Games

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.

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.