Neighborly Luck Boosters

Good morning friends, I had no intention of taking a break yesterday but this week has conspired against me. It is shocking what a difference having a good cup of coffee in the morning makes. On Monday we ran out of creamer and I had some truly heinous coffee in which I attempted to make a vanilla protein shake work… and it very much did not. During the day a whole other crisis ensued as we lost access to water for about half the day, and given that I have neighbors in visual range of my back yard the whole “peeing in nature” thing doesn’t quite work. Yesterday morning we were awoken at 4:47 by the awful sound of the next-door neighbors AC unit forcibly shutting off… as we lost power. This was off for the entire morning and given that the creamer we purchased was sitting in the fridge… I was deeply hesitant to open that in order to preserve the cold as long as possible. This morning however the dials all clicked into alignment and I have just finished my first cup of coffee the way I wanted it… and it was grand.

I am still very much grinding away towards my ultimate goal of having all classes to level 80. In fact, I have been trying to add a little bit more effort given that I know New World is going to be launching in a few days and I will be spending a significant chunk of time getting started over there. My goal is to reach a state of equilibrium where I am playing both games, but given my focus on the leveling goal that might be a little harder than I want it to be. I am updating the spreadsheet daily and there is a certain joy in seeing the numbers drift upwards. I tweaked my log scale line chart a bit to show the maximum number of total levels which is 1430 and better indicate where I am sitting on that curve.

It is still much easier to see progress on the bar chart where I am mapping each individual job and my current level. The main thing that I changed was adding level call-outs to each of the bars and changing the color of them to denote DPS, Tank, or Healer class. Visually it feels like I am way closer to my goal than I actually am. I should very easily push White Mage to level 80 today once the roulettes reset, but that would still leave me with 57 levels to go. Given that I really enjoy Heaven on High, I am working a bit on grinding out AST and BLM through those levels. Once I get to 71 Trust becomes an option, but that really is a somewhat mind-numbing offering. Trust levels go so much slower than actually running the dungeon with human beings. Getting to level 71 also opens up Bozja which is probably something that I should actually explore a bit further, but I do not find the joy in it that Asha and Waren seem to.

Another big thing that took place over the weekend is that the stars aligned just right and we were able to bring our next-door neighbor to the Free Company house and their assorted friends along for map night. In the car with me are Sigrid, Vita, and Aimi and we had a grand night of maps. I think they brought us significant luck because not only did we manage to make it to the final stage of a single portal… but we managed this feat twice. I am pretty convinced at this point that what happens in the dungeons is completely up to chance. However for the entirety of the night we each managed to clear just shy of a million gil in cash drops alone, not taking into account anything that we were able to sell after the fact.

I am not sure if there is a broad offering of bosses, but we managed to get one which a rework of Echidna from Void Ark. It was actually a somewhat challenging encounter or at least one that was pretty hectic. Another big bonus of the night is that we managed to drag along Eliyon who picked up most of the level between 79 and 80 on his White Mage. It was so good to finally be able to do something with Sig, Vita, and Aimi other than just waving and talking in Shirogane outside our respective houses.

I did not get a proper screenshot after conquering the dungeon, but I did manage to snap this one before we all exited. I kinda wish there was a higher alliance raid version of these maps, to be honest. Whatever the case I am glad we have gotten in the rhythm of running these every Sunday. They make for a really relaxing way to close out the week and a good way to just hang out with friends.