Pre-Warlords Patch Time

Tis the Season

I have to say I am more than a little bit scared that this crap I have had for the last few weeks is not just “allergies” as I had originally thought.  The last couple of days whatever it is seems to have settled into my lungs, and it is getting a bit harder to actually breathe.  I still would not think anything about it really, apart from the fact that my boss has been out the last few days for a fairly serious case of bronchitis.  I guess in truth it isn’t so much the bronchitis that is serious but more so the fact that he has bronchitis… and only one lung.  In any case something appears to be going around, and considering the close proximity in which we all work together… it is likely if one of us catches something we are all going to catch it.

The positive I guess is the fact that today is my Friday.  Since my wife is off for fall break the next couple of days I decided to take them off as well.  As of yet we don’t really have any solid plans other than a few projects around the house.  In any case even if I feel like shit, at least I don’t have to go into work right?  Thankfully most of the projects are just time intensive rather than labor intensive so I can totally muddle through them with junk in my lungs.  If things get much worse I will either go to the doctor or go to urgent care and hopefully get a steroid course or something to clear it up.  I would probably call in this morning, but since my boss has been out for the last two days… and I have been attending meetings in his place…  we need to actually do a bit of an information dump before I am gone from the office as well.

Pre-Warlords Patch Time

belghast_beforeafter Yesterday twitter was completely abuzz over the release of the 6.0.2 patch in World of Warcraft that brought in all of the major changes that are always the precursor to a major expansion.  One of the biggest of these was the entrance of the brand new player models for all but the Worgen/Goblins.  While I had played quite a bit in Alpha… I had not actually copied most of my characters over to see what they would end up looking like.  I copied my main Belgrave, but since he is a Worgen it really didn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things.  I made a handful of premades, but when I last did that they still had the whole “single face” issue going on so it was really hard to see just how they would match up the appearances.  So when I logged in last night I have to say I was a little shocked at just how strange the transition looked.  Above is an image of Belghast prior to the patch and Belghast after the patch.

belghast_updated Something was just off for some reason in the appearance.  It didn’t feel like “my” character that I had spent so much  time playing and tanking on.  So like everyone the first thing I did was run to the barber shop and try and improve the appearance.  After some tweaking I finally landed on a look that feels “closer” to how I felt Belghast looked in appearance.  What is strange about this entire process is how much I realize that the characters no longer feel like they are “mine”.  I am not sure how to articulate that, because it wasn’t until I saw what my characters looked like that I realized how much the face apparently DID matter to me.  The differences aren’t that massive, but they just don’t feel like they belong to me any more.  They were just these higher fidelity things that happened to have the name and all of the gear of my previous character.

lodin_beforeafter The characters I feel that translated perfectly however were the Dwarves.  This shot is of Lodin my original raiding main from vanilla and his after the patch translation.  I have to say it is perfect, it captures everything I intended for the character and feels just about perfect.  So the handful of characters I have that were dwarves feel the same to me as they did previously.  The big problem I seem to be having is with the Humans and Draenei.  For whatever reason they just seem to be off in ways that I can’t fully articulate.  If I did ever come back, I have a feeling I would be race changing most of my characters to be dwarves, because so far that seems to be the clear winner in this upgrade to me at least.  Granted that could just be my natural affinity to the subterranean folk in the first place.  In any case my curiosity was sated and other than things feeling odd, I didn’t really have much emotion about the translation either way.

Lalafell Badass

ffxiv 2014-10-14 18-28-57-728 The real fun of yesterday was the fact that Tuesdays are reset day in Final Fantasy XIV.  This means I was able to pop back into Syrcus Tower to try for another piece of gear, or one of the tokens needed to upgrade an existing piece of gear to ilvl 110.  In addition this was the week that I finally would have enough tomestones of soldiery to be able to purchase the chest piece.  Granted I already had a level 100 chest, but there is just something about this chest that the moment I saw it… I knew I had to get it.  I have this thing for plate mail skirts in games, that I likely will never fully understand.  In world of Warcraft, my favorite set of gear will always be the Paladin Judgement set, and in FFXIV it seems to be right now the soldiery chest.  The problem with it is that my bunny samurai helmet no longer really went with it.  Thankfully last week I managed to get in on a Behemoth kill which netted me the really badass looking plate helm I am wearing in the above image.

ffxiv 2014-10-14 22-22-01-721 Tuesday nights are traditionally our raid night, but over the last several weeks we have been struggling with getting enough people online at the same time.  Last night we sat there with seven for quite a bit, and then two of our newer 50s that are considerably less geared came online.  We opted to get their weekly elite hunt done, which would allow them to get just enough gear to be able to enter something interesting.  As a way of breaking them into what raiding in FFXIV is like, we opted to do Hard Mode Ultima Weapon.  It had been quite some time since we had downed it ourselves, so we were all a bit rusty, but we managed to work through the issues and the massive lag issues our newest charges were having… and defeated the boss.  Hopefully over the next few days we can start knocking out the various hard modes for them so that they can do the Hard and Elite duty roulettes for gear and tokens.  If nothing else going into Ultima allowed me to take this really badass screenshot.  I love my new armor, and while I will miss the bunny samurai hat…  the behemoth helmet just looks amazing.

#WoW #FinalFantasyXIV

7 thoughts on “Pre-Warlords Patch Time”

  1. FFXIV isn’t really “sticking” for me. I’m enjoying the crafting and gathering as a relaxing pastime, but the actual adventuring game just isn’t drawing me in. I’ll log in saying to myself “gonna work on my thaumaturge” and within seconds of logging in be happily crafting away instead and not even consider heading out into the world to kill mobs, find fates, or do quests. No idea why it’s like this. It’s fun enough when I’m out doing it, it’s just not “sticking.”

    OTOH, the patch notes for the new ESO 1.5 patch are out now and once it drops, I’m thinking I’ll be heading back to that game. But I’ve also got Civ5 “Beyond Earth” pre-ordered, so will be playing a lot of that come month’s end, so. . . . . . .we’ll see, I guess.

    • To be honest I think most of us still have our subscriptions active to ESO, and will likely be dipping our toes back in whenever the new patch hits. Mostly I stopped playing because I really cannot stand the present veteran system. As far as FFXIV, don’t force it. If it isn’t the game for you then no biggy at all. Have you made it far enough in the quest chain to unlock the first dungeon? If not I highly suggest you do that, because really for me it was when I saw how good the dungeon content is that turned my opinion of the game around initially.

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