30/09/2024

These Pugs Be Crazy

As much fun as I've been having in War Within over the past month, one thing I carefully avoided for the longest time was the random dungeon finder. I wrote a post earlier in the year about how WoW's random dungeon experience is terrible, and early indications from reddit pointed towards things only having gotten worse with the expansion. It made sense to me too, seeing how the introduction of follower dungeons meant that people who don't want to be harried or berated by strangers could now opt out of that experience while still seeing the content, further increasing the relative percentage of rushers and toxic players in LFD.

So for the first month or so, I strictly stuck to doing dungeons with the NPCs or in guild groups. However, in the past week my resolve started to weaken a bit. My priest needed a couple more levels and random dungeons started to look appealing as both a source of XP and as a way of practising my healing with the new priest toolkit. I'd had plenty of time to get to know all the dungeons on a basic level, and I figured that the sweatiest of the sweats would probably be in Mythic Plus or wherever by now, right? Right?

You can probably already tell that I ended up being wrong about that, at least to some degree. Basically, I ran about half a dozen normal mode pugs, and while they made for excellent healing practice, at least half the runs had someone in them who was acting insane. That is not a good percentage!

The very first dungeon I got into was Priory of the Sacred Flame with a monk tank. They pulled the entire courtyard to begin with and it felt like a minor miracle to me that nobody died, especially since I got silenced at some point. But okay, I'd consider that "normal" pug behaviour, even if unpleasant.

However, then they made a straight beeline for the first boss, which immediately made me go "uh oh". In case you don't know, the first boss in Priory is a bit like the second boss in Court of Stars in the sense that he gets buffed by lieutenants that you're supposed to draw away and kill separately first. He is however slightly less deadly than his Court of Stars counterpart, meaning that I'm told it's technically possible to kill him without taking out the lieutenants first, as long as your group has a perfect interrupt rotation. Which a normal pug obviously wasn't going to have.

Unsurprisingly, we got AoEd to death within a few seconds, which then resulted in the tank saying something along the lines of "you guys have no clue how to interrupt, good luck" and dropping group. I was only annoyed because I really wanted to tell them "What in the world did you think was going to happen?" The replacement tank we got did the fight the intended way and we had no further issues for the rest of the run.

Insanity of a different kind - but also displayed by a tank - was something I encountered in the Rookery. This tank was a death knight and level 71, when the scaling is most in your favour and you should be a god among men. However, for some reason this tank felt like they were made of paper and it was a real struggle to keep everyone alive, especially as the tank decided to go for massive pulls regardless.

Still, healing practice, right? At some point I opened Recount just to get an idea of how the numbers were looking, and I noticed that the tank was at the bottom of the damage done chart, having done less than half of the damage I had done as a healer (and that was with me not having had much time to add dps since everyone was constantly on the brink of death). I really have no clue what this person was doing.

Considering that every pull was a life or death battle due to the tank's disregard for their own or anyone else's health, I was worried about the bottom floor of the instance, as this is where the trash does a lot of AoE damage and can wipe you even if you were fine with bigger pulls up top. Naturally the paper tank tried to pull three groups at once and died. Somehow the dps had the sense to go into crazy kiting mode and it wasn't a full wipe, but it sure was intense. After we'd killed the last boss, one of the damage dealers put "please don't tank" into /say before leaving and I felt that.

However, the most impressive display of - to me - crazy behaviour happened in a Stonevault that actually seemed to be off to a good start initially. Sure, everyone was running and we were doing huge trash pulls as usual, but this death knight tank actually seemed to know what they were doing and things were much more controlled, with not that much damage hitting the party.

However, after the first boss a vote kick for the mage in the group suddenly popped up, with the given reason being either gibberish or a language I didn't understand. Naturally, I voted no. Moments later it came up again, this time with "puller". I voted no again, though I hadn't really seen what was happening. Everyone was ahead of me, I hadn't seen who had actually pulled, but there hadn't been that much damage going around either way, so it seemed fine?

The vote kicks kept popping up though, with different reasons. There should really be something to prevent you from trying to vote-kick the same person over and over if it keeps failing. The mage tried to kick the tank in turn at least once as well, but I voted no on that one too. We were fine! Why were people freaking out so much?!

