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!

So we did some PTR raid testing yesterday, the first four bosses of Eternal Palace on normal with item level scaled to 405. This scaling made the raid a bit of a challenge actually, along with the tuning otherwise probably being completely out of wack on account of it being the PTR where that tuning is being done. Sometimes the raid test are also intentionally overtuned to allow people to properly test the mechanics and not just steamroll them—was probably also the reason for the item level scaling. Of course, none of us knowing any of the mechanics along with playing two healers for 15 raiders also contributed though I think having a third healer would just have made it boring—it was still normal after all. But my point is, people on live realms will probably have better gear and more of an idea when going in so it will be easier.

Another slightly annoying thing was, while we did have the Heart of Azeroth scaled to level 60 theoretically unlocking a major and minor essence slot, only the major one was available since we would have needed to visit the heart forge in order to unlock the minor essence slot. Now why we didn’t do this, well that scaling was only enabled inside the raid, so once we would have been at the forge we would no longer have had the neck at level 60 and as such the slot would not have been available to unlock. To be fair, I’m somewhat doubtful that most normal raiders will have that slot unlocked when they start with the raid anyway though that will depend on how much easier it becomes to get levels in the Heart of Azeroth with the next patch and how much time we have until the raid is released but it would still have been nice to be able to test a minor essence in addition to the major one.

Abyssal Commander Sivara

The first boss was pretty trivial and I think we ended up killing it on our first try. The boss basically had the mechanic from Guarm, where everyone gets a color and you shouldn’t run into people with another color. In addition to this the boss occasionally shoots out arrows in all directions that also have a color and you should be especially careful not to get hit by the ones that have another colour though even getting hit by your colour is bad since it is also a debuff with a small ticking damage effect and a secondary negative effect. These secondary effects seemed to a bit buggy, for example one of them was reduced healing but it reduced healing by 0% in other words not at all.

The last mechanic that was enabled on normal was a random player getting targeted by a spear of another colour that a player with the colour matching the spear needs to soak. Soaking this spear stuns you until someone removes the spear, which then of course also needs to be done by a player with the same colour as the spear.

All in all rather simple but it was also the first boss on normal. It could get somewhat interesting on mythic depending on tuning, but being the first boss the tuning probably won’t be that hard. Still, the boss at least had mechanics you couldn’t ignore unlike the first boss of Battle of Dazar’alor so that is a plus.

Blackwater Behemoth

The second boss we did was the Blackwater Behemoth, Blizzards new attempt to make an underwater boss. Or to be more exact, a boss with a third dimensions since the previous attempts weren’t really underwater but rather floating in the air—those bosses being Kael’thas as well Al’akir.

This seemed like it could potentially be the hardest early boss though again will depend on tuning. One of the big problems with this boss is being under water, which means that your movement speed is heavily reduced. Along with this, spells that you cast on the ground don’t necessarily hit you while you are swimming above the bottom of the cave, this was a big problem for me in the beginning since I tend to use Angelic Feathers as my movement speed ability and those are put down on the ground—later on I started swapping my weapons for the Underlight Angler, the artifact fishing pole from Legion. I would definitely recommend getting it if Blizzard does not nerf it before release since it’s a huge movement speed increase while swimming and actually allows you to swim against the pushback the boss does.

The other difficulty with this boss is the primary mechanic: everyone except for the main tank is heal immune—absorb shields worked while we were testing, which will probably mean that discipline priests will be rather strong here early on. To remove this immunity, you need to kill the pufferfish that are on the platforms around the boss but with the correct timing since you only have two of these per platform and the boss switches platform on a timer not dependant on health. This means the boss is also something of a damage check, since you need to be done with the boss before you run out of the fish and your raid is heal immune and slowly gets killed by the damage from the boss. The boss rather constantly does a chain lightning type cast on several players that increases in damage the more it jumps so the raid needs to be spread out—rather difficult for melees as well as while one is getting the pufferfish buff. The pushback which is a channeled casts also does a decent amount of damage so having players healable and topped up before it comes will probably be rather important—on our kill try we ended up focusing the pufferfish before the boss on the second platform for example. It will also be interesting to see how some tanks deal with this since the boss deals a large amount of damage to the whole raid if no tank is in melee range and it is of course hard to be in melee after the pushback.

