Battle for Azeroth

So the expansion got delayed, the pre-patch is hitting soon, I’ve played some more beta and barely play any live. All of these factors are condensing into quite a lot of feelings towards the game, so I thought it prudent to write those down to process them better.

Delay

Shadowlands getting delayed is old news at this point, and I haven’t really mentioned it so far because all I can really say about it is echo what I think the general sentiment seems to be: great news, a bit unfortunate that we have to wait longer since I was really looking forward to having new things to test out—not just in beta form—but the expansion really needed this and I’m hoping it gives Blizzard what they need to make it great. It’s giving me more hope that the expansion will be good on launch which is a positive thing, even if it does mean some boredom in the short term.

Pre-patch

With the announcement of the delay we also got the date for the pre-patch, which mostly felt like a concession so that people would have something new to grab on to during the extended wait for the expansion. It is cool, since it will give more people the opportunity to play around with the class changes that were restricted to people with beta access before, and it will mean that we get to do some more allied race leveling we had been postponing so that’s a nice bonus.

On the other hand, pre-patch is generally the worst time of the games lifecycle, since it’s the time when the old stuff gets disabled or weaker—looking at you, corruption disappearing and secondary stats getting a lot weaker—and the new stuff isn’t quite there yet to replace it so it tends to play rather poorly. Still, my time playing it will probably be quite restricted—at least on max level characters where the negatives are most noticeable—so it shouldn’t be that noticeable to me and as said brings with it the opportunity to level some allied races so on the whole it’s probably more positive than negative.

Beta

Having played more of the beta however, oof. It makes really clear to me why they delayed the expansion and why I was hoping for it, but even though there have been some changes for the positive so far, it still feels like there is quite a lot of work to go before the expansion is in any state that could be classified as fun or good.

The covenants and soulbinds still feel like a mess, more limiting of player choice than actually enabling it. The class changes I’m rather unsure about, sure there is some good stuff in there but the tuning is a bit all over the place which makes it hard to predict if the fun things are the things that will actually stick. The Maw is an unfun mess that I would prefer to completely avoid at this point yet they stuck the gem vendor in there making it essentially mandatory content where you seemingly in its current iteration can spend quite a lot of time there daily.

Barely playing any live

Among all of this, it feels like there’s barely any reason to log into the live game, excepting maybe doing the weekly keys and arena on my latest alt.

All of this is putting me into the somewhat strange place of having alternating phases of hype and dread towards the new expansion. On one hand, I’m really read for something new, on the other, the thing we’re getting really doesn’t look all that good at the moment and even though Blizzard took more time in order to be able to fix that, I’m really worried that it just won’t be enough.

At the moment, I’m in more of a down phase which I’m sure shines through in what I’ve written, and I’m really hoping Blizzard proves me wrong because I would really like another good expansion right about now.

Lately, I have had a renewed motivation to play World of Warcraft, yet with the next expansion knocking around the corner the primary forms of content I tend to participate in are in a somewhat of a cooldown period and consequently I’ve ended up doing some leveling and gearing of new characters, most recently a rogue.

It’s actually been kind of amazing to see how quickly it is possible to level at the moment, even barring aside all of the “cheesy” things one can do and just going for the pretty straightforward path toward max level, though to be fair we did do some trickery with party sync since we had a couple of people that were a bit behind so that enabled us to douple-dip into the bonus objectives in Warlords of Draenor that remain one of the more ridiculously quick means of leveling in that range and allowed us to basically completely skip leveling in Legion.

As for gearing, well that’s a bit more interesting, since we took something of an “expansion launch” approach to the whole thing where we ended up just gearing through dungeons as opposed to the usual fare of having some guildies help us out with mythic+ keys, and while the progress has naturally consequently been quite a lot slower, it’s been quite fun dragging it all out a bit and having a longer span of time where I have a reason and motivation to play a new character. It does also present more of an opportunity to get to know the class and spec in a more appropriate environment, which hopefully means that once Shadowlands launches—or more accurately, the pre-patch hits—I’ll be a lot more prepared for the class changes that come with it.

Speaking of Shadowlands, one of the reasons I decided to do some leveling was rather unsurprisingly preparation for the new expansion, since I am hoping this time around will be somewhat more conducive to actually playing several characters on a reasonable enough level without too much of the grindy things that has bogged down creating several characters in the past couple of expansions, and from what I can gather from other sources, this is indeed the case.

One of the other considerations for a new character was simply the opportunity to explore playing damage dealers a bit more again, since I usually tend to mostly stick with healers and even more so mostly tend to just stick with my priest for most types of content, so getting to explore more parts of the game once again was a welcome change in these times where there doesn’t really seem to be all that much to do in-game. It really also helped that rogue is a class (like hunter) that I’ve been interested in playing more for a long time and actually did dabble in back in Warlords of Draenor, and having the time once again to get to know the class better in anticipation of new content has been a treat, sneaking around is a lot of fun.

That reminds me, so far I’ve mostly been playing Outlaw since it seemed to be the most sensible spec for leveling as much of it was done in dungeons and the spec seems to have the most AoE available to it, but truly go for that sneaky feeling it does not so maybe I need to take another look at the other two specs, Subtlety in particular since it feels like that might be the spec that fits my idea of a rogue the best. To be fair, going all pirate especially after having rewatched all of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies recently has also had a rather nice feel to it, so I truly haven’t minded playing the spec, especially since I’ve mostly been ignoring its biggest drawback: the randomness with the rolls. Trying to get better at the spec though, does mean I need to start considering those rolls more so maybe my enjoyment of it will change in the near future.

I have been feeling a bit of a nostalgia hit recently, having seen some gameplay from Shadowlands where a holy priest was played and really wanting to give the spec a shot again. So far I’ve ended up deciding against it, since I’m still somewhat familiar with the state the spec is in and there isn’t really any content that I do where changing specs would make sense along with my last impression of the spec in this expansion being somewhat negative with it just feeling so powerless in comparison to Legion.

It feels a bit strange how something so innocuous has managed to trigger so much desire in me for something I know I won’t actually enjoy all that much in the end, and perhaps consequently the most sensible approach would be to give it a short shot so that I have it over with so to speak and then not have to think about it again. The problem there becomes, the recent thinking about wanting to play my old spec has also rekindled feelings of wanting to play my old race, night elf, which of course isn’t something quite as easily manageable.

I still find the connection I feel there to be somewhat remarkable, especially now that I have over two years of quite active—probably more active than at any point prior to Legion—play on Horde. To be fair, at the same time it still somehow feels that I’m finding my feet a bit here, not when it comes to the community or the guild I am in as I quite like those but my character. Her latest iteration is, as mentioned here before, vulpera and while the race does feel quite nice to play and having the roll back is really cool, I still find myself somehow missing both being a blood elf but even more being a night elf. Now the former is of course still an option though I think toys or consumables for swapping appearance are the more sensible alternative there rather than a race change again, the latter is sadly still quite definitely off the table unless we get to start raiding cross-faction.

In the end these will probably be feelings I end up not acting upon since while they are valid they conflict with other desires I have that take priority, and I do also really quite enjoy both playing vulpera and discipline as well. Though to be fair, as far as specs go, I do have a bit more freedom to experiment so maybe a raid here or there as holy isn’t such a terrible idea, especially one of the boostraids since the spec might even be slightly better suited for that environment; more easily allowing for healing such large groups. In addition, I was also considering trying shadow again for at least an instance or two which does mean I need to look into the gear needed for that as well. I guess I have more things to consider than I thought…

So that part of the expansion cycle is with us again, the endtimes. The raid is cleared, there is no new content on the horizon beside the next expansion and the general interest towards the current content is rapidly waning.

Raiding

We are still going somewhat strong and maintaining our weekly raids though we have those down to one per week now, but aside from that it’s mostly just the occasional mythic+ run along with the weekly alt-run that keeps us coming together and playing together.

The reduced activity has given me the opportunity to actually participate in the aforementioned alt-run and I’ve actually taken and geared my paladin well enough to be allowed to join in there which has been rather fun. My paladin I tend to play as a tank so getting to play another role again has been fun as well though surprisingly stressful even in a raid environment which I wasn’t expecting—usually I find raids more relaxing to tank than mythic+ but this somehow hasn’t quite been the case with Ny’alotha so far though I’m getting there with my comfort level.

This has also given me the opportunity to see how much of the raid I had been ignoring mechanically since these things didn’t really directly concern me though in at least one case it would have actually been useful to know. Three specific things come to mind: Shad’har tank mechanic; Ra-den phase two tank mechanic; N’Zoth Psychus phase.

Now the Shad’har tank mechanic is essentially don’t let your co-tank get two different types of debuffs which while quite simple as a mechanic and not something I need to concern myself with when not tanking is something that tripped me up the first time there.

The Psychus phase again is very relevant as a tank since I’m directly responsible for positioning Psychus correctly so that the debuff gets applied as well as ensuring the pool on the floor spawns correctly, and it’s also very good to know as a damage dealer so the correct tentacle is getting damaged it is largely irrelevant as a healer except for impacting how and where I move though even that is more down to environmental awareness than anything else.

The Ra-den tank mechanic however is something that might have been somewhat useful to know even as a healer though to be fair our tanks did call it and as such specific knowledge of how it works wasn’t important. But essentially, in phase two, Ra-den applies a debuff that does damage to the tank which scales with their current health at the time the debuff was applied. Knowing not to heal the tank before the debuff gets applied is of course important because of this, but as noted it got called anyway and I wasn’t focusing on healing the tanks in that phase so how and why it was important didn’t really register until way after progress was over.

All of this has however made me even more interested in maintaining more alts in Shadowlands if possible so that I have reason and opportunity to gain this insight earlier on in the content when it might actually prove relevant to progressing those bosses on mythic.

Shadowlands

Speaking of Shadowlands, we are slowly also getting more information to how the upcoming expansion will work and while my outlook remains perhaps more pessimistic than most I’m trying to keep an open mind.

The systems on the surface actually look quite promising, I’m looking forward to seeing interesting legendaries again and Thorgast could end up rather fun if implemented correctly especially considering my recent experience with another roguelike but I’m just worried they’ll suffer from the same problem that the Mage Tower in Legion and the Horrific Visions in Battle for Azeroth: being gated behind world quests/dailies. To me, this just adds a completely unecessary level of stress and frustration to the experience especially when playing multiple characters.

My other really big worry are the Covenants since even with the updated information of the initial switch being easy but returning being difficult I’m really worried about how Blizzard will manage to balance the abilities in a sensible manner as well as tying cosmetic rewards to gameplay since that will probably mean I won’t really have much of a choice in the matter. With luck those two things will align however I don’t feel that is overly likely. The optimal case is of course all of the abilities being close enough together that one can actually choose freely and this is more likely for the healers anyway than for damage dealers or tanks, but it is still something I’m looking at with more worry than excitement at the moment.

