AP, Artifact Power in Legion and Azerite Power were the new “infinite progression” mechanics introduced by Blizzard in order to keep different types of content rewarding for max level players. Now this worked very well in Legion—for me at least—since it was the first expansion in a long while that I played all the way through. Simply always having something available to strive for was a nice change of pace since it meant there was always a reason to log in—this was especially powerful in combination with mythic+ since this enabled me to do fun and engaging content while still working towards that goal of the next artifact level.

Unfortunately, somewhere halfway through Legion this system changed for the worse and remains in this incarnation—though I would argue even worse—with Battle for Azeroth. The big change that came was a significant reduction in artifact power received through completing mythic+, now because the reward had always been rather low in raids but this meant that the most sensible way to gain artifact power became world quests meaning there was no interesting way of gaining it anymore. This made the whole system feel a lot more grindy since I don’t find world quests particularily enjoyable yet I like raiding and mythic+ a lot and now I was being pushed to participate in content I did not enjoy.

In Battle for Azeroth this same system remained of low reward through interesting content and high reward through trivial content continuing through world quests and with the addition of Island Expeditions. Now on the surface island expeditions sound like a cool idea: explore a new island and collect the azerite there, the problem comes with the implementation. Firstly, it’s a lot less about exploration since you are competing against another team even in the PvE mode where you compete against NPCs that behave slightly more in a “PvP” way but without much of the strategy of real players—you also don’t get to use your PvP talents and some abilities work very differently from actual players—but these end up being more of an annoyance than anything else.

Secondly, the content ends up just being so trivial as to be uninteresting: the opposing faction poses no real threat and neither do the normal mobs and they can’t really, since this is content that is supposed to be doable with any setup including three healers or three damage dealers severely restricting the possibility of Blizzard balancing it into something interesting. Now in the end, this is probably the better outcome since for me personally I don’t see how a more time consuming version of this content could be made interesting with the technology currently available as I’d rather just have it be over with quickly since it just feels like a grind.

Thirdly, the grind also feels much worse on alts in Battle for Azeroth than it did in Legion with the changes to how artifact/azerite knowledge work. This is the catch-up mechanic which makes it possible for alts as well as players joining the game later to achieve comparable levels of power to the players that have been playing throughout. The problem comes with how it was implemented, in Legion the amount of AP you gained from doing activities scaled up as artifact knowledge went up; in Battle for Azeroth the amount needed per level goes down until a floor of 1000 and that is still a rather decent amount of azerite power, something along the lines of three mythic islands or three to four world quests. Meanwhile in Legion, doing one world quest might have given you something like ten levels towards the end which means that alts not only have a more severe version of the problem of having to unlock traits for their new gear since they’ll probably be receving it faster than a main character that has been farming since the start it will also require comparably more effort than it would have in Legion.

Now, the other problem with azerite in Battle for Azeroth is the reason you farm it: the azerite gear. This system just doesn’t feel quite as rewarding as it was in Legion, partially because you keep unlocking the same traits and partially because at some point you just kind of have everything and the only reward is a couple more item levels on your neck—hardly anything to look forward to. The maximum level is even capped within reach and most players who can still be bothered to do the farm content are probably already at that cap—several in my guild are, I’m not because the content just doesn’t interest me.

This is getting changed with the upcoming patch as well as some buffs to the amount of azerite rewarded for some activities but I don’t actually see how it will really help the system since at the start there will only be three new ranks of real interest—the one major relic slot and the two minor ones of which the latter won’t be available—which means that most of the time while gaining a new azerite level you actually don’t get anything for it except for maybe a small boost to stamina—not really a system that motivates you to play. That along with the above mentioned problems of the relevant source of azerite just make the system feel a lot more annoying and a lot less rewarding than it was in Legion which has meant I try to avoid participating in it as much as possible which is somewhat unfortunate since I think I’m probably exactly the target audience of such a system: someone that prefers having something regular to do in order to keep me going.

