Back to World of Warcraft for Now

My playtime has been pretty limited over the past week or so because of out-of-town swim meets and various appointments associated with getting the house ready to put on the market in March.  After the update from last week, I found myself mostly focused on going back and gearing up some of my other core Warcraft characters. 

None of them are probably geared enough to really make much progress on delves at max level right now.  We'll see what the catch-up event looks like in the next week or so, but in the meantime, I may focus on weeklies and world quests to try to get them caught up.

I have continued to play a little bit of Elder Scrolls and Guild Wars 2 as well, so it's been a pretty balanced past week.  I need to put together some kind of spreadsheet to help me track my progress on zone completion for ESO, because that's another thing I'd like to get done while there is some downtime.

I'm definitely interested in seeing what the next piece of the story line looks like as we get into the Warcraft pre-patch.  I tend to use a lot of addons, so I'm also anxious to see which ones are borked and which still work.  I probably could have researched this in advance, but I'd rather just be surprised. 

It is also still my plan to keep trying with FFXIV to get caught up on the content.  I know it's going to be a long time before a new expansion comes, so I feel like I have plenty of time to work on it.

Not much of an update this week.  Next week, I'll have my initial thoughts on the pre-patch, so I may do this post later in the week after the event goes live.

Cheers,

Joar

Drifting Between Games

I reinstalled and resubscribed to FFXIV and started trying to catch my character up, but then fairly quickly remembered why I had stopped playing in the first place after spending several hours in queue for various dungeons, trials, and raids to try to advance the story or just gear up to be ready for the next patch.

This isn't as bad when you're doing things as current content, and the queues are not as long because everyone is doing those particular dungeons, but it's definitely a lot worse when you are trying to get caught up.  I do love the characters and the story, but I just don't think it fits my play style very well right now.

I also started leveling a Barbarian through the new season in Diablo 4, but I found there wasn't much to get me very excited, so I put that down as well.  One can only do so many Helltides before it starts to get a bit dull, especially now that the rifts from last season are gone.

In Elder Scrolls Online, I started finishing up the remaining quests and other tasks for the Solstice zone and am almost done with it.  I never did finish the main story quest for the zone, as there is some kind of one-hit mechanic on the fight at the very end that kept getting the best of me.  I tried it about 7-8 times, following the advice I saw on various threads to always keep moving, but it didn't seem to make a difference for me.  If I see that they've adjusted the fight down the road, I might go back and give it another try; otherwise, that one is just going to sit there for a bit.  The other piece of the Solstice zone story has been good, though!

I've also noticed that my Magplar doesn't seem as strong as he used to be, so I'm not sure if something got nerfed there while I wasn't playing.

In Guild Wars 2, I've also started running my mechanist through the newest expansion, which has been going really well so far, so I'll keep at that until the latest World of Warcraft content hits shortly.

That's the update for now.

Cheers,

Joar

2025 Year In Review Part 2

Thanks to Kevin Brill and the TempusGameIt app, I'm now able to provide more detail about how my gameplay broke out over the course of the year.  In 2025, I played for a total of 18 days and 17 minutes, which works out to about 36 hours per month.  

World of Warcraft was my most-played game with 324 hours total, and the rest was split pretty evenly between Guild Wars 2 (43 hours), Diablo 4 (33 hours), and Elder Scrolls Online (30 hours).

Because my weekends tend to be dedicated to swim meets, my days with the most playtime were Monday and Friday, while my least were Saturday and Sunday.  

For the actual month of December, my game time totaled 28 hours, with 26 of that in World of Warcraft and the rest split among the other 3.  

Since my last update, I also managed to get that Gnome Hunter to max level, and so I've now switched over to playing the last of the Worm Cult storyline on Elder Scrolls Online.  The last boss of the new content seems a bit over-tuned for quest content, so I'm struggling to finish that one up. I'm going to take a few more shots at that today and then move back to working on Diablo 4.

That is the update for now!

Cheers!

Joar