As mentioned I’ve been playing some Magicka recently and we finished the main campaign and one of the DLC campaigns: The Stars are Left.

Now it has been a really fun time and I’ll have to look into getting some of the other DLC campaigns, I believe there are still two or three to play along with Magicka 2 it seems, I wasn’t even aware that there was a second installment of the game out so now I’m looking forward to getting the chance to play that and see what it’s all about and what they’ve changed.

It has also been really fun to be playing in coop this time around, as I have had a few bashes at the Stars are Left DLC alone but those had ended mostly in frustration since I was so unused to playing the game again as my original playthrough was around the time the game came out I think, which is around 7 years ago now.

But what is Magicka?

Magicka—as the name might imply—is a spellcasting game where you play as a mage with eight base elements at your disposal, these being: Water, Life, Shield, Frost, Lightning, Arcane, Earth and Fire. You can activate one of these elements by pressing a hotkey and combine up to five of them and either throw them at the enemy—or yourself—as is or if the combination is a magick you know then you can cast that, usually casting the magick is the right move as they tend to be more powerfull but sometimes just throwing a big rock at the enemy is more effective. You also can’t use all magicks everywhere, for example you can’t conjure a lightning bolt indoors which limits its usability somewhat.

Some of the base elements also combine into other elements, water and frost combining into ice and fire and water combining into steam for example.

This basic system is really the beauty of the game, since there are so many combinations you can do and you’re encouraged to use many of them since enemies have different weaknesses. This is especially apparent later on in the game where actually using the wrong element against some enemies will heal them instead of damage them—the obvious example being undead being healed by arcane and damaged by life, which does make undead somewhat easy to deal with in this game.

For those looking for a challenge, the game is also rather hard when played alone as the monsters can kill you really quickly and you only have one extra life between checkpoints, this encourages a rather careful style of play.

Alternatively, play in coop with 1-3 other people and start getting hit by their errant spells as well, though luckily you do get the Revive magick from the start and it is rather easy to cast—don’t try it while wet though, trying to cast magick involving lightning while wet will just lead to you hurting yourself.

That does lead nicely into another aspect about the game though, namely status effects. Now these are also rather obvious, cast water on someone and they’ll be wet and be weakened against lightning and unable to use lightning in their spellcasting if they are a caster. Fire removes the wet status though it does cause some damage even then. Frost similarily slows one down or freezes even if one was already wet. Fire also removes the slow from frost. There is also a magick that removes all status effects from everything on the screen which can be useful at times—especially if one has thrown down a few too many mines.

Right, mines. As in the explody type, not the diggy type. They are made by combining either life or arcane with shield along with any other elements one wants and tend to be very useful when playing along as they knock back enemies which makes them easier to control. Shield and earth is another good way to control enemies as this creates walls, which while destroyable at least prevent the enemies from squishing you instantly. You can also create a wall with shield alone and at times that is necessary, but the stone walls tend to last a bit longer but are slower to cast. You can also combine the stone walls with fire or frost to burn or slow your enemies, making them even more useful.

Should I play Magicka?

If you like either hard games (single player) or very fun coop games (multiplayer) and spellcasting, then yes. Magicka is just simply a fun game that doesn’t take itself too seriously and just allows you to have tons of fun with spellcasting. It can be frustratingly hard at times but coop with its revives alleviates that a lot and the silly teamkills that can happen are consequently more funny than frustrating—as long as one isn’t playing with a griefer, but I suppose that wouldn’t be fun in any game.

Magicka even seems to be -70% at the moment on Steam until the end of the week, so I suppose it would be a decent time to buy as well. It seems to be slightly cheaper on the Paradox website if one wants to buy the game along with all the DLC though, so that might be worth checking out as well.

Oh, there are also actually arena PVP and challenge modes in the game, but I’ve focused on the campaign/adventure mode since that’s what interests me and what I’ve played and is probably where one should start with the game anyway.

Sometimes there are quiet times, like the past week. Not much has really been going on apart from the usual raids and some mythic+. And while that has been slightly disappointing at times—mostly because I keep wanting to do more mythic+ and do better there—it’s actually gone as one should have expected. The affixes aren’t exactly conducive to doing higher keys, especially within the constraints of our setup since we don’t really have any classes that excel at dealing with orbs.

