World Of Warcraft

Not going to bury the lead with this one, especially given that I talked at length about it on twitter. This weekend I finally managed to get the Headless Horseman’s Reins. I have been chasing this off and on since 2008 when the event was first patched into the system. That first year I tried to tank it for anyone who was willing to let me use their summon. Back then each player got one chance to click on the pile every day, and as a result you could summon it for a group that didn’t have the ability to summon it themselves. I attempted to tank it for everyone that would allow me to use their summon and saw it drop so many times, but each time lost the roll.

Once it went to a personal loot system, where the boss drops a loot bag and the mount is contained within it… I ran it on pretty much any character that was eligible. I have been chasing this with varying degrees of vigor for twelve years, and this year given that I have so many max level and near max level characters I made a hardcore push to attempt to get it. At the beginning of my run I had thirteen characters eligible for the mount, given that you have to be at least level 45 (pre-squish 110) in order to get the right kind of loot bag. As the event ran I kept leveling more characters to the minimum level and as a result expanded my roster of attempts to nineteen. If my calculations and memory is correct of the sequence of when I leveled which characters… I ran it in total 206 times before finally getting it.

Probably the coolest part about the entire process is the fact that when it FINALLY dropped… it dropped for my OG Main Belghast the Human Warrior. This was the character I started the chase from all those years ago. This was the character that I would beg people to get their daily summon all for a shot of getting the mount. Why did I care so much? Well I have always loved this mount model and I have Attumen’s mount that I won fair and square while we were running Karazhan. However none of the other versions of this model can fly, which greatly cuts down the utility of the mount. The best part about all of this is that I never have to do Horseman ever again pending I don’t want some free rings for alts.

What did I do AFTER getting the mount? Well I proceeded to start working on my lowest level horde character my shadow priest. I think I finally found a character that the Eternal Traveler set actually suits. So I am now spending the last days before the pre-patch lands running a low level character through BFA which is supremely weird. In some ways it makes BFA much easier, and in other ways… it is just a pain in the ass not to have flight again. I should in theory be able to train flight in a few levels when I ding 30, and last night if I am remembering correctly I hit 28. Still working on the first zone of BFA so you end up moving through the levels at a pretty good clip.

In other less enjoyable news. Yesterday my Dad was out working in the pasture and was just about to hop on the tractor and move it, when he lost his footing and took a really bad fall. He landed in such a way as to crack the ball part of his hip joint and separate it. I found out about the time he was being taken to the hospital, and given Covid protocols no one is being allowed back with him. We’ve thankfully been able to talk to him off and on over cell phone. Essentially they are going to treat this like a hip replacement and at some point this morning he is going to have surgery that removes the effected joint and replaces it with an artificial one.

What makes this more complicated is that my Mom is effectively bed ridden, or at the very least has very limited mobility. So my focus has been trying to make sure she is okay. I spent three or four hours up there yesterday making sure she was settled and locking down my dad’s shop and retrieving the key from the tractor out in the pasture. It is no wonder he fell because just in my traversal to get the key I ended up tweaking my ankle when what I thought was stable ground was significantly less stable than I thought. She is set for now, and am going to call her in a few hours to check in. I will likely run up there tonight just to make sure she is doing okay.

The thing is… I have no clue what the schedule for the next few days is going to look like right now. I am making a post this morning but I have no clue if and when I will make posts from this point forward until the situation is stabilized. I greatly thank you all for the comments that I have received over twitter. Yall rock, simple as that. Basically my life is going to be real weird for awhile so I will update as time allows.

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.

Last night the Genshin Impact servers went down for maintenance, and after my fourth night of failed attempts at the horseman mount I found myself a little listless. I attempted to log into Destiny 2 and flew into the tower and then pretty much logged right back out again. Not sure what to do I opted to test the new player experience that went into World of Warcraft with the Shadowlands pre-patch. Instead of starting in the original starter zone, new characters can choose to instead begin on Exiles Reach. I believe this works for any character that is not an Allied Race, given that those appear to still go through the original racial starter experience.

