Shooting things

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I’ve been slowly chopping away at Destiny 2 and I’m level 11 now.
destiny2_exo_hunter_11
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.

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Thinking about a blog move

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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!

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Goals in SWTOR

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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

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I missed the 9th blogoversary

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Is that even a word? Last year I managed to remember the 8th birthday of the blog on the 18th of October, now it’s a month late. Bah, who cares. I managed to write around 73 posts in that year (until the 18th, that is) – but with 31 in August and 29 in the 2 weeks before and after  that’s only 12 posts for the remaining 10 months. As far as I can see I didn’t do any of these posts before last year.
Last year I had just restarted SW:TOR (and played for like 2-3 months) and also had played a lot of Guild Wars 2 just before.
2 years ago I was back in WoW, having fun in Legion – this was an extended stint in the Alliance, after having abandoned WoW in early 2014 and only returning for 2 months for WoD a month after it launched iirc.
3 years ago I was back in Ragnarok Online, my first MMO ever. But this was on another server, the first two ones I had played on had been closed down years ago. It’s a long tale of franchises and other things.
4 years ago I apparently wrote about mobile games, and my view hasn’t changed much, but maybe another post is due, having written about mobile games three times in total. I had stopped playing WoW in spring (after a fun visit to another server) and when WildStar launched I was fully on board.
5 years ago I was playing WoW and not much else. That’s also the year where I came back after a 3 year hiatus, not having managed to keep a full year running, only from October 2009 to March 2010 (20 posts in total). Since July 2013 I didn’t have any breaks longer than 3 months, which isn’t too bad. So maybe July 26th, 2013 should be the date to celebrate, but to be fair I did some games blogging in Dec 2011/Jan 2012 [1, 2, 3] – just not here. But these 3 years can be summed up quite nicely by: I finished university, I started working full time, I played a lot of WoW. I also wasn’t not blogging (~25 posts on other blogs in that time), just not about games.

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I managed to raid

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Phew, an exciting week!
I was lucky and a spot opened up in my new guild’s newbie raid, so I got to do Story Mode Terror From Beyond and then Veteran Eternity Vault yesterday. So January 22th 2012 to November 12th 2018 that’s… nearly 6 years and 10 months. Also apparently we really did Nightmare mode back then, according to my achievements – it’s just puzzling that I didn’t have the Veteran 8 man clear achievements (only Normal), but those “Archived” ones show “Master mode”, i.e. old Nightmare mode. It’s weird.
Got some nice drops, so I’m at Item Rating 246 now – the first pieces not from Command Chests. It also was really fun, raiding for the first time since 4.5 years? I guess I stopped with WoW raids in early 2014. Wasn’t particularly challenging, though – the whole team being quite well equipped, everyone except me kinda knowing what to do, and then it was only SM and VM, not really hard – I mean we 7 manned Veteran EV, and one DPS was in tanking gear, that’s why needed 2 tries on the first 2 bosses. I died more than most others, but I wasn’t always in last place (from 3/4 DPS), so I’m really happy with the result. I’m not hooked again and want to RAID RAID RAID again soon, but I’d love to see all the Operations and I guess Veteran would be doable, even if I was capable I’m absolutely not keen on regular Master mode raiding 😛
I just need to read up on my rotations, on stationary fights I was overheating all the time and thus DPS suffered.
Also managed to finish the Conquest on three chars again, for a total contribution of roughly 60k.
All in all the “be in a guild again” is a really cool experience – having people to chat, and it’s low key right now without mandatory attendance and I can do a little to contribute (helping to conquer a planet, just helped someone with a fight in a Veteran chapter) and I’m getting rewards (for the planet conquest) and the opportunity to go on a raid. I guess that sounded a bit exploitative, but I don’t see taking something from anyone – I didn’t join for phat loots, so I see it as a win-win.
PS: I totally went through this post again and replaced “Heroic” with “Veteran” – I hate this change.

  • Normal Mode – Story Mode
  • Heroic Mode – Veteran Mode
  • Nightmare Mode – Master Mode

PPS: Cheers to Archarius of Tulak Hord who wanted to get the “50 people in the Stronghold achievement” and asked in General while promising 5m – and actually handed it out to a long queue of people 🙂

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Shockingly I played another game

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When I’m not posting much it means either of two things: Nothing has happened or I was too busy. This week definitely the latter was true. Activision Blizzard (is that how we’re supposed to call them?) gave us Destiny 2 for free and back when I wrote about it I seemed to enjoy it very much. So of course I grabbed it and as is typical for me didn’t play it right away but waited like a week. So for the last few days I’ve been slowly puttering along, 20-30 minutes per day, one story mission at a time. I really do think my time as an FPS gamer is past. I’m not really good and if it’s not Quake (I didn’t really write about Quake Champions back in the summer. I liked it) I’m really tense and waiting for some enemy to pop up behind a corner, which feels kinda unhealthy. I’m not really scared… just kinda tense, which makes it not fun – multiplayer doesn’t have this weird problem for me.#
Anyway. I’m trying to not burn out on it after only 10 hours like I did on Borderlands 2 and so I’m taking it slow. I’m pretty surprised it runs flawlessly on my 6 year old potato (with a newer graphics card) in 2560×1440…
Also, I get it – he’s not a bad voice actor, but why always Nolan North? Maybe I played too many hours of an SWTOR Consular in the last months, but come on – there MUST be more voice actors out there…

