Gracie Status Update

Season 14 Guardian

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Season 14 Guardian

I wasn’t that excited about D3 season 14 until I heard about the double treasure goblin event. I’m a sucker for treasure goblins. The season got off to a slow start, but I still haven’t lost interest in it. One reason for that is the free demon hunter set for the season (Marauder’s), which has several fun variant builds that mesh nicely with my playstyle. I started off with a grenade build, then switched over to the multishot version once I started really pushing greater rifts.

Once I made that switch I was enjoying myself so much I decided to make an attempt at full completion of the season. Since several of the conquests and season requirements overlapped it went very quickly. I didn’t take a screenshot when I completed the Guardian chapter, so I took one when I did this GR80 instead. I went back and checked my non-seasonal characters, and 80 is the highest I’ve ever done. I feel pretty proud to have done it with seasonal gear, most of which isn’t ancient yet. I still have not even seen a single primal ancient drop.

Now that I’m done with the season journey I’m not sure how much longer D3 will keep my interest. I’m really happy I was able to do the full season so easily this time though. I believe this is only the second time I have ever completed all the way up through Guardian.

July 2018 Gaming Goals

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I can’t believe it is July already. That means it is time to find out how I did on my goals for last month and make some new ones!

June Goals:

WoW: Finish at least 2 more priest transmog sets. I think this is a yes? I actually didn’t make a note of exactly what I still needed when I wrote this goal. But now I’ve finished everything from MoP except for one pair of boots from SoO.

Level the new mage to 100. Done! She’s actually 110 and ready for BfA!

Heroes of Hammerwatch: “Beat the game”. Nope. I only ever made it as far as the last boss (before NG+). Then a new D3 season started and I got distracted…

July Goals:

WoW: Finish one priest transmog set from WoD and the last one I need from MoP. The WoD raids are harder to solo but I think I can do this.

Level one allied alt to 50. It will probably be my highmountain monk. Leveling these alts when I already have 110s of every class feels sorta pointless, but the completionist in me won’t let me stop.

Figure out who my main will be for BfA. In my heart my forsaken priest will always be my main, but I haven’t enjoyed the playstyle in ages. Lately I prefer monk, but they aren’t in the best place in terms of group utility and I don’t know if that is getting better in BfA. Druid is great and always useful, but I will have to level a new one as soon as zandalari become available because DINOSAURS. I also need to decide if I am going to rejoin my alliance friends, join a new horde guild (which means rerolling on a new server again), or just go solo and skip raiding this expansion. So many decisions!

Once again that’s not many goals for the month. The really big one is figuring out my main, because it relies on answering so many other questions about how I want to play in the new expansion.

First allied alt leveled!

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First allied alt leveled!

Working on this nightborne mage has been on my goal list for a couple months. I finally finished leveling her this week. Once you get to 90, the rest of the levels just fly. I wish the whole process had been like that. I got her to 100 mostly collecting treasures and doing the occasional WoD “world quest”. From 100 – 110 I relied on invasions and one zone worth of questing. I don’t know why they decided to make the leveling so uneven, but 20 –  80 and 80 – 110 feel like completely different games.

So now I have another 110 mage. The problem I have with her is that she’s too much fun! I want to try to get at least one more alt leveled before BfA gets here, but I’m not excited enough about any of them to push them through. Frost mage is a good fit for my play style and “class fantasy” enjoyment, plus she’s been surprisingly survivable, even on Argus. I even ran part of Antorus with her. My dps was terrible, but then again, my gear was the minimum to get in the door. At least I wasn’t bad enough to get booted after a wipe (several others were kicked that run).

If I want to make my goal I need to set her aside and choose between my highmountain monk, lightforged pally, or velf priest. I love the look of the velf the most, but priest always feels like a dead weight to level. I still sort-of consider my disc priest my main, but I don’t like the way the spec plays right now. On the other hand, I enjoy the monk playstyle quite a bit, but I already have 3 max-level monks sitting around. The pally is just a giant question mark. My belf pally was my first real main, waaay back in TBC. Since then I’ve always leveled her with each expansion, but I’ve never done enough to really understand the class and how it has evolved. Basically I have no idea what I’m doing on a pally these days, and no sense of whether I would enjoy it or not.

So those are my options for my next alt to level. I would flip a coin, but I can’t seem to find one with 3 sides. Which one would you choose?

June 2018 Gaming Goals

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May has passed us by and I don’t feel like accomplished much of anything. Losing our air conditioning has really changed the amount of time I’m willing to spend locked in a tiny room with a heat-generating PC. But I did manage to meet some of my goals for the month despite the heat.

May Goals in review:

WoW: Keep playing in the M+ nonsense group. Nope. Between losing interest and the temperature in my office, I just couldn’t make it anymore. This makes me super sad.

Finish all the priest transmog sets up through the first tier of MoP. Done! I managed to get the LFR sets done for all of the Pandaria raids last month, in addition to finishing off all versions of the sets from the Terrace of Endless Spring / Heart of Fear tier.

Level the new mage to 75. Done! Switching from TBC to Wrath zones and throwing in a few dungeon runs to speed things up really saved my sanity.

Destiny 2: Check out the new expansion. Done! I played through the story on 2 characters but that’s as far as I got.

Stardew Valley: Try multiplayer. Not quite – I tried some of the other beta changes but not the multiplayer part.

June Goals:

WoW: Finish at least 2 more priest transmog sets. Soloing is getting harder as I keep creeping closer toward the current expansion, but I should still be able to finish off the MoP sets without help.

Level the new mage to 100. I’m being ambitious on this again because I finally got out of the TBC/Wrath stage and the leveling is going much faster again. I finished off May right around 84, and once I get to WoD it should go super fast.

Heroes of Hammerwatch: “Beat the game”. I put that in quotes because I’m excluding NG+ nonsense. This was our Aggrochat game of the month for May and I really enjoyed it. I think I made it to the last boss but haven’t beaten it yet. I want to do so before I move on to other things.

That’s it? Just a couple simple WoW goals and finishing one game I’m almost done anyway? Yep.

I’m in a real gaming lull right now. I just don’t feel very excited about games in general at the moment. Combine that with my lack of climate control and it is really hard to spend time in my office at all. Hopefully that will turn around in a couple weeks when our new system finally gets installed. In the meantime I’ll be chasing my simple WoW goals in very small doses, and focusing on my crafty projects instead. Downstairs in the basement, where it is nice and cool.