I think that actually sums up my general feeling toward Shadowlands: a mix of worry and excitement, though definitely more of the former; I’m looking forward to what’s to come but wary of getting overly excited.

So progress is over for this expansion, we killed N’Zoth yesterday with a moderately decent performance of only 219 tries in total.

The fight itself is a big improvement on the heroic version, with actually some rather interesting parts going on for healers with all the damage coming in though it ends up feeling somewhat finnicky with how precise all the timings one needs to hit are; a mistake a minute or so earlier with a wrongly used cooldown might lead to deaths later on. Still, it does make the whole thing feel a bit more like a precisely executed dance than anything else, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing though it can get frustrating when progressing the later parts of the fight with simply how long it takes to get there. Having to maintain a decent level of concentration for 10+ minutes before one even gets to the new and interesting bit can be difficult at times.

The secret phase was also something of a disappointement, with not that much going on aside from the usual healing and damage. Sure, there is the dance where you dodge a couple of swirlies and yes some people have to disarm the bombs, but overall it felt more like a bit of a lull between all the activity in the other phases while still requiring somewhat precise execution on timing, namely when the mob dies.

Overall though, the fight did end up feeling like a good end to the expansion, even if there might have been some fights earlier on that were interesting and the patch overall didn’t really “save” the expansion as one might have hoped. Now I guess we just need to wait for the alpha or beta to start in order to see how Shadowlands is progressing, though I am more pessimistic than optimistic of its prospects at the moment.

So as mentioned, I was rather disappointed by the confirmation at BlizzCon that we won’t be getting cross faction play, mainly because I was hoping to get the chance to play Night Elf again but of course having the opportunity to play with some friends who are still Alliance was also a factor. With the release of the new patch however, that has lessened somewhat with the Vulpera being available.

They are obviously a completely different feel to Night Elves, but still, I think they are the first Horde race I can feel at home with though admittedly it is early days and time will tell. Just hoping we don’t get another raid like Dazar’alor where one gets turned into the other faction, since Mechagnomes are the Alliance counterpart and while I do find the concept cool, they just aren’t my jam at all. Though the race changes in Dazar’alor were somewhat random anyway, not following the counterpart rules of the Orb of Deception at all—played Forsaken, got turned into Human instead of a Night Elf for some reason.

So the year is slowly coming to an end with the holidays approaching and we had our last raids on Sunday and Monday, retail and Classic respectively. There will probably still be some non-mainraid activity going on, potentially an alt raid on Friday and an optional Classic raid on Monday the 23rd, though it will be interesting to see how far we get since I’m assuming attendance won’t be especially high.

In the meantime, I think I’ll continue farming some transmog, with my current target being finishing the Naxxramas 25-man set. Only the gloves are still missing and they quite stubbornly refuse to drop, had an especially unlucky run yesterday with two pairs of set-gloves actually dropping from Sartharion but neither pair being the Priest ones unfortunately.

Another thing on the agenda will probably be finally getting the +15 achievement from mythic+, have somehow completely neglected that so far this season and it’s rapidly coming to a close so I’ll slowly be in somewhat of a hurry to complete it. Still, only 5 dungeons are missing so the bigger challenge will probably be finding the correct keys rather than actually completing the dungeons themselves, at this point in the season most of us are rather overgeared for +15 keys so they tend to go rather smoothly when we aren’t fooling around too much. I’ve also had a couple guildies mention they are happy to help, so getting the group together shouldn’t be a problem, it’s more the actually engaging and asking people that will be the “challenge” I think.

So that’s retail, as for Classic, I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled on the auction house since I got lucky and won the roll for Eye of Divinity on our previous Molten Core run which means I need the Eye of Shadow in order to do the quest for Anathema/Benediction.

Unfortunately, we actually somewhat recently transferred over from our overpopulated and Horde-biased server to a somewhat smaller server where we avoid both the rather long queues—an hour or two during the weekends and evenings—as well as the constat gank squads in the open world which is nice but the new server being smaller means both that the Eye of Shadow is somewhat more expensive here as well as a bit less available meaning it isn’t simply a quick matter of buying the trinket I do have to do some waiting. I did briefly try farming it with a guildie with no luck, unfortunately the droprate isn’t the greatest either and the mobs have a sufficient amount of health to make farming them somewhat tedious.

Still, I’m sure I’ll end up getting the trinket eventually, and probably still this year, but it is something of an unexpected setback in the sense of something I hadn’t considered while we were changing server.

All in all, I’m rather looking forward to this small lull in activity going forward, even if the two raids a week haven’t been exactly bad and actually quite fun so far, it’s still nice to have fewer things on the todo list for a while. Especially so considering 8.3 will probably be hitting sometime early next year, which means a lot more farming coming up with the cloak as well as new levels on the neck.

We did the thing a few days ago actually, just been too busy with Classic to post. I don’t really have much to say about the boss really, except that it’s probably the most complex and annoying boss I’ve played so far and from a healer point of view not overly fun, which was kind of to be expected when the world first was with only two healers. Still, finally getting the kill felt really good, probably even moreso due to that!

So with me playing the Hunter more frequently in recent times and many of the people I play with on Alliance not necessarily being active raiders currently, there was some interest in taking a poke at the new(ish) raid and see what the bosses in there were capable of and it also gave me a good opportunity to potentially get some more gear—unfortunately no luck with that.

We started out with a core of seven players, meaning we were a few short of being able to reasonably enter the raid necessitating looking for randoms to fill out the ranks. This lead us to the decision of going with the more PUG-friendly raid-size of 20 players, with the usual 2/4/14 setup—two tanks, four healers and 14 damage dealers. The bigger raid size allows for more individual mistakes from each player which tends to be a very good property to have when you are relying on players whose capabilities you have no idea of.

The raid started out well enough, with us killing Sivara on our first attempt though admittedly with heavy losses—it seems the decision to bring a larger group paid off, since several people clearly had no idea what they were doing in this encounter. I tried my best to explain the general tactics to our own group on TeamSpeak, knowing that they had little to no experience in the raid and this seemed to work out well for them for the most part.

After a successful kill we moved on towards the next boss, Behemoth, who did provide us with one wipe since several of our randoms did not seem familiar with the healing immunity magic and consequently didn’t get the buff allowing them to be healed—one of our own had also missed out on us killing the pufferfish on pull, meaning they didn’t get the buff at start and also ended up dead. A short couple of raid warnings later on the second pull we managed to down the boss with no casualties which was a relief since I don’t find the boss particularily interesting to play.

Radiance of Azshara again went smoothly, without many casualties and I believe only one try needed to kill the boss. To be fair, this boss’ mechanics are more standard faire than Behemoths’ and anyone who did some dungeoning in Legion and remembers Wrath of Azshara from Eye of Azshara knows something like 80% of the mechanics on this boss already, making success with inexperienced players more likely.

This, however, is where our moderately good run ended. We unfortunately got stuck on Lady Ashvane trying the relatively standard two-phase tactic but unfortunately not quite making it with our best try being with around 500-thousand boss health left. I probably should’ve done some more stringent pruning of people who weren’t performing or perhaps switched to the potentially more easy-to-execute three phase strategy if we had people failing, but the wipes eventually lead to the raid dissolving with the extra players we had found leaving. Luckily, this nicely coincided with a healer we know coming online who we knew and was reliable, so we decided to continue the raid in tighter setup of 2/2/6 though still needing two random damage dealers—for Ashvane we actually ran 2/1/7 since we still wanted to make the damage check for two phase and we knew our healer could handle healing it alone.

We rounded up the evening by killing Orgozoa without too much fuss and Queen’s Court with a lot of fuss, and I have to say though the first half or so of the raid was much easier with the larger group it was much more fun having mostly people we knew in the raid and being able to communicate properly even when we were having significant problems such as at Queen’s Court.

Overall I had a rather fun time doing some “casual progress raiding” in a somewhat more relaxed atmospehere than my normal progress raids, where while I did know the encounters many in the raid did not and I also had to play them very differently, not only because I was playing a completely different role from normal but also because of the small raid size towards the end necessitating me more frequently playing and paying attention to mechanics that I could probably normally safely ignore in heroic—it might actually be rather fun if we get this small raid going on a somewhat regular basis, at least for a while, and there seemed to be interest in doing so. Here’s hoping we find enough people to get going next week without having to look for extras!

So, well, we killed Za’qul. And, well, it feels like there isn’t that much more to say about the fight from a healer perspective that I haven’t already said. It’s basically: keep the tanks alive, handle the bursts of damage from the dreads preferably with some sort of damage reduction cooldown—making Priests and Paladins good—and for the rest, just play the mechanics. Sure, there is some jumping between the different realms—specifically the fear realm in the later stages—but even there you just have to follow the rest of the group and go down at the correct times.

This means the fight is a bit boring to talk about since it’s all more in the execution than any specific exciting mechanic, and while the fight does get a bit more intense with time it isn’t overly intense. We also ended up running four healers for this fight, though I could see the rekills starting to get done with three healers quite quickly, since there really isn’t that much healing to go around. So overall, a bit of a disappointment after Queen’s Court, but still we got him down which is always nice.

So I’ve mentioned having leveled my Hunter on Alliance before and in recent times due to some old friends who still play Alliance having returned to the game, it has given me the opportunity to play her a bit more and try out being a damage-dealer for a change, a role I very seldomly play in World of Warcraft. The experience has actually been a surprising amount of fun, with us doing mythic+ a couple of times per reset and Marksmanship proving to be a suprising amount of fun even with Barrage not being as good of a spell as it was in early Legion making the spec a bit less fun.

There is however, a bigger frustration I have with the spec and that is the somewhat silly way AoE damage works, with one target being good, three or more clumped targets being good, but two targets ending up as basically single target which can be very frustrating depending on the dungeon and the tank since one gets the feeling one isn’t contributing as much as one should on two-target pulls. From what I know, this is the primary reason our hunter in the mythic+ group I had Horde-side earlier in the expansion was playing Beast Mastery—a spec I do not really enjoy at all, and he I believe also didn’t find as fun as Marksmanship—which I feel is unfortunate. It’s a very strange feeling, seemingly being unable to anything sensible on certain packs.

Another slight frustration with the Hunter doesn’t really come from the class but rather from bad luck, with me not having looted a single new weapon in the three or so weeks that we have now been doing mythic+, leaving me to run around with a world quest reward weapon with very suboptimal item level and somewhat suboptimal stats. It’s frustrating especially knowing that we have several times done dungeons where an upgrade could have dropped and me at times even using a bonusroll in hopes of simply getting something decent yet constantly simply having the bad luck of not getting an upgrade.

