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.

So patch 8.2 Rise of Azshara has been out for a week now being released last Wednesday and it feels so far we have seen the worst parts of the patch. Now, it was to be expected with a new patch that it would include lots of new world content and a renewed requirement to farm Azerite—neck level 55 being the goal for my guild—but the implementation of these new world quests as well as daily quests—wasn’t expecting to see those again—leaves something to be desired. Many of these require finding or killing something somewhat rare, like hunting six chests in Mechagon or killing 3 rare mobs in Nazjatar which means with bad luck you can end up running around the zone for half an hour without getting any progress on these quests which makes for a somewhat frustrating experience, and these type of quests seem to be a daily occurrence in the new zones.

Some of these quests are made significantly worse because they require you to interact with normal items in the world, like collecting the Sea Stars in Nazjatar or the construction projects in Mechagon and since these are under normal circumstances expected to be something of a rare thing or something thought to be a benefit for many players—the construction projects—only one player can interact and gain quest progress at a time meaning not only are you randomly running around looking for something that isn’t overly common and the quest doesn’t bother specifying where to find it but you are also actively competing against your fellow players since them getting progress means you don’t get any. This effect seems to be at its worst when you need to collect the Sea Stars in Nazjatar since you generally need ten of them and they don’t exactly spawn often, so even if you do know where to look it takes a while running around the area to get them all.

Another somewhat mean example of daily quests was in Mechagon on Monday, where you needed to contribute 1000 spare parts, which wouldn’t have been too bad if I hadn’t converted most of my spare parts into boxes of spare parts in order to save on inventory space—spare parts stack up to 250 and a box requires 250 parts to craft and also stacks, how far I don’t know, but I’m assuming 20 or so which saves a lot of space—and in addition to that you needed another 260 or so spare parts in contributions to a construction project worst part of which was that finding one construction project wasn’t enough and only got me 76% of the progress towards completing the quest.

In addition to this, something that slightly annoys me with the new zones is the amount of content that you need to stumble upon or look up in a guide. For example, you can unlock two extra world quests in Nazjatar per day by going to the pylon in the cave in the murloc village to the east of Nazjatar and doing a short quest chain—only two or three quests. These world quests give you an extra 150 or so reputation per day which while trying to get to exalted as quickly as possible in order to unlock flying is something of a big deal yet there is no indication that all of this content is there meaning those that don’t find it on the first day are permantently behind.

Now, I understand that these zones are meant to include a lot of exploration and to a degree being forced to run around these zones more does contribute to that goal but it feels rather frustrating to have something so central as flying gated behind this type of content that is quite frankly annoying to do along with the unclarity of how to go about doing it, and I know missing out on a couple of world quests for a couple of days isn’t the worst thing especially since there are many other hidden or luck based sources of reputation similar to that available in these zones. Despite that, these zones for me feel more frustrating than fun since the content they encourage me to do feels more frustrating than fun which makes me dislike them and demotivates me from playing the game a bit and that is not a good feeling to have from new content. Luckily this all will pass once I’ve farmed the reputation and can start ignoring these zones but I don’t think that Blizzard’s goal was having people looking forward to not having to do these zones anymore right from the start.

All of this is put into an interesting perspective when contrasted with Classic, since there it was the norm not to get too exact instructions on where to go in order to complete a quest, just a general direction where you can find the things you need and off you go. Of course, this generally lead to people looking up where to find things on the internet instead of discovering it themselves and the quests did provide some indication in what direction you were supposed to be looking instead of none like the quests in the new zones—one example of this being the bounty quests which just ask you to kill X amount of mobs yet give no indication where they are to be found, neither in the quest text nor a map indicator. It kind of feels that the developers were trying to replicate some of that Classic feeling through these quests but forgot the crucial part of at least giving some indication where to go.

Anyway, it shouldn’t be too big of a problem getting all of this done before the raid releases on mythic which is the important part, so maybe it isn’t that bad in the end though it still doesn’t feel nice having content that feels frustrating even if it is just in the short term.

