[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!

[Civ5] [FFXIV] Waiting for Civilization: Beyond Earth

Venice is a megalopolis at this point

I’ve played a touch more FFXIV, but it really just isn’t grabbing me.  I like the crafting quite a lot and any time I log in I find myself crafting or harvesting rather than adventuring.  I don’t think it helps that my current story mission is to go into a group dungeon and the time I actually queued for it I waited well over an hour without the queue popping on a Saturday afternoon when one would think there’d be a lot of people online.  I haven’t really logged in since to try again.  And tbh, don’t really care either.

This past weekend I played a couple of games of Civ5.  I’ve not done much with the Autocracy ideology, so I’ve got several “missing achievements” from it.  Fired up a new game as the Assyrians to take advantage of their Royal Library giving extra xp to units.  Was kinda fun to (eventually) be creating units with 85 xp already under their belt — 15 barracks, 15 armory, 15 military academy, 15 Brandenburg Gate wonder, 15 from Autocracy, and 10 from the Royal Library.  I actually did Autocracy once before a long time ago as the Zulus, but due to the vagaries of the game, as I was in process of assaulting the final capital the UN cam up for a vote for world leader and I won a Diplomatic Victory.  This time I got the domination I was looking for.  Go me!  It may have helped that I turned off Diplomatic as a possible win-condition this time. . . .   But I got my achievement for the Autocratic win, so go me.

I also noticed that I actually still don’t have a science win under the Freedom ideology either so I went with Venice since one tends to keep the empire smaller with Venice than with others, and Freedom is more suited to smaller empires.  Played along in typical fashion, but as I started getting late in the game I noticed that my city size was *much* higher than I ever recalled seeing before.  Typically the biggest one sees a city get to is in the 20’s, *maybe* low 30’s.  It was 52.  Yeah, I was surprised.  The screenie I put at the top of the post I took then I clicked the “finish the spaceship” button and won the game.  Size 56.  Insane!

But anyway, I got my achievement for the science victory under Freedom as well, so…. fun weekend of Civ5.  Looking forward to this Friday and the release of Beyond Earth!  Happy gaming!