final fantasy xiv Archives - Page 65 of 82

Talador Completed

November 19, 2014 by Belghast

Frustrating Stutters

This morning I am feeling relatively miserable. In truth I have felt extremely lousy since mid way through last week. The hacking and coughing and clearing of my throat just wears me out, and as a result of all of it my lungs are extremely pissed off at me. That said since the weather outside is brutal with lows in the teens each morning… I am perfectly content to stay bundled up inside. Yesterday it was my hope that I would be playing Dragon Age Inquisition, but even with a driver update there are still some issues. The issue I am having is that the game will quite literally be running at a locked 60 frames per second… then all the sudden it will freeze for a moment causing everything to stutter including the audio… then resume back at 60 frames per second as though nothing happened. The game is still playable, but extremely annoying since this seems to happy about once a minute.

The most frustrating thing is that it doesn’t seem to be settings related. I have dialed down the game to extremely low settings and the hitching still occurs. This means that essentially I am not able to join in any reindeer games for the time being. My hope is that an early patch will either come out for the game, or another updated Nvidia driver that resolves the issue. If it is not fixed by this weekend however I am likely to just such it up and deal with the pauses. The game itself, what little I have seen of it… seems really cool. Overall it feels far more like Dragon Age 2 than it does Dragon Age: Origins… which itself is a mixed bag. I wish my character had been silent, because it doesn’t really feel like my character at all… when there is a voice talking instead of me. That is just one of my personal quirks however, but I figure most people prefer to have a voice acted character. Ultimately when I play games like this it is all about the big damned hero fantasy, and saving the kingdom… not the narrative of the actual characters.

Talador Completed

First off I have to say that I love this screenshot. It does not give away any details about the quest chains in Talador other than the fact that Blackhand is involved. However if you have completed the quest chains in the zone you know exactly what this screenshot is from. In any case I am happy that I managed to catch it at just the right moment. Yesterday I was contemplating just completely skipping the quests in Talador to move forward into Spires of Arak. My friend Rylacus begged me not to do this, because there was a moment in the game that I just had to see. Thankfully I followed his advice and man… that zone was freaking amazing. Granted there was a lot of faffing about in that zone unrelated to anything… but the four chapters were all excellent. Terran Gregory and team have don an amazing job with the cinematics in this expansion… and I am constantly floored at how nice everything looks. When one of these scenes cuts in… it manages to make me forget this is a decade old game.

Now I have another dilemma to decide. Once again I am at the breakpoint of a new zone, as last night I managed to ding 98. I have all of the precursors leading into Nagrand, or I could go start the Spires of Arak. In either case it will ding me, but Nagrand will actually give me gear that I need to get into normals and heroics. That said… so far each of the zones has provided important bits of the puzzle letting me understand more of the expansion as a whole. The Spires however are the zone that everyone seems to think drags a bit… and just in the look of it, it reminds me so much of Blades Edge mountains… which had massive pacing problems thanks to the horrible terrain. Part of me wants to jump straight to Nagrand, since it was my favorite zone in Burning Crusade. However the other part of me realizes that if I don’t do Spires of Arak while it is relevant… I will never likely go back and do it because the terrain looks frustrating. At this point I am just not sure which direction I am going to go… but in any case I am only two levels away from 100.

An Excellent Moment

I’ve talked at length about just how phenomenal the Final Fantasy XIV community is, but when I have concrete examples I still feel like I need to share them. Monday before our 8 man raids, I was attempting to cap out my poetics earned for the week, and as such decided to run a completely random expert roulette. Now I queued as DPS, and was shocked at just how fast the queue actually managed to go. We got into the instances and everyone said hello as is the FFXIV custom, and then some actual chatter started up. Things seemed to be going smoothly but within a few minutes the healer asked us if we were experiencing any lag. I was not but as the run progressed I started to see small bits of it with my actions. However I have totally seen times where even among our little circle of friends… one of us was experiencing some crushing lag.. and everyone else was just fine. During a pull the healer disconnected and the ninja and I managed to hold out just long enough after the tank died to finish off the pack.

