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.

The last few weeks of raiding have been mostly filled with progress on Kil’jaeden. And slowly I am getting slightly frustrated and strangely enough, bored, with this boss. The fight requires a decent amount of attention though not quite on the levels of Mistress or Maid however everything just happens over such a long span of time that actually getting to the part we’re progressing on is gettign frustrating.

That all is slightly strange, because at the start when almost nothing was happening as we were progressing phase one, I was actually quite enjoying the boss. Now slowly however, phase one and the intermission are becoming frustrating slogs while waiting for the interesting part to arrive. It kind of reminds me of the healer challenge: the beginning is by no means trivial, but at some point quite easily doable once one knows how it goes, however having to keep redoing it to get to progress gets really frustrating at some point. That’s the thing I’m currently experienceing with Kil’jaeden, frustration at having to keep redoing the “boring” parts and consequently at times making simple mistakes.

A perfect example of this was once getting hit by one of the orbs from the adds in phase one due quite simply forgetting to even think about dodging because I was so ready for the phase to be over.

I realize these things are a part of raiding and a part of what makes these bosses difficult to execute properly, an endurance check in a sense. However being in the middle of progress on such a boss can be frustrating at times.

Seeing past that though, I think I actually enjoy the fight. I’m not overly keen on the knockback orbs spawning in the middle essentially being a timing check for one dispeller in the raid, but in general the knockback mechanic can be quite fun and gives opportunities to make life saving Leaps of Faith which I appreciate. Phase two is also quite interesting, though the healer adds feel slightly frustrating as I feel I can’t properly contribute there. Maybe worth looking into Apotheosis which should give a significant increase in burst heal for those adds, though we seem to be handling the adds rather well for the most part so probably not necessary.

Right now though, I’m just hoping that we actually manage to kill the boss in time, since it seems Antorus is arriving on the 29th and that’s not a whole lot of time for us. Sure, it’s still three weeks that we’re probably extending the ID, but even then it might end up being tight. All of that also assumes I don’t get benched, would naturally very much like to be there for the kill. I’m sure it’ll end up being fine, but it’s a bit of extra pressure that I didn’t need. Especially considering it makes the deadline for getting 75 traits apparent.

On Monday we finally managed to down Avatar after surprisingly few tries. Believe I personally have around 230, which seems to be quite on the low end for that boss. In the end as noted, the boss is quite simple. Sure the DPS and HPS requirements are somewhat tough, and phase one as a healer especially. But in the end, somewhat like Maiden, the kill ended up coming as a surprise. We went down into phase two around 32% and just decided to play it to see how it goes. A few minutes later, the boss was down. It was all surprisingly clean and boring almost. Maybe a place or two where it looked somewhat dangerous.

I also ended up getting some loot which was nice.

And after Avatar, we ended up having some time to poke at Kil’jaeden. Which was surprisingly fun even though we were only wiping in phase one before the first intermission. I find it strange, because on heroic I don’t really find the fight that interesting. Maybe that opinion will change as we get into more phases and get some of the more annoying overlaps, but so far it was rather fun. Could also have been the hype coming in from the Avatar kill as I honestly wasn’t expecting us to kill Avatar that day yet. So now I’m unexpectedly actually looking forward to doing progress again, which wasn’t so strongly the case on Avatar, and that feels great. Especially things like the additional healer adds will be interesting to have to deal with in a fight that already seems kind of hectic with all the flying around.

But until that, it seems we need to clear the raid again, as we’ll be going back to farm. Which I find kind of good as I’m sure there are still several people that need equipment (especially tier pieces) from both Maiden and Avatar. On the other hand, I kind of want to just go do progress on Kil’jaeden. But yes, more gear probably means smoother progress, so that will be nice since it seemed we might have had some damage problems already with getting into phase two quickly enough. But I guess we’ll see how that all goes in a week or two again, not sure how quick our re-clear will be.

Regardless, definitely looking forward to raiding more than I was last week which is a very good thing.

So we’ve gotten a lot more progress made on Avatar thanks to extending the raid lock. Honestly I’m not quite sure if it was the right move but I do want to kill Kil’jaeden before Antorus comes out so in that sense I suppose it could be helpful. And in theory at least, we should have the gear to be able to kill both bosses so it should be fine from that perspective. Leaving out the farm bosses does feel sligthly bad though, especiall considering we have only killed Maiden once. Feels like an odd compromise.

