[FFXIV][Civ5][Endless Legend] A Month? Oops!

My new look

And here I’ve let a month go by without posting.  Mostly since I’ve been doing as noted in the last couple of posts — 1 expert run per day plus the Vath Tribe quests for 90 Lore tomes 5x per week in FFXIV.  On the bright side, I’ve gotten all of my gear except my weapon (and 1 ring) to i230 and I’ve even gotten enough Lore tomes to buy the 7 tokens I need for my weapon too, I just haven’t been bothering to run Alexander 8 Normal to get the weekly token that the weapon also needs 7 of……  I’ll get there eventually.  It’s not like I’m doing content where I need anything higher than i200 anyway.

Expanse Barding

I also went through and bought all the barding I could off the market board, so… more looks for my Chocobo.  I was kinda impressed that the Ice Barding looks like my Lore Casting outfit.  But then I went and decided to glamour the outfit so I wouldn’t look like “Generic Caster #9572.”

My new Cavalry Elbst

I’ve also completed the Sahagin Beast Tribe favor grind and bought my Cavalry Elbst.  It’s a lot of fun to ride when back in the no-fly zones.  I’m now working the last of the (non-crafting) Beat Tribes — the Sylphs.  I’m at Rank 3 and need about 6 more days of doing it to hit rank 4 for my Goobue mount.  But man…… these quests are frightfully annoying and that’s at 60 where I don’t have to dodge around mobs since I’m so high level they ignore me.  I cannot imagine having done these at 50 when everything would be chasing me all the time.  The 2 common quests to have to do a FATE which takes a half-hour to pop aren’t really that wonderful either.

Levin Barding

I popped into the Gold Saucer to check on the MGP price of the flying turtle mount, and somehow fell down the rabbit hole of Chocobo Racing.  I’ve got a Pedigree 3 mount now to rank 31, so soon will be able to retire it and breed up a Pedigree 4.  All so I can repeat the process and get a pedigree 5, then a 6…… but somehow I am finding it compelling to do now, where I didn’t before.  Go figure.

Tidal Barding

Since the daily stuff in FFXIV only needs me to log in 5 days a week, the other 2 days are seeing me playing a lot of Civ5 and Endless Legend.  Not much to say about them other than “they’re fun” and “I hit ‘Next Turn’ an awful lot.”  But hey… they’re fun, and that’s why I play them, so there you go.

Ice Barding

Happy gaming out there!

I liked the Ruin 3 spell effect from this angle, so I took the shot

[FFXIV] Fun, but with a Side of Apathy?

My current appearance — i230 chest, legs, and boots. Gloves are glamoured to “Claws of the Beast” to hide how poorly the Midan gear matches the Lore Tome stuff.

When I log in to FFXIV, I have fun, but now that I’ve completed all my leveling (that I care to do, anyway — just not feeling the desire to do crafting or gathering just for the sake of doing them) I’ve lost a lot of my impetus to log in.  Apathy thy name is pkudude99!

Fighting “Brute Justice” in A8/M4

Well no, not quite.  I am still playing enough to cap out my Lore tomes each week, and I’ve started running through the Alexander Midas mini-raids to boot.  They’re quite fun, and I’ve already gotten some i220 gear upgrades from them as well as my 1st “Midan Gear” out of the 7 that I need to be able to upgrade my weapon from i210 to i230.  The items I’ve been upgrading to also aren’t job-locked, so both my Summoner and Black Mage jobs are i216 for their average since they’re sharing gear again.  And yet I just can’t bring myself to play as BLM anymore.  The joy is somehow gone from that job for me. 😦

Doing Turn 9

Last night I also did an unsynced run through Turn 9 with my FC.  Even unsynced and with the 20% buff you get for doing it anymore (I had over 18,000 hit points as a caster, 2nd only to the tank who was just shy of 36,000) it was pretty brutal and took us about an hour of trying before we finally got it.  We were able to brute-force a lot of the mechanics due to our higher health pools and damage output, but there are also a lot of instant-kill mechanics that we still had to learn to avoid or mitigate.  I won the greed roll on a nice-looking dragoon spear I can use for glamouring, though I actually rather like the look of my current spear, so.. to the retainer it goes for now.

