9.0

We ended up completing Twisting Corridors in Torghast last Monday, all eight layers, and I have to admit it was surprisingly fun. Well, perhaps not surprisingly, I had kind of expected it to be more fune than normal Torghast since one actually properly has the opportunity to do something sensible even with some of the common anima powers, but still.

The runs themselves went rather well, we ended up having one failed run but that one was probably more down to late-night shenanigans than anything else, but all in all it felt more like a question of the content being time-consuming than difficult. To be fair, it’s a hard balance to strike, and with the runs being so long it would probably also be rather frustrating if it was more punishing since it would mean more time was “wasted” on failed runs, so the current balancing is probably correct.

One slightly unfortunate thing with it all, is that now there isn’t really any reason for me to revisit the Twisting Corridors outside of doing it for my own enjoyment, and the normal runs will probably feel even more boring than they were before since I’m more aware of the cool things that are possible with longer runs yet are so unlikely as to not be worth aiming for during a normal run. It really is a pity, and one nice change that could be made on that front is having Twisting Corridors as an option instead of the normal runs for the weekly ash, though implementing that might be somewhat difficult even if it would make farming it on alts that much more enjoyable.

The biggest gain from the whole ordeal, of course, was the mount awarded at the end, which is one of the few mounts currently available that is actually useable in the Maw, making that zone not utterly terrible to be in. It was really the primary motivator for me to get started with the whole thing, since I had been ignoring the Maw best I could but this strategy is probably not viable in the long term if I want to continue raiding at a reasonable level, so making doing the Maw not utterly terrible as it was unmounted was something of a priority for me, actually having some fun achieving that was just a bonus. It still baffles me at times, how Blizzard can make so many steps in the right direction to make the game more enjoyable with less mandatory grinding, and then just kind of give up at the last moment and introduce something like the Maw. Still, should have enough time now with the mount and weekly quests to get a sufficient amount of reputation for the gems before the next major content patch hits, so I guess that annoyance has kind of been dealt with for now; having to re-farm the Maw on alts however, I’m not looking forward to, hopefully that gets fixed at some point.

All in all, a successful week, especially since we ended up killing Sire Denathrius the next day, completing progress for now. Quite a nice feeling, being able to take it a bit more relaxed with the game again.

Something of a early-expansion phenomenon seems to be that holy (meaning priests, paladins are usually rather useful) are actually rather decent at times and sometimes even preferred over discipline, meaning I actually get the opportunity to use the spec at times again which has been somewhat fun.

The spec itself, actually does play rather decently again since Shadowlands prepatch, far away from the boring slog it was in Battle for Azeroth but still a lot slower than Legion unfortunately. Salvation is still something of an annoying spell to have, since while it is very powerful actually getting to use it at reasonable intervals means a somewhat decandent playstyle which isn’t all that fun to execute on. Luckily, no fight so far has called for that so it’s mostly just been used as a once-or-twice per fight kind of thing, where it slots in perfectly—probably even more the design-intent behind the spell.

Beyond Salvation though, holy’s niche is in this strange place where its strength really lies in making the other healers shine, which while it does luckily work excellently in fights like Sun King’s Salvation, doesn’t really make a lot of sense in most other encounters especially when the alternative is to just bring a discipline priest since it’s the same class. Oh, also, bigger raids do favor holy over discipline to a certain degree, since discipline is rather limited in the amount of targets it can heal and that is another area where I have found use for the spec, specifically in our boostraids since we tend to go over the 20 player mark.

What I’m really enjoying about the situation though, is the versatility in gameplay it brings having the opportunity to actually play both specs on a regular basis and have it make sense, since no matter how fun either spec is getting to switch it up with both of them actually being enjoyable is much better. I’m also curious to see what some of the later bosses bring to the table in this regard, I’ve heard some rumblings that there is something later on that can be cheesed a bit with the Redemption-legendary that became available this week, and I’m looking forward to seeing what exactly that ends up entailing. Getting there might take a bit though, we’re slowly starting to get to the difficult bosses in the raid so progress is slowing down somewhat, hopefully we’re not too many weeks away from me getting to actually test it all out.

So the prepatch is here, has been for a few days even, and it has started in usual fashion, with things being very broken. There’s the usual thing, of most addons being broken with the changes that came, I think the biggest problem for them has been the change to require some extra code for frames that need a backdrop since apparently time was being spent figuring out to render non-existent backdrops before so Blizzard changed how they handle all of that.

A bit more annoyingly, what was also rather broken the first couple of days were the servers, which considering how well Blizzard has handled the expansion launches recently was something of a surprise. Patch-day itself was pretty much unplayable, we wanted to do some leveling and couldn’t really get started at all before late into the evening when things mostly stabilized somewhat. At this point, the servers are mostly stable again from what I can tell so things seem to have settled, which is nice.

A lot more annoyingly, the patch seems to have brought a couple of bugs along with it, the worst of which is some sort of desynchronisation between the clients and the server, where a player ends up just showing in the completely wrong location. Have had it happen both in dungeons and in the raid, and is rather annoying when it does especially as a healer since the player in question will only be shown in range on the desynchronised position not their actual position, making healing them in dungeons essentially impossible. Raid fights, well depends on the fight and how far one has to move, though luckily we only had this bug come up once and some strategical relogging seemed to fix it so.

Another more minor bug but rather annoying one non the less is the inability as Alliance to start questing and leveling in Battle for Azeroth at the start unless one does Exile’s Reach as starting zone. Which would be fine, except the whole reason we are leveling Alliance characters at the moment is in order to unlock the heritage armor which means playing allied races which means we can’t play Exile’s Reach since we start at level 10. This is a minor bug for me since there are other avenues to level and we mostly wanted to do Battle for Azeroth to see how the scaling on the neck was at early levels and it seems that gets unlocked later anyway, but still it was rather annoying to find it since we spent a good while trying to figure out how to start questing there—including leveling other characters through Exile’s Reach to see how that works and seeing if maybe party sync could allow us to finagle our way in there—but unfortunately it all seems very buggy at the moment.

Beyond that, we had our first prepatch raid yesterday—moved from Wednesday due to the aforementioned server/addon issues—and it was all a surprisingly fun time, since we got to do content that was rather familiar while at the same time having to relearn how to play it to a degree due to the class changes and consequent damage output changes following that. Especially prominent in this was no longer having the burst from fire mages which meant we had to adapt some of our strategies somewhat to reach some key damage checks, but overall it seemed that our relative damage had actually increased since we seemed to kill N’Zoth at a earlier point than before. The lack of haste hasn’t hit me too badly _yet—_though the worst part of course comes when we start leveling in Shadowlands—but it was definitely noticeable when doing my ramps on my priest since it means I have to time things differently and potentially not cover as many people. I’ll get used to it with time but still a bit sad to have it all gone.

Overall the prepatch has been a fun time so far despite the hiccups, so should be able to tide me over well until the expansion itself launches.