In good news however, some of the disappointment has also come from increased interest and consequently participation of a few guildies in the runs. They have indicated a more regular interest in doing higher keys, which would allow for a team that plays better together instead of the constant reliance on random people that are hard to evaluate before the run begins. Now I did mention disappointment, and that has partially come from some level of inexperience showed by them at times, but inexperience is quite simply fixed by experience so that will come with time. Setup wise, I actually think we should be decently off for most affixes even if it is very unconventional. Though Hyrja might pose some problems, but when doesn’t she?

This is actually making me a bit more excited for the coming weeks—well, not the next, the affixes are even worse and I don’t think there will be any higher keys done then—since we get to refine the team and I actually get to know some more people from the guild better.

Quiet times however, are also perfect for taking a poke at some other games and me and a guildie did that yesterday with Magicka. I have played the game through before, but it remains really fun even though it was a particularily deadly time yesterday for some reason—as in, I kept dying. There did seem to be a surprising amount of lag at times, as in enemies walking through my mines and the mines just despawning without doing damage which might have contributed to some of my deaths—though luckily in coop you have a resurrection spell that is rather easy to cast.

The game really is meant for the chaos of multiplayer and not the slow methodical play of single player. Maybe I’ll end up doing a similar retrospective on Magicka as I did on Terraria, though I feel Magicka requires less explaining than Terraria—the fun is a bit more obvious: crazy, destructive magical coop. Fair warning though, it’s really important who one plays with. If one likes constantly goofing around and killing their teammates and that frustrates the other player, it probably won’t be a fun experience.

It is really fun in single player as well, though the game is much harder when played alone for two reasons:

1. In single player, you are the target of all enemy abilities making you that much more likely to die
2. As mentioned, in multiplayer other players can ressurect you. In single player, you have a spirit that will ressurect you once between save points, otherwise you get sent back to the save point.

In single player you do avoid your coop partners accidentally killing you though, which does make it slightly easier to stay alive but is in no way a compensation for the benefits having other players there brings. The two modes quite simply require very different playstyles, single player more focused on shields and walls and in multiplayer one can have a bit more fun as well as more time to cast things.

All in all, I was already about to ask if we could continue playing, but the guildie isn’t online yet so I guess that will have to wait a bit… Well, good things are worth waiting for. And there seem to be many good things to wait for, there was a Q&A announced for Thursday, Magicka as noted, hopefully more successful mythic+ with a more regular group of cool people—from what I can tell my guildies are pretty cool—and finally Battle for Azeroth a bit further into the future. No confirmed release date yet, wonder if we get one on Thursday? Would seem a bit early but one never knows.

They say time flies when you’re having fun and the last few weeks have gone by rather quickly. As mentioned briefly, Argus is down. Now this is a few weeks ago and I have my kill by now as well along with my trial being over in the guild apparently. That was a bit of a surprise, since I just kind of ended up being promoted without any feedback or discussion or the like but nice nonetheless.

The Argus fight in itself was fairly trivial at this point though I did do a few silly mistakes. There’s only really one difficult part in the last phase if one gets the wrong debuff, aside from that it seems to be basically: stay with the group unless you have bomb/debuff in which case out of the group. Sure there is a bit more nuance than that and Argus isn’t an easy boss, but it still felt fairly straightforward—which gives me much better understanding for some of the people in the guild who are kind of done with the boss since I’m guessing they were rather tired of wiping on other people’s mistakes. Though that is something that happens with every difficult boss and we actually managed the kill with relatively few wipes, 225 or so.

Now I’m just curious to see how they continue with the setups, since I believe only three healers need anything from Argus if they decide to keep taking four healers along or go with three from now on for farm as well.

When it comes to downing bosses, there has obviously been some other “progress” for me as well since the last boss I mentioned progressing on was Kin’garoth. So far the Coven of Shivarra still stands for me, but Kin’garoth, Varimathras and Aggramar have been downed—along with Argus as mentioned. The Kin’garoth fight was about as straightforward as it felt in progress, it’s still error prone with the bombs but other than that straightforward.

Varimathras is almost the same as heroic, just that one has an escort when one goes out with the Necrotic Embrace and there’s a need for keeping proper distances due to this. Also there’s an add that needs to be focused quickly. The fight remains a pure mechanics check, similar to the Maiden in Tomb of Sargeras.

Aggramar, well, just felt like more damage. Sure the big cleave needs to be soaked as two camps as it applies a debuff increasing the damage taken from it, and there spawn some more adds. But the intermissions remain the only difficult phase healerwise and beyond that it’s just add control. Which is fragile yes, and takes time to learn but doesn’t apply to me as a healer much. Though I did get to help a bit with kicking the adds back, which was fun.