My current spear for Dragoon that I’m not going to glamour over, as well as a bunch of Dravanian gear from my Expert Roulette runs

I’ve also dipped a toe back in to Civ5.  I’ve gotten used to playing it a certain way, so I’ve been playing around with the various options and using different civs than I usually would in order to break me out of that mode and see what other types of fun I can glean from it, but how exciting is it for me to tell you that it’s been enough to keep me hitting “next turn” until 3:30 in the morning on a work night more than once in the past few weeks? 😉

I got the fugly Easter event barding. May it never see the light of day again!

Happy gaming out there!

That looks like the hair dryer from hell, doesn’t it?

[Blaugust Day 31][FFXIV][SR:HK] And here we are

My Blaugust post-mortem:

Fighting under the fireworks

What I’ve learned:  I *can* write every day, but I don’t want to.  I like the idea of sharing my gaming experiences with the world, but if I’m blogging at home I’d rather be playing than writing about playing.  If I’m at work there’s usually something else that I should be doing, even during lulls, so it again feels like I’d rather be doing something else.  So my old once-a-week schedule is just fine for my blogging wants.

I’ve also learned that Blaugustinians use feed readers.  As noted in last Friday’s post, my page views and visitors have been flat for August compared with July, but the number of comments has about tripled, from 18 to 64.  Of course, 5 posts prompted 18 comments in July, where 30 posts (since today hasn’t hit yet 😛 ) prompted 64, so the comments per port has dropped.  Since my style is more or less to simply report on my play experiences, I never expect a lot of comments though.  I say “I did this.”  What is there to comment about that other than something like “Cool” or “Glad you had fun?”  And who visits a site to say something like that instead of marking it read in the feed reader and moving on?

So anyway, I’ll be returning to my 1-2 posts per week schedule.  That works for me, where doing it daily doesn’t.

***

Ishgardian Full Barding on the left, Half Barding on the right.

I fired up Shadowrun Returns: Hong Kong for a few hours this weekend.  Since I know it uses the combat AI developed in the Dragonfall Director’s Cut and I therefore will need a melee person to go flush the bad guys out of cover, and between reading a little about other people’s experiences and a friend telling me about it also so I know that my crew of NPC’s includes a ranged guy, a shaman, a decker, and a rigger, I decided that I would be that melee guy, so I went with a Troll and put all my karma points on creation into body, cyberware, strength, and close quarters combat.  So far it’s worked out fairly well, though I’m going to need to get some quickness and dodge trained up soon.

It’s really the same game as the 2 prior SR titles, just a new story.  And of course it’s pretty over the top.  You get a message from your foster father who you haven’t seen in 8 years asking you to go to Hong Kong and the second you get there you find yourself the subject of a terrorist manhunt and the police attack you.  And it goes downhill from there.  In all honesty, I got bored pretty quickly, so this will probably be a game I do in short spurts here and there.

***

Doing the Moonfire quest again

In FFXIV, I capped out on Esoterics again, plus I did the level 35 job quests for the Monk and the Ninja.  Both were quite easy, so no big deal there at all.  I actually spent most of the weekend working on my daughter’s character.  Since she likes to play dress-up and liked the various swimsuits I’d gotten on my character in the Moonfire Faire, I took her there and ran the Out to Sea leve quest over and over while doing the event FATEs as they popped up.  I got her White Mage to 34 to unlock Stoneskin and I got her Scholar to 35 since that’s her “main job” due to her love of the fairy.  I intended to only get to 34 to unlock Eye for an Eye, but I didn’t have enough tokens to get all the swimwear yet for her, so I just kept on going.  I also started in on Thaumaturge as well since I want to get it to 26 for Swiftcast.  I only got it to level 9, but I didn’t really work on it either, pretty much just did the low-level hunt logs, a FATE or 2 as I ran across them and the level 1 and level 5 job quests for it.  I plan to use the remaining week of its run to finish getting her all the clothing from it.  I already set up various gear sets of the swimsuits that she can just click through, so it should be nice and easy for her to play with her look as she runs around in “my world” as she calls the housing zones.

