Nogamara

Heritage armor status update

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Wrote about this in October and July, but about the the full picture only in May, and so this is a consolidated update:

  • Horde
    • Blood Elf – DONE
    • Tauren – DONE
    • Goblin – Exalted: 86 Warrior
    • Orc (not ingame) – Exalted: 120 Rogue, 120 Shaman, 120 Hunter
    • Troll (not ingame) – Exalted : 120 Warrior
    • Undead (not ingame) – Revered: 120 Mage (-18600), Honored: 102 DK (-30100)
    • Mag’har – Level 96
    • Nightborne – Level 49
    • Zandalari – Level 40
    • Highmountain – Level 36
    • Vulpera – Unlocked, no character yet
  • Both
    • Pandaren (not ingame) – ???
  • Alliance
    • Dwarf – DONE
    • Gnome – DONE
    • Worgen – Friendly: 120 Druid (-38938)
    • Human (not ingame) – Exalted: 120 Rogue
    • Night Elf (not ingame) – Exalted: 120 Warrior, Friendly: 120 DH (-38000)
    • Draenei (not ingame) – Friendly: 74 DK (-36500)
    • Kul Tiran – Level 84
    • Dark Iron – Level 41
    • Lightforged – nearly unlocked
    • Void Elf – not unlocked yet
    • Mechagnome – not unlocked yet

So the concrete goals are:

  • Mag’har Rogue – 14 levels – yes, actively working on it
  • Kul Tiran Mage – 26 levels – yes, prio 2
  • Goblin Warrior – 34 levels – maybe…
  • Worgen Druid – a lot of rep – maybe…
  • Nightborne Priest – 61 levels – probably, just did a few dungeon runs again
  • Zandalari Paladin – 70 levels – probably, but more slowly
  • Highmountain Warrior – 74 levels – meh
  • Dark Iron Monk – 69 levels – meh

I just started running some 1-2 dungeons per day when fully rested on all the Allied toons this week, but it’s tedious. Also I had a really long break of over 2 months. Rogue is fun and no problem, Mage is coming along ok but it’s slowing down and it’s simply not much fun. Can’t wait for 110 there. Undecided if I’m up for this massive rep grind on the Druid.

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Backlogs of games

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When I saw the “Love Your Backlog” I wasn’t really interested at first, it’s kind of dead horse – everyone buys too many games in sales or bundles and never catches up. Bhagpuss’ post somehow stood out, but I’m not really sure why.

First of all, the word backlog doesn’t have such a negative vibe for me. As a Software Developer it’s mostly used for all the stuff that you absolutely plan to do, but not in the immediate future (usually 1-3 weeks). Also it’s mostly sorted by priority, so after your current cycle is over you just pick stuff from the top and start with that. So much for the theory. Very often it’s just a pile of random ideas and stuff that someone should do, but nobody knows why or how. But anyway, for games it’s a coarsely sorted list of stuff I want to play, I don’t see the need to work through it at any certain speed.

And that’s the other point – I don’t really feel the pressure to work through, for most of the titles in it. Sure, there’s always this one full or half-price game you absolutely wanted to start the weekend after buying it, but you didn’t and suddenly it’s 2020.

But I don’t have so many of these. OK, there are some

  • Quake Champions in 2018 – didn’t play a lot
  • Dead Cells in 2018 – I loved it, but it frustrated my by being too hard, but did play it!
  • Cities: Skylines in 2017 – never started

Of course there are a few more, but if I spend 1 EUR on a game and only do that like once a month, I have zero regrets about not playing it. I know I’m kinda not loosely spending money, because I keep track, but the cost of a few coffees or beers over the course of a year don’t bother me. I’m kinda glad I’m not a hoarder, I let most sales pass without buying anything.

Not even sure if this counts towards the backlog, but there’s actually a bigger pile of games that I bought, started to play… and then didn’t love but also didn’t hate. For some reason I just stopped playing before reaching a meaningful amount of hours, usually 2-5. If it was cheap, fine, I got my money’s worth of entertainment out of it already. But some of them… sure it was cheaper than going to the cinema (I’m pinning that at 5 EUR per hour) but I don’t feel like I got my money’s worth if I play a 10 EUR game for only 2h, but maybe I’m overly critical here.

