With WoW Forever launching later today, I expect I'll be giving retail WoW the cold shoulder for at least a few weeks. That said, I've been enjoying it quite a bit for the past couple of months, so I wanted to do a bit of a round-up post talking about some (to me) notable things that happened during that time, but which maybe weren't quite worthy of having their own post.
Chowdown Champion
I wrote about the surprising amount of fun I had with Brewfest this year, but what wasn't covered in that post (because it hadn't happened yet) was that I managed to win the five chowdown competitions required to buy the Brewfest Chowdown Trophy toy before the event ended. I was just ridiculously proud of myself for that one.
I'd read some comments claiming that it's completely RNG who wins, but I'd like to think that there is an optimal strategy and that I got really good at it, because once I'd figured out what to do I only lost a couple more matches before earning my trophy. (The strategy is to just eat a choke sometimes when the cooldown on the next drink is the same or greater length than the "choking break" anyway, plus the choke meter seems to deplete in "ticks" so sometimes it's worth waiting just one second or so before eating another sausage just to get one last chomp in without choking. God, do I feel weird having written that sentence.)
After getting my trophy, I still continued taking part in the chowdown event but actively made sure not to win again so more people could have a shot at earning their champion tokens. Yes, I really enjoyed it that much.
Mythic+ Season 2 (So Far)
I wrote about how I "accidentally" did more M+ in Midnight Season 1 than I'd done in some previous seasons when I was actively trying to get my rating up. Somehow things seemed to be getting even worse in Season 2 in so far, as the attendance of certain people on my guild's M+ team became so bad that I was almost joining more often than they did. After hitting 2k rating I put my foot down and said they really need to find someone else to help out because I don't want to do it anymore when it's almost every single week. It feels a bit weird because it's not like I've hated the runs I helped out with, but I simply do not want to have my Sunday evenings committed to this every week and I currently feel like I'm being taken advantage of in a way. We'll see whether the situation improves over the next few weeks.
Venomous Abyss LFR
I'm sure for some people LFR is something they do on multiple characters every week, but for me it just always feels like a bit of a chore to "see the raid" once per tier, mostly because of the hours of waiting to get pops for all the wings. Though one upside of getting this done is that it always exposes you to both the best and the worst of the modern WoW community, which can honestly be quite hilarious.
In the Venomous Abyss, the definitive winner in that category was the second wing. It started with me cracking up at the mere sight of the Entombed Sentinels and going "yeah, I can see where that meme came from". Then there's a mechanic during the fight where people are meant to run into each other to make a debuff above their heads disappear - I think on higher difficulties there are rules to it, but on LFR anyone running into anyone else seemed fine... except some people still didn't want to move and a massive ping-fest ensued trying to get them to walk towards each other.
The bosses themselves also need to be handled in a certain way so as not to heal each other... and we were apparently doing that wrong. I had no idea about how any of that was going to be honest (I was healing) but I did notice that the fight seemed to be going on for a while, and people started to say things in chat like "worst LFR group ever" or "this run is cursed" while engaging in more wild pinging. However, this in turn then got others in the group to tell them that they needed to chill out, it's LFR etc. On the following trash someone demanded that we should "vote kick the haters" and someone did indeed try to initiate a kick for someone, but it failed and I'm not sure that person had even done anything.
At this point it felt like the insanity was out of the bag and people started saying increasingly random things in chat, such as "you shouldn't be able to skin the snakes, they're basically people", which someone else countered on the next boss (who's one of those snake people) by yelling "can't wait to skin this guy". It was just mayhem and I couldn't stop giggling. I was mildly disappointed that the two wings after that were fairly normal and boring.
The Labyrinth of Kindo'jan
I'm not great at keeping up with the news about all the new stuff retail is pumping out with each patch, but one thing I had taken note of was the promise of a "labyrinth" or "mega-delve" that you could do in chunks. Unfortunately the whole "being able to do it in chunks" thing ended up on the cutting room floor at some point, which was a bit disappointing. So the final result is just one fairly large delve with a lot of rooms that you can end early for fewer rewards if you want. Still, it does have its appeal - the husband and I have enjoyed running it in full multiple times. The sheer number of chests and treasures you end up with after a full run makes for quite a satisfying looting experience, even if a lot of it isn't that valuable to our characters at this point.
Anyway, what I hadn't known in advance was that there was also a boss at the end that's a bit like the nemesis bosses but not really, in the sense that you need to do the delve first to access him, but also in that he's much easier than the nemesis bosses usually are (and doesn't have a special extra hard difficulty, he just scales to the delve tier you pick I guess). And for some reason, Blizzard decided to add a FOMO achievement for killing him with zero deaths in the first week of release (which was later extended to two weeks), complete with a toy that shows you the how manieth person to earn the achievement you were.
I did it kind of late in the week because I hadn't really planned to go for it at all, but then everyone said it was so easy I figured I might as well give it a go, and it was no problem at all. Nothing like being able to say that you were in the top 80,000 to do something (in the EU region). The husband later became one of the top 90,000, haha. I wonder how high the number actually went before the achievement was turned off.
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