Garrison Leveling

Carabiner Failure

Several years ago I picked up a cheapy Carabiner in a hardware store and started using it as a key chain.  I liked it because I could hang my keys on my pocket or anything else for that matter when I had my hands full, and that I could easily separate out my house keys, and both sets of our car keys as needed.  The spring in the original one got loose and I replaced it with the black one that I have currently.  Over the last few months I had a few incidents where a key fell off in my pocket but I didn’t think much about it, that is until this weekend.  Saturday we took my Mother in Law to Joplin and we spent pretty much the entire day running around town.  Joplin is roughly two hours away for us, and it is just different enough from the normal pace to make it interesting.  While in Joplin we hit a bunch of different stores and even spent time in the mall, so it was an absolutely packed and busy day.

When we were walking out to the car at Sams Club our final stop…  my heart sank as I realized that my keychain “felt funny”.  Sure enough I was missing the key to my Jeep, but the problem is I had no clue where it might have slipped off.  We looked around the parking lot and didn’t see it at all.  We traced our footsteps back to the store we were in before Sams thinking it might have fallen off there in the parking lot also.  Essentially we had no luck, and were about to simply chock it up to being a $150 mistake…  given that is roughly what it takes to get a new key made for my jeep given it is one of those combo keys with the remote built in.  Yesterday while running errands my wife called around to the various stores we had been to, to see if anyone had turned in a key.  Sure enough at Sams they had a grungy key matching the description of mine.

Yesterday was an extremely strange day.  I had been up until 2 am the previous night working on the podcast, and then was up at 8 am that morning working on it again.  After errands my wife went off with her sister to visit her mother again…  and we had tentatively made plans to go today to Joplin. I was living in this strange zone of sleep deprivation, where things seemed like good ideas.   So in my lack of wisdom… I decided to drive by myself the two hours to Joplin and two hours back… on what was one of the dreariest days imaginable.  I have to say it was a rough trip, but I made pretty good time and acquired the key that was in fact mine.  I finally crashed last night around 9 am… and then was back up this morning at 4:30 because my wife was upstairs watching Law and Order…. and I kept hearing the “Doink Doink” sound.  Pretty much as soon as I finish writing this post I am laying back down, however I did manage to get back my keys which is pretty awesome.

Garrison Leveling

Wow-64 2014-12-22 05-58-29-55 Since the launch of Warlords of Draenor I have managed to level two of my stable of characters to 100, but even more than that I have managed to push up most of my level 90s to at least 91 while unlocking their Garrisons.  As such this has allowed me to flip through them each day running missions and doing crafting content, giving me access once more to having all available tradeskills.  I thought nothing much about this until the other day when my Paladin dinged 93 from completing follower missions.  I guess I knew I had been gaining experience from my Garrison, but I did not really think about it being much if anything.  Turns out that you could in theory level your alts entirely through doing Garrison content.  In fact I am managing to keep a stockpile of gear to level into on my paladin at least, so if you had the patience of a saint you could in theory gear a character to epics doing nothing but daily quests.

There is just something strange about that thought process, considering it is just about the most passive way to level that I could imagine.  That said you are managing to get a bunch of incidental experience each time you clear out your mine, or harvest your herb garden.  By the same token each follower mission rewards you similar experience to actually completing a quest.  I just find it so strange that Blizzard decided to implement this system, because it seems like such a departure form the way things have worked in the past.  Granted I expect fully to actually level my alts for real in the near future, but it is nice that I am slowly creeping forward on each of them as I swap between them each day queuing more work orders, and follower missions.

New Class Footage

I have not talked much about Final Fantasy XIV since monday’s post, but there has been a bunch of news floating around the interwebs as this weekend was the Fan Festival in Tokyo.  It seems at this point all of the new classes have been revealed.  We have known about the Dark Knight for some time, and I fully plan on switching to that as my main job when it is released.  On top of that we now know that the healer is going to be the Astrologian, which looks to be some sort of healer that heals through the use of Tarot cards.  The gun class is in fact one that Yoshi P had hinted at some time ago as being one of his favorites, the Machinist.  In both cases they look pretty slick and have a lot of people excited about them.  The Machinist feels like it is going to be a slow firing blunderbuss type class which may or may not be all that enjoyable to play… seems like the cooldowns on attacks might be frustrating.

The most important thing to me is that they finally showed off some footage of each of the classes.  The Dark Knight looks like everything I possibly hoped it would be.  Ashgar and I joked that while it makes me very happy… it is likely going to make Tam very sad… since he seems to really dislike random spikey bits on things.  That said I personally find it amazing, and the animations may just top Warrior, although I have yet to see anything that really tops Steel Cyclone.  I love the way two handed classes feel in FFXIV, because there is a certain heft to the movements, like the weapon is extremely heavy and difficulty to wield.  I feel like the Dark Knight is going to let me live out my “Tiny Odin” fantasies even more than I can now as a Warrior.  I really look forward to seeing more information about the actual attacks that these classes can do, but I am sold… and am more than ready to throw my money at the screen.

2 thoughts on “Garrison Leveling”

  1. Minor correction, you don’t get character XP from every Garrison Mission, just from Garrison Missions that provide an XP bonus (you’ll see a big purple square with the letters XP in it for the mission reward). Seems like it’s about 30k XP with rested bonuses (assuming they apply).

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