No post for nearly 4 weeks. I did continue playing Borderlands 3, but got stuck on one boss soon after the last post and then I kinda didn’t play anything for the last 3 weeks, but at least I managed to log in to grab my daily rewards in EVE most of the days. Christmas stuff happened, was meeting friends and former coworkers over mulled wine, and in general was busy with other things. I just prepared my “Year in review” post and scheduled it for the 31st. Let’s see if I will have time to play anything in the remaining days of the year.
After the last post and one of the big goals done I’m apparently less incentivised to do stuff in WoW, on the other hand it’s maybe not so bad to dial back a bit on the excessive daily login and get stuff done.
Sanctuary
I’m also kinda happy with Borderlands 3, slowly chipping away at the content 1-2 quests at a time. I’m level 13 now and about to start the third planet. Playing on easy really is kinda easy, but I hate dying and the gunplay isn’t really my favorite. I love the quests and the characters though. And it looks pretty. Other people should go play hard shooters, I’m here for the story and the humor.
I did find it a little weird that the third boss was a lot easier than the second, but ok.
Overall I’m also pretty happy with the game, there’s only one minor bug. When selling weapons/equip and scrolling through and/or filtering by type the icons are wrong. So the grenade in the uppermost left slot might still have a weapon’s icon. Not the end of the world as at least the tooltip is correct, but I would’ve thought they’d fix that in the few weeks since I had it.
Totally forgot to post this, on Friday I managed to get my Horde Demon Hunter (boo, another Blood Elf) to 120, which makes it toon #20, but more importantly: the last missing Horde class.
Bet I screenshotted this already a few times
Again I kinda forsake the gear grind, just got her a set of Benthic gear, did the Nazjatar starter quests and then got 2 half-decent rings and trinkets and a 2nd weapon. iLvl 386 after ~3h at 120. I don’t really plan to do much more, would rather focus on my other DH which is already decked out a lot better
This is the first toon where I jotted down the times for each level:
at ding 110: 6:04
111: 19 minutes
112: 30 minutes
113: 31 minutes
114: 51 minutes
115: 36 minutes
116: 41 minutes
117: 41 minutes
118: 46 minutes,
119: 37 minutes, doing the 3 strongholds for the war campaign
120: 49 minutes and quite a few deaths despite 10% spillover from last one
total: 6h 22 minutes, mostly rested and 100% uptime on the +15% anniversary buff
So yes, it’s a Demon Hunter that starts at Level 98, but iLvl 386 after 12,5h of playtime is a little ridiculous. 6h for Legion, 6h for BfA.
Paeroka linked to an interesting post of 25 MMOs that came and went since WoW went live and the overlap to what I played or even know a little about is a lot smaller than I expected.
The Matrix Online – I was interested in the franchise, but it launched around the time I was still playing Ragnarok and had just started with WoW. Bad timing
Pirates of the Caribbean Online – I can’t imagine I missed this so it’s much more likely that I dismissed it, because like The Matrix, the original film in this series is one of my favorite movies of all time.
Hello Kitty Online – I tried it for a day because someone said it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I think it was a little boring, if I remember correctly.
Darkfall – I only knew about this game because Syncaine wrote about it a lot
Everquest Landmark & Next – I tried EQ2 for a day and didn’t really like it, then I tried WoW and did like it. End of the story.
Tabula Rasa – Another one of those “sounds interesting, but I’m busy with other stuff”. Incidentally, “Blue Turns to Grey”, the final track is one of my favorite MMO pieces:
And now the ones I actually played:
Warhammer: Age of Reckoning – I was pretty excited for this one and the Collector’s Edition box still sits where I can see it. Sadly the game didn’t hold me for very long. It just wasn’t as good as WoW, no one I knew played it and it had some problems with endgame as I heard. I think I started reading Syp‘s blog posts back on his old Warhammer blog, so that’s a good 10 years.
WildStar – I wrote quite a bit about this game on this blog, maybe not enough. It was awesome at the start, it was fun in the middle… but in the end the raiding didn’t seem fun and even the 5mans weren’t my thing, They did a lot of things very right but apparently also enough things not right enough.
Marvel Heroes – now this is the game I played the most on this list, by a long stretch even. Sure I did take breaks, but I spent ~1500 hours between late December 2014 and summer 2017 in this game, played 56 heroes in this game and even did a cosmic prestige once. I blame Green Armadillo for this one.
