The mythic version of the Battle for Dazar’alor was released this week and we’ve gotten a decent start in the raid so far, downing three bosses with good progress on Opulence though unfortunately lag problems prevented me from participating yesterday for a bit.

So far the raid has been rather fun, with overall interesting bosses. There are a couple which are somewhat frustrating to play as Discipline especially on heroic, since there just aren’t those damage spikes which Discipline thrives on healing away—constant slow ticking damage really isn’t a strength. This has already changed to a degree on mythic, with Grong for example having some decent damage spikes on mythic even though the boss felt rather easy to heal on heroic.

This week has also been really nice in regards to mythic+, since the affixes are probably the easiest ones overall and it is kind of baffling to see the difference affixes make. Keys that would have been hell last week are easy this week even though 2-3 levels higher. I don’t really understand Blizzard’s design in this respect, it feels strange to have the differences be so big as to discourage people from playing the content certain weeks.

With regards to big differences, with the new season we also got the new seasonal affix, Reaping. In contrast to Infested, this affix is actually reallyfun. It allows for some strategic play since you need to think about when it gets triggered but the way you deal with the affix—kill a bunch of mobs—is also just simply more fun from a mechanical perspective than trying to control the mobs that heal other mobs. It’s also more interesting to have something hectic happen like a bunch of mobs which need controlling and kicking happen occasionally than just bringing the correct CC to deal with certain mobs.

So far I’m enyoing the new season, hopefully that continues!

For the last few weeks I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey on and off. It has been mostly a good time with some frustations, mainly centered around the leveling system.

Now, why is the leveling system frustraing? Well, in essence it actually isn’t and does bring something of an RPG-feel to the game which I at least welcome since I tend to like RPGs quite a lot, Arcanum for example being one of my favourite games. The problem comes in how the leveling is interleaved with the questing.

Now, I’m a person who tends to like story in games, even at times when that story might not be particularily well written and so far I have found the story of Odyssey quite enjoyable with some interesting decisions even in the side quests. What however makes me somewhat miffed at times is the game’s tendency to encourage me to ignore the story and go do side activities, be it questing or the like. The most recent and egregious example of this came recently, where I finished some main story related quests and a character told me to meet them later in another area. Now this area is 10 levels above my level and the quest is also marked 10 levels above my level; the main story quest I just completed was of my level. Now they did also point me to some more appropriately leveled main story content though that was already a bit off the path, but completing that went quickly and only yielded a level or so and afterwards also provided more quests that were 6+ levels higher than my level. This is the point where the leveling system starts to detract instead of adding to the game.

Now one could make the argument that these are places where the game designers would have added in filler quests if it were not for the leveling system in order to pad out the play time of the game and actually having the option of choosing the content one does in order to get to progress the story is a better option, but the cynic in me feels these sections are there in order to push people to buy the experience boosts from the in-game store. And even if I were to believe that argument, I feel it falls somewhat flat since wouldn’t it be better in general to just remove the padding alltogether while keeping the optional side content for people who really enjoy the game or the gameplay? I mean, that is all content that I might very well be tempted to return to after I have completed the main story if I enjoy the game, I remember doing this with Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag and Saint’s Row 3 for example. Both were games I greatly enjoyed and consequently I wanted to complete all available content after I was done with the main story. It feels strange that the developers would choose to actually detract from the main story in order to pad something so meaningless as a playtime number for a singleplayer game, especially since that number is already greatly extended for those people that want to keep playing by the side content as noted earlier.

Beyond that though, the only thing that has annoyed me with the game is the somewhat lackluster performance, it only runs at around 60 FPS though the frame times seem to be decent, I at least haven’t noticed any stuttering.

The rest, really, is quite good. I quite enjoy the setting as someone who has been rather fascinated by Rome when I was younger since ancient Greece thematically can be quite similar and having the option again of choosing either a female or male protagonist again was really nice, I really wish more games did that.

