Mount Madness

I have lost my damned mind friends. A new day dawns and with it will be my eighth day of attempts on trying to get the headless horseman mount. This is something that I have been chasing yearly since it initially released in 2007 during The Burning Crusade expansion. I’ve been chasing it longer than the existence of this blog, which started in 2009. Why have I been chasing it you might ask when I already have the way cooler looking Fiery Warhorse’s Reins that dropped legitimately during a Kara raid? Simple… this one flies and that makes it significantly better. It is said to have somewhere around a 0.5% drop rate, which means in theory that you should be able to get it within around 200 runs. The challenge there however is that the event only lasts two weeks and there is no way you can farm it 200 times on a single character, essentially throwing that logic out the window.

Starting on the 18th I Headless Horseman on every character of level 20 or higher, leaving me making attempts on it 24 times for those first two resets. By the time reset three rolled around I had done some additional research learning that it can only drop from characters capable of earning the epic loot-filled pumpkin. You have to be level 45 in order to win this epic loot, or what would have been the equivalent of 110 prior to the level squish. This forced me to dial things back to 13 characters for a few days until I realized that I had another eligible character on Eonar that I more or less forgot about. Still for days three and four I ran 13 characters and starting on day five I added a 14th.

Now is where the madness starts to settle in to take a rest. I put my thinking cap on and remembered that prior to the launch of level I pushed every single class up to 100 or in the new level squish nomenclature level 40. Surely it wouldn’t take terribly long to push more characters up to 45, given that it is only 5 levels worth of content right? It turns out that no… it really doesn’t take a lot of time and as such I have pushed up my Alliance Demon Hunter and Hunter and now am working on my Warlock. So that has increased each daily run total by a single character for runs six and seven and in theory I should be able to finish off the warlock today increasing it once again for day eight.

Based on my napkin math, I have run Headless Horseman 119 times so far this season, not taking into account any of the runs that I will be making tonight. I’ve seen pretty much every drop multiple times but the mount and now I feel completely committed to see this nonsense through. I have a total of seven more days worth of attempts, counting today since at the time of writing the reset has not happened. Even if I somehow stop with the Warlock that puts me at 17 characters with their own attempt each day for the next seven days which will net me another 119 attempts. I’ve never had this many characters eligible in past years, so I hope beyond hope that I somehow manage to get this thing I have been chasing for thirteen years.