On Sunday we ended up killing Azshara first try after some rough sub-one-percent wipes on Thursday and it was a very nice feeling even though it would’ve been even nicer to kill her already on Thursday since I think we would have ended around top 10 world at that point.

This kill was immediately followed by clearing The Eternal Palace on normal as well as reclearing once again Battle of Dazar’alor for the mount from Jaina, all in all a rather impressive set of farm achieved on one raid evening which took me somewhat by surprise but I guess should have been expected with our quick progress in the “pleb”-raid on Friday where we managed to clear normal as well as several bosses on heroic with alts as well as the greatly increased damage from the essences.

The raid in general is rather fun, though the last two bosses, Za’qul and Azshara, have me worrying somewhat for the more casual players since they again seem to be somewhat complex fights with several phases and a ton to learn. That said, they will now have the advantage of a big item level increase through the new raid that they did not receive in Crucible of Storms which might prove enough to make this raiding experience smoother as well as my perspective on the whole thing being rather far away from their experiences so such troubles are hard for me to predict.

That aside, I did find the Azshara fight rather fun though somewhat boring as a healer until the last phase with not much damage coming in before that. There are a decent amount of mechanics to think about, among them the decrees and mind control which I think nicely show some of the personality of Azshara—being so certain in her position as a queen as to commandeer people who are not her subjects, as well as being able to charm almost anyone to do her bidding—as well as the wards which we need to maintan in order to keep the water from killing us. With how the tuning was on heroic however, it does make me curious how many wipes we will end up seeing on mythic since I think we had much less trouble with Jaina on heroic than Azshara and Jaina was 300+ pulls—on the other hand, for Uu’nat we went in on heroic without any idea what to do while almost completely ignoring mechanics and killed him on the first try, and yet on mythic he was 300+ pulls as well, so maybe that’s no indication.

As for the rest of the bosses, my thoughts from the PTR mostly stand, with the exception of Orgozoa who proved much easier on live than there as well as Za’qul who didn’t have quite the one-shot potential with his fears on live as he did on the PTR making the fight much more manageable—of course, that is partially down to our gear level on live as compared to the PTR, so this might be much more difficult with less gear. Also, the Blackwater Behemoth is still a poorly executed environment, with not being able to eat under water preventing the group from properly recovering from a wipe as well as buffing up, that really needs to be fixed in some sensible manner though the fight itself seems fine now.

Yesterday we went ahead and cleared Operation: Mechagon on the live realms with hardmode and it was quite the contrast compared to the PTR experience, feeling somewhat easy even though we had the hardmode active which we didn’t for the most part on the PTR.

The biggest change I noticed was by King Gobbamak where the damage from the quake he does had been heavily reduced, not really even needing healing to keep anyone from dying as long as nobody got hit—still a good idea to top up the group but not nearly as intensive as on the PTR. The trash before King Mechagon had a similar nerf, where it still does significant damage but is much more surivable without instant reaction from the healer or using the absorb shields from the other adds.

Another interesting thing was the hardmode on K.U.-J.0., where you get a stacking slow debuff which ends you at 80% reduced movement speed. Since the fight is rather dependant on being able to spread apart as well as line of sight the boss, this proved somewhat tricky to work around though there was a nice corner to the left of the boss’ spawn—when you are looking at him standing in the room—where it was rather easy to do. With weaker gear or less damage I would think this might still prove somewhat tricky though, we didn’t need to play the movement mechanics overly much since we were able to kill the boss fairly quickly.

Finally, the big challenge came by King Mechagon himself, where the hardmode actually caused us a fair amount of wipes since the timing for it is somewhat brutal. The hardmode activates a instakill mechanic on the boss that charges up (down?) with time, the energy bar of the extra boss serving as a timer and the mechanic firing when the bar gets depleted. This happens fairly quickly, however it can be stalled with the interruption sequence. This flashes on the skulls on the side of the room when the cannon is at 35 energy and the buttons become clickable at 10-15 energy or so giving your group approximately 5 seconds to enter the correct sequence to prevent a wipe.

We solved this by giving each of the buttons a world mark and assiging one of the damage dealers and the healer to one of the buttons, then having them call out their world mark color after they had pressed the button to inform the next one that it was their turn. We also had a dedicated player watch the sequence and call it, so the rest could keep focused on mechanics—in phase one this was the tank since they had a good view of the buttons and didn’t need to focus on the other mechanics as much, in phase two one of the melees was responsible for calling this since they needed to move away from the boss anyway in order to arrive at the button in time. This worked well though it required some practise since the timing was really tight. I’m curious if an addon ends up being developed for this, since communicating it through voice almost felt too slow with very little room for error which I feel might be a bit too punishing on more casual groups which I feel should be able to complete this boss at some point.

Overall, the dungeon was fun and I look forward to seeing it on mythic+ at some point as well as maybe trying for the no-death achievement there apparently is rewarding rank four of the Mechagon essence, which is good since in the meantime I will probably need to run the dungeon a few times in order to unlock the previous ranks of the essenece since I think it could end up being rather good for some fights or mythic+.

On Friday I finally managed to get Pathfinder Part Two unlocking flying which was a relief especially since I seemed to be a bit behind the curve on that with several guildies unlocking it already on Wednesday and Thursday with one outlier unlocking it already on Tuesday.

To be fair, I took the lazy way out of only doing the “normal” daily things in the form of daily quests and world quests and completely skipping out on the hidden sources of reputation gain in the new zones in the form of fishing and rare hunting among other things—what other things I don’t know since I didn’t really want to put in the extra effort for small reputation gains. One small extra thing I did do was the pet battle world quests though those in and of themselves don’t give that much extra reputation, defeating each of them the first time provided a quest item for a decent chunk of extra reputation—especially in Nazjatar where I think you get 250 reputation per turn-in—which was a boon as otherwise I would probably have had the required reputation a day or two later.

