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?

My Experience in Amirdrassil LFR

As of today, Dragonflight has the (dubious?) honour of being the first WoW expansion since Cataclysm in which I (technically) saw and cleared all the raids while they were current content, even if I only did so in LFR. I say "technically" because, well... we'll get there.

I had set it as a pre-Christmas goal for myself to do all of Amirdrassil in LFR, and with me being off work already, today seemed a good day to do so in order to secure some boss kill credit for next week's great vault. I decided to putz around planting seeds in the Emerald Dream while waiting in the queue, but pops were so quick as a healer that I never got to finish a full growth cycle between wings.

Wing one was nothing too special or exciting. The bosses fell over with no great difficulty and despite my usual habit of going in blind, I wasn't too confused about what was going on, except for having no idea what to do with Igira's spears, as DBM telling me "Spear!" was not particularly helpful. I just tried to imitate the people around me in placing them in a loose circle around the boss.

Wing two initially made me raise an eyebrow as wing one finishes with you killing Smolderon, and then wing two starts with said boss suddenly being back to life and yelling things. Why, Blizzard? I get that LFR isn't the priority when it comes to designing a raid, but surely you have the power to group the bosses together for LFR wings in a way that makes more narrative sense? I just don't get it.

That aside, this wing was probably my favourite. The Volcoross fight was very atmospheric, with the looming tail coming out of the lava to smash people during the trash already and then being a mechanic during the boss fight as well. Mechanically, I really enjoyed Larodar, Keeper of the Flame, and how it gave healers something slightly different to do by asking us to heal NPCs to trigger certain mechanics. I just thought that was neat.

I was just thinking about how much I was enjoying myself with everything going so smoothly and the colour palette being unusually easy on the eyes for a raid, when I ran into my first hiccup in wing three, where my group wiped twice on Nymue for reasons not entirely clear to me. If group chat was to be believed, it was because one of the tanks moved one of the tree adds into a bad place (twice). This wasted some time, but ultimately wasn't too bad. I just found myself wondering why we were killing the bosses in this wing in the first place, as they didn't seem like bad guys or even "corrupted" in the way WoW bosses so often are.

Then it was time for the final wing! Now, I'd learned during Dragonflight's previous tiers that the last boss of a raid could be quite a shitshow even in LFR, so I tempered my expectations, but what actually happened still caught me by surprise.

We started the fight with "T. Swift" (as Calcas calls him) and after a bit of skirmishing he flew away. Everyone around me jumped on their dragonriding mount and I followed suit as quickly as I could. I'd heard mention of there being a fight that involved dragonriding and kept muttering "oh no" to myself as I had no idea what I was doing, but I made it to the next platform just fine. Here the cycle repeated, except when the boss flew away again and everyone mounted up to follow, my mount icon remained greyed out. I ran in circles for a few panicked seconds, when I suddenly remembered a reddit post in which I had seen this fight mentioned, where someone had made a comment about needing to run over a feather. Those fiery things that looked evil and like you should definitely not stand on them? Yup, touching one finally unlocked my mount and I raced after the rest of the group as quickly as I could.

However, I had lost too much valuable time already and suddenly found myself dismounted in mid-air. I could see that I was close, and being a dracthyr, I was hopeful that I'd be able to safely glide down to the platform with the rest of the raid on it, however a painful damage-over-time effect kicked in and killed me before I could land, leading to me plummeting to my death just under the platform.

The boss died anyway, and I waited a few seconds to see if I would get a revive, but I wasn't sure whether that was even possible with me being dead on the ground underneath. Anyway, no res indicator popped up, so I released and found myself back on the last boss's starting platform, seeing no other option to get off than to talk to the nearby green dragon, however that just took me back to the previous wing, so I had to immediately revert.

I couldn't think of anything else but to mount my own dragon and try to manually find the platform on which the boss had died, but the map was completely useless and of no help. Someone did a ready check, which I obviously declined, followed by him immediately pulling the boss. Someone else did gripe about that in chat briefly, something along the lines of "dude, WTF do you pull when not everyone's here" but I seemed to be the only one affected so they did just fine without me.

After a bit of flying I was suddenly killed mid-air again and got an achievement for dying to Fyrakk. My body appeared next to the corpse of Mr. Swift (whom I'd been unable to locate until then) and which was sparkling at me tantalisingly. Annnd... that's where I spent the rest of the raid, never even seeing Fyrakk until the raid completion achievement popped up. This is why I said I "technically" saw all the bosses at the start of this post, because in reality I never even saw him. I'm not sure whether I should go back and re-do this wing at some point just to actually see the fight.

I'm glad I've got a blog to spin this into an amusing tale, because otherwise I might've been somewhat annoyed by how that last wing went. The postmaster didn't even send me whatever loot I had on Mr. Swift, and I didn't get loot credit for Fyrakk at all (which is fair but was still a bit annoying as well since I did get the lockout). Once again LFR delivered on an experience that was mostly inoffensive in terms of gameplay but also a terrible way to experience the story. I'm just glad I was able to tick all the raid boxes for an expansion for once, considering how much importance WoW still places on this content above all else.