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.

So this weekend had some more raid tests open on the PTR, Azshara Heroic on Friday for a couple of hours and all of normal except Azshara for the rest of the weekend and we took a poke in there again. Now the bosses we killed last time around all went down easily, after all they are the early bosses so that is to be expected. Now there had been some changes to the Blackwater Behemoth which overall made the fight significantly easier, though unfortunately they had disabled the use of the artifact fishing pole—or its effect rather, nothing happens when you equip it during the fight. But this time around the damage on that fight was much lower and the pushback also had a much shorter duration, making the fight much easier than before.

Orgozoa

The rest of the raid however, was a bit more interesting. The first new boss on the list was Orgozoa, who actually proved to be a decent challenge to us since we didn’t quite understand the mechanic at first and weren’t sure how to handle the intermission. Now the primary mechanic, at least from a healer perspective, is the Incubation Fluid that he spits on a random player. This is a DoT that lasts for the rest of the phase and deals rather significant damage. That alone wouldn’t be so bad since the debuff wouldn’t spread too quickly since the boss doesn’t use the ability that often but the boss also periodically casts Arcing Current on a player with the debuff that chains up to three targets and spreading the debuff which meant that by the end of the phase we actually had quite a bit of healing to do.

The boss also spawns three adds at a time that were rather easy to deal with though they do leave after them a pool that needs to be soaked—in our case the tank could soak all of the pools alone—or they will explode wiping the raid, this mechanic was actually present on the trash on the way to the boss.

Finally for phase one, the boss occasionally does these circles on the ground and you need to move out, it can get rather tight since it’s basically a “dance” mechanic where most of the room fills up with them and you need to move out until they disappear and then new ones spawn. This goes on a couple of times and the fight goes back to normal—the only thing to watch out for here is that people stay properly stacked or spread so that the debuff doesn’t jump to new people.

Then there’s the intermission which just seemed to be a case of run down the spiral quickly enough in order to interrupt the boss or you wipe, watch out for the mushrooms that knock you back on the way down.

After the intermission comes phase two, and honestly I can’t really say anything overly memorable about it even though I ended up healing it alone since our other healer died on the way down. The debuff from phase one seems to be back, but only one player ended up getting it so it was really easy to heal through. I guess the adds changed from mind benders to naga, or maybe both? Didn’t do much from what I remember, though that might change on higher difficulties. Once we got into phase two, we killed the boss and in general we didn’t have that many wipes here but I’m still interested to see the boss on mythic especially with how the damage was in phase one to see how extreme it will end up there—especially since we were only thirteen or fourteen while playing this boss so the room will feel much more full with a 20 person raid.

The Queen’s Court

The next boss was The Queen’s Court consisting of two bosses: Silivaz the Zealous and Pashmar the Fanatical as well as Queen Azshara a bit in the background toying with the players.

This boss in retrospect actually surprises me with the amount of mechanics there were that were relevant on normal since my expectation at least is that there are maybe a couple main mechanics for normal and the rest start being relevant on heroic and up but on this boss there are actually two different fail checks which can instantly wipe you along with the spear throw from the melee boss that will probably instantly kill a single player if not soaked properly—same idea as the charge in King’s Rest for example, the more people in the way the less damage the actual target becomes, though do keep an eye out where you stand if you get targeted since it leaves a damage effect on the ground.

Now, the first mechanic which could wipe you is one of the abilities Azshara uses, Queen’s Decree and more specifically Form Ranks. This spawns—for us at least—three circles in the middle of the room each of which need to be occupied by one player and if they are not when the decree expires they explode dealing damage to the whole raid with the damage at least on the PTR being such that all three circles being empty wipes the raid.

There was a second decree that while not quite as bad could still potentially kill players who didn’t know how it works or notice that they had it, Deferred Sentence. This decree gives you an increasing amount of stacks that are reduced when you move however you take damage from moving, but if you don’t move all of the stacks explode at once at the end for some decent damage. This wasn’t too bad on normal but I could see this killing people on mythic especially depending on what other sources of damage are active at the same time.

