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
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.
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 🙂
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…
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.