It is also completely possible that I simply burned out on the system back in Legion when the gains from mythic+ were nerfed and Battle for Azeroth never really had a chance, but even then the whole system has been something I’d rather be avoiding from mostly day one which is not a good sign for such a major feature of the expansion. I’m hoping 8.2 will bring some improvements that actually make me care again but I guess time will tell.

So apparently MMO-Champion is being sold off by Curse and getting bought up by Magic Find.

Now it seems that one of the investors is the original creator of MMO-Champion:

I won’t be involved in the website, but for full disclosure I am an investor in Magic Find, and the team includes people who have worked on MMO-Champion since 2007.

I’m extremely grateful that Fandom helped us preserve the community and I’m sure the team will have more updates soon — Bouboille

which does make it seem that this will be a good change. I personally wasn’t a huge fan of Curse gobbling up so many gaming properties especially since some of their sites like WoWDB are just poorly functioning alternatives of better sites—Wowhead in this case. To be fair, competition is good and I was actually hoping that WoWDB would be good since Wowhead has some nasty history with the ads they serve, some of them being particularily loud or obnoxious—now on the other hand apparently the same can be said for MMO-Champion so maybe gaming sites just can’t afford to be too stringent about the ads they serve. But for me at least, when that competition can’t even manage proper responsive design and more importantly localisation of the different item it becomes kind of useless—I actually wanted to try to use WoWDB as my primary information source once but that attempt was instantly stopped by me having the game client in German and WoWDB only supporting English which was really unfortunate. I would still have probably missed the years of comments on Wowhead at some point but the faster loading speed of WoWDB would have probably kept me using it over Wowhead if it had remained an option.

Still, I hope MMO-Champion remains a relevant resource for World of Warcraft news since while Wowhead does provide similar content and even at times better and faster, the signal to noise ratio of MMO-Champion posts is much better. I have watched both feeds and Wowhead often includes to me irrelevant content like some contest or different announcements about the site; meanwhile the only non-relevant content I get regularily from MMO-Champion is the weekly summary of active world bosses and the weekly event quest—I generally don’t have a need for this content so which boss is up doesn’t really matter to me. Another reason I prefer MMO-Champion is simply the nostalgia I think, it’s the website I’m used to going to when I need to know what’s going up with World of Warcraft since it was pretty much the best alternative back in the day, sure things like WoW Insider existed but from memory they had the same problem as Wowhead has now: too much non-news content. It’s really nice being able to have an actual notification for new articles on MMO-Champion and be reasonably sure that it’s something of interest, like changes on the PTR or announcements of new features or interviews of Blizzard staff.

Now thinking back, I did also enjoy WoW Insider content—especially some of the columns there—and I haven’t looked at the successor Blizzard Watch in a while. Sure the focus is broader these days but I believe it is still possible to filter the content by game which would allow me to just view the World of Warcraft content, that might be something I want to start doing more regularily again. They even have a podcast I remember enjoying for a bit, so I guess there is a decent bit of content for me to catch up on.

In the end, I guess there’s nothing really to be worried about since I haven’t noticed any decrease in quality during the previous acquisitions and maintaining a pure news site is pretty simple as long as you can get the news out there quickly enough.

Sooo. Have had a couple of coop play sessions of Borderlands 2 this weekend and it has been a decently fun time so far. We decided to play the game since the Handsome Collection is currently available for only 6€ until the 17th of June I believe and includes a bunch of DLC and the game had interested us all from before already so it was kind of a good opportunity for it. Now I have been playing Gaige the Mechromancer which is one of the DLC character. She is actually a pretty cool character that as a special ability to summon a robot called Deathtrap that seems to be very efficient at meleeing enemies down and I recently got him the extra ability to fully restore the shields of an ally—this has proved rather useful in helping the party keep alive in sticky situations.