Despite those frustrations, the experience overall has been rather positive and somewhat more relaxing than my tanking adventures—though those are enjoyable as well—and has given me the opportunity to do something completely different amidst the current mythic progress which is a welcome change.

So this is actually a bit of old news, but we managed to kill Queen’s Court on mythic!

The fight is actually a perhaps surprising amount of fun, being one of the more hectic fights so far as a healer with a somewhat constant barrage of high incoming damage on the group through the sparks along with the edicts that at time makes executing on healing cooldowns rather tricky, especially Repeat Performance as a discipline priest since it forces you to change the way you apply Atonement by silencing you after two consecutive casts of the same spell. This was fairly easy to work around by alternating between Shadow Mend and Power Word: Shield, but it was just another thing to keep eye on in a somewhat hectic fight.

Still, it’s also a fight that one can actually learn with the sequence of edicts being known and the bursts from the sparks being fairly predictable so once you get it down it starts feeling, well not easy but at least manageable.

Now with the kill being a few days old, means we have also had a decent amount of tries on Za’qul, which to be fair actually feels a bit more boring so far than Queen’s Court. The problem really, is that while there are some pretty large bursts of damage early on through the fears the rest of the time it’s mostly a case of doing damage even as a healer and playing mechanics—mainly the tentacles that on mythic come in threes—which just doesn’t feel quite as interesting as the previous two bosses. It does get better on in the later stages of the fight with the stacking debuff, but it feels like mosts tries so far we are losing people to the “simple” stuff of tentacles or simple bad luck with the spawn of the Maddening Eruption landing in the middle of the tentacles causing a wipe. So the fight is still tricky, it’s just that we haven’t consistently gotten to 40% where the fight really begins in earnest and the way there is something of a slog. Still, those last 40% will probably prove very interesting indeed and I’m looking forward to our progress there.

We managed to kill Orgozoa yesterday, and honestly my thoughts from the PTR kind of still stand. The fight is really rought to heal, yes, and has to be executed well purely from a mechanical standpoint, but as far as really interesting things actually happening during the fight? Not really overly so.

Phase two still really felt like the easier one of the two, mainly because from a healer standpoint you are basically back at the beginning of phase one with almost nobody having the debuff. Sure, there are some other things to watch out for like the stomps and we did have a few deaths and consequently wipes to those but that I think is mostly because the area of that ability is somewhat unclear and people had to learn that, but overall phase two just doesn’t have that much more going on—always having the adds there for DOTs was nice as a discipline priest though, getting that extra healing going on.

And phase one, well, it got really rough towards the end even with us five-healing it, but it feels like such a slow burn that while it is challenging it doesn’t really feel exciting or overly dangerous most of the time with potentially the exception being during the Arcing Currents when players have to spread out in order to avoid spreading the Incubation Fluid to unaffected players so they are outside of many area healing spells yet take a burst of damage, but even those weren’t really lethal if the players were topped properly. That was still the primary point we lost players especially towards the end where almost the whole raid needs constant healing so it is something to watch out for.

After we killed Orgozoa however, we did have a decent amount of time left to get a few trys in on the Queen’s Court which proved much more interesting. Now, I was slightly skeptical of the fight at first because even though some of the decrees can be annoying on heroic like Repeat Performance, they’re mostly somewhat ignorable. On mythic however, the pure damage coming in from the orbs along with the much tighter timing on both the decrees as well as things like the charge made the encounter much more interesting than I was expecting. Also, there always being a decree active and them rotating in a set manner makes the fight more interesting as well, since that allowed the designers to put in really harsh sequences like the orb explosions during Deferred Sentence which then very quickly gets followed by Obey or Suffer. That combination really ended up being the most difficult part for us so far and the one which I think we will need to work on the most.

So I think we have some very fun progress ahead of us, once we manage to reclear everything this reset.

So Method managed to snag the world first on Queen Azshara as is somewhat usual, though it seems to have been a rather close race with Limit this time around, moreso than the last couple of ones.

Method have done it! They've finished Queen Azshara off, claiming the World First and winning the Eternal Palace Race to World First. This is Method's 12th endboss WF and raid/race win, as well as the third of Battle for Azeroth!https://t.co/vlitnSMzrC#RaidProgress #RWF pic.twitter.com/BXJejSGccM

— Method (@Methodgg) July 28, 2019

That however, isn’t really what I wanted to talk about, but rather the somewhat unusal setup they ended up running for the boss, namely: only running with two healers on the first kill of the last boss of a raid. Now, playing a healer myself this is obviously something that doesn’t feel overly nice since it means that more healers will be benchend than usual and to me it already felt rough having three healer bosses since I like my fellow healers, but also from what I know this is somewhat unprecedented and it feels like it points towards some heavy flaws in the encounter design of Queen Azshara for this to be possible at all.

One large contributing factor to this being possible was the maximum health reduction debuff that you need to take in order to keep the different seals charged which mean there has to be overall less damage coming in or it would simply be oneshotting players. This was also a large contributor to Method’s decision to run two discipline priests I think, since shields give you that extra buffer on that low health—of course, discipline also brings with it some decent extra damage, and them already running only two healers indicates every extra bit of damage is welcome.

But secondly, as noted above, the fight on heroic as well just feels like it has very little incoming damage, with me on our kills generally spending more time doing damage than healing. Sure, there is some decent burst in the last phase but aside from that the fight felt kind of boring from a healer perspective and I guess that is now simply getting validated even on mythic which I think is sad to see.

It’s odd, all of this makes me kind of not look forward toward Azshara that much, since it makes me feel like maybe the fight won’t be that interesting. Now granted, Method still needed several hundred pulls to get the boss down, so I’m not thinking it will be easy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the fight will be interesting which is unfortunate for the end-boss of a tier especially for one with so much lore tie-in. I guess I’ll have to see once we get there, but for now my excitement for the end-boss is down somewhat though we still have a long way to go so there’s time to change that—I also somewhat doubt we will be running a two healer strategy since we only have one priest at the moment, but we’ll see.

We managed to squeeze in a kill on Lady Ashaven yesterday, on the last day of the reset bringing our total of first week mythic kills to four which I think is a rather respectable number this time around.

On the surface, not much changes with this fight from heroic with the primary difference being higher damage and healing requirements but in the case of this boss that was more than enough since the tuning is really rough meaning you basically can’t afford any deaths—that you can’t instantly battle ress at least—or you will not have enough damage to kill the boss in time. The bigger difference—for me, personally, as a healer—was the rather hefty amount of incoming damage as well as the fact we were only playing with three healers on this boss making every single healer mistake or general mechanics fail that much more critical, having just one extra coral patch up after phase two basically instantly spelled a wipe. I guess there is one significant difference to heroic there, when you laser the corals away in phase two they actually spawn a couple of spots on the ground that need to be soaked, if not they spawn new corals which spells a bad time.

In general, I found the fight suprisingly fun since there was almost always some upcoming timing I had to keep in mind and the rotation between phase one and two provided a bit of change in what I had to be watching, and because the damage check was so tight I actually got the opportunity to focus a bit more on doing damage during the lulls in my own cooldown usage which provided some interesting additional challenge since my damage actually mattered more than in other fights.

After the kill we had a little time left over to take a few pokes at the next boss, Orgozoa, and I can already tell that fight is going to be fun since during the few tries we did the healing requirement on individual healers seemed similar if somewhat lower than Ashvane with the difference being us having five healers on Orgozoa and only three on Ashvane. I even managed to go completely out of mana on one of our pulls which is impressive considering the fight lasted maybe three minutes or so which has me somewhat worried but simultaneously excited what that fight will bring, I guess I’ll find out this reset if we manage to clear out the previous bosses in a reasonable time.

So mythic week for the Eternal Palace started on Wednesday and we have managed to get stuck on Lady Ashvane as was to be expected I think with her being the first “proper” boss of the raid because she has something of a difficult damage check even while running only three healers. I believe our best try ended up somewhere along 40% with us managing to get to the third phase two and some way into it but that’s nowhere close to killing her since as far as our timings go, we are trying to kill her in the third one and we don’t quite have the damage for that yet. Still, I think we had a rather good showing for only three hours of raiding on Thursday, having killed the three first bosses along with heroic clear on Wednesday.

Wednesday in general was an interesting day, with a large part of the guild along with me deciding they wanted to farm mythic+ in preparation for the raid which meant I had to get up earlier than usual in order to be online when the servers reset. It was a fun time though the loot gods were not with us, with our group getting pretty much no titanforges and very few upgrades in general. I might want to do some more mythic+ on the weekend in order to prepare for the next raid on Sunday, though shouldn’t be quite as important for me since my gear is for the most part quite up-to-date and we didn’t really have healing problems on Ashvane as of yet though I guess it could enable me to do some more damage and it seems that Orgozoa could require a bit more healing again since I believe we want to run five healers for that boss.

I’ve also had the time to run Operation: Mechagon again giving me the blueprint for rank two of Vision of Perfection which was welcome for Ashvane—using it there for the little extra damage it provides and the cooldown reduction also proved useful—though I have to say I’m not a huge fan of the time gating there, would prefer something more farmable but I guess timegating is the name of the game for essences, either through limited reputation or weekly things like the mythic+ chest or Mechagon with the exception being that one very grindy battleground essence that I’m happy I don’t need to get since I’m not a huge fan of PVP.

In general, I think that’s something Blizzard failed on in regards to the essences, depending on “luck” you might be forced (read, heavily insentivized) to do content you might not enjoy at all in order to get the essence that is actually good for your class and spec in content you do enjoy doing. Simultaneously, I do think it is good that there is some incentive to try out different forms of content in order to see if they have changed enough that you might like them now but this approach just seems unecessarily heavy-handed.

Overall, the mythic week has started out very fun with finally some proper fun new content to do along with a renewed interest in mythic+ from my guildies which means more opportunities to run dungeons which I also enjoy so if it goes on like this I’d call this week a success.

On Sunday we ended up killing Azshara first try after some rough sub-one-percent wipes on Thursday and it was a very nice feeling even though it would’ve been even nicer to kill her already on Thursday since I think we would have ended around top 10 world at that point.

This kill was immediately followed by clearing The Eternal Palace on normal as well as reclearing once again Battle of Dazar’alor for the mount from Jaina, all in all a rather impressive set of farm achieved on one raid evening which took me somewhat by surprise but I guess should have been expected with our quick progress in the “pleb”-raid on Friday where we managed to clear normal as well as several bosses on heroic with alts as well as the greatly increased damage from the essences.

