Good morning, internet!

Nothing much to report today, didn’t get to play much over the weekend.  Spent most of Saturday at Ikea shopping for furniture with the wife, and most of Sunday assembling said furniture.  It really blows my mind that there are folks with kids that seem to be able to play on nearly a daily basis.  How do they do it?  It feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day, but maybe I just need to be more assertive about how I allocate and spend my free time.  I have noticed that I tend to kill a lot of time in-between chores, just browsing on my phone or staring off into space.  Maybe I just need to really focus on getting my shit done without those little breaks so that I can convert all of those little chunks of downtime into a couple hours of gaming time. 

I am closing in on 50 with my White Mage.  I ran Dezmael Darkhold (sp?) through the leveling roulette, which took me to 47.  The more I get reacquainted with these old dungeons, the more excited I get to play through Heavensward/Stormblood.  I am really looking forward to progressing through the story and experiencing all of the new content, because ARR doesn’t really offer much more than a grind for me at this point.  An awesome grind, like, (Trump voice) the best grind, but a grind nonetheless. 

Speaking of grinds, on the Brave Exvius front I have been grinding the Bahamut raid and the new Type-0 event.  My two priorities for FFBE are ability crystals and trust moogles; in particular, I want to upgrade Lightning’s Crushing Blow and I want Shine’s TMR.  In general though, I am not stressing super hard about being efficient with FFBE.  I went through a phase where I was checking the app constantly to make sure I was spending all of my NRG, orbs, etc., and it started to stress me out a bit – because it never ends!  As soon as you have milked an event for all of the goodies you can get out of it, another one pops up in its place.  On the one hand, I think it is amazing that a mobile game is constantly churning out fresh content, but it also can wear you out if you let yourself become too invested.  Now, I just pull up the game and do a couple of things when I have the chance, without worrying about “keeping up” with it. 

With both MMOs and these mobile gacha games, it is easy to fall into the mental trap of “keeping up” – as if somebody is keeping tabs on you and judging your progress (or lack thereof).  In reality, all of that content is (usually) there for you to enjoy at your own pace, and unless you have a static group of friends that need you to be on par with them, the pressure to stay on top of things as they roll out is entirely in your head.  This is why I decided not to buy Heavensward separately from Stormblood; I know the Heavensward content isn’t going anywhere and I am refusing to buy into the mental pressure to “catch up” on content before the release.  FFXIV is such a strong, well-developed game, I am sure it is going to be around for many years to come.  I have time to experience everything at my own pace. 

Which is glacially slow.  Damn you, Ikea!

Dear internet friends,

Is it endearing that I address you as if you actually exist, when really you are a figurative entity through which I address myself?  Or is it just sad?  Maybe a little of both, like reading the diary of a middle-school girl that is ashamed of her braces?  In any case, I hope you like me and that you still think my smile is cute.

I had a great weekend, our first free weekend since we started planning the wedding – well, almost; we did have to spend some time putting together thank you cards.  Anyways, I managed to get in some game time before the maintenance kicked in.  I now have my White Mage at 44, Miner at 46, and I also started Fisherman and got it to level 9.  I am actually really excited for fishing since I have level 50 Culinarian, maybe I can make some money off of my fish-dishes.

I also tried Palace of the Dead for the first time with my White Mage.  I did floors 1-10, and then 11-20; these early floors were kinda fun, but also kinda mindless.  Maybe the dungeon permutations become more interesting and challenging on the subsequent floors, but at these beginning levels it was just a lot of running around and blasting quickly through enemies.  I do like that you get to level up so quickly, I guess this gives players a good opportunity to survey the skills of a class before actually levelling it up in Eorzea – but at the same time, the pace is so quick that there isn’t really time to configure your hotbars as you go, especially on PS4.

 

After PotD, I did my leveling daily roulette and ended up in a Thousand Maws group where the tank refused to provoke.  This might frustrate most players, but for me it was kind of a fun challenge.  Usually, these low-level dungeons are really boring for a healer, but with the dps characters taking so much damage I actually had to keep on my toes.  I got a little bit cocky and started juggling some dps into the mix too, which was fine right until the last boss where I was too slow to save our black mage.  We still beat the boss, but the black mage gave me some lip about not healing him – which I found kinda funny, since nobody even mentioned that our tank put zero effort into keeping aggro.  Kinda sucks that my first description of social interaction in the game has to be so negative.  But what can you do?