The second potentially wipe inducing mechanic were the Potent Sparks, three of them spawned around the room and started slowly losing health and when they die they explode dealing damage to the whole raid and apply a debuff increasing damage taken from that explosion by 100%. So not a new mechanic, but still you need to kill them staggered so that the raid doesn’t wipe. These never really posed a problem since it even seemed that the debuff might be missing on normal and our damage dealers did a decent job of making sure they didn’t all explode at the same time anyway so the damage we did get from the normal explosions was easy to heal against.

Beyond that, the boss had some other funky decrees and random damage, but nothing overly noteworthy since they were all quite easy to get the gist of the first time one was affected by them. There was a particularily annoying decree though, Repeat Performance, which silenced you if you cast the same spell twice in a row. This wasn’t too bad as a Discipline Priest since I could just weave healing and damage but it seemed to annoy some of our damage dealers a lot.

Za’qul, Harbinger of Ny’alotha

Now for the final boss of the evening, since we tested Azshara on Friday and the normal bosses on Saturday. This one seemed rather overtuned especially for our group size which did make it a very cool boss to play but also meant that we unfortunately did not down it—also thanks to it getting rather late and people wanting to go to sleep.

This was probably the most fun boss we tested even including Azshara since there was actually a decent bit going as well as some interesting mechanics for healers, namely the fears.

Phase one

Phase one of the boss is fairly straightforward and doesn’t last for too long, from 100% to 85%. Some adds spawn that you need to kill and a few players get feared—interestingly, for us even at the end when we were playing with ten, three people got feared which seems to indicate that even for small groups three healers might be preferred. Now the fear lasts for eight seconds and is dispellable, so if that was all it wouldn’t have been too bad for us, simply one person that was running around a bit longer since we only had two healers, but what made the fear probably our main cause of wipes was the fact that it explodes when it runs out or get dispelled and for a lot of damage—three simultaneous explosions killed pretty much anyone who wasn’t a tank.

I’m somewhat sceptical that the fear will remain with that tuning in the raid, since every single application would seem to require some pretty heavy cooldown usage to be manageable—remember, only eight seconds between the first and last blast at best—and I’m doubtful that is all that possible with how often the fear comes. I’m expecting that at least on normal the explode damage when dispelled gets removed, seems like that would end up as a heroic or mythic mechanic to give the boss that extra bit of something.

Phase two

In phase two all the players get sucked into the Fear Realm where everyone gets a stacking debuff which dealt a minor amount of damage, stacking up every 20 seconds. For the most part, this phase was over so quickly that the debuff wasn’t relevant, but in phase four you need to re-enter the Fear Realm in order to kill the adds from phase one since they don’t take damage otherwise, and the debuff puts a bit of time pressure on that especially for smaller groups.

The second new thing was a debuff put on a couple of players which left spots on the ground so you had to keep moving while placing them in order not to die. It also made the available space in the already somewhat small bossroom smaller, so I can see this being problematic on mythic and for bigger raid groups since I’m assuming more people get the debuff. It also seemed a bit buggy or overtuned, since you always seemed to take the damage when a spot got put down, usually there is a grace period for the player with the debuff so they have time to move out—will have to see if that gets changed, if not it puts a decent amount of extra strain on the healers.

The debuff is especially bad if it comes in conjunction with the fear which we had happen a couple of times, both debuffs on the same player with pretty consistently lead to their death. Any players with the debuff as the fear came were also more likely to die since the damage from the fear explosion along with the damage from the debuff was tricky to heal against.

Finally for phase two, occasionally a tentacle comes from the side of the arena and tries to poke the raid. The area for this was decently big and the effect always seemed to go towards the middle, so keep an eye out on rifts that form on the sides of the arena. The damage was healable for us, but might very well be a one-shot on higher difficulties.

Phase three

Phase three doesn’t have that much new going for it, you can enter the Delirium Realm where you get a haste buff but all other players are hostile to you, so only really makes sense for damage dealers but not too many of them since you still have the dispel mechanics to deal with. This phase generally went by really quickly and I barely noticed we were in it, but it did introduce the Delirium Realm to us so that we knew what was going on for phase four.

Phase four

The final phase and as far as we managed to get. The first thing that happens is everyone gets pulled back into the normal realm and you now have to manage the abilities by going into the correct realm in order to counter them. The summoner adds from phase one are up? Go to the Fear Realm in order to damage them so they don’t keep summoning more adds. The boss gets an absorb shield—yes, a new mechanic—and starts casting to deal high damage to the whole raid? Enter the Delirium Realm and get rid of the absorb shield to stun the boss and interrupt the cast, damage from other realms doesn’t affect the absorb shield.