This continued until after the second boss. On the trash to the third boss, the tank decided that they'd had enough and stopped tanking. This time I could see that the mage had indeed pulled, and naturally I had managed to get healing aggro already. The mage ran out of the instance portal and I had to do the same as the tank showed no interest in saving me from the mobs either. We both zoned back in once aggro had reset and rejoined the group at the third boss. Here the tank decided to... I don't even know what exactly they did, but it ended up wiping us, clearly on purpose. The mage gave up and quit, and people in chat were like "haha, finally". I was honestly just confused.

As we got a replacement and made our way to the last boss, the tank seemed surprised that I hadn't quit as well, and a conversation along the following lines ensued:

Tank: "Why didn't you kick the mage if you weren't together?"
Me: "Because I don't like kicking people over the tiniest things."
Tank: "Do you tank?"
Me: "Yes, I do."
Tank: "Don't you find it annoying too when dps pull for you?"
Me: "Yes, but I also find it annoying when tanks don't save me from healing aggro just cause they're annoyed with a dps."
Tank: "Who was annoying here first though?"
Me: "Here? To me? You were! But I didn't vote to kick you either."

Now, if you're someone who's very cynical about retail WoW, you might just chuck this up to retail being retail, lacking incentives to socialise etc., but the funny thing is, out in the open world I keep having great collaborative experiences and keep thinking how nice everyone is. It's just normal dungeons that have become this pocket of utter insanity.

I definitely find it worrying that so many of my runs were like this though. This wasn't one bad apple in a dozen runs, this was every other dungeon or worse. How are new players ever going to have a chance to experience grouping in a positive way like this? Friends and guilds are great, but I'm not sure people are going to stick around long enough to get to that point if their first grouping experiences are like this.

26/09/2024

Nerub-ar Palace Solo Vs. LFR

I actually got one of those opinion surveys from Blizzard today. It wouldn't make for an exciting reddit exposé because the questions were all over the place (though the one that asked whether a MoP Classic would make me more likely to spend time in Classic was certainly something to take note of), but one subject it asked about in particular was something I've been meaning to write a post about anyway, namely how I felt about the new solo/story version of the Nerub-ar Palace raid.

WoW has long had a reputation for being both a solo player's game and yet all about raiding. I certainly think that both of those play styles can coexist peacefully, but as Blizzard has put more and more emphasis on storytelling, this dichotomy has certainly presented a bit of a problem: Over and over, you'd go through this whole intricate storyline by yourself just to have it end at the entrance to a raid, with nothing but a breadcrumb quest telling you to go do the raid now. By the time the next patch came around, it was on to the next storyline and solo players were largely left in the dark or confused about what had actually happened at the end of the raid.

The devs tried to alleviate this problem a little by adding an NPC after a few weeks that would let you watch the raid-end cut scene regardless, but that only worked to a limited extent. I thought Amirdrassil was a great example of this actually, as the story leading up to it ended with big baddie Fyrakk entering the raid and needing to be stopped, and then the cut scene you were allowed to watch afterwards was just a few seconds of the aspects looking surprised while their eyes glowed. I believe my initial response to this was something along the lines of: "What is even happening?" (I did eventually get more of a resolution through LFR, though that took more than one attempt as well.)

Being aware of this problem, Blizzard decided to try a new approach with The War Within's first raid by adding an actual story/solo mode. It's not the whole raid - only the last boss - and you won't get any loot out of it, but it should provide more context for what's going on. Naturally, as someone who's been following the in-game story through LFR for the last couple of expansions (or at least trying to), I was very interested in this.

So how does it work? A week after the raid opened for group play, a new quest appeared for solo players that had completed the campaign story, asking them to meet a contact in the City of Threads. He gives you a couple of tasks to help out people in the city, which culminate in a mission that tells you that the time has come to strike against the queen. Another NPC near the raid entrance "smuggles" you inside... along with nine friendly NPCs, the same ones that help out Horde and Alliance in the follower dungeons.

You then get to meet and fight Queen Ansurek in what I can only call a weak imitation of a raid fight, with some flashy mechanics going off that don't really seem to do anything and the NPCs mostly just forming a big pile. If you're a tank or a healer, the game doesn't even trust you to do the role you signed up for, as you'll be slotted in as the sixth dps regardless. But you do get a (very) vague idea of the fight and can watch the little cut scene at the end in peace. The reward for the quest also includes one of those rare crafting materials for a high-level item, which I actually used to place my first ever public crafting order for an epic belt.