Aside from raids, I have also gotten into doing some mythic+ a bit more regularily again which has been really nice. It feels good to be pushing for higher keys again and being challenged—though this week hasn’t gone quite according to plan with more depletions than I’d have thought. But no matter, it has been too much fun anyway to care too much about that. I think I’m slowly managing to get rid of the stress to perform I have been feeling at times which has prevented me from enjoying aspects of the game I tend to enjoy the most.

With that said, I’m actually hoping I manage to play the key I have still, though time is quickly running out and finding decent people for a key this late might be a challenge. But should still be manageable, if not then not the end of the world either.

Overall, good times at the moment. I’m really looking forward to actually participating in progress when Battle for Azeroth comes out, hopefully there will be many opportunities for that.

So recently I have actually been playing something other than World of Warcraft at times—namely Terraria. It has been a surprising amount of fun really, I mean I’ve played Terraria before and gotten to the start of hardmode¹ but not really much farther than that. This time I and a guildie actually played through the game on expert² managing to kill all of the bosses though I believe there are still a few events we haven’t seen but doing those would be mostly for completionisms sake as we don’t really need the rewards provided anymore.

So what is Terraria?

Basically 2D Minecraft with bosses to kill and RPG elements in the form of loot, gear and spells and a tiny bit of one might say leveling. Now let’s break that down a bit.

Why do I say 2D Minecraft? Well, the most recongisable feature of Minecraft is being able to mine and gather things and use those things for crafting and this is a central feature of Terraria as well, but Terraria is a 2D game where Minecraft is 3D. This is the central progression system in Terraria, as getting better materials feeds into the RPG element of loot, gear and power progression. The better the gear, the more one survives and the more damage one deals.

However, these materials are not only found through mining or the like, it also requires killing mobs and bosses—especially bosses for the more powerful things. Sometimes the bosses drop straight out equipment, other times crafting materials which are used to craft the more powerful equipment.

So in essence, the goal of the game is to mine some ore, smelt some bars, get a decent set of starter armour and weapons and take down some bosses in order to get better equipment to take down the harder bosses or maybe just harder monsters out in the world. Or just being able to mine the better ores, there’s also a progression of pickaxes enabling one to mine better ore.

Why is this game actually really awesome?

It combines the whole creation aspect of crafting not only gear but structures into the RPG mechanics really well, to the point where for most of the bosses one actually creates custom built arenas in order to have a better chance of defeating them. Sometimes these arenas are really simple, take for example the Wall of Flesh—a big wall of flesh that moves from one side of the map towards the other and one does not want to get stuck inside of it. So the arena is really simple, just a long straight path along one can run and shoot at the boss as the terrain in Hell where the boss resides is usually dangerous—due to lava—or simply otherwise hard to navigate due to housing.

Other bosses, like the Moon Lord or the Destroyer are better defeated by building a small cage barely big enough to fit the player where one sits and shoots at the boss from, giving protection from some of the bosses attacks but far from all as they tend to go through walls.

And lastly, there are the simple big cages with platforms³ allowing one to better dodge the bosses abilities, especially useful against something like Skeletron. These usually have solid walls to allow player spells to bounce around inside the arena so that they may hit the boss several times.

This ability to mould the world along with the wide selection of weapons and spells makes the game really diverse when going from start to finish. One is also forced to keep changing weapons and spells as one progresses, meaning one has to adapt to a slightly altered playstyle. This is most evident with spells, since spells usually have very different effects meaning one really gets to change how one casts as the game goes on.

As the game progresses one also gets nice utility items like grappling hooks which allow one to much more easily move around the caverns of the world and wings improving one’s mobility even more. Both are also rather essential to kill many bosses, since dodging without these accessories becomes difficult if not impossible.

Closing words

All in all, the game is a really enjoyable experience with lots of diverse weapons and I’m kind of sad that it’s over. Now I suppose I need to find something else to do along mythic+ and raids, especially since we’ll probably slowly be raiding less with progress being over. Right, that’s a thing, Argus is down! Not for me, but for the guild, I’m looking forward to taking my own poke at the boss when the time comes.

Classic servers were announced a long while ago at BlizzCon along with the Battle for Azeroth announcment. But I think that slowly my thoughts on them are starting to crystallize as someone who played on a private Classic server.