With the new war campaign quests released with patch 8.2 including rescuing Bane it seems to be made moderately clear that many of the central characters are somewhat tired of the faction conflict—Jaina, Thrall, Thalyssra, Baine and Lor’themar as some notable examples. This kind of teases the potential of either an upcoming patch or the next expansions including cross faction play since if the NPCs are working more together than before—one of the arguments they already present is the fact that we have already worked together many times before—it would make little sense to maintain the faction barrier as a gameplay mechanic. In a sense, it also feels somewhat fitting that following the expansion that puts the main emphasis—in the beginning at least—on the faction conflict we get one where we kind of properly start joining forces and working together on a more permanent basis.

It also makes a great deal of sense in the light of Azsharas involvement as well as her being controlled by an old god as these are usually threats that we end up banding together to defeat. Another point potentially pointing towards this is whatever unkown force caused Vol’jin to appoint Sylvanas as warchief—everyone including himself had been assuming it was the Loa however they all seemed to deny it as well as several other death related characters and we left off with Vol’jin going into the realm of the dead to figure out what exactly happened there which seems somewhat risky since even getting to the point of figuring out that he indeed was being controlled by some mysterious force lead to several attacks against him as well as the player so letting him go along and adventure alone somewhere where we can’t really reach him doesn’t seem like the best move but does make me curious to see what that story is foreshadowing; it felt like something more than another old god since it had to do with the realm of death and they tend to be more void aligned but we will have to see.

Now this is all speculation on my part and I am curious to see where the story goes regardless, but I am really hoping this will actually be the case in the near future for a few reasons. Primarily, I just really want to play a Night Elf again since I just really like Night Elves and that’s my primarily annoyance “having” to play Horde. Secondly, “having” to play Horde. The faction imbalance at higher levels of PvE play is really bad which means that for anyone wanting to seriously participate in high-end PvE content be that raiding or mythic+ it gets really difficult to do so if you play Alliance making it not much of a choice since you will have great difficutly in finding others to play with and this problem seems to be getting worse over time—as an example, I know of at least a couple high-end guilds that transferred from Alliance to Horde at the end of Legion due to recruiting problems but have not heard of any transferring to Alliance even with easier access to the Hall of Fame being something of a small carrot. Recruiting is just hard enough as it is without making it even harder by playing on the minority faction—now I say minority faction even though from the stats I’ve heard the overall faction balance is decent and just the high-end is skewed but that doesn’t really help when you want to do high-end content.

I will actually be somewhat disappointed if Blizzard doesn’t end up implementing this in the near term—next expansion at the latest—since it would seem to be a clear indicator that they don’t see this faction imbalance as a problem which would seem odd. It’s also a problem that will get bigger the smaller the playerbase is since recruiting and finding groups will get harder even on the majority faction and probably close to impossible on the minority one and as it seems that World of Warcraft is in a slow decline—it is a really old game after all—this seems somewhat inevitable.

But I guess we will have to see, so nothing to do now but wait.

With timewalking being active a friend of mine asked if I wanted to level a character from 110 to 120 since it was apparently supposed to be easy to level through timewalking and this indeed proved to be true—I think we averaged two dungeons per level.

I used this opportunity to level my Paladin whom I rather liked playing as Protection before though not so much Holy since somehow the toolkit just felt lacking to me being used to playing Holy Priest. This ended up actually being a rather fun time after the first dungeon where I needed to get used to my keybinds again and rediscovered my abilities—one thing that surprised me was that Protection Paladins have bubble again, I believe it was simply a 40% damage reduction in Legion though I’m not quite sure anymore. What also contributed to the fun—for me at least—was it being The Burning Crusade timewalking—my favourite expansion after Legion—and the scaling being somewhat difficult again making smaller pulls with a bith of line of sighting necessary. It also really made me miss being able to effectively level through dungeons again, it was so much more fun than questing. Another cool thing about timewalking while leveling up with a character one played in Legion, is being able to use the “legiondaries”—the random legendary equipment from Legion—the whole time since your level gets scaled down so it stays active.

