Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We have a bit of a long show because we wound up cramming a few games that we missed in the first show into this list. We round out our yearly tradition with the second part of our Games of the Year show. I am once again so glad that we decided a few years ago to start doing these on multiple nights because this year would have been a four-hour-long epic marathon of recording.
Good Morning Folks! I find myself in one of those transitional periods in gaming… where the thing you really want to be playing has not come out yet, but everything that you are playing is not quite right. I am having a heck of a lot of fun in Final Fantasy XIV but essentially only to the point where I run out of daily roulette bonuses. I spent chunks of yesterday trying to catch up on quests and honestly… I think I am of the mindset of my friend Jay and just going to cancel them en masse and then pick up the pieces whenever I feel in the mood to sort them out again. First I think we should all take a moment to appreciate just how pretty Limsa Lominsa is at night. I think more than anything this is why I decided to switch my allegiance to this city all those years ago.
I’ve been scurrying around trying to do a bunch of prep work, but am starting to feel like I am studying too hard for a test to where I start to second guess myself. I don’t really have enough time to get my gear maxed out at this point, and I have already geared out my Warrior and Machinist to a point where they should be viable for a good chunk of the early bits of Dawntrail. I’ve been pouring “bookrocks” into ninja gear so that I can finish that character out after I have finished leveling my tanks. My Dark Knight is getting pretty close as I managed to knock out two levels yesterday, and will easily get another level today. After that, I will spend the last week working on Gunblade but am unlikely to get it across the finish line before the expansion launch without some dedicated grinding. Essentially I am in this pattern of playing a lot of things… for a little bit of time… and feeling weird about it. Side note if you have not backed up your settings in awhile you might want to do so. I had not backed mine up since 2021.
In Guild Wars 2 I am pretty much playing a little bit each night at reset and knocking out my daily wizard chores. I should be wrapping up Secrets of the Obscure but I gotta say… I am not the biggest fan of Nayos. Right now the story quests have not inspired me to dive deeper into it. The fight with Ceros was easily three times longer than it should have been. That entire instance should have been chopped up into multiple instances because, by the time I finished it, I was ready to gnaw my arm off to release myself from that trap. I am in this weird place with Guild Wars 2 where I still enjoy playing it casually and I like knocking out things that will eventually get me another legendary… but I am having trouble fully attaching to it knowing that I am about to go all in on Dawntrail.
Similarly, I am in an odd place with Diablo IV. My build was good enough to get me to 100, but feels sort of awful pushing harder content. I have been poking at leveling a Necromancer, but the drive to play is mostly gone. Getting to 100 feels like “finishing” the game to me, that was the thing I had never done previously and after accomplishing that goal I was ready to do something else. I enjoy the changes to the game but it also doesn’t really drive me to play more of it. It is nowhere near as rich and textured as Path of Exile and there are not as many different things to interact with. Everything sort of feels very samey where you just keep pushing up difficulty rather than interacting with systems. I keep thinking about respeccing either to Dust Devils Dual Swing or the new Dust Devils Whirlwind… but it feels like it takes too much effort and focus to get me there. So instead I log in… flop around like a fish out of water for a bit and then log right back out.
I am still periodically logging into World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix as my “third game” but honestly a lot of my drive to play it is gone there as well. I’ve leveled and geared one character to the standards I am willing to do during a short event, and leveled a second character…. and now sit less than 10 levels away from the cap on a third. I could level more characters or I could grind out more bronze… but honestly… I scooped up most of the mounts I care about and gearsets are honestly more enjoyable to farm from the raids themselves once the warband changes go in with the expansion. I still have no clue what I am going to do for War Within. I have my Alliance home in House Stalwart, a Horde home on the same server in Facepull, and then another group of friends over on Drenden that have offered me a home. I just don’t really know what I want to do with myself when it comes to Warcraft nor how seriously I want to treat the game.