The fight itself though seems surprisingly simple at its core with some of the combinations becoming punishing rather than any of the core mechanics being difficult to handle. For example, the beam soaking is easy enough on its own, it can become a pain with the daggers flying around and the AoE from Ubound Chaos. Phase two as well, it’s mostly just managing soaks (like on Kil’jaeden) as well as not standing in the AoE. Sure there’s a quite decent chunk of incoming damage and the damage requirement for DDs isn’t exactly light either but there just isn’t much going on (though there is a decent amount of movement required, which makes finding moments to heal challenging at times). All of that did mean that the first day we practiced Avatar felt like such a chore. It was just unusually boring and uninteresting, though strangely that feeling was gone the second day. It might’ve just been the expectation of going in to do farm bosses and then ending up with progress that affected my mentality so much.

Don’t take all of the above to mean it’s an easy fight though, it’s not. As said, there’s lots of unopportune movement involved both in phase one and two, which means healing can be a pain (since usually having to heal coincides with having to move shortly before or after). Both phases are also very spread out (well, phase two only in the beginning) which while sure, reduces the amount of people I have to look after as a healer also increase the responsibility I have towards each of those individuals. Moving at the wrong time is much more likely to lead to deaths or close calls. I’m also quite curious how we end up managing with mana and cooldowns once we start coming to phase two “for real”, since so far we had full mana and all cooldowns ready while practicing which of course won’t be the case for the actual kill and both phases are rather big mana sponges.

Aside from the healer requirements, it’s all also a rather tight DPS check from what I can see, which will prove to be intersting. We have had a few wipes due to insufficient DPS on the Maiden, though usually something had gone wrong earlier in those tries. It’s interesting actually, Avatar doesn’t punish mistakes as instantly and brutally as Maiden (of Vigilance, that is) but they are still very detrimental. One soaker death? Well if a beam soaker, kind of OK though does mean all the other soakers receive more stacks. Dark Mark soaker? Well, we need to figure out something on the fly quickly or it’s just a wipe when they come, since that’s assigned to individuals that can handle the mechanic alone and we don’t exactly have many extras. Or hope we still have a battle ress, though those go out rather quickly at the moment (it is progress after all).

In the end, I’m actually rather looking forward to see more progress on Avatar. Sure, the boss isn’t actually the most exciting but it is still quite a challenge. And we do have to kill Avatar in order to get to Kil’jaeden, which I’m also looking forward to (though I’m not sure how much I’ll actually end up liking that fight, so far not actually one of my favourites).

So we finally managed to kill the Maiden yesterday! It felt like it was a bit too long time coming, which made finally managing it feel rather nice. At the same time, the kill was also rather anticlimactic because of how the fight works. Since it’s only the two phases rotating the whole time, there’s no real escalation built into the fight, it only requires concentration and clean play the whole time. While yes, having 20 people make close to zero mistakes during a whole encounter is challenging and that’s what led us to having so many wipes as well, it means the encounter is rather monotone. I didn’t realize we were killing the boss until a few seconds before she was down, which is strange because usually one can see the escalation in incoming damage or the like as the encounter goes on, a perfect example being Mistress Sassz’ine or the Desolate Host. Both become much more dangerous as far as incoming damage is concerned and that adds a certain tension.

It is kind of nice with a more I guess relaxing fight in there, though at the same time the almost zero tolerance for failure does introduce tension into the fight. Will be interesting to see how the rekill goes, assuming we don’t extend the ID.

In other news, killing the Maiden meant we got to poke at Avatar a bit. We just practiced phase two, and that fight seems like it will be messy. Theoretically we’ve now played through the whole phase two, though we definitely need to do it better if we actually want to end up downing the boss. Damage looked okay considering we’ll be in execute range in reality but there were a few too many avoidable deaths and failed soaks. Something I’m sure a few more tries will fix. Of phase one I still have no idea though it seems it’ll be something of a pain, since once more tons of movement and trying to keep people healed up in that time. Especially with the different sources of damage that actually require us healers to keep people topped so they don’t get one-shot by mechanics while also dealing with movement. At the same time, I think that promises an interesting fight, so hope to be progressing there next reset again (and not spending the whole reset on rekills).

But in the meantime, some rejoicing that the Maiden is finally dead and we got some progress done!