Strange Dreams
For the last few nights I have had the strangest but at the same time most vivid dreams. The problem is that they are for the most part utter nonsense. For example this morning I woke up from a dream involving writer Beau Hindman. He had reached out to me to ask if I had any gmail invites… and for those of you for whom that makes zero sense… Google mail was once upon a time invite only and invites were rationed and carefully guarded. I told him that I had a couple that I could hand out, and he asked me to send one to someone. Turns out the person in question was an old man that lived in the small town my wife grew up in. Apparently Beau really needed to get ahold of this person… and apparently using the phone was just too cumbersome? Trust me… I fully understand a lack of wanting to call someone… so I too would probably go through strange lengths to avoid it.
When the guy didn’t accept the invite, I had to drive up to the small town and talk to him in person. He was afraid that the internet would steal his soul, and by having an email account he would be supporting the terrorists or something. So I spent the next hour talking him into accepting the invite, all so Beau would be able to contact him. Sure it is madness, and honestly Beau and I are not even in contact that often, but somewhere in my brain it made all of this make sense. That is the crazy thing about dreaming… is at the time none of this seems as irrational as it does when you are trying to break it apart later. I guess Beau got pulled in because I know that he is originally from Oklahoma, and my wife often gets a staring role in my dreams… so it is strange the way the mind weaves this seemingly plausible tapestry out of bits and pieces of leftover memories.
Nael in the Coffin
Monday nights is traditionally our Final Fantasy XIV raid group night, and last night was no exception. For months… literally… we have been working on learning the dance on Turn Nine of the Coil of Bahamut. For a long time now we have been super close to pushing over the edge, and held up on the madness that is the dive bomb phase. Last night we wanted to defeat Nael by any means necessary so we could move on with our lives. Not sure if it was true for all of our group, but I have developed a love and hate relationship with this fight, and was more than ready to put it behind me. One of the features added with Heavensward is the ability to queue for something as an undersized group. What this does in theory is zone you into a place without scaling your level down to the appropriate place. What this means in practice is that you can now wreck certain zones for the purpose of collecting those dungeon drops you missed in the past. Since several of us were sitting at level 60, we decided to give this option a shot on turn nine and see what would happen.
The truth is the very first attempt out of the gate we straight wiped to mechanics and over confidence. After that it still took us a few tries to get the dance close enough to being correct to be able to finish off the encounter. The funny thing is… that even with 20% echo and 10 more levels… the fight can still straight up eviscerate you. I think we managed to down it on our fourth attempt last night, and can now move on with our lives into Final Coil. On one level it bums me out that we didn’t “do it for real” by facing this encounter at level 50. On the other hand however I am happy to be done with being in there. There comes a time when you just get sick of seeing the same encounter over and over, and I remember our group reached that same place back in WoW’s Blackwing Lair with the Firemaw encounter. It is going to be interesting to see what the next few weeks bring us as far as content goes. Today is the official launch of Alexander, but as it stands right now… none of us are even vaguely closed to “geared enough” to tackle it.
Ice Packs and Grinding
Yesterday I stayed home from work because I was struggling to walk around. So my key focus in life became making sure I was ice packing every hour or so for maximum effect. This meant that most of the day I spent it hanging out on the couch with my leg propped up a bit. It also means I spent a lot of time piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV. Throughout the day I worked on getting all of my Clan Hunts for maximum upgrade token goodness, and did all three of my bonus law roulettes, which left a lot of time to work on my Dragoon. Now previously I had managed to get it to level 51, which is key because that unlocks access to the dungeon Dusk Vigil. So yesterday I spent the majority of my in game time queueing for Dusk Vigil over and over. Before raid time last night I was but a sliver away from 53, which should grant me access to the second dungeon… Sohm Al. The only problem with Dusk Vigil is that technically nothing in it other than the jewelry are strictly upgrades from what I had been wearing.
Sohm Al on the other hand… everything in there should be full of upgradey goodness other than maybe the weapon. The other good thing about running all these dungeons is that I am able to soak up gear for my alt jobs for when I finally get around to leveling them. I like that pretty much every dungeon in Heavensward offers an item set, which is unlike the old world where only every so often did a dungeon actually drop something cool looking. I really want to finish the Dragoon set from Dusk Vigil because it looks kinda amazing. It is a blue set of armor that looks just like the one that Lucia is wearing in the cut scenes. In the news of me… well I am largely functioning better thanks to the constant ice packs. At this point the swelling is down significantly and I am hoping I can function today without a lot of pain. I am sure come this evening I will need to ice pack once more but for the time being… life seems to be grand, or at least getting there.
