Weekly Hype Train! Week of 3/3/2020

A day late, but hopefully not a dollar short, it is time for another Hype Train!

Heroic Ny’Alotha: Getting AotC is on my very short list of remaining things I must do this expansion before I can properly give up and wait for Shadowlands, alongside 5-masking both Horrific Visions and getting my Aqir mount. Last week’s last raid night saw us vanquish N’Zoth normal very early in the night (hooray!) so we pushed forward into Heroic and went 3/12 in roughly 90 minutes. Mechanics definitely matter much more on Heroic than they did on Normal, but the early bosses are still far easier than I would like. We did wipe a few times trying to down Hivemind to close out the raiding week, but I think we have a new order of difficulty for Heroic we’ll be trying to hopefully maximize our performance and get farther this week – coupled with cloak and gear upgrades, I imagine we’ll down a couple of new bosses this week.

Horrific Visions: Last night with reset, I got a little accidentally overeager – I grabbed the Mask of the Long Night, halving my sanity, so I figured, oh well, 5 mask then – I had done 4 in Org easily, so why not? Couple that with trying to do Mage Quarter first (my normal route in SW is a clockwise rotation through the zones) and I failed – hard. So, okay, no big deal, 4 mask and try the same route with full Sanity again. Nope.

Wasted two Vessels on 0 boss clears last night, and only in the 3rd run did I return to my normal route and successfully finish a 4-mask SW.

By the end of the week, I want to avenge this loss with another successful 4-mask run, at least. Might try 5 if I can get a second vessel, but I’m not counting on that!

Final Fantasy XIV – Maintenance Gameplay: I’ve been working on slowly gearing up my White Mage set, using excess Allagan Tomestones of Phantasmagoria to buy tanking gear for my Gunbreaker job, and for the first time in my time playing FFXIV endgame, working through roulettes and specific content to cap tomestones and weekly gear tokens. It’s actually been really nice – I’ve enjoyed getting back into the groove and regaining the skills I lost over my short pseudo-hiatus from the game since November, and I’m sure soon I’ll probably want to dive into more content like leveling alt jobs and continuing Ishgard Restoration to level up my crafters and gatherers.

2020 Upgrade Planning: I had hoped to go full watercooling on my PC last year with an open loop (my first!) but ultimately put it off in favor of just (just?) getting the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X, a vertical mounting kit for my GPU, and my audiophile hardware stack.

2020 seems like a great year for some bigger upgrades though, and my hope is to push a new system before Shadowlands, with (hopefully) a 4th gen Ryzen 16 core, 64GB of RAM, a Geforce RTX 3000-series GPU, more storage, and then to watercool the whole thing with a custom, hard-tubed loop with fun coolant and a sleek visual theme. Once I am sure I am committing to this path, I’ll probably start buying things piecemeal (watercooling fittings, radiators, and tubing are all straightforward components that won’t change if my hardware trajectory does) and start to slowly assemble the stuff around the edges before the hardware I want and expect to be available later this year comes into the market – especially since wanting an RTX 3080 Ti (or whatever it gets called) on custom watercooling means waiting for a full-cover waterblock to be made!

Other office upgrades are on the horizon, though, like a new router (my current one drops WiFi randomly, which is just great!) and perhaps a pair of L-shaped sit/stand desks from Monoprice (they sell a kit of triple-motor leg base and tabletops that runs about $550 for a massive corner sit/stand setup, which is a fantastic deal).

That wraps another week!

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