Triple Triad Anyone?

Miserable Defined

KenzieWithMe I am getting my morning post out extremely late today, because I have been attempting to sleep.  Since last Thursday I have been fighting something and going into crazy coughing fits.  Finally yesterday I went to the doctor and it turns out it is a bad case of bronchitis they are worried may turn into pneumonia.  As such I am resting as much as I can, but I am in this odd state of limbo.  They gave me a Z-Pack of antibiotics and some prednisone, but there are times the cure feels worse than the problem.  I grew up a sick kid, and constantly taking doses of prednisone to get over whatever issue I happened to have at the moment.  I am not sure if this is an all people thing or just the way my body metabolizes the drug, but it puts me in this state of being ravenously hungry, unable to sleep, and alternating between freezing cold and burning hot.

My blog post is happening so late because I thought I would try and get as much sleep as I could this morning.  Unfortunately the moment after I got to bed in earnest…  I went into the regular course of coughing fits.  I really need to find a way to sleep standing up comfortably.  I’ve never been one of those people that could actually sleep in a recliner, though as I type this I am at least attempting to rest on the sofa.  I am hoping today is the day when things start to turn around.  Generally speaking the second day on prednisone starts with you feeling considerably worse and then by that evening life is starting to get better again.  In the mean time my kitten is being adorable beside me on the sofa and keeping my company.

Triple Triad Anyone?

tripletriadwin Yesterday was an insanely huge day for MMO patches.  In Final Fantasy XIV 2.51 was patched in unleashing upon the world the greatest time sink ever…  Triple Triad.  When Final Fantasy XIV came out, it was during the heyday of collectible card gaming.  So I was floored when I saw that they had their own deviously simple card game inside of a game.  I remember farming monsters to get gold, to buy better cards… to ultimately get a better deck so I could duel NPCs…  and win better cards.  It was one giant feedback loop that kept me enthralled for months as I tried to collect all of the cards in the game.  I was so into this game that I tracked down physical cards and purchased a handful of extremely expensive for the time imported packs.  Nowadays single packs are selling on ebay for upwards of $60… I think maybe I paid like $5 a pack at the time… which I thought was highway robbery.  Now I can play the game inside of another game I already love… and so far I have not really left the Golden Saucer other than to duel npcs out in the world.

ffxiv 2015-02-24 11-26-02-04 Though honestly… as amazing as the Manderville Golden Saucer is… who would want to go anywhere else?  I know there is more to this patch than this one attraction but I feel like this is the part that I have been waiting on since it was first announced.  I puttered around trying out each of the minigames, and so far the one that is easiest to increase your Manderville Gold Points, the currency needed by all Golden Saucer games, is the strength tester.  It costs a single MGP to play, and if you can press the hammer at exactly the right moment you can get 5 MGP in return.   This will take forever, but should be able potential way to earn enough money safely if you so choose.  Triple Triad on the other hand has significantly better payouts, so my hope is that I can build a good enough deck to regularly dual the King and win.  There are already videos online with some strategies for winning against the king with the default deck.  Right now however my priority as always will be to win more cards..  because that is the part of the game that is interesting to me.

Heirlooms for Everyone

Wow-64 2015-02-25 09-54-41-32 heirlooms Not to be outshined, yesterday was also the release date of the 6.1 patch in World of Warcraft.  With it came a number of quality of life changes like the brand new heirloom system.  One of the coolest things about it, was the fact that any heirlooms that you owned, got bumped up to level 90 preemptively.  For the most part heirlooms seem to be around 500g for the level 60 version, 1500g or so for the upgrade to 90, and then 5000g or so for the upgrade to level 100.  All of which seem really reasonable to me.  The best feature is that you can have the same heirloom on as many characters as you like.  As such my army of horde alts are now fully kitted out in heirloom gear for at least level 60.  To make the process a little easier they introduced a new currency called Misprinted Draenic Coins that actually give us a proper reason to do a daily heroic!  You can turn these in for the items used to upgrade your heirlooms.

Wow-64 2015-02-24 21-34-55-22 In other news, last night I limped through the raid even though I likely should have done so.  I performed pretty shitty all night long, but I did well enough to keep from screwing anyone else up.  We started the night with Gruul, moved to Hans and Franz and then Darmac before starting in work once more on Oregorger.  We finally either reached a point in gear where we could handle the damage and healing, or we simply got better at moving… but whatever it was we managed to finally defeat Oregorger removing what had become a physical and mental wall.  The other night when we tried Kagraz it seemed like we could get that fight down without much more effort.  Similarly I think we will be preparing to play with trains and Operator Thogar.  My hope is that we can get back our momentum and get closer to clearing the instance on normal at least.  My hope is that soon we will give at least Gruul a poke on heroic.  We have that fight pretty well under control, so I can’t see as how we should not be clearing the first bosses of each wing on heroic before too much longer.  In the meantime I am hoping my medication kicks and I can return to live as normal… because being sick sucks.