The first thing I ended up doing with my re-found freedom was inviting a friend for a round of azerite world quests since I had been completely neglecting those in a small protest against Blizzard’s insistence to keep flying annoying to acquire. This small protest is probably in vain and more likely to hurt me than anyone else but still it felt good to do. Still, being able to fly again is just nice and I’m very happy that ordeal is now behind me so that I can enjoy the game more and be less annoyed by the trivial things in it. Luckily I won’t need to worry about not flying until the next expansion—hopefully, unless they again introduce a no-fly zone which I doubt—and that makes me look forward to new content even more since I won’t have to explore it on the ground.

I recently rediscovered Blizzard Watch which I used to read with some regularity a couple of years ago maybe but after that I stopped actively reading most World of Warcraft news sources except for MMO-Champion for patch news. Reading through some of the WoW articles over there I stumbled upon an interesting one titled “This raiding tier is not fun for a number of reasons. Is casual raiding dying?” which got me thinking a bit especially with the unrest in my guild over re-killing Uu’nat which was partially motivated by the difficulty of the boss and thus not wanting to play it again.

Now, I tend to enjoy difficult content and dislike trivial content as a general rule, though there are times when I just want to sit down and do some mindless content to pass the time. I also find it somewhat difficult to see normal and heroic as difficult, especially considering I boost both Crucible of Storms and Battle of Dazar’alor on heroic with something like half or one third of the raid being essentially dead weight. Still, we also have gear that probably significantly exceeds that available to the average normal or heroic raider which does make a big difference.

All of this made it really interesting for me to see the perspective that normal and heroic raids might be overtuned for the playerbase they are designed for at the moment, since for me and most in my guild they feel kind of trivial at this point even when they are released—again, we tend to go in overgeared into these raids so maybe that is to be expected. I can also very well understand that a player who has been playing for a very long time might be getting overwhelmed by the simple amount of mechanics they need to pay attention to per boss, since those have been increasing pretty drastically with time. Compare pretty much any Classic or Burning Crusade, probably even Wrath of the Lich King boss with current earlier tier bosses that tend to be easier and the amount of mechanics the bosses have have gone way up. The article makes the same point, stating that the time they need to spend mechanics has gone way up with Battle for Azeroth.

Now from a egoistical personal perspective, this is a good change since it means I have more access to difficult content which I enjoy, but at the same time I’m already raiding mythic which is the place people looking for difficult content are supposed to go and I also still find the earlier difficulties somewhat trivial outside of the PTR so having those earlier difficulties be too difficult for casuals also isn’t really benefitting me or anyone in any real way. There is one argument I can see for making normal and heroic more difficult than before and that is keeping it more in line with mythic so that the jump when going from heroic to mythic doesn’t become too big for players wanting to step into the next level of content, however this introduction has generally been done by having the earlier bosses be easier and them getting more difficult the further you get into the raid giving something of a smooth learning curve for people stepping into a new difficulty therefore I don’t really see this as a strong argument.

Even for me, there is also the flipside of difficult content, namely farm. World of Warcraft is an MMORPG after all, and that means that gear is a significant part of the experience as well as part of preparing for the next raid which means that the previous raid needs to be farmed in order to give the group the best possible chances when going into the new one. This also means that if every single boss has a high difficulty or high chance of wiping the raid due to individual fails it means that farm becomes more sluggish which also isn’t really fun since once you have killed a boss a couple of times it kind of moves into the trivial content category where you know what to do and expect and don’t really want to spend overly much time on that singular boss. I think that’s what is at the heart of the reluctance in my guild to rekill Uu’nat as well: somewhat significant time investment for something that doesn’t really provide us a tangible advantage and is more just a gesture of solidarity. Now I find that gesture really important personally but for others it’s just about getting the first kill as a group and what happens after that with mounts or achivements isn’t that important so I can kind of see that perspective even though I still find it rather rude towards our fellow guildies.

This all also makes me wonder how Azshara will be, since our short experience on the PTR seems to indicate the fight will be rather intricate even on heroic as there were already a somewhat significant amount of mechanics that you need to pay attention to just in phase one-first intermission-early phase two which would mean that the fight will possibly again prove somewhat difficult for your average casual guild which might prove very problematic for the game in the long run since casual guilds tend to be the lifeblood of the game where new players enter the game and then potentially at a later point move into more hardcore guilds or if they find themselves content there stay—I, too, have spent a significant time in casual guilds throughout my time in World of Warcraft and there have been very fun moments in there and without those times I wouldn’t be playing where I am today and would probabl have stopped playing before getting to where I am.

So in the end, this article provided me with an interesting perspective that I hadn’t really thought about since it isn’t really relevant to me or something I run into while playing, which is why I tend to really like reading blogs and the like from players who are playing the game in a different way than I am since it provides a new perspective and gives me something to think about, while also allowing me to question the assumptions I have about the game and its players. Hopefully the concerns in the article get appropriately adressed by Blizzard in the next expansion—I think it won’t be possible to change the way the raids are designed this expansion since it would be somewhat jarring for the new raid to feel significantly easier than the previous one since there has so far been a general progression towards harder raids as an expansion goes on with something of a reset with the first raid of a new expansion—and that the game overall starts getting more interesting again.

So it seems the weekly reset brought with it some changes to Nazjatar, namely fewer elite naga required for the bounty quest—believe it was 15 before, was only 5 now—as well as the requisition quests showing the areas of the map where you can find the items which is rather nice since it means I didn’t have to look that up somewhere else. Small changes but were still nice to see and makes it a bit less annoying to do the daily stuff in Nazjatar.