I still wanted to see the whole thing in LFR too though - more than usual in fact, because while I'd appreciated the opportunity to see the story conclusion at my own pace, it did feel a bit "off" to me to just "sneak up" on the queen like that and face so little resistance. It made me go into LFR with a different attitude than usual, in the sense that I knew exactly how it was going to end this time, but I wanted to see more of how you're supposed to get there. Even if LFR fights are also mostly unorganised mayhem with extremely toned down mechanics, it does feel more epic with real people, and it's certainly possible to wipe.

I also found myself paying more attention to the bosses. I was happy to get a proper conclusion to the last fight of the Dawnbreaker dungeon for example (the boss runs away at the end and you don't get to take her down properly until the raid), and I found myself wondering just how the Ethereals will play into all this, as they were featured in the pre-expansion quest line and one of the bosses is a "Nexus Princess" who also makes an escape after you defeat her. These may be minor, but there are still story threads leading both into and out of the raid that you don't get to see in solo mode.

Overall I'll say the new story mode is a big improvement though. Its biggest weakness this time around was actually just the bad signposting. I was looking forward to checking it out, but I would not have known when or how to start it if a headline from Blizzard Watch hadn't caught my eye on my Bluesky timeline.

Blizzard is usually quite fond of just auto-granting you new story quests, but not only did they not do that with this one, it's also marked as a side quest - in an expansion with about a million of them. So unless you'd already cleared your map of all side quests before this one came out or used some sort of map filter, odds were high that you'd simply miss this new exclamation mark being added in town.

The other issue I had is that the WoW community is still absolutely atrocious about spoilers. The cut scene at the end of Nerub-ar Palace doesn't exactly contain any major plot points, but I still tripped over it left and right mere hours after solo mode was released and before I'd had a chance to see it in game for myself, as multiple YouTubers I watch used it as background footage for their videos while talking about something else. Like, come on, dudes. Is it that hard to show your viewers a little bit of courtesy by holding off on doing that kind of thing?

As far as Blizzard themselves go though, I think story mode is a good addition and didn't even turn me off LFR. I'm generally not a huge fan of LFR - I don't dislike it by any means but I also find it a bit tedious as a way of just seeing the end of the story, so I was wondering whether this new story mode would make LFR feel redundant to me. Surprisingly that hasn't been the case though - if anything, it kind of made me appreciate LFR more for what it is. Like a side quest to the final boss fight that I'm happy to check out, but I also appreciate that I don't have to do it to understand what's going on.

It's worth noting that the overall structure of the storyline also felt a bit different in this first tier of War Within than it usually does, as the raid is really more of a side story. Not to downplay Queen Ansurek's importance, but we know from the beginning that she's not the one in charge. The solo campaign also has a satisfying ending of its own (for the moment), so the pressure to go see the raid to understand how it all wraps up is actually lower than it would usually be at this point in an expansion. And I think that's a good thing as well.

What was your experience of the Nerub-ar Palace raid storyline?

21/09/2024

Experimenting with Alts in War Within

I mentioned in a previous post that I wasn't sure what class I wanted to play as my main in War Within. Fortunately, the fact that I had one of each at level 70 by the time the expansion launched (largely thanks to MoP Remix and the Radiant Echoes event) meant that I had a lot of choice. One month in, I'm honestly still not sure which class I'd like to play more than any other, but I've had time to do a bit of exploring at least, as this expansion is very alt-friendly even if you're only playing on a relatively slow and casual level.

Preservation Evoker

For all the options I had, I still decided to go down the path of least resistance for my first character. She was my main in Dragonflight; it seemed easiest to just keep rolling along with her for now. Hopefully it shouldn't be too tough to switch focus to a different character later on if I feel like it.

She was the character on whom I did the main storyline, and the husband and I are still working our way through the side quests at a slower pace when there isn't anything else going on that takes priority in that moment.

The hero talent choices for Preservation Evoker are between Chronowarden (more bronze magic) and Flameshaper (more fire magic). I chose the former because it seemed more passive and I'm the kind of person who doesn't want to put extra abilities on her bar just for the sake of having more buttons to press, but it's honestly been kind of boring. I think it makes my Living Flame glow a bit differently? But other than that it really feels like a big nothingburger. In some ways that's a good thing since I was worried about hero talents adding too much additional complexity, but on the other hand it's also a little disappointing, especially since I've seen on some of my alts that these can be a lot more fun.