Now the game is a shooter looter or shlooter which means shoot down lots of enemies with a few bosses at times and loot new cool guns and equipment however here the game it feels has a couple of problems. The shooting—so far at least and to be fair we aren’t that far in—isn’t that great since it is so innaccurate though some of the guns feel kind of cool. This is made worse by my biggest peeves with this game: limited ammunition and somewhat bullet-spongy enemies at least in four player coop—the enemies health scales with amount of players I believe. There just isn’t enough ammunition in the game for all four players so you end up having to buy more at the kiosks selling it but simultaneously some weapons are designed around low damage high fire rate making these weapons make zero sense in a coop situation since you won’t have enough ammunition to kill anything with them—you could probably empty all of your ammunition into a single of the normal tougher enemies.

The low ammunition of course is made worse by the bullet-spongy enemies, since it can be very difficult to kill one of the “badasses” alone and when three or four of them spawn at a time your whole time might need to be a bit clever with their ammo in order to actually be able to kill all of them. This got especially bad at a spot in the game where waves of enemies spawned including a couple of the tougher enemies where pretty much all of us were running low on ammunition I think.

Now, different weapon types use different ammunition and you can carry several weapons so it is plausible that the idea is that you should be switching weapons as needed—and the game even encourages this through elemental effects on the weapons which cause them to deal extra damage to different types of enemies—but this also doesn’t really feel it makes sense to the core mechanic of the game which is looting cool weapons which you then aren’t supposed to use if you need to switch away from them. I actually very much like both accurate high damage weapons like snipers as well as more spray-and-pray weapons like miniguns but find myself steering away from the latter since I know I won’t have the ammunition to sustain their usage. I can understand ammunition in something like a survival game where resource management is a core part of the game but here it just feels like it doesn’t really fit that well—at the same time games like Diablo 3 have something similar simply through having to manage health and potions so maybe it is something that is part of the genre since they are both games centered around loot but I just feel having to bother with ammunition and not being able to use the cool weapon you like because you’re out of ammunition detracts more than it adds from this game.

Other than that though, as said Gaige feels pretty awesome to play with her robot buddy, we’re still pretty early in I think so we don’t have that exciting guns yet but I already have a couple that are pretty fun to use and the fights seem to be pretty dangerous or at least we pretty often have knockdowns with the occasional complete deaths sending you back to a save point. Even the shooting, I think the lack of ammunition is coloring my feelings of it a bit, since the guns in themself feel pretty cool but it’s just frustrating not to be able to hit anything except for close range when that’s really dangerous and you are heavily limited by ammunition and not being able to use the weapons I would more like to use because I no longer have ammunition for them—even the bullet-sponginess would be more forgivable in that case since I understand it’s one of the simpler ways to add some difficulty but when you feel you use a limited resource to no effect it just ends in frustration.

Despite all that, I have been enjoying the game and am looking forward to the next play session which I expect will be on Monday since all of us seem to like the game. Now here’s hoping the third installment coming later this year will fix some of these problems, maybe we’ll have a new fun game to play once we’re done with this one.

So with me having changed to Horde a while ago I ended up leveling a new warrior, since my previous one was still on Alliance and a different server and I wanted to be able to play a tank with the guild as well as the other people I now actively play with.

Another reason for getting back to the warrior was that it seems to have gotten some fixes since the pre-patch where they played really terribly and for some reasons warriors have always been the tank I most like the theme of—just being badass enough to handle all the incoming punishment, well the armour helps too. They are also the “meta” tank at the moment especially for dungeons, but seeing as that probably won’t be true with the next patch anymore and I’ll hopefully be playing the warrior for the rest of the expansion again—as long as it continues to play fun—that didn’t really factor into my decision. Generally being a good “meta” class doesn’t play into my decision on whether to play something, more important is the theme and feel of the class or spec.

Leveling the warrior went okay, I did something unusual for me and decided to level as fury instead of my usual choice of protection—I tend to prefer to play tanks and healers over damage dealers even for leveling. This was probably a good decision since fury was a decent amount of fun—I have always liked dual wield specs—as well as having some self-heal for survivability though it did get a bit tough at times at the very late levels and there I probably should have changed to protection.

