Hunter

So I’ve mentioned having leveled my Hunter on Alliance before and in recent times due to some old friends who still play Alliance having returned to the game, it has given me the opportunity to play her a bit more and try out being a damage-dealer for a change, a role I very seldomly play in World of Warcraft. The experience has actually been a surprising amount of fun, with us doing mythic+ a couple of times per reset and Marksmanship proving to be a suprising amount of fun even with Barrage not being as good of a spell as it was in early Legion making the spec a bit less fun.

Screenshot of Lyrre the Hunter on the character selection screen
The not so Hunter-y looking Hunter

There is however, a bigger frustration I have with the spec and that is the somewhat silly way AoE damage works, with one target being good, three or more clumped targets being good, but two targets ending up as basically single target which can be very frustrating depending on the dungeon and the tank since one gets the feeling one isn’t contributing as much as one should on two-target pulls. From what I know, this is the primary reason our hunter in the mythic+ group I had Horde-side earlier in the expansion was playing Beast Mastery—a spec I do not really enjoy at all, and he I believe also didn’t find as fun as Marksmanship—which I feel is unfortunate. It’s a very strange feeling, seemingly being unable to anything sensible on certain packs.

Another slight frustration with the Hunter doesn’t really come from the class but rather from bad luck, with me not having looted a single new weapon in the three or so weeks that we have now been doing mythic+, leaving me to run around with a world quest reward weapon with very suboptimal item level and somewhat suboptimal stats. It’s frustrating especially knowing that we have several times done dungeons where an upgrade could have dropped and me at times even using a bonusroll in hopes of simply getting something decent yet constantly simply having the bad luck of not getting an upgrade.

Despite those frustrations, the experience overall has been rather positive and somewhat more relaxing than my tanking adventures—though those are enjoyable as well—and has given me the opportunity to do something completely different amidst the current mythic progress which is a welcome change.

Queen's Court

Hofstaat der Königin, in English Queen's Court, mythic achievement

So this is actually a bit of old news, but we managed to kill Queen’s Court on mythic!

The fight is actually a perhaps surprising amount of fun, being one of the more hectic fights so far as a healer with a somewhat constant barrage of high incoming damage on the group through the sparks along with the edicts that at time makes executing on healing cooldowns rather tricky, especially Repeat Performance as a discipline priest since it forces you to change the way you apply Atonement by silencing you after two consecutive casts of the same spell. This was fairly easy to work around by alternating between Shadow Mend and Power Word: Shield, but it was just another thing to keep eye on in a somewhat hectic fight.

Still, it’s also a fight that one can actually learn with the sequence of edicts being known and the bursts from the sparks being fairly predictable so once you get it down it starts feeling, well not easy but at least manageable.

Now with the kill being a few days old, means we have also had a decent amount of tries on Za’qul, which to be fair actually feels a bit more boring so far than Queen’s Court. The problem really, is that while there are some pretty large bursts of damage early on through the fears the rest of the time it’s mostly a case of doing damage even as a healer and playing mechanics—mainly the tentacles that on mythic come in threes—which just doesn’t feel quite as interesting as the previous two bosses. It does get better on in the later stages of the fight with the stacking debuff, but it feels like mosts tries so far we are losing people to the “simple” stuff of tentacles or simple bad luck with the spawn of the Maddening Eruption landing in the middle of the tentacles causing a wipe. So the fight is still tricky, it’s just that we haven’t consistently gotten to 40% where the fight really begins in earnest and the way there is something of a slog. Still, those last 40% will probably prove very interesting indeed and I’m looking forward to our progress there.

Orgozoa

We managed to kill Orgozoa yesterday, and honestly my thoughts from the PTR kind of still stand. The fight is really rought to heal, yes, and has to be executed well purely from a mechanical standpoint, but as far as really interesting things actually happening during the fight? Not really overly so.

Phase two still really felt like the easier one of the two, mainly because from a healer standpoint you are basically back at the beginning of phase one with almost nobody having the debuff. Sure, there are some other things to watch out for like the stomps and we did have a few deaths and consequently wipes to those but that I think is mostly because the area of that ability is somewhat unclear and people had to learn that, but overall phase two just doesn’t have that much more going on—always having the adds there for DOTs was nice as a discipline priest though, getting that extra healing going on.

And phase one, well, it got really rough towards the end even with us five-healing it, but it feels like such a slow burn that while it is challenging it doesn’t really feel exciting or overly dangerous most of the time with potentially the exception being during the Arcing Currents when players have to spread out in order to avoid spreading the Incubation Fluid to unaffected players so they are outside of many area healing spells yet take a burst of damage, but even those weren’t really lethal if the players were topped properly. That was still the primary point we lost players especially towards the end where almost the whole raid needs constant healing so it is something to watch out for.

After we killed Orgozoa however, we did have a decent amount of time left to get a few trys in on the Queen’s Court which proved much more interesting. Now, I was slightly skeptical of the fight at first because even though some of the decrees can be annoying on heroic like Repeat Performance, they’re mostly somewhat ignorable. On mythic however, the pure damage coming in from the orbs along with the much tighter timing on both the decrees as well as things like the charge made the encounter much more interesting than I was expecting. Also, there always being a decree active and them rotating in a set manner makes the fight more interesting as well, since that allowed the designers to put in really harsh sequences like the orb explosions during Deferred Sentence which then very quickly gets followed by Obey or Suffer. That combination really ended up being the most difficult part for us so far and the one which I think we will need to work on the most.