Now were this any other online game, when the healer got back… they would have been chewed out by the players and called horrible for having a “bad” internet connection. I’ve seen that play out many times in the past in several different games. However in Final Fantasy XIV the healer came back, apologized and the general consensus of comments from the group was “stuff happens” and “thanks for trying”. As the run progressed the were several moments where the healer lagged out of disconnected, often times causing the tank to die. In every single time the tank took it with grace and thanks the healer for fighting through the issues so we could keep going. Upon completing the run everyone thanked the healer for valiantly “sticking it out” and I am certain that I was not the only person to give her my commendations. She sounded thoroughly frustrated by the events, but every player in the instance was supportive of her situation. What other game have you ever seen where that happens?

Awesome Boss

This morning I am thankful for an awesome boss. As I write this… I am feeling absolutely horrible, and have sent my boss an email saying that I would not be in today. That I would be taking the day and resting. I’ve had bosses in the past that would have had a problem with this, bosses that the only thing that mattered was that I was sitting at my desk during the hours of 8 to 5. I am very fortunate to have a boss that is more family than administration. Prior to this current environment it had been a very long time since I had anything resembling a work family. Maybe it was the fact that my first environment straight out of college was so close knit, but it essentially spoiled me for other places I worked. While I still feel close to a lot of the people I have worked with over the years… in part it was either through shared interests or shared struggle in horrible situations. This team that I am part of now… I feel like I belong to something bigger than myself and it is entirely thanks to the support of our boss.

Previously we were a group of self starters, and functioned well as independent islands more or less left along by every boss we had been under. Our current boss was a member of that team, and saw the disconnectedness of the group as a whole as something of a challenge. Over the last several years he has worked to bring us all closer together, and as such make us mesh more tightly. I know that I can go to any one of my team members with a problem and they will do everything in their power to fix it, and they know the same is true for me. Its the stupid little things like bringing a cake to our staff meeting on the months we have a birthday, or going out to see a movie together as an after hours team building activity. All of which by themselves are silly or minor… but adding up to be an awesome environment to work in. So I am thankful I have such a great environment to call my work home.

A Tale of Three Games

November 18, 2014 by Belghast

Cold Snap

Our Final Fantasy XIV group has ended up taking about a month long break following the launch of the 2.4 patch. For various reasons we have not rallied the troops on Tuesday nights, and as such we have opted to move our group content night. Tuesday has turned out to be just as bad a day to do anything serious as it was in every other MMO. For some reason it seems that Final Fantasy XIV patches more often than not late Monday night leading into Tuesday morning. This means along with the normal weekly reset we are often times dealing with marginally unstable servers. Since Monday tends to be a night where most folks focus on getting the last poetics needed to cap for the week, we figured it was also a relatively low volume raid night. So going forward we are going to try and pull together 8 man group content Monday nights with whomever we can muster at the time.

Often times who we have available will dictate what we can do. Last night we started off with Shiva Hard Mode, since most of us had not actually completed it. I have to say the fight was rather enjoyable, and it was kinda like a strange mishmash of titan and ifrit. It took us a couple of tries to see all the mechanics and then we straight stomped her. Granted this is just a hard mode and we are used to mostly attempting extremes. After that we went back and did Garuda Extreme again, because there was at least one member of the party who had not completed it. Traditionally we would be working on Titan Extreme, but it was good to go back and see that we could in fact repeat our victory. Granted it had been well over a month since we had last done the fight, and as such all of us were a bit rusty. However after a few wipes we nailed it like we actually knew what we were doing. Hopefully by next week everyone will have unlocked Ultros so we can take that on as a group, and this should have keyed most everyone for Garuda… so we can make attempts on Titan Extreme again.

