I Dislike Delves but Not for the Reasons I Expected

So, hey! My first negative post about The War Within! Like I said, the bad things always take a bit of time to come out. To be clear, I'm still enjoying the expansion overall, but this post is about the one major gripe I have with it so far.

Delves were actually on my list of TWW features I was concerned about, but those original concerns could basically be summed up as me expecting delves to be boring and inconsequential, which is how I felt about Mist of Pandaria's scenarios.

As far as the inconsequential part goes, delves have actually been the opposite: This past week they have been the best way to get gear, giving higher item rating than was even possible to acquire in dungeons or raiding, meaning they were the "meta" thing to do. As I was already feeling only lukewarm about delves at this point, being made to feel like I "should" be doing them to gear up didn't endear me to them any further. But let's start at the beginning.

I did my first few delves duoing with my husband, and my first impression was actually that they were pretty alright. Unlike scenarios, they didn't throw you into the middle of some ongoing story or overwhelm you with gimmicky mechanics. Earthcrawl Mines, the first delve and the one you get led into as part of the story, was a pretty straightforward little mini-dungeon in the sense that you go into a hole in the ground and clear out some baddies. There were some unique mechanics like the sticky spider webs, but it wasn't too much. I actually enjoyed that it seemed to reward slow and thorough exploration over speed-running, as there were little treasures to be found in every corner.

As we continued to explore different delves, the gimmicks started to ramp up a bit, like the candle circle that shrinks with each step you take. Having the husband yell at me to stand still with the candle while he pulled all the mobs was a bit less fun (thankfully the devs added a "drop candle" button later so I could do that and move too). Then we found that there were delves that were underwater, with constant fear of drowning. Ugh! There are air bubbles you can run through but they are finicky in their respawns and positioning. We had more than one death from drowning or falling off a cliff when trying to pick up a bubble close to an edge. (Why do you die from "falling off a cliff" in an underwater setting anyway?!) These definitely feel like something you shouldn't even attempt without a warlock or underwater breathing potions.

I also kept being a bit baffled by the delves' length, as Blizzard had been promoting them as something quick to do when you only have fifteen minutes, but I don't think we ever managed to do a delve in less than half an hour. They looked shorter than a dungeon based on the map, but every mob was a massive hitpoint sponge that took forever to die, which made things quite tedious gameplay-wise.

At one point the husband and I were about to do Waterworks together when he suddenly felt a bit unwell and wanted to lie down for a bit. I thought I'd give soloing it a try, as we were only on tier four and my item level was way, way higher than the recommended one already, so I figured I was going to be okay even as a healer.

My preservation evoker ended up being absolutely destroyed by the very first mob. I immediately decided that this clearly wasn't going to be worth my time and left again.

On reading around a bit, scaling for different specs, classes and group sizes has apparently been all over the place, and Blizzard has been applying hotfixes pretty much daily that could vastly change your experience even on the same character from one run to the next.

So you simultaneously have people talking both about how delves are a big cakewalk and should really be made a bit harder considering the high-level loot they give, and people saying that the bosses they're encountering are numerically impossible to beat even on lower difficulties. And both groups may be telling the truth, because depending on your class and spec, both of these scenarios, plus a number of ones in-between are all possible.

However, because you don't really know what others are experiencing, people just end up resenting each other over the whole thing, because if they are having an easy time, they think that WoW is full of bad players who are entitled and want loot for nothing, and if they are having a hard time, it's no fun to listen to others humble-brag about their easily earned loot showers while you're being told that you just need to learn to play.

Oh, and I haven't even talked about Brann yet! Brann Bronzebeard is your companion in this first season of delves and just... bloody hell. It's funny to me that Blizzard made such an effort to turn Magni back into a more serious character after how much of a meme he had become in BfA with his constant yells about the wounds of Azeroth, and then they went ahead and turned his brother into an even worse meme. He's just an absolute ball of chaos, firing off random abilities accompanied by voice lines non-stop. It's honestly pretty funny at first, but gets kind of annoying quickly. (I'm not surprised that there's already an addon to mute him.)

I've heard people complain about companion pathing in SWTOR on occasion, but after seeing Brann in action, I feel the SWTOR devs deserve more mad props than ever, considering how much our dwarven friend just leaps and teleports all over the place. "Where is Brann now?" is a question you'll find yourself asking often.

Oh, and unlike SWTOR companions, Brann can only be set to dps or heal, not tank, and his performance in either role also seems completely random, just to add to the pile of massive imbalances already described above. I've heard both reports of him being supposedly absolutely godly, making you unkillable while he's healing, or basically soloing the entire delve for you while dpsing, while others say that he's utterly useless, doing virtually no dps or healing, and that he just dies at the drop of a hat.

So ultimately, what we're left with is a mini-dungeon that somehow takes longer than a regular dungeon, with gimmicky mechanics that are sometimes fun and sometimes annoying. Promoted as TWW's new solo progression path, it can technically be soloed, but you gotta be the right class and spec. Healers (which is what I still main at the moment, but more on that another time) seem to be having a particularly terrible time, what a surprise. I actually think an argument could've been made for this kind of content simply not being designed with solo healers in mind, but apparently Torghast was perfectly fine to do as a solo healer during Shadowlands (I didn't try that myself) so I'm not sure why it's suddenly a problem.