The “modern day” story telling has been kept to a minimum so far, which for me is a big bonus since that was something that completely ruined the first game for me and put me off of the series for quite some time. I still can’t quite figure out why they think we’re interested in some random people trying to find some old stuff over the actual main meat of the game, the historical storytelling. Hopefully it is kept to a minimum for the rest of the game, extended segments of that could be something that could really ruin the game for me. Another reason, by the way, why I found Assassin’s Creed: Liberation one of the better AC games, barely any interaction outside of the historical stuff (also the first one with a female protagonist, which is a bonus for me).

While I generally enjoy the game, it is also a game from which I have ended up taking several breaks due to the aforementioned leveling problem which makes me somewhat hesitant to recommend it. Now I have a friend who is also playing the game and seems to be enjoying it just as much as I while not being bothered by the leveling since she likes to do the side-quests and such anyway and if that’s your case then it would definitely be deserving of a recommendation if you like the Assasin’s Creed in general. But if you think that might bother you, it might be better to stay away. Even then, a ancient Greece themed RPG with action combat is already a pretty damn cool game and not something likely to come along anytime soon, so might be worth pushing past that annoyance. That’s my plan at least once I get the motivation to continue.

Patch 8.1 is upon us since yesterday which I think makes for a good opportunity to talk about some of the changes.

It’s a bit of an odd one, since it somewhat significantly changes class balancing and some abilities while some guilds are still progressing in Uldir, making the experience for the latecomers potentially more difficult which makes me somewhat unsure of how I feel about this. The most prominent example would probably be Zul, since with Rogues getting changed basically because of that fight it does make the fight somewhat more difficult to execute—we still killed the boss easily enough but the fight did last a bit longer than before.

There is also somewhat of a hidden boss buff for Zek’voz, at least in guilds that have a Discipline Priest. Because Evangelism now has a slightly longer cooldown—15 seconds longer, from 75 seconds to 90 seconds—it is no longer ready for every dance on mythic, I ended up with it on approximately 10-15 seconds of cooldown remaining when I wanted to use it. This makes the fight require slightly more coordination between healer cooldowns for guilds still progressing there though the fight is easy enough that it shouldn’t be a real problem anyway. Beyond that the change to Evangelism didn’t really feel noticeable to me since I usually wanted to use it in conjunction with Rapture anyway which has a 90 second cooldown, making the change somewhat moot. Mentally though, the difference is suprisingly big and does mean I’ll be a little more careful of using the ability opportunistically.

In general, I think the nerfs to Discipline felt manageable, it’ll take some time to get used to for sure and the increased mana cost of Power Word: Shield might actually mean that our gearing priorities change slightly against haste since one of the big benefits of haste was being able to blanket the raid quicker which is now much more mana intensive. The general reduced throughput isn’t really something I felt in fight though it was somewhat apparent on the healing meters on all bosses except for G’huun oddly enough. It could just be that it was a off-night for me as well, so I guess we’ll know that better once the next raid comes out.

Now there were some other moderately interesting things in the patch as well, for example the continuation of the war campaign though I haven’t really had the time to take a poke at that yet. Another big change was now crafted BOP items require skill in that profession in order to be used; this was hotfixed to only apply to new recipes coming with the next raid but it’s still an interesting change. It means it will no longer be possible to pick up a profession, say tailoring, craft some fancy pants in the first raid week or two and then drop tailoring and learn a more useful profession like alchemy since those fancy pants would end up being unusable after unlearning tailoring. This seemed to be mostly popular in the higher end guilds so it shouldn’t affect most players but is a somewhat interesting change nontheless.

Another thing of note was the addition of achievements for completing all mythic+ dugeons in time on +10 and +15, unsurprisingly this was bugged. Now unfortunately we didn’t have quite as much time as hoped last week so we were aware that we wouldn’t be getting the +15 achievement, but we also didn’t get the +10 and for some of us it was even displaying zero progress towards completing the achievement. Hopefully this ends up being fixed shortly, would be rather annoying to have to hunt for keys for the dungeons again. Especially so since we can no longer delete keys, run a dungeon and get a new set of keys which was possible up until the patch hit.

