Me and this chest do not get along well. It is not so much that the chest itself offends, or the items that come from it… but instead the process of getting it to unlock. When I first heard about Mythic Plus dungeons… I thought it was pretty freaking great. It sounded a lot like the Greater Rift system in Diablo 3, and I was completely on board with it… until I actually set down to do one. I don’t handle timers well, namely they cause me so much more anxiety than they should. Literally if you put the easiest quest in the world on a timer… I will avoid doing it like the plague because it feels like every fiber of my being has to be concentrated on beating that timer. I mean I should have know this going into Mythic Plus content given that Greater Rifts in Diablo 3 cause the exact same sort of roller coaster of stress. To make matters worse… the first several keystones that we attempted we failed at miserably, which made me feel like the biggest failure of a tank in existence. This mental block against timers goes way back in my psyche, and it isn’t something I can entirely control. Once upon a time when I was a youngin… I went from being in the highest performing mathematics class to the lowest performing one… all because of a timer. There were these worksheets called mad minutes, where you were judged on how fast you were able to do math problems… not how correctly you worked them. The grading scale was skewed in a way that not making it to a problem was twice as bad as missing one. I’ve always been a fairly pensive person, and even though I push myself not to be… that is my nature and when you put me on the clock it puts me into panic mode.
All of this said… last night we ran two Mythic Plus dungeons and we were able to complete both of them before the keystone expired. So I guess I am managing the panic mode, well enough to push through a dungeon in time to get progress. Now I will probably NEVER go for the whole multiple chest bullshit, because I lack the drive to attempt to get multiple chests… when the loot in said chests is more than likely shit. On the positive last night I managed to pull a 5 item level higher version of the trinket I like, getting it at 845… which still seems really low to me given the effort. That however is a completely different rant for a different day because honestly I feel like every tier of mythic plus is 5 to 10 item levels too low for the effort spent in running it. What is the tale of today however is that apparently I am working through my anxiety with being on the timer. I still over prepare for this process and try and make sure there is nothing that could possibly interrupt my focus while running the dungeon. It was a huge boon last night when we got revenge on Halls of Valor… which is one of the early pluses that we attempted and failed at least twice. The entire goal of last night was simply to get the chest from our order hall unlocked that you can see above in the screenshot from Skyhold, however I will absolutely walk away with two victories that beat the timer… one of which was good enough to absorb a wipe on the final boss and still managed to pull out a win. Plus will likely always be a stress factor for me, because that timer… feels so insanely oppressive. I tried my best NOT to watch the timer, because it is one of those situations that so long as I didn’t think about it I was largely fine.
