The original plan this week consisted of doing some M+ (hopefully, but not easily reaching +10s), some raiding, and getting to know the new zone.

Then I noticed that they changed the ?? Delve boss so you had the whole week to kill him (instead of just the Hall of Fame last season that filled up in like 7h, before most people even logged in patch day), and then I tried the ? difficulty and it was so easy, so I tried ??. And died, and died, and died again.

The 62nd try worked.

There’s also a mount again:

And there’s also a toy that you get for doing ? difficulty with a quest, but of course I hadn’t done that, so I had to kill him again:

So Monday came and public transport foiled our plan to start really early, but at least we made 19:30.

The key is Windrunner Spire and our best timed try was roughly 70 minutes over, so I made a mini spreadsheet to glance at with certain split times.

We had to reset 4 times, but the 5th try went well and we timed it with 37 seconds to spare. 13 points, 17 to go.

Luckily my resilient key rerolled to Nexus-Point, the second needed dungeon. Apparently we had practiced that one enough, didn’t even have to reset (and our last try was 8 damn seconds over at 16), but unfortunately it gave only 14 points or so, so 3 missing. Then our DK had to go to bed because of work. With key rerolling we had 2 non-resilient AA, so that’s 2 tries, not bad. Fortunately our old raid leader (now in another guild) was online and we could convince him to come dps, then we did my resilient Seat 16. Reset once because of some really odd wipe and then we were fast enough that the 3 got their achievement at 3399.9 RIO, rounded to 3400 AND then my key rerolled to Academy, perfect.

So now all we have to do is time a resilient +16 Algethar Academy tomorrow and we have several hours. Or potentially try to time a very fast +15.

But it’s really weird just how strong resilient keys are, even if you only have one in the group.

Tuesday: We had to start a little later than anticipated (I’m also to blame because I was waiting for my food to arrive), so we practiced the first pull of 3 lashers a bit. Taking all 3 with 2 Melee in the group isn’t just too great without a lot of practice, so we did it with 2 with BL into 3 again and it worked, and pretty fast. Then the rest was not very eventful except 2 deaths (me as the tank once, oops) and we timed it with over a minute spare. So the full team did not only get 3400 rating, but also Resilient 16 – although useless on the last day, but it’s another achievement. Yay!

In other news, with the Turbulent Timeways I managed to finish off leveling my Horde chars, one per class – so that’s 26 chars at 90, one per class per faction, no duplicates. This leaves around 7 at 80, 4 at 70, and around 4 at 60.

… and I’m not entirely enthusiastic about the new season, this was just too much high stakes content in the last week, would have preferred a completely stress free break.

After my mini WoW burnout a few weeks ago (I only logged in for M+ with my team and to get the Timewalking mount, both reluctantly) and played Diablo, I was back with a goal.

So my M+ team had set our eyes on the 3400 rating mount, but for different reasons we were a bit slow, and when most of them left for an actual guild meetup summer vacation (it’s complicated, our raid is made up 50:50 of two guilds, and I’m in the other one that doesn’t meet up irl) we we still short 3 M+ dungeons timed at 16 – Nexus-Point Xenas, Windrunner Spire, and Algethar Academy, or maybe 2 of them relatively quick – just 30ish points. We have planned the Monday and Tuesday night before the raid to get these last points – either timing the new ones, or improving our time in homework keys, if we need to reroll keys.

So as I had 7-8 evenings spare I formed the plan to somehow get to Resil 16 alone, to be able to at least provide one Resil key so we don’t have to waste so much time on homework keys.

For the first one I found someone in NoP with a resil 16 and we got to work in a lunch break (happy coincidence). Unfortunately it didn’t really work out with a few tries and we switched to the Guardian Druid tanking, which felt kinda unfair. Instead of fighting for his life every pull he never really dipped below 80%. And I sucked at dps, not having done a single key as Fury this season. But we timed it. Next up was I think Tuesday evening and someone in NoP offered to lower their resil 18 because it would reset 10h later anyway. That just worked somehow but I might have abandoned one in a pug before that, not completely sure. Only AA missing then. There were 2 people (NoP again) offering their resil keys but scheduling hadn’t worked out so far, so I went pugging. The first try wasn’t even so bad (just a few deaths) until everyone started dying on the last boss. In the end we wiped it twice and finished 8mins over. The second try went better but again some deaths and the Aug did less than tank damage (even in the logs, not Details) and in the end we were 70 seconds over or so. Third time’s the charm and I was lucky to get a real group of blasters, but then with only 3 pulls to go I panicked a little and started playing bad, but in the end we made it with over a minute spare and I got my Resil 16, and it rerolled into Windrunner Spire – perfect.

I have not even bought my mount yet and it also really wasn’t this great feeling of accomplishment (for the 3400, getting resil 16 was really nice), it’s only half as fun if you abandon your team just before the end, but I think this resil key might really help us get this finished. I’m just hoping it works out, otherwise it was still practice, but maybe 4h of time wasted.