2025 was…a year. At times frustrating, at times relaxing, and at times – transformative.

For me, it was a year where I refocused my energy on enjoying things and learning to make necessary changes, and while that sounds dramatic now, I’ll explain in this post (and buffer it by talking about my two MMOs because why not?).

WoW in 2025:

I played a lot of retail WoW, a weekend of Classic Hardcore, and some hours of Midnight beta testing (along with some joyrides in an Alpha sandbox flying around the new zones).

I think that retail WoW is hitting something of a stride in the so-called “Third Era” of the game. Content has been on a consistent 8-week cadence, dungeon and raid design has been fairly interesting and well-done (if perhaps a little overly repetitive of single-target designs in the raid setting), world content has been more consistently rolling out and with more diversity of activities, and the game’s overall structure and focus is pretty strong, in my opinion. While I would struggle to say The War Within has been my favorite WoW expansion (it probably isn’t due in large part to the wet fart of storytelling within it), it has certainly been the most engaged I have been with the game since Legion (the very expansion that started me on this journey of blogging). In terms of goals, I largely smashed my goals all expansion – I have 69 (N I C E) max level characters as I write this, I’ve obtained the top-level Keystone achievement each season of TWW, reached AOTC for all 3 raid tiers, cleared at least one Mythic boss on the first two tiers of raiding, and I have maxed-out reps, a banked pile of TWW currency that I am burning through to buy housing items, and a solid foundation going into Midnight including having maxed knowledge on most professions and having collected at least two colorways of every single tier set this entire expansion.

I think that Blizzard has landed on a great overall strategy for WoW, one with some tradeoffs but that feels good as a player. The 8-week content cadence has been unrelenting but it means that there is always something looming to look forward to and if something is a dud, the next new thing will be out in two months or less, so hey! I worry about how that might affect developers and lead to quality gaps which we have seen in TWW, especially hearing firsthand about the experience of working in that pace and environment from Scarizard’s appearance on the PoddyC, so while I think a balance could be better struck (could we do 9 weeks? 10 maybe? Both are still faster than the Legion 11-week cadence and it felt like things were well-received and higher quality at that point in time so hey), as a player I’m pretty content with the release of this content (English is such a dumb language, lol).

Midnight, coming in just two months as I write this, looks to maintain some aspects of the current design paradigm while also making one of the biggest transformational shifts the game has ever seen with regards to the interaction of the game’s data and addons. So far in beta, I’ve been baffled by Blizzard’s decision and approach while also quite impressed with the overall balance that the design tweaks have struck in regards to keeping things consistently WoW-like while also removing some of the more complicated layers of interaction. We’ll see how that goes as 2026 rolls on.

FFXIV in 2025:

I basically raid-logged this game for the whole year.

Dawntrail has been weak on the one front I most want FFXIV to be strong on – story – and while I don’t think it’s necessarily bad it has been difficult to muster the same enthusiasm for it as I had in Shadowbringers or Endwalker, especially as WoW has been hitting a high note on the things I play it for all year. Dawntrail’s combat design is a story of halves – the encounter design is generally improving, especially in queue-able lower-difficulty content, and while Savage has its reliable tropes and mechanical themes, the two Savage tiers we have had so far have had some novelties and been enjoyable to progress through. The other half, however, is job design, and the job design has felt fairly stagnant and dull as very little of note changed from Endwalker to Dawntrail, most of the changes streamlined and oversimplified fun friction that did exist in job kits, and the overall approach in toolkits means that even the most novel Savage fights can often still feel very paint-by-numbers to play through, especially since my main role in that game is a healer. Healer kits remain overstuffed with oGCD tools that mean the best healers always move towards not casting GCD heals while hitting a very simple two-button DPS rotation (although all the healer jobs gained a third DPS button in Dawntrail that is used in burst windows, so hey, improvement?), good tanks rarely ever need direct single-target healing so that side of the role is dull (M6S was an improvement here, but it also just meant that low-skill tanks were super-exposed and you couldn’t really carry that either), and most mechanics with serious threat generally still require correct execution or players die, so there’s not a lot of interaction you can have as a healer to save people. Dawntrail has had fewer hard body checks compared to Endwalker Savage raiding though, so overall I still think encounter design is improving – jobs just need something to bring back that intrigue!