Just a minor side rant, that’s one of those changes I find somewhat hard to understand and I’m hoping a question to that get answered on Friday. I understand that it was technically a unintended consequence of the buggy keys in the first week of BfA with them carrying over from Legion that lead to this but it was something that in a sense was actually a very useful feature to people who prefer playing with a set group. We only have five keys per week we can use and getting unlucky can very realistically mean we don’t see a dungeon at all in a given week. This was annoying enough before from the perspective of Raider.io/Wowprogress score since trying to push that was the primary reason we kept doing mythic+, but it’s even more of a problem now with the defined seasons from Blizzard and actual in-game rewards tied to them. Simple bad luck could mean missing out on those which I don’t find a particularily good design decision especially since they now intentionally patched out something that alleviated that problem.

Beyond that though, I honestly can’t quite say what the patch brought since quite frankly the game isn’t holding my interest quite as well as it was in Legion which I find very unfortunate. It’s a hard thing coming from the (subjectively) best expansion to one that just overall feels meh. I’m not even necessarily saying anything is completely broken it just doesn’t feel motivating or inspiring and just that tad bit more boring than what came before and that’s enough for it just to feel bad.

The next raid will hopefully fix that a bit with some actual new interesting content to do and as far as timing goes the holiday season is about the best time of the year for the game to feel a bit boring since usually there’s enough other stuff going on so that one doesn’t notice that too much.

Here’s to better times for World of Warcraft in 2019!

Kind of.

So the last few months have been great and simultaneously not. Well it is a long time for everything to simply be great, so it makes sense that there have been some less great things in there I suppose.

To get more specific, we killed G’huun a few weeks ago already which was awesome. Unfortunately a day too late to make it into the top 100 for the Horde—or more specifically, to get the associated achievement since the top 100 guild killed G’huun the previous reset and we ended up extending and killing him on Wednesday. Still, the kill was awesome, we kept our integrity as it were and didn’t introduce extra raid days or prolong the raids in order to try and squeeze the kill which actually makes me really happy. Now I really like the guild and the people within in general, but that is one of the things I’m I guess most proud of that the principle of raid times is held to. Sure I could manage the extra hours and would probably enjoy them as well, but there’s just something cool about seeing the guild stick to its rules and still perform well.

Secondly, as noted, the guild has just been awesome. While I liked being in the old guild I love being in this one which is a very important distinction that does affect one’s enjoyment of the game greatly. I am also fortunate in that I still get to regularily play with people from the old guild, so it’s the best of both worlds in a way. There is only one slightly unfortunate part: the “dead game” meme. Now the guild in general seems to be rather meme happy which is fun, but there is this whole “dead game” meme going on partially due to the content being cleared and partially because the core systems of the game at the moment just aren’t as engaging as they were in Legion. Now both of these things are very understandably frustrating people to a degree—especially the latter I think—but to me the whole meme just makes the situation worse. Not by much, mind you and I would be playing the game less at the moment even without the meme but it just kind of unecessarily reminds me of the situation we’re in. At the same time, I guess it helps other people to make the situation a bit more enjoyable so there is that.

Now that specifically is the less awesome part: I’m just not feeling motivated to play that much at the moment. Now there are several factors to this, one is the azerite system feeling unrewarding meaning I’m not really participating in content that rewards azerite but one could argue that is a good thing since it’s not really the sort of content I enjoy overly much—island expeditions and world quests. The other part really is that one of the players in our regular mythic+ team has been unavailable for a while which means we aren’t doing as much mythic+ as before which combined with us not progressing anymore and thus clearing the raid more quickly means there’s a lot less for me to do in the game. Hopefully they’ll get better soon and we can get back to running some more mythic+.

Though mythic+ is actually one of the awesome things that happened recently, if a little late: we finally cleared a +15 in time. It was way later than I’d liked and we are very much behind the curve but we did it even without our full setup—which kind of makes me sad at the same time—but it does pave the way for us to get going stronger than before in the future.

And honestly, fuck the curve. We managed it with some pretty annoying affixes (fortified, quaking and bursting) and had fun doing it, that’s the more important part anyway. Sure a high raider.io score is nice to look at, but considering how buggy the Blizzard leaderboards have been not registering some of our runs the experience of managing it is more important than some number at the end.