Not leveling as protection did mean something new for me however: I needed to actually get the correct weapons at max level in order to start tanking. To be fair, I wouldn’t have been able to tank anything relevant anyway but still it was a new experience not being able to get started with my chosen spec immediately. This lead me to start gearing through world quests instead of the usual getting boosted in mythic+ by friends and guildies and it was actually somewhat of a nice experience. I’d actually done something similar not too long ago with my hunter that I leveled which is still Alliance and on another realm so I didn’t really have any choices beyond just gearing myself through world quests and there as here it proved to actually be a bit of a interesting casual experience. It was also interesting to see how luck-based world quests actually are since you need to not only get something in a slot where the item level is still an upgrade but the quest also needs to be one that actually provides the highest possible item level—a good example of this is from yesterday, where I actually saw a world quest on my warrior for a piece of 355 azerite gear even though I had already been getting mostly quests for 370 azerite gear and was wearing all 370 azerite gear as well as an average item level of 380 or so. This means world quests still have to a degree the randomness of being able to actually get useful gear from them as other content just that you know beforehand if you even need to bother—expecting titanforging of course.

It was interesting to witness this in play again since I have been mostly ignoring world quests for a while since the chance for relevant gear is so low—basically on most of my characters it needs to titanforge—and the content in and of itself isn’t that fun. What made it fun for a while on the warrior and hunter was the possibility to look around for new world quests and see at least one or two that gave a guaranteed upgrade and to be able to see that slow progress towards higher item level pieces after a while, still that doesn’t last long and is already ending pretty much on my warrior—I very rarely now see any world quest that provides an item level upgrade and while I know that world quests can scale higher it doesn’t seem like a realisitic gearing path for me anymore.

The general diversion into more casual content—leveling and world quests—has been welcome though as at the moment the general level of interest for the more interesting content doesn’t seem to be that high—or maybe more the availability of the people I would like to play with—and at times it’s just nice to be able to play the game at a slower pace. Maybe that’s what classic will end up being for me—the more slow paced casual diversion for the times when there is less going on in retail. I guess we’ll know that in a few months when it releases though we will probably be in the middle of progress again by then.

We took a poke at Operation: Mechagon yesterday on the PTR and it was a surpising amount of fun—especially since the tuning on some of the abilities is a bit extreme yet. We didn’t get to start quite from the beginnging since some people in the run had already killed the first couple of bosses and we also had the small extra challenge of doing the third and fourth boss on hard mode since they had begun that sequence—this made the encounters a bit more interesting though the hard mode mechanic didn’t seem that bad though it did mean I needed to play my druid instead of my priest which made the healing requirement at times more challenging since I have less experience healing with the druid and timers aren’t available yet so it was rather difficult to try to predict when the damage would come.

King Gobbamak

The first boss we fought was King Gobbamak. The boss fight seems to normally be fairly straightforward with some players needing to stand in the tank hit to split the damage as well as get charged so they can run to the pylons that stand around the boss area and charge them so that they kill the adds that the boss continually spawns. What made this fight more interesting for us was partially the hard mode—additional adds get spawned that follow the players and leave goop on the ground that kills you very quickly. These adds were also the reason we wanted a druid with mass entanglement. But the really difficult part was the area damage that the boss periodically does, stomping the ground and dealing heavy damage to the group along with rocks that fall one-shotting players. We actually two healed this boss at least for those damage phases since they ended up being just too much for my druid without the ability to predict them accurately.

That kind of was the whole fight though, kite the boss around the room due to the bots and activate the pylons. Somewhat simple but a relatively hard healing check at the moment—I’m guessing that will be nerfed before the dungeon goes live, but on the other hand it will be much easier to manage with proper timers so maybe it isn’t necessary.

HK-8 Aerial Oppression Unit

Next came the Aerial Oppression Unit, the boss that activates the hardmode on the three previous bosses and killing them on hard mode makes this one activate its hardmode as well. Though now that I think about it, I’m not sure if we played this one on hardmode or not, since I don’t actually know if they played all the three previous bosses on hardmode or not and I did not pay attention to the name of the add.

