Marvel Heroes Binge

A Truly Amazing Day

avengers-age-of-ultron-art-poster-133238 One of the huge positives about where we live is that we are close to an awful lot of things that are within reasonable walking distance.  Over the last year or so we have tried to take advantage of this fact by walking to dinner more often.  This weekend however I did something I should have done a very long time ago and walked to the movies.  There is a theater literally less than two blocks away from my house, but I’ve never actually walked there before.  Granted when walking to dinner we walk past it all of the time.  Sunday I decided to go to the 10:30 am matinee and watch the new Avengers movie.  The movie itself was pretty great, and i feel like I need to watch it again to really take in all of the sights the movie had to offer.  This is a very “busy” film packed with some absolutely insane action sequences.  I feel like it is a toss up between the Hulk and Black Widow as to who stole the show, but I have always been partial to both of them.

As I was exiting the theater I texted my wife to let her know that I would be on my way home.  However when I poked my head out into the light there she was waiting on me.  She walked down hoping to surprise me, and then the two of us walked over to get lunch.  It was a really beautiful day, and she is constantly telling me that I need to get more sunlight.  While I am still not the biggest fan of the sun, she is probably right because I feel better today after having done all of this yesterday.  We had some errands to run, but by the time we got back to the house we both decided it was nap time.  After getting back up we ran to target really quickly and then she went outside to read in the rocking chair, and I played games.  It was a pretty great day, and I am hoping to take advantage of the movie theater being so close in the future.  There are a lot of movies that I want to see that she has no interest in.  Walking down makes it feel less of a hassle for some reason, and also serves as some exercise.

Marvel Heroes Binge

MarvelHeroes2015 2015-05-03 19-40-14-108 It was probably because of the awesome Avengers movie, but when I got home I ran a quick expert roulette and then logged to play Marvel Heroes.  This game has really grown on me and I am feeling like a massive failure for not giving it a chance before now.  Normally the whole Diablo thing is a bit of a turn off anymore, but for whatever reason the combination of Super Heroes and Diablo works well for me.  I have been accumulating a lot of various boost potions, because they give you plenty of them as part of the daily login reward system.  Yesterday I opted to take several of the various 2 hour boosts and see what all I could accomplish.  I pushed Captain America that has become my main from 22 to 27 almost 28 over the course of those two hours.  Right now there are a lot of things working in my favor since there is an event happening that gives Avengers a boost.  The only bad thing is that the cosmic gear I am wearing has yet to be replaced which bums me out slightly.  I guess I might have to try my luck again at the cosmic boxes from Adam Strange.

I am just starting the Savage Lands which according to my friend is one of the more frustrating areas of the game.  I personally found that the tail end of Stryker’s camp to be extremely frustrating with Sentinels dropping on me every five seconds.  I keep feeling like I should probably play other characters up since I now have this whole synergy thing unlocked…  but really I am still having a blast playing Cap.  His skillset is almost perfect suited for my particular play style.  I can charge through a bunch of mobs taking them out, and then when I get into the center of a pack twirl my shield around taking all but the blue or better mobs out.  Then I just mob up with shield throws or punches and repeat.  It feels very enjoyable, but I am actually looking forward to seeing what the new heroic difficulty that I unlocked is like.  There are absolutely times that the game feels mindlessly simple, so I would be curious to see if Heroic is like hard is for Diablo 3… aka the new “normal”.

Closing in on Botanist

ffxiv 2015-05-04 05-52-41-84 Another thing I worked on last night was pushing Botanist up a bit more.  I really want to finish leveling this to 50, and have felt the need to do just this before really starting in on crafting proper.  I realize this might be a bit strange of logic but it works for me.  I spent my evening catching up on Game of Thrones and Silicon Valley, both shows that I had not really watched for the last few weeks.  While doing this I ran a whole slew of Botany leves and managed to push from 35 to 45 which hopefully means I can finish off the leveling process at some point this week.  I will be happy to have finished leveling the two harvesting professions that I am going to need to most while leveling my other  crafters.  Right now however I have to collect 20 high quality mistletoe to turn in to the quest giver.  This is going to be a fairly daunting task, given that I cannot simply buy my way through it.  It seems HQ mistletoe is in short supply as there was absolutely none on the market board.    As a result I will be spending the next little bit in the Whitebrim area harvesting like mad trying to complete the 45 quest.

The other thing I really want to do soon is push my Arcanist from 22 to 30 so that I can become a scholar.  If I manage to do that I can get to 50 relatively easily doing the fast healer dungeon queues.  Depending on how many leves it takes me to get to 50 Botanist, I might follow this interesting guide posted on the FFXIV Reddit.  Ashgar pointed this out, and it seems like a perfectly reasonable way to level.  I actually like chain running leves because it is also a decent source of retainer tokens.  I would love to see myself level a few more classes to 50 before the expansion, because I have 100 level weapons waiting on them.  I have been dumping my excess soldiery into buying the various weapons, and just have one left to purchase, which admittedly is a little insane.  The problem is… what else was I going to use that soldiery on?  I am actually right around the point where I need to buy the final weapon, which makes me feel like a slacker for not leveling all of those classes to 50.  Final Fantasy XIV has way more content than I could ever hope to do… so at times I just feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that I want to be doing.

