Nogamara

The end of Shadowlands

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I’d nearly forgotten that there was a prepatch/launch event, if I hadn’t been pinged via WhatsApp to help with an achievement and thus logged in.

Not that levels mean anything anymore, but this is the final tally of 36 Level 60 chars:

  • Rogue x5
  • Warrior x4
  • Paladin x4
  • Hunter x4
  • Warlock x3
  • Death Knight x3
  • Priest x3
  • Shaman x2
  • Druid x2
  • Monk x2
  • Demon Hunter x2
  • Mage x2

Renown 80 on 17 of them, and I think I maxed out every profession at least once.

All that is left now is grabbing a few transmogs. And actually buying the expansion – not very hyped up at the moment, I have to say.

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A blogging lull

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My month in Eorzea ended recently, quite uneventful. I managed to get my Relic Weapon, the bow for the Bard – but I even forgot the name. It’s iLevel 615 and looks ok.

Other than that I’m hardly logging in to WoW, basically trying to earn a little money with missions and waiting for the expansions, rarely leveling my last 4 chars – but I have 2 weeks left, even a little more.

My time is spent mostly with EVE, but not much to write about.

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One hundred ten million

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And again time has passed and I had an EVE subscription, my main is now at 110 million skill points. (Last post in February).

Skill category             Points     No. of skills
===================================================
Spaceship Command         33,551,562  63 *
Gunnery                   17,810,068  42 *
Drones                     9,658,434  22 *
Navigation                 8,606,589  13 *
Missiles                   8,390,514  23
Engineering                6,842,040  15
Subsystems                 4,096,000  16
Fleet Support              3,843,169  12
Shields                    3,496,158  12
Electronic Systems         2,863,220  14
Targeting                  2,575,530   8
Armor                      2,547,805  11
Scanning                   1,899,374   7
Resource Processing          902,450  10 *
Neural Enhancement           778,275   5
Rigging                      679,060  10
Science                      502,275  13
Social                       434,510   6
Planet Management            394,040   4
Trade                        359,530   8
Production                   276,743   4
Structure Management         135,765   1 *
Corporation Management           250   1

* = changes since last time

Skills at Level 5:   125 (+6)
Skills at Level 4:   122 (+1)
Skills at Level 3:    47 (+6)
Skills at Level 2:     2 (-3)
Skills at Level 1:    24 (-2)
Skills at Level 0:     1 ( 0)

And my alt also reached 60 million (forgot 50m, last post in May 2021 at 40m).

Skill category             Points     No. of skills
===================================================
Spaceship Command          17,392,801 53
Gunnery                     9,166,860 36
Missiles                    6,093,279 21
Engineering                 5,919,060 14
Drones                      4,597,475 17
Navigation                  3,284,080  9
Subsystems                  3,253,020 16
Shields                     2,260,080 10
Electronic Systems          2,054,120 13
Armor                       1,602,413 10
Targeting                   1,521,805  8
Neural Enhancement            738,275  4
Rigging                       679,060 10
Fleet Support                 527,530  2
Science                       483,690  3
Planet Management             394,040  4
Scanning                      184,000  6
Resource Processing            24,250  2
Structure Management           24,000  1
Social                         23,072  4
Trade                          12,244  3

Skills at Level 5:    81
Skills at Level 4:   112
Skills at Level 3:    32
Skills at Level 2:    10
Skills at Level 1:    11
Skills at Level 0:     8

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No WoW news

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WoW is completely on the backburner at the moment, I’m only logging in a handful of chars once or twice per day and spend 2 minutes for the table, trying to make some easy money with the covenant missions.

I still have these 4 chars I have started to push through Shadowlands (57, 56, 56, 54), but I had actually forgotten about them momentarily and only thought about them again yesterday. Maybe I’m in the mood to work on them again in a week or so when their rested XP has filled up.

But overall, I’m done with the expansion – there were a few achievements I wanted to do and maybe I will, but right now I’m not even sure. Basically a wasted last month of my 6 month subscription, but at the time we didn’t really have a release date or knew how S4 would pan out, bummer.

WotLK has also not managed to interest me, at all. I tried to login once and there was a queue, and that was that. Oh well, I got EVE at the moment, so I’m not bored. I’m half-heartedly following news and updates as people prepare their Dragonflight TODO lists and tips, meanwhile I’m not even sure which character and spec I want to play. I guess waiting until the last moment has worked out fine several times for me and just because right now I can’t even imagine leveling up and raiding… it’s 6 more weeks and I don’t want to write off the expansion launch yet.

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Hello again, Eorzea

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With WoW being in a real lull (we officially stopped raiding and we kinda stopped M+) I took the liberty to get at least a month of FFXIV in and catch up a bit.