PS: Naithin recommended the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin to finally have OpenGraph blurbs and pictures so I’ve been dying to get a new post up for the last few days. Let’s see if this works 😛
PPS: And I just noticed again how long I’ve been following some bloggers, so three cheers for the people who also have kept blogging for 10 years 🙂
Last week I upgraded my computer and AMD was nice enough to let me choose between The Outer Worlds and Borderlands 3 for buying a Ryzen CPU. I took Borderlands 3 because I’m not into solo RPGs right now and if I was, I’d play Mass Effect Andromeda first, or continue with one of the Witchers. Or play Pillars of Eternity.
Hello, Lilith
Anyway, it’s fun. A typical Borderlands game. I liked BL2, but I found some things a little annoying. Maybe because it’s a shooter. So this time I’m playing on easy mode and I’m already not sure if Zane was the right choice but I’m having fun – in moderation, playing one story mission a day. This seems to be the sweet spot for not being turned off. Oh, and it’s pretty. And some funny things.
When I moved this blog off wordpress.com 8 months ago I was only 90% happy with my new theme, trying very hard to preserve the old basic look I’ve had since 2009. My CSS skills are a bit rusty and I really wasn’t in the mood to fiddle with everything endlessly, but I was getting less and less happy with something I couldn’t express 100%.
Something annoys me here
Inspired by Rakuno’s post I instantly noticed what was bugging me most, the author blurb/posted on/meta part.
The meta information about the post is in one line
So as I had a little time I went digging for a theme where I could do this better after spending half an hour fiddling with the CSS on the old theme and overwriting 20 rules. It was close, but not perfect and then I noticed 2-3 other things..
Yes, much better.
Long story short, now I have a new theme, Astra, and I only had to override one thing with CSS and the rest can be configured. Awesome. Let’s see if I stay happy with this evolution of the basic look.
An interesting topic I saw going round: How much to spend for games? Paeroka wrote about it, Naithin did, and Krikket started it.
I’ve been summing up my gaming expenses in the end of year posts since 2014, that post isn’t due for 2 months but the current state for me seems to be that I have allowed myself to pay 3 MMO subscriptions at the same time, maybe for the first time ever. I can justify that because I don’t think I bought any game this year, with the exception of FFXIV’s Shadowbringers expansion, if you want to count that. I resisted any sale and I’ve been busy enough to not be lured in by any new release of any games coming out this year. The only things on my current “I really want to play that” list is Horizon: Zero Dawn and Beat Saber (and I’m certainly not buying a PS4 or VR gear for those). Also the Switch sounds nice, but I suppose I should play all my XBox 360 games first before buying another console.
That average playtime figure is oddly high
Compared to the others I linked above my number of games is ridiculously low, and I still played only half of them, but I think I can also pull the bundle excuse – for example the complete idSoftware-Pack. I did play those games, before I bought the bundle, even have some of the CDs somewhere. And I have zero regrets for that purchase, as an example.
Does anyone I know have a lower value here? 😛
So the final tally is still out and I’m too lazy to do the math now, but I guess I’ll come up with the same ballpark as every year, roughly 30 EUR per month for games, which is 1 EUR per day – quite cheap for a hobby that takes up a major part of my spare time.
And yes, overall I feel quite bad to always just buy games on sale and only support MMOs that seem to do well anyway, but I don’t really see why I should hand out money for games I’m simply not really interested in playing. Sometimes I get the urge, but nothing but MMOs seems to really stick in the last years. There simply wasn’t a major release that has me pumped and excited in a way where I could reasonably guess I’d even spend 20 hours on a full price game for 60 EUR. Maybe Cyberpunk 2077 is the first one in years. Maybe.
And in conclusion, maybe I should look up my /played times of various MMOs, that would certainly justify being subscribed there. Marvel Heroes said just shy of 65 days, that’s 1554 hours.
Still sick at home so I played a little more WoW. My Dwarven Hunter is now 120, which makes 19 max-level toons. He got the full Benthic treatment and again I’m missing rings (268+284), was a bit lucky with Trinket WQs (360+370), which makes him sit at 371 iLvl (370 MH Bow as well).
