05/07/2021

Casual 9.1 Impressions

As mentioned previously, the husband and I more or less abandoned our current retail mains as we ran out of things we wanted to do on them and have been focusing on our demon hunter alts since then. With the release of the patch, it was time to get back to the warrior/monk duo however to check out the new content.

First off, I gotta say it was a bit weird that as champions of Bastion, we had to go to Oribos to be told that something terrible had happened to the Archon. Couldn't they have told us at home?

Anyway, it took us about three hours to plod through the introductory quest chain together and it was... pretty neat? There were some nice cut scenes and I was pleasantly surprised by how much ground the story covered, such as having that callback to Odyn and Helya - good thing we've been playing Legion content recently or I wouldn't have known who these guys are (beyond obvious Norse mythology knock-offs). Killing the Eye of the Jailer was cool, even if the fight was kind of annoying. To be honest I'd always thought of the Eye as something metaphorical, not a literal giant eyeball that you could fight to blind the Jailer!

Nonetheless we felt kind of exhausted and like we hadn't actually achieved very much by the end of the quest chain. I find it hard to say why... I do find the current story interesting but... I guess not that emotionally engaging? It all feels a bit too removed from my character to be honest. It's a very stark contrast to the Legion content, where the stakes were always blindingly obvious. I mean, the whole reason we went to the Shadowlands was to rescue a bunch of important people, which we did except for Anduin - but he's corrupted now so he's kind of a write-off unless you're a big fan I guess?

We also learned that the "machinery of death" is broken, which is obviously a big deal, but beyond being mad at the Jailer because he's the obvious benefactor and likely to be behind it all, we haven't really tried to find out more about how to fix it (unless I missed some important plot points somewhere, which is not impossible). So now it's all this NPC soap opera about Tyrande vs. Sylvanas, the corruption of Anduin etc. - which again, isn't uninteresting but I'm not sure why my character would care that much about any of these guys. They're important lore characters, but they're not my friends.

Anyway, we picked up our first weekly fill-the-bar quest in Korthia and did an Ardenweald assault in the Maw and it was... okay I guess, if a bit buggy. For example the final boss fight took forever since it seems to be tuned around having all the friendly NPCs help you, but they just followed us around like sheep and refused to attack anything. I also didn't really enjoy the part where you have to sneak around with Lady Moonberry to free your captured companions - I got thrown back to the start so many times it was frustrating. Some of it was just me being bad at this particular mini-game, but things like other players being able to distract the eyes onto you, or outside mobs aggroing on you in your defenseless vehicle mode if you accidentally cross the area border didn't help.

We were also a bit put out that completing that first assault only counted for 25% of our bar progression because having to do four of them each week sounded like a lot, but it later turned out that the rest of the bar fills up pretty quickly anyway if you just do the Korthia dailies and make sure to run towards any shinies you spot on the mini map while doing so. We were also lucky in that we were able to do another assault the next day - I found out via Gnomecore's blog that assaults only reset once halfway through the week, but we had basically caught the Ardenweald one at its very tail end, so the next day a Venthyr-themed one was up instead. I thought that one was a lot more fun personally.

The husband was oddly down on the whole experience, moaning that he'd expected more than "just another daily area". It was very strange for me to end up being the one to defend retail WoW, but this sort of content is its bread and butter, isn't it? At least from my limited first impressions, it seems to do a good job at being what it's meant to be and strikes a good balance between giving you distinct tasks and offering "explorable" content to discover while working on the former.

As our characters were also sitting around only item level 200, every gear reward we got was an upgrade, so that felt good as well. I like the idea of having this new bit of content to work on with the husband now that playing a bit of retail has become part of our weekly routine. About the worst thing I can say is that Korthia is visually somewhat drab, but then we are still in WoW's version of hell, so you can't really expect it to look very welcoming.

