9.1

This past Wednesday saw the release of the new raid on heroic and normal, along with some slight progress along the campaign and the availability of flying in the Shadowlands—with the big caveat of it only being available in the four Covenant-Zones, and not in the rest of the world, not even Oribos, making it a somewhat useless thing. It’s still nice to have of course, but still feels like one of those situations where Blizzard begrudgingly allows us to fly for a bit when it is completely irrelevant for the content. It remains, as ever, frustrating.

The campaign itself was rather usual, with possibly the most obvious and clearly telegraphed reveal of all time at the end, but it was still a welcome change of pace from the daily grind content the rest of the patch has been. Though there is of course the frustration of having to repeat it on several characters for those who play several, which is unfortunate.

The raid itself has been something of a wild ride so far, and we actually haven’t managed to clear it on heroic yet though we did have some rather quick progress on the earlier bosses and are working on Sylvanas and had several good tries there. Kel’thuzad probably cost us more time than he should have, but at least it works as practice for mythic so it isn’t wasted time. I think I have actually ended up enjoying most of the bosses in the raid at least to some degree, there are a couple in there where the tuning is a bit strange and several where the mechanics are buggy but I think my enjoyment of the raid is a lot higher than it was in Nathria. Of course, early times and not mythic yet, but bodes well for the future.

Speaking of buggy, Sylvanas. On the last platform there is a rather infuriating bug which makes targeting AoE ground effect abilities impossible—the cursor just permanently stays grayed out—and it just makes the whole fight so much more annyoing to play because the only workaround we have found so far is creating macros casting the spell on oneself, which of course means running in to melee so that it actually hits a sensible amount of people. It also seems to pop up rather randomly, making it more annoying. Hopefully that is one of the things that ends up being fixed before we are progressing the boss on mythic, otherwise I’m not sure what I’ll do there. To be fair, it won’t be as bad since by then I will have specced away from holy and back to discipline, so I’ll be less reliant on such spells.

That has actually been another interesting thing, playing holy again. The spec feels fine to me still, if somehow very weak. I’m not sure why, but it just feels like all of my spells do almost no healing—well, with the exception Holy Word: Salvation which has a hefty cooldown. Still, the change of pace is welcome, especially since it is a much easier spec to handle in heroic with new and to me unkown mechanics and timings, but there is still a certain sadness to it all, remembering how it was and seeing what it has become. To be fair, I am also putting a rather heavy focus on damage since that was pretty much always my speciality, so maybe that is coloring my impression, but it still feels odd.

Anyway, new content is fun, look forward to progressing the raid!

This past week saw the release of World of Warcraft patch 9.1, and with it—I think, because I can’t see the future and know what’s coming—the culmination of my frustration with the game.

For those who follow the game a bit more this will be old news, but with the patch came some rather drastic balancing changes to discipline priests, the class and spec I primarily play, which all but forced me to change covenant as well. This means farming renown once more, which while a great deal easier since the patch, is still a very luck-based activity and the amount of content one needs to do to get back to where one started varies greatly.

Early on in the week, I was unfortunately not so blessed by Lady Luck, and staring down the prospect of potentially having to farm a rather extensive amount of renown through less than reliable sources doing content that I don’t find overly enjoyable. This, unsurprisingly for someone who was already rather on the fence as to my motivation to keep playing, was a rather crushing feeling. This was exacerbated by flying being locked behind renown and becoming available next week, which regardless of how useless it is looking to be this expansion is something I’ve always looked forward to unlocking and having as soon as possible since I really don’t agree with Blizzard’s design direction in this regard, and thus there was a creeping fear of being “cheated” out of the opportunity to unlock it quickly. A rather irrational feeling when evaluating the utility of actually unlocking it, but a strong feeling nonetheless.

Fortunately for me, the guildies I have are rather excellent, and with the help and motivation of a friend (💜) and without almost completely participating in said unmotivating content I already on Saturday ended up being able to fill up my renown once more.

This puts me in a somewhat unexpected position, since I find myself at the moment actually enjoying World of Warcraft—even the more menial things—a lot again, and am rather motivated to keep playing. I am curious to see how long this will last, since it may well be that I am merely still riding on the high of a new patch being released and the content being somewhat fresh, but I am happy for the change.

Another benefit of the current situation is that having been forced to change covenants actually ended up as a positive for me, since now at least as far as theme and looks go I ended up with the covenant I wanted the most when they were unveiled, even if the abilities associated with the covenant aren’t necessarily the ones I would choose.

The biggest takeaway from this experience for me has really been the reminder of the value of friends and a good guild in a game like this, since at the end of the day they are the true reason I keep playing, with the game merely serving as the backdrop for those connections.