World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft Post

Uncomfortably Jaded

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Good Morning Folks. Last night I made my way through the last part of the Alliance Raid for Endwalker and really enjoyed the story. Mastodon was sort of adorable last night as we all said goodnight to our Warriors of Light and put them to bed for a two-day nap. It feels really weird waking up this morning and knowing that I can’t log back into the game until the Dawntrail expansion has launched. I think I am fully back in the swing of all things Final Fantasy XIV and my mind is swimming with all of these goals. I am trying to pace myself so that I don’t burn out, but there are so many objectives that I want to complete. Will this be the expansion when I finally stick around for a while and do things like leveling my crafters? I have no clue… and honestly, I am supremely doubtful.

Yesterday this amazing video came out with 300 Musicians performing a medley of themes from Endwalker and Final Fantasy XIV in general. Firstly I was overwhelmed with emotions while watching this video. I am not sure what it is about music in general being an amazing vehicle for conveying emotions but it certainly is for me. When I hear something I am often transported back to exactly what I was thinking and feeling when I heard that same music at a pivotal time in my life. It was all I could do to keep myself from weeping as I remembered how fundamental the ten-year ride leading up to Endwalker was. As much as I love the joy that can surround a gaming community… I struggle to maintain this shine for long. I want to unabashedly love something without reservation and allow myself to get wrapped up in a thing for years at a time.

The problem is… I also know myself. Even games like World of Warcraft… I never played consistently for the entire run of the years I was extremely active in the game. I remember not even making it to 60 before bouncing and going off to play some Everquest II with a different group of friends. When A Realm Reborn launched… I am not sure I made it to 1.1 before checking out until about a year into the game’s release schedule and then playing catch-up. We were extremely active for the second year of ARR and a good chunk of Heavensward, even consistently raiding. However, for Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker I have been an MSQ-only player who played through the story quests and then bounced to come back late in the release cycle when the excitement for the next expansion reached its fever pitch. Side note… the above image is of my pre-Lalafel version of my FFXIV character.

There are times when I wonder if I simply have forgotten how to love something without reservation. Slightly related… let’s take the concept of Christmas as a holiday event. As a kid… from the moment the “wishbooks” started arriving until the day you were physically going to all the different houses… everything was manic levels of excitement about all of the possibilities that the season had to offer. Everything from the gigantic tree to the twinkling lights to the rituals surrounding it… seems like pure magic. As I got older… it became harder and harder for me to slip into the “Christmas Spirit” usually as an adult taking me until I was actually visiting family or seeing the magic reflected in the eyes of kids… before I really got there. However now that all our Grandparents are gone, and the rituals have been broken… I am not sure I ever really get into the spirit, or at least not the same way I once did.

The same is somewhat true for gaming events. I remember “Blizzcon Fever” used to hit me in the lead-up to that show and I would inevitably resubscribe to the game and fall back in love with Warcraft for a few months. I would look forward to the E3 press conferences and even devote a series of blog posts talking about the finer points of things I was looking forward to from each. While I know we technically no longer have E3 and it could be said that we have not for several years now… we still have big press conferences in June from each of the companies. I don’t think I wrote a single blog post this year about any of it… because I was struggling to muster the excitement that I once had. I find myself uncomfortably jaded, and I am not sure how I back away from that precipice.

I find myself in a mindset where I am very much enjoying Final Fantasy XIV again… and have all of these things that I want to do. I am back tanking for random strangers on the regular which is an impressive feat given that I simply was not doing that at all for most of Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker. I am having a lot of fun, but I am scared I am going to fuck this up. I always figure out some way to deflate my balloon of hopes and dreams. Maybe that is just what becoming an adult does to you, or maybe I am just more pessimistic than the average person. Whatever the case I would really appreciate it if my brain could accept the unabashed enjoyment of something for once without trying to analyze it to death. We will have to see how that goes.

Anyways sorry for a bit of a bummer blog post but it has been the thing that has been bouncing around in my skull. Maybe now that I have committed it to “paper” I can stop thinking about it. I think in this downtime from FFXIV I will probably be working on getting another world completion done in GW2 or grinding out another gift of battle.

Ill-Fitting Pants

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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.

Getting Tanking Groove Back

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This is admittedly a post that I am not entirely certain how to get started. I’ve been thinking about it for a bit and yesterday’s blog post was a bit of a filler while I sorted out my thoughts further. It is my Birthday today and as a result, I am getting around much more slowly than usual. I did go get bonus donuts though so that was tasty. When I started this blog back in 2009 its original purpose was to be a “World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking Blog” patterned off of another idol of mine who was doing something similar with her experiences as the main tank for a raid. I was the main tank from Burning Crusade through Cataclysm, at which point I hopped off that bandwagon and had to sort of reinvent the concept of this blog. Basically tanking is in my DNA and I have done a heck of a lot of it over the years.