The raid in general is rather fun, though the last two bosses, Za’qul and Azshara, have me worrying somewhat for the more casual players since they again seem to be somewhat complex fights with several phases and a ton to learn. That said, they will now have the advantage of a big item level increase through the new raid that they did not receive in Crucible of Storms which might prove enough to make this raiding experience smoother as well as my perspective on the whole thing being rather far away from their experiences so such troubles are hard for me to predict.

That aside, I did find the Azshara fight rather fun though somewhat boring as a healer until the last phase with not much damage coming in before that. There are a decent amount of mechanics to think about, among them the decrees and mind control which I think nicely show some of the personality of Azshara—being so certain in her position as a queen as to commandeer people who are not her subjects, as well as being able to charm almost anyone to do her bidding—as well as the wards which we need to maintan in order to keep the water from killing us. With how the tuning was on heroic however, it does make me curious how many wipes we will end up seeing on mythic since I think we had much less trouble with Jaina on heroic than Azshara and Jaina was 300+ pulls—on the other hand, for Uu’nat we went in on heroic without any idea what to do while almost completely ignoring mechanics and killed him on the first try, and yet on mythic he was 300+ pulls as well, so maybe that’s no indication.

As for the rest of the bosses, my thoughts from the PTR mostly stand, with the exception of Orgozoa who proved much easier on live than there as well as Za’qul who didn’t have quite the one-shot potential with his fears on live as he did on the PTR making the fight much more manageable—of course, that is partially down to our gear level on live as compared to the PTR, so this might be much more difficult with less gear. Also, the Blackwater Behemoth is still a poorly executed environment, with not being able to eat under water preventing the group from properly recovering from a wipe as well as buffing up, that really needs to be fixed in some sensible manner though the fight itself seems fine now.

Yesterday we went ahead and cleared Operation: Mechagon on the live realms with hardmode and it was quite the contrast compared to the PTR experience, feeling somewhat easy even though we had the hardmode active which we didn’t for the most part on the PTR.

The biggest change I noticed was by King Gobbamak where the damage from the quake he does had been heavily reduced, not really even needing healing to keep anyone from dying as long as nobody got hit—still a good idea to top up the group but not nearly as intensive as on the PTR. The trash before King Mechagon had a similar nerf, where it still does significant damage but is much more surivable without instant reaction from the healer or using the absorb shields from the other adds.

Another interesting thing was the hardmode on K.U.-J.0., where you get a stacking slow debuff which ends you at 80% reduced movement speed. Since the fight is rather dependant on being able to spread apart as well as line of sight the boss, this proved somewhat tricky to work around though there was a nice corner to the left of the boss’ spawn—when you are looking at him standing in the room—where it was rather easy to do. With weaker gear or less damage I would think this might still prove somewhat tricky though, we didn’t need to play the movement mechanics overly much since we were able to kill the boss fairly quickly.

Finally, the big challenge came by King Mechagon himself, where the hardmode actually caused us a fair amount of wipes since the timing for it is somewhat brutal. The hardmode activates a instakill mechanic on the boss that charges up (down?) with time, the energy bar of the extra boss serving as a timer and the mechanic firing when the bar gets depleted. This happens fairly quickly, however it can be stalled with the interruption sequence. This flashes on the skulls on the side of the room when the cannon is at 35 energy and the buttons become clickable at 10-15 energy or so giving your group approximately 5 seconds to enter the correct sequence to prevent a wipe.

We solved this by giving each of the buttons a world mark and assiging one of the damage dealers and the healer to one of the buttons, then having them call out their world mark color after they had pressed the button to inform the next one that it was their turn. We also had a dedicated player watch the sequence and call it, so the rest could keep focused on mechanics—in phase one this was the tank since they had a good view of the buttons and didn’t need to focus on the other mechanics as much, in phase two one of the melees was responsible for calling this since they needed to move away from the boss anyway in order to arrive at the button in time. This worked well though it required some practise since the timing was really tight. I’m curious if an addon ends up being developed for this, since communicating it through voice almost felt too slow with very little room for error which I feel might be a bit too punishing on more casual groups which I feel should be able to complete this boss at some point.

Overall, the dungeon was fun and I look forward to seeing it on mythic+ at some point as well as maybe trying for the no-death achievement there apparently is rewarding rank four of the Mechagon essence, which is good since in the meantime I will probably need to run the dungeon a few times in order to unlock the previous ranks of the essenece since I think it could end up being rather good for some fights or mythic+.

On Friday I finally managed to get Pathfinder Part Two unlocking flying which was a relief especially since I seemed to be a bit behind the curve on that with several guildies unlocking it already on Wednesday and Thursday with one outlier unlocking it already on Tuesday.

To be fair, I took the lazy way out of only doing the “normal” daily things in the form of daily quests and world quests and completely skipping out on the hidden sources of reputation gain in the new zones in the form of fishing and rare hunting among other things—what other things I don’t know since I didn’t really want to put in the extra effort for small reputation gains. One small extra thing I did do was the pet battle world quests though those in and of themselves don’t give that much extra reputation, defeating each of them the first time provided a quest item for a decent chunk of extra reputation—especially in Nazjatar where I think you get 250 reputation per turn-in—which was a boon as otherwise I would probably have had the required reputation a day or two later.

The first thing I ended up doing with my re-found freedom was inviting a friend for a round of azerite world quests since I had been completely neglecting those in a small protest against Blizzard’s insistence to keep flying annoying to acquire. This small protest is probably in vain and more likely to hurt me than anyone else but still it felt good to do. Still, being able to fly again is just nice and I’m very happy that ordeal is now behind me so that I can enjoy the game more and be less annoyed by the trivial things in it. Luckily I won’t need to worry about not flying until the next expansion—hopefully, unless they again introduce a no-fly zone which I doubt—and that makes me look forward to new content even more since I won’t have to explore it on the ground.

I recently rediscovered Blizzard Watch which I used to read with some regularity a couple of years ago maybe but after that I stopped actively reading most World of Warcraft news sources except for MMO-Champion for patch news. Reading through some of the WoW articles over there I stumbled upon an interesting one titled “This raiding tier is not fun for a number of reasons. Is casual raiding dying?” which got me thinking a bit especially with the unrest in my guild over re-killing Uu’nat which was partially motivated by the difficulty of the boss and thus not wanting to play it again.

Now, I tend to enjoy difficult content and dislike trivial content as a general rule, though there are times when I just want to sit down and do some mindless content to pass the time. I also find it somewhat difficult to see normal and heroic as difficult, especially considering I boost both Crucible of Storms and Battle of Dazar’alor on heroic with something like half or one third of the raid being essentially dead weight. Still, we also have gear that probably significantly exceeds that available to the average normal or heroic raider which does make a big difference.

All of this made it really interesting for me to see the perspective that normal and heroic raids might be overtuned for the playerbase they are designed for at the moment, since for me and most in my guild they feel kind of trivial at this point even when they are released—again, we tend to go in overgeared into these raids so maybe that is to be expected. I can also very well understand that a player who has been playing for a very long time might be getting overwhelmed by the simple amount of mechanics they need to pay attention to per boss, since those have been increasing pretty drastically with time. Compare pretty much any Classic or Burning Crusade, probably even Wrath of the Lich King boss with current earlier tier bosses that tend to be easier and the amount of mechanics the bosses have have gone way up. The article makes the same point, stating that the time they need to spend mechanics has gone way up with Battle for Azeroth.

Now from a egoistical personal perspective, this is a good change since it means I have more access to difficult content which I enjoy, but at the same time I’m already raiding mythic which is the place people looking for difficult content are supposed to go and I also still find the earlier difficulties somewhat trivial outside of the PTR so having those earlier difficulties be too difficult for casuals also isn’t really benefitting me or anyone in any real way. There is one argument I can see for making normal and heroic more difficult than before and that is keeping it more in line with mythic so that the jump when going from heroic to mythic doesn’t become too big for players wanting to step into the next level of content, however this introduction has generally been done by having the earlier bosses be easier and them getting more difficult the further you get into the raid giving something of a smooth learning curve for people stepping into a new difficulty therefore I don’t really see this as a strong argument.

Even for me, there is also the flipside of difficult content, namely farm. World of Warcraft is an MMORPG after all, and that means that gear is a significant part of the experience as well as part of preparing for the next raid which means that the previous raid needs to be farmed in order to give the group the best possible chances when going into the new one. This also means that if every single boss has a high difficulty or high chance of wiping the raid due to individual fails it means that farm becomes more sluggish which also isn’t really fun since once you have killed a boss a couple of times it kind of moves into the trivial content category where you know what to do and expect and don’t really want to spend overly much time on that singular boss. I think that’s what is at the heart of the reluctance in my guild to rekill Uu’nat as well: somewhat significant time investment for something that doesn’t really provide us a tangible advantage and is more just a gesture of solidarity. Now I find that gesture really important personally but for others it’s just about getting the first kill as a group and what happens after that with mounts or achivements isn’t that important so I can kind of see that perspective even though I still find it rather rude towards our fellow guildies.

This all also makes me wonder how Azshara will be, since our short experience on the PTR seems to indicate the fight will be rather intricate even on heroic as there were already a somewhat significant amount of mechanics that you need to pay attention to just in phase one-first intermission-early phase two which would mean that the fight will possibly again prove somewhat difficult for your average casual guild which might prove very problematic for the game in the long run since casual guilds tend to be the lifeblood of the game where new players enter the game and then potentially at a later point move into more hardcore guilds or if they find themselves content there stay—I, too, have spent a significant time in casual guilds throughout my time in World of Warcraft and there have been very fun moments in there and without those times I wouldn’t be playing where I am today and would probabl have stopped playing before getting to where I am.

So in the end, this article provided me with an interesting perspective that I hadn’t really thought about since it isn’t really relevant to me or something I run into while playing, which is why I tend to really like reading blogs and the like from players who are playing the game in a different way than I am since it provides a new perspective and gives me something to think about, while also allowing me to question the assumptions I have about the game and its players. Hopefully the concerns in the article get appropriately adressed by Blizzard in the next expansion—I think it won’t be possible to change the way the raids are designed this expansion since it would be somewhat jarring for the new raid to feel significantly easier than the previous one since there has so far been a general progression towards harder raids as an expansion goes on with something of a reset with the first raid of a new expansion—and that the game overall starts getting more interesting again.

So it seems the weekly reset brought with it some changes to Nazjatar, namely fewer elite naga required for the bounty quest—believe it was 15 before, was only 5 now—as well as the requisition quests showing the areas of the map where you can find the items which is rather nice since it means I didn’t have to look that up somewhere else. Small changes but were still nice to see and makes it a bit less annoying to do the daily stuff in Nazjatar.