Resubscribed a week ago and the first thing I did is empty my 2 free retainers of all the glamour gear. The next day I paid for retainer number 3 and 4, so I could empty at least number 4 and cancel that one for the future. My glamour dresser is now at around 680/800 – not bad, as I’ve collected quite a bit of Endwalker gear already, so this should at least be ok until the next expansion.

I managed to do all of the 6.2 MSQ very quickly (it was really good), including the trial. I noticed I had done 6.1 already just before unsubscribing at the start of the year, just the one 6.1 trial is missing.

As usual it took a bit to get acquainted again with all the currencies and what to do, but I already traded in my old tomestones, bought some 610 crafted gear on the market board (Bard is 594 now, just as WAR was with raiding Savage in 6.0) and started trying to cap the 450 Tomestones of Causality for the week, and it has worked out for both resets. Not sure what to buy yet. For now I’ve reverted back to my old main job, Bard, because I didn’t want to tank the new stuff last night, but already healed some Alliance Raid stuff, we’ll see.

WHM and RPR are at 571 iLvl, so there are some easy targets for gear and spending my old 6.0 tokens.

Main priority after grabbing some tomestones was SMN/SCH – which I had left at Level 87 – and then there’s a ton of content I need to check if I’m interested in doing.

Was a bit surprised to find this draft from day 2, so I had to rewrite parts of it. SMN/SCH was 90 pretty quickly and the last week I’ve been doing a duty roulette or two most days and got Red Mage to 67 already. My main focus is the Hildibrand quest line now, and I have finished the ARR part.

Overall it’s fine but I’m not having awesome fun. I didn’t touch the new Deliveries, I have not checked Tataru’s quests and I only briefly visited the Island Sanctuary. It’s an ok use of my time but I’m not desperate for a second month at the moment. I’ll see that I progress the things I care about but not overdo it. I guess it’s my typical way of needing goals, I can’t just subscribe to an MMO and look at the sandbox and find spontaneous fun.

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Minion Masters

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Probably gonna jinx it by posting about it, but I’ve started playing Minion Masters last week – it’s free to play with ingame stuff, no clue if it’s pay to win, so far I haven’t felt the need to buy anything. I’m only like 20 games in (2 hours) but it’s fun for a few minutes per day. Of course there’s free login stuff and small quests like “Win 3 matches” but also neat stuff like rotating free heroes (I think LoL also has this) and then some “Win 5 matches with the rotating heroes”, and several different tournament and ladder modes.

Oh, what kind of game? I’d say it’s realtime Magic: The Gathering. Two opponents face each other, you play the cards from your hand (mostly creatures, some spells), those run towards the enemy and hopefully kill their minions and then life pool. If it has strong MOBA vibes, I am not feeling them. It’s quick and fun and nothing of the annoying weird stuff, but I’m way down in the league. Anyway, fun game – recommended.

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A weird event

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Raider.io currently has an event called “Break the Meta” where you’re encouraged to run M+ with… well, specs that are currently not meta. Bit weird because in the regions where I run we just take the player and not class.
Anyway, they apparently partnered with Blizzard and if you run just 2 +15 in time you’re supposed to get an ingame toy as a reward. Didn’t have to ask for long and we had 5 people – DH tank, Monk healer, DH DPS, Ele Shaman DPS, DK. Successfully finished our two +15s (was a bit close due to two people being a bit inexperienced in their role/class, me one of them) and now we’re waiting for our reward.

Just one hour and for where we stand it could’ve easily taken 2h instead of one, but a nice diversion when we said we wouldn’t really do anymore M+ just this week.

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WoW and Season 4 goals

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Thanks to my awesome M+ group I got my Season 4 mount on Friday

! Managed to do 2 19s and then one of the instances I was completely missing (Upper Kara Fortified) which brought me over the hump of 2000 rating. Then I noticed I’d forgotten to buy one of my BiS trinkets with the raiding Dinar and a macro was broken. Oh well, I’m really good at this game, you know. That’s 4 +15s for the Vault this week as well, nice.

Wastewarped Deathwalker mount

I also healed a few +10s in PUGs to get my Shammy to 1400 rating to upgrade some gear, I guess I’ll even try for 1700, I’m still missing enough Fortified/Tyrannical runs that this should provide a good base with +10s and then I can grab 1-2 +15s with the team.