Something happened though during Shadowbringers that sort of broke me. I am not sure how or why it happened, but I stopped being willing to queue for random groups with strangers. I would still be willing to tank for my friends, but those groups became fewer and further apart. Instead, I started spending most of my time on a DPS alt, because it didn’t really require anything of me to join a group and blend in. I am not sure if it was my lack of willingness to take responsibility for the success or failure of a group, or that the community as a whole was feeling less friendly than it did previously. Whatever the case I developed a mental block against tanking that held for roughly five years. When Endwalker launched I exclusively did that content with the Trust system and tanked zero dungeons for random people.

I honestly think I probably would have stayed in this “stuck” state indefinitely were it not for my recent foray into Pandaria Remix. It was a temporary environment with extremely low stakes and to get anything started… you either had to hope someone accepted you into their party finder group or in my case… just start your own. It quickly became just the status quo that I was forming groups on the regular, at first just for the world bosses, and then later for the normal mode raids that did not have dungeon finder support. I got so comfortable building groups that it sort of whittled away at that mental block to the point where I felt ready to do more. I think the magic of Pandaria Remix is that it is a 90-day experiment and no matter how bad things go… everything you are doing is just temporary which makes the player base considerably more forgiving about everything.

Even then when I came back to Final Fantasy XIV for the purpose of catching up to the pre-Dawntrail content… I stuck with a DPS character. This was in part because somewhere along the line I had stopped gearing Paladin which was my Endwalker main job. All the while though… there was a not-so-subtle itch in the back of my skull telling me that I really wanted to try tanking again. I set my mind to finishing out the story and then my goal was to siphon off resources to the point where I could build up a decent set of gear for tanking purposes. That plan didn’t exactly carry forth as intended.

When Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn first launched, I went all in on Warrior and it was my main job up until Endwalker. I loved EVERYTHING about the job… except Overpower which last I knew was a frontal cone attack that you had to carefully time in order to make sure you clipped everything in front of you. A lot of the appeal of Paladin was that I could have a much more chill experience hitting everything around me in a big circle. However, as much as I love the concept of Sword and Board, there was just something much more enjoyable about hitting things with a big axe. Essentially I got the itch to level my Warrior and then noticed that at some point when I was not looking Overpower was changed to function almost exactly like the Paladin AOE. This set a plan in motion to level up and gear my Warrior so that I could switch to it as my main in Dawntrail.

However, at this point, I was not actually tanking much of anything. For the first few levels, I was running a daily Frontline and then doing the Hippo Endwalker dailies to get essentially one easy level each reset. However when I got to level 88… I started to get impatient and started queuing for what I thought of as some of the low-hanging fruit like Mainstory Roulette. It went pretty smoothly and felt pretty great… which built up my confidence to start queueing for Leveling, and eventually the Mid-level roulette, and so on. When I survived the embarrassment of forgetting to throw my stance on… trying to turn it on while pulling… accidentally dragging it off my bar… and then wiping the group… I figured I could handle anything. Truth be told… easing back into tanking has felt good. It has felt like I am exercising a skill that I had forgotten about and put away in the closet for some reason.

At this point I think I am on my fourth day of doing all of the roulettes as a tank… or at least everything but Trial and Alliance Raid. It isn’t so much that I don’t think I can do those… but more that I am not sure I want the hassle of tanking those yet. I’ve started splitting time with Dark Knight and Warrior as I am trying to level up that job… with the ultimate goal of getting all of my tanks to 90 so that I can jettison all of that old tanking gear. I’m honestly having a freaking blast and I feel more alive in Final Fantasy XIV than I have in years. It is like I had forgotten at some point along the way, just how freaking fun the dungeons are in this game and how well-designed they are. Do I remember every mechanic perfectly? Absolutely not. However, I am remembering most of them enough to limp my way through the fights while also racking up a lot of commendations along the way. Comms feel good.

I’ve managed to get my tanking gear up to a decent enough level for starting the next expansion and I will keep picking up the rare tomestone gear as I move forward. I did buy a shiny crafted Axe because I did not want to deal with the nonsense of getting a similar axe and then trying to augment it. Once the expansion goes live I will be spending my Poetics on getting maxed out level 80 and 90 sets for various roles so that I can level those in a chill manner. Generally speaking that max raid tier is good enough to get you all the way through the next expansion. My goal is to get really merciless with what I actually hold onto gear wise, because I am tired of having my vaults stuffed full of random trash. I’ve also been having quite a bit of luck buying loot boxes with Grand Company Seals.

I guess my next goal is to reclaim my raid leader heritage and get comfortable forming Squads with my mostly unused Catmander tag. Baby steps I know… but I think the dam that burst with me getting comfortable tanking for strangers may also sweep downstream and eventually batter down the dam that that was placed there to stop me from leading larger groups. Also, appreciate Thumper the baby Siege Turtle because he is precious. Anyways… I am now looking forward to Dawntrail more than I have previously because I actually want to try and progress through the raid tiers and extreme fights while they are current. I am trying really hard to apply the lessons learned during Pandaria Remix to playing more serious games… because at the end of the day… the opinion of strangers does not matter in the least. However, it does seem a bit like some of the toxicity I was seeing in the FFXIV community when it had a mass influx of WoW players… has potentially died down as well.

