Shadowlands

The new raid released this week—though “only” the first eight bosses—and so far we’ve gotten rather decent progress in. To be fair, being the first week, it’s heroic and not mythic, but with the apparent state of the bosses I’m fairly content with how far we have gotten, that being progressing on Anduin.

As for the raid itself, it really is a welcome change from Sanctum of Domination and so far a lot more fun as well. Though part of that is surely the novelty, it still just somehow feels better to me in a nebulous hard to specify way—aside from the rather ridiculous amount of trash, which luckily has been rather possible to skip so far.

What has been personally more interesting to try to pinpoint however, is how I feel at the moment in regards to World of Warcraft in general, since I have been in something of a low point concerning the game for a somewhat long time at this point. What I’m noticing is perhaps not a direct return to form or overabundance of excitement towards the game—which I do also think would be very difficult to build at this point in time—but I am distinctly more interested in playing now than I was, say, at the beginning of the last tier. It just feels like the reduction of more-or-less mandatory content to do along with a raid I am actually somewhat curious to see is creating something of a spurt of motivation towards the game. I do still think I will end up taking it slow, as the situation feels somewhat precarious at the moment, but it does feel encouraging to see at least a slight uptick in interest once more.

Now what remains to be seen is just how the week ends up working out for our progress in general—as I’m writing this we’re only halfway through on our progress days, Sunday and Tuesday still to go—as well as how and if my feelings change next week with the last bosses in the raid that we know very little about so far as they weren’t available for testing.

Another confounding factor is the potential to actually be playing both priest healing specs in the raid again, as I’ve been running holy so far for our progress which usually hasn’t been the case. I’ve, surprisingly, actually kind of enjoyed the opportunity to do so again especially since it has given me the chance to try out a new covenant along with getting to experience their campaign for the first time which was nice. The “new” system of being to change covenants more freely is certainly a welcome change for all of this at it allows me to actually prepare both specs to a decent level for the raid, though it is still somewhat clunkily implemented and it always feels a bit weird to get berated when changing back to Venthyr—though I guess the whole humility and remorse thing fits with their theme.

That was a long and winding path of thoughts, but I hope they made some sense. I think I better stop before it gets even worse.

Last Wednesday Legion timewalking with mythic+ got released for the first time.

Having done the dungeons at the time, to the point of not doing them very much anymore towards the end of Legion—probably more due to general boredom with the state of the game or the game itself than the dungeons themselves—I didn’t have all that high expectations from this event. This was enforced by my general disinterest towards World of Warcraft at the moment, as I’m just really not feeling the game—probably because I’ve been playing it for a long time now without significant breaks.

This, however, turned out not to be the case. To my surprise, doing the dungeons again is actually a great deal of fun, much more so than pretty much any current content. I’m not sure if this is merely because I actually enjoy them more, or if the fact I am once again playing more with friends along with nostalgia are the primary contributing factors to the amount of fun I’m having, but it was definitely a positive surprise.

It feels a bit strange to actually have fun playing World of Warcraft again, and certainly not something I was expecting to happen so soon or suddenly, but it is a nice feeling to have.

What still puzzles me however, is why timewalking in general is an event, and not merely something one can choose to queue for whenever. I get that it might make sense to not make the weekly quest available at any time, but the dungeons themselves feels like would be a sensible choice. Especially considering all the scaling tech now implemented for the new leveling experience, the distinction feels so completely arbitrary.

Now I just need to consider if I have the time and motivation to tacke the mage tower challenges as well, as those are back too. I did give the discipline priest one a few half-hearted tries, but I do think it might be fun to make more of an effort towards it. I’m just noticing a certain feeling of frustration in me towards again the time-limited nature of that as well, which is making it more difficult to actually start ironically due to feeling forced to do it.

Well, time will tell how that develops, I still have Endwalker to play too so it’s not like I’m missing fun things to do—here’s hoping I can get started on actually doing them at some point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The somewhat recent release of Burning Crusade Classic has thrown all kinds of new flavors into the mix of feelings I am feeling towards World of Warcraft at the moment, some good, some bad.

For the good part, it has oddly really reminded me why I like the game and why I kind of still want to keep playing it, despite all of its flaws. Being somewhat more casual in classic than I am in retail, has meant that there is a greater feeling of freedom to doing things since the only real motivation is what I personally want to achieve and not what is required for some external reason, and also a lot less pressure to actually do things I might not want to do but feel in one way or another required to do the things I do want to do. Classic still has a lot of flaws, especially when it comes to things like consumables, but the fact that I am playing it in a way that doesn’t necessitate those things to the same degree as retail makes it much easier for me to ignore those flaws if I want to.

Further, having the goals be that much more personal and also usually concrete things makes working towards them a lot more engaging, since it’s a lot easier to feel the progress as it comes along.

