I wrote about some goals a week ago and despite not being at home for a few days I managed to check a few things off the list. But tomorrow (in like 9h) work starts again and things will slow down. Also I managed to do some of the easy ones, pfff
DONE Harlow Ricks’ daily on Light Side Empire chars
Get Commando to CL 300 (at 265)
Missing 4 3 conquest events: Emergency Operations, The Dread War, Total Galactic War, Flashpoint Havoc
Have a look at the Ossus dailies – normal / heroic
So that’s only one of twelve chars not having done Makeb and one of twelve not having done Ilum. But seven sitting with “Battle of Ilum” in their quest log and one with “False Emperor” – so that’s the cutoff point for my willingness to continue the Ilum story arc.
As is customary I am writing a “year in review” post that shows my exploits and ignores the rest of the world, there are better writers for this kind of stuff 🙂
What I played a lot:
WoW: 1x 35 EUR for Battle for Azeroth, no subscription yet
Oh my, just checked the Blizzard store. It’s on sale *again* for 25 EUR. Stupid me for buying it, but I really had planned to play around this time. Is it selling so badly they need to have it on sale twice in the first few months? Wow.
Games on Steam: 24 EUR for Quake Champions, 0.42 EUR to complete 2 Card sets
Games on GOG: 3.90 EUR for Torchlight 2
Games on Humble Bundle: 20 EUR for Dead Cells, 1 EUR for Shadow of Mordor
This means: 176 EUR in 2018, at ~15 EUR per month. WTF, this is a new low I guess.
Amount of MMO subscription months paid: 7
Bought stuff in the ingame shop: SWTOR, but with no additional cash
Full price games: 2 (Quake Champions, Dead Cells)
MMO Expansions: 1 (WoW: Battle for Azeroth)
So (and this is new this year) some analysis:
I’m still mostly playing one MMO at a time
Although I have 4 mobile games up there, this was only a few minutes at home this year, mostly while waiting for something
Depending on how much public transport commute I have, I play some mobile games. Usually I read RSS feeds, this winter I preferred gaming
I guess I didn’t buy so many games that I won’t play then. Yay.
There are still a few Steam games on sale I’m thinking about 😛
A goals/achievements update. Funny how I wanted to post this on Sunday but ended up playing a lot, until after midnight. So some inline updates. 😛
Missing/working on it:
13x 9x Harlow Ricks’ daily on Light Side Empire chars, then the 200 missions are done
Get Commando to CL 300
Missing 4 conquest events: Emergency Operations, The Dread War, Total Galactic War, Flashpoint Havoc
Try out Space Missions for the first time since 2011
Try out an Uprising
Do the Star Fortress quests for a second time
Finish my Datacrons: Rishi, Fleet, Corellia, Taris
Done (what a short list):
10th Class to Level 70 (Mercenary), now missing Marauder (55), Guardian (20 50), Sniper (20), Sorcerer, Gunslinger, Vanguard
100% Life Day
2500 kills with C2-N2, and thus all achievements with the 2 droids
The real question is now if I want to grind out those 2500 kills on the Sentinel/Assassin that I hardly play or if I try to get my 20 Guardian up quickly to do Rusk/Scourge. Sounds a lot more interesting, with the XP event I can focus on the class story and still progress quickly. Then there’s still the weeklies, right now I’m using my Smuggler to farm healing gear for the Operative: Do weeklies, gain ~20 boxes, respec Healing, open them, reslot all 246/248 items to Bind-to-Legacy. Same can be done with the Commando once I hit 300. Not a bad use of my time I guess.
Also the Relics of the Gree Conquest (that I usually don’t like provided me with more completions than usual. Bounty Hunter, Mercenary, Juggernaut, Operative, and maybe I can even finish Guardian).
Some time ago I decided I want to try healing in SWTOR, but I had no suitable character. As I’m playing mostly Empire right now, that CL 300 Smuggler with ~240 DPS gear wasn’t any help, so I started to play my Operative a bit more, with the intention to grab some healing gear from the higher tier Command chests. He’s CL 134 now, so that’s not so much, but ok, it’s progressing.
