So in the past I have talked about how our middle cat, Kenzie… loves to play fetch. This originally started with her stealing the rubber bands that occasionally bind together bundles of hangers when we get dry cleaning. This escalated to her swiping the elastic string that holds together shoes sometimes when you buy a pair at the store. One day while roaming Dollar Tree we noticed these hair bands and thought… this is a thing that Kenzie would love and would also be easier to tell when she has dropped one on our head. So we picked up a package of them and at the same time my wife swiped one for herself to use as a binding strap for one of her notebooks. Over the weekend Kenzie found this hairband… and pulled the notebook off of my wife’s desk in her office… somehow figured out how to get the band off the notebook… and by the time we got up that day was playing with it downstairs.
She has a special proclivity for this one that is sorta light pink/mauve-ish, and if you happen to be holding it… she stops whatever she is doing and goes into seek and retrieve mode. This is actually rather handy in the mornings when we want to shoo her out of the bedroom… all you have to do is toss it down the hall. The other side effect of these bands is she does a much better job of carrying them back to us… whereas with rubber bands they almost never made it back for tossing/flinging again. She is a crazy cat, but also mostly awesome for her weird little quirks like this one. The photo is a stash of them we have hidden on top of the entertainment center, because occasionally she misplaces them. I think she can smell the rubber honestly, and for whatever reason likes it… because that is the only common thread behind all of the things that she seems to want to fetch. Our eldest cat though… her thing is bread twist ties so maybe all cats have a “thing” that they are super passionate about.
Today is maintenance day for World of Warcraft and I feel like the game definitely needs some tweaking. A curious thing started happening over the weekend… where a lot of the spawn rates for world quests went completely out of whack. This for example is an Azerite Mining area in Vol’dun that went from near instant spawn Sethrak to single spawns every few minutes. As a result it was a free for all match of trying to get a tag in on a mob when it spawned so that your faction could get the credit for killing it. I apparently was fairly good at tagging things with my thrown glaives and then would sit back and ignore the mob hoping to let as many players get a tag in as well as possible before it inevitable evaporated.
Similarly there were other world quests that had near instant respawn rates… or faster. There was a quest in Stormsong Valley where I would often end up with five copies of the same mob as it would keep spawning over top of itself before I could kill the first one. There was an Azerite Mining area in Nazmir where I just straight up got overwhelmed because I ended up with five of those golems on top of me from the same spawning node and simply could not keep up with the self healing. My hope is today’s patch will sort all of this out and tweak the respawn rates back to normal ranges. In truth the servers have mostly been doing excellent until yesterday… when all of this nonsense started showing up so I am wondering what tweak behind the scenes brought it all about.
Lastly we ran our first Mythic last night, and chose to go after Freehold… the super awesome pirate dungeon. In truth it was far easier than we had expected it to be… especially given that a couple of our players were just barely heroic level… let alone mythic level. At this point I am 324 on the Demon Hunter which is not that far off from the 330 I managed to get my warrior to before shifting focus. I have for all purposes “caught up” and over the weekend chain ran several heroic with Grace healing at the helm. Demon Hunter is an excellent tank with the one slight problem… they lack the wide variety of “oh shit” buttons that many of the tanks have. Essentially I have Demon Spikes as a frequent use little burst of survival… which helps take the edge off things but isn’t going to really keep me alive for long. Then I have Metamorphosis that acts as my major survival cool-down and turns me into a big damned demon.
That is pretty much it… I can roam around some and pick up souls that I have not managed to suck back into myself yet… but the class lacks the wide variety of survival tools that say a warrior has. This means that if everything is going well I am super easy to heal because the sustain that the class has all by its lonesome is phenomenal. However if the Demon Hunter tanks starts to really take a damage spike… there is going to be nothing they can do themselves to pull back out of it and save the day. Basically after playing tanks that have a deep bench of abilities they can pull in to save themselves from things going south… it feels sorta helpless to have nothing much in reserve.
As far as the Mythic itself… we took it slow and over cleared just to keep from things going south… but things did in fact go south at a few points when we had chain aggro… or someone back into a pack of mobs… or a runner go grab something. That said we managed to whittle our way down through the bosses and the only one we actually wiped on was Shark Puncher… which gets WAY nastier on Mythic. I am super amped to get in and try some more Mythics tonight if we can assemble the same strike team as we had last night. I’ve been contemplating pulling together a horde community of folks who want to do Mythics to sorta make the process of building them a bit easier. I am not sure however if I have it in me to do much group organization these days… if it happens however you will likely hear about it here first.