The Queue: Freedom!

I honestly forgot what I was going to say here because while I was procrastinating writing the Queue, I actually finally got the Blackhand Mythic mount!

I’ve been farming that once a week on my Druid for a long, long, long time. It took until its 170th kill for it to drop. There are about another 100 attempts scattered across my other characters, but the Druid was the only consistent one that I was running Blackhand on. Especially since I had it down to a quick post-raid routine. Take my garrison portal, use the mole machine to go to Gorgrond, fly up to the boundary, and kill Blackhand — five minutes, easy peasy. Now I don’t even have to think about it anymore! I’m free!

While I figure out what’s next on the old mount list to hunt for, it’s time for — The Queue.

Those portals are new, so don’t feel bad that you didn’t notice them until now! They’re fresh as of the release of Season Four of Shadowlands. They’re there to help players going to the current Mythic Keystone dungeons get there easier. I imagine there are more than a few players who’ve never done any content in Mechagon or Warlords of Draenor who might have a hard time actually walking into the instance for their runs. So a kind developer at Blizzard made it so they wouldn’t always have to rely on someone else summoning them.

The bigger question will be if they’ll stick around after the season is over. I wouldn’t bet a lot of money on it, but maybe they’ll be overlooked with our mad dash towards the Dragon Isles.

Mechagon Junkyard is my favorite. I love the extra bot buffs in it making the runs feel a little more forgiving.

Lower Kara is my least favorite. It was rough from the start, and even with a bunch of nerfs it still feels unforgiving.

I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about those before either on the Queue or in the comments. So I figured I’d toss in the middle-of-the-road ones. Which are Tazavesh Streets and Iron Docks.

Tazavesh Streets feels like it’s in a really good place right now. There’s a good amount of trash in between each of the fights, and enough routes and choices that you can make to feel like you could potentially pull strangely to try and make up for lost time. Unlike Workshop, Upper Kara, So’leahs Gambit, and Grimrail which are all very much straight lines. At least Gambit gives you lots of Murlocs to kill if you want to skip things later, Workshop has one pull that you can skip really.

Iron Docks has neither impressed me nor made me furious. It just kinda is, the trash on the back half can be a bit much but everything else feels in line difficulty-wise. I wasn’t upset that it made it into the dungeon rotation this time around, as much as I would’ve like to have seen Everbloom or Skyreach come back.

Amazingly I also haven’t run a single Grimrail Depot this season, I haven’t had a ton of time to run keystones, and the one week I did manage to carve some time out everyone kept offering up Karazhan and Tazavesh keys! I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually, but at this rate, I’ll get my Keystone Master without having set foot in there at all.

A Priest, a Minister, and a rabbit walk into a blood bank. The rabbit says “I think I’m a Type-0”

It’s not Divine Intervention back from the dead, but a new class with a brez is nice!

I can’t help but notice that Demon Hunters and Monks are still the only two classes bringing the extra special fancy debuffs though and I’m saddened by that. Even adding just one more class that could offer that up as group utility would’ve been huge. It always feels like my groups are struggling to keep a Demon Hunter or Monk in them. I know for a fact that there’s a Monk I raid with who’d much rather be a Shaman or Priest but has been staying on his Monk so that we have that 5% debuff consistently.

That Assassins Creed Odyssey was actually a pretty solid RPG was a pretty big surprise to me. I’d checked out of the series somewhere around the second and did not see that coming.

HADES being something that I could really sink my teeth into was another big surprise. I’d loved Bastion and Transistor but hadn’t really vibed with Pyre as much from Supergiant. So I wasn’t sure if I would like another nonlinear game from them. Jokes on me!

Just to be clear I still love the music in Pyre. Darren Korb and Ashley Barrett can do no wrong no matter what else is happening around them.

I’d love to have more space to play with and design. I do appreciate the simplicity of spending time in a system to play with that system more. However, I think I’d feel a little weird if things I did outside of it didn’t contribute.

I’ve never played the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV? With an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime. So I’m not sure if that’s the case, or if by beating the latest raid would give you a cool new throne or art to hang on your wall, but I’d hope that as I went out to defeat whatever monsters are currently threatening the World of Warcraft I would get flashy new furniture and knick-knacks.

Funny enough, when I was checking last year’s Labor day weekend post to see if I had indeed used The Dropkick Murphys Worker’s Song as the earworm.

(I had, it remains catchy)

I stumbled across this question from SJHawk. Amusingly last night with Season Four and Fated raids in full swing I spent time on each of those bosses progressing on Mythic difficulty again!

Time is a flat circle.

For the record, we had to 19 man it due to some absences and were almost able to get Remnant of Ner’zhul down. I’m talking 1.8% almost. It was super sad, but even a nearly invincible bear can’t live through being yeeted off of a platform into the great wide nothingness. Next go-around for sure though!

Soulrender we tried a couple of times just to see if we could get it in a couple of pulls, but again with 19 people in the raid, the damage and healing checks were a little rough.

Today’s Anna Earworm™: 16 Tons

Happy Labor day everyone.

Don’t forget to leave Anna actual questions for tomorrow in addition to any puns and jokes y’all might leave.