So patch 8.2 Rise of Azshara has been out for a week now being released last Wednesday and it feels so far we have seen the worst parts of the patch. Now, it was to be expected with a new patch that it would include lots of new world content and a renewed requirement to farm Azerite—neck level 55 being the goal for my guild—but the implementation of these new world quests as well as daily quests—wasn’t expecting to see those again—leaves something to be desired. Many of these require finding or killing something somewhat rare, like hunting six chests in Mechagon or killing 3 rare mobs in Nazjatar which means with bad luck you can end up running around the zone for half an hour without getting any progress on these quests which makes for a somewhat frustrating experience, and these type of quests seem to be a daily occurrence in the new zones.

Some of these quests are made significantly worse because they require you to interact with normal items in the world, like collecting the Sea Stars in Nazjatar or the construction projects in Mechagon and since these are under normal circumstances expected to be something of a rare thing or something thought to be a benefit for many players—the construction projects—only one player can interact and gain quest progress at a time meaning not only are you randomly running around looking for something that isn’t overly common and the quest doesn’t bother specifying where to find it but you are also actively competing against your fellow players since them getting progress means you don’t get any. This effect seems to be at its worst when you need to collect the Sea Stars in Nazjatar since you generally need ten of them and they don’t exactly spawn often, so even if you do know where to look it takes a while running around the area to get them all.

Another somewhat mean example of daily quests was in Mechagon on Monday, where you needed to contribute 1000 spare parts, which wouldn’t have been too bad if I hadn’t converted most of my spare parts into boxes of spare parts in order to save on inventory space—spare parts stack up to 250 and a box requires 250 parts to craft and also stacks, how far I don’t know, but I’m assuming 20 or so which saves a lot of space—and in addition to that you needed another 260 or so spare parts in contributions to a construction project worst part of which was that finding one construction project wasn’t enough and only got me 76% of the progress towards completing the quest.

In addition to this, something that slightly annoys me with the new zones is the amount of content that you need to stumble upon or look up in a guide. For example, you can unlock two extra world quests in Nazjatar per day by going to the pylon in the cave in the murloc village to the east of Nazjatar and doing a short quest chain—only two or three quests. These world quests give you an extra 150 or so reputation per day which while trying to get to exalted as quickly as possible in order to unlock flying is something of a big deal yet there is no indication that all of this content is there meaning those that don’t find it on the first day are permantently behind.

Now, I understand that these zones are meant to include a lot of exploration and to a degree being forced to run around these zones more does contribute to that goal but it feels rather frustrating to have something so central as flying gated behind this type of content that is quite frankly annoying to do along with the unclarity of how to go about doing it, and I know missing out on a couple of world quests for a couple of days isn’t the worst thing especially since there are many other hidden or luck based sources of reputation similar to that available in these zones. Despite that, these zones for me feel more frustrating than fun since the content they encourage me to do feels more frustrating than fun which makes me dislike them and demotivates me from playing the game a bit and that is not a good feeling to have from new content. Luckily this all will pass once I’ve farmed the reputation and can start ignoring these zones but I don’t think that Blizzard’s goal was having people looking forward to not having to do these zones anymore right from the start.

All of this is put into an interesting perspective when contrasted with Classic, since there it was the norm not to get too exact instructions on where to go in order to complete a quest, just a general direction where you can find the things you need and off you go. Of course, this generally lead to people looking up where to find things on the internet instead of discovering it themselves and the quests did provide some indication in what direction you were supposed to be looking instead of none like the quests in the new zones—one example of this being the bounty quests which just ask you to kill X amount of mobs yet give no indication where they are to be found, neither in the quest text nor a map indicator. It kind of feels that the developers were trying to replicate some of that Classic feeling through these quests but forgot the crucial part of at least giving some indication where to go.

Anyway, it shouldn’t be too big of a problem getting all of this done before the raid releases on mythic which is the important part, so maybe it isn’t that bad in the end though it still doesn’t feel nice having content that feels frustrating even if it is just in the short term.

With timewalking being active a friend of mine asked if I wanted to level a character from 110 to 120 since it was apparently supposed to be easy to level through timewalking and this indeed proved to be true—I think we averaged two dungeons per level.

I used this opportunity to level my Paladin whom I rather liked playing as Protection before though not so much Holy since somehow the toolkit just felt lacking to me being used to playing Holy Priest. This ended up actually being a rather fun time after the first dungeon where I needed to get used to my keybinds again and rediscovered my abilities—one thing that surprised me was that Protection Paladins have bubble again, I believe it was simply a 40% damage reduction in Legion though I’m not quite sure anymore. What also contributed to the fun—for me at least—was it being The Burning Crusade timewalking—my favourite expansion after Legion—and the scaling being somewhat difficult again making smaller pulls with a bith of line of sighting necessary. It also really made me miss being able to effectively level through dungeons again, it was so much more fun than questing. Another cool thing about timewalking while leveling up with a character one played in Legion, is being able to use the “legiondaries”—the random legendary equipment from Legion—the whole time since your level gets scaled down so it stays active.

Tanking with a Paladin again was really fun as well, the Paladin was actually my first tank that I leveled back in Wrath of the Lich King when the mana management for them became a bit more sane and the easier time with keeping aggro made me more confident to try tanking. The ability at the time to easily generate area threat with Consecration along with friends wanting to take a poke at Horde characters and me consequently wanting to play a Blood Elf sealed the deal—Warriors not being available to Blood Elves at the time and Blizzard already having killed my interest in tanking with a Death Knight when they nerfed dual wield tanking. This makes me think, one of the things I would probably actually want to try with Classic is playing a tank—along with re-experiencing old school Priest healing—since I never really tried it back in the day though the time investment required for leveling makes me wonder how much I actually want to try this.

The whole shield and Consecration based tanking style I still find fun and in general I find myself strongly preferring tanks that can actually block—so Warriors and Paladins—over other tanks having played a bit of both Death Knight and Druid tank somewhat recently even. I also have to admit, Avenger’s Shield is also just such a fun ability to use and I makes me a bit sad to lose the legiondary that gave us extra damage and bounces to the shield since just seeing it fly around felt fun and satisfying. This all makes me actually want to play my Paladin more than my Warrior at the moment and the gearing and Azerite hurdle shouldn’t be too bad with the upcoming patch especially since it seems we get to easily unlock Azerite level 35 and the new Essences without much grind—well, the early essences at least. So that might very well be my secondary project for next reset, getting some questing in with my Paladin in addition to my Priest so that they both are at a decent point when it comes to essences, though this should apparently be easier with the Priest since from what I hear the best Discipline at the moment can be acquired through questing in Nazjatar which shouldn’t be too bad as long as there is no time gating—I don’t know if there is, haven’t really done much on the PTR outside the raid tests since farming the same content several times happens often enough on live for me.

I guess all of this means one more reason for me to look forward to the new patch and the next reset, I’m also curious to see how much I actually end up getting to use my Paladin since my Warrior so far hasn’t seen too much use—unfortunately doesn’t have enough gear at the moment to confidently tank alt keys for the guild and haven’t really been motivated to gear. Hopefully I get time to play both tanks a bit more, but I guess we’ll see that in the coming weeks.

With last reset being The Restless Cabal this reset it was time to take our poke at killing Uu’nat for a second time and unfortunately it did not go as well as Cabal did. Admittedly, we had many more new players in for Uu’nat than Cabal among them a new tank that I believe had never played the boss on mythic before so it was quite understandable that we did not end up killing the boss again—at least in the one evening we’ve had time to try so far. For me though, it was still fun seeing the boss again and getting some more raiding in—especially since it would have otherwise been only one raid day—even though I do enjoy the occasional pause in raiding the boss is still fun and we do have good reason to try for a rekill for some of the people that made significant contributions to progress but couldn’t be in on the actual kill.

What did somewhat disappoint me however was the attitude of some of our raiders, questioning why we were there again and seeming to be very unmotivated by the whole raiding thing which made me internally question why they then were in a raiding guild at all if they don’t like the activity. The worst example of this was one of our raiders stating they would only be raiding one day a week and only Battle of Dazar’alor until the new raid comes out which felt very rude and inappropriate. There are some attempts at discussing matters further so I’ll have to see where that goes, but overall something of a strange reaction I think.

That also seems to somewhat put into question if we will actually be able to get enough people together for next reset to try for another rekill, if not I find that a very rude way to show that these players don’t really care about their fellow raiders, something of a “I’ve got mine and you don’t matter to me” which I don’t really find an appropriate mentality to have in raiding. To be fair, it being summer does make it more understandable that players might not be available for raiding as much as the rest of the year and that does make me a bit worried about how we will manage the progress starting in a couple of weeks but that doesn’t really excuse the mentality or the statements made.

If we do end up having enough people to try for the rekill again, it should in theory get a bit easier with the Essences becoming available—of course this depends on people actually having and taking the time to unlock those essences. I just hope this all ends up being a minor footnote and not something of greater relevance since it is behaviour that seems to annoy quite a few of our raiders and I hope it doesn’t end up having bigger consequences for the future of the guild.

This reset we ended up taking a poke at the Restless Cabal on mythic again, since apparently there is some desire to kill the bosses in Crucible of Storms again even though the original plan was to only kill them once each—the changed plan seems to have to do with some nice tank trinkets among other things.

Now going back was really interesting, since while the encounter is somewhat simple on the surface, there were still a ton of details that we had collectively forgotten not having played the boss since our first kill probably a month or so ago. Small things like exact timings of abilities, when to use which cooldowns and who needs some extra attention when the explosions come and they have the stacking debuff, when to dispel the debuffs in order to keep everyone alive while optimising the amount of damage they can do. So there was a lot more detail to the fight than I even considered during progress that kind of just came naturally at the time but needed to be quickly relearned now in “farm”.

It was actually really fun to see how much complexity was actually in the fight that had been forgotten, especially since once we did have the boss down and the few trys before that it had all become so routine as to feel trivial. That actually meant that even though we “wasted” almost three ours of farm on killing just the one boss, I actually still had a decent amount of time that evening even though that ended up being all we did. It was just nice to have some change from Battle of Dazar’alor since while sure, we have been doing a lot more Crucible than Battle lately we have still farmed Battle a lot more.

Still, we are only killing Cabal this reset and extending next reset in order to rekill Uu’nat, probably because they don’t want to risk us not finishing Battle for Dazar’alor—even though we managed that today and we still had plenty of time over in addition to an extra raid day—as well as probably keeping with tradition of shorter raid weeks during farm so they don’t want us to spend all of our raid days in Crucible of Storms. It’ll be interesting to see Uu’nat again next week, it’ll be a shorter time difference from the first kill but it will still be a good three weeks or so in between since the plan seems to be to try to do him on Sunday instead of earlier in the reset.

