The couple first weeks of Antorus progression are now behind me and the raid still feels rather simple. The new mechanics introduced by the mythic difficulty so far have been trivial though to be fair we are not that far into the raid yet with only five bosses down.

There are some bosses I’m still looking forward to though, namely Kin’garoth, Varimathras and Circle of Shivarra. They all had potential on heroic already and will be interesting to see them with more proper damage and healing tuning. Of course, Argus will be interesting as well from what one can gather from the top guilds, but seems it will be a while until we reach that point. Hopefully not too long. At the very least I can end the week somewhat content after how badly last week went, which is already a very good thing. Here’s hoping we keep up the pace next week and one can happily enjoy the holidays.

Week one of Antorus has come and gone and with it the first impressions of the new raid. Only on heroic so far as mythic isn’t out yet, but still.

So far the raid hasn’t offered many real challenges, with probably the most noteworthy fight being the Coven of Shivarra. That boss fight has the potential for some really nasty overlaps on heroic causing problems and almost instant wipes. I’m really looking forward to seeing it on mythic.

Apart from that though, with the exception of Aggramar where people had problems grasping the strategy and priority targets for some reason, most of the fights there were very straightforward. The majority of the fights even being finished in just one try.

There are several fights that show potential for mythic though. Antoran High Command is already slightly stressful on heroic and might be the first problem for some guilds going into mythic. I also think Varimathras, Aggramar and Argus have the potential to become bigger challenges when going into mythic, as the first two at least do already have some significant mechanics on heroic to think about which will likely be even more critical on mythic.

So with that I’m really looking foward to the coming reset, will be interesting to start seeing some of the bosses on mythic difficulty and what the first actual stumbling block ends up being for me. Though first I need to settle on a guild, that matter is still slightly open.

So the last week or so has been rather annoying as I ended up leaving the guild I was in and have been looking for a new one. Sadly, the search has gone rather terribly so far, though I have a few leads still. I’m really hoping one of those pans out, as it would be rather sad to miss out on the early progress in Antorus since that’s usually the most fun time. Unfortunately that’s looking rather likely, since the pool of guilds that are of interest is rapidly shrinking.

And I have no idea what I’ll end up doing if I don’t find a guild, I still want to keep playing the game but if I’m not able to raid at a reasonable level that doesn’t really make much sense any more. But time will tell.

This post is acutally quite late as we already killed him on Wednesday, however I figured it was still worth making. So indeed, Kil’jaeden finally down after some 300+ wipes and now we finally get a small breather before Antorus comes out. Well, kind of, since we are hopefully re-killing Kil’jaeden before Antorus comes out to give the people that didn’t have the chance to be there an opportunity to get the achievement. I will be sorely disappointed if we don’t manage that.

As for the fight itself, well there’s not really much for me to add. Sure, I hadn’t played the second intermission yet at the time of the last post, but that one went over so quickly there’s hardly anything to say about it and phase three was really a mechanics check for one to two players who were responsible for the orbs or looking for safe spots from the obelisks. For the rest, it was just a DPS and HPS race. That’s not to say the phase is trivial, it is however quite a lot simpler than phase two and we really didn’t have a lot of wipes in phase three once we started to consistently get there.

All in all, it’s a fight that seems to mostly test patience due to the length. Sure, there are timing challenges with the orbs especially for slower classes that don’t have means of ignoring the mechanic, but those are somewhat easy to overcome with practice. I am still rather content with the fight, though it’s not exactly my favourite and I do also have to say, as we were more consistenly getting into phase three the fight actually came a lot easier to bear since it started feeling like the fight was progressing rather quickly. This due to there almost always being something happening that needed ones attention, if not now then in a few seconds. That did definitely add some intensity to the fight later on. It is by far not as punishing as something like Maiden, which is probably a good thing as it allows for more training to be done each try.

Blizzcon came and went and with it the announcment of a new expansion for World of Warcraft, Battle for Azeroth. And again they are talking about focusing on the fight between the Horde and the Alliance, this time with actual new game mechanics to emphasize that fight, specifically Warfronts and Island Expeditions though the latter don’t have quite as heavy an emphasis but still involve doing that exploration while fighting against a team from the opposite faction.

Honestly, I’m not quite sure what to think about that. For me, the constant conflicts between the Alliance and the Horde have been the most frustrating part of the story, probably because I quite like both factions and seeing them kill each other off doesn’t sit quite right with me. Especially the conflicts between certain races, like the Night Elves and Tauren seem to make little sense other than the allies they have and the support they want to give them.

At the same time I understand that it’s something that’s been core to the franchise for a longer time and refocusing on it makes sense, especially considering the PVP objectives we had in Legion already and the story between Genn and Sylvanas. But it’s still really frustraing to see Teldrassil burning, though I guess that was the point of it, to actually try to create some feeling of anger against the other faction.

Though I believe in the end the expansion through its raids will end up focusing on common enemies anyway, so I’m not sure how big a focus the conflict will be in the end. I have a feeling it’ll end up beeing a similar to Mists of Pandaria, in the sense that we began with faction conflict and ended up with a common enemy, even if he at the beginning of the expansion was the leader of one of the factions. I just hope they don’t end up using Sylvanas for that purpose, though that feels doubtful, more likely something like the Old Gods, since we are already seeing signs of their involvement. Though Old Gods being involved of course opens up the opportunity for some corruption arc, but hopefully not feels like we’ve seen enough of those.

With that said, I am really looking forward to this new expansion. They seem to be removing the legendary system and replacing it with the new artifact neck basically, since it’ll allow you to “spec” three pieces of gear which seems to offer similar customization to the legendaries. The progression on the new artifact neck is also character wide instead of spec specific, which really helps with off-specs especially in time like the current where one wants to get to a certain level in order to prepare for an upcoming raid. The raids also look really interesting, which in the end is the primarly reason I’m playing the game. With those and mythic+, probably my favourite addition to the game ever, staying in the game and even getting expanded, I’m pretty sure I’m going to enjoy the upcoming expansion. Only time will tell for sure.

I’m still not happy about Teldrassil though.