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.

I have been playing mostly Discipline since the pre-patch and it has been really nice if a bit new. Not as new as one might think, since I really liked spamming Smite as Holy as well, but it does take some different thinking to play Discipline, especially when preparing cooldowns.

However, now I have had a couple of opportunities where it simply made more sense to play Holy which one would think is great since I loved the spec in Legion—so much so, that I basically didn’t play Discipline at all in Legion even to my detriment at times since it was such a strong spec—unfortunately, Holy just doesn’t play very fun at the moment.

Legendaries

The smallest contributor to this is the lack of legendaries from Legion. Holy didn’t have the most exciting legendaries in Legion, in fact one of the most used ones was just a worse version of Reincarnate from Shamans¹. It was however, still a very nice wipe recovery mechanism in raids allowing you to get back to trying the boss again faster in many cases. It also functioned as a powerful cooldown through Spirit of Redemption, since it essentially gave you free rein to heal for a short time with Spirit of Redemption making you invulnerable and giving you infinite mana. It was also a way to use two potions in one fight since death starts your potion cooldown. This made it a very strong utility legendary.

However, the legendary I miss far more and that ties into the next point, are the legendary bracers that reduced the cast time of your primary healing spells while you were over 75% health. These were a mythic+ favourite of mine.

Haste

Now the lack of that legendary along with the tiny amount of haste we have in the beginning of the expansion makes the spec feel extremely slow and sluggish. This will hopefully be fixed to a degree with more gear, but it does give the spec a terrible feel at the moment for someone used to the extremely fast pace at the end of Legion—I had sub one second cast time on some of my primary spells with the legendary bracers, going back to almost a second and a half is a huge change in pacing.

The lack of haste is made even worse since Light of the Naaru is, well, not missing but basically unpickable at the moment which brings me to my next point.

Talents

The talents are kind of terrible though maybe actually a bit better than they were in Legion. We still have Enlightenment/Trail of Light and Binding Heal/Surge of Light to switch between for raids and there is actually a choice between Benediction and Halo depending on the encounter—maybe even Divine Star if people are stacke enough or the damage pattern is correct.

But the problem—though I guess that was the design intent—is really the last row. Now there is actually a cool choice here between Apotheosis and Holy Word: Salvation and they are both nice powerful cooldowns to use though they both have their clear niches—mythic+ and raids respectively. The problem really, is that Light of the Naaru is competing with them and can only win for players that want a really passive playstyle and while it’s cool that the choice exists for such players, it makes the rest of us suffer with a spec that just feels insanely sluggish when compared to Legion which as noted is made worse by the limited haste available at the start and lack of legendaries to speed up casting.

Conclusion

The core mechanic of Holy, the powerful Holy Words is what makes these long cast time and lack of extra cooldown reduction feel so bad. I want to be casting lots so that my fun spells are available again but the time in between just feels extremely drawn out and I feel kind of useless since my spells don’t do much in the meantime. As Discipline, sure I’d like some more haste but I also have a ton of smaller cooldowns I can stagger to do useful things and they aren’t dependant on me casting certain spells to come back within a reasonable time. Those cooldowns are also powerful enough that they give me a more clearly defined role within a raidgroup which means I know I can take it a bit easier when I’m waiting for them to become available again. As Holy I don’t have this luxury since I need to keep casting and using mana in order to have my cooldowns available in time again.

It’s a strange feeling, going from feeling it was almost a necessity to learn Discipline in order to remain competetitive to feeling I much prefer the spec after all these years due to the changes made in Battle for Azeroth to Holy. I guess it was about time for me to change things up a bit though and not be so constrained by my past feelings of the different specs. Now I just hope I don’t have to play Holy too much until the spec starts feeling a bit more fun again.

Blizzard added something really cool for tailors in Battle for Azeroth: Resilient Spellthread. It prevents you from being dazed in Kul Tiras and Zandalar, which is a really nice perk to have before flying is active and while outdoor content like world quests and herb farming are the most relevant.

Unfortunately, Resilient Spellthread hasn’t worked for the whole expansion and recently got a silent nerf to the description¹ stating it only works while walking and running, not mounted which would be the most useful part.

Permanently embroiders your cloak with resilient spellthread, preventing you from being dazed while in Kul Tiras or Zandalar. Only the tailor’s cloak can be embroidered, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound. – Original text

Permanently embroiders your cloak with resilient spellthread, preventing you from being dazed while running or walking in Kul Tiras or Zandalar. Only the tailor’s cloak can be embroidered, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound. – Updated text

This change has understandably left many tailors somewhat miffed with me among them. Now, tailoring has for a long time been a profession with little long-term usefulness though an expansion like most professions where you primarily craft gear but this just leaves one feeling robbed of something that was clearly inteded to be there and it just kind of seems they couldn’t be bothered fixing.