Dwarf Hunter at 120
For some reason I was fed up with bag space on several toons today, so I made a spreadsheet of all 27 (19 110+ and 8 lowbies) non-bank toons on my main server and thanks to the Altoholic addon I could quickly jot down who has which bag and size, without having to log through them all. To my surprise I didn’t grab the free 28 bag from a Tiragarde Sound Rare (Totes) on most of them, and a few were also missing the free 26 slot Legion bag from Addie in Highmountain. Interestingly WoD didn’t seem to have one, as the next fitting one is the 24 slot Grummlepack from Pandaria’s Kun-Lai Summit. So I killed Totes roughly 13 times, did the Addie quest like 5 times, handed out some 30 slot Netherweave bags I’ve been dutifully crafting and then most of it looked fine. Found enough non-BoE/BoP 16 slot bags to shuffle them around to all the ones who didn’t have all their bank slots unlocked and so on. I didn’t write down the exact numbers but I think most toons gained 4-10 slots in their bags and also in the bank. The only problem was still my Rogue main who didn’t benefit from the upgrades (gonna get the 28 slot at some point, but he’s on all 26+ already anyway) and was still at 0 free bank space. Yes, I’m keeping too much shit since Vanilla. In the end I managed to sell 10 armor pieces, throw out 5 bogus buff items and move ~15 Tier armor pieces to the Void Storage, which is also 3/4 full. But in the end even he reclaimed 29 slots. This took like 5h in total but it’s worth it. I also managed to redistribute some stuff and overall this will save time. But I still have like 60 greens to disenchant.
Also the 15 year anniversary event started today and it gives a nice +15% exp and rep buff for the next 2 months. I took advantage of that and also cleaned out some WQs and Emissaries (it’s also +50% bonus WQ rep). And I finally brought some Nazjatar allies to Rank 3 to get the Necklace bonus trait on the toons who are Azerite Level 55 already. Also finally cleaning out the quest logs.
With the Hunter at 120 – what’s next? My 3rd Rogue will be put on the backburner now, she’s at 390 iLvl and in a state I can absolutely see her as “finished”, being on the remote server and all – I already put in ~10h more at max level than originally planned.
110 Blood Elf Demon Hunter – my last missing Horde class, tempting
70 Draenei DK – with Horde being so lonely I kinda prefer my Ally guild right now, also tempting
72 Kul Tiran Mage – leveling only in Random Dungeons so far, could be pumped up a little
73 Worgen Priest – pass for now I think
82 Mag’har Orc Rogue – staying with Random Dungeons I think
42 Nightborne Priest – Random Dungeons it is
34 Zandalari Troll Paladin – more Random Dungeons
34 Dark Iron Dwarf Monk – guess what? Random Dungeons!
I’ve not done a lot of interesting things the last 2 weeks, mostly because of a nasty flu that didn’t so much knock me down to bed but more made my head completely dizzy and unable to concentrate on anything but a few dailies and grinding. I didn’t even dare to login to Classic because I found the questing to be too hard. Yay.
I’m still trying to catch up all the professions from Legion, and some from Draenor (mostly Alliance) so I was busy gathering some mats, at the same time doing some Broken Isles WQs and Emissary Quests. And a few Mythic 5man solo dungeon runs because those are a joke at 120.
Legion Mining seems to be a pain and my Human Rogue is lacking most of the points, Draenor Inscription seems to be fine with 1-2 points per day if you remember. On the other hand Mining will fuel my lackluster Legion Jewelcrafting which seems to need a ton of Ore to prospect. Kinda glad I don’t even have a BS on alliance side. Overall there seems to be a reason that despite playing a few toons in Legion I never have been so sloppy with professions, because they were horrible. BfA is better, but not by a huge margin – but I at least have the gathering ones maxed on nearly all toons and am well beyond 100 on some crafting ones.
Draenor Cooking is mostly mailing the correct staple of mats around and maybe buying a few things at the Garrison. Horde has been done for a while but I only have 2 Alliance garrisons, and need the last 5 points of Draenor Cooking on the 7th Alliance toon.
And lastly I’m grinding out Legionfall, Argussian Reach and Army of the Light rep on the Rogue and do a few Broken Isles Emissary Quests on the Shaman, my Legion Horde main who is progressed most. Need to tick those checkboxes 😛
While it’s been a while since I played SW:TOR I absolutely don’t have the time right now. I did login quickly to have a peek. Some observations:
Not subscribed, so only 1 char “active” right now, my Commando
The character window is different
The Valor bar is still? buggy and flickering
I only have 3 currencies left: Tech Fragments/Dark Side Tokens/Fleet Commendations
I still have 2 Command Crate – Tier 4 in my inventory (this is in the patchnotes)
The Renown Stash is still full 9/10 😛
I have 350k credits + some in escrow, as expected
My Legacy bank still shows me all my millions of credits
The Combat Proficiencies window is still the only one that won’t close via the Esc key 😛
There wasn’t a single pop up “new quest! new expansion! go here!” – weird. Do I have to subscribe? Should be big on the website or the patch notes or did I just miss this? Aha. Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ – Onslaught is coming October 2019, free to all subscribers – ok, missed it 🙂
And I basically also logged in because a friend just said he logged in for the first time in 2 years and was overcome by “OHMYGOD BAGS FULL” instantly. I was curious… and yep, it’s a thing. Makes you want to log off straight again.
