My Midnight Season 1

As we're approaching patch 12.1 and with it the start of Midnight's second season, I wanted to take a moment to reflect a bit on Season 1.

My primary activity for gearing have of course been delves, and those have been fun. I already talked a bit about it previously, but I've basically been happy with everything Blizzard has adjusted about delves in Midnight. I got Valeera to her current level cap in no time, and she already feels much better tuned than Brann ever was. Her only weakness are those Spellshield Collaborators in the Darkway, which seem to be capable of reflecting her Mandate of Sacred Death and basically cause her to get one-shot randomly if you don't kill them quickly enough.

One thing I hadn't mentioned yet in previous posts is how much better tuned the delving experience has become as a healer. I did a fair few delves as a healer in War Within, but one thing that always put me off was how incredibly slow it was, even while wearing gear that was better than the drops you could get within the delve itself and with Brann fully maxed out. Boss fights were particularly bad, and I got into the habit of changing my companion from tank to dps for the last fight to speed things up, yet that final boss still tended to remain a 5+ minute slog on tier 11. In Midnight I followed the same strategy early on, but I quickly found that Valeera's dps had improved so much compared to Brann's that I could leave her as tank and we'd still kill any end boss in decent time. That's really appreciated.

Also, it feels a bit weird admitting it, but Blizzard have been very good at stringing me along all season to keep me playing for longer. I was "done" with basic delve rewards months ago, but they kept adding either reasons to re-run them or other/similar content (like the ritual sites) and I went along with it. I've only really been taking a bit of a step back for these last two weeks of the season.

I do think there's a risk of burnout if they keep trying the same trick in upcoming seasons. 

The big surprise this season, however, was that I actually ended up doing some Mythic+ again. You might recall that I decided to nope out of M+ after War Within Season 1, and I had no plans to get back into it since then. And I didn't... really, but what happened was that our guild group was somewhat diminished at the start of Midnight, and my husband was still part of it, so I naturally got pulled in as a backfill to make sure they could keep running. Part of it was that I was obviously an easy person to ask, the other part was that due to my enthusiasm for delving, I had reasonably geared characters of every role at a time when others were still struggling to gear their main.

So I ended up running some M+ in all three roles, though the vast majority of it happened on my hunter - which again, was a surprise considering that dps are usually not the role that's hardest to find. In fact, she ended up doing so much backfilling that by the end of what was declared our last run as a group, she was only a single-digit number away from 2500 rating. I hadn't really cared about it before, but that was so close that it seemed a waste not to take that last step. A more experienced acquaintance who plays tank agreed to take me through the one dungeon I was still missing for rating (Pit of Saron), which eventually resulted in me getting Keystone Hero for the first time, in a season when I wasn't even trying to play M+ at all.

I'm still not sure how I feel about that. There was a lot of talk about how Midnight Season 1 was one of the easiest M+ seasons ever, and my own experience seemed to bear that out in so far as our little group had never been able to reliably clear +10s before (and we even went a little higher than that this time!). At the same time, because of the irregular nature of my backfilling (even if it ended up adding up to a lot of runs in total at the end) meant that I never felt particularly engaged with the system. I couldn't really give you my detailed thoughts on all the dungeons as I didn't run some of them on mythic more than once or twice.

As far as intra group tension goes, which had been the main reason I stopped in War Within: as dps it was easier to just hang back and let people do whatever, and likewise nobody seemed to care that much what I was doing. When I had been tanking there had always been a lot of annoying backseat driving that slowly drove me up the wall.

That said, I still don't know whether I'd necessarily want to do more of this again. In some ways it was good fun, but other times I did feel a bit stressed by the hyperfocus that M+ requires for thirty minutes straight. I don't mind that kind of intense activity as a one-off once a week, but every run? Meh. I guess points go to Blizzard for being able to add me to their metrics this season.