Anyway, this boss begins with just an add on the ground being attackable and you can’t leave a circle around this add or you get ported back in. During this phase the bots describe by King Gobbamak spawn again and follow players as well as bombardements going through the middle of the circle. The phase was rather trivial for the most part with not overly much going on as long as one managed the bots well—again, this is why I was on my druid.

After this add gets killed, the Aerial Oppression Unit starts channeling and a tesla coil activates on one of the platforms on either side of the entrance. This tesla coil needs to be activated to interrupt the channel from the Unit however the way to there is trapped and you still have the bots that should not be kited up there so I rooted the bots one last time before we went up.

There are three types of traps: smaller bots that teleport you to the beginning of the maze; vents that electrify and stun you for five seconds as well as a rotating thingymajigg that also teleports you to the beginning. This part is fairly straightforward though you do have to try to be as quick as possible and the vents aren’t always overly clear as to when it is safe to go over them—recommend waiting until they activate and then going over quickly. We did also find that it was actually possible to avoid the first set of traps by just going around the edge but this was very fragile and somewhat risky so not sure I recommend that though it does cut down on the time significantly—I’m also expecting this be patched away before the dungeon goes live but you never know.

After the tesla coil is activated the Unit stops channeling and falls down to the ground and takes double damage for 20 maybe 30 seconds—didn’t look at the time of the debufff that exactly. After the debuff expires it flys up and you start from phase one again with the add on the ground. We needed two activations of the tesla coil to kill the boss and more than that might put undue stress on either healer mana or just the risk that more mistakes get made since the intermissions are somewhat dangerous if they take too long. Still, it was a fun fight and was fun to see more mechanics and phases on a dungeon boss again.

Tussle Tonks

After that you start going into the actual Mechagon complex and are met with the Tussle Tonks. This fight consists of two bosses, a big bot and a tank. The tank follows a random player, occasionally charges another random player and knocks them back as well as rarely doing very heavy area damage made worse by the arena actually being rather large and us being somewhat spread out so it was at times difficult to have everyone in range of area heals.

The bot on the other hand starts with three stacks of extra armour reducing damage taken by 99%. The tank needs to kite the bot to one of the hammers that are around the arena in order to remove one of the stacks—it bugged out for us though and the first hammer immediately removed two stacks which was convenient. The bot also occasionally does a whirvelwind attack which the melees need to watch out for as well as spawning mines.

The third enemy in this fight is actually the arena which occasionally spawns sawblades in a few different patterns as well as those hammers mentioned earlier—I belive they can also hit players if you are positioned poorly.

All in all the fight was relatively trivial outside of the area damage of the tank since few abilities did significant damage and the arena was probably a bit too big to make dodging some of the mechanics difficult as it was rather easy to spread out or simply stand so that you never got hit by the sawblades. The idea is neat but probably still needs some tuning.

K.U.-J.0.

After defeating the Tonks you get thrown down into the garbage disposal of Mechagon—some reward for winning the fight. Here was some rather nasty trash that had a rather significant area explosion on death that can be avoided through line of sight—would recommend this since we did have some deaths due to these explosions.

After the trash you finde a cute mechanical dog by the name of K.U.-J.0. and it is the next boss. The fight was actually even more simple than the previous one unfortunately. The boss has four main mechanics: a very heavy damage over time effect on the tank that needs to be dispelled immediately since the damage it does is completely overtuned—luckily it comes seldom enough that you always have dispel ready; secondly crates fall on players at increasingly frequent intervalls, these simply need to be dodged; the boss also heats up and does heavy area damage which needs to be avoided through line of sight—in other words, hide behind the crates though move away from them afterwards since they will explode; and finally the boss charges random players and does moderate damage.

And that’s the fight. We had one wipe because I underestimated the damage from the tank debuff and didn’t dispel it immediately—at the time I also didn’t know how often it stacked so I wanted to see if the tank survives until the second stack—but after that we killed the boss easily. Not every boss can be difficult but it felt a bit strange to have two easy bosses after two hard ones.