The final mechanic are the intermissions, now these aren’t really anything more than swimming from one platform to the next however there is a small catch: if you are healable a fish from the depths will come and eat you while you are moving in between the platforms instantly killing you. This is also true outside of the intermissions so players need to stay on the platforms though there is a few second grace period so you can see you are in danger. During the intermission you also need to be careful not to swim into the jellyfish that are on the way since they also give you the healable buff.

All in all, it was actually a surprisingly complex boss for normal and I will be very interested to see how the tuning ends up being on live—this boss could pose some real problems for some guilds. Also, only the first four bosses being available I’m not actually sure if you can just skip it, we could definitely have done the bosses in another order so maybe that will be the solution for some.

Radiance of Azshara

This boss also surprised me a bit and was probably the second hardest one for us. It was basically a more complex version of the Wrath of Azshara from Eye of Azshara in Legion. So the mechanics that were the same: the boss is in the middle of a ring and you play around the boss—also, don’t use Shadow Step if you are a rogue—as well as the Arcane Bomb: players get debuffed with a bomb that explodes after a while stunning players in an area, dispelling the debuff allows the debuffed player to also avoid this explosion since the bomb is then left on the spot the player was standing when they got dispelled. The boss also spawns arcane tornades you need to dodge that knock you back and damage you when you get hit by them—with how much stuff is going on in this encounter this can easily lead to your death through a chain reaction.

Now the primary new mechanics—on normal at least—were the intermission in which adds spawn in one of four places that you have to get to since the rest of the room gets heavy ticking damage and the boss is taking reduced damage. Killing these adds allows you to damage the boss again as well as removing the ticking damage from the rest of the room. These adds consist of one big add that does a knockback with heavy damage which was the really dangerous part since getting kicked back outside the safe zone could easily lead to death. There were also smaller adds that need to be controlled and damaged down to prevent them from casting chain lightnig on the group.

The second new mechanic were lines of mines that spawned making moving between the different parts of the room rather difficult especially when one was trying to reach the adds. There were at times small gaps between the mines but we primarily worked around this by having one of the tanks soak one of the mines allowing the rest of the raid to get through—soaking a mine does spawn a new tornado though so need to stay careful.

All in all, mechanically the boss seems rather simple but like Wrath of Azshara back in Legion it’s just rather easy to be overwhelmed by all that is going on at the same time as well as the rather heavy movement requirement. We also tended to have a bad habit of spreading out a bit too much meaning it was at times difficult to keep players within range which was especially bad when they needed to be dispelled. Will be interesting to see how the boss plays on mythic—I’m expecting it to be interesting.

Lady Ashvane

The last boss we did was Lady Ashvane and she was rather trivial for us especially compared to the two previous bosses, we killed her on the first try. The boss starts with a big absorb shield that needs to be damaged down so that the boss actually takes damage and after a while she will recast her absorb—apparently this shield will keep getting bigger with each cast so it will be something of a damage check.

Corals also spawn periodically that then spawn orbs that move to the boss increasing her absorb shield. These orbs can be soaked by players but doing so triggers an explosion damaging the whole raid—this means that the longer the fight goes on the more damage will come in. Now these corals can be removed through an additional mechanic: several players get marked with a colour in pairs. After the debuff expires damage will be dealt between these pairs and can be used to remove the corals. We managed to keep the corals quite well in check though I imagine this will not be as easy on mythic. I think this will heavily influence the difficulty of the fight as well as how big the damage check will be.

Another mechanic that could make these marks more difficult to play are the stuns: for us three players got put into a water bubble and stunned within. To remove the stun the bubble needed to be destroyed. Now we did get some warning before this happened though we didn’t really use this to stack up which we should probably do on mythic. However, depending on the timings on mythic these bubbles might come inconveniently timed along with for example the marks which might make the positioning for those much more difficult.

Finally, the tank debuff or hit the boss does leaves a damaging spot on the ground so the boss needs to be moved around the room. I guess the room filling up will be the soft enrage, though I’m guessing the healers will be out of mana and the raid will have exploded to the orbs before that happens.

Now the tuning for Lady Ashenvale seemed rather easy and we got her down on the first try. But there were some interesting mechanics in there that could prove problematic on mythic and I’m hoping the boss will be more interesting to play there.