To Skip or Not to Skip

After our group broke apart in Final Fantasy XIV I opted to poke my head into World of Warcraft and see what mayhem I could cause. I apparently was significantly closer to 96 than I realized, because upon entering the game and beginning work again on the Gorgrond content… I dinged within doing a few of the bonus areas. I still have a handful of bonus content areas to complete, but now this gives me a dilemma. I am at an ideal point to transition to the new zone that unlocked at 96… Spires of Arak. The problem being I have yet to do anything at all in Talador other than set up my garrison outpost. It looks like a really cool zone… but I am wondering if doing it will basically screw me for getting into normal mode dungeons. The problem that I ran into with Pandaria is that I leveled significantly quicker than the content would normally allow… and this means that I ended up needing to skip entire zones in the process. Normally I would keep plugging on, but I would really like to be available for at least a normal mode tank when I reach 100. The gear level that I came into the expansion with is just not going to hold long enough for me to do meaningful content.

It was my experience in Pandaria that if you could get into Townlong Steppes and Dreadwastes at the level cap to enter them… you could end up getting enough gear upgrades from questing that you were more than ready to set foot into normals… and quite possibly you were within an upgrade or two away from being able to do heroics. I guess in theory I could keep plugging away at Talador and simply finish all the content in the game before worrying about doing dungeons. Ultimately I do want to finish the content, because this expansion actually has a storyline that I care about for once. I guess my only desire to rush to 100 is so that I can get in on the initial wave of folks needing to run dungeons. While tanking for strangers was not as bad of an experience as I had expected… I feel like once everyone hits cap that experience will degrade significantly. Ultimately I will need to make a decision and move forward. Right now I am leaning heavily towards just skipping Talador entirely for the moment and diving into the Spire of Arak for maximum upgrade potential.

A Tale of Three Games

At midnight of last night another game launched that will be fighting for my attention, or significantly earlier than midnight if you know how to use a VPN to cause yourself to show up as another region. This once again is proof positive that region lockouts are dumb, because they are so painfully easy to circumvent if you really want to. I however did not care enough to do this, and my Monday night was already pretty full so I just waited until 11pm my time to get in and play the game. Dragon Age: Inquisition is a game with so many hopes wrapped up in it, that can either be booned or bashed within the first few hours of game play. Will this game return to Dragon Age: Origin style game play, or will it be more akin to Dragon Age 2. Quite honestly I don’t have an answer for you yet because I just have not seen enough of the game.

I am however already questioning my choices, and thinking that maybe I should not have gone sword and board tanky. The game unfortunately gives you a tank for your very first character, and while I have not even completely the introduction… I am already having flashbacks of trying to make two tanks work to keep Alistair in my party. The description mentions having proficiency with a two hander as well, so hopefully one of us can equip one of those and be done with it. Quite honestly the game felt a little sluggish, but I think maybe I had something installing in the background when I made my attempt to play it. For whatever reason it seemed to run silky smooth.. and then absolutely thrash the hard drive every so often without much rhyme or reason as to why. My hope was that it was just a background process thing… and not the game doing something dumb like trying to dial into the dragon age servers periodically. The game took a significant time to load… which I do think we can probably blame on busy servers as everyone was trying to launch the client at exactly midnight. Hopefully as the week goes on, I will have more to report on it… other than it exists.

My Cousin

No matter how smoothly this Thanksgiving goes… it was going to be a rough one regardless. This is going to be the first dinner without my grandmother, who has been such a fixed point and an anchor in our family. She represents that last in a long line of degrading family events that pretty much means all of the normality that I grew up with as far as family and holidays goes is gone. When my grandmother on my fathers side passed away, those meals just stopped in any semblance of order. We would say that we would try and get together, but ultimately we each made a quick visit in private to my grandfather… and that reason for maybe passing each other in the drive way even left when he passed away. Similarly with my wife’s family… when he step dad passed away the era of having big family meals went away… and folks opted to break apart into much smaller units. The last bastion of the big family get together was my Grandmother on my mothers side… and this past year she passed away. Predictably holiday plans have been non functional.

Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays, because it is one of the last pure ones. Sure the day after thanksgiving is this black mass to consumerism… but thanksgiving day itself has remained relatively pristine. It was a day about getting together and having a meal with your family, and that mission was just simple enough to stay pretty true to its original goal. There is something about sharing a meal with friends and family that is just special to me… and for years I tried to convince my family to turn Christmas into Thanksgiving 2.0… where we just got together and shared conversation and food… and forgot the presents. My grandmothers house was this focal point of all of the family activity. She was such a strong matriarch and she is as much a reason for why I am the person I am… as anyone in my life is. I spent the majority of my childhood at her house, with her as my companion and friend. So this Thanksgiving was always going to be a hard one, no matter what happened.

The interesting thing that I have noted as we have gone through a series of recent funerals is how well my generation seems to get along with one another. When my grandmother passed away, I stayed long after most of the folks had left just talking to my cousins. My generation just does not fit into our family as a whole… we went out into the world and for the most part all did something with our lives beyond the boundaries of the small town my family hails from. The other day my wife was lamenting how strange Thanksgiving would be without my grandmother on facebook, and at this one of my cousins announced that she was intending to invite us to have the meal with them. Apparently she had gone through the same malaise and similarly they had a few deaths in their family that pretty much ended up with the holiday decimated. So as such here we go trying to start our own new traditions. Hopefully Thanksgiving will go smoothly, but in any case it will be better than spending it without family.

Sell Me on Warlords

November 16, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat 31 – Endless Legend of Draenor

Last night we recorded yet another episode of AggroChat, and I was joined by Ashgar, Kodra and Tam. Still no signs of Rae, but she has been absent in a lot of things lately. I think she is just going through one of those periods of seclusion, that I occasionally find myself in. I went into last night not thinking we had a whole lot to talk about, but once again we managed to ramble on for an entire show. This week Ashgar, Kodra and Tam have been spending some time playing Endless Legend a relatively new 4X game that spawned from a rather steam early access program. From what it sounds like it is a really interesting take on the traditional civilization game model. Throughout the discussion it reminded me in no small part to Age of Wonders but with more original fantasy race combinations.

Thanks to a sale on Steam Tam delved into the rather critically acclaimed Shadows of Mordor. When I originally saw the trailer I thought… “man this is a Tam game”. He loves all things stealthy, and by the same token I thought “man this is not a Bel game”. At least the second part of that statement might have been wrong. It sounds like there is plenty of carnage and mayhem, and a super interesting nemesis system to keep players busy. Essentially if I could manage to struggle through the stealthy bits, there is probably a really enjoyable game there waiting. One of the cooler ideas is that apparently your friends nemesis characters… will join your game and hunt you down too. So in theory you could unleash some living nightmares on your friends if you end up letting them level up too much.

Finally I delve into the topic of Warlords of Draenor and my return to the game. I still stand by my original statement that if you have no interest in World of Warcraft, this expansion will do little to change that. However if you are like me and still have at least a passing interesting in the game, or have a huge vault of nostalgia towards the Burning Crusade era… this is going to be like crack. Right now I am finding the game extremely interesting, and we ramble on talking about it at length. So while I thought we didn’t have a whole lot to talk about, it turned out as the night went on that we still managed to fill up a show full of verbal faffing.

Burning Crusade Nostalgia

One of the points we landed on last night that I find extremely interesting might also be the reason why I am enjoying this expansion, but I don’t feel like someone like Tam would. Ultimately I think it depends on how you felt about your experience in Burning Crusade as a whole. For me Burning Crusade was really the expansion where I came into my own as a player, and became “Belghast”. I started my WoW raiding life as a Hunter, but that was a class I had never actually intended on playing. Originally I wanted to play a tanky paladin, but the bait and switch when they replaced the strike system with the seal system… and the fact that at low levels paladins were frustratingly slow to level solo caused some problems. I had a death in the family shortly after the launch of the game, and when I came back most of my friends had shot far ahead of me, leaving me to have to solo almost entirely.

