Orthos and Pink Beans

Hey Folks! I did not make it terribly far last night but spent most of my evening in Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve been fighting some sort of unnamed crud so when my wife decided to head to bed around 8:30 to read, I decided to follow and wound up falling asleep pretty rapidly. I’ve been avoiding the desire to roll a new character in Path of Exile because I know there are a series of short events coming up starting this week, and I don’t want to burn myself out. Also, I have already made seven functional builds this league and I am uncertain what I might want to build after those. So as a result I had the intent of working on the Main Story Quest but wound up fiddling around with Eureka Orthos instead on my Samurai.

I got the first twenty floors done but only because my friend Donald Serrot took pity on me and queued. For whatever reason this version of the Deep Dungeon does not seem anywhere near as popular as the previous ones. I guess for starters… it is way more punishing with the mechanics having several AOE attacks that I found out just straight-up one-shot you. The boss fights as well are significantly more challenging than a Deep Dungeon tends to be. I’ve got no idea why the team decided to go in this direction, but it is somewhat of a bummer given that I could not get the last part of the dungeon at all last night and finally gave up after the two folks who seemed to be queueing along with us bailed. Huge thanks still to Don for helping me out. The first queue… was over 50 mins so had I not gotten some help I likely never would have gotten it going.

This morning I noticed that the Fall Guys collaboration started in the Gold Saucer. This introduces a new area called the Bluderville Square that is completely decorated in they Fall Guys style. What this introduces is a new queued zone where a bunch of players complete to get through all of the Fall-Guys-inspired obstacles and win the crown. If you have ever played Fall Guys it proceeds very similarly, where each round culls the total number of contestants until the final round crowns a single winner for the event. The cool thing is that even if you fail miserably like I did… you get some MGP and Fall Guys event points so that eventually you will be able to purchase whatever you want from the event.

There is a whole slew of items available for the currency tied to the event. You can check out the full listing on the Fall Guys event page. I think I probably want to at least pick up the two minions the Pink Bean and Pegwin, but I am not sure what else really interests me. Getting eliminated in the first round earned me 50 points so even if I continue to failboat this miserably I can chip away bit by bit on getting some of the rewards. If nothing else this event seems to be a good source of bright primary-colored dyes so if you are inclined it might be something to stock up on. There are housing items, but I am uncertain that I want to decorate my home to look like an obstacle course.

Even in the case of failing out miserably… 680 MGP seems like a reasonable reward. I am wondering if there is a daily cap on how many times you can attempt the event. You could in theory fail out pretty quickly and then go about your way queuing for another round. I will probably do some testing around this to see if I hit some sort of cap at some point. I don’t spend a ton of time in the Gold Saucer, but it was fun enough to try at least a few times. I suck at jumping puzzles so this is not really down my alley. It is cool to see something weird like this go into the game though.

Farewell Flower

First Casualty

One of my big concerns about our trip last weekend was not so much the long lag in blog posts…  but the lack of ability to take care of my “flower babies”.  I have become oddly emotionally invested in the lives of our flowers, and while our animals are super hardy and resilient…  flowers seem to constantly teeter on the brink of death.  Some of our more thirsty flowers I had been watering morning and evening just to make sure they were nice and happy, and unfortunately it is an insane request to ask someone else to do that.  So we left Friday hoping everything would be fine, and my flowers would survive until I got back.  For the most part things are fine but we have a few of these “c word I cannot pronounce” plants… I think it is something like Catharanthus.  We got them as hanging plants… and the purple/pink mixture and yellow/orange mixtures are still thriving.  However over our disappearance the red/white mixture started to struggle.  In fact the entire red plant withered and died, and in truth given how happy the others seem to be I don’t feel like I can really blame it on the care.

The plant probably would have struggled even if I was there babying it along.  However it still is a little sad to see it… and while we removed as much of the dead plant as we could…  and by dead I mean spaghetti brittle stems…  the white half of the planting seems to be struggling as well.  My hope was that by removing the dead plant it would give the thriving plant more room to spread out.  The other awkward problem we are having is… it is raining constantly and it is hard striking a balance of when we should and should not water ourselves….  and when the rain water is good enough.  I realize the plantings that we have currently are annuals and at some point they will all die out, but I am not looking forward to seeing it.  Of the two of us… I am definitely the nurturer, and I just want to take care of the flowers so that they live forever.  Even thought I know that is not something that is actually going to happen.  The other flowers are lovely however, and if the white half of the planting does die as well we will likely replace it with something else in that planter.

Senor Sabotender

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As far as gaming goes, last night I split time between Destiny and Final Fantasy XIV.  I feel like I am still getting into the swing of things after returning from our trip, and as a result I have wound up getting super tired significantly earlier than normal.  I am sure the extra sleep isn’t hurting me either, so I am largely indulging in the earlier bedtime.  As far as Destiny goes I spent a bit of time piddling around on my Hunter and running strikes to knock out some quests.  On both the Warlock and Hunter I have really done very little of the post level cap missions that the game throws at you, and as a result I don’t have legendary artifacts on either of them.  This is the single slot that is dragging down my gear score the most, so I attempted to solo some Court of Oryx.  Unfortunately I kept getting the twins, which for whatever reason is very hard for me to solo as a hunter.  I initially summoned thinking that folks were actively running court, however as soon as I popped the coin I saw the familiar animation of them going to orbit.  I did however knock out several strikes towards the “run 5 strikes” quest.

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As far as FFXIV goes I decided I should probably spend my evening working on the current event that is going on in the Gold Saucer.  There is a murder mystery that ends up rewarding you an /eureka emote that makes you look like the stereotypical MMO quest giver with an exclamation mark over your head.  Instead of showing you this emote however I am showing a picture of Memusu Tsuuma who I happened to log into the game the other night standing right beside.  I love seeing orange names while I am out running around, though so many of them I cannot remember exactly where I knew them from.  That was not the cause with Memu however, how I have absolutely abducted into all of my regular multi-game shenanigans.  Something I noticed about hanging out in gold saucer…. random people come up to me and give me a hug.  I am guessing it is the Bunny Samurai thing, which has become sort of my trademark look.  As far as the questing went, it took a long time to gather up all of the evidence needed for the mystery… but thankfully the game will tell you when you have found all ten of the items with a little message saying that you cannot find anything else of use.  Now I just need to devote some time to finishing out the 3.2 story line to be ready for when 3.3 lands on supposedly the 7th.