I couldn’t actually queue. My item level is too low.

We ended up running one of the new dungeons instead, since I could actually do that and they drop gear that will help get me closer to being able to join the raid. My mood was ruined though, and I suspect I wasn’t very good company. Instead of being excited to see the new dungeon, I was annoyed that I had to play SMN instead of SCH, and that I was missing out on the raid.

Once we finished I ended up spending some time messing around with the new glamour system and that made me feel a bit better. I’m hoping it will be relatively painless to get geared up enough to catch up. This exact issue is one of the reasons I bounced off of FFXIV last expansion, but I’m not quite ready to give up on it again yet.

The kicker of this story is that after my disappointment and bad mood I went to look at the shiny new races they added to WoW…and couldn’t. There was a bug going around where none of your characters would show up on the server list or login screen, and I was lucky enough to experience it. I took it as a sign that I should do something else, so I spent the rest of the night working on my creative thing for the day instead.

Here’s hoping tonight is a better night for gaming!

Games While I’ve Been Alive

Belghast posted a list of the most important games to him for every year of his life. I decided this would be a fun thing to do too. Little did I know how much I would agonize over some of these choices. There were a couple years where I just could not choose only one game. Conversely, there were a few years where I barely played anything worth remembering. Without further ado here is my list:

1979 Asteroids
1980 Pac-Man
1981 Frogger
1982 Pole Position
1983 Spy Hunter
1984 Tetris
1985 Super Mario Bros.,  Oregon Trail
1986 Bubble Bobble
1987 Space Quest II
1988 Super Mario Bros. 3
1989 Prince of Persia
1990 Dr. Mario
1991 Lemmings
1992 Wolfenstein 3D
1993 Myst
1994 Final Fantasy VI
1995 Descent
1996 Diablo,  Tomb Raider
1997 Final Fantasy VII
1998 Parasite Eve
1999 Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast
2000 Icewind Dale
2001 Pikmin
2002 Ratchet & Clank
2003 Beyond Good & Evil
2004 Katamari Damacy
2005 Metroid Prime Pinball
2006 Kingdom Hearts II
2007 Portal
2008 World of Warcraft: WotLK
2009 Dragon Age: Origins
2010 Plants vs. Zombies
2011 SW:TOR
2012 Diablo III
2013 Final Fantasy XIV: ARR
2014 WildStar
2015 Undertale
2016 Stardew Valley
2017 Horizon: Zero Dawn

Reading Challenge #83: The Culture Series by Iain M. Banks

It’s time to start on my reading challenge in the new year! The next item on my challenge list is the Culture Series by Iain M. Banks. There are nine novels in the series, but as usual I’ll just be tackling one to complete the challenge. Oddly enough I have read the first book in this series as well as one of the later ones before, and quite enjoyed them. This month I re-read the original Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, which was first published in 1987.

Necromancer Set Mastery

There is no fancy wing reward for mastering the Necromancer set dungeons, which partly led to me ignoring these set dungeons for so long. Like all of the other classes, there are still two banners to get though, one for basic completion and one for mastery. At this point there’s also the principle of the thing. I’ve come this far, I might as well master all of the available dungeons. Plus it is my secret hope that Blizz will continue to add more classes, and eventually add another cosmetic reward for mastering everything. In any case it’s finally done, and here’s how it went:

The free set for Season 11 was Rathma’s, so that’s where I started. The two objectives were to get a total of 500 seconds of cooldown reduction on army of the dead, and to summon 100 skeletal mages. The summoning part was easy, especially with the ring that summons an extra mage every time. The cd reduction was a bit trickier. On my first attempt I didn’t get anywhere close. The second attempt saw me get the objective but run out of time trying to mop up the required kills. I finally mastered it on the third try. The “trick”, which wasn’t really a trick, was to make sure I was using army of the dead immediately when it came off cd so I didn’t waste any cd reduction. I basically got to a big room full of enemies and let my skeletons swing at them until I got the objective done, then summoned tons of mages and mopped up. I waited to summon the mages since when they’re up the damage buff means things die before they contribute much to the cd objective. Not a bad dungeon at all, and I appreciated that both objectives tied to the set, and weren’t gimmicky “don’t get hit by X” type things.