Last point, I find the metric of adding up the numbers for these “How long to beat X” totally useless for me. Take Borderlands 3. Should be 21h(main) and 60h (completionist) – I’m 50h in, finished the main story (more like at 30h) but am only Level 41 and have a ton of side missions to do. What’s the real number now? I stopped playing a lot of games before I reached the completionist or even main+extras number. Anno 1404 should be 17h for the main story, we’ll see. And for all the titles I get from a Humble Bundle or something… it never even crossed my mind that I would play even half of them for anything near completion time, so why would I count them? It’s more like buying a bundle for 2-3 games and getting 5 more for free…

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Playing Anno 1404

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It’s been a while since I played an Anno game, and the blog search is being stupid but I think I wrote about Anno 1503 once, but I bought Anno 1404 in January and played it for the first time today. ~90mins for the first two Campaign missions. It’s really nice. I know it came out in 2009, but it looks kinda new (except the menus), especially when being compared to Anno 1503 from 2002 or Anno 1602 from 1998 – and those where the only ones I played, although I think I looked at 2011’s Anno 2070 once at someone else’s computer…

So yeah, the choice was between spending 30 bucks on the recent Anno 1800 with no immediate plan to play it or spend 3 or 4 bucks on the 10 year old one. Easy choice, and now, 2 weeks later I installed it and played for a bit, and those 2 missions were enough for today, so I’m happy. Usually these series tend to evolve into completely complicated and overblown things (this is how 2070 looked to me), so often I am a lot happier with the older titles. But we’ll see how many hours I’ll spend on this one, I usually leave them after 10 hours, at least that’s what happened the last 15 years – I played *a lot* of 1503 at launch, but these times seem to have passed for me, I can only stand a certain type of game for a whole day on the weekend, or even a full 4-5h session on a work day evening.

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Season 19 progress

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I just managed to finish Destroyer without spending too much time, but I’m not sure I’ll manage Conqueror – sitting at 3/8 and missing these

  • 2 Gems at 55, 1 at 45 – easy
  • 0/2 Conquests done – 3 to 65 should be easy but tedious
  • Ghom in 30s in T13 – medium, easy as a duo
  • Augment Ancient Legendary – easy, grinding
  • reforge Legendary – easy, grinding

But I suppose I won’t have enough time for the 2 Conquests.. Too bad, don’t think I’ve ever been this close to Conqueror. Paragon 582 isn’t too shabby either.

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Slogging along in D3

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I did manage to finish the Slayer and Champion Season goals on the weekend but right now it’s a bit of a stretch. I was lucky with my choice of Demon Hunter, only needed one try for the set dungeon with both objectives. I’m 6/8 on Destroyer now and I guess the Conquest of choice will be 3 gems to 65 as this is just a grind that will happen while playing, and the Hellfire Amulet shouldn’t be a problem either. My real problem is that I am not sturdy enough. A real glass cannon. Just did my first solo GRift 70 and I died all the time. Exactly 5 minutes to spare but I was already going very slowly and killing mobs off-screen with this Sniper build – but every projectile or ranged attack can be deadly. Also my bank is already full… I’m a bit clueless how to get better gear right now – the ring of Royal Grandeur won’t drop, so every single slot except Bracers and Belt are either Set Items or MH/OH which are kinda needed for this build. A good problem to have, but being so squishy isn’t fun. Right now I’m mostly grinding T12 and 60 GRifts, but 70 is still really hard.

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New season? Old season!

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Back in Diablo 3 for Season 19. Chose a Demon Hunter, got powerleveled to 70 in just under an hour in Torment 6, then I really felt weak. Probably an L2P issue, but I at least managed to grab a few nice drops on the way to Solo GRift 20. Now I’m at 7h 30min, Paragon Level 352 and just did a Solo GRift 50 in 4:39 – really not bad for just a bit of active farming at 70.

Yeah, boring default set

The season isn’t going on for very long, but apart from the frustrating part it’s a fun diversion for a few hours. I haven’t progressed to Slayer in the journey yet, but at least that one shouldn’t be a problem – I have the whole weekend.

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A quick look at WoW’s 8.3

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After a ~7 week break I logged in again to WoW, sent my toons on ship missions (*yawn*) and also finished the Vulpera Allied Race quest line, it was fun. As I’m not yet Exalted with the Rustbolt Resistance (*yawn again*) no Mechagnome Warlock in my near future.

I also wanted to take a look at the 8.3 content and as a non-raider I’m a little disappointed. Cutscene, go to Magni, do a meh zone quest where I can’t solo the elite mobs in a good way as a Rogue, fill up the bar slowly, go to Magni, go to next zone, log out because meh.

Today I logged in, got distracted and didn’t even start the zone event in the second zone, but I guess I will at some point, this week.