My evoker is also a skinner/leatherworker and I was kind of surprised by how engaged I've been with crafting so far this expansion. I thought the Dragonflight profession revamp was a bit of a miss, but Blizzard made some changes to the system this time around that, while small, have been pretty impactful. For example they added NPC ("Patron") crafting orders, meaning you can finally interact with the crafting order system even if there are never any public orders up for things that you can actually make. There's also a new button for concentration, which is kind of hilarious to me because I believe this is a mechanic that was already added in Dragonflight, but I just couldn't find it/see how to use it (and I didn't care enough to research it). Now there's suddenly this button and I can press it and it does things! Just goes to show the importance of a good user interface I guess.

All in all, I'm still feeling a bit mixed about evoker though. I healed some dungeons for my friends and had a decent enough time, but... the TWW talent revamp has given me some new buttons to use that I keep forgetting to press because they don't feel particularly fun. Also, with the new expansion and having to gear up again, I feel extremely weak doing anything by myself in the open world right now, which can make even the easiest of world quests feel like utter tedium. The class feels surprisingly squishy for a mail-wearer, my self-healing seems poor in relation to my health pool right now, and my damage output is just absolutely pathetic. I don't expect to do a lot of damage as a healer, but evoker just feels so bad at it right now, and the lack of any AoE that's not on a long cooldown is particularly noticeable. If I pull more than one mob at a time, I always feel like I'm at risk of dying from boredom before actually killing any of my opponents.

Protection Warrior

This is in particularly stark contrast to my Protection Warrior, who is one of my newest alts (levelled during Remix) and was my second character to 80. Like all my alts, she's been levelling without doing the story, just by doing a mix of other activities like dungeons, world events and professions.

This probably won't surprise anyone who's got experience with the current retail game, but as someone with a more "classic" mindset, it still blows my mind that speccing tank is basically the best way to play the game as a casual soloer nowadays. Sure, you'll be slower at killing things than someone specced into dps (though still a lot faster than a healer), but you're also really good at AoE and near-indestructible. Wherever you go, you can just round up everything in sight and then slowly AoE it down at virtually no risk to yourself.

Is there a tough rare in front of you, or a heroic world quest with lots of elites? Never a problem, you just go in anyway. Worst case, you'll be there a long time, taking things down slowly by yourself, but most of the time some damage dealer will come by and be like "oh neat, a pile of controlled mobs that I can put AoE on for kill credit with zero risk to my health", which speeds things up considerably and effectively makes a tank the best class to solo on because you're both decently powerful and never have to wait for help from other people.

There was this one elite world quest I did in Azj-Kahet which granted one of those temporary ability buttons and for some reason it didn't appear in its usual spot but covered my health bar instead, meaning I couldn't see my own health anymore. While I tanked a big group of mobs, now and then the edges of my screen would start flashing red, which is when I knew it was time to hit a cooldown, and soon things were fine again. It just seemed ridiculous how easy it is to get by this way.

I have done some actual tanking as well, even if it was all normal mode dungeons. I tanked the Rookery at least half a dozen times to help get some guildies levelled up for example. This was decent fun and kind of reminded me of when I used to do a fair amount of tanking on my paladin and druid back in Wrath and Cata, even if the gameplay is somewhat different nowadays. Threat is pretty much a non-issue if people aren't being stupid and AoEing things you haven't even touched yet (though they often will do just that), and it's really only about how to best round up groups of mobs efficiently and being able to gauge how much you can pull without killing the rest of your group. Your own survival generally isn't a problem at this level, the more likely issue is that you end up pulling too many mobs with randomly targeted or AoE attacks, causing the damage on the dps and healer to become overwhelming.

For all of that, I'm not 100% sold on tanking as my new calling either. The main downside I see is just the amount of focus it requires. As described above, it's not exactly hard (on the level we are doing it on), but it does require you to be switched on for the entirety of the run in a way that dps and even healing doesn't in easier content. It's something that would probably get better with practice, but I'm still not sure how much time and energy I really want to commit to it.