In the end I’ll probably check Legion out as well, though as usual it’ll probably be mostly to see the leveling experience and checking out the dungeons a few times. Sure, maybe I’ll poke my head in to LFR as well, but eh, it doesn’t really seem all that interesting. Might as well watch some of the livestreams for that.

Me, 2015

How little I knew at the time.

Are Classic servers a good idea?

I think so, yes. There’s clearly quite a lot of pent up demand from them considering how much the community has been clamoring for them for a long time. Also considering that new private Classic servers keep popping up as old ones get closed clearly shows it’s something people are willing to work on to keep alive and something people want to play.

They also provide an outlet for people who love World of Warcraft and want to keep playing it, but have gotten tired of the current content or mechanics. Being able to play the original form might very well re-ignite their love for the game—looking at the quote above, that’s certainly what it did for me. Playing Classic on Nostalrius was what made me have another proper go at Warlords of Draenor and actually try to like it and learn the new mechanics. Here we are a couple of years later with Legion accounting for something like half of my /played on my main that I’ve had since Classic.

Sure that’s also down to Legion being a really good expansion and the people I’ve met while playing, but without Nostalrius and being able to play something I know I love I’m not sure I’d given Legion (and Warlords) the same chance.

What could go wrong?

The implementation. This is something Blizzard is extremely aware off, but it might still go wrong. The question is: what, if anything, do you change? Now with StarCraft: Remastered, they changed a few things: the lobby system for multiplayer (from what I know) is now integrated with the new Battle.net, Battle.net friends are now to a degree accessible in-game through whispers and the like, and finally the big obvious thing: the graphics.

Now the graphics along with better resolution support were the obvious change that people wanted with SC:R and that’s what they got and from what I know people are quite happy with that. With WoW however, the situation might be different since we have already gotten new textures and character models with expansions and they are not universally loved and would quite significantly alter the feel of the game. Resolution support is already up to par from what I know, since WoW is a 3D game anyway so resolution restrictions aren’t a thing in the same extent as with a sprite-based game. I personally would hope for updated textures in higher resolution with no model changes.

Another innocent seeming change might be Battle.net integration, I mean who wouldn’t want to be able to talk to their friends? At the same time, that was unavailable in Classic and actually really encouraged server communities. And if we have Battle.net, do we get cross-server group support? While it is a really nice feature to have, it does erode the importance of the server and the reputation one can build there. So seemingly innocent changes can come with big consequences for the feel of the game which makes the whole thing something of a mine-field which is probably why it has taken Blizzard so long to start working on this. I would like Battle.net integration in order to be able to keep chatting with people who aren’t necessarily playing on a Classic server but any cross-realm features beyond that I don’t think fit.

Then we come to the less innocent changes, like LFD and LFR. Both of those seem like a somewhat obvious “no way” to me, but at the same time they might be something people expect. And what about the LFG-tool, does that belong in the same category? It’s a lot more convenient than spamming chat channels but it also doesn’t allow for the same kind of spontaneous activity. Most of my dungeon runs in Classic came from chilling in a city and seeing some group going somewhere looking for more and me just deciding to join. That doesn’t really happen with the LFG-tool in the same way as I have to actively open the tool and decide what I’m looking for (the category if nothing else). I don’t really see a place for any of these tools on a Classic server, but we’ll see what Blizzard comes up with along with the community.

Am I going to play on a Classic server?

Now for the real question. I think the short of it is: no. That comes with some caveats however—am I going to at least try a Classic server? Yes, almost definitely. However I do not see myself playing on a Classic server long term at the moment as playing two MMOs at the same is just a huge time investment and I have kind of done most of the things I wanted to achieve in Classic.

Sure, there are things I never did that would be nice to achieve—like clearing the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj and Naxxramas—however the path to those things would include doing all of the content I’ve done which would require regular raiding which depends on a guild. And I’m really enjoying only having three raid-days at the moment, introducing another guild with more raid-days is not really something I’m planning on. Now if the Classic servers get released at the end-lull of Battle for Azeroth where I only have one day a week of farm left, that might change. But I highly doubt Classic servers would take priority over the current expansion servers for me which would make it difficulty to do the content I’m interested in and enjoy.

Unless maybe I decide I hate the current direction of the game and decide to go back to something old and familiar again, but I hope I have grown past that and that I can be a bit less stubborn these days. Sometimes being stubborn is good, but when it’s preventing one from enjoying something one wants to enjoy it’s not very helpful.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to seeing how Classic servers turn out and at least taking them for a spin—I’ll let future-me be the final judge and keep an open mind for now.