A Jumbled Mess

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Good Morning Folks. I hope that I am coming out of the worst parts of Covid hell. Today is the first day I am going to attempt to put in a full day’s work. What is so fucked about this illness is how wildly it impacts different people. Essentially my wife brought this home to me from her workplace and for her it just seemed like a generic cold with touches of allergies. For me… it started out that way but then essentially knocked me on my ass. I’ve spent so much time coughing that my entire torso feels like it is bruised. Each day has gotten a little better, but it was yesterday and today that I actually started to really begin to feel better. My focus has been scattered as hell, even seeing me attempt to revitalize the Engineer that I worked on unlocking Mechanist with but did nothing afterward.
I honestly had a pretty freaking great day in Guild Wars 2 and I will probably talk more about some revelations that I made yesterday in a longer form post tomorrow. However, I essentially figured out how to make the whole meta-train click. Yesterday I managed to catch Dragon Stand, Chalk Gerent, Auric Basic, Aetherblade Assault, Kaineng City Blackout, and then Echovald Gang War back to back. I could have ridden the train for as long as I would have liked, arriving in the zone just as the next event was ramping up, but I needed a break after that much excitement. That is the big thing I am noticing right now is I can only handle so much focused activity before I get drained. Essentially I will share these dark secrets tomorrow, but if this works as well as I think it does it will absolutely breathe new life into the game for me.
I am continuing to make slow progress in World of Warcraft as I push through The War Within on my Pandaria Remix Dark Iron Dwarf. If nothing else it has given me quite possibly my new favorite transmog. I’ve started the second zone which is considerably cooler than the first one was. I dig the Dwarven-adjacent storyline of the Earthen and this is legitimately quite possibly the best World of Warcraft has been in years. The problem is… it is still World of Warcraft. It lives in this sort of messy middle-ground between Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 for me. The combat is nowhere near as tightly structured as FFXIV and at the same time does not feel as fluid and fast-paced as Guild Wars 2… so it just sort of feels loose and messy all the time. It does not help that they removed Titanic Throw which was easily my favorite ability from Dragonflight. I miss having something as good as the Paladin shield throw, and I absolutely feel like I need it when moving around the tightly packed corridors to group everything up.
Since I cannot seem to be pinned down to focusing on any one thing… I of course went off and created a new Ruthless character in Path of Exile. A lot of the streamers have been exploring Ruthless mode, which of course made me interested again given that the Settlers town gives you easier access to gear than normal in this mode. I rolled a Duelist with the purpose of going Bleed Gladiator and am mostly just running around with splitting steel and the only two supports that I have found to this point which is Added Cold Damage and Chance to Poison. Not a combination I would ever use together… but when you are limited in your options you use whatever you can get. Add to this some bleed chance that I am getting from the passive tree… I can mostly zip around pretty well in Act III.
What is most interesting about this game mode is the way that it makes re-evaluate items that you might have considered trash drops previously. It isn’t like I have never used a Tear of Purity before, especially if it drops while I am leveling, but I also would not have considered it godly. However, in Ruthless, a game mode where you are unlikely to see access to Purity of Elements or any other auras save for Vitality/Clarity/Precision… this is a game changer. I got this from my very first shipment of goods and it has made all the difference in the world for me given that I now have a decent amount of elemental resistances while leveling and the ability to just entirely avoid all elemental ailments. On top of that, it is a needed source of life and intelligence. So I get why folks enjoy this mode because it makes you really scrutinize the drops to see if you can squeeze any benefit out of them. If normal Path of Exile is well constructed Magic The Gathering… Ruthless is trying to play with the old-school starter deck and nothing else.
I also spent a bit of time this weekend working on my home in Final Fantasy XIV. I raided the private room from our Free Company house and started migrating some of my miniatures over on the shelves behind the counter and vendors. I also brought over my Ahriman furniture set that I picked up from my retainers years ago. I am kind of going for a storefront/showroom vibe for the upstairs and then will build out the downstairs to be more of a bedroom/readyroom thing. If nothing else the home looks a little less barren. If you are on Cactuar, feel free to pop by Ward 28 Plot 3 and sign my guestbook. I will continue to tinker with things because I figure this is going to be a long project, not something I finish in a weekend.
Lastly, while I am squirreling out of control… I am starting to look forward to the Cycle restart in Last Epoch on the 19th. I did not really play that heavily when this cycle started, and will probably come back and start something fresh again. Likely going to spin off the type of character that I was playing in this cycle and see if I can build it a bit better. I really like Warpath and the Spin to Win gameplay style, and more specifically I liked the dual wield torch/smite sword thing. Largely I like this build because it works perfectly fine without the right gear and just gets better as you add the key pieces to it. However, I could throw a last-minute monkey wrench in the system and play a Necromancer again because it has been a while since I have done that. Whatever the case I am looking forward to having the mental bandwidth to give this game some devoted time again. Basically, I am still spinning out of control right now, but I am hoping as I continue to mend I will be able to focus on individual things a bit better in the coming weeks. The post A Jumbled Mess appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Reinvention

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Shaking off some cobwebs on this site. There’s quite a few of them.
It’s been six years since I last posted here, and more like ten since I posted regularly (if my addition to this page could ever have been considered ‘regular’). A lot has happened. It’s interesting to read a log of my own thoughts from years ago, especially because I can plot an arc of my own mood and where I was in my life through just the last five or ten posts. Pretty bleak, all told.
Change is inevitable and I am very much changed.
I’m not yet sure how or if I want to use this space, but I’ve kept it online largely because I can look back at my own writing and thoughts and while I’ve advanced my thinking since then, I don’t fundamentally disagree with myself from six to ten years ago. Despite everything, it’s still me. That said, I don’t even know if this will even work when I hit “publish”. The site is old, and has had some updates, but still keeps throwing me errors as I type into this draft that I started in 2017.
I would use this post to write a plan for my posts, a schedule, etc, but the truth is I don’t have one. What I do have is a broader understanding of games and the business surrounding them. In the last few years I’ve spent time outside of games in Big Tech and since returned to games. It’s given me a lot of perspective on things I didn’t fully understand before, and I can answer some of my own questions from years ago. Right now I have a lot of thoughts, and it’s hard to keep them all organized.
There are a few things I want to write down, to get them out of my head. With any luck, I’ll put them here.