On a separate note, with 8.2 being a Release Candidate on the PTR I’m curious to see how long it’ll be until the next content release, rumour has it Patch 8.2 will be dropping on the 26th of June and with there being a two week off-season it stands to reason that the raid will become available two weeks after the patch which would give us only three weeks of farm remaining before the raid. It also means that it is rather unlikely that the Hall of Fame will end up being filled on Alliance side, for Crucible that is. I’m curious to see how Blizzard will handle that, simply having less than 100 guilds in there since I’m assuming Cutting Edge is going away with the release of the new raid and so far that has been a prerequisite to earn the tile from participating in a Hall of Fame kill. It also would make little sense to be able to still earn the title with potentially much more gear available from the new raid so interesting to see where that goes.

If the Hall of Fame doesn’t end up being filled, that will both definitely show the poor state Alliance PVE is—outside of the MDI at least, but those are premade characters—as well as the brutal difficulty of this raid with so few guilds managing to get Cutting Edge. It’s strange really, personally the fights don’t seem that difficult anymore but to be fair we had a pretty decent learning curve on them with over 300 wipes on each boss so maybe a lot of guilds just don’t have the time to do that because they might still be progressing in Battle of Dazar’alor? It’s a strange circumstance, but kind of cool to see some more limited content again even though it does unfortunately mean that fewer people can participate. I’m looking forward to seeing the final numbers on all of that, could it even end up being the raid with the fewest Cutting Edge guilds so far?

AP, Artifact Power in Legion and Azerite Power were the new “infinite progression” mechanics introduced by Blizzard in order to keep different types of content rewarding for max level players. Now this worked very well in Legion—for me at least—since it was the first expansion in a long while that I played all the way through. Simply always having something available to strive for was a nice change of pace since it meant there was always a reason to log in—this was especially powerful in combination with mythic+ since this enabled me to do fun and engaging content while still working towards that goal of the next artifact level.

Unfortunately, somewhere halfway through Legion this system changed for the worse and remains in this incarnation—though I would argue even worse—with Battle for Azeroth. The big change that came was a significant reduction in artifact power received through completing mythic+, now because the reward had always been rather low in raids but this meant that the most sensible way to gain artifact power became world quests meaning there was no interesting way of gaining it anymore. This made the whole system feel a lot more grindy since I don’t find world quests particularily enjoyable yet I like raiding and mythic+ a lot and now I was being pushed to participate in content I did not enjoy.

In Battle for Azeroth this same system remained of low reward through interesting content and high reward through trivial content continuing through world quests and with the addition of Island Expeditions. Now on the surface island expeditions sound like a cool idea: explore a new island and collect the azerite there, the problem comes with the implementation. Firstly, it’s a lot less about exploration since you are competing against another team even in the PvE mode where you compete against NPCs that behave slightly more in a “PvP” way but without much of the strategy of real players—you also don’t get to use your PvP talents and some abilities work very differently from actual players—but these end up being more of an annoyance than anything else.

Secondly, the content ends up just being so trivial as to be uninteresting: the opposing faction poses no real threat and neither do the normal mobs and they can’t really, since this is content that is supposed to be doable with any setup including three healers or three damage dealers severely restricting the possibility of Blizzard balancing it into something interesting. Now in the end, this is probably the better outcome since for me personally I don’t see how a more time consuming version of this content could be made interesting with the technology currently available as I’d rather just have it be over with quickly since it just feels like a grind.

Thirdly, the grind also feels much worse on alts in Battle for Azeroth than it did in Legion with the changes to how artifact/azerite knowledge work. This is the catch-up mechanic which makes it possible for alts as well as players joining the game later to achieve comparable levels of power to the players that have been playing throughout. The problem comes with how it was implemented, in Legion the amount of AP you gained from doing activities scaled up as artifact knowledge went up; in Battle for Azeroth the amount needed per level goes down until a floor of 1000 and that is still a rather decent amount of azerite power, something along the lines of three mythic islands or three to four world quests. Meanwhile in Legion, doing one world quest might have given you something like ten levels towards the end which means that alts not only have a more severe version of the problem of having to unlock traits for their new gear since they’ll probably be receving it faster than a main character that has been farming since the start it will also require comparably more effort than it would have in Legion.

Now, the other problem with azerite in Battle for Azeroth is the reason you farm it: the azerite gear. This system just doesn’t feel quite as rewarding as it was in Legion, partially because you keep unlocking the same traits and partially because at some point you just kind of have everything and the only reward is a couple more item levels on your neck—hardly anything to look forward to. The maximum level is even capped within reach and most players who can still be bothered to do the farm content are probably already at that cap—several in my guild are, I’m not because the content just doesn’t interest me.

This is getting changed with the upcoming patch as well as some buffs to the amount of azerite rewarded for some activities but I don’t actually see how it will really help the system since at the start there will only be three new ranks of real interest—the one major relic slot and the two minor ones of which the latter won’t be available—which means that most of the time while gaining a new azerite level you actually don’t get anything for it except for maybe a small boost to stamina—not really a system that motivates you to play. That along with the above mentioned problems of the relevant source of azerite just make the system feel a lot more annoying and a lot less rewarding than it was in Legion which has meant I try to avoid participating in it as much as possible which is somewhat unfortunate since I think I’m probably exactly the target audience of such a system: someone that prefers having something regular to do in order to keep me going.

It is also completely possible that I simply burned out on the system back in Legion when the gains from mythic+ were nerfed and Battle for Azeroth never really had a chance, but even then the whole system has been something I’d rather be avoiding from mostly day one which is not a good sign for such a major feature of the expansion. I’m hoping 8.2 will bring some improvements that actually make me care again but I guess time will tell.

So with me having changed to Horde a while ago I ended up leveling a new warrior, since my previous one was still on Alliance and a different server and I wanted to be able to play a tank with the guild as well as the other people I now actively play with.

Another reason for getting back to the warrior was that it seems to have gotten some fixes since the pre-patch where they played really terribly and for some reasons warriors have always been the tank I most like the theme of—just being badass enough to handle all the incoming punishment, well the armour helps too. They are also the “meta” tank at the moment especially for dungeons, but seeing as that probably won’t be true with the next patch anymore and I’ll hopefully be playing the warrior for the rest of the expansion again—as long as it continues to play fun—that didn’t really factor into my decision. Generally being a good “meta” class doesn’t play into my decision on whether to play something, more important is the theme and feel of the class or spec.

Leveling the warrior went okay, I did something unusual for me and decided to level as fury instead of my usual choice of protection—I tend to prefer to play tanks and healers over damage dealers even for leveling. This was probably a good decision since fury was a decent amount of fun—I have always liked dual wield specs—as well as having some self-heal for survivability though it did get a bit tough at times at the very late levels and there I probably should have changed to protection.

Not leveling as protection did mean something new for me however: I needed to actually get the correct weapons at max level in order to start tanking. To be fair, I wouldn’t have been able to tank anything relevant anyway but still it was a new experience not being able to get started with my chosen spec immediately. This lead me to start gearing through world quests instead of the usual getting boosted in mythic+ by friends and guildies and it was actually somewhat of a nice experience. I’d actually done something similar not too long ago with my hunter that I leveled which is still Alliance and on another realm so I didn’t really have any choices beyond just gearing myself through world quests and there as here it proved to actually be a bit of a interesting casual experience. It was also interesting to see how luck-based world quests actually are since you need to not only get something in a slot where the item level is still an upgrade but the quest also needs to be one that actually provides the highest possible item level—a good example of this is from yesterday, where I actually saw a world quest on my warrior for a piece of 355 azerite gear even though I had already been getting mostly quests for 370 azerite gear and was wearing all 370 azerite gear as well as an average item level of 380 or so. This means world quests still have to a degree the randomness of being able to actually get useful gear from them as other content just that you know beforehand if you even need to bother—expecting titanforging of course.

It was interesting to witness this in play again since I have been mostly ignoring world quests for a while since the chance for relevant gear is so low—basically on most of my characters it needs to titanforge—and the content in and of itself isn’t that fun. What made it fun for a while on the warrior and hunter was the possibility to look around for new world quests and see at least one or two that gave a guaranteed upgrade and to be able to see that slow progress towards higher item level pieces after a while, still that doesn’t last long and is already ending pretty much on my warrior—I very rarely now see any world quest that provides an item level upgrade and while I know that world quests can scale higher it doesn’t seem like a realisitic gearing path for me anymore.

The general diversion into more casual content—leveling and world quests—has been welcome though as at the moment the general level of interest for the more interesting content doesn’t seem to be that high—or maybe more the availability of the people I would like to play with—and at times it’s just nice to be able to play the game at a slower pace. Maybe that’s what classic will end up being for me—the more slow paced casual diversion for the times when there is less going on in retail. I guess we’ll know that in a few months when it releases though we will probably be in the middle of progress again by then.

So I’ve actually joined a boosting community recently and have been on a couple of boost runs. It seems like an appropriate way to get some extra gold to cover raiding costs as well as maybe eventually be able to afford the much sought after longboi. Now that latter is more of a long term goal since I don’t know if I will be boosting that often and while the payout is good you do need to boost frequently if you want to make a lot of gold in a short period of time. It also depends on the amount of buyers per run, more buyers of course means more effective use of one’s time.

It has actually been a somewhat strange experience so far even though I’ve only been on a couple of runs. For one, how fun it has actually been considering we are doing content that is trivial enough for us to be able to boost somewhere along half of the raid. I guess actually having to boost all of those people is what makes it fun, since it brings some level of challenge back to the content actually having to think a bit more what we are doing there.

Complete side rant, there was one rather frustrating experience during one of the boost runs in Crucible of Storms. We were taking on a couple of more boostees than in the earlier runs and there was some uncertainty around us being able to actually make it through with so many boostees. Now we had a try and a wipe because of failed kicks on Uu’nat—I play Discipline so I can’t really react to fails that well afterhand, I have to predict them, admittedly I could probably have reacted better and it would have been fine. However, after this a call is made by the co-leader to bring in one more damage dealer and one more healer. Now, in theory this is a fine call since it makes it more likely that we are able to manage the amount of boostees but my issue comes here: the additional damage dealer was not told to interrupt anything which was the whole reason for us just wiping and we were doing more than fine up until that point. The additional healer also just meant that there was less for us to heal per person just making it seem that the healers weren’t pulling their weight. We of course easily kill the boss after that but we would have done that anyway if the kicks had been done properly which they were the second time around. As a consequence, we also didn’t try taking more boostees in on consequent runs—though to be fair I’m not sure if there was enough interest anyway. All of that just annoyed me more than it probably should for some reason, the “lost” gold isn’t that important just the complete misidentification of the issue and the overbearing response as a consequence.