Now that is possibly unecessarily harsh language; I recongize that software development must have priorities of what gets fixed and in the grand scheme of things one broken utility effect for a profession that the majority of players probably does not have isn’t high on the list. Or maybe it was always inteded to only work while on foot. That does not change the feeling this change leaves behind.

Now there are two other utility spellthreads for tailors, one that decreases threat and another one that decreases falling damage and I am running around with the reduced falling damage for now to at least get some utility out of the profession. However, being immune to daze really was one of the cool things I was looking forward to with tailoring in Battle for Azeroth, and now with that gone and the rarity of Anchor Weed and the despawning nodes which are becoming a meme I am seriously considering switching professions. I have mixed feelings about this since I’ve had the profession for so long but looking at it logically the doubled flask duration of alchemy is the only profession perk that makes any sense at the moment.²

It’s really unfortunate that the other spellthreads feel so lacklustre since we as tailors haven’t really had anything new and useful to craft since the Frostweave Net in Wrath of the Lich King. Now I have been using those rather actively since the extra 3 second root is a nice thing to have, but the tiny amount of utility it brings just does not feel worth the price of keeping the profession around for me.

Now, before someone argues “but you can craft gear!”, that is really low on utility for two reasons. Firstly, it is rather slow with the materials for that gear being timegated by dungeon and later raid lockouts. Secondly, once the raid releases on Wednesday, that gear is completely irrelevant since the raid will drop as good—or better once mythic releases—gear anyway. It might bring some small utility to players who are focusing on the easier tiers of raiding or not raiding at all, but with titanforging I’m not even sure that applies. I’m also ignoring the item level 300 gear since that can be bought and is so low item level anyway as to be completely useless.

In the end, I think I’ll watch out for hotfixes until Tuesday or so hoping this gets fixed, and if not I’ll start leveling alchemy so I have that skilled enough to get the extra hour on flasks before the raid on Wednesday. Might need to do some extra herb farming, so probably good to get at least a days head start on that.

So I mentioned some of my frustrations with reputation in Battle for Azeroth in my previous post and I think my feelings might’ve changed somewhat. This I think comes primarily from the vastly different nature of reputation in Battle for Azeroth compared to Legion.

Now, there is still a primary very important faction to get repuation with, this being the Honorboud for the Horde and Seventh Legion for the Alliance since these factions gate a dungeon behind them. What is significantly different from Legion however, is the pure amount of world quests available for these factions along with the speed one gets reputation. In Legion, getting the Suramar dungeons unlocked was something of a significant farm whereas in Battle for Azeroth, I only really started poking at the world quests on Thursday and was done by Sunday or Monday. This significant shortening of the farm naturally leads to it being much less annoying than it was in Legion. This also significantly helps because I think a big source of my frustration with this system came from the uncertainty of me being able to do the dungeon in a timely fashion¹ and now once that stress has been lifted I am also less frustrated with the system itself.

There is also another significant factor to this that I did note in my earlier post, specifically having something to do. In the past couple of days I’ve found myself simply doing every single world quest available just from the continued desire to keep playing the game and trying to find something sensible to do within the game and the world quests have presented the perfect outlet for that. This has allowed me to even surpass the required reputation for the dungeon and actually finish the War Campaign, well for now at least. The game and the quests themselves do state that it will be continued², but this chapter is finished for now. So me being motivated enough to be doing the world quests somewhat unrelated to the rewards they bring kind of negates the whole frustration I might’ve felt with having felt forced to be doing them. Well it isn’t strictly true that I’m doing them regardless of reward, since completing the world quests is bringing me closer to Pathfinder, Part One³ which will allow me to ride faster and eventually be a part of the flying requirements. But the biggest stopper on that achievement will be the Champions of Azeroth which have a very limited amount of world quests available anyway that I would definitely be doing every day so it isn’t really getting me the achievement any faster.

In the end, this is kind of a long way of saying I was stressing out and worrying about things that ended up being fine in the end. Though there is somewhat of a sad end to the story after all: we’ll have to look for one additional player in order to complete Siege of Boralus in the first reset, since one of us hasn’t been doing barely any world quests and is unfortunately not going to have the required reputation in order to participate. It is an unfortunate situation but considering the requirements were known we can’t really blame the game for it but it still feels bad that he can’t experience the dungeon with us.

So Battle for Azeroth was released a few days ago and so far it has been something of a blast, it has been really enjoyable to have something to do again in the game after the quiet times at the end of Legion where I was almost only logging in to do raids with the occasional mythic+ sprinkled in.