I guess you can always go in with a group, but another thing I haven't mentioned yet is that there's a death counter as well, and if there are too many deaths during the run you lose the big prize at the end of the delve. Just to make sure healers don't have too much fun while doing these in a group either I guess.

It's just an all-around unappealing situation from my point of view, to be pushed into content that seems broken and un-fun in so many ways. I can only hope that Blizzard will eventually achieve some kind of balance for delves, or more importantly that they will lose relevance as the gear rating from other game modes ramps up. I feel like I'm clearly not the target audience for these so having them be the most optimal way to gear up right now is just not something I like.

WoW's Upcoming 20th Anniversary

This November, World of Warcraft turns twenty years old. There are MMOs that are even older than that, but in general, a game being live and continuing to be developed for such a long time is still a rare thing. I remember when I had just started playing WoW and was absolutely enthralled by it for the first few months, the thought occurred to me how I would feel if it was going to shut down, and I found the idea rather heart-wrenching at the time. Still, I don't think I would've expected to still be here playing and talking about it almost twenty years later. Funny how that goes.

There are always some celebratory activities going on each year, but they usually don't change from one year to the next. I think the first time I did them I was quite impressed and meant to write a post about hunting down the modern version of the green dragons, but I never actually ended up doing that. When I came back in subsequent years and found that it was just the exact same stuff again I became somewhat less impressed.

I remember there were some big nostalgic events going on during the tenth anniversary and that I was vaguely tempted to resub just to check out Molten Core in LFR, but that ultimately didn't end up happening either. During the fifteenth anniversary I was technically subscribed, but Classic had just launched and I had absolutely zero interest in retail at the time.

For this year's 20th anniversary, it looks like Blizzard is pulling out all the stops. They just released a video and accompanying article about everything that will be happening and it's a lot of stuff. Chromie will host an event to commemorate the opening of the AQ gates, there'll be a Blackrock Depths raid, classic dungeons will come back for Timetalking, and there'll be new high-res versions of the old tier two sets available, to name just a few of the items on the list. It sounds really cool and I look forward to checking it all out. Inject that nostalgia right into my veins, baby.

I'm thinking about doing something for the anniversary on this blog as well actually. I've really enjoyed what Wilhelm and Bhagpuss have been doing for Everquest's 25th anniversary this year for example, and I never even played that! Wilhelm wrote a series of posts about the game's many different starting/early zones and how he remembers them, and Bhagpuss is currently working his way through a series remembering all his EQ characters and their adventures in order of their original creation date. I couldn't do that for my WoW characters as WoW doesn't let players see their characters' creation dates, and I feel there's been more than enough talk about WoW's original starting zones already (really enjoyed this recent video by Jediwarlock about the human starting experience for example).

Some readers may remember however that I mentioned in the past that I used to maintain a personal blog for more than a decade. You wouldn't find it via Google because this was during a time when personal blogs like that were "noindex" by default. Imagine people writing with the express intent of not being found by search engines. Those were different times...

Anyway, I'm actually not that keen on looking back on that blog because even though I'm sure it contains some interesting tidbits about my past, on a more general level it mostly covers a period of my life that I don't look back on with too much fondness. However! It also contains some notes about my earliest experiences with World of Warcraft, and those I find quite interesting. I actually wish I'd written more about that so I'd have more written evidence of what I thought about things like new content when it actually came out. What I did write down reads quite strangely two decades later, as it harkens back to a time when I basically knew nothing about MMOs and therefore talked about my experiences in WoW in very different terms.

I think for the anniversary it could be fun to pull some of those old blog posts and reproduce them on here, maybe with some commentary. We'll see how that goes. Oh, and if you are interested in reading more personal ramblings, I did actually start a new personal blog last year that currently has zero readers because I didn't tell anyone about it, even though it's linked from my blogger profile. I only update it about once a month but if you ever were curious about what goes on in my life outside MMOs, feel free to take a peek.

Early Musings on The War Within

The War Within's official launch happened less than a week ago, and as usual with new WoW content like this, the husband has been binging hard while kind of dragging me along for the ride, meaning that I've spent most of my limited free time last week exploring the new expansion with him.

So far I've hit level 80 on one character and started levelling a second. I'd heard in a dev interview prior to launch that they'd trimmed down the main storyline to only events they felt were absolutely necessary for players to take part in to understand what was going on, while moving a lot more optional story content into side quests. This sounded reasonable enough to me, but seeing it in action was still kind of weird.

The husband and I started with our usual modus operandi of just doing all the things, which meant that we were level 75 by the time we'd finished the first zone, and keeping in mind that access to a lot of endgame activities is tied to campaign completion, I suggested that we should just push through the main story for the remaining three zones to not delay unlocking this additional content for too long. This resulted in us gaining access to endgame at level 79, meaning that the main storyline plus all side quests in the first zone did more for our levelling than the entire rest of the storyline spread out across the remaining three zones. That was more than a little surprising, though I don't mind having to do more than just the campaign to level up.