I feel like I want something that I can really sink my teeth into and no life… but also don’t really want to get engaged in something when in eight days I am just going go degenerate on FFXIV. Path of Exile released a patch yesterday and I logged in this morning because it needed to update its cache after some significant graphical changes. All in all the game seems to maybe perform better. I suppose I could while away the hours where I am not doing dailies in FFXIV or GW2 doing some more POE. There is another league challenge that I could probably knock out if I set my mind to it. I have a bunch of the memories maps and there is one for doing those that I did not touch during Necropolis.
Basically, as the title of the post says… it feels like I am wearing a pair of ill-fitting pants right now and some new ones arrive in eight days. I’m not fully engaged with FFXIV enough to be using this time to its fullest and doing all the raids… most of which I have not even unlocked. I finished up the Stormblood Hildebrand quest so I will keep moving forward in that chain, but I am not sure what else I am really going to accomplish before the 28th. How are you spending your time before Dawntrail? Drop me a line below.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I did something that I did not think I would actually manage to do… and that is get back into the Final Fantasy XIV Main Story quest. I’ve been saying for months that I left off at Rubicante but in truth apparently, I had played far enough to get right up to the Barbariccia fight. Look all of the vaguely Italian archfiend names from Final Fantasy IV have always flowed together in my head. When I last played the game I was apparently sitting at the Trial fight, so yesterday the very first thing that I did was dive into that. I feel like it is Pandaria Remix that is to thank for breaking my mental block against grouping with other human beings.
I’m actually somewhat into the storyline at this point. I did in fact play through to the point where I just finished fighting Rubicante and have plans to do some nonsense. The other thing that I did not expect is that I am now really invested in the character of Zero. I feel like I had just been very much locked in ARPG gameplay mode and coming back for Pandaria Remix has flipped a switch in my brain so that I am once again in “MMORPG Enjoyer” mode. I had been bouncing pretty freaking hard on anything that was not Guild Wars 2, which sort of sits in a happy medium between the ARPG and MMORPG genres. I figure that I will without a doubt catch up on the story before the Dawntrail head start begins at the end of the month. I am now actually finally in the mood for it I think.
Speaking of Pandaria Remix, I’ve now dinged level 70 on my Tauren Paladin over on Drenden. I’ve tanked a few world bosses at this point but have not gone so far as to tank any of the raids. I feel pretty weak at only having around 500k hitpoints. I still have a number of gear slots that I have not upgraded to the maximum dropped item level and in theory, I should probably do some more questing in order to get some more raw stats on my cloak. I really feel like blizzard screwed up on the cloak because they should have made the stats account-wide. It would have felt significantly better to play alts if everything you played was contributing to the same nonsense stat bomb.
I’ve also created a Viera Hunter over on Eonar that I am now starting to level. I named the default Cobra pet that you get “Smooples” but I think I am going to have to venture forth into the Isle of Giants and tame me some cool Dinosaurs soon. I’ve not had much desire to grind out bronze for the purpose of gearing, but I am enjoying leveling alts which in itself creates a large stockpile of bronze. At this point I am pretty close to buying most of the mounts, and then will start handpicking my way through the cosmetic gear sets that I want to collect. The only thing that I do not really care about in the least are the toys. Toys are one of those things that I completely forget exists in the game 99.9% of the time. However, I did see one that I would love to have so I need to figure out where it comes from… essentially it was a portable ocean allowing you to fish from anywhere.
The new summer-themed mounts and cosmetics are up on the tender store… and I am honestly not sure how I feel about them. Firstly I am throwing some side eye at this mount because it feels pretty much exactly like my memories of a mount that was available in Wildstar. I am weirdly against Fantasy characters wearing “real world” gear. Like Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV have a bunch of non-adventurer citywear and it sort of bugs me anytime I encounter someone wearing it. The other day I saw a Charr in a T-shirt and Cargo shorts and it sort of broke my brain. I don’t talk about it much because I don’t want to harsh anyone else’s fun… but I sort of hate the Fortniteification of World of Warcraft at times. I get that the Korean P2W MMORPGs did it first… but Fortnite was really the game that popularized in the West the “anything goes” style of cramming everything into a single game. Side note that is the preview on the Tender store… I did not buy the mount and likely will never buy it. It just is not my vibe.