It seems the boss can also split himself, creating a copy in each realm which start giving him more energy and when he gets full, I guess that will wipe the raid. I don’t belive we actually saw this mechanic in action, probably comes into play later in phase four than we manage to get to.

Finally, the fear from the earlier phases gets buffed, dealing more damage than before through the explosion making it even harder to heal against. In addition, players in other realms are phased out so you can’t heal or dispel them which probably means this will be a minimum three healer boss, though I guess when someone in the Delirium Realm gets the debuff they just need to get out of there since they can’t be healed anyway since everyone is hostile there. So two healers might be possible, but the damage at the moment really is quite heavy and I’m not sure there are enough cooldowns to deal with it with only two healers.

The boss—despite the tuning and incoming damage—seemed really fun. I am very interested to see the final version, if it stays anything like it was on the PTR it will definitely end up being one of the blocker bosses for many guilds.

Azshara

Now, Azshara. This was a heroic test, which meant we were scaled up a bit but also had more mechanics to tend with and the tuning was probably a lot rougher than for the normal tests along with a much shortened timespan—we only had an hour and a half or so to test Azshara—all of which meant we didn’t end up defeating her or getting overly far actually.

Phase one

The fight starts with Azshara spectating and her sending out two lovers to deal with the raid. These need to be kept either in line of sight of each other or out of line of sight depending on the cast, believe Painful Memories was the cast where you needed to separate them but can’t remember the name of the other cast—should be fairly obvious though. The melee lover also occasionally throws a spear on a random player which needs to hit one of the two pillars in the room or it deals significant raid damage. It will also hit any player in the way, so the path to the pillar needs to be made clear. This seemed to be a bit buggy for us, where the spear would occasionally hit an NPC and explode or hit the pillar but still explode, so will probably be an easier time on live.

In addition to the lovers, there are three seals in the room which keep the water outside under control and these need to be kept charged—charging them is as easy as standing in one but this does give you a stacking debuff reducing maximum health by 10% per stack which lasts for the rest of the phase. The energy in the seals get reduced by two things, Azshara which is unavoidable so just recharge them, and hulks I believe they were called, which spawn in the middle of the room and run to a seal and start stomping it to bits. These need to be killed as quickly as possible so they don’t drain too much energy from the seal. They were also crowd controllable once and it seemed if you stunned them at the right time they would change their mind on which seal they wanted to go to which meant they had a further way to run so more time to damage them without them breaking the seal. The best timing I believe was just before they reached the seal and started casting, but it wasn’t 100% consistent and might have been fixed for live anyway—if not, definitely something to try since it makes the damage requirement easier. Azshara also occasionally charms a player and forces them to walk into the middle, which could be bad when there was damage spots on the ground which got put there by one of the tank mechanics of the lovers I believe so try to keep the middle area clear and interrupt the charm when possible—I’ll be honest, I didn’t quite get a clear idea of how this charm mechanic worked since it was mostly the damage dealers dealing with it.

Intermission

Then we have the intermission, where Azshara decrees you have to do something—or maybe even two things—and if you don’t you get stacks of a debuff that will probably kill depending on the amount of stacks. I believe the primary decrees were: stand alone, stand together, move, stay still, soak the arcane orbs. All fairly straightforward and the arcane orbs need to be soaked anyway so they don’t explode, though the move decree was a bit unclear how it worked since we had players moving yet getting stacks of the debuff. A theory we had was that it left small spots on the ground which applied the debuff, so moving back and forth or in a small circle wasn’t enough but we didn’t get to test that theory properly—also possible the ability was simply bugged on the PTR.

Phase two

After the small intermission Azshara enters the fray and you get to deal with a couple new mechanics: a dispellable debuff as well as another charm. The dispellable debuff explodes when dispelled or when it runs out after 20 seconds, echoing of every other player with the debuff or Azshara that are in line of sight which basically means hide somewhere and get dispelled. This might get interesting on higher difficulties or with more players since there is a level of coordination required so that you don’t explode each other or echo from the boss exploding the whole raid.