Now the reduced motivation to do things on my main has given me the opportunity to level a twink which I ended up finishing sometime early Monday morning. I ended up leveling a Monk planning to play mostly Mistweaver with a bit of Brewmaster thrown in for dungeons since I hadn’t played a Monk at high level yet and it seemed to be a good filler twink for the healer roster after speaking with our guildmaster. Also I already have paladin, shaman and druid at fairly high level so leveling one of those didn’t seem sensible. It’s been interesting so far though I haven’t really had the opportunity to heal anything “real” yet, only a +2 and +3 key which even with my at the time around 290-300 item level gear was easy since we had some other geared people in the party. I’m really worried how I’ll manage my mana in raids though, which generally seems to be my biggest problem playing healer twinks—having no idea which spells to prioritise specifically in raids. Dungeons is generally pretty easy since mana mostly isn’t a concern; keeping people alive is. But raid fights tend to last for a long time and trying to heal the whole raid alone generally doesn’t end well unless the content is trivial to begin with.

Now I just need to gear the monk so hopefully I can sneak into a heroic raid this week. Beyond that though, getting proper gear is somewhat time-gated since I can’t really properly heal a +10 key yet so I’m kind of toying with the idea of leveling a second twink if I keep having so much time available. I have always kind of liked the idea of a rogue and learning to play one would be cool, so that might be the next project. I had even created one before the monk with the plan of leveling one but having a secondary healer character just to precedence so we’ll see.

Battle for Azeroth has now been out for a bit longer than when I shared my first impressions of it and my feelings on the expansion have crystallized somewhat even though it is still early days and I won’t know how it all turns out until the end of the expansion.

Mythic+

So far, doing dungeons has been rather fun in Battle for Azeroth. We are still very much in the learning stage and tend to run into some packs or bosses whose difficulty or mechanics surprise us—third boss in King’s Rest comes to mind as an example. I had barely noticed the DoT from the axe lady before this week with tyrannical and now that boss seems to be one of the hardest ones in the dungeon since it combines heavy movement due to the axes with heavy damage on one player due to the DoT.

As noted though, the fact that we are all still learning does mean that the rate of mistakes being made can mean that keys unfortunately don’t get played in time that very well could have been. But that is a part of learning and becomming better which in the end is what makes all of it fun. Sure, the accomplishments as well, but those mean so much less without the learning process and obstacles that come before.

Azerite gear

Now azerite gear is a strange thing, and I touched on my early impressions of it before. Going from Legion to Battle for Azeroth, we lost tier sets, our artifacts (with their relics) and the legendaries from Legion. All of these things provided different bonuses to our character that either made them play different or provided utility for certain situations—as a Priest, the cloak legendary for Holy stands out as an excellent example of extra raid utility that was very nice to have.

With Battle for Azeroth, all of these things in a way get rolled into a single system: Azerite Gear. Now for me, this system has a few flaws that stick out rather obviously:

1. Limited sources of gear.
   Since azerite gear is only available from sources with a weekly lockout, there is a very limited amount of the gear you can try to acquire in a week.
2. This becomes a big problem, when the trait(s) you need might only be available from the weekly mythic+ chest, meaning the chance of you getting the right item are very low.
3. Certain traits are just more fun.
   And when you gain a performance upgrade that then removes those traits, it’s not a great feeling.
4. Traits are selected per character, not per spec.
   This means in order to play many specs on a single character, you actually need multiples of the same difficult to get gear in order to perform well or intentionally make all of those spec potentially significantly weaker by selecting generic traits.
5. Utility traits will probably be locked when you get new gear.
   Some of those traits that are fun or just give nice utility—like the Prydaz trait—might not be available to you when you get a new piece of gear since your neck isn’t yet of a high enough level.

Now all of these problems kind of feed into each other except for the last one. But the limited availability of gear just makes it really hard to actually get an azerite piece of decent item level and even harder to get the right item level along with the traits one wants. This along with an upgrade meaning a trait one enjoys potentially disappering just makes acquiring new azerite gear feel kind of bad; the system inherits the worst traits of the three systems it’s replacing: the slow progression of the artifact, combined with the difficulty of acquiring gear sets comined with the frustration of the randomness of acquiring legendaries. Sure, with raids the third point is largely diminished since you know what the traits are on the piece of gear this specific boss drops, but considering how late into the raid some of the pieces are it may not be a realistic way to get that piece of gear anyway. Also assuming the raid piece is actually the one you want as far as traits are concerned.