***

And silly me I fired up Civilization 5 last night at about 9:30.  And I was in a good stopping spot at about 11:30, but wanted to do just 1 more turn…… and I went to bed at about 1:30.  Still compelling game play.  I think I’ll go grab some caffeine now.  Happy gaming out there!

[TSW] [FFXIV] [Civ5] Apathy

Dual-gun turrets on a tank look cool, but how practical are they?

Didn’t really play much of anything this past week.  I logged on to FFXIV most evenings for my daily mini-cactpot and then logged right back out, but didn’t feel like actually *playing.*  Feeling kind of apathetic — I enjoy the game when I do play it, but right now, I’m just not feeling the hook to keep playing, even though I’ve got  the hook of the daily mini-cactpot.  Part of that might also be that I’ve got a 6-day trip coming up this week and I game on a desktop, so it’s not coming with me, so I don’t feel like really pushing for anything right not anyway.  I enjoy the leveling and also how quickly one can actually get into the i100 gear once hitting 50, but since it actually is so easy to do with a bit of weekend grinding, I don’t feel the need to push there either — I’ve already got several classes to 50, so I feel “ready” for the expansion already and thus don’t feel the need to repeatedly grind dungeons for more/better gear/tomes/whatever.

I bought a new book this week that I wanted to read and since Civ5 has a lot of downtime between turns, especially in the later game when you have city-states turned on, I fired that up and would read my book while waiting for the turns to advance.  In case you wonder, it’s called “A Long Time Until Now” by Michael Z. Williamson and I quite enjoyed it.  I also won handily with Venice and 41 city-states on the game that took me 3 evenings to play.  And yeah, with 41 city-states, by about turn 200 the game was crawling between turns, so I had lots of time to read.  I also did a game as Morrocco and managed to get a lovely start with about half desert tiles, a river, a mountain, marble, and a coastal location, so I could take the Desert Lore pantheon for an early faith boost, build any wonder, including the 2 that require mountains, and build Petra and the Kasbah improvements and make my capital into a real powerhouse of a city.  I turned the city-states off for that once so that I couldn’t simply ally them all and dominate any vote I wanted so it balanced the game out a bit more.  Ended up winning that one on score at turn 500, but the turns went a lot faster when I had no city-states to worry about.  As it is, I’m feeling Civ5’d out, so probably won’t fire it up for another 3-4 months again.

Friday night my friend J wanted someone to buddy up with in running through Issue 9 story missions in TSW, so I told him I’d join up.  when the appointed hour arrived, I sat at the pc and looked at the TSW icon and thought to myself “I don’t really want to play that right now.”  Then I fired it up anyway, logged in… and had a blast.  And yet… even though issue 11 is out, and I’ve seen a blogger here and there talking about it and it sounds interesting…. I’m apathetic about logging in to actually finish issue 10 and then start in on issue 11.  I know I’ll get there eventually, but.. for now…. apathy.

Anyway, I hope you’re all enjoying your gaming out there!

[ESO] [Civ5] Monday Update

Enchanting doesn’t level quickly. OTOH, level 25 lets me enchant up to VR5 level now, so it’s still “current” for me. Go figure.