So I think we have some very fun progress ahead of us, once we manage to reclear everything this reset.

Method Queen Azshara world first

So Method managed to snag the world first on Queen Azshara as is somewhat usual, though it seems to have been a rather close race with Limit this time around, moreso than the last couple of ones.

That however, isn’t really what I wanted to talk about, but rather the somewhat unusal setup they ended up running for the boss, namely: only running with two healers on the first kill of the last boss of a raid. Now, playing a healer myself this is obviously something that doesn’t feel overly nice since it means that more healers will be benchend than usual and to me it already felt rough having three healer bosses since I like my fellow healers, but also from what I know this is somewhat unprecedented and it feels like it points towards some heavy flaws in the encounter design of Queen Azshara for this to be possible at all.

One large contributing factor to this being possible was the maximum health reduction debuff that you need to take in order to keep the different seals charged which mean there has to be overall less damage coming in or it would simply be oneshotting players. This was also a large contributor to Method’s decision to run two discipline priests I think, since shields give you that extra buffer on that low health—of course, discipline also brings with it some decent extra damage, and them already running only two healers indicates every extra bit of damage is welcome.

But secondly, as noted above, the fight on heroic as well just feels like it has very little incoming damage, with me on our kills generally spending more time doing damage than healing. Sure, there is some decent burst in the last phase but aside from that the fight felt kind of boring from a healer perspective and I guess that is now simply getting validated even on mythic which I think is sad to see.

It’s odd, all of this makes me kind of not look forward toward Azshara that much, since it makes me feel like maybe the fight won’t be that interesting. Now granted, Method still needed several hundred pulls to get the boss down, so I’m not thinking it will be easy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the fight will be interesting which is unfortunate for the end-boss of a tier especially for one with so much lore tie-in. I guess I’ll have to see once we get there, but for now my excitement for the end-boss is down somewhat though we still have a long way to go so there’s time to change that—I also somewhat doubt we will be running a two healer strategy since we only have one priest at the moment, but we’ll see.

Fortified and Tyrannical

We ended up doing some mythic+ after the raid yesterday as is somewhat usual, and it reminded me of something that had bothered me in Legion and is back in Battle for Azeroth though the other way around; namely the big difference between the fortified and tyrannical affix. Now, they make different parts of the dungeon stronger so it seems obvious that there would be a big difference between them, but the bigger thing I feel is not that there is a difference but that one of them always feels disproportionately harder than the other; in Legion that was tyrannical with some bosses simply one-shotting you if you didn’t have enough gear or later on if you simply played the wrong class or spec, in Battle for Azeroth however it seems to me that fortified is the much worse affix.

I think this change is due to Blizzard’s changed design direction with dungeons in Battle for Azeroth, putting more of an emphasis on making the trash interesting and actually having abilities to prevent the kind of insane large pulls that we saw towards the end of Legion especially in the Mythic Dungeon Invitational and while I think this design decision was a valid attempt at fixing that and something that is hard to change again for Battle for Azeroth, it does make the dungeons feel like much more of a slog for normal groups during fortified weeks as well as strenghtening the skip-focused metagame at the MDI which I think is more harmful than the one focused on large pulls. While those large pulls felt pretty insane to the averge player and even relatively high-end ones, they still required excellent execution and usually came with high risk while simply skipping the mobs while not risk-free is considerably less risky as well as from an esports perspective, being much less interesting to watch—this is probably also why so many players I know enjoyed the Reaping affix so much since it provided the opportunity to kind of re-live that feeling of making a huge pull and surviving it while also providing a nice opportunity for more multitarget focused classes to shine. I also feel that having very intense trash that constantly requires a high level of attention along with bosses that also tend to be mechanically intense even with fortified makes running dungeons much more tiring than it was in Legion and somehow also a bit less fun, and skips aren’t all that interesting either nor as generally available especially the ones done at the MDI since those often rely on the Night Elf Shadowmeld ability which you rarely have for the complete group on live especially since most of the higher-end activity is on Horde and not Alliance unfortunately.

Now, Blizzard has attempted to counter this skip-focused meta in the new season with the introduction of Azsharas’ emissaries that are often placed so that you have to vary your route or simply preventing you from doing a normal stealth or invisibility skip due to them having truesight, but I’m not sure this is a change in the right direction. As noted above, I don’t feel that the whole dungeon being this intense gauntlet of always complex encouters be they trash or boss actually contributes to a good dungeon experience, as a player it is actually nice having a bit of a lull during the trash while preparing for the next boss-fight with maybe some more interesting trash sprinkled in at times but not every single pack—looking at you, MOTHERLODE!!!.

Along with this, there is the general problem of the very high variability in the difficulty of different mythic+ affixes with this week being Grievous again which is just a pain to handle as a discipline priest making me much less eager to run significant amounts of mythic+ this week which I find a shame since it’s an activity I actually quite enjoy so being discouraged from participating in it doesn’t feel particularily good but this seems like something Blizzard isn’t particularily intent on changing.

Overall, I think that with Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard went a little too hard in the other direction with dungeon design and I hope we end up meeting somewhere in the middle with the next expansion where bosses one-shotting you doesn’t become a hardcap on how high of a key you can do that specific week like it was in Legion but trash still feeling more manageable even in large groups than it is now in Battle for Azeroth. If Mechagon is any indicator of future design changes though, I don’t think that is very likely given the trash in there but we’ll see with the next expansion.