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.