Machinist’s Garden

This is were the dungeon gets a bit annoying and puzzle-y. First there is a loading belt pushing you back while you need to dodge flame jets, not really difficult but a bit annoying especially since the belt isn’t that wide—here again you could avoid the pushback through going right on the edge but I did not even end up trying that since the belt was already narrow enough.

Second comes a stealth section where you instantly get teleported to the beginning if you fail and if you wipe on the next boss—Machinist’s Garden—you have to both of these again though you can disable the flame jets. Now neither of these two sections were difficult just something that you needed to do calmly which can be annoying after a wipe—luckily we didn’t have many of those on the next boss. However, these will be very annoying once the dungeon gets turned into a mythic+ dungeon since you are under time pressure to do them quickly however this makes you much more likely to fail and the whole group suffers from individual fails in the sense that they need to wait for individual players. It is cool that Blizzard at times does something different with dungeons but these sections just don’t really fit into mythic+ unfortunately.

The boss however was, again, not overly interesting—I’m getting the feeling that only the overtuned/hardmode bosses really were interesting for us. Was mostly just dodge the flamethrowers that spawn in the middle and go around the room, kill the small plants that shoot at random players before they kill the player. I actually can’t recall any other mechanics though I’m pretty sure there were others—we did kill the boss with two dead players so it wasn’t exactly trivial just felt a bit uninspired from a mechanics point of view somehow. Though I guess having a mechanical garden that turns out to be deadly is as a concept interesting but it might just be more difficult to turn that into memorable mechanics.

King Mechagon

Now, the final boss King Mechagon. This was actually a rather cool proper two phase fight with a decent duration.

Phase one

The boss flies on a small machine reminiscent of something like Mimiron’s Head. During this phase the boss regularily targets one player with a Giga-Zap which does heavy damage and leaves a nasty dot. For this players need to be a bit spread out so that two players don’t get hit—getting hit a second time from the zap is deadly since the debuff also doubles the damage received.

There are also small stationary bots around the room that deal ticking damage to players around them, the boss regularily recalibrates these causing them to move to a new position as well as dealing damage to players on their way there.

Finally, the boss occasionally flies into the air and stars bombarding the ground with a laser following one player. This deals deadly damage if you stand in the laser and moderate-heavy damage to the whole group—as a healer, pay special attention to the player that still has the debuff from the zap since they will die quickly if not healed.

Phase two

After the boss mocks you for only disposing of a piece of furniture—his flying machine—he jumps into a big robot suit on the far side of the room from the entrance. As the flying machine is broken he will no longer fly into the air but the two other abilities from phase one are empowered, the small bots now constantly fly to new positions and the Giga-Zap is now considerably wider and is cast three times in a row each time on a new player.

The boss also periodically throws a magnet into the room, which sucks all the small bots into one spot, dealing area damage to the whole group which gets reduce the farther away you are.

Phase three?

The King jumps out of the big mecha suit and melee attacks the tank. No mechanics, just kill him—a bit like the last boss of The MOTHERLODE!!!.

All in all, this fight doesn’t have that many mechanics however the tuning of those mechanics—especially the Giga-Zap in combination with the area damage—still makes it rather challenging to heal. This also made it for me at least the most mechanically interesting fight in the dungeon, since it was all healable without timers but you still needed to be on your toes the whole time and anticipate potential sources of damage the whole time. The intervals of the mechanics was also fast paced enough to keep the fight interesting the whole time—a fitting end to the dungeon.

Conclusion

I find the dungeon to be rather fun, though there are some parts I already see being very annoying once it becomes available on mythic+. Still, as it is it does give something of that raid feeling in a five player group and as such I think Blizzard has succeeded with their goal and I’m sure the few tuning issues there were will be fixed before the dungeon gets released on live realms. It was also really fun going in and poking on a dungeon beforehand, getting a early look at the abilities similar to how it felt doing the raid on the PTR. Learning by doing is afterall much more fun than just watching guides of other people doing it.

So, go do the dungeon once it comes out, seemed fun!