Games

Well friends, my Dad is officially out of the hospital and is now settled into the “spare house”. I realize that is a bit of a weird concept but my parents have two houses, the one I grew up in and the one that passed down to my mom when my aunt died several years ago. This extra house has effectively served as a hotel for any family that happen to need a place to crash in the tiny town. This has also been extremely beneficial for moments like when my dad had thyroid surgery and needed to recuperate someplace while he was still radioactive. The benefit of the house is equipped with all manner of upgrades for those struggling with mobility since my Aunt struggled with that in the last years of her life.

The other huge benefit is that it isn’t filled with junk that makes it hard to traverse. My folks are more or less hoarders and taking anyone who was recovering from hip surgery to that house would have been a death trap. I think I finally have my mother convinced that it is time to just start throwing away or donating at least half of everything in the house, but that is a story for another day. Right now we are just trying to keep both Mom and Dad going. We have someone hired to come work with Mom and do whatever is needed to be done, so that hopefully I can return to work next week. We also have home health scheduled to come work with Dad in a location that should be conducive to the sorts of physical therapy he needs to do.

I cleaned the spare house and got it set up for him, and then ferried him from the hospital yesterday afternoon. I spent some time lasts night bouncing between the two houses, and during one of my absences he managed to get up, go to the restroom and make it back to his chair successfully so I am hoping we are good there. The fridge is stocked with some of his favorite things and if you look at the picture of the chair I have arranged most of the things that he would want to deal with on a regular basis around his chair. He has been waiting to read the latest Dresden novel and it is sitting there on the table for him. Today… unless things change… is going to be me staying home and dealing with the dead television and hopefully picking up a bit.

Yesterday I spent the morning waiting for a shipment from Amazon of things I needed for dad, and as a result I spent time puttering around on my final horde character. I managed to get him to 50 which completes a full set of characters on my horde server The Scryers. The above is a mildly photoshopped image so that I could actually fit all of the characters on one screen. I should probably devote some time to getting reasonable gear for my Shadow Priest and my Rogue, but for now I feel like I am in a great place for the start of the expansion.

Since I find leveling to be a relaxing experience, and that I need comfort gaming right now… I have turned my attention to my stable of Alliance characters. I had started leveling a number of these to at least 45 during my Horseman grind just so I could have additional chances each day. So I will be spending the next bit of time pushing up these characters the rest of the way to 50. There is no way that I actually finish leveling them all before the expansion, but I did get one of every class to 100 prior to the launch of Legion, which means the bulk of these now are sitting in the 40ish range. I do have some duplicate characters on this account because of allied races, but those are super low priority for me currently.

I am still out here and I am still largely functional… but there is a weariness in me that I am not sure I have ever felt. Right now I am mostly just trying to do what needs to get done and not thinking a terribly large amount about it. You can only function on instinct and adrenaline for so long however before a crash comes… and I think as we enter the weekend that I am starting to crash hard.

Friends I am exhausted… mentally, emotionally and physically. I’ve talked about the situation I find myself in, so I am not going to do so this morning. I will however continue to thank everyone for the support I have received from my community. What I am going to talk about is comfort gaming and how when I do make it home I am using World of Warcraft and the leveling game to unwind and attempt to feel normal again even if for only a few moments. After I finished my Horseman grind I picked up a new mission which was to level my Shadow Priest from level 10 to level 50.

I completed this last night, and I am somewhat shocked just how much fun I had playing Shadow Priest. Like for years I have avoided “finger-wigglers” like the plague. My safe space is playing a tank class and in the absence of a tank I tended to play some sort of melee dps. However something shifted at some point in my brain and it probably started with realizing I enjoy the Arcanist/Summoner in FFXIV. This lead me to play the Warlock in World of Warcraft and also realize that I do in fact enjoy it… and that more or less opened the finger-wiggling-floodgates. I am not exactly sure what shifted, but I have begun approaching casters in the way that I think you have to approach them in order to enjoy. Basically you have to realize how squishy you are and make assurances to kill the thing before it actually can damage you.

The only real challenge to my leveling was the constant loot lag experienced in several of the zones. For awhile I have seen these Moonkin bots roaming around in areas around the world. Apparently the Tar Pits in Nazmir is a hotspot, similar to the Murloc camps in Azsuna. I flew over the other day to get a screenshot and there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 moonkin running a fixed route and spamming Starfall. When actual players are added to this zone this created a level of loot lag that I had not experienced since the launch of the game back in 2004. This is being blamed on Multiboxers, and I am certain that Multiboxing was in play… but the behavior looked a lot more like automated botting.

This however has been a big enough deal for Blizzard to create a ruling that the input broadcasting software that is used to run multiple characters is a bannable offense. Multiboxing itself is not, which is a bit of a thin line to ride but one that I am happy they are doing so. I have multiboxed in the past, but me doing so meant I was running two accounts windowed on the same machine and just flipping over to a healer every now and then to throw some heals or buffs out. I have used a piece of software called IsBoxer that arranges your windows in such a way as to make this swapping easier. Now I have not done any of this in five or six years but I am thankful that the mere act of multiboxing is not bannable itself. I don’t forsee myself doing it again at any point soon, but I do like knowing I can if I want to. Specifically I used to do so to make farming older raids and such go a bit more smoothly.

I had given up on leveling the Rogue… but here I am with it being the last sub 50 character on my Horde server. As of last night it is sitting at level 48… so I guess I am now leveling it. I will be able to say before the launch of the expansion that I pushed all of my Horde characters to the level cap. Once I finish it… I have no clue what I will latch onto as a mission then. In theory next week I think the pre-launch event starts which will allow me to at least work on farming some gear. I might start down my Alliance list, because I find leveling to be a deeply relaxing experience and I absolutely need that stress relief right now.

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.