[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.

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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.

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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!

[Blaugust Day 26][FFXIV] Monk unlocked!

Last Job unlock completed!

And it only took the 1 leveling roulette.  The XP from Haukke’s kills plus the bonus for the roulette and the 3-dungeon challenge was just enough to trip me over to 30.  So I ran the class quest, then the job unlock quest, and am now the proud owner of the ability to play as any job, not merely any class.  And that was actually all she wrote for me last night.  This morning I actually slept until 6:20.  For me that’s practically sleeping in anymore.  It gave me enough time to at least do my daily Expert run for the 75 Esoterics and finish up my daily hunts before I needed to get ready for work.  This also got me in position so that tonight if I run the monk through a leveling dungeon I’ll get the 5-dungeon challenge plus also the one for giving out 5 commendations, so that should easily get me to 31.  I’d like to get to 32 so I can equip my infantry set of gear and just get rid of the piecemeal set I’m wearing of level 26-30 stuff right now.  Plus I’ll be caught up to the Ninja and thus will be clearing out more bag space, which is always a plus.

***

Apparently this is what it looks like when you open your chakra.

Shadowrun Returns: Hong Kong released this week.  As a backer of the original one I get this one included in that initial purchase, so I installed it last night.  Just logged in far enough to see the login screen so I assume it’s working, but it was bedtime so I logged back out without even creating a character.  I’ll see about playing it this weekend when I’ve got more time and don’t have to be worried about the daily expert and hunts in FFXIV.  And is it weird that I’m starting to want to slip in a couple of games of Civ5 in this weekend too?

Happy gaming out there!

When I logged in last night, this was where my daughter’d left my character — on the wing of the big airship in Sea of Clouds on a non-flying mount.

 

 

[Various Games] It’s been a while. . .

Fighting sea serpents is fun. Too bad Daedric light armor always looks like a dress, though.

IRL’s been rather nuts for the past month.  Been putting in a lot of hours at work due to an office move, and my significant other’s got new meds so she’s needed some time to adjust to them and that requires my attention as well, so… gaming time has been reduced and “slow time” at work that I’d typically use to post has been non-existent.  Up until now, anyway…..

On the ESO front, my NB tank is now up to level 32, so he’s gotten 9 or 10 levels since I last reported on him.  Mostly running around in light armor and using the 1H + Shield anymore (as you can see in the screenie), since blocking is the only armor that matters and magicka is the only resource pool that matters for damage, so…. light armor is the only one worth wearing.  Man, I hope they balance that better soon.  I wanna play my melee sorcerer again sometime without feeling gimped.

Did a bit of Civ5 also.  Not really too much to report on that front other than that it’s still insanely addictive with the whole “1 . . . . more. . . . .turn . . . . ” thing going, so when the “Beyond Earth” version comes out I’m thinking I’m going to be losing a lot of sleep for several days after that.

The “Director’s Cut” of Shadowrun Returns was released last week.  The new UI is wonderful.  The customization/upgrade of your companions is very nice.  The enemy AI makes more informed decisions — they focus fire, if you ever bunch up prepare to see some incoming grenades, and they take advantage of cover and don’t leave it unless forced, so it overall feels a lot more tactical.  Armor’s been changed to be straight damage reduction now also, instead of reduced chance to crit.  Overall, combat feels a lot better, though it can take quite a bit longer now as a result of the changes.

Even so, the only time it got a bit frustrating (so far, anyway) is on the mission to retrieve the “MKVI.”  Where before he’d just spray everything with his minigun and it’d all fall down, now everyone’s hiding behind behind cover so he misses a lot and then what does hit takes half damage due to cover, which is then further reduced by their armor, so……. getting out during that mission is, well….. I haven’t succeeded at it yet.  Failed on my only attempt so far becuz I peeked my main character around the corner and every enemy focused on him.  Only had 2 trauma kits for “rez” and used both but couldn’t pull him back far enough, so he went down a couple more times and well… time to reload last save, but that fight had gotten annoying enough that I didn’t feel like it at the time.  And then a car crashed into a power pole just behind my house and it took 11 hours for the power company to get a new pole in and the lines hooked back up, so. .  . . .

I hope all is well in the gaming world.  I’ll eventually dip my toe into the F2P version of ArcheAge once the initial launch rush dies down, but until then. . . . Happy Gaming!

Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall

So a while back, the Shadowrun Returns folks dropped their 1st expansion, called Dragonfall.  I played it the weekend it came out, but got stuck after a few hours due to a vitally needed job disappearing, so I couldn’t make enough money to advance the main story, since there were no other jobs to do.  There were a few other minor bugs I ran into, but they weren’t game-breaking like the lost job.  It’s been a while, so I figured they’d patched the game (and I was right), so since I had a free Saturday to kill before ESO’s early access I went back to it.  I cheated a bit, in that I used the mod that allows me to import a prior character rather than starting fresh like the game is designed, and I pulled in my character that’s run the original Dead Man’s Switch campaign a couple of times, so I had maxed out Body attribute (max HP), maxed out rifle skills, maxed out drone control, maxed out decking. . . you get the picture.  The import just brings the character, but no gear.  Oh sure, there’s gear in the slots, but it’s not actually usable.  Though when you swap in new gear it puts the “invalid” gear in your stash and you can sell it, so that was a nice little cash bonus.

Anyway, I made more liberal use of the save game feature this time around, so when that same job went “poof” again, I could simply reload to when it was still extant and just go right after it so it couldn’t get lost again.  And thus I was able to move on and eventually complete the whole thing.  The story was quite good, and I liked that a couple of the runs were pretty much able to be done completely in “stealth mode” with disguises and sweet talking the guard with the Security etiquette.  I tried to take some screenshots, but since I’ve got my screenies tied to my Dropbox account now they act a little weird at times, so all I ever got was my desktop background, not the game itself when I took them, so… sorry.  But anyway, just a “nomadic gamer” post showing it’s not all 1 game all the time, and to also say the Dragonfall was a very worthy expansion and anyone who likes turn-based tactical gameplay games should definitely pick it up and give it a go!