Conclusion

The testing was actually surprisingly fun and I’m looking forward to doing more in the future. Us being almost a full guild group with one external player probably helped, but still being able to do even normal bosses in a version where they can present some level of challenge was fun. It was also a great opportunity to get something of a sneak peek on the bosses that will probably be more valuable than our first clear on heroic since with the smaller raid size along with only two healers means there was more to do as well as more responsibility placed upon us two. In the heroic week we generally have enough healers that I don’t tend to have to do much and as a consequence don’t really learn what is dangerous on the different bosses. Now this can of course change between difficulties as abilities get added to the boss but still it gave some idea how the bosses actually work.

So, hopefully there are more raid tests soon!

I have been playing one of my favourite games again recently, Arcanum. It’s a CRPG released 2001 that unlike many popular ones released around that time is not based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset¹. I think this is what gives me so fond memories of the game, since while I do enjoy Dungeons & Dragons and think it’s a good ruleset for Pen & Paper it always felt somewhat lacking while playing it as a CRPG. Especially the whole “casts per day” mechanic I felt really did not fit in with CRPG’s that tend to be somewhat monster filled. It made casters really frustrating to play especially at low levels since you either did very little or ended up resting every couple fights. But this was about Arcanum, not Dungeons & Dragons.

Playing the game has been a somewhat strange experience, since I have really fond memories of playing it a ton as a kid and those memories seem to be very strong since I can still memeber the early levels really well and know almost exactly what I need to do, what quests are available where and how to complete them as well as how I want to level my character even though it has been several years since I last played the game—though I’m not quite sure how long exactly, I think I did another playthrough of the game ten years ago or so?

Still, I find the game excellent but this strange feeling of knowing exactly how everything will play out all the time is keeping me from playing the game a bit. I mean, I still enjoy what I am doing but it feels somewhat routine which is strange since it has been so long since last. The feeling will also probably dissipate a bit the further in I get since I actually haven’t played the whole game through that many times, only the early levels and maybe the first half or so?

I think I’m actually so slowly at my usuall stopping point back in the day, before going and visiting the Black Mountain Clan. For some reason this first proper dungeon used to intimidate me, I believe partially due to the Rock Golems there which can actually make your weapon break when you attack them.² Since I’m playing a melee character again this will be something I have to take into account before going in there—perhaps I should get some “expendable” weapon I can use to kill the golems? It’s actually really unfortunate, just got nice magical weapons for the whole party after clearing out P. Schuyler and Sons but I guess I need to use the other weapons for only one or two fights in there.

I think I’ll start enjoying the game even more once I get over that hurdle, and now with Uu’nat down we should probably be raiding less again which means I have more time for other games. Though maybe I’ll just spend that time boosting more instead. I just hope this game doesn’t end up the way Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey where I don’t end up finishing this run—haven’t really played Assassin’s Creed since that post, there as well I would need to get over the level grinding hurdle.

With that all said, the game is still probably my all-time favourite CRPG and if you haven’t already played it and like CRPGs I would definitely recommend you do so. But do read the manual, some of the things—like skills training—really aren’t explained at all in game. As a kid I had no idea what it did, just that you could pay a trainer to get some text to stand next to the name of the skill. But the training is actually really good, and among other things is what is required in order to be able to try to repair completely broken equipment.

If you do end up playing the game, I would recommend getting some of the community patches for it as well as the widescreen patch which is available and works well for the most part though it does have a funky effect on some screens. For example the character sheet and inventory are fixed size, so you end up being able to see some of the world while you have them open which is not the case in the original resolution. Also, depending on whether you like experimentation or just want to see the story, it might be worth looking into some good builds. There is a lot of freedom to the character creation, but there are very much “cookie cutter” backgrounds and skills you can choose to get a easier experience. In my opinion, there are also some somewhat misleading spells, that seem like they could be strong based on the description but end up being somewhat weak in actual usage. One example of this are the different elemental forms you can learn in the elemental spell paths—it seems really cool to be able to turn into an earth elemental or the like, but in my experience the damage and survivability wasn’t that great compared to some other choices. On the other hand, being able to turn into an earth elemental is really cool, so maybe that is enough reason to go that path—I know I made an elemental mage at some point that focused on the different transformations and had fun with it.

Now I’m actually getting the feeling of maybe wanting to remake my character and going for a more magic build again since those tend to be more interesting even if the melee builds can be really strong as well. Maybe I just need to get those first points in earth magic to get the extra strength and that would make my meleeing more efficient. I guess I have a plan for tomorrow then.

