More Notes from Midnight

The husband and I are continuing to play a lot of Midnight, both together and individually. Over Easter we both had a few days off and used most of that free time to binge on the game together. It was actually really nice that we were equally excited to play for once. Often our shared play time consists of one person gently coaxing the other into doing a specific thing they want to do, while the other just goes along for the sake of playing together without necessarily caring that much about the activity. However, right now we're both equally keen on the new WoW expansion.

Delving Deeply

We jumped into delve week with so much gusto that we already have the achievement for doing all the delves on tier eleven as both tank and dps roles. For the first round, I tanked on my warrior while he did damage on his mage, and then we did the whole thing again with him on his death knight and me on my hunter.

Delves were already a source of fast gear in War Within, but with the extra streamlining Blizzard has done, my hunter went from freshly dinged to full champion gear in something like three days. Some of that was probably luck, but they also upgraded the vendor at the end of delves so that he sells gear for other slots than trinkets now, so when he had something my hunter could use, I was able to just transfer some Undercoin from my main and bam, another gear slot sorted.

Despite this I was never running out of keys, and my levelling alts are already swimming in them before they've even hit max level. A guildie surprised me by saying that he didn't like the change because he used to farm key shards via World Soul memories in War Within at the start of the season, and now he felt more limited by being hard capped at six keys per week, which was a stance I'd never even considered. For me the effort required to farm keys had just always felt like too much and often prevented me from doing even four delves on alts because I couldn't bear to go through the same lot of key-awarding activities on every single character. Now that shards come from seemingly everywhere including treasure chests, they've just become a complete non-issue for me and I love it.

I also learned that you can apparently meet yourself in delves. This is my priest (who was my third character to 90) sitting across an "echo" of my hunter. 

Soloing Nullaeus

Somewhat related to delves, there's the new nemesis boss. Let me backtrack to the end of War Within for a second: back in September I stated that I was still planning to do ?? difficulty Ky'veza at some point, but then Legion Remix happened and that was just so much more fun that I never even bothered with Ky'veza again. (Not to mention that I'd already found the regular version of the fight extremely un-fun. Having every single mechanic be a one-shot if you mess it up is just not my cup of tea; I prefer the elation of being able to recover from a slight misstep over feeling like I have to force my brain to achieve 100% perfect execution through endless repetition.)

When Midnight came out I heard that the newest delve boss was really easy, so I went to check him out sooner than I normally would have. Normal mode was indeed a cakewalk and I one-shot him without even having read any kind of guide, but ?? still took a bit of practice (though not nearly as much as Zekvir or the Underpin did).

Nullaeus basically feels a bit like Zekvir with all the edges filed off: there's crap to dodge on the floor, something to interrupt, something to dispel, and adds you need to kill, but everything is easier. The stuff you need to move out of doesn't hurt so much that clipping it a bit will kill you, and when adds are summoned, the boss goes into an immunity state and leaves you alone so you're able to focus on the adds without also having to worry about him.

Finally, this boss is where Valeera really shone as a companion for me as it was noticeable that she'd been tuned to be much more competent than Brann. One of the difficulties with Zekvir was that Brann would only interrupt or cleanse every other cast, but it could be inconsistent when he'd do it, which made it hard to coordinate with his abilities. Valeera in dps mode on Nullaeus just interrupts every single cast that needs interrupting, or alternatively, if you set her to heal, you need to do the interrupting yourself but she'll reliably dispel you at all times so you don't have to worry about that.

Doing ?? Nullaeus on my protection warrior was my first experience with Valeera set to healer and the healing orbs she throws are also much more consistently targeted than Brann's potions used to be - one will always land right on top of you, with the other two to your left and right, so no having to race across the room to find Brann's latest drop in Narnia.

One of the things that challenged me on ?? Nullaeus was, ironically, maintaining focus for the interrupt through the tedium of nothing much happening. On Zekvir it was hard to keep track of everything that was going on, but here there's so little going on that after a few minutes my mind tended to wander and I would lose focus and miss an interrupt (which was a guaranteed one-shot).

The other thing was the tank buster, which I didn't even realise was a mechanic exclusive to tanks until he flattened me from full to dead with the boss at about 1% health. It was only when I googled what the heck was going on that I learned that this one ability exclusive to tanks is meant to be mitigated - while I'd been able to get by with sloppy shield blocking for most of the fight, his damage increases during the final burn and that's why I'd died. Still, after about half a dozen attempts he was down.

Majestic Beasts and Where to Find Them

I mentioned in a previous post that I've been very motivated by the profession system and have been enjoying the new "high value beast" designation for skinning targets. This has since intensified with a renewed focus on what are called "majestic" beasts, which need to be called forth with a special crafted lure and have a chance of dropping valuable epic materials.

This is a system that has existed since the profession revamp in Dragonflight, but I distinctly remember crafting my first lure back then, using it, and getting absolutely nothing useful from the mob it spawned - which led to me concluding that the whole system was a waste of time and then never bothering with it again.

In War Within, I became somewhat more aware of the value of these rare materials as certain patron crafting orders kept requiring them, but I just tended to skip those. However, in Midnight the new epic profession tools that Blizzard has added all require the new "majestic" materials to craft, so I've been on a mission to learn how to lure all five of these beasts so I can hunt and skin them every day. While the RNG can be frustrating for sure - the day after I'd crafted my shiny new epic skinning knife with a boost to perception I didn't find a single purple item on any of the beasts - doing my daily tour of the four zones is a routine I enjoy right now.

It's also motivated me to pick up fishing again - prior to this, the last time I maxed out my fishing skill had been during Shadowlands. During Dragonflight and War Within I dabbled a little but found it too difficult to make sense of which fish had value and why. All the beast lures require specific fish, which has provided me with a new motivation to gather that is easy enough to understand.

Nightmare Prey

Seguing from the subject of hunting to the prey system - I did already mention it positively in my last post, but I did want to give nightmare difficulty another shout-out now that the husband and I have had a chance to dig into that too. Basically, I really like it! Sure, we'll both complain when we're on a squishy character and things go terribly wrong when too many random events happen at once, but as I also said to him, it weirdly reminds me of vanilla gameplay in a way, in the sense that one of the biggest challenges of questing in the open world in vanilla WoW is accidentally pulling more than you can handle, and Nightmare Prey kind of pushes the same buttons for me as it expects you to keep an eye on your surroundings and prepare for the worst at any moment whenever you're on a hunt. That's cool and I like it!

They also work pretty well in a party - I haven't fully figured it out, but it does seem like progress is shared to some degree as long as you're not too far apart, as we'll always find our prey at the same time. It even overrides the penalty you get from dying, where it will say that your progress has been reset to zero, but if your partner pushes their own hunt to completeness while you're close by, your own progress indicator will also instantly go back from empty to full.