The start went by rather quickly, we managed to get to 120 directly on Tuesday and still have enough energy after a small sleep break to clear all of the available dungeons on heroic—that left out two dungeons, Siege of Boralus which was locked behind reputation and Kings’ Rest which is only available on mythic. It was really interesting to see the dungeons for the first time since I hadn’t really spent much time on the beta at all though they were for the most part a bit easy, which I guess is to be expected from heroic dungeons.

There were a couple of notable exceptions though, primarly Shrine of the Storm and Temple of Sethraliss¹. The end boss in Temple even prompted a respec from Discipline to Holy for me, since I couldn’t quite figure out on the spot how to manage the single target healing requirement of that boss without any mobs present.

Temple of Sethralis

Since these dungeons are new, I should probably elaborate. The final boss of of Temple of Sethraliss is basically a healer fight with other roles being in more of a support position: a mob in the middle needs to be healed to full. The problem is that you can’t heal that mob the whole time since it is immune to healing so first some channelers need to be killed after which you have a short window, maybe 10-20 seconds or so to heal the mob. While this window is open and later on in the fight as well, there’s a rain of frogs going on which leave a debuff behind when they touch a player, reducing that player’s healing by 50%. Since we weren’t completely aware of that mechanic, that probably also played a role in my initial difficulties as Discipline in this fight.

It is still a dungeon where I will probably prefer going in as Holy as opposed to Discipline on mythic+ simply due to the last boss and the healing requirement there, though I am interested to see how that fight scales with higher mythic+ levels.

The dungeon also had some interesting moments with some “true” Player versus Environment elements, where you had to dodge arrows falling from the sky or navigate through a labyrinth of moving lightning orbs. Interestingly, these elements also scaled up on mythic which we did later on, the arrows were much harder to dodge with them being close to impossible to dodge without movement speed increase if the circle spawned on top of you.

Shrine of the Storm

Now the other notable dungeon was Shrine of the Storm. This one was less about the bosses and the environment and more purely some rather difficult trash. There are some particularily difficult mobs in the beginning, a form of water elemental which stuns the whole group, throws you up into the air and then damages you with falling damage. For mythic we figured out some ways to skip most of these mobs which of course was less helpful after some wipes, but it will probably still be a very useful strategy for mythic+.

There was also a rather annyoing mob later that did an extremely painful beam on a single player, which I had some difficulties dealing with though luckily it was heroic and still manageable especially once we noticed the rune the mob left behind which reduced damage taken significantly—at least when people were attentive enough to actually move into the rune.

Beyond that most of the dungeon was smooth sailing, excepting the last boss on mythic but even there we quickly figured out what we needed to do.

Reputation

There is one slight thing that is annyoing me though, much less so than in Legion but still. As noted, there is one dungeon that is locked behind reputation and Blizzard decided to once again do a reputation gated questline in order to unlock this dungeon. Now my problem comes from the fact that one needs to keep doing world quests in order to acquire this reputation while I would much rather just be able to sit down and farm it out in a group in a single or several sessions. Instead it seems necessary to check in on the world map often to find available world quests for this faction, which I suppose increases the engagement statistics for Blizzard but is a bit iffy as a player. On the other hand, it’s a much lower reputation requirement than in Legion with Suramar which is a big improvement and I guess it is one of the things contributing to me actually having something to do in the game again which is a positive.

Simultaneously, for “slow burn” reputations that one simply wants to get in due time which don’t gate critical content, I do prefer the whole world quest model since we are encouraged to do those anyway for emissaries and Azerite.

Azerite armour

Which does nicely bring me to my next point, Azerite armour. Now so far I’m not that convinced by it, since most of the bonuses I’ve seen so far have been rather unspectacular and I can’t use the bonuses on most of my gear yet since the requirement on mythic dungeon gear to unlock those traits is so high even after they reduced the requirements. I am however really curious to see what ends up happening with the raid gear, and there is an interesting trait or two already available so there is certainly promise. I’m also interested to see how the “Prydaz” trait scales, there were some people on the beta noting that it doesn’t scale very well but maybe it will be less mandatory for mythic+ than Prydaz itself was in Legion as a Priest.

Conclusion

All in all, there is still very much wait-and-see going on, mythic+ isn’t available yet and neither are the raids which is the content I primarily enjoy. But the expansion has started of really fun and it is nice to be able to do some of the more casual stuff from time to time without too much stress about time and performance. That said, I’m still looking forward to more content unlocking and getting to do the things I enjoy most, but the start of the expansion has given me a good feeling about coming times and I hope that lasts.