The Return of Esmënet (and Curve)

After 55 days on a break, I ended up clicking "play" on the launcher to do some m+ on hunter.

After playing big crpgs and 4x games for my digital gaming fix during the break, my brain ended too fried in the leadup to christmas to do anything but be a good WoW zombie.

Since the return of Esmënet I did small batches of m+ each day, with a big batch on christmas day of all days (all trains nationwide held up by IT issues leaving me stranded). Going from 0 rating to 1950ish in about a week. The big batch made me remember very fast the dungeons aren't very fun.

I also randomly stumbled over a HC clear run in my mage's guild that I managed to get a spot in, and was promply humbled on the meters since a bunch of mythic raider mains was in that raid. But hey, random curve is a good thing.

There was a patch with a new special ring grind (like season 1 of Dragonflight had) with player hostile grinds and lots of bugs - they changed the hostile grind fairly fast but the bugs haven't been shaken so easily. Old Blizzard avoided doing patches for holidays for a reason, memo to current management...

The big thing that came with the patch wasn't the content - rather adjustments to crests. They increased crest drops based on key difficulty (so a +7 gives 6 more runed crests than a +4 for example), decresed the exchange rate (upgrading crests costs 45 instead of 90) and the cost of getting a gilded enchanted crest was reduced from 90 to 60. Making a max level craft go down in cost from 540 runed crests to 180 runed crests, a third of what it cost most of the season. Add to that crest cap is removed, and gearing is suddenly not a brick wall for people like me.

Meaning that if I cant reliably get into timed +8s for gilded crests, I can do double the amount of +7s and get a max level craft still. Or even spam +4s, but then needing 15 timed runs. Or if you do a full HC raid clear, you get enough crests for a craft just from that.

So I'll chomp away at trying to get ~630 iLevel before next patch, and get KSM while at it.