It's not as if there is a lack of fun things to do. If anything, I'd argue that the number of indicators for things to do on your map gets a bit overwhelming, especially once you unlock world quests and all that jazz at the end of the campaign. At one point the husband and I touched down in the third zone near some farms where it looked like there were a few world quests right next to each other... but then it turned out that there were more than just a few, plus there were also bonus objectives, and rares kept spawning in, and if you lit a fire in front of any of the many farm houses an NPC would come out and offer you a daily quest - something that was only visible to the original clicker and not to other members of the group and which caused us quite an amount of confusion. We just ran in circles killing and clicking things for what felt like ages and the whole thing just made my head swim.

Overall I've been having a lot of fun though. Not that that's saying a lot - the first few weeks of a WoW expansion are always fun; the discontent with this or that feature usually follows a few months later. Still, considering I had a lot of reservations about what I'd seen and heard about the War Within pre-launch, it's not doing too badly so far. I wouldn't say that all my concerns have been dispelled - while the zones are big and beautiful for example, I'm definitely feeling that difference between overground and underground in my head, with an urge to always return to the one overground zone at the end of each session. We'll just have to see how things feel a few months into the expansion.

I looked back at my first impressions of Dragonflight for comparison, and Blizzard did sadly ditch some of the things that charmed me about that expansion from day one. I loved the boat ride to the Dragon Isles for example, but this time we're back to having to go through an auto-granted scenario, which I can already tell will either be a nuisance in the future (I think of every alt that's been auto-granted the quest telling them to go to the Shadowlands while levelling up) or make it confusing how to actually start the expansion later down the line (to this day, I don't know how you start the Legion story outside of Chromie time).

Dragonflight's sense of hope and optimism coupled with whimsical exploration is once again replaced by a sudden, potentially world-ending threat that overrides everything else. I remember last expansion I saw some lore discussion about just how the Dragon Isles "awakened" so they could be found after being hidden for so long, but this time around there's remarkably little excitement surrounding the fact that we're going to a place that seemingly hasn't had any contact with the outside world in forever. Magni just has a vision of where to go I guess, and Jaina and Thrall know where to point the boats later on in the story. The Earthen reject us as trespassers for about five seconds before we're actually all welcome and wander about as if we owned the place. It's a bit odd in my opinion how much is just taken for granted here.

The "story regression" I was worried about hasn't really been in evidence yet, exactly... a lot of the main levelling storyline actually had a similar vibe to Dragonflight, with conflicts between factions needing to be resolved and people talking about their feelings. The intro scenario though was chock-full of throwbacks to tropes I can't say I've missed, such as having a bunch of death and destruction for shock value, our characters being dumb and accidentally helping the baddie do something awful, and a well-established, powerful character suddenly being completely useless in the face of the newest villain to show how cool the latter is.

Still, overall I enjoyed what I've seen of the story content so far, though I can kind of see at this point why some of it may be a bit too touchy-feely for people's tastes. In Dragonflight, the storyline for the black dragonflight was one of my favourites, as I thought it painted an interesting picture of the messy nature of people trying to change and improve, and the dynamic of Wrathion and Sabellian as both allies and rivals was really interesting. But there was still a plot beyond that, such as the question of who should become the new leader of the black dragonflight, and just what Deathwing had been up to in Aberrus.

In War Within so far, both Alleria and Anduin have an emotional journey in the early questing, but there's very little meat to that part of the story beyond their feelings (if that makes sense) which did feel a bit weird to me. I much preferred spending time with Moira and Dagran, because while they also had a few emotional moments, they were also curious and engaged with the world around them, actually doing stuff and driving the plot forward.

I have been kind of surprised to see a lot of content creators and people on reddit praise the new story to the heavens because while I think it's been engaging and fun enough so far, it doesn't feel dramatically different to me from anything that came before. I've been rather bemused to see Preach for example talk about how this expansion is going to be different and the story is so worth it if you can only prevent yourself from skipping everything... like, are you saying you've been skipping those previous expansion stories that you've done so much complaining about? No wonder you're not enjoying what you're not actually paying attention to; any story is better if you actually engage with it...

I'm very curious to see how reception of The War Within is going to evolve over the coming weeks and months. In some parts I'm seeing huge hype, but I'm also seeing some pushback against it, and anecdotal reports of people's friends lists remaining empty as fewer people have decided to come back for this expansion than for the last one. In the week or so leading up to launch, I was getting absolutely bombarded with marketing for the expac, with every other reddit ad encouraging me to "play The War Within now", and I'm still seeing those ads a week later, while we haven't heard any proud announcements from Blizzard about what a great launch the expansion had.

I thought the call of Chris Metzen would surely bring a lot of old-timers back (and maybe it has; I just don't know), plus Dragonflight's overall good reputation should've gotten the word out that retail WoW has been in a solid place gameplay-wise for a couple of years now. But maybe there's just too much of a divide now between entrenched players loving their new Warbands and those who cynically left during BfA and Shadowlands? The people who are actually playing mostly seem to be having a blast, but is that good enough at this point?