Make some new in-game friends maybe?  Still trying to figure that one out.  I don’t know if I really spend enough time in-game to really form a bond with anyone that way.  I think I would rather have something akin to a gaming pen-pal that I can occasionally meet up with, but mostly we would just correspond about our game progress and our lives.

 

Right now, that person is you, phantom reader, except you don’t write back because you don’t exist.  Bummer.  You should try existing so that you can write back to me.  And do other fun things that you can only do if you exist - existing is fun, trust me on this.  

Hello, phantoms of the internether.  Just wanted to a post a quick update; haven’t had any time to play FFXIV, so no progress to report there, but I’m back from the wedding!  It went pretty well, better than expected actually.  It feels a little weird to finally be done.  I am really pretty introverted, and not at all used to being the center of attention.  All of the outpouring of affection, praise and gifts…it was a lot to handle!  Now I feel pretty fried.  It reminds me of that feeling you get right after wrapping up a school year, when all of your finals and projects are finally done but it hasn’t really sunk in yet that you have a whole summer of freedom ahead of you.

I did get a chance to play a bit of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius (FFBE), and I think I might want to use this blog to discuss those exploits as well.  For those unfamiliar, FFBE is a mobile “gacha” RPG with an original storyline that also incorporates characters from the entire Final Fantasy franchise.  It’s really fun, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for a JRPG for their phone…as long as you don’t have a gambling problem!  Unlike with FFXIV, I am actually what you would consider an “endgame” player in FFBE – I started at the game’s release, I have a few top-tier units, some good gear and some of the “trust mastery rewards” that take a good deal of time to obtain.  I really love this game because it is very casual friendly, while still having a deep-end to dive into.  Plus, the story is surprisingly good!  I actually look forward to each chunk of story they release so that I can find out what happens next to the main characters.

During our travels, I managed to beat the Gilgamesh trial after just a couple tries.  My line-up was Refia (with Dual-cast), Cecil, Ling, Lightning, Luneth, and a friend Noctis.  The mechanic of the fight involves “sealing” Gilgamesh’s moves by hitting him with corresponding elements, the most important elements being fire, lightning, wind and holy.  I failed the first couple times because I didn’t realize that Lightning’s Sparkstrike move wasn’t sealing Gilgamesh’s lightning attack for some reason.  Once I realized that, it was just a matter of grinding through the very long fight, which was made even longer by having only three damage dealers.

Well, I guess that’s it for now.  Cheers!

Oh!  Hi, I didn’t see you there!  Have a seat, can I get you something to drink?

 

Just kidding, you’re reading a blog, you aren’t physically visiting me so I can’t offer you beverages.  Someday that will be a thing; you will come visit my blog, click a little button and a drone will buzz over to your house and drop a cold beverage on your lawn.  But if you order a drink through my blog, you can only choose from what I typically keep in my fridge, e.g. cans of cheap beer, a bottle of cheap Sauv Blanc that has been open too long, almond milk, or some orange juice.  Nevertheless, you would be welcome to it.  Mi casa es su casa.

I had a good, productive weekend on both the life and game fronts.  I got my Miner to about 37 and Conjurer past 40.  I had an embarrassing moment with my Conjurer on Friday night; joined a party to run Qarn through the Duty Finder, and was asked why I wasn’t a White Mage yet.  I didn’t have a good answer, other than that I totally forgot that I was supposed to tackle the job quest at level 30.  Oops!  I have forgotten a lot of very basic stuff about this game, but I guess it’s good that I am refreshing my memory with all of this low-level content.

And in life news…this weekend is the big wedding!  Both my wife and I really can’t wait to just get it out of the way.  At dinner last night, we were both joking about how it felt like we have been married to the wedding for this whole year instead of each other.  So much planning and effort soaking up our free time for so long, and so much social pressure and expectations from friends and family…all for one fleeting day, which I am sure will fail to live up to the hype.  Will it be worth it?  I don’t know, maybe?  I’ll let you know when I am on the other side of it, looking at it in retrospect.  I am already thinking that I should have tried to convince my wife to throw the wedding in Eorzea.  Oh well, maybe we can do that for our anniversary :P