SATURDAY
A DAMN good but very rough night at work. I ended up pulling my left calf muscle pretty much right when I walked in the door, and was walking funny throughout most of the shift, especially sometime after work, where all of a sudden the back of my left knee started feeling tender (presumably because of the extra load put on it, due to having to walk funny). Ended up staying late too, since I didn’t have that much and wanted to get it all done and leave over the weekend on a good note.
But otherwise, yeah. I played some Gems when I got home, but didn’t stick around long since I was so wore out from the worknight. Did the dailies, as well as the raid boss event (and my guild is just about finished with this. Yes!). I’ll have to do the Faction Assault either during Sunday’s stream or later on today.
…which I ended up doing. Woke up from a short nap and got going on that. Did a few runs with my Zuul’Goth team, but eventually - after trying out several different teams - I eventually swapped them all out for:
That is, until around floor 200, where monsters were taking a long time to bring down. After that, it was back to my Zuul team. Eventually I completed the event, but I still have a few sigils left. So I’ll probably finish them off during tomorrow’s stream.
SUNDAY
Joe’s Gems of War Stream, 2/18/2024
So, overall, today’s stream, never should’ve happened. 
A really bad 4 hours of sleep that didn’t even feel like it was 4 hours, yet I decided to stream anyway. My gung-ho got the better of me.
And a fairly dead stream as well, with just djscrew361 coming on for a hot minute. And then later on Delcun came on for a while. But on the upside of all this, gamingrulin_ came by right at the start of my stream. Good to see him! Been a long time (about a year I think). So we talked for about an hour or so, did some catching up.
Otherwise, for the actual session it was a bit wonky. I started my stream way earlier than I wanted to (couldn’t get back to sleep), so I ended up doing PvP in the inner kingdoms for 2 hours. After the reset though, I got going on the dailies, which took longer than normal. 
Long explanation here
• Underspire enemies can no longer be one-shot - to say nothing of the fact that Sword’s Edge is an awful kingdom for this kind of stuff to begin with - now taking at least several turns just to complete one battle.
• Empiriazar delves are around the lvl 450 mark and can’t really be auto-piloted. Gotta show some care & caution.
• The Wand of Stars weapon was backfiring a lot during all this, making matches take at least twice as long.
But fortunately, there was no need to do the raid boss, since my guild has fully completed it. So instead, I worked on the Faction Assault. But as I had finished it earlier yesterday, I just did quick straight-to-the-boss runs instead. After about an hour, I just went ahead and went back to PvP. This time doing some silver mark farming. I seldom do these nowadays, but since I wasn’t going to be on much longer (starting to nod off) I figured “Why not 
” And I capped off the sesh by doing some Central Spire runs. So, all in all, a not-as-good stream. Just gotta hope tomorrow’s will be better 
Tried out a new idle-ish game called Vacuum Warrior (and yeah, idle games are one of my favorite video game genres 
). It plays pretty much exactly like another idle-ish game called Leaf Blower Revolution except that, in this game, you use a vacuum cleaner (one game blows, the other one sucks 
). And it’s a bit easier on the eyes and ears as well. But even then, with these kinds of games, I probably won’t be playing it long. It’s just something to do on a lark. 
Been watching a lot of Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul movie clips lately. I have an easier time watching these than trying to watch a whole episode/season, even though the clips are totally out-of-context. I bought the 1st season of Breaking Bad and got maybe as far as the 2nd episode. Never seen an episode of Better Call Saul, and didn’t want to make the same mistake I did with Breaking Bad. Like lots of other TV shows I can’t think of right now, conceptually some of them are brilliant! It’s just that I can’t watch them for one reason or another.
MONDAY
Joe’s Gems of War Stream, 2/19/2024
An excellent stream today! A stark contrast to yesterday. 
And right when the stream started zebiiLIVE and astralataraxy dropped by for a while, cheerin’ me on. And a while later kf6dbs also came by for a bit. Got pretty quiet after that, until Keitaro87 showed up, where we chatted it up for a while. This one was pretty unique in that none of my regulars showed up. It was all people who come by only once in a while.
But for the session itself it was a good and busy 5.5 hour long session, most of it being PvP, both at the start of the stream and towards the end of it. And this week’s kingdom is Maugrim Woods, which is much better than the crap Sword’s Edge last week. Did my usual daily stuff, followed by the godawful journey event (go here for the latest dev CYA).
And once all that was done, it was back to PvP. And a fairly bad week of PvP this time, since I can’t use my Queen & King team in any of the inner kingdoms. I can use my Skulls R’ Us team in the yellow kingdom and my Zuul’Goth team (using Harpy Mage in the bottom slot) in the red kingdom. And for the green kingdom:…
Seems to work most of the time. Most of the time. Anyway, just did the inner kingdoms for a while and then switched over to some Central Spire PvP, where I can still use my Queen & King team, before calling it a sesh.
And later on after my nap I played some more Gems for a bit, doing the green kingdom in PvP. Kept getting screwed by RNG though, oftentimes my hero getting killed from my own skulls (lots of enemies impervious or immune to entangle). Eventually I switched over to the red kingdom, where using my Zuul’Goth team is much quicker yet reliable (especially after replacing Harpy Mage with Morthani’s Darkness. I keep forgetting about her 
).
But, that’s gonna do 'er for now. Gonna do some laundry (Nobody hogging the laundry room this time. Yaaay!) and probably lay down before I do another stream. Thanks for reading, everybody. Always appreciated! And I’ll see you all on Wednesday. Take care. 