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A busy week in SWTOR

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Due to having a few days off I actually got some stuff done, which was really nice – I love goals and milestones 🙂
Both my Sage and Juggernaut finally got to Archaeology 600 – apparently the easiest way is to harvest on Iokath until 580 and then just do 5-6 missions. All the guides I found online said you’d be able to harvest until 600, but at least I didn’t manage to do that. Anyway, 6 Level 10 missions isn’t too much money – so I got all Crew Skills at 600 now – that’s a big goal ticked off the list.
I also managed to finally hit 100% “companion completion” on Smuggler and Consular, after dragging Guss Tuno and Felix Iresso through some content for 1000 kills. Iresso was especially hard as I had already started KotFE on my Sage, so I had to actually use my Shadow for that. So she’s 60 now and is in the Manaan story arc.
The Rakghoul Conquest is kinda nice, especially if you’re not strictly soloing anymore, so I have finished the Conquest goal three times and I guess in total I am at like 65k.
As I joined a guild I’m now focusing a bit more on my Empire toons, that means I’ve diverted all Bonus CXP packs to my Juggernaut (who is at 194) and making that my #1 active character right now, and demoted the Scoundrel (who is 195). Juggernaut is more fun to play anyway. The aforementioned third conquest character is my Operative, who I don’t really enjoy playing (but also not less than the Scoundrel) is my only Empire character at 70 capable of healing – so I’m gonna invest a little time now and respec healing to try that out.
I also motivated myself to work on Datacron completion, finishing Imperial Balmorra, Makeb, Quest, and Ord Mantell. That leaves me missing Corellia, Fleet, Rishi, and all but one on Taris (both sides) – so 60 found and 18 missing. I remember trying Corellia already and giving up. Some of those jumping puzzles are really horrible (like that one on Makeb, where I think I needed 1h for one).
I wasn’t as happy with the Rishi Stronghold as I had originally thought, so I ripped everything (well, wasn’t so much yet to be fair) out and migrated my army of alts to my Nar Shaddaa stronghold and started remodeling parts of it.
And I cleaned out some bank space, selling off all those duplicate identically looking pieces of armor and weapons…
Finally I started on the Macrobinoculars quest chain, but only got Dromund Kaas done so far.

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Some progress

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First of all: yes, I did it. While I had finished most weekly quests on Thursday already I somehow managed to get Iokath and a few other things done and got my 2nd Command 300 on Saturday. Taking advantage of that sweet +25% XP boost I could finally start the weekly quest run on my Juggernaut and Scoundrel, they’re at 158/164 now.
I’m also mostly done with my weekly Conquest, though I do have to finish it tomorrow. Part of that was Kuat Drive Yards, which I did solo. Wasn’t too hard but I was kinda glad Mako is Level 36 and not 20 anymore, like a few weeks ago. My DPS is high enough to get rid of everything but the last boss kinda quickly, that one took quite a while…
I kinda ran out of podcasts right now, so I’ve used Netflix in the first time in months. Not sure it was a good idea, I caught up on quite some “I wanted to see them, but I wasn’t really excited in the first place” movies.

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I joined a guild

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So the three day WoW trial is up, I logged in maybe 4 times but didn’t do anything worth mentioning besides what I already wrote. Let’s see if 8.1 pulls me back in.
On to more exciting news. I’ve made the conscious decision to stay in SWTOR for the moment (and why wouldn’t I? I’m having fun.) and I’m a lot more excited about 5.10 (without a release date more exact than “probably December”) than BfA which is out now. So I looked around on my server and have now joined an Empire guild, my first foray into socializing since 2014 I guess. We’ll see how that works out. Maybe I get to do some Operations again.
Anyway, right now I’m desperately trying to get my Sage to 300 to get the 25% Command XP bonus, but right now I’m stuck at 286 and already did most of the weeklies, only Iokath (planned for tomorrow) and Makeb (ugh, nope) left. I really want to get it done this week, not next week, so maybe some more planet daily sets…

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I almost bought a WoW expansion

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The weekend is upon us and after being out last night I thought.. today will be the day I grab Battle for Azeroth! Only had to grab 100 MB of patches, then I got an interesting popup. “Trial for BfA! 3 days of game time included”. This sounded good, I was on the way to buy it anyway.
So I logged in all my toons, cleaned up the bags for the mains, grabbed a quest, did a scenario (Fall of Lordaeron) and then… couldn’t continue. I would’ve expected a breadcrumb quest to lead me to a new zone, as with all the other expansions before, but nope. Went around a bit in Orgrimmar, nothing – so I went to search the web and apparently it only works with a freshly created Trial character. Not so cool. I was still interested so I checked what class/race combo I was missing among my high level characters and decided on a Gnome Warlock. Apparently I had created one to save a name, so I logged in, mailed the Heirlooms to another toon, deleted, and recreated. Then I had to do the scenario again (doh) – but at least from the other perspective now. After that I could indeed go to Kul Tiras and experience roughly half an hour of gameplay. At that point the game decided this was enough and I should now pay up. Including holding that character hostage with a big fat lock on the login screen and a “Trial Completed” message.
But what I saw from Kul Tiras and the new quests was really nice. Except for the jarring mouth animations when the NPCs were talking. I also feel drawn to the Alliance quite a bit, as the scenario wasn’t really more enticing than the preview cinematics. This also sucks, I’d prefer to play my old mains from before Legion.
So yeah, on the one hand it’s my own fault. On the other hand this “free” “trial” has pissed me off enough that I’ve not instantly gone and bought it. Actually I’m quite dissuaded at the moment. Good job, Blizzard, if it hadn’t been for the wording and execution of this trial I would’ve bought it already, incl. a subscription.

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