For the bad part, it feels like the biggest ill that has come from it isn’t even necessarily something bad in and of itself, but it feels like I am questioning a lot more why I am continuing to play retail at this point. It at this point feels like the game might be giving me more stress than it is bringing in joy and that seems like a obviously lopsided equation for what it is supposed to be, and while I would very much like to experience the new raid once more and progress it, I am simultaneously dreading all of the things that might be required to be done around that progress, not the progress itself

These aren’t exactly new thoughts, but merely things that having a point of comparison has once again brought to the fore, and I unforunately can’t really see any easy answers. There are reasons I’ve continued playing retail for as long as I have, and those are my guildies, and it feels very wrong to leave them high and dry so shortly before progress so quitting at the very least at this time is not an option, but it feels like continuing as is might be taking an unkown toll on me. At the same time, I fear that not continuing might be the even worse option, since it would provide me with an opportunity to retreat more completely into myself since there would be a certain lack of routine keeping me together, and while that routine can at times feeling frustrating in its limiting of what I have the freedom to do, it also helps ground me and keeps me doing the things I enjoy.

Another thing I fear, is that it feels like playing might have become a too big part of my identity, or at least how I self-identify, and changing who one is is a scary thing indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here we are, almost a week after release, and so far the experience has been while somewhat stressful at times—mostly due to my own doing and ambition—something of a relief.

I’ve written before, of some of the anxiety I had going into it all, and so far my fears have been mostly unfounded though the real trial will of course be with the release of the raid—still in the honeymoon-phase. Yet the significantly reduced expectations following on from Battle for Azeroth have been a real blessing, and while this does lead to me perhaps logging in less than I did in the early days of that expansion, the time that I am spending playing is more meaningful to me and consequently more enjoyable.

Now, I admit, part of this enjoyment is probably also me having almost completely dodged the Maw so far, and the little I’ve done in there I still did not like, but the experience has still overall been very positive—if at times still somewhat frustrating due to the low amount of haste everyone has but it’s early days of the expansion and that always happens.

This does also mean I am looking forward to my future in this expansion that much more, since it has such a much more promising beginning than the last one meaning I can more easily see myself enjoying it all in the long run as well.

Now to get back to some leveling and dungeoning…

So a while back, we got the (new) release date for Shadowlands, 24.11.2020.

My feelings toward this are rather mixed, one the one hand, it means we get to play new content and hopefully properly explore the new zones, something I’ve put off doing on the beta for the release. On the other hand, though I’m hopeful that Blizzard will figure everything out in time for release, it all feels somewhat unfinished in the state it is in during my last testing.

Beyond that, the release date along with the two week delay until the raid opens and one week delay until mythic becomes available, means we will once more have progress over the holidays which is never really a nice thing. I mean, there’ll probably be less going on anyway what with the pandemic going on, but still, having that sort of split attention is never all that nice—much prefer simply being able to take a break from raiding during that time rather than having it lurking in the background.

At this very moment though, I think my elation is winning over my pessimism, since I am actually rather looking forward to playing more World of Warcraft, especially with how good the opportunities to play several characters look in the expansion. Now, sure, I can do that during the prepatch, but there just isn’t a lot of content to pursue that feels in any way shape or form meaningful at the moment—the raid is on farm since months at this point, gear is about to become completely obsolete, and the whole transmog and mount farming thing wasn’t really my, well, thing to any great extent. Sure, getting some specific transmogs can be nice at times, but I rarely feel any particular need to simply catch them all as it were.

To be fair, we are even doing that to a degree, with a somewhat long-running at this point weekly Molten Core run, trying to get Thunderfury. But it’s not exactly the kind of content that provides a lot of engagement with a character nor does it take a significant amount of time, so it’s not really the experience I’m looking for in the game most of the time.

At any rate, there is that old saying of learning to accept the things one cannot change, and my actions at this point in time have rather little influence on the outcome of the release so all I can do is wait and see, making any sort of premature worrying and overthinking of the whole thing rather pointless. I’ll just have to end up showing up for the launch—which I’m hoping goes smoothly once more—level a bit, have some fun with friends, and take my time enjoying the start of the expansion, since it’s looking like that too is an option this time around. In the meantime, my energy is better spent making sure the time up until that point is spent enjoyably in good company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

This past week I ended up participating in some more raidtesting along with a quick run of a Mythic+ dungeon as well as some quick addon development. I finally ended up getting frustrated enough with the healing experience on the beta, and ended up seeking out and fixing the couple of errors I was encountering with Clique in order to be able to actually play the beta with sensible keybindings. The fix was actually rather minor which I’m happy about since I’m not overly familiar with the Clique codebase and since it means I get to test the new expansion properly, though it does mean I’m sligthly frustrated to have waited so long to give it a shot since all these problems could’ve been over ages ago. To be fair, during the fixing I was relying on reports from other people regarding what changes Blizzard has made to the API which might not have been available as easily at a earlier point in time, so maybe it was so easy because I ended up waiting so long to fix it.