I have some friends on Wyrmrest Accord, and as such I opted to create a clone of the original Belghast over there. From what I understand the flow of the content is effectively the same on both Horde and Alliance. You start with some cinematics laying out the mission before you of trying to find an expedition that has gone missing. While ship side your team similarly encounters issues and finds themselves shipwrecked on an island… conveniently the same island that the earlier expedition shipwrecked on.

Across the board the experience feels like a much more streamlined and simplified version of something like the Ghostlands or Azuremyst Isle. Everything is very self contained and neatly divided into areas that you will only actually go through once as you traverse the island. Along the way you will meet characters that I am certain you will never see again during your entire time in World of Warcraft. That aspect is a little disappointing, but Blizzard might prove me wrong and integrate Captain Garrick for example into future content. You however go through a sequence of events that see you rescuing most of the original expedition and figuring out the central conflict of the island.

A group of Ogres has apparently set up on this island and is trying to use necromancy to resurrect some dragon. I mean it is a generic set up, but also sorta awesome because we have not really seen much from the ogres since Draenor. This is an expert reuse of a bunch of models that had not seen the light of day since the Warlords expansion. Additionally the necromantic dragon seems to be an asset flip of Nythendra from the Emerald Nightmare raid, but similarly it was a cool model and deserved to be reused. Everything though flows together nicely and ends up being a much quicker starter experience than what I remember from the other zone options.

The culmination of the starter experience is a dungeon… but one where the NPCs serve as the tank and the healer and everyone is just effectively following them around and DPSing. I am not going to lie… I would not mind if they did some more of these dungeons for leveling purposes because it didn’t feel horrible. I almost wonder if this is an attempt at them playing with the concept of being able to run dungeons with NPCs much like they have with the Trust system in FFXIV. So far the experiment seems to have worked however because it was a pretty solid experience. I got zero loot from the dungeon but I did watch as other players got things… so maybe spend some time evening that out a bit. It would feel better if everyone exited the dungeon with a shiny blue.

Upon exiting the island you go through an entire sequence where you are introduced to Stormwind, and welcomed back as a hero of the Alliance. This is nice especially since it leads you through some of the important things like binding at an Inn. It also gives you access to your first mount, setting you up to start the game proper. The quests all appear to take place in the Old Town area, which is fine… but everyone knows the Dwarven Quarter is the only good part of Stormwind. I could definitely see this being a good introduction to World of Warcraft for a brand new player.

What felt really odd was that the game immediately went into the Battle for Azeroth content without me really choosing it. I guess as a brand new player this would flow nicely, but I kinda wanted to poke around with the Chromie system. Right now I am rolling with it because it seems like the BFA systems have been modified slightly as well to accommodate a brand new level 10 character. For example I didn’t get to choose which area of Kul Tiras that I wanted to start in, but instead was only given the option of Tirangarde Sound. I never really got into the BFA content for Alliance and maybe playing on a fresh character on a server I have no presence on… would make it feel more meaningful?

I like the experience that is presented here, but I also sorta think it is wasted if Blizzard does not make some fundamental changes to the way that World of Warcraft works. This is an experience ideally designed for someone who has never played this game. I just feel like at this point that if you have owned a PC capable of gaming, that more than likely you have already had access to World of Warcraft. With the introduction of controllers to the game on an official level, it is time for Blizzard to roll this game out to the console players and maybe to mobile players as well. In both cases I think it would work best if they shifted from the subscription only to offering some sort of free to play track as well.

However for the purpose of this post… the experience of Exiles Reach is good. I would probably run new characters through it… were it not for the fact that I already have a stratified army of one of each Alliance and Horde class that are at a minimum of level 40 in the new squished system. I’m already at the point where I have way more racial options than I have classes to play them with, and I think maybe it was a bad idea to not allow the Allied Races to go through the Exiles Reach starter experience. Have you played through the new starter zone? Drop me your thoughts down below in the comments.