But I also still had one of those boosts left so I went out to create a new char with the intention to boost. Then I read up on the boost and I felt this wasn’t worth it. You skip all the story, you can’t make your decisions, meh. How long can it take to level up? Wasn’t there some Double XP event planned after Christmas? Commando with a new helmet
That’s how my Mercenary got started. I wanted to replay the Bounty Hunter story line anyway (thus the boost would have sucked) and I very quickly went to Level 20 (big surprise). Then I couldn’t play for a few days due to Christmas stuff, but with the +25% XP boosts from quests and the +100% server XP buff I managed to get to 70 in less than 10h, and I’m sitting at CL 26 already, having finished everything up to and including Yavin 4, as I usually do on all my chars. I just skipped Ilum again this time. And I already could transfer one 240 item from my Commando (at CL 236 now) over, via slotting the modules into a bind-to-legacy item. It’s not so cheap, but I’m not exactly lacking funds right now. 240 is a lot better than the 210 item he had equipped. So I guess this route is a lot quicker now. I respecced the Commando to Healing as well to get healing gear from the boxes, then I will transfer that over. Maybe I should’ve done this legacy-ification a lot sooner, but I felt it wasn’t really worth pre-248. This is now just an exception because I want to have some healing equip. Of course I was still too chicken to try to heal a random FP, but I hope I’ll feel confident enough soon 😛 I do think it has more to do with “running a dungeon” than “the pressure of healing” – I just don’t like small group content.
I’m pretty happy how he looks, I wrote before that I tried Male Body Type 4 once and hated it. This one now is fine – I just need to watch out which chest item I show, because in some of them he really looks to fat and unfit for combat. Twi’lek Mercenary at Level 70
I usually insert too many screenshots, because I make too few – but here’s one of one of my favorite semi-reproducible bugs: If you change your spec while being mounted you will sometimes be shown running while mounted. Depending on the type of your mount this looks wrong or really funny:
Did I already rant how I hate December and all the stress about Christmas? Probably not here (at least this year) but it’s real. I stopped playing Destiny 2, I still haven’t resubbed to WoW.
Torchlight 2 was on sale the last days, so I finally bought it after some nudging. It’s fun, although I didn’t play a lot yet. The only game I was playing a little was SWTOR – but I’ll have a separate post for that, maybe sooner. At least now the real part of my vacation time starts, all the Christmas stuff is over now.
It seems I’m falling back into a lower cadence of posts, but apparently the holiday season has started, which means a lot of stuff to do. Fun things like meeting people for mulled wine but also buying presents and other stuff. Or travel for work. I did play a bit, but not much this week.
This “Continuing Comfort” weekly quest I wrote about is finally done, I managed to not forget to visit Odessen every week and hand in some (not so) expensive mats. No more handing in stuff in Odessen every week
I did manage to get my Smuggler to Command Level 300, so that should grant me the maximum of a +100% boost to Command XP on the remaining toons at 70. Yay, more weeklies! 😛 Fourth mirror class to Command Level 300!
I also managed to get my Jedi Shadow to Level 70 today (finishing everything up to Ziost and then doing the last 1-2 levels via daily quests, as usual). She’s my first toon that “duplicates” a per-faction mirror class. The moment I dinged I bought her a full set of 230 Tanking Gear with Command Tokens (1700 left now) and respecced to Kinetic Damage, we’ll see when I will try playing that. That makes 9x Level 70
Speaking of alts and levels, apart from this 9th Level 70 I now only have a 50 Marauder, 20 Guardian, and 17 Sniper. I still have a Level 65 boost which I think I’ll use on a Healing Mercenary, but I haven’t decided on the race yet. Then there’s still this male Rattataki Vanguard and the male Togruta Gunslinger on the table, a male Zabrak Sorcerer is created, but never logged in yet. Yeah, that should be 16 characters according to a plan of 8 male and 8 female (for the stories and voice actors), one per class each.
Doing Conquests with a guild in a coordinated manner is still fun, not having to grind daily, but being able to commit to 2h once per week and knock out 15k on one toon, still leaving the possibility to do it solo on another. Also I’ve seen some more operations, Dread Fortress, Terror From Beyond, and if you want to count them Xenoanalyst and Golden Fury.
Some more progress:
Rishi “A Pirate’s Life”: 132/200
Lokin to 1000/1000 kills
C2-N2 to 1674/2500 kills
And a huge fail: I tried to do the Eternal Championship again on my Bounty Hunter, where I had not so huge problems getting to the 6th boss, but then failed (back when I hit 70). Now I tried this again – with 246 gear and a 41 Companion. Wow, I still failed at the exact same place. Of 3-4 tries I nearly managed to win the 6th round once, but that was half luck and then I gave up some time later anyway. The internet told me to let my companion get aggro on one of the 2 adds, then kill an add, then kill the main enemy, then kill the second add. Apparently my companion is not able to either hold aggro, or survive. Don’t even remember which spec worked (tank or dps) but with healing it was an even bigger disaster. Maybe I should try with a different class, that one’s certainly my nemesis. And I’m also not used to really hard content anymore, I know that 😛
Bonus: Got to Rank 20 with the 4 alliance contacts, now overflowing with Legacy gear
Farmed some guards on some planets with the guild for achievements
Completed Dread Fortress 8 man SM – this was really fun, but a DPS PT is not a good offtank.