Another somewhat strange and unfortunate part of the experience has been the—I guess—culture some of the players there have. Very much “let’s go boys” and lots of e-peen measuring it feels like giving something of a “boys club” feel at times. Now admittedly I’m seeing this more subtly for the most part and it’s probably something that they are bringing over from other communities they participate in rather than something innate for this community but it still doesn’t make the envirnment feel the most welcoming to me. It also feels really strange since there is so much talk in the Code of Conduct and so on about showing a professional image to the buyers by being on time and keeping the in-game raid chat clean but I guess this same professionalism isn’t expected to be extended towards other bosters.

Now as noted these are initial vibes and I haven’t been on that many boost runs yet and it’s probably very dependant on the leader as well as one’s fellow bosters—in fact the second boost run was much better than the first though that was probably partially due to very low participation in voice chat from almost all boosters present, me included—but it still isn’t really motivating me to more actively look out for additional boosting opportunities. I guess I should probably be fine if I avoid the outwardly obvious incompatible groups.

I still think I want to be doing more boosting than I have been so far, and Uu’nat being down should provide more opportunities as well as more importantly more energy to be able to do boost runs—that has actually a really interesting side effect of this progress that I haven’t though much about, actually just feeling like the breaks from raiding on non-raid nights were really needed.

Speaking of progress, one unexpectedly annoying part of it has been preparing the “foosts” (feasts) for the raids. Now there is a special version of the feasts that instead of the rare fish take the crafting reagnents from Uldir however there is of course a slight problem with this: we aren’t raiding Uldir anymore. There is something of a way around this, in that you can convert the Battle of Dazar’alor crafting material into the Uldir one with several different crafting professions. The problem here becomes when you want to convert 1000+ of the things it takes a lot of time even with the crafting enchantment—I think I spent 10-15 minutes converting mine. Now this doesn’t need to be done that often and it has been a one time thing for me so far but it has still been something of an unexpected and quite frankly unecessary small annoyance with regards to progress. Luckily that shouldn’t be so necessary anymore since from what I hear we will be getting a new feast in the next patch anyway and I don’t have that many of the materials left since we haven’t been clearing Battle of Dazar’alor since we started Crucible progress. But it would just have been nice to either have the transform cast be shorter or have an option to transform several at the same time.

Well that was quick. The most satisfying kill in a while.

So as noted we have been progressing on Uu’nat for a bit. This is still ongoing and I think I’m starting to get a good feel for all phases of the fight, phase three included.

Now my observations on the second boss have changed somewhat. It seems that for melees the fight is mostly rather boring, since two of the primary mechanics of the fight—baiting the Oblivion Tears to the edges of the room so that people don’t run into them; not running into other players while Unstable Resonance is active thus creating an explosion instantly killing players nearby while reaching your relic before the debuff runs out—don’t target melee players unless there are too many of them or too many of the ranged and healers are dead.

Phase one

Now even as a range and healer, phases one and two are getting to be rather boring. Sure, there is a bit to watch out for with the marks¹ and how the Oblivion Tears have been baited so that you don’t run into other players as well as me having the extra duty in phase one of carrying the void relic² so I need to be positioned well before Unstable Resonance is cast so that other players can get to me easily as well as move around me easily. This is mostly difficult right at the end of phase one, since the room keeps getting smaller in phase one and before the intermission to phase two it tends to have gotten rather small indeed making the last Unstable Resonance somewhat tricky to play. Still, the incoming damage isn’t that great for the most part so you can stay almost completely concentrated on the mechanics and damaging the boss making phase one not overly interesting to play repeatedly—I think this is usually the main cause of some of our fails with Unstable Resonance in phase one, the mechanic still requires a certain amount of attention and people just get so into the flow of the fight that they let themselves get caught in a bad spot or actually just let the debuff run out.

The first intermission is also not overly complex, use the storm relic³ to kill the adds that have accrued during phase one and then use the void relic² and soak the Oblivion Tears—so we have more room to play in phase two—and then drop it on the correct mark by soaking the Unknowable Terror. The room also gets bigger again and doesn’t shrink regularly anymore making phase two somewhat easier to play.

Phase two

Here the fight gets slightly more interesting from a healer perspective, since there are actually some decent bursts of damage coming in when the storm relic³ gets used to clear the adds which at times comes in combination with Gift of N’Zoth: Hysteria which deals a decent amount of damage to the raid as well as healing the adds. This means there are actually a few decent chances to use cooldowns and actually heal people in phase two, which is made somewhat difficult by the necessity to bait and the largeness of the room—there is rarely a moment where I actually have everyone in range allowing me to properly prepare for incoming damage meaning I have to take positioning into account in order to be able to heal people properly. This adds a somewhat interesting layer to the fight from a healer perspective, though it only comes up once for me at least in the fight meaning it isn’t that much of an issue. Positioning in phase two is made even more important by the Unknowable Terror which spawns a large area effect on the floor which will most likely kill any non-tank players—this ability is especially dangerous in combination with the need to bait the Oblivion Tears, since you can’t necessarily just run through the middle which is usually the quickest way out.

Now for the damage dealers there is one extra bit to watch out for in phase two: more frequent adds as well as caster adds. This means that the adds actually need to be cleared during phase two like in the first intermission as well as interrupted—interrupt fails along with Unstable Resonance fails are also the most frequent wipe reason for us. All in all it’s not overly complicated, though the amount of damage on the adds needs to be rather precise since they need to be killed through the effect from the storm relic³ and not directly by the damage dealers which means they need to be brought low together.

Phase three

Now the intermission going into phase three is similar as described above, kill the adds then soak the tears² and drop the relic on the mark—though I still have cooldown on the relic, so this time someone else is the primary soaker. The rest however, is much more hectic than any of the earlier phases. Phase three is played in a room that is sligthly smaller than phase two, so baiting the tears correctly is more important. The beams from phase one also make a return, which means you have to be positioned properly in order to avoid getting two stacks but at the same time also baiting properly so that tears aren’t placed incorrectly—for this, we have set spots for the ranges to bait as a group, so that hopefully the baits land correctly. Now the marks still have to be played like before, but now baits at time come in very close proximity to the marks so you have to be on your toes and not stand incorrectly once you’ve gotten rid of your mark. During all of this the adds spawn like before and have to be interrupted and dealt with like before.

In addition, phase three also has a new mechanic: Insatiable Torment. This ability reduces the healing you receive by 100% making you almost heal immune, with two exceptions: absorbs still work, which is why for the marks we use Rapture and shield the tormented players to allow them to survive since they usually need to split from other players; the tormented players also damage players around them leeching health and this is the other way they can be kept alive.

So phase three all in all is mostly familiar to someone who has played the other phases just with much more tight timings and less tolerance for failure. This does present something of a learning curve since you have to get used to knowing where to go beforehand so you’ll be at the right place at the right time but I think we are slowly starting to get over this hurdle. I think our best try was 12% so far and we have had several phase three tries in the last few raid evenings so hopefully this means we can down the boss sometime this reset still—would actually mean we get a decent world ranking again as well, which would be nice. But I guess we’ll know how that went in a week or so.

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Well, that didn’t last long. First kill was today.

So the new raid has been out for a while new and we’ve been poking at it for almost all of our raid time since it came out with the exception of one half-clear of Dazar’alor. So far we have managed to kill the first of two bosses and happily actually killed the boss before significant nerfs. Unfortunately those nerfs also came to the second boss so won’t be able to say the same thing there. Still, the nerfs seem quite justified considering the silly setups we’ve seen for some of those early kills.

Still it has been really nice to have a new raid to progress and the bosses are also quite fun on mythic if rather boring and undertuned on heroic which rather surprised me. We actually had a decent amount of wipes on the first boss on heroic due to casts going through at the wrong time but ended up killing the second boss on our first try as if almost all of the mechanics were simply irrelevant—it was a really strange feeling.

On mythic however, it’s the other way around really. The first boss is deceptively simple: play the kicks and dispels correctly and that’s most of what you have to do in order to kill the boss. After that, it mostly comes down to correct timing of cooldowns for the healers and no individual failing too much. Getting all of this clean still took a fair amount of tries for us but once you learn the important parts and don’t stress too much amount the irrelevant bits the boss is rather straightforward to play. I did really like the boss though as it managed to give me several mechanics as a healer that were relevant which is somewhat rare.

The second boss on the other hand seems to have more things that are relevant for the whole raid. You have concerns about correct positioning both for baiting the Void Tears as well as not exploding each other wenn you get the marks and making it in time to your relic. In addition you more phase dependant effects you need to look out for in your positioning.

Uu'nat also has a decent amount of somewhat bursty incoming damage that you need to plan for as a healer, which makes the fight more enjoyable for me though cooldown usage being at times boss health dependent does make timing those cooldowns harder. The boss is fun so far though, even if we are only not so consistently poking at phase two. I’m interested to see how it feels to play phase three.

So we finally have Jaina down—a while ago actually—and it was quite the adventure. I believe we ended up with around 360 wipes, a bit more and two complete resets of progressing (three, if you count the one day of the reset we “killed” her).

The fight is quite the adventure, though phase one—especially with the nerfs—feels somewhat boring. Sure, there is a lot that can go wrong there and one does need to remain concentrated and most of our wipes were probably due to phase one fails but it still doesn’t really feel satisfying somehow. Especially as a healer, I got basically assigned to being a worse damage dealer since the healing requirement is so low. I did get to mind control Jaina’s minions off the ship though, so that was a plus.

The first intermission is the first really tricky part as a healer, since you need to keep a good eye on your group so they don’t die while also focusing on the rather significant amount off ground effects going on so you don’t freeze. Consequently, I belive our healers were the most likely to be frozen in our tries, though that did iron itself out quite well by the end and people getting frozen was more the exception than the rule.

Phase two begins with something of a bang for healers, since all the stacks you gathered in the intermission will keep on ticking. This was also where I got my first chance to do some proper healing as a discipline priest who is somewhat reliant on there being something to damage for my healing. So cooldowns are used and stacks get reset and the group gets to be somewhat stable for a while. After that phase two is in general moderately safe, there are some critical timings with the stack resets and Siegebreaker Blasts where we do use some additional cooldowns, but in general it’s pretty steady going.

The second intermission, in other words the wall and rescuing Nathanos, is mostly also pretty easy going. There are some quite high stacks going on when the intermission starts, but those calm down rather quickly and as a healer I don’t have to concern myself too much with the wall damage and Nathano’s health—or rather, the health of Nathano’s ice block. Consequently, this usually ended up being the place we used our mana potions in order to have as much mana as possible going into phase three which is where the healing requirement for this fight really is at its highest.