Frosty Machine

Craigslist Fails Me

I have had a strange relationship with Craigslist over the last few years.  Sometimes it is the source of truly amazing things… other times the source of nothing but frustration.  When it comes to buying laptops for example I have had a high rate of people flaking out on me and simply not showing up with the merchandise.  When it comes to console systems however I have a pretty damned stellar experience getting a PS4 for $200 and a Vita for $100 for example.  Hell right now I am typing on a $150 Logitech G710+ Keyboard that I got for $40…  so generally I have some phenomenally good luck there.  I’ve always felt like if I can keep from taking the initial depreciation hit on an item…  I might as well do it.  I have no problem with second hand goods, and while I don’t get to pepper the internet with unboxing videos…  but I think we are both better off for that.

Several months back I found a Power Color r9 290x for over half off the price it should have been for the card.  I figured it was worth the shot because that was way more video card than I would normally allow myself to buy.  The problem with buying something like a video card is… there really is no way of knowing if the card is good.  It could be burnt to a crisp and unless there are visible signs of damage there is no way of knowing.  When it came time to meet the guy, he said that he replaced the card for a dual Titan Black setup…  so that seemed legit at least as to why he would be getting rid of an otherwise solid card.  I take the card home and install it and it caused my machine to reboot after a few minutes of running any game.  When I started watching the temperature on a monitoring app it would just start climbing, and no amount of manual fan control would bring down the temp.  The card would overheat and freak out my system.

Frosty Machine

At the time I was a bit forlorn but didn’t give up heart.  I ordered a few things to increase the amount of cooling in my case and there they sat in the floor of my office for months.  Part of me didn’t want to install them because deep down I think I knew that I essentially got ripped off on the first card.  This weekend I tore apart my machine and installed all of the extra cooling and I have to say the processor now runs at a frosty 21* C with a recorded maximum of 28* C during gaming load.  I am pretty happy with that but after installing the R9 290X it went through the same cycle as before.  Load up any game and a few minutes later my system is rebooting.  Chances are the guy was using it for bitcoin mining, which quite literally burns out a video card.  I point blank asked him if that was the case he and said no…  but people sometimes lie.

To get a good after market cooler to slap on the card it would end up costing me around $100 for one that fit this particular card… and it just didn’t think it was prudent to throw more money at it when the end result might be the same.  I have mostly stuck with GeForce cards because quite honestly they are what I know.  I know how they perform, I know how to tweak the settings.  This was a brief foray into the concept of owning a Radeon but I am now retreating back into the realm of things I understand.  I ordered a MSI GTX 960 card over the weekend and hopefully if everything works out as planned it will be here Tuesday.  While this is not the screaming card the r9 290x should have been… it is at least stable, reliable and a significant upgrade over the 750 ti I currently have.  I just want games to run without much futzing, and this card should allow me to do that.  Also due to a promotion I apparently get a copy of Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt to play around with on it, a game I likely would have picked up anyways.

Most Improved

MarvelHeroes2015 2015-04-19 23-11-38-80 Marvel Heroes is one of those games that I have avoided like the plague for reasons I don’t fully understand.  I played a tiny bit of it in beta and was not extremely impressed.  However over time it has racked up a wide array of “most improved” titles from the various gaming sites.  I always thought this was a funny concept to be touting… but in truth it is really well deserved.  Earlier in the week I had decided to install the game through steam, because I kept seeing friends of mine playing it.  I figured I would give it a shot and check it out to see how enjoyable it actually was.  The end result was me spending three hours straight playing it last night without really realizing it.  The game has the super hero feel down perfectly, and it actually does a better Diablo than Diablo at this point.  When you start you are given a choice of several heroes, and after reading the descriptions of each of them… it seemed like Captain America fit my desired mode of play the best.

The irony of this is that other than enjoying the movies, I have never really been that big of a fan of Captain America.  At the very least it was not a comic I ever read or spent much time on other than his involvement with the Avengers.  Character wise however he is just about perfect a mix of a solid melee, solid ranged, and lots of defensive cooldowns.  I guess you would assume that a character with a shield as a weapon would end up feeling pretty tanky right?  My favorite thing about him is the shield throw and the ability to use it similar to Sivir in League of Legends to sweep the room and take out a bunch of bad guys.  At this point I think I am level 11 and am actively looking forward to playing more of it.  There are times it feels so much like a top down City of Heroes, so maybe this is the game that is going to finally give me my superhero mmo fix.  I’ve heard the end game can get pretty grindy… but then again so does Diablo, so I guess it makes sense.  In any case I threw some money their way for the X-Force pack through steam and look forward to trying all of those characters as well.