My warrior tank's final M+ scorecard

My hunter's final M+ scorecard

My holy priest's final M+ scorecard

A Peculiar Casual

I've been kind of fascinated by Data for Azeroth ever since I found out about the site via a Bellular video. What blew my mind at the time - around halfway through War Within from what I recall - was that it claimed that I was among the rare five percent who had completed the Khaz Algar Diplomat achievement (to max out your reputation with War Within's four base factions). The reason this was shocking to me was that it's something that's extremely easy to do, as every piece of casual content (quests, world quests, delves) awards reputation with at least one of these factions. I get that this isn't something raiders would spend time on, but I'm a casual and lots of other people are casuals like me, right? Right?!

As far as the Khaz Algar Diplomat achievement goes, my assumption did eventually bear out, kind of - now that War Within is in the rear mirror and all subscribers have access to its content even without shelling out extra for the newest expansion, Data for Azeroth says that more than 50% of all its tracked accounts have completed this achievement. I guess I was just ahead of the curve, so to speak.

Looking again more recently, I've once again been surprised by what sorts of achievements of mine are classified as super rare. Here's a list of my currently rarest achievements according to their database, as of today:

1. A Hal'hadar Walks into a Swamp - complete a quest line in Naigtal
2. Lorewalking: The Loa - complete the lorewalking quest about the Loa
3. Disguised to the Nines - complete all Decor Duel achievements
4. Omnium Folio Studies - complete the Omium Folio quest line
5. Doing Your Share - smelt 5 Enchanted Elementium bars
6. Prey: Hard Mode III - kill all Prey targets on hard mode
7. Champion of Ulduar - completed a deathless 10-man Ulduar run back in Wrath
8. Destined to be Legendary - craft a Sulfuron Hammer
9. Abyss Anglers: Jeju's New Rival - complete most Abyss Anglers achievements
10. Abyss Anglers: Top of the Class - swim through 250 schools of fish
11. Null and Avoided - get found but not tagged in Decor Duel five times
12. Prepared for a Showdown - complete quest lines on Val and Naigtal
13. Abyss Anglers: Myths from beneath - catch a mythic creature six times
14. Deployed to the Void - tag five players while seeking as a Nullifier in Decor Duel
15. Midnight Delver III - complete every Midnight delve on tier 11 with lives remaining as every role
16. Grand Magister's Sommelier - drink a lot of different wines during a rare Midnight world quest
17. The Ancient Keeper - acquired Rhok'delar before the Cataclysm
18. Bringing Order to the Isles - completed all order hall campaigns during Legion Remix
19. Midnight Delver II - complete every Midnight delve on tier 8 with lives remaining as every role
20. Abundance: Ain't Dun Till It's Dun - complete all the Abundance achievements
21. Heroic: Worlds Ahead - complete 15 different world quests on heroic Naigtal or Val
22. Collector's Edition: Netherwhelp - have the pet from the BC collector's edition
23. Abyss Anglers: Certified Depthdiver - earn 250k cumulative points in Abyss Anglers
24. Midnight Delver - complete every Midnight delve on tier 4 with lives remaining as every role
25. Amani War Bear - earned the Zul'Aman timed run mount back in Burning Crusade
26. Abyss Anglers: Pearls to the Abyss - acquire all the diving upgrades for Abyss Anglers
27. Tagged and Bagged - tag five players while seeking as an Arcane Ranger in Decor Duel
28. The Balance of Light and Shadow - acquired Benediction/Anathema before the Cataclysm
29. Abyss Anglers: Vintage Collector - collect 250 treasures
30. Abyss Anglers: Reservation for One - do a dive and do nothing but kill a mythic creature
31. Abyss Anglers: Pahk Trench Fins - buy an upgrade and catch 500 fish
32. Abundance: Artisan - earn 10k points from artisan nodes during an Abundance event
33. Flame Warden of Midnight - honour the flames in Midnight zones
34. Pinnacle Ritual Work - complete both ritual sites on tier 6 with all challenges active
35. Abyss Anglers: Now That's Anglin' - catch 100 fish from bubbles
36. Abyss Anglers: The Finest of Fish - catch a mythic creature three times
37. Sunreaver Onslaught - maxed out the Isle of Thunder rep on Horde side during MoP Remix
38. Abyss Anglers: Delicate Diver - catch all small creatures with nets
39. Kirin Tor Offensive - maxed out the Isle of Thunder rep on Alliance side during MoP Remix
40. Midnight Lumberjack - harvest 250 Thalassian lumber
41. The Whole Kit and Caboodle - unlock all upgrades in Decor Duel
42. Rise of the Ultradon Slayer - kill the enemy Ultradon in the Slayer's Rise epic battleground
43. The Key to Madness - open 500 bountiful coffers in delves
44. T-A-G that spells "Gotcha!" - tag five players while seeking as a Spellbreaker in Decor Duel
45. Algari Master of All - raise all War Within professions to max skill
46. Abyss Anglers: Luck of the Loa - catch an epic fish from a bubble
47. Putting Wilhelm Out of Business - return all of Omarion's notes from Naxxramas (part of unlocking the old Naxx resist gear to craft)
48. Showdown Success: Val - complete 8 different world quests on Val
49. Algari Delver II - complete every War Within delve on tier 8 with lives remaining as every role
50. Showdown Success: Naigtal - complete 8 different world quests on Naigtal