Now, phase three. It’s kind of chaotic, especially as a healer that needs to keep tabs on not just the fight mechanics everyone else is dealing with but also cooldowns and making sure they come at the right moment and don’t overlap too much. Since this phase should be quite short if played correctly—it becomes unhealable at some point, so there is something of a damage requirement—most of the healing here is covered by cooldowns which does mean that using those cooldowns at the correct time to maximize their value becomes more important than otherwise. It does make the last phase really stressful not helped along by it being, well, the last phase so it’s the one you get the least practice with but it is also a nice culmination to the fight and does feel fun.

That is in general a good way to describe the fight: fun. Sure, the first phase isn’t overly intersting from a healer point of view but even then I got to mind control people off of a ship which doesn’t happen often. The rest of the fight has a rather good pacing as well, keeping you on your toes pretty much the whole time since small mistakes rather quickly build up to big problems. It’s a really nice change of pace from Uldir and I hope the coming raids will be as good as this one.

The mythic version of the Battle for Dazar’alor was released this week and we’ve gotten a decent start in the raid so far, downing three bosses with good progress on Opulence though unfortunately lag problems prevented me from participating yesterday for a bit.

So far the raid has been rather fun, with overall interesting bosses. There are a couple which are somewhat frustrating to play as Discipline especially on heroic, since there just aren’t those damage spikes which Discipline thrives on healing away—constant slow ticking damage really isn’t a strength. This has already changed to a degree on mythic, with Grong for example having some decent damage spikes on mythic even though the boss felt rather easy to heal on heroic.

This week has also been really nice in regards to mythic+, since the affixes are probably the easiest ones overall and it is kind of baffling to see the difference affixes make. Keys that would have been hell last week are easy this week even though 2-3 levels higher. I don’t really understand Blizzard’s design in this respect, it feels strange to have the differences be so big as to discourage people from playing the content certain weeks.

With regards to big differences, with the new season we also got the new seasonal affix, Reaping. In contrast to Infested, this affix is actually reallyfun. It allows for some strategic play since you need to think about when it gets triggered but the way you deal with the affix—kill a bunch of mobs—is also just simply more fun from a mechanical perspective than trying to control the mobs that heal other mobs. It’s also more interesting to have something hectic happen like a bunch of mobs which need controlling and kicking happen occasionally than just bringing the correct CC to deal with certain mobs.

So far I’m enyoing the new season, hopefully that continues!

Patch 8.1 is upon us since yesterday which I think makes for a good opportunity to talk about some of the changes.

It’s a bit of an odd one, since it somewhat significantly changes class balancing and some abilities while some guilds are still progressing in Uldir, making the experience for the latecomers potentially more difficult which makes me somewhat unsure of how I feel about this. The most prominent example would probably be Zul, since with Rogues getting changed basically because of that fight it does make the fight somewhat more difficult to execute—we still killed the boss easily enough but the fight did last a bit longer than before.

There is also somewhat of a hidden boss buff for Zek’voz, at least in guilds that have a Discipline Priest. Because Evangelism now has a slightly longer cooldown—15 seconds longer, from 75 seconds to 90 seconds—it is no longer ready for every dance on mythic, I ended up with it on approximately 10-15 seconds of cooldown remaining when I wanted to use it. This makes the fight require slightly more coordination between healer cooldowns for guilds still progressing there though the fight is easy enough that it shouldn’t be a real problem anyway. Beyond that the change to Evangelism didn’t really feel noticeable to me since I usually wanted to use it in conjunction with Rapture anyway which has a 90 second cooldown, making the change somewhat moot. Mentally though, the difference is suprisingly big and does mean I’ll be a little more careful of using the ability opportunistically.

In general, I think the nerfs to Discipline felt manageable, it’ll take some time to get used to for sure and the increased mana cost of Power Word: Shield might actually mean that our gearing priorities change slightly against haste since one of the big benefits of haste was being able to blanket the raid quicker which is now much more mana intensive. The general reduced throughput isn’t really something I felt in fight though it was somewhat apparent on the healing meters on all bosses except for G’huun oddly enough. It could just be that it was a off-night for me as well, so I guess we’ll know that better once the next raid comes out.

Now there were some other moderately interesting things in the patch as well, for example the continuation of the war campaign though I haven’t really had the time to take a poke at that yet. Another big change was now crafted BOP items require skill in that profession in order to be used; this was hotfixed to only apply to new recipes coming with the next raid but it’s still an interesting change. It means it will no longer be possible to pick up a profession, say tailoring, craft some fancy pants in the first raid week or two and then drop tailoring and learn a more useful profession like alchemy since those fancy pants would end up being unusable after unlearning tailoring. This seemed to be mostly popular in the higher end guilds so it shouldn’t affect most players but is a somewhat interesting change nontheless.

Another thing of note was the addition of achievements for completing all mythic+ dugeons in time on +10 and +15, unsurprisingly this was bugged. Now unfortunately we didn’t have quite as much time as hoped last week so we were aware that we wouldn’t be getting the +15 achievement, but we also didn’t get the +10 and for some of us it was even displaying zero progress towards completing the achievement. Hopefully this ends up being fixed shortly, would be rather annoying to have to hunt for keys for the dungeons again. Especially so since we can no longer delete keys, run a dungeon and get a new set of keys which was possible up until the patch hit.

Just a minor side rant, that’s one of those changes I find somewhat hard to understand and I’m hoping a question to that get answered on Friday. I understand that it was technically a unintended consequence of the buggy keys in the first week of BfA with them carrying over from Legion that lead to this but it was something that in a sense was actually a very useful feature to people who prefer playing with a set group. We only have five keys per week we can use and getting unlucky can very realistically mean we don’t see a dungeon at all in a given week. This was annoying enough before from the perspective of Raider.io/Wowprogress score since trying to push that was the primary reason we kept doing mythic+, but it’s even more of a problem now with the defined seasons from Blizzard and actual in-game rewards tied to them. Simple bad luck could mean missing out on those which I don’t find a particularily good design decision especially since they now intentionally patched out something that alleviated that problem.

Beyond that though, I honestly can’t quite say what the patch brought since quite frankly the game isn’t holding my interest quite as well as it was in Legion which I find very unfortunate. It’s a hard thing coming from the (subjectively) best expansion to one that just overall feels meh. I’m not even necessarily saying anything is completely broken it just doesn’t feel motivating or inspiring and just that tad bit more boring than what came before and that’s enough for it just to feel bad.

The next raid will hopefully fix that a bit with some actual new interesting content to do and as far as timing goes the holiday season is about the best time of the year for the game to feel a bit boring since usually there’s enough other stuff going on so that one doesn’t notice that too much.

Here’s to better times for World of Warcraft in 2019!

Kind of.

So the last few months have been great and simultaneously not. Well it is a long time for everything to simply be great, so it makes sense that there have been some less great things in there I suppose.

To get more specific, we killed G’huun a few weeks ago already which was awesome. Unfortunately a day too late to make it into the top 100 for the Horde—or more specifically, to get the associated achievement since the top 100 guild killed G’huun the previous reset and we ended up extending and killing him on Wednesday. Still, the kill was awesome, we kept our integrity as it were and didn’t introduce extra raid days or prolong the raids in order to try and squeeze the kill which actually makes me really happy. Now I really like the guild and the people within in general, but that is one of the things I’m I guess most proud of that the principle of raid times is held to. Sure I could manage the extra hours and would probably enjoy them as well, but there’s just something cool about seeing the guild stick to its rules and still perform well.

Secondly, as noted, the guild has just been awesome. While I liked being in the old guild I love being in this one which is a very important distinction that does affect one’s enjoyment of the game greatly. I am also fortunate in that I still get to regularily play with people from the old guild, so it’s the best of both worlds in a way. There is only one slightly unfortunate part: the “dead game” meme. Now the guild in general seems to be rather meme happy which is fun, but there is this whole “dead game” meme going on partially due to the content being cleared and partially because the core systems of the game at the moment just aren’t as engaging as they were in Legion. Now both of these things are very understandably frustrating people to a degree—especially the latter I think—but to me the whole meme just makes the situation worse. Not by much, mind you and I would be playing the game less at the moment even without the meme but it just kind of unecessarily reminds me of the situation we’re in. At the same time, I guess it helps other people to make the situation a bit more enjoyable so there is that.

Now that specifically is the less awesome part: I’m just not feeling motivated to play that much at the moment. Now there are several factors to this, one is the azerite system feeling unrewarding meaning I’m not really participating in content that rewards azerite but one could argue that is a good thing since it’s not really the sort of content I enjoy overly much—island expeditions and world quests. The other part really is that one of the players in our regular mythic+ team has been unavailable for a while which means we aren’t doing as much mythic+ as before which combined with us not progressing anymore and thus clearing the raid more quickly means there’s a lot less for me to do in the game. Hopefully they’ll get better soon and we can get back to running some more mythic+.

Though mythic+ is actually one of the awesome things that happened recently, if a little late: we finally cleared a +15 in time. It was way later than I’d liked and we are very much behind the curve but we did it even without our full setup—which kind of makes me sad at the same time—but it does pave the way for us to get going stronger than before in the future.

And honestly, fuck the curve. We managed it with some pretty annoying affixes (fortified, quaking and bursting) and had fun doing it, that’s the more important part anyway. Sure a high raider.io score is nice to look at, but considering how buggy the Blizzard leaderboards have been not registering some of our runs the experience of managing it is more important than some number at the end.

Now the reduced motivation to do things on my main has given me the opportunity to level a twink which I ended up finishing sometime early Monday morning. I ended up leveling a Monk planning to play mostly Mistweaver with a bit of Brewmaster thrown in for dungeons since I hadn’t played a Monk at high level yet and it seemed to be a good filler twink for the healer roster after speaking with our guildmaster. Also I already have paladin, shaman and druid at fairly high level so leveling one of those didn’t seem sensible. It’s been interesting so far though I haven’t really had the opportunity to heal anything “real” yet, only a +2 and +3 key which even with my at the time around 290-300 item level gear was easy since we had some other geared people in the party. I’m really worried how I’ll manage my mana in raids though, which generally seems to be my biggest problem playing healer twinks—having no idea which spells to prioritise specifically in raids. Dungeons is generally pretty easy since mana mostly isn’t a concern; keeping people alive is. But raid fights tend to last for a long time and trying to heal the whole raid alone generally doesn’t end well unless the content is trivial to begin with.

Now I just need to gear the monk so hopefully I can sneak into a heroic raid this week. Beyond that though, getting proper gear is somewhat time-gated since I can’t really properly heal a +10 key yet so I’m kind of toying with the idea of leveling a second twink if I keep having so much time available. I have always kind of liked the idea of a rogue and learning to play one would be cool, so that might be the next project. I had even created one before the monk with the plan of leveling one but having a secondary healer character just to precedence so we’ll see.

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.

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.