I tend to get to work pretty early in the morning; between 0600 and 0630 usually.
I blame this on my years in the military, but it does come in handy if you want to skip traffic and get an hour or two at the office before other folks show up and throw off your groove.
You also get to appreciate the sunrise, and occasionally moonset… Today was one of those days:
Moon over Denver. If it looks cold in this picture, it’s because it is; it was roughly 8 degrees out there (-13.33 for my metric friends) when I took this.
In other news, I’m still leveling my way through Final Fantasy 14 and attempting to catch up with some friends.
I did levels 1-30 Friday and Saturday, and 30-40 on Sunday, but once the work week started and my free time dwindled to roughly an hour each evening I’ve slowed way down. I hit level 44 last evening, while my friends are at 60+ now. I expect I’ll catch them at the level cap of 80.
I’ve been having fun healing the various dungeons, and as I’ve played healers in pretty much every MMO ever, I’ve been pretty successful at it; everyone who has gone into the first seven dungeons with me (Sastasha, Tam-Tara Deepcroft, Copperbell Mines, The Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak, Haukke Manor, Brayflox’s Longstop, and The Sunken Temple of Quarn) has survived to see the exit.
Last night my winning streak ended in “The Stone Vigil” though. The ‘Black Mage’ in the party successfully managed to stand in every fire possible and I just couldn’t keep him vertical through the last boss.
We still defeated the encounter and I managed to unlock the next bit of storyline, and it was really the mage’s fault for insisting on standing in the fire (or frost in this case), but still — it’s my job to make sure even the kids on the short bus survive. 🙂
FF14 has a another kind of instanced content called a ‘trial’, which is where you have to beat up a single boss who has several phases, lots of mechanics, and an entire dungeon’s worth of hit points… The first one of these (Ifrit) was pretty easy, but the second one (Titan) is apparently there just to humble you.
There’s a third one (Garuda) that I’ll have to face here real soon, and I’m dreading it…
My group had to try about five times to take down “Titan”, and with each attempt after the third your group does slightly more damage and healing and the boss does slightly less damage.
I think I did okay as I’m really good at doing several things at once while not standing in the fire, but for every fight one of the two DPS classes would end up blown off the platform in the first few seconds of the fight. We eventually beat it with just the tank and I…
It’s still a very fun MMO and I’m really enjoying the storyline, so that’s good. 🙂