This morning I had a delightful experience. For a few months, we have been getting up at 5:30 and going for a walk before things heat up. Part of this experience is feeding the outdoor feral cats that visit our home. Generally speaking, we have Greybie, Skippy, Big Boy, and Blackie waiting on us out front of the house. This morning there was another little face peeking around the corner of the house and in the dark I thought at first it was a cat. Once I got a good look it was a skinny little possum, that troddled off once I had “perceived” it. After my walk, I go out into the backyard and feed Tripod the three-legged stray calico that lives there, and as I was walking back into the house I noticed this momma possum hanging out in front of me. She was pretty chill about it and largely did not move until I was just about to go back into the house… at which point she wandered off towards the cat food I had set out.
Surely the joeys are about to be weaned because they were pretty big and VERY active. I felt for the momma because one of them kept slipping down and covering her face… which would lead her to push them back up onto her back. We’ve had some pretty extreme reactions from our family as we have shown them pictures. I told my dad we had a new weird-looking cat, and he appreciated it because they live in the country and have all manner of visitors like this. Another family member has been squicked out by the possums and thought they looked scary. Me… I just think they are adorable and wish they would be my friend. I don’t dare attempt to pet one because they have very hurty-looking teeth. I kinda hope that we have a bunch of baby possums underfoot in the backyard honestly. I am wondering though if they are living under our deck.
Last night we continued our shenanigans and realized we had missed unlocking one dungeon… Lost City of Amdapor Hard. We ran through it, Sohm Al Hard, Hullbreaker Hard, and Great Gubal Hard. All in all they pretty much all went smoothly. I am still seeing the recurring thing about Reapers having ants in their pants and being unable to stand still. I did screw up and start one dungeon without tank stance on, but recovered pretty quickly. Things ended up going onto Ace… who was heavily shielded giving me plenty of time to pick it back up. I am consistently annoyed that Tank stance gets turned off constantly… and while I am usually good about hitting it first thing. Ace and I had gotten to talking about something over Discord and I completely forgot about it.
We got a bit of a late start last night so did not end up doing anymore Alexander, but we did duo Ravana and Bismark Extreme. Ravana was pretty easy and we one-shot it without much problem… giving us the confidence to try harder things. Bismark however took a couple of attempts for us to get a pattern going. The first failure was trying to kill both of the Snake adds at the same time…. then the second go I turned off tank stance and Ace heal/dpsd one down while I dpsd down the other… only to have Ace get knocked off the platform. On the third attempt, we executed everything pretty perfectly and got our kill. We attempted Thordan Extreme and just could not make it through the very final phase. There was some mechanic we were failing to do correctly…. which would knock us both out in a single hit so we are going to need to do some research on how to solo that fight. Either that or we just wait until we have more levels on us and attempt it again.
Probably the coolest part of last night is that we killed two Extremes and got two Lanners to drop. We both rolled on and I won the one from Ravana, and then passed on the one from Bismarck so we each got one. Honestly, the distribution is pretty perfect because my gear is way more red in theme, and theirs is way more white on average just because healer gear is usually white. We’ve made a pact that once my Path of Exile shenanigans wind down a bit we will probably start working on farming all of the lanners… doggos… etc on our Cactuar mains. I am pretty sure Ashgar and Thalen might want to get in on that nonsense as well. I had to turn back on the mount music so I could cruise around listening to the Ravana music. I am glad they chose the Phase 2 music instead of the Phase 1 music… but either is pretty great. Side note we also both got a pony from our Extreme ARR shenanigans.
In other news, I patched up World of Warcraft and logged in enough to make sure my friend Finni had gotten an invite to House Stalwart. I am not actively playing the game and it will probably be a while before I check out War Within, but I did run through the quests to unlock the Warband fully on my OG Main Belghast. Right now the Warband is showing my Dark Iron Warrior, Tauren Paladin, and Vulpera Hunter from Pandaria Remix. It seems as though the Warband bank is bricked at the moment… but this is apparently a known issue. At some point I will get in and play around some more with it. Probably when my Dark Iron Dwarf transfers over from Pandaria to Retail. That is probably going to be who I play War Within on because I had a lot of fun being a Dark Iron.
Finally, today is the league start for Path of Exile Settlers League and I have decided that I am once again going to level a Righteous Fire Chieftain. There is a meme over on Reddit that indirectly calls RF players Cowards and I am fine with that. Largely I enjoyed the leagues when I started RF and regretted starting something else on the leagues where I have not… ultimately rerolling at some point. It is my happy place and I have reached a point of acceptance around that. I like playing other builds and I will absolutely roll something else along the way to play as well. I just like having my good stable base of a character to get through the atlas and into the endgame before I start experimenting with other things. I know at some point I am going to make a Gladiator Bleed character of some sort… and maybe something focused around Retaliation skills as well. I also want to try building something around the new Warden ascendancy… but those are all side projects that I will do after building a stable base of currency on the Chieftain.
If you play any of the games that I play regularly feel free to join me in the Super Dungeon Friends discord. It is a little community that I run that is admittedly not super active, but we have a league chat channel for example where we talk a lot about Path of Exile while the league is going on. I keep getting the notion that I am going to start streaming again at some point, and if I ever do I will be hanging out in this Discord while live. All are welcome pending they agree to the rules upon entry. It pretty much follows the guidelines that I have for this blog as can be seen in my Core Beliefs page, so if you align to those thoughts you would probably enjoy yourself just fine.