The patch stories as the year wound on have gotten better, and I find myself interested at the number of possibilities on the table after the conclusion of patch 7.4, which just launched at the end of the year. There’s also some interview commentary from the team that implies some possibility the team might finally understand the critique leveled at the game (even if large swathes of the community refuse to treat critique as anything other than a personal attack on their beloved game) and creates some potential for change in 2026. Personally, I think the things that bug me about FFXIV the most right now are the lack of great storytelling this expansion and the dogged insistence on a formula that was repetitive, predictable, and boring a long time ago and is in dire need of some kind of variety. Dungeons remain 2 packs > wall > 2 packs > boss, repeat x3, so while the dungeon ambience and story can be quite good, my god are they absolutely the same basic execution every time that I can play in my sleep. The second boss of the 7.3 dungeon was the most exciting thing in a while because it just creates new mechanics by splitting the party into their own bosses so it isn’t just opening partywide AoE > movement mechanic > tankbuster > healer check on loop, so I give the team full credit for that, but they really need to find some novelty in the dungeon design as the core gem of gameplay they push everyone towards. They don’t need to make WoW dungeons, but some branching paths or diversity of trash compositions and pull strategies would give interesting room for skill development and excitement.

I’m still a fan, but 2025 absolutely tested my loyalty to FFXIV and my trust in the team to deliver improvements to the experience, so while a lot of the hope I might hold is based on things I’ve been disappointed by in the past (YoshiP loves to talk about opportunities in press interviews and then simply refuse to answer those opportunities in the actual content and design of the game!), I still foolishly have some idealism that the game will improve. 2026 brings a new Savage tier and the Normal boss designs we have for it seem to offer some interesting possibilities that could be expanded upon. If nothing else, I have two decently fun raid teams, one that plays well and one that is socially amusing, and I still enjoy clearing Savage so hey – 2026 will start strong here!

Personal Life in 2025:

As I write this, I am 8 weeks from graduating college. Hooray!

2025 was a tough year in my personal life for a few reasons, almost none of which I am going to get into in this post save for one – my health.

I started the year with some health problems, nothing too major but things that definitely gave me a scare and led me down a path of working to seek out a good doctor to get things checked out and see where I was. Finally, at the end of July, I got a diagnosis I did not want to receive, a new set of things I needed to work on, and what was, metaphorically, a gun to my head – adapt or die early. The summer was very hard for me and a lot of the draft and forget writing I did in 2025 was down to this issue emerging and shifting my focus away from writing and responding to comments and towards making focused, sustainable changes to my lifestyle and health to ensure I wasn’t going to suffer from something avoidable.

The good news is that the shift in focus paid dividends for me in the tail end of 2025, as from August 1st through to the end of the year, I lost 70.5 pounds, resulting in 12.25 inches in reduction to my waist size and reducing the percentage of my body made up of fat by 13.6%. It’s helped me feel more energetic and more alive than I have in a long time, and so while the health concern is ongoing, managing it has been substantially easier than I first feared it would be and I’m on a solid track to sustainable results and continued improvement. All of this happened as I was turning 40, so there’s definitely been a lot of quiet contemplation of how long I can reasonably live and what changes I need to make and continue to make in order to ensure that I don’t die at too early an age from something preventable, along with a lot of the getting-older quagmire I’ve felt as I age (Midnight Season 1 will have a 17-year old dungeon in the rotation that I played as an adult when it was new….ahhhhhhhh). At some point in the future (hopefully soon) when things are even better controlled and I reach some of my long-term goals, I do plan to share a little bit more about what the issue has been and how I arrived here (I actually have a fun post idea about it wrapped up in a gaming/MMO concept!), but for now I’m keeping that close to my chest and I’ve generally been very strict about who I’ve shared my story with (my own parents don’t know by my choice, which is…a topic I won’t get into at any real length here!).

Between those health changes and my upcoming attainment of a Bachelor’s Degree at last (only took 22 years!), 2025 was a year of a lot of powerful, positive, transformative change for me. In many ways, the diagnosis I received and the wakeup call it provided was a gift and while that feels like a very empty, goofy way to think about it, it’s true. We all get a hand dealt to us that includes some bad shit every now and then and learning to play in the space and adapt can build a lot of great things. It was easy early on to be self-pitying, ashamed, and disappointed – but learning to live in that space and find a path forward has been very empowering and enlightening (and maybe other en-adjectives too) and I entered 2026 feeling very confident in the version of me I have become. In a lot of ways, the goal-oriented version of myself I found through gaming, through chasing seasonal goals in WoW and progression goals in FFXIV set me up for success with the real life goals and progress I want to attain. I’ve always observed that gaming can make a positive foundation for real transformative change in our lives (I have old posts to that exact theme in fact!) and in 2025 I made it a point to apply a lot of the same methodology and insistence on forward momentum to my health and education, to great benefit.

And with that, I also have made it a goal to create more in 2026, so my hope is to have more posts here, more engagement with comments and such, and to also create more outside of just the blog. Some of that I’ll share here and some won’t fit, but I have a strong tailwind pushing me towards doing more and better this year and I am excited for all the possibilities it holds, while setting myself up realistically to attempt to avoid burning out.

Also, I guess I’ll play some games and talk about them, and that’s kind of the point of this whole thing as we are almost entering year 9, eh?