Now they are working on the acquisition part, which hopefully fixes some of these concerns but we don’t know what the plan is yet and when they are going to implement it. Hopefully it ends up being something good since the current state seems to be frustrating a lot of players. But I don’t think anything less than a rework of the system can get rid of the bad feeling of getting a numbers upgrade that removes a trait you enjoy having.

Preach also made a video raising some other concerns, namely regarding the balancing of the traits and how some of them can be rather unstraightforward to figure out if they are good or not. Now this specific point doesn’t really matter much to me personally—since I would probably be looking up the ratings and rankings of the separate traits anyway and not just go by gut feeling—but it still does mean that I can’t just go and equip a new piece of gear and select the traits therein in any meaningful way without having to do that which also doesn’t really feel right.

I’m excited to see what if anything they end up changing with the system though, it feels like one of those things where the backlash might be big enough to actually cause some change to be made but we’ll see.

Guild

I don’t think I’ve ended up mentioning it here yet, but I’ve changed guilds (again…). This time around it was a bit different though, since it was less out of a desire to leave the old guild—have actually been playing relatively actively with some of the people from there—and more out of an opportunity to raid again with a good friend of mine.

The change has also felt different in a completely other way, namely I’ve felt quite at home here very quickly. Sure, it helped that I already knew a person in the guild and that I’d been along of some of their alt runs with one of my alts previously, but the general feel and attitude of the guild seems to be better aligned with me than in the previous guild. I guess that is to say, I feel like I’ve found my place here quicker and have been enjoying the raids tremendously so far. Hopefully that means I can stay here happily for a long time!

Raids

Speaking of raids, Uldir has been out for a while now and we’ve had the opportunity to poke down some of the bosses there, more specifically we are ⁶⁄₈ mythic since yesterday! We had a bit of a surprising stumbling block on Fetid Devourer and one day of somewhat slow reclear—as in, we didn’t reclear in a single day of raiding and needed to continue clearing the next raid day. But despite that, I’d say it’s been going rather well especially our latest catch: Zul.

The Zul fight is a strange one, since it ends up being so short it is quite simple but it seems so confusing on the surface with all the adds going on as well as having to move out of the raid, dispels and then something of a damage race in phase 2 with the AoE on the floor. The fight was really enjoyable though once we started to get it down, since progress was so clear to see and the healing required during the fight was also rather intense, kept me optimizing my cooldown execution at least. The fight also gave me an opportunity to use Divine Star for once, which was a nice change up from Halo since the cooldown is so much lower meaning I have more to do.

Uldir has been really good so far overall once you’re past the first two bosses. I didn’t hugely enjoy Fetid since there is more of a focus on positioning and damage there than healing and execution, but Zek’voz I also enjoyed since it required proper execution of cooldowns on my part for the dances along with playing the dance, eye beam and add mechanics properly. Especially the overlaps with the debuff/eye beam and dance provided some interesting moments in the fight.

Vectis I also found somewhat interesting—especially now that I can play Discipline there—even though it was a somewhat boring fight from an execution standpoint as Holy. Just spamming Binding Heal so that Salvation is ready in time isn’t the most engaging gameplay, but the healing requirement still made the fight interesting. Especially in the intermission where one needs to avoid stacks and still keep ones party topped from the debuff that keeps jumping around.

Discipline

Now I’ve briefly touched on this before but I’ve also really been enjoying Discipline. It plays a bit better in raids than in dungeons since you can better plan for cooldown usage with more predictable damage, but the spec in general plays quite good at the moment I feel and really fits my damage-happy playstyle as well. It wasn’t unusual to see Smite as my most used spell even as Holy, so playing a spec where it actually contributes to my healing as well makes a lot of sense. As noted before as well, Holy just feels so slow with the changes in Battle for Azeroth that Discipline becomes a even more welcome change to me.