At that point the Hunter was the king of soloing all things, and as such I picked it up and caught up to my friends rather quickly. I can’t say I disliked playing Lodin my hunter, but it just wasn’t the class I had ever intended or imagined myself playing. Then one thing lead to another, and a good friend needed a hunter for his raid… and bam I ended up becoming a raiding hunter. I loved the Late Night Raiders group of hunters, and many of them I am still close with even today. However i never really excelled as a hunter, because my heart was not fully into it. I could do better than average damage, and had decent enough reflexes and was reliable as part of a rotation… but I had no passion for it, at least not the way the other hunters did. However as I started accepting gear from the raid, I felt bound by loyalty to keep playing that character as long as they needed me.

The Raid Crash

With the launch of Burning Crusade it was this great reset button, and I seized the opportunity with both hands. I half heartedly tried to level Lodin at first, but quickly found myself exclusively playing Belghast my protection warrior, and became a much needed tank as we all leveled up. The Burning Crusade could be thought of as the great raid killer, because all of the changes… all of the moving characters around and dropping the standard raid size from 40 to 25 man ultimately was the final blow to many raids on our server that had only been limping along for some time. Here is where the perspective comes in because while I was just an admittedly well liked member of the raid… Tam was one of the leaders of it. So while I viewed everything as this grand opportunity to do the things I had always wanted to be doing… his viewpoint had to be decidedly different. I know when my second raid “No Such Raid” fell apart around me it took a lot of our me personally. I had that raid dumped in my lap, and with the figurehead in its cult of personality gone… there was really no amount of duct tape to keep the ship afloat.

So while I personally view Burning Crusade as this expansion where I got to finally move into the role that I had been designed for… others might not have quite the hopefulness that I did. I remember when the expansion hit, there were a lot of raid members that were frustrated by the gear reset. In fact they were down right mad that all of this work that they went through and effort they put into getting just the right items… was to be immediately erased the moment they stepped foot into Hellfire Peninsula. Expansion are the great equalizers… they give players the opportunity to shift focus, and pick up something that they had always wanted to play but were never given the chance to. With the launch of Warlords of Draenor I am doing just that myself. I felt it was fitting for me to be setting aside my Deathknight and once again taking up the mantle of Protection Warrior.

Sell Me on Warlords

Last night during the course of the podcast, Tam uttered the words above.. “Sell Me on Warlords”. In truth I couldn’t nor would I really want to. Warlords of Draenor is more of the same, with a prettier coat of paint and some nifty casual friendly features like the Garrison. I feel this is an expansion that only those who still begrudgingly feel love for World of Warcraft in their hearts should ever try and play. The game has some serious shortcomings still as compared to more modern MMOs. It pisses me off on an almost nightly basis that it doesn’t have a mentoring system, nor does it have a content scaling system for dungeon runs. I greatly prefer that Final Fantasy XIV sizes down the players to fit the dungeon, so that there is never a case where you straight up roflstomp the content. This came up the other night when Zeli and Jabberant started characters and used their boost to 90 to create them on Argent Dawn. Jab asked if there was a way to go back and experience the old dungeon content… and sadly unless you mean by soloing with great ease… the answer is a resounding no.

So I can’t really sell Warlords as the next best thing since sliced bread. I still think that functionally Final Fantasy XIV is a better game. That said I am happy that I don’t really have to make the choice between them, In fact I have been extremely thankful to have FFXIV that I am still deeply connected to as Argent Dawn has burned down around me. What Warlords represents is a game with the charm and grace of any Blizzard title. The recent performance issues still do not degrade the fact that the game is extremely well crafted. At the end of the day it is an old game, with a fresh coat of paint… but it is a very enjoyable game still. The content itself I am finding more enjoyable, because they took the lessoned learned with the Timeless Isle and extended them out to the world as a whole. There is so much to see and find, and so many neat rare mobs to take out along the way. It is like they gave me carefully crafted crack just for me… because I love getting interesting loot and killing interesting things. If you hold a special place in your heart for Draenor… it might be a worthwhile time to return as well. At this point I still have not actually renewed my account… but signs are pointing to that I will be doing so.