All of these are only owned by 3% of the player base at max. Some of them make obvious sense of course. Anything that's old and/or no longer obtainable is bound to be rare - 7, 17, 18, 22, 25, 28, 37 and 39 fall into that category.

Similarly, I wouldn't put too much stock into the rarity of anything that was only released as part of the most recent patch (12.0.7) about a month ago, because it makes sense that most people wouldn't rush to do every new thing on launch day. However, even if they did, Data for Azeroth only refreshes character data every few weeks (unless you request a manual refresh) so a lot of these probably wouldn't be nearly as rare if the data was truly up to date. That applies to 1, 2, 4, 12, 21, 34, 48 and 50.

The first big surprise to me were the number of Abyss Anglers and Decor Duel achievements on this list. Now, I'll fully admit that I did get a bit more into these than the average Joe after my initial feeling of simply feeling whelmed by their addition had faded. But uh... being a top 1%-er for casual mini games in WoW feels weird.

In a similar vein, I was surprised by some of the delve achievements that are apparently rare - not the one to open 500 bountiful coffers, that clearly required some level of grinding - but that even completing delves on tier 4 as every role is this rare surprised me. Looking at my achievement list beyond the 50 I reproduced here, it seems that people don't like doing delves as healers, as even the "do every delve on tier 4 as a healer" achievement has only been completed by 4% of players. Tanks and damage dealers have nearly double those completion rates. Still, while there are clearly a lot of people who've engaged with delves in some way (the "complete a delve" achievement is apparently owned by 92% of players), I once again appear to be among the most hardcore for this casual content.

There are a few more achievements that fall into this category: I won't deny that I clearly like the Abundance event more than the average person, and the Sommelier achievement does require you to have more than a passing interest in world quests. Flame Warden of Midnight was only available for a limited time, but I'm still surprised it's so rare, considering that there were only five new fires in obvious places, and it's basically free gold for a click. Then again, I'd managed to fly past the Harandar flame repeatedly without noticing it I guess...

For most of the profession achievements on the list it does make sense for them to be rare in my mind. Learning to craft a Sulfuron Hammer and getting all the mats for it is not difficult but definitely qualifies as an obscure old-school grind nowadays, and most players won't have any reason to learn how to smelt Enchanted Elementium bars, never mind actually doing it. Maxing out all the War Within professions was something that actually took a lot of effort and that I was actively proud of.

The 250 Thalassian lumber is not difficult either but I guess requires both at least a passing interest in housing (to learn how to gather lumber) and a love for gathering in general. I haven't gone out to "grind" lumber at any point but will happily grab a piece here or there as I see it, and over time that has simply added up.

The Naxx recipe gathering is definitely an obscure thing to do, something I didn't even see discussed on any news site when it came out and that I had to actively look up after learning of its existence.

The two (to me) funniest achievements on the list are probably Rise of the Ultradon Slayer and Prey: Hard Mode III. The former I got for the one and only time I got into a Slayer's Rise epic battleground, and I had little idea what was going on in it at any point, so I couldn't even tell you whether this