I was looking for a nice screenshot to illustrate this post, but found that the only thing I'd taken a picture of was me being transformed into a mushroom person after ingesting a questionable mushroom. It's a running joke between me and the husband that I'll click on anything that the game will let me click on, even if it's some sort of edible that's marked as poisonous. He's not wrong, but I have no regrets. Except for spam-healing myself for 20 minutes after I ate that cheese in LOTRO when I could have just died and lost nothing.

8 comments:

  1. LOL! I too had thought the Eye was metaphorical! The fact that the Eye was real, and was really Odyn's Eye was a real "wait, what?" moment.

    I really think this is a major weakness of the current WoW writers, they aren't blunt enough, and not enough of what they want to convey is getting through.

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  2. This is what I wrote in my guild's Discord spoiler channel:

    "Well, I made it through the available parts of 9.1. I'm meh about the story.

    The Tyrande Night Warrior story line continues to be stupid. That she continues to be defeated just makes the whole Night Warrior build up incredibly bad writing. They never show her to be that dangerous.

    Bringing in the Nathrezim to work for the Jailer just feels like a really bad retcon. I'd have no problems with them working for the Jailer if it had been established that they were that mercenary, but it had been firmly established that they worked for Sargeras.

    As far as Sylvanas goes, I think they'll screw the pooch with her no matter what they do. They backed themselves in a corner and no matter the choice they are going to piss off some big segment of their fanbase."

    The quest flow was a bit annoying. We should have gotten the Renown quest sooner so that we could start on it immediately since it and the 1,000 anima one are the only ones available, now. (When I took the x Souls collected quest it had Renown as a reward, but that was removed when I turned it in during the Korthia quest chain. :sigh:) I had to scramble to find enough things to do to get that done. (I wanted to make sure I could get flying next week.) All in all, typical modern Wow design stuff, though not realizing that there would (again) be two assaults through the week meant I missed the first one because I waiting until the 4th to start the patch.

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  3. It's a running joke between me and the husband that I'll click on anything that the game will let me click on, even if it's some sort of edible that's marked as poisonous. He's not wrong, but I have no regrets.

    I can't help but think of of the time I ate the obvious "do not eat" poison fungus in LOTRO (the one you acquire in the Barrow Downs) because I wanted to clear my bags and I found myself dying to it.

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    1. What did you think the line "Except for spam-healing myself for 20 minutes after I ate that cheese in LOTRO when I could have just died and lost nothing." is referring to? :D

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  4. I think overall we agree. I liked the intro quests a lot but skipped it on my second char the next day.

    I like that the dailies aren't real chores and are quick.

    > NPC soap opera

    Very well put and I actually laughed.

    > I also didn't really enjoy the part where you have to sneak around with Lady Moonberry

    Maybe I had EZMODE enabled. I could use the vanishing powder every time I was seen (very often on the first char, not once on second char) and was never thrown back.

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    1. My Mum loves to watch soap operas and I've occasionally sat down to watch an episode or two with her. They tend to have a backlog of hundreds if not thousands of episodes, and long-time viewers have insight into all this history of knowing which character plotted against which other character in the past, yet it's quite possible to jump in with zero knowledge of that and still be entertained, because the drama tends to be obvious and somewhat amusingly over the top. Watching WoW cut scenes really feels very similar to me at this point.

      As for the Night Fae assault, it seemed easy to me at the start but then I somehow ended up getting trapped in situations where two mobs turned towards me at once and the dust only works against one at a time. Maybe it was due to the other players around me doing the mission at the same time, who knows.

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  5. > To be honest I'd always thought of the Eye as something metaphorical, not a literal giant eyeball that you could fight to blind the Jailer!

    There's the Eye of Kilrogg, the Eye of C'Thun, there's the "It's All Fun and Games" quest in WotLK where you have to blind the LK by killing an eye. WoW is full with giant eyeballs. :-)

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    1. True I guess, but none of those started their lives as UI elements! What's next, that moving eyeball from the LFD menu coming to life?

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