On the downside I’ve not really felt like tanking, so both my DK and my DH didn’t do a lot, maybe I’ll try to get a +2 in on the weekend, but unlike with the Shammy it feels a little pointless this late in the season. There’s only a few weeks left, so I’d have to hardcore play tons of dungeons and I don’t want to really learn it. Maybe in Dragonflight…

So overall everything looks pretty good with regarding to goals in Season 4 and Shadowlands overall – I’m working on a few achievements as well, mostly the Stitchyard and some zone metas. I won’t make the big overall Shadowlands meta achievement because I didn’t care for the Kyrian (Path of Ascension) and Venthyr (Ember Court) thing.

The only thing I’m a little worried is the Fated mount, as we’re still missing the last 3 bosses in Sepulcher, but the guild -again- only did the first 8 when I missed my first raid, so I hope we’re extending this week because no one should have this mount unless the pugged later in that week.

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Random bits about games

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Currently a bit meh on everything gaming wise. Retail WoW is ok, but also not perfect, detailed post probably incoming soon.

I’m feeling the urge to play something Diablo-like, but not the same old Diablo 3 again. As I wrote, unfortunately I couldn’t find a lot of fun in the Torchlight Infinite Beta. I thought about Path of Exile, but as one of my main points atm would be co-op, and my wife wasn’t enthusiastic about returning to it, that’s a no. (“How about PoE?” – “Nah, I don’t like it” – “Steam says you played it for over 250 hours” – “Yeah, but maybe I didn’t have fun for the last 50 hours” – “…” – “…”).

Then I saw that Darksiders: Genesis was on sale and people described it as Diablo-like, so we tried that, but both didn’t really get to terms with the WASD movement and some research yielded: click to move doesn’t work, also in general some keybinds seemed to be “play this with a controller or GTFO” – so that was the first game in a combined ~20 years of Steam that was returned after 30min. (Only bought one copy and both tried it).

So, I also didn’t like Torchlight 2 (she did) and so I’m not fond of trying Torchlight 3 and that’s that. Maybe we should try Grim Dawn or Victor Vran after all.

Then there’s also the loose end of Guild Wars 2 where the bugged multiplayer story missions annoyed me so much that I completely stopped playing in July, also I don’t really want another WoW-like MMO atm, I want some ARPG. Maybe we should actually go back to Diablo 3 and I’ll just not take a Demon Hunter…

But I also played a little bit of “The Bridge”, a puzzle game I found in my Epic library, it’s really cool.
Then I tried out Solitairica which is kinda cute (but the sound effects are a little annoying) and I think it’s a good game if you enjoy Solitaire or Rummy or such things. I found it a little too luck-based and slow.

Then I also finally gave Prison Architect a spin, a game I’d had wishlisted for quite some time and then somehow got it, maybe also for free via Epic, but I noticed I don’t like it. Like, I was impressed with what you can do and it looks enjoyable enough.. but it simply didn’t click with me but I can give no objective criticism except one time in the campaign I had to let the fire brigade try to extinguish a fire and for some reason that burning tree would not stop, no matter how I positioned four firemen around it, moved them around, tried auto aim and manual aim. Had to restart the level, which was no problem, that were like 3 minutes lost, still weird.

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Torchlight Infinite Impressions

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When I saw Connor’s post about Torchlight Infinite I was interested and wanted to give it a try. We played the original Torchlight for quite a bit in this household (Diablo-style ARPGs are usually very popular) and while I didn’t really get into Torchlight II, my wife really liked it and also played a lot.

So, beta it is. The graphics are awesome, I love Cel Shading and it looks nice. After playing for just shy of 2 hours that’s unfortunately everything positive I have to say. It kinda feels clunky (maybe also because it’s a mobile port to PC), the UI is not great, but mostly… it just doesn’t seem to be fun for me. I tried all the classes, some are better than others, but overall there’s a complete lack of this “I just started and I want more” feeling that these games usually evoke. One more mob, one more level, one more map. Nope, nothing. It feels kinda slow, the mechanics feel weird to me and then there are the little things. The minimap is on the upper left and I always want to look to the right (very minor detail), I didn’t yet try to rebind from Q W E R + D F, but I can’t hold shift to stay still, I need to only right click attack. Yes, this sounds a bit like “I want Diablo” but those controls make sense for me, these don’t.

I guess it’s absolutely worth a try if you like these sort of games, but it’s not for me. Watching a Level 30 Fire Mage destroy stuff looked kinda fun, but I’m not feeling like putting even 3h in to continue. In my opinion they need to work on the first 20 minutes of gameplay.

Now it’s a day later and I continued to play the Melee Warrior type class a bit and it was actually a little more fun, interesting how a single skill can change everything. Also my wife agreed that the dual pistol class I originally started with is not fun. Maybe I’ll sink some more time in after all, now that I didn’t hate it.

Torchlight Infinite Beta – standing in town

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