Morning folks! Last night was a pretty rough evening. We were under a Tornado Watch turned Warning and that really started to escalate around what is normally our bedtime. So that meant a somewhat fraught evening of sleeping with the channel tuned to our favorite weather station. Oklahomans have developed this skill which is to half-sleep and half-listen to the weather report at the same time. I remember specifically waking up at various points in the evening when the meteorologist cut in with important updates, and then blending back into sleep… to the point where I am not even sure if I was actually waking up or if I was just dreaming about the weather? Whatever the case it is going to be a long day as I am pretty sure that neither my wife nor I got anything resembling restful slumber.
One of the positives and negatives about New World is how easily you can level just by doing pretty much anything. The positive is that the levels come quickly and it always feels like you are making incremental progress. The negative is that there really isn’t a way to actually slow down your leveling in an effort to let friends who started later try and catch up. For example, I spent the podcast on Saturday night fishing, since it was a pretty relaxing activity and wound up putting on most of a full level while doing it. Last night I was trying to catch up with my town reputation in Everfall and wound up doing most of a level as well in town board quests. Then there is crafting which always adds a not insignificant boost to your leveling. Suffice to say at this point whether or not I want to be… I am going to be level 60 and waiting on folks to catch up.
My crafting priorities shifted around a little bit last night when I noticed sitting in my bags the pattern for a Starmetal Storage Chest, or more correctly the Hope Storage Chest. I have been slowly working on my furnishing skill, and I guess I should spend a bit more effort trying to get it up to 145 so that I can start making these. I could have sold the pattern for a pretty penny on the market board, but in truth, I want to be able to craft my own furnishing so I guess this just gives me more purpose in leveling. I’ve reached a point where I am completely out of storage in both Windsward my main crafting hub, and Everfall my backup crafting hub. This means I will need to expand out further into another city… and I am trying to decide if I would rather do this with Brightwood or Weavers Fen. Both are currently held by my faction which would give me rapid (but costly) access to items from that bank.
One of the nights this weekend I happened into a group that was farming Rifts… aka Corrupted incursions or whatever this game calls them. I will always think of them as Rifts because they show up randomly, involve defeating a boss and then go away quickly rewarding you a chest in the end. The key differentiator so far is that Corrupted Rifts are way more rewarding than most of the tears were back in Rifts. I’ve pulled some decent gear from even the minor loot chests, and the majors give you the currency that you need in order to craft dungeon keys. I need to do this more often because it was rather enjoyable and also fairly rewarding.
Over in Final Fantasy XIV, I am working on my last job and have it up to 75 as of yesterday. I completely blew off maps night last night unintentionally. We were downstairs watching the weather and I was slowly prodding along in New World, and simply was not watching the time nor did I have any messaging clients active on the laptop. So I completely missed the message from Waren reminding me, and it wasn’t until we were shutting down for bed that I even began to realize that I had completely missed things. I feel bad, but also given the weather patterns I might not have been the most reliable group member last night anyway. I do need to make sure I make next week because I really do feel bad about completely missing it two weeks in a row.