Supporting Wife

One of the recent sagas in my life that has somehow managed to stay mostly out of my blog is the ongoing issues I have had with my laptop. I feel like at this point I deserve an honorific of “laptop killer” because I seem to be exceptionally hard on them. My Asus Republic of Gamers laptop lasted about two years, and I loved it dearly… until something went wonky with the motherboard and kept it from charging the battery. Then I got the SLI configuration Lenovo y500 laptop… and I too adored it. Ultimately I think it was pretty much my perfectly laptop, until a few weeks ago I went downstairs to boot it up… and it refused to go past the Lenovo splash screen. I realized unfortunately that it was out of warranty, so I ended up posting on the Lenovo support forums.. and as of yet have not received a response.

So over the last few weeks at my wife’s urging we have been watching craigslist to see if we could find something interesting. In the past when I have been without my laptop, I have been in a state of utter panic… however this time around I have tried extremely hard to be zen about it. We saw a few interesting things but either the poster wanted more than I was willing to pay for it, or after some exchanges of texts I found out that the video card would be too underpowered for my purposes. All of this while I did not realize that my wife had also been searching craigslist on a daily basis. Thursday night she happened across a post on the Oklahoma City craigslist, for someone selling a Lenovo y580 a model slightly newer than mine… for a ridiculously cheap price.

My wife did not even bat an eye at the thought of us making a trip to Oklahoma City, entirely for the purpose of getting me a laptop from some random seller on Craigslist. I am exceptionally lucky and thankful that I have a wife that is so supportive of all of the random otherwise meaningless activities I engage in on a daily basis. She knows all of this is important to me… and while she doesn’t always grasp the reason why… she constantly surprises me at just how much she is willing to do in support of my madness. So yesterday went took a two hour trek to Oklahoma City, looked over the laptop… and today it is sitting beside me downloading various things. Of course we made a trip through all of the Half Priced Books stores in the area, since we don’t have those in Tulsa… so it was not entirely about the laptop. Still I am extremely thankful to have a partner willing to jump through so many hoops for my happiness.

Amon’s Pants

November 15, 2014November 14, 2014 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff Episode 2

Since I was sick yesterday I decided to go ahead and wrap up the last bits of editing needed to push the latest episode of Bel Folks Stuff out the door. While editing I had this strange trip into the past, as I had recorded the podcast a few weeks ago. We talked about news… in speculative terms that have long since been resolved. So my important lesson is that I really should not sit in a show as long as I have with this series. The end result feels a little strange, like we are looking into the past and seeing what our thoughts were like on a subject a couple of weeks ago. In any case it was an enjoyable episode to record, and I am fairly proud of this side project as a whole. However it is causing me to rethink my plans to record the next episode now… that I wouldn’t actually release until mid December.

In this episode I am joined by the illustrious Rowan Blaze of the I Have Touched the Sky blog and a frequent guest on the Beyond the Veil podcast covering The Secret World. In an interesting change to the format of the first show… we also had a second guest with us… thought due to some technical constraint she was not extremely chatty. Scooter is Rowan’s awesome wife and constant companion both in game and out. Since one of the more interesting tidbits of his blog is the fact that he is almost always chronicling their adventures together rather than apart. He suggested we include her in the discussion, and I think it turned out to be a fairly brilliant idea. Once again there was not a really strict format, and as I said before… some of the information is a bit dated now… but in any case I think it was a good effort well worth your time.

Amon’s Pants

In the weeks after the release of the 2.4 patch, I have been spending most of my time in Syrcus Tower. On the average night I have been running it between 2 and 5 times an evening. At this point I can literally run the place in my sleep… and on more than a few of the runs I am pretty sure I dozed off at some point around Sylla and finally woke up when we were taking down Amon. I’ve been running the raid for several reasons… but primarily to complete the ilevel 100 dragoon set. I started off with extremely good luck, gathering up most of a set within the first few nights. This all had a side benefit of also gathering up quite a few Sands and Oils and enough Unidentified Allagan Tomestones to outfit an army of alts. I reached a point where all that was left were the pants, and that had been the state I was in for the last three weeks. I managed to see them drop a few times, but in all three of those occasions… there was another dragoon and the RNG gods decided to smite me.

