We’re into the 3^rd week of back to school.  The summer months had both daughters spending nearly all their time together, which is great from a relationship perspective.  The downside is that my eldest has a bit of a hen-like attitude, wanting to take care of her little sister.  Some of that is good but too much and it’s smothering.  Now that both kids are split between school and the babysitter, it’s given both the ability to stretch their proverbial legs.

And for the youngest, this has caused a rather significant change in attitude.  Previous, she was rather shy but now it’s like we have a new extrovert in the house, a little clown at times.  It’s great!  While we were aware that the eldest was likely headed towards the “gifted” program in school, we weren’t quite sure where the youngest would head into.  Even though it’s a few weeks, they have had such a massive increase in cognitive abilities, we may end up with both in that stream.

I rather enjoy challenges and to see my kids follow suit, without pushing them, is pretty neat.  It’s fun to see them learn a new skill and relate it to a previous one.  It’s important for us to keep them on their own separate tracks, given the age difference, to avoid any competition.

Whimsyshire

I decided to try something a bit different in D3, farming the rare transmogs found in Whimsyshire.  To get access to this zone, you need the Staff of Herding.  Given that seasonal characters start from scratch, I needed to farm the staff once again.

Way back when, it was an absurd amount of farming to get the staff material.  I think I ended up killing Izual for the plans for nearly a week before I got the drop.  Last night I got it in 2 kills.   Following the guide above some portions of the farming are much better in the adventure mode, while other are in campaign.

Further complicating things is that the adventure mode was removed as a requirement for season 4, so none of my characters had made any progress on that front.  I would hazard to say that it took longer to get to campaign act 2 than it did to farm every other drop for the staff, combined.  And this was on my farming monk, the one that just flies through the map.

So with the staff in hand, I took a dip into rainbow land.

Each run is about 3-4 minutes with the farming monk.  Given that only a few named enemies actually have a chance to drop the Spectrum, and that only piñatas can drop the Hamburger, running through is pretty quick.  It takes nearly as long to log out, in, and teleport into the zone as it does to clear it, which says something about efficiency I suppose.

I didn’t get much luck mind you.  Drop rates are apparently separate from difficulty, so I was still able to chop down whatever was around me quick enough.  An extra 300 or so DBs won’t hurt.  I received one legendary, from a piñata no less, from all of that.  Which makes me think that drop rates are artificially dropped in that zone.  Not sure if the next session will focus on this but it’s a good break from the regular TX rift runs.