I worked on the Inarius dungeon next. The objectives also both directly tied to the set bonus: rip the bones from 100 enemies and kill 200 enemies affected by a bone armor tornado. This one was incredibly easy. I had the full set but no other specific legendaries, I just used whatever I had laying around in the season. I went in blind to the map and I got the mastery on the first try. Killing enemies affected by bone armor tornado is super easy, it will pretty much happen naturally. Ripping the bones from enemies required a bit more care, mostly because I was killing things before I could group them up. It was definitely easier than Rathma’s dungeon so if you’re having trouble with that one try Inarius’ instead.

Next up was Trag’oul’s dungeon. This one requires you to spend, and then heal, 1,000% of your life with your abilities. I basically just went at a cautious pace, alternated blood nova and devour, and beat it in one try. The layout of the dungeon has some nooks and crannies for enemies to hide in, but as long as you don’t leave stragglers you should have plenty of time.

After how easy the first three dungeons were, I was pretty nervous that I had saved the hardest for last. In retrospect I should never have worried. It was way harder for some reason for me to actually farm up the full set and bother to try this dungeon than it was to master it. The Pestilence dungeon objectives are to hit enemies with 150 empowered bone spears, and to NOT take 400k damage. The first bit is the easy part, it will pretty much happen with any build that you would want to use in this dungeon. Avoiding damage wasn’t that bad either, I just had to play a bit conservatively and not rush into the middle of swarms and elites. I mastered this dungeon on the first try, with over a minute of time to spare. Easy as bone spear pie.

Overall the Necromancer set dungeons were some of the easiest in the game. The worse of this lot was definitely Rathma’s. I one-shot all of the others, so I guess they were all equally easy. You can find my thoughts on the other classes’ dungeons in this post from September. I wish I hadn’t waited so long to finish the Necromancer, especially with how easy the last dungeon was to master. It felt a bit anticlimactic after the long journey it took to get to this point. At least now I’m officially finished with set dungeons, at least until they release a new class!

Reading Challenge #84: The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

I managed to finish one more book from reading challenge before the end of the year, and am finally getting around to posting about it. At this rate it will take me about 6-7 more years to get through my list of 100 books. That’s not ideal! Hopefully as I start moving farther up the list the better books will be more compelling reads. This one certainly was. Let’s talk about The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart, first published in 1970.

January 2018 Gaming Goals

Happy new year! December was a month of mostly not meeting my goals. Let’s resolve to do better in 2018!

---

December Goals in review:

WoW: Decide on a new long-term goal. Done! I’ve been chasing old transmog sets on my priest. As an extra bonus side project I’ve been trying to go through her tailoring and craft every item she still needs the appearance for too. It’s not super exciting but it is keeping me busy.

Destiny 2: Explore the new expansion content. Sort-of. I have explored some of the new expansion, but I still haven’t finished the story or moved on to the new grinds yet.

Diablo 3: Complete the last Necromancer set dungeon. Nope.

Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete the new DLC. Nope. I fully intended to do this over the holidays but I got distracted by other things.

---

January Goals:

WoW: See every Legion raid at least once, even if it’s just LFR. The last bits of the current WoW raid will be out for the LFR crowd this month. That means it’s time for me to see them. I still haven’t finished all the wings of the previous raid yet so I’ve got some queuing to do.

Destiny 2: Finish the Osiris storyline. I’ve been working through this with the spouse on my hunter and solo on my warlock. Hopefully I can finish both soon.

Diablo 3: Finish that last set dungeon already dang it. I have no motivation to play D3 right now but this goal has been on my list for months and it would feel great to knock it out.

Horizon Zero Dawn: Start playing the new DLC. I might not have time to finish it considering all the other things on my list this month, but I would at least like to see it.

Hollow Knight: Get to an ending. I picked this one up on the Steam holiday sale and have been loving it. I have a lot of trouble with the boss fights but I like everything else so much it balances out. I doubt I’ll ever get close to 100% completion, but I hope I can progress far enough to see an ending.