Normally speaking Syrcus Tower goes extremely smoothly, as most of the server has reached a point where they are using it as a way to farm oils and sands… and the occasional piece of alternate job gear. In truth most of these runs are actually rather friendly, with folks willing to lend a hand to those just learning. This particular run however was the exact opposite of the spirit I normally experience. For a moment I thought that maybe I was in another game, because I saw the same sort of petty name calling and infighting that I had experienced so many times in the World of Warcraft Looking for Raid tool. It took us no less than four times to finally be able to beat Amon… and when we did there sitting in the loot window were my pants. This time however there were no other dragoons in my party to ruin my day. Never again do I have to run Syrcus Tower as a Dragoon… but that just means I will likely start running it as a bard and working on that set of gear. I might have an issue with grinding things.

Garrisons are Great

I reached a point last night with my Garrison where I finally decided it was a pretty amazing thing. Not that you can really clearly make out what I am doing in the above screenshot… but this is Belghast my Warrior Engineer Enchanter… mining ore. For years I have struggled with my decision to level both enchanting and engineering on the same character. The lack of mining has always been something I have struggled with… but there is a long story behind how I ended up in this predicament. Primarily Belghast started his life as an Enchanter/Tailor because that was a combination of trade skills that I was missing. Then I got serious about raiding… and hit a drought when our raid was clearing Tier 5 content in Burning Crusade. I could not for the life of me get a helm upgrade… and there sitting on the crafting table was the insanity of engineering goggles. At that point they were Tier 6 equivalent… so I made the decision to gather up all the resources and in a single afternoon I dropped tailoring and leveled engineering to the then cap.

While the mine respawn seems extremely long… it still gives me access to gather ore and slowly progress my engineering a little bit while I level. Additionally I am finding the follower missions to be extremely enjoyable. Last night I managed to reach rank two with my town hall, which allowed for a larger selection of plots. As such I now have placed an Engineering plot, Enchanting Plot, replaced the Barracks with a Dwarven Bunker, and kept the Inn with the hopes of upgrading it to rank 2 and recruiting random followers. Essentially on Belghast I am pretty much trying to go with all the “killing stuff in the world has interesting effects” buildings. Since well… I like charging around the map killing things. My hope is that with things like the Dwarven Bunker giving me an increased chance of getting Rares and Epics… I will actually get some stuff I can use. I feel like I have a much larger post entirely devoted to Warlords of Draenor in me, so I will save further information for tomorrows post. Needless to say I am enjoying myself.

That Dad is Okay

I really did not talk much about this next thing, but today I am thankful that my father made it through surgery fine and seems to be improving. For the last several months my father has had a rather scary condition that they originally thought was causing his eyeball to swell up in size. After much investigation, and a slew of specialists it was determined that what was actually happening was that his eye was being pressed forward… giving it the appearance of growth. As it got worse however, he lost his ability to do most things like drive… as ultimately he was always trying to manually reconcile the two images he was seeing at all times. He tried not to let on that it bothered him, but as the months drug on you could tell he was absolutely miserable.

Finally this week a specialist provided a plan of attack, and he went from having a consultation on Tuesday to having full blown surgery on Thursday. Thankfully everything went as planned and to the best of anyone’s knowledge there were no complications. I talked to dad over text this morning and his vision continues to improve. In fact I was shocked that moments after the surgery he was able to see normally again and read signs. It has been a scary time for my family, not knowing quite what was going to happen. As such I am so thankful that things turned out well. One of my biggest fears is the loss of my sight, and I know my father shares that fear. While he never wanted to let on just how frightened he was… I am sure he must have been. I am also thankful that once again we get to share our love of books.