Mythic+

The dungeon we did was Halls of Atonement and it ended up rather surprising me with its ease especially since I was still figuring out the keybindings at the time. To be fair, we did not end up managing to complete the dungeon in time and seemingly the only affix that was active was Fortified even though it stated it was a +10 dungeon so maybe all of the scaling was completely broken but still. If it was indicative of what a +2 will feel like come release with some heroic blues it all seemed to be in line with expectation.

Raid testing

The past week I also participated in all of the raid tests, rather than just the one I had participated in the week previous, and well, the new raid is looking rather nice. Sure, there are tuning problems and bugs but that’s what we’re there for.

The most fun boss of the bunch so far to me seemed the Council of Blood, I liked the flair of the intermission where you have to participate in the dance since from the little story I’ve played so far it felt like it fit the theme of the place perfectly. Beside that though, the fight did feel rather hectic and I’m really curious to see how it ends up on mythic since it already had so many things going on—maybe this is one of those cases where we only get the numbers tuned up and no real additional mechanics. I might be biased though, since it’s the only boss in testing these raids so far that we have actually killed.

My definite least favourite boss of the bunch was Shriekwing, which seems to be the first boss of the raid—gets a bit confusing at times since there is actually another bossfight that takes place in the same room and you just get ported to the correct boss anyway. There was an annoying tendency on this boss for people not to be in line of sight of me which is understandable since it plays such a huge role in the fight and dodging out of the boss’ line of sight at the correct time is crucial, but it does make for a very annoying experience as a healer. Luckily, this is the first boss of the raid so it will probably be trivial anyway but those reclears could get a bit annyoing. The second phase also seemed like it could be interesting, the boss basically went into a rage which you needed to wait out where it took almost no damage and periodically did a sonar pinpointing people which you had to hide from.

The other two bosses, Huntsman Altimor along with the Stone Legion Generals, somehow felt a bit more bland though still fun even if the Huntsman once again introduced the twist of there occasionally being an add that needed healing instead of just being able to focus on the raid. This is probably also partially due to the bugginess and tuning of these two encounters, so final judgement is as always reserved until mythic.

Holy

For this week I also took the opportunity to test out holy a bit more again and I have to admit it does feel rather good to be playing the spec again even if I at the same time feel it is probably not the most sensible choice. It all does still feel rather weak and I don’t have nearly as much time to dish out damage as was available in Legion but there is still a familiar comfort to it all. To be fair, it’s probably also the better choice for new content where the damage patterns are still rather unknown.

All the returning abilities have made it a bit more interesting to figure out what is the optimal play in different situations as well, so that is a welcome change.

Last week I ended up getting access to the Shadowlands beta and while I haven’t done much testing so far what little I have done has been interesting. The first thing I noticed has been the reintroduction of several spells, known beforehand of course but still interesting especially since I now get to consider where in my toolkit those spells fit in and more importantly where I get to bind them—for this it will actually be rather nice to have the beta so I have all of that figure out before I have to stumble around with it on live.

With this introduction of several new spells looking for keybinds, I ended up rather sorely missing Clique since it meant that several keybindings I was used to being able to access were no longer accessible to me leading to something of a dearth of available binds; drawbacks of beta-testing I suppose.

Finally, actually getting into the content and playing it, once more the lack of haste hit me though for some reason not quite as badly as in the transition between Legion and Battle for Azeroth (except when I played Shadow for a short while, there it felt really painful to have almost no haste).

What I have done on the beta so far is the second evening of raid-testing the past week as well as a couple of introductory quest runs into Torghast, and so far it all seems rather promising if a bit disorienting with the aforementoned lack of certain keybindings leading to rather more relearning than usual. Of course, the content is all new and I haven’t really had to bother with the daily grind aspects of it so I guess there is a certain tendency towards optimism in it all, but it does somehow seem surprisingly nice even if I am still not quite sold on having to give up on transmogs I could be interested in, in order to enable me to actually get the abilities that I feel benefit me the most which is a situation having to choose a covenant still puts me in.

Also, there is a smaller irritation I have with the covenants, namely the flight between their base of operations and what seems to be the central hub of the expansions, I’m not sure the extra travel between these two places which will both be visited rather frequently by players is completely justified.

Beyond that, it’s a bit too early for me to give any more concrete feelings on the new expansion and it is all still a work in progress I endeavor to help make better where I can find the time so I’ll reserve final judgement for the release version but I do have a hint of more optimism in me towards the new expansion than I had previously, we will see how long that lasts.

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.