The new charm mechanic actually properly mind controls a player making them attack the raid and gives them a decently sized absorb shield which needs to be removed in order to break the mind control—this seems like one of those mechanics which will be easier in big raid sizes since the amount of incidental damage will be higher and fewer players actively need to switch on the mind controlled player in order to break the mind control.

There was also a new seal in the middle whose energy needed to be kept low instead of high so that it doesn’t explode the raid, I believe decharging it gave a similar debuff to charging the other ones but since we didn’t spend a significant amount of time in this phase I’m not quite sure.

Conclusion

All in all, the bosses even on normal were a decent amount of fun to play for the most part—looking at you Blackwater Behemoth—and I’m now looking forward to the raid more than I was before. Even the first boss which tends to be trivial could have some interesting wipes up her sleeve thanks to the color mechanic which tends to lead to trouble so it will probably be quite fun progressing here “for real”. I guess I now just need to wait a couple of weeks or so for the raid to come out, we’ll see if Blizzard sneaks in some more raidtests in the meantime and if we end up participating in those.

So Blizzard recently posted their plans for European Classic realms and their plan seems to be to only have International (English) realms which has made several people rather upset—it feels like a third or more of the comments on the English forum are in other European languages complaining about this decision—and while I can see where this decision is coming from it still to me too seems like the wrong one.

As we get closer to WoW Classic’s release, we thought now would be a good time to talk about our plans for Classic realms here in Europe.
We’ve prepared several realms, which will include Player vs Player, Player vs Environment, and Role-playing realms.
For Classic, we’re planning on not splitting up realms by language. This has its advantages and disadvantages, but overall, we think that it’s the best starting point for WoW Classic. An exception will be made for the Russian language, which will have separate realms due to its reliance on the Cyrillic Alphabet. For technical reasons this will also mean Russian is going to have its own separate game client, similar to what happened in The Burning Crusade.
We think this approach will give players more freedom to move around to where they want, and find guilds and friends that best match their interests.

Taepsilum – Community Manager

Now, my mothertongue never had language specific realms so I started out playing on English realms and ended up on one where the inofficial language at least was my second language and this is probably what is going to happen on these realms as well—inofficial language servers or a mixing pot of several languages on the same server being spoken in the public channels—and I don’t quite see how that will be beneficial in the long run since there will still in effect be language specific server they will just be harder to find like it was for me back in the day.

It will also be a bigger problem in Classic than it would be in today’s game, since in Classic you are locked into the server you start on and can’t really transfer away or do anything cross-realm, so if you unknowingly roll on a server where the inofficial language is one you don’t speak you might be in for a somewhat bad time since communication will be considerably more difficult. In general, this decision seems to poorly take into account the diverse language landscape present in Europe and even in the case that it goes as Blizzard fears—namely there simply not being enough players on single language realms—it feels like the more sane option would be to then merge realms instead of creating a solution for a problem that might not even present itself. Alternatively, if merging realms is considered a bad thing by Blizzard—understandably so, since it does present problems with names and who gets to keep theirs—they have since Classic already developed the technology allowing multiple realms to be in the same pool and share guilds, auction house and so on completely separate from the other cross-realm features impelemented since. This would still allow for that server community feel that several people think is important since you would still have a limited pool of people you play with but would mean that you don’t get the naming problems you would get with merging realms.

At the same time, part of the beauty of the European community is exactly the diversity of language and being able to overcome the challenges the game presents despite that extra difficulty in communication and it does keep the opportunity open for people to enter into communities which don’t have their mothertongue as the primary language—exactly this happened to me on live, have been playing on German servers and learning the langauge for over two years now and without the exposure that cross-realm gave me to those German servers this would never had happened. So there could potentially be a big positive in a small amount of cases as a consequence of this decision, so maybe it will all end up good in the end.

All in all, I guess my feelings on this decision are rather mixed. It won’t overly affect me personally since I have already been in the position of playing on a realm where my language isn’t the primary language at a time where I barely knew any English so I know the situation will be manageable. Simultaneously, I can understand that people don’t necessarily want to have the extra stress of learning or using a new language while doing an activity that is supposed to be relaxing or fun. In the end, I think people will find ways and means around that if they are truly interested in playing Classic be that through inofficial language servers or in-game chat channels for specific languages and this will all be a smaller issue than the forums currently make it seem.