Sixty Candles

This is another one of those mornings where I am struggling to write.  I know I have a lot of things to do today, but just am having trouble getting started.  It is a cold, dreary and rainy morning, and that definitely does not help the sluggishness.  I’ve been out already, gotten breakfast and filled up the gas tank on my wife’s car but as I sit here to write the words are now flowing as well as they usually do.

Gameplan Changed

2013-05-03_230918Last night I had all these plans of riding along on the Hellbug raids in search  of a purple mount, but that didn’t actually happen.  Instead I wound up getting distracted once more by carnage quests, and as I saw my experience bar moving I decided I would push for level 60.  I am normally one of those people that levels extremely quickly.  In fact I used to pride myself that in WoW I could take a character from 1-85 in 7 days.

So as a result the fact that I still did not have a max level character almost six months after the release of Storm Legion was a bit of a point of embarrassment.  I hit a massive wall along the process however, and the crap spec that I thought was decent… presented an impassible barrier as I tried to grind through the content.  Every few weeks I would fire the game up, and try again knowing I was only three levels from the cap.  I should have sought help, but I had been hearing the same grindy comments from others and assumed that was just the master plan.

Sixty Candles

2013-05-03_220213Thanks to a post from Wilhelm, I finally got out of the funk and found some specs that actually worked.  As a result the game has been a blast for me.  Last night I finally dinged 60 and it was a complete accident.  Over in Kingsward I found this really great sequence of quests that started at the Academy, and culminated in a siege on the tower of dawn.  The whole feeling of taking back a part of the world for the royal family was amazing.  I don’t want to give away more spoilers than that, but as a whole it ranks up with some of the most epic quest chains I have experienced in any game.

The other night in Empyrean Core I had gathered up a few items for level 60, and the quest chain at Dawn Tower provided a really nice blue sword.  So after completing that I set out to explore Ashora.  I had been out there before, during some guild event that involved doing an invasion out there, so I had at least one of the ports.  The zone is pretty awesome looking, but also would have been super dangerous if I had explored it before now.  I was originally going to work on the quests, but just ended up wandering around and exploring the map for most of the evening.

Money or Mount

2013-05-03_221626Now I am not sure what my next goal is.  Ultimately there are really two competing goals.  Firstly I feel like to be anything but a detriment to world events… I need to get the 130% speed mount.  In order to get that I need to gather up 300 plat.  Considering I am one of those players who is habitually poor in every single game, this is a pretty insurmountable obstacle.  I cannot even fathom having enough money to be able to purchase the 1000 plat 150% mount. 

So the ultimate question is, do I begin actively searching for Hellbug rift raids, knowing that they will be annoyed by the fact that I am slow… or do I grind out the 300 plat and buy my mount first.  I have no clue how long the Hellbug rifts will be active, but knowing Trion it will likely be at least a month.  The only problem is, I have yet to unlock any daily quests, so I have no clue exactly HOW I will get the money.  Money is just not a thing I worry much about in MMOs.  It is odd, in the real world I am completely financially stable, but in games my characters are habitually broke.  This feels somehow backwards from most MMO stereotypes.

Oh well I need to finish this up so we can go out and do things.  Though honestly I am not sure exactly what we will be doing as rainy and icky as it is out there.  If you’ve made it this far in the post, I hope you have a great Saturday and an awesome weekend in general.  I have a server move to do at 10 pm tonight, but I will likely be gaming before and after it.  Figure I am going to have to take a nap today for optimal clarity of thought during the downtime.