So I’ve actually joined a boosting community recently and have been on a couple of boost runs. It seems like an appropriate way to get some extra gold to cover raiding costs as well as maybe eventually be able to afford the much sought after longboi. Now that latter is more of a long term goal since I don’t know if I will be boosting that often and while the payout is good you do need to boost frequently if you want to make a lot of gold in a short period of time. It also depends on the amount of buyers per run, more buyers of course means more effective use of one’s time.

It has actually been a somewhat strange experience so far even though I’ve only been on a couple of runs. For one, how fun it has actually been considering we are doing content that is trivial enough for us to be able to boost somewhere along half of the raid. I guess actually having to boost all of those people is what makes it fun, since it brings some level of challenge back to the content actually having to think a bit more what we are doing there.

Complete side rant, there was one rather frustrating experience during one of the boost runs in Crucible of Storms. We were taking on a couple of more boostees than in the earlier runs and there was some uncertainty around us being able to actually make it through with so many boostees. Now we had a try and a wipe because of failed kicks on Uu’nat—I play Discipline so I can’t really react to fails that well afterhand, I have to predict them, admittedly I could probably have reacted better and it would have been fine. However, after this a call is made by the co-leader to bring in one more damage dealer and one more healer. Now, in theory this is a fine call since it makes it more likely that we are able to manage the amount of boostees but my issue comes here: the additional damage dealer was not told to interrupt anything which was the whole reason for us just wiping and we were doing more than fine up until that point. The additional healer also just meant that there was less for us to heal per person just making it seem that the healers weren’t pulling their weight. We of course easily kill the boss after that but we would have done that anyway if the kicks had been done properly which they were the second time around. As a consequence, we also didn’t try taking more boostees in on consequent runs—though to be fair I’m not sure if there was enough interest anyway. All of that just annoyed me more than it probably should for some reason, the “lost” gold isn’t that important just the complete misidentification of the issue and the overbearing response as a consequence.

Another somewhat strange and unfortunate part of the experience has been the—I guess—culture some of the players there have. Very much “let’s go boys” and lots of e-peen measuring it feels like giving something of a “boys club” feel at times. Now admittedly I’m seeing this more subtly for the most part and it’s probably something that they are bringing over from other communities they participate in rather than something innate for this community but it still doesn’t make the envirnment feel the most welcoming to me. It also feels really strange since there is so much talk in the Code of Conduct and so on about showing a professional image to the buyers by being on time and keeping the in-game raid chat clean but I guess this same professionalism isn’t expected to be extended towards other bosters.

Now as noted these are initial vibes and I haven’t been on that many boost runs yet and it’s probably very dependant on the leader as well as one’s fellow bosters—in fact the second boost run was much better than the first though that was probably partially due to very low participation in voice chat from almost all boosters present, me included—but it still isn’t really motivating me to more actively look out for additional boosting opportunities. I guess I should probably be fine if I avoid the outwardly obvious incompatible groups.

I still think I want to be doing more boosting than I have been so far, and Uu’nat being down should provide more opportunities as well as more importantly more energy to be able to do boost runs—that has actually a really interesting side effect of this progress that I haven’t though much about, actually just feeling like the breaks from raiding on non-raid nights were really needed.

Speaking of progress, one unexpectedly annoying part of it has been preparing the “foosts” (feasts) for the raids. Now there is a special version of the feasts that instead of the rare fish take the crafting reagnents from Uldir however there is of course a slight problem with this: we aren’t raiding Uldir anymore. There is something of a way around this, in that you can convert the Battle of Dazar’alor crafting material into the Uldir one with several different crafting professions. The problem here becomes when you want to convert 1000+ of the things it takes a lot of time even with the crafting enchantment—I think I spent 10-15 minutes converting mine. Now this doesn’t need to be done that often and it has been a one time thing for me so far but it has still been something of an unexpected and quite frankly unecessary small annoyance with regards to progress. Luckily that shouldn’t be so necessary anymore since from what I hear we will be getting a new feast in the next patch anyway and I don’t have that many of the materials left since we haven’t been clearing Battle of Dazar’alor since we started Crucible progress. But it would just have been nice to either have the transform cast be shorter or have an option to transform several at the same time.