hk-47

And Also With You

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Nar Shadda Living

And Also With You

Lately I have been on this Star Wars kick and like I said before… I absolutely blame the Force Awakens hype for putting me in this position.  My good friend Tam mentioned something last night about playing SWTOR again…  that absolutely rings true.  We were both brought up in “good catholic families” so he mentioned something that is happening to me too.  When we hear someone say “May the Force Be With You” it is absolutely instinctual to want to say “And Also With You”.  Even worse…  I have this irrational need to make the sign of the  cross at the same time.  The funny thing about playing this game again is that I guess I did not realize how often I have subscribed for a month or so in the past, that said I guess I am happy I did.  I had access to Section X and the HK-47 quest line without having to pay to unlock it, because apparently I subbed at just the right time.  When it came time to look into Strongholds it seems like I also have a five room Nar Shadda Sky Palace unlocked for free as well.  The cool thing about that is that if I had to choose one of the housing options… it probably would have been Nar Shadda anyways because I have been in love with the concept of that city since I first encountered it in Dark Forces.

For the time being most of us are going through a bit of a lull in Final Fantasy XIV.  Right now I am absolutely enjoying raiding and I really hope we down Ravana Extreme before the launch of the 3.1 patch…  but past that I really don’t have much desire to log in.  I could force myself to grind out the esoterics every week, but my fear is that if I start forcing it… I will also start resenting the game like I have World of Warcraft in the past.  That was a cycle I would get into with WoW, where I would force myself to be there… “for the guild” or “for the raid” and then ultimately it would lead to my cancelling of my account once more.  Final Fantasy XIV is my new home base of operations, and I am happy with it…  I just don’t want to do anything to tarnish my enjoyment.  There is never a point where Lalafell things or Final Fantasy XIV news does not give me warm fuzzies right now…  but I also know me.  I like playing lots of different games, and if I force myself to ONLY play FFXIV it will ruin the experience for me.

The Search for Parts

And Also With You

I have to say I am enjoying the HK-47 quest line.  I spent most of last night working on it and gathering bits and pieces scattered around the galaxy.  It seems like it provided just the right amount of friction, in that you had to go to the PVP area on Tatooine first and once that was out of the way, were able to explore the galaxy at your leisure finding the rest of the bits.  The first part on Taris was the most annoying, because you had to get used to using the scanner to determine if you were close to a piece.  All of the other pieces seem to have a clear path that you can search along, but in Taris it is hard to see the pattern of where the pieces will show up.  Luckily there was a large group of people roaming around looking for it while I was there, and fortunately the quest is fairly pro-community.  When someone finds a piece it stays there for about a minute allowing anyone in the vicinity to loot it.  So when someone finally hit on being 10 meters away from the piece we quickly gathered together and found it.  Essentially to get a piece to show up you have to be within 2 meters, which means a lot of staggerstep movement right around the 10 meter location.

From there I had to travel to the Jedi Temple and the Dark Temple.  These steps require you to have an alt of appropriate level on the opposite faction, and the pieces you get in either can be mailed to any character on your account.  Since I was doing this on my Jedi Guardian, the Jedi Temple was a pretty quick process.  From there I mailed the scanner to my Sith Warrior and I proceeded with the same thing… but this time on the Dark Temple approach rather than the temple proper itself.  After doing all of the locations… essentially my suggestion would be to stay on the path and keep moving forward a little bit until you hit on a piece.  No piece that I found was very far off of the main path, so that at least seems to make life a little easier for you.  By the time I was working on the final piece on Hoth I had gotten pretty decent at the whole searching process and it came the quickest of them all.  Now I need to do both a normal mode dungeon and a hard mode dungeon, and I am hoping that Tam gets caught up so that we can grab Ammo and Sol and run them as a four player group.  As far as plans go for today… I am going to return to leveling on Makeb and plan on binging the Star Wars movies…  since I am clearly apparently going through a phase.

Section X

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Life With a Teacher

Section X

It feels like I don’t have a whole lot worth talking about this morning.  My evening was rather fragmented, in that I got home fairly early and then spent the next couple of hours trying to pass the time while waiting on my wife to get home.  We had tentatively made plans to go out to dinner, and on a normal evening I would have fixed something and been engaged in a game by the time she got home.  This school year has been rather rough for her, and she is spending silly amounts of time up at school grading and planning.  It gets annoying at times because it is super hard to plan my life around her ever changing schedule, but I manage.  There are certain aspects of being a teachers husband… that no one will ever really understand fully.  We ended up going to a BBQ place near the Walmart Neighborhood Market, because my thought was after dinner we would walk over to the market really quick and pick up a few things.  This seemed like a simple in and out trip, and we could get on our merry way homewards.

Fate stacked against us, and of all of the places to have “back to school clearance” I did not expect a Walmart Neighborhood market.  For those who do not have these in their area, they are essentially a grocery store only Walmart, but have some minimal other items.  As we were rounding the bend past frozen foods I saw that they had a kiosk of back to school stuff.  I didn’t think anything about it, but next thing I knew we were sorting through all of the folders trying to pick out nine of each color from a mixed up bin of them.  I cannot count the number of times I have had an experience similar to this one.  There really wasn’t much space so my wife did most of the sifting through the folders but in the past I have had my hands knee deep in vats of assorted merchandise looking for that one item that matches the rest of the things we had pulled out.  Part of being a teacher is trying to find all of the things you need for your classroom as cheaply as humanly possible, and while I am fairly used to it… it just surprises me sometimes when I am not expecting it.  After all of the bin sorting… we got home a little later than I had expected.

Section X

Section X

When I finally got settled in for the night, I made a blanket cocoon on the couch and booted up Star Wars the Old Republic.  I am now on this kick of trying to get through all of the story line that I have missed before the release of Fallen Empire.  For this I am going to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of Disney.  You cannot go anywhere right now without being deluged in Force Awakens merchandise, and with it comes an upwelling of all of the other movies that I am really damned nostalgic about as well.  I have these designs on making a Marathon of the movies this weekend while working on the SWTOR content.  It has been a really long time since I have watched the prequels, so I am honestly hoping I can bury the hatchet that I hold towards them.  The prequels broke me, and came damned close to breaking my love of Star Wars as a whole.  So when I heard about Force Awakens I was mildly interested, but now I feel like I am full on in the thrall of overwhelming feels towards the franchise I grew up with.  I even went so far as to order the Disney Infinity 3.0 Saga Edition… because it was on sale and two I had enough saved up discover credit to get it essentially for free.

Section X

 

I have to say playing this game again… and seeing fresh content in it… reminds me of why we were so damned addicted to it for a couple of month period after launch.  The story content is really good, and even though Makeb does not actually feature any “class specific” content I am absolutely enjoying myself.  I did however take a break from Makeb last night to start working on the Section X content.  I guess I played long enough to get that area unlocked for free, and with it should give me access to my very own HK-47 droid.  From what I hear it is a rather lengthy quest and involves collecting bits on several different characters, including a Sith.  Mainly I was told that if I cared about story progression, that I should go ahead and do that now before getting too deep in the new content.  As you can see from my previous pictures I went back to the Jedi Knight robes as seen on the box art.  I have to say I dig the Holowardrobe because it is way cheaper to change your appearance using it than re-modding your gear.  There are a few of us currently going through this Star Wars nostalgia attack, which makes me feel kinda sad each time I interact with the person who held down the fort while we have been gone.  I know that I am just here doing some MMO tourism…  and as soon as I am done with the story content I will be gone once more.  Even though I have not been playing a lot of it… Final Fantasy XIV is still my home base of operations.