2024 Year In Review

A lot was going on with most of the games I played in 2024, so there was a lot of activity and a lot of hopping around between games depending on the particular content that was fresh at the time.

I started the year with 9 max-level characters in World of Warcraft Dragonflight, basically every role at max level in FFXIV, and one max-level character in both Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online.

January and February saw me mainly focused on Elder Scrolls Online as I started leveling a character of each class to max level in that game.

I continued that process in March and also ran through some of the new chapters released in Guild Wars 2.

In April, I finally finished getting a character of each class to max level in ESO.  With that done, I returned to World of Warcraft to finish knocking out some Dragonflight renowns and start leveling alts again.

In May, I managed to get a character of each class in World of Warcraft to max level, something I hadn't done since Battle for Azeroth.  I also started working on professions in Elder Scrolls Online and got quite a few of them knocked out fairly quickly.  I also leveled a character to max level using the MOP Remix.

June saw the 15th anniversary of this blog and a lot of drifting back and forth between games without accomplishing much.  

Dawntrail dropped for Final Fantasy in late June and became my primary focus until early August. I managed to get my Summoner, Machinist, and Samurai to max level before losing focus with FFXIV.  

In August, I finished getting my DOH / DOL jobs to max level and started using Radiant Echoes to level many of my alts in World of Warcraft.  I ended up with a total of 21 characters at max level using Radiant Echoes before War Within dropped.

September and October had very little play time because of college recruiting trips with the youngest Joarling, who ended up verbally committing to swim for Texas A&M in mid-October, although the play time that I did have was pretty much all focused on World of Warcraft.  

In November and December, I took some time away from World of Warcraft to run both my primary alts through Janthir Wilds, which I very much enjoyed.  

So, at the end of the year, I'm sitting with 8 max-level characters in World of Warcraft (unless I get the paladin that I'm working on to max before the end of the day tomorrow, in which case it will end up being 9).

Courtesy of TempusGameIt, I can also look at my total playtime across all my games for the year, with a tiny exception.  My total play time was 17 days and 9 hours, divided across 5 games.   The most significant play time was World of Warcraft with 7 days and 22 hours, followed by Elder Scrolls Online at 6 days and 11 hours, then Guild Wars 2 at 2 days and 6 hours.  

Now, here is the caveat to this.  At some point, I had to move my install of Final Fantasy XIV to a different drive on my machine; I completely spaced doing a Tempus GameIt rescan when I did that, so I essentially missed counting pretty much all of my Dawntrail playing time.  Based on my typical weekly average, I suspect I'm missing around 80 hours of playtime there.  My estimate is probably around 3 days and 16 hours of playtime for FFXIV during the year.

Next week, we'll talk about gaming goals for 2025.  

Cheers,

Joar

Back to More Warcraft

I completed Janthir Wilds on both my Reaper and Mechanist in Guild Wars 2.  I'm spending a little time working my Mechanist through all of the old storylines he missed.  I'm halfway into Icebrood Saga now, so there's not much further to go.  

In World of Warcraft, I've gone back to alt leveling and am almost done with my Demon Hunter, who is currently sitting at level 78. I've been mostly questing even though I know timewalking dungeons are quite a bit faster, but general questing fits better with my style.

I also did the latest installment of the campaign quest and unlocked Siren Isle on my main.  So far, Siren Isle is a lot like most of its predecessor zones, which were mostly about killing rares and participating in various events.  Not really much of a story to it at this point, but it's certainly fine for what it is.  There are also dailies that seem to reward Renown with the other various factions, so that's handy.

There is some nice catch-up gear that can be helpful if you're also trying to gear up alts.

I may switch to leveling some alliance characters to mix things up as I continue to move my 70's to level 80, before starting on a very large batch of level 60 characters.

That's it for now!

Cheers,

Joar

More Aimless Wandering

I wrote back in April about how I was wandering aimlessly between games these days, not making much progress on any of them.  At various times in the last six months, I've wondered whether the issue may be that I'm just losing interest in video games at this stage of my life.  I feel like I'm just waiting for some interesting new game to come out that I can bury myself in for a while, but I have no idea what that might be.

Right now, I'm bouncing back and forth between World of Warcraft, FFXIV, ESO, and Guild Wars 2.  With all the professions finished and no new content out, ESO is getting the short end of the stick from a playtime perspective.  After that, FFXIV probably has the 2nd lowest amount of playtime.

I did go back and do the new MSQ material, but I have not unlocked or tried the new alliance raids.  

In World of Warcraft, I stalled out in the middle of leveling my Demon Hunter.  In theory, the way renown works now should encourage me to do weeklies and world quests across more of my alt army.  In reality, I'm not motivated to do them at all.  

The most play time lately has definitely been going to Guild Wars 2.  I finished the main story quest for the new expansion on my Mechanist and have been working through it on my Reaper.  I've also gone back and started to work on getting my Mechanist caught up on the other story quests.  I also decided to go back and work on unlocking the Roller Beetle since it's the only Path of Fire Mastery I have left to do, and I'm earning POF experience as part of catching up the Mechanist.  Right now, I'm stuck on the saddle on the part where you have to kill the Ley Line Anomaly world boss because I can't seem to manage to get to it before the stupid thing ends up dead.  I was trying on the Friday after Thanksgiving, where there may have been a ton of people playing, so I will give it a few more tries during a period that's likely to be a little bit more dead.

Of course, I'm already on Dragonfall on the Mechanist trying to finish up Puff the Purple Crystal Dragon, so I don't have that much Path of Fire experience still to go.  Oh well.  I think Icebrood Saga is up next, which has its own mastery tracks, none of which I recall as being particularly interesting.  

I'll also work on unlocking the turtle mount before I start the Mechanist through End of Dragons, and after that, he'll be all caught up.  At that point, I can go back to finishing up the post-Tyria world completion stuff on my Reaper, at which point it will probably be time to switch to something else.

I feel bad for not using the anniversary event experience boosts to level alts like crazy in World of Warcraft, but I'm not exactly sure what the point is now, anyway.  It is a good reminder to go back and grab the Darkmoon Faire profession boosts for this month since it's time for that.

That's the update for now!

Cheers,

Joar