Now that my brain seems to have had its switch flipped… I also want to get back into Guild Wars 2 and finish out the Secrets of the Obscure content. I’ve not unlocked Inner Nayos but I think I am getting pretty close to doing so. Hopefully, your week is amazing. We have a bunch of thunderstorms over the next few days but hopefully, they will not produce “twisty weather”.
It is no longer morning… and honestly, I have no clue why I have struggled to get blog posts out for the last few days. Whatever the case I had a bit of a lucky streak last night. After being largely unable to get a spot in either a Siege of Orgrimmar or Throne of Thunder raid for the last few evenings, I managed to knock both out in relatively short order. I am not sure if getting some jewelry pieces knocked out and bumping up my gear by a single level made my item level look more appealing… or if I just happened to luck into a more open-minded group. In both cases thought I joined when there were very few party members and maybe have just lucked into strong teams. Siege went pretty much flawlessly and I was surprised by just how fast the entire run went.
Throne of Thunder felt a bit more challenging, namely, we struggled a bit with Dark Animus. This was mostly due to the fact that it was VERY hard not to kill everything at the same time and in doing so blow the entire raid up. We had to each choose a robot and solo it… until we finally got it down to a few robots and finally merged them into the big one. Damage never seemed to be an issue, but I did feel sorry a bit for the healers who had to keep up with us. Going through all of this has made me realize that Pandaria really did have a number of very solid raids in it. I think the only reason why it was ever remembered less than favorably is because of how long it was between Siege releasing and Warlords finally coming out.
At this point, I have every slot unlocked for all of my alts going forward, and I think I might be calling it good for this character. I can’t really see myself pouring the bronze into upgrading every slot, so it is likely that I will pop in each day, kill the world bosses, and do the daily quests. I’m already powerful enough to pretty much do anything I might want to do in the open world, but also feel like now is a good place to start tapering down my playtime on this character at least. Blizzard has come out and said that they do not plan on reducing the amount of gold required to upgrade characters all the way to the maximum, and I can’t see myself being willing to grind the 600k Bronze or so that are required to upgrade everything.
I’ve shifted focus over to my Drenden Tauren Paladin character and have been shocked at just how fast I am pushing through the levels. After finishing up Jade Foreset I am basically sitting at level 53. I can see finishing out the leveling process and then maybe doing dailies on two sets of characters to pick up the rest of the cosmetic gear that I want. At this point I have bought three pages worth of mounts and have a few more of those to pick up, and then I will start snagging gearsets that interest me.
I think the part that has been most interesting is all of the random groups I have gotten in, and how I am way more comfortable listing my own groups. I would love this newfound focus to carry over into other games, because I would absolutely love to start using my commander tag a bit more in Guild Wars 2. Weirdly I feel way more confident in leading things in World of Warcraft, because of the scope of what is needed is so much more clearly defined. I still think group gameplay in Guild Wars 2 is a confusing mess, and I am uncertain I will ever truly grasp organized play in that game. At a minimum I would love to be comfortable doing strikes and fractals and getting them started on my own, rather than waiting for that Unicorn of a group to form itself.
All of this return to Pandaria has made me realize how far I have fallen. I used to be the person who was comfortable enough in crafting my own groups that I wrote a guide on doing so. Now I just hate the thought of taking responsibility over others in a video game. I miss being that guy though who was willing to take on that mantle. Mostly because I miss having groups available on demand rather than waiting around for them to form. I need to work on that, and I need to get over my performance anxiety. I would ultimately be a happier person if I did so.
