Happy Holidays!

Yes indeed good ladies and gentlemen... Happy holidays and best wishes for the coming New Year.

I've been playing a lot recently now that patch 2.1 arrived a week ago and first off, I have to say that Crystal Tower is ridiculously immense!    As a few of you know, I'm an architecture grad student and the architecture of this place redefines the meaning of the word monumental...

That said, it is fun, it is enjoyable and (provided the alliance knows how to co-ordinate properly),  it has some great level 80 loot.  I've been fortunate so far to get the Crimson chest for my Black Mage (on Thursday) and the Onion armour for my Dragoon (yesterday)...

Managed to do multiple runs with some friends and acquaintances and took snapshots of their loot as well...

By the way, the piccy of the axe is one of the rewards for beating all three of the new extreme primal battles.   They are ridiculously tedious and I'll gradually get through them; but in the meantime  I managed to beat the new Ultima battle...

The King Moogle Primal battle....

Speaking of which, beating Ifrit or Garuda Extreme has a chance of dropping the new Nightmare mount from the chest after winning.

Since we are on the subject of mounts, I wonder if I will ever get the ultimate "mount" which would be either an airship or pirate ship...

I can only speculate, innit?   Anyway, back onto the subject of mounts, here is the new behemoth mount (veteran reward for 270 days subscription).  Epic innit?  Perhaps 365 days gets you the Ultima Weapon as a mount?

Ahhh yes, almost forgot... few friends noticed that I changed my look and that's thanks to the Aesthetician NPC added in 2.1.  The quest to unlock it is short, straight forward, and explains a brief history of the guy ...(once again, Im making a very wild guess that like our relic guy Gerolt, he might also be Sharlayan).  But I have to say, the chap is absolutely fabulous.

Yeah... he's epic.  I changed my look from this...

To this... (actually changed my look twice before settling for this current look)...

Inbetween all these changes, I found the time to run into our good ol' friend, Yoshi--- ahem--- I mean, the Wandering Minstrel.  This might sound cliche but he's now chilling like a sly villian in Mor Dhona.  I was kinda proud to return to him in triumph after trouncing Ultima...

Also got round to completing the new Main Scenario quests (and as usual, those bloody Scions NPCs ran me ragged)...

Great fill-in story though.  In addition, I completed one of my outstanding missions like the Mining quests...

And the Armourer quests (with our beloved Admiral Merlwyb making an appearance)...

 Did some treasure hunting...

Beat Haukke Manor Hard Mode...

And of course, I definitely had to do some PvP.   As promised, I have dedicated the honor of my first win (and first rank up) to my friend in Paris, Fox Reaper!

Amazingly got round to stop being lazy and leveled my Weaver to 50.  I was thoroughly surprised at how much I actually enjoyed the quests for the storyline... and because I wish to minimize spoilers, I will only put up pics of the main characters involved in this little story...

And of course, afterwards, I had to get the Weaver's "AF suit".  Spiffy innit?

Now I have to store even more crap from my inventory into my safebox at the Inn.   Which brings us to the new Housing areas (currently available for only Free Companies at the moment).  There has been a raging debate about the very exuberant prices since 2.1; nonetheless, I needed to take an detailed exploration into what exactly we were paying for.

Thus, I present to you screenshots from the two new housing main areas we haven't really been able to see until now (remember, only the "Mist' one for Limsa was opened for us during beta phase 4).  And I have to say... Lavender Beds is my current favourite for now...

First up though is The Goblet (Ul'dah residential)...

And then Lavender beds (Gridania residential)...

Yeah, Lavender beds really does look pretty lush, innit?  Ahhhh yes... also managed to do a Behemoth battle again (finally got yet another horn)...

Moving on, I managed to keep up with the beast-tribe quests as well (as you can see, Black Mage is proving to be a very efficient job class here, partly because of their sleeping ability)...

And as always, I did some more explorations... is it me or some certain environments have been tweaked?

I must also mention that our old buddy Hildebrant is back.  And I promise you, the quests are worth it because it ends with a very interesting cliffhanger

That's it for now folks.  I need to finish wrapping presents and make sure we have all the liquour brought out before the day is done.    Happy gaming, be well and Happy Holidays!