I hope you have a most wonderful day. I am going to be cleaning my office… which is probably not the most exciting birthday activity but I put together a new cabinet and I need to migrate stuff into it.

Problems With Goals

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Good Morning Folks! This is going to be a bit of a tangent post, but given that, I don’t have anything terribly pressing to talk about… I am going to roll with it. I have a problem with goals. What I mean by that is not that I necessarily have a problem setting goals, but that I have a problem with accomplishing them. There is something baked into my brain that upon accomplishing a goal that required quite a bit of work… I suddenly want nothing to do with the thing after achieving it. This has been a curse for me throughout the years, that upon cresting that hill and accomplishing whatever it was that I thought I wanted… I no longer want it anymore. For example, I set forth the goal of getting to level 100 in Diablo IV this season, and instead of reveling in the accomplishment and joining in all of the reindeer games that are gated behind that level… I mostly checked out of the experience.

Similarly, I had a blast with Mists of Pandaria Remix in World of Warcraft while I was grinding towards an objective. I wanted to unlock all of the gear slots, which required me to complete all of the heroic dungeons, and heroic scenarios, and complete all of the normal mode dungeons that I had to get groups for manually. Once I completed that… I fell into the routine of farming World Bosses every day and then checking out… basically losing all forward momentum. It isn’t just that I lose focus and fail to set a goal… I began to reject whatever activity it was that I was doing and hop furiously over to something else. In the case of PMIX I tried leveling a few more alts but never really gained the same level of enjoyment out of it.

Honestly, I am not sure why I am so surprised by this each time it happens. I know I experienced the same thing when playing through Dragonflight. I finished the story, did a few days of world quests, and then decided that I was mostly done with the game in its entirety and bounced. Even in my beloved Path of Exile, I have experienced a bit of this. I’ve made far fewer characters in this league than I have in any previous. I set forth a series of goals but the major overarching one was completing the Gruelling Gauntlet Grinds challenge, and after finishing that I mostly checked out of the league only to return recently when a friend needed assistance with something. It is like there is a toggle switch in my brain that flips when I have checked something off my “to-do” list and then immediately wants to shed any presence of that thing from my brain.

I think in part this is why I occasionally drag my feet when I am enjoying something. For example, right now I am having a blast in Guild Wars 2 again. I am slowly working towards crafting my third legendary weapon but trying not to grind it out so much so that it becomes one of these overarching goals of mine. Similarly, I’ve yet to finish up the Secrets of the Obscure campaign because I am somewhat afraid that once I do so I might check out of the game again for an indeterminate amount of time. It is like I am trying to keep the fun going for as long as I can before finishing things up. There is something about that finality that I have never liked. I hate finishing a book series for example, and have been dragging my feet on reading the 4th book in the Stormlight Archive series because I know… that is all we have for the time being.

I’ve been back in Final Fantasy XIV playing through the post-Endwalker story and have honestly been having a lot of fun with it. I did not expect to become emotionally invested in it quite in the manner that I have. Similarly, I am afraid that when I catch up to the story, I am going to “nope” out of the game as I have done before. Prior to the launch of Endwalker, I went on this whole mission to level everything to 80, and I accomplished it… then was mostly done with Endwalker the second I finished the story. Basically, I know that I do not personally have a healthy relationship with finishing things. I am not exactly certain how I played World of Warcraft for as long as I did. A lot of that was the fact that I was heavily engaged in a raiding community and with that many goals that were never fulfilled. As a solo player, I find that I get easily distracted by the next thing on the horizon when I finish with anything.

Maybe all of this is okay, and I should just learn to accept myself. However, I find myself jealous of folks who can stick with the same thing day in and day out without wavering. The folks who get super engaged in a single community baffle me, especially given that I was once one of those people. I am not sure what changed in my brain and whether or not I can recuperate the part of me that used to stick with something for years at a time. Granted I tend to hyper-focus on a single thing at a time, but also quickly burn through it. I am hoping to delay the inevitable with Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV for as long as I can so that I can at the very least see my way through Dawntrail and see the content drop for Janthir Wilds.

All of this said… I know that major distractions are looming on the horizon that will claim me. I know I will play Last Epoch Cycle 2 when it drops in early July. I also know that I am very likely to play my way through Path of Exile 3.25 when it drops in late July or early August. So maybe it is okay that I keep jumping ship to the next thing because ultimately given enough time… I return refreshed and ready for more. At some point, I want to dig back into Valheim or New World, because I feel like I am never 100% done with a game that I have hyper-fixated on in the past… I am just done with it for the moment. Maybe I am just living that content locust lifestyle.

I’ve joked and said that blogging is often therapy for me and that I don’t set out writing a post with a fixed ending. This is one of those cases because I started out the post pretty down on myself because of my inability to follow through after accomplishing a goal, and now suddenly feel less bad about that practice as I near the end of this post. Anyways if you have made it this far… thanks for sticking around for my nonsense.