Reinvention

by
Shaking off some cobwebs on this site. There’s quite a few of them.
It’s been six years since I last posted here, and more like ten since I posted regularly (if my addition to this page could ever have been considered ‘regular’). A lot has happened. It’s interesting to read a log of my own thoughts from years ago, especially because I can plot an arc of my own mood and where I was in my life through just the last five or ten posts. Pretty bleak, all told.
Change is inevitable and I am very much changed.
I’m not yet sure how or if I want to use this space, but I’ve kept it online largely because I can look back at my own writing and thoughts and while I’ve advanced my thinking since then, I don’t fundamentally disagree with myself from six to ten years ago. Despite everything, it’s still me. That said, I don’t even know if this will even work when I hit “publish”. The site is old, and has had some updates, but still keeps throwing me errors as I type into this draft that I started in 2017.
I would use this post to write a plan for my posts, a schedule, etc, but the truth is I don’t have one. What I do have is a broader understanding of games and the business surrounding them. In the last few years I’ve spent time outside of games in Big Tech and since returned to games. It’s given me a lot of perspective on things I didn’t fully understand before, and I can answer some of my own questions from years ago. Right now I have a lot of thoughts, and it’s hard to keep them all organized.
There are a few things I want to write down, to get them out of my head. With any luck, I’ll put them here.

Cactuar Landed Gentry Again

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Good Morning Folks! Today was a rather fortuitous day… that quite honestly I was not expecting. At the beginning of this year, I lost my first home in Final Fantasy XIV. I got busy with Christmas and the New Year and just was not logging into the game… and apparently completely missed the email warning me. I was more than a little heartbroken, but I played it off as best as I could. There was something always weird about that plot of land though, because specifically, I went after plot 13… aka the plot that we used to have as a Free Company in The Mists before we upgraded to a Medium in Shirogane. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance however because my mind expected it to be our old home… but no matter what I did it never would be again. Nor did I have a fucking clue at all what various options we had set because Solaria the Guild Mom took care of all of that.
Pretty much every week since coming back before Dawntrail I have entered the housing lottery. What shocked me was just how much turnover there is on a server like Cactuar in the Aether Data Center. There was never a week where I did not have at least two or three different plots in different wards to choose from. I can only remember one week when there was nothing available on The Mists, aka my ward of choice. Hell, there were even three times that a version of Plot 13 came open again. I had been hitting this Timer website periodically to tell me if a new period opened or if it was time for me to check to see if I had won. Yesterday I was completely out of it and thus missed the opening of the results period. So this morning I logged in expecting to get a refund of my downpayment but instead… I had won the plot.
As such I have spent most of this morning getting things set up to where the home is functional again. The inside is extremely bare bones, and just has the necessary vendors and amenities like a guest book, summoning bell, and aesthetician… all of which I saved from my previous home. The outdoor furnishings are starting to get there, but I am sure I will continue to tweak and add little details. I’m in Ward 28 Plot 3 of The Mists on Cactuar, which is right around the corner from the Apartment building. This creates this funny situation where I have a market board to both sides of my home and an Aetheryte across the street from it. The neighborhood is really well built up, and so far I have seen zero signs of any nightclubs… so hopefully it is a chill relaxing place. There are a few nearby Free Company homes with extremely nice setups. One of which has all of the Gold Saucer machines in the basement… but alas I think only the FC members can play them.
I’ve had assorted visits from Free Company members this morning as they logged in to check on various things. They’ve also checked in on me to see how I was doing, given that I am still very much in the deep recovery mode with COVID-19. I am not doing much better, but I am also not really doing any worse so that is something. Here is a nice shot of me and Ammo hanging out on the roof… because being able to stand on your rooftop is really important for player housing. I have a phenomenal view of the entire district. I had to place some of the things just right so that I could jump up there since I did not have a nearby roof to drop down from above as I have had in other setups. More importantly, I have now set up a recurring calendar notification to remind me that I need to log in… with plenty of time to spare. When I get extra stressed out I can lose focus on pretty much everything in the world.
Now that the outside is starting to feel nice and cozy, it is time for me to begin to sort out what exactly I want to do for the inside. Speaking of cozy… ignore the fact that I am sitting out in the pouring rain on my stargazing deck. Essentially my game plan is to build out the downstairs as sort of a bedroom/training room/gear warehouse sort of feel befitting a warrior. Then the upstairs is going to be more of a public area with all of my vendors and maybe a bunch of bookcases and such. It will come together over time, but the outdoor features are always the most important so that I don’t stick out like an undecorated eyesore in my neighborhood. I am not going to try and do all of it over night, but I do want to keep poking away at it. Maybe this is what will finally drive me to finish training all of my crafting professions so that I can start making things rather than buying them. Anyways… on the health side. I have two more days of this steroid dose pack of Prednisone, so I am hoping that today I will start to turn the corner. If not I will reach out to the doctor and maybe try and get either an extension or some other course of treatment. I am not doing any worse, but I certainly don’t really feel any better yet. The post Cactuar Landed Gentry Again appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.