Oh, and I went down the Colossus hero talent tree, which gives me an extra ability with a medium cooldown that always makes it look like my character is flailing about wildly. Not sure I'd really call that my warrior class fantasy, but I do like the way that hero talent tree is generally about ramping up your damage output over time, making you hit harder and harder as time goes on, as that's something that synergises quite well with a tank's longer kill times.

Holy Priest

My lightforged holy priest is a character I created during Shadowlands and which I've always kept on the back burner since then, never spending too much time on her but also never leaving her too far behind. I still feel a strong affiliation with the class that gave this blog its name, but neither shadow nor discipline appeal to me nowadays. Holy supposedly isn't very good at the moment either, but I have had decent fun healing some alt dungeons with her and playing whack-a-mole with all the different heal buttons.

The thing that has stood out to me with this character is that unlike my evoker, she still feels decent fun to solo on, even as a healer. Now, she's still levelling, so her power levels will continue to go down some more before they go up again, but the dps toolkit just feels more fun than that of the evoker in general. Putting Shadow Word: Pain on every enemy, spreading Holy Fire and popping a Holy Nova whenever it's in its fully empowered state is just entertaining, even if it's not the fastest way to kill things. If I stick with healing, there's a chance I might end up using this character more instead of the evoker.

Holy priest hero talents are again a bit of a dud as far as I'm concerned. Oracle is all about complicated buff management and was what initially made me feel absolutely terrified of hero talents when I heard it being discussed in a podcast prior to the expansion, so I was definitely not going to go for that one. That left me with Archon, which kind of seems to be focused on Halo, an AoE with a long-ish cooldown for a heal and that isn't among my favourites. What can you do?

Frost Death Knight

At some point I felt that I really needed to level a damage dealer just to see what mob kill times are actually supposed to be like for the average player, and I was going back and forth between prioritising this character or my hunter. The death knight eventually won out due to professions, as she's a herbalist/scribe, while the hunter is another skinner/leatherworker.

So this is one of the characters I only revived after the Warband patch and levelled during Radiant Echoes. She lives on my original Horde server and I remember not being overly fond of death knights back in the day, though the class grew on me a little over time and I even recall tanking some dungeons.

I mostly felt inspired to play her in War Within by the fact that her dps rotation seemed incredibly easy, with very few buttons to press (as having too many buttons to press just to do damage is one of my main issues with modern WoW's gameplay).

What did take me by surprise (after my previous experiences with hero talents) was how incredibly fun the Rider of the Apocalypse hero talent tree is. It basically allows you to fight from your ground mount in the open world and passively summons important death knight NPCs to help you out occasionally. I reckon that this is probably not the ideal choice for dungeons, but while just out and about doing world quests it's incredibly fun, even if it feels a bit ridiculous to have Highlord Darion Mograine show up to help you kill a random worm or bear. The mounted speed is also really great for rounding up mobs to AoE or to escape a fight you really can't be bothered with. My husband always complains that lack of mobility is the main thing he dislikes about his death knight, and this talent just counters that in a great way (in the open world at least).

Though one "mobility" issue remains... while questing as a duo with me on my evoker and my husband on his death knight, something that occurred more than once was that we'd fall down/off somewhere and while I'd glide gracefully to a safe landing, he'd go splat next to me and need a revive. I always made fun of him for that, but playing my own death knight, I quickly learned that it's basically a vibe for this class. As mentioned before, mine is also a herbalist, so it didn't take long for me to "discover" that those special flowers that knock you back and whose knockback can't be countered made their way over from the Dragon Isles - which is my way of saying that my first two deaths in Khaz Algar were both to being punted to my death by a herb while picking flowers on the Isle of Dorn. I guess you get used to it as a death knight.

Finally, I had a fun encounter on this character while questing one night: As mentioned, she's on my old Horde server, and I tend to forget that for all the cross-server stuff, if you're just out and about, you're still more likely to see people from the same server as you than complete randoms. So my eyes went wide when I actually ran into a troll priest whose name I recognised from fifteen years ago or however long it's been. I whispered him with something like "Nice to still see familiar faces around when coming back after a long absence!" to which his response was simply "That's just a polite way of saying we're getting old", which made me laugh.

16/09/2024

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.

A bountiful delve icon but instead of a friendly golden glow inside, it contains the Eye of Sauron
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.

07/09/2024

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.

01/09/2024

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?