So there I was, with the TSW launcher open and updating but it was taking a bit of time and I haven’t yet bought the points to buy the new issue yet and I was looking at my desktop and saw the Civilization 5 icon there.  Since TAGN’s been doing multiplayer on it lately, and thus I’ve been kinda thinking about it a bit more, I launched it.  Pulled up my saved games and had a game as Venice in there.  Launched it and vaguely remembered where I’d left off.  I’d turned off all victory conditions except conquest for that game and I had battleships and destroyers on an island map, so nearly every city had ocean access and they could just clean up — bombard with battleships, then the melee destroyers (with their bonus to attacking cities and 2 moves per round since they were built as privateers in a city with the 3 military upgrades plus the Brandenburg Gate wonder, then upgraded later) come in and finish it off.  Works very well on the maritime maps.  So anyway…. became a major warmonger and took over Brazil since they were closest in power to me.  Then took out the Shoshone since they had a lot of cities, though they sued for peace before I finished them off and offered me all the rest of their cities too, then finished off Siam and Persia since I’d fought them before and had them down to a single land-locked city each.  Hadda build some ground troops for that, bit wasn’t a big deal.  And yeah, eventually had the whole planet all sewed up except for the Shoshone capital and I had 8 battleships and 4 destroyer parked just off his coast, so… nothing else to do but finish him off.  So I did.

Lighting a fire inside a sentient tree somehow endears me to said tree? Not sure how that works, but ok. . .

Then is twas time to “do it different” so this time I went with India and only disabled the “time limit” victory.  But by the early 400’s in turns I had 4/5 cities dominated culturally, and the Maya inexplicably decided that our worldwide alliance of all civilizations sucked, so they denounced everybody.  Which of course led to 3 of us jointly declaring war on Pacal.  I took his 2 coastal cities on his continent, and then he sued for peace with me.  I accepted.  His capital was landlocked and I didn’t have any ground troops other than my self-defense garrisons at the time, so I wasn’t any real threat to him anymore anyway, and with Morocco and the Iroquois sending large land-armies over, I thought they’d get him, but he had a 140 defense rating on that puppy (Red Fort wonder helped, I guess) so they expended themselves against his walls but never were any real danger to him.  My separate peace treaty with Pacal expired, so I declared war again and during the 10 turns of the peace treaty I’d built and moved an infantry unit into position to land and march in.  He was still within range of bombardment, so I softened the city up with 8 battleships attacking it for a couple of turns and as a result when my infantry got there they just waltzed on it.  There was much rejoicing, so even though you typically get a lot of “we hate you now” messages after completely destroying a civ, I didn’t get any this time.  And since the Maya were the only civ I wasn’t yet influential with, wiping them out bizarrely gave me the cultural victory.

I really like how the colors turned out in this shot

I kept playing after the win, though and consolidated my gains and was working on building up the former Mayan cities (my 3 Indian cities were all maxed out and doing research production by this point) when the Iroquois (who shared my continent with Austria and me) asked me to go to war with Austria too.  Since Austria’s built a city up against my borders yet well away from theirs I thought that this would be a good excuse to take that one, while leaving the rest of their empire alone, so I accepted the treaty and declared war.  Very next turn the Iroquois denounced me.  Say what?!?!?!?!?!?!  I’m helping you in your war and you denounce me for it?  Silly diplomacy. So I wiped out the Austrians instead.  And since Morocco’d pushed Brazil to a single city near me on the other continent’s coast (before I’d ever met anyone from that continent, even), I took it and got rid of them now being mad at me too.  And then since I’d already won, I turned it off.  It was also 2 am.  Yes…… just 1. . . . more. . . .turn. . . . . . had gotten me good that night.

***

Watching a play after I’d helped the performer find her props and supplies.

Didn’t really do much on the ESO front as a result of all that time spent in Civ5, but I did get my NB tank to level 21 and my caster sorcerer is about 29.95.  At level 30 I’m planning to upgrade her to the sets that give 5% spell crit each so with the 19% she’s getting from Inner Light, the 4% on her weapon and the new set bonus she’ll be at 33%.  Once Light Armor is up high enough she’ll get another 10% and Inner Light is “getting there” to that final percentage point as well.  Looking forward to the 44% crit rate.  She’s managed to hit Mage’s Guild 6 and is thus working up Fire Rune, plus she got Equilibrium and Surge from her class skills as well, so they’re all in the bar to level them up.  Makes the current leveling build a tad… less than optimal, but once they’re leveled and morphed they’ll open up a lot of new options for me, so I’m looking forward to it!  plus in cases where I actually need an “optimal” build, it’s easy enough to swap skills back in.

Happy Gaming!