Last week I only managed to contribute around 34k on 2 chars to the Guild Conquest, but I’m not good at crafting. This week we have the Gree event, also not looking forward to this…
I’ve been slowly chopping away at Destiny 2 and I’m level 11 now.
Apparently I suck at PvP in a way that’s hard to describe in words, but let’s say I play this game not like a real shooter I guess. Scout Rifle + Sniper Rifle + Melee + My Ultimate (or whatever it’s called). OK, sometimes I use the Grenade Launcher, but this is in no way frantic, it’s careful going forward and backward and aiming for head shots 😛
I’m not sure if this “Forsaken” expansion would be interesting to me – it’s 30 instead of 40 EUR right now, but I guess I’ll see if I get to max level first. My track record of actually staying with shooters is so bad I should probably not risk it after playing only a few hours.
I did buy Battle for Azeroth today because it was 10 EUR off though, because I’m absolutely going to play it for the story – I just don’t know yet when, probably over the holidays, so I didn’t subscribe just yet.
I accidentally posted twice yesterday, that second post was supposed to be for today after a quick edit of “I finished the Conquest target on 3 chars and made ~50k points”. But yeah.
Haven’t done much yesterday and today, but I did start KotFE on my Agent and if you spacebar hard enough you can get Chapter 9 done pretty fast. This chapter is important for 2 reasons: Unlocking “To Find a Findsman” to get Alliance Alerts, and to be able to start the Star Fortresses story arc.
As I read lately that the ads on wordpress.com seem to be getting worse and overall because I’m feeling like it, I’ve been researching domain names and hosting options – if I should move off here. So far it’s been pretty good, but maybe I don’t want to scare off all my 5-10 readers with too many ads. 😛 I don’t want to spend too much money and I want a domain with whois privacy. The latter already soured me on that awesome domain name I was already about to buy. I’m not so good with catchy names, so I guess I’ll ponder a bit more about this. I’m pretty sure we had this topic as a writing prompt in Blaugust this year and I’m not happy with my choice (name of the author in the domain name) right now, although I was for years and maybe it will come again 🙂 Also at Blaugust I didn’t think this through renaming most of my accounts to Nogamara and just keeping the blog name and the twitter handle. Poor people had to write Nogamara/Armagon all the time…
And yes, I know about the wordpress.com plans, but I’d either have to get the 4 EUR/month plan and pay for the domain from year 2 on, so that would be like 110 EUR for 2 years, or just get an external domain which would probably cost ~28 EUR per year (~15 EUR for the domain, 13 EUR to map it here) but not even remove the ads, so no big win. Self-hosting is some work, but I guess I can pull it off for ~25 EUR per year.
Enough rambling, off to bed now and trying to get up early tomorrow to be home sooner and be able to run some errands quickly so I can be online after maintenance and get my Juggernaut to Command 300!
I’m not a fan of “gaming goals”, as in “I want to get this done next month” – but I am absolutely a fan of ticking off boxes to provide some structure to my play. I’m really too forgetful to keep longtime goals in mind. It’s kinda ok to remember doing a certain weekly each week, but surely not “if I am in this region, kill mobs of type X, not Y”. So here’s a list of SWTOR stuff I plan on doing in the next time, no deadlines provided. I didn’t do too bad since August.
Get Sith Juggernaut to 300 Command Level (at 273, so hopefully next week)
Get Scoundrel to 300 Command Level (at ~220, might take a while still)
Progress with the Rishi “A Pirate’s Life” achievements (Daily Harlow Ricks on the 4 pairings of Empire/Republic + Dark/Light)
2 more weeks of “Continuing Comfort” (I plan to not just forget this)
Get BH to Valor 40 (whenever I have to do PvP for the Conquest the next time)
Get to Social 10 (now that will take a while)
20 PvP matches on the Sage for M1-4X
Start KotFE, get to Alliance Alerts, refuse Rusk/Skadge/Broonmark/Lokin/Xalek/Ak’ghal Usar (For the achievements)
Get 1000 more kills with C2-N2 (achievements again)
Get some missing kills: Scourge (400), Rusk(850), Lokin(600), Khem (700), Talos (550), Andronikus (800)
Try out Galactic Starfighter
Try out Space Missions for the first time since 2011
Try out an Uprising
Do the Star Fortress quests for a second time
Finish my Datacrons: Rishi, Fleet, Corellia, Taris