Also I’m a bit burnt out on leveling alts, so no progress since November, and no #21 120 in sight. But I’m really ok with that. 20 is a nice number, I got all the classes to max level this time, I had a ton of fun, so why force it now?

Right now I’m happy playing 30-60mins of Borderlands 3 at least every second day. Although a friend was a bit surprised why I am playing it if I don’t really like looter shooters. Even more so when I said I’m playing it mostly for the story and the world. But we’ll see, maybe coop will happen.

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Random people from the internet saved me

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As I wrote earlier, I’d been stuck on the “Katagawa Ball” boss in Borderlands 3 for a while now. Stuck as in: no matter how often I try the encounter, I get one-shot or die when the boss is still above 90% – it’s probably doable, but I don’t know how, even after reading several guides. It really made me want to quit the game.

Welcome Home

So because all two people I know who also play BL3 (and I don’t even know on which platform) weren’t available to ask them for help I clicked around in the social menu and discovered you can actually play online! In the campaign! And you can set a “Looking for help” flag. Nice. So I joined a game… and it was confusing. At first all 3 were displayed at the other end of the map (middle) whereas I spawned at the start, but all enemies were still here. Respawns? Something else? No clue. So I made my way towards them (as far as I know I can’t fast-travel to them if the map only has one quick travel point at the start of the level, but I could be wrong) and while I was killing the first pack of mobs they kicked me. Ah well, to be expected. No communication, idiots abound, whatever. So I waited 5 minutes, tried to find out if I could have teleported to them (didn’t find anything) and queued again… just to placed in the same group, so I left.

A few hours later I tried it again, got a group where I started together with one other player at the level entrance and two others somewhere, but we both moved in the direction and actually caught up to the other two after a while, played through the level and managed to get to the dreaded boss. I learned that you can heal/rez your co-op players (like in GW2) and after a while we actually killed the boss. Just like that. The road block was removed and I can continue playing Borderlands 3 on my own, slowly, on Easy Mode. Nice. Thank you, random people from the internet! (But only those in the second group.)

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2019 in review

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The year is ending and so it’s time for a review post. 2019 was an odd year.

What I played a lot:

  • World of Warcraft – Retail
  • Final Fantasy XIV
  • World of Warcraft – Classic

Where I spent a decent amount of time:

  • SW:TOR
  • EVE Online
  • Borderlands 3

Played a bit:

  • Shadowrun Returns
  • several Picross titles on mobile, but not really worth mentioning

Gaming expenses in 2019:

  • SW:TOR: 3×13 EUR = 39 EUR for subscriptions
  • WoW:
    • 7×13 EUR + 6×12 EUR = 163 EUR for subscriptions
    • 3x 17.50 EUR = 52.50 EUR for discounted server transfers
  • FFXIV:
    • 9x 11 EUR for subscriptions = 99 EUR
    • 5x 1.40 EUR for retainers = 7 EUR
    • 20+35 EUR for expansions = 55 EUR
  • EVE Online: 1×11 + 3x 13 EUR = 50 EUR for subscriptions
  • GOG: 0 EUR
  • Humble: 0 EUR
  • Steam: 2,50 EUR for Islanders, it’s really cool
  • Epic: 0 EUR
  • Got Borderlands 3 for free for buying an AMD Ryzen CPU.

In total that’s 467 EUR in 2019, at 39.66 EUR per month – I think that’s a record expense for me, because I was indeed subscribed to 3 MMOs except in the summer, but the server transfers made up for that. So again sorry to all game creators who don’t happen to be making MMOs 🙁
It seems like a lot, comparing it to the last years, even exceeding 2014’s 450 EUR by a bit, but overall I think it’s still a really good figure for your main hobby, if you exclude upgrading your gaming PC – but I don’t do that very often (this year I did).
Also I could subtract ~26 EUR for prepaying EVE and WoW into January, but I paid this year, so I’ll keep it in.

  • Amount of MMO subscription months paid: 29
  • Amount of games purchased: 0
  • Amount of expansions bought: 2 for FFXIV: ShB + SB (actually, 3, but SB included HW)
  • Amount of money for ingame/services stuff: 60 EUR
  • Amount of games I got for free and played a lot: 1 (Borderlands 3)
  • Amount of games I got for free and didn’t play at all: ~10? (mostly Epic Store)

Yeah, this was an odd year I guess.

A final look at my wishlist/winter sales didn’t bring any surprises. There are a few games I might like, but right now I can’t think of anything that gets me really excited, except the new SW:TOR expansion, which I haven’t checked out yet. So I don’t think I will buy anything, as I don’t see myself playing anything in the near future.

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