Tanking with a Paladin again was really fun as well, the Paladin was actually my first tank that I leveled back in Wrath of the Lich King when the mana management for them became a bit more sane and the easier time with keeping aggro made me more confident to try tanking. The ability at the time to easily generate area threat with Consecration along with friends wanting to take a poke at Horde characters and me consequently wanting to play a Blood Elf sealed the deal—Warriors not being available to Blood Elves at the time and Blizzard already having killed my interest in tanking with a Death Knight when they nerfed dual wield tanking. This makes me think, one of the things I would probably actually want to try with Classic is playing a tank—along with re-experiencing old school Priest healing—since I never really tried it back in the day though the time investment required for leveling makes me wonder how much I actually want to try this.

The whole shield and Consecration based tanking style I still find fun and in general I find myself strongly preferring tanks that can actually block—so Warriors and Paladins—over other tanks having played a bit of both Death Knight and Druid tank somewhat recently even. I also have to admit, Avenger’s Shield is also just such a fun ability to use and I makes me a bit sad to lose the legiondary that gave us extra damage and bounces to the shield since just seeing it fly around felt fun and satisfying. This all makes me actually want to play my Paladin more than my Warrior at the moment and the gearing and Azerite hurdle shouldn’t be too bad with the upcoming patch especially since it seems we get to easily unlock Azerite level 35 and the new Essences without much grind—well, the early essences at least. So that might very well be my secondary project for next reset, getting some questing in with my Paladin in addition to my Priest so that they both are at a decent point when it comes to essences, though this should apparently be easier with the Priest since from what I hear the best Discipline at the moment can be acquired through questing in Nazjatar which shouldn’t be too bad as long as there is no time gating—I don’t know if there is, haven’t really done much on the PTR outside the raid tests since farming the same content several times happens often enough on live for me.

I guess all of this means one more reason for me to look forward to the new patch and the next reset, I’m also curious to see how much I actually end up getting to use my Paladin since my Warrior so far hasn’t seen too much use—unfortunately doesn’t have enough gear at the moment to confidently tank alt keys for the guild and haven’t really been motivated to gear. Hopefully I get time to play both tanks a bit more, but I guess we’ll see that in the coming weeks.

With last reset being The Restless Cabal this reset it was time to take our poke at killing Uu’nat for a second time and unfortunately it did not go as well as Cabal did. Admittedly, we had many more new players in for Uu’nat than Cabal among them a new tank that I believe had never played the boss on mythic before so it was quite understandable that we did not end up killing the boss again—at least in the one evening we’ve had time to try so far. For me though, it was still fun seeing the boss again and getting some more raiding in—especially since it would have otherwise been only one raid day—even though I do enjoy the occasional pause in raiding the boss is still fun and we do have good reason to try for a rekill for some of the people that made significant contributions to progress but couldn’t be in on the actual kill.

What did somewhat disappoint me however was the attitude of some of our raiders, questioning why we were there again and seeming to be very unmotivated by the whole raiding thing which made me internally question why they then were in a raiding guild at all if they don’t like the activity. The worst example of this was one of our raiders stating they would only be raiding one day a week and only Battle of Dazar’alor until the new raid comes out which felt very rude and inappropriate. There are some attempts at discussing matters further so I’ll have to see where that goes, but overall something of a strange reaction I think.

That also seems to somewhat put into question if we will actually be able to get enough people together for next reset to try for another rekill, if not I find that a very rude way to show that these players don’t really care about their fellow raiders, something of a “I’ve got mine and you don’t matter to me” which I don’t really find an appropriate mentality to have in raiding. To be fair, it being summer does make it more understandable that players might not be available for raiding as much as the rest of the year and that does make me a bit worried about how we will manage the progress starting in a couple of weeks but that doesn’t really excuse the mentality or the statements made.

If we do end up having enough people to try for the rekill again, it should in theory get a bit easier with the Essences becoming available—of course this depends on people actually having and taking the time to unlock those essences. I just hope this all ends up being a minor footnote and not something of greater relevance since it is behaviour that seems to annoy quite a few of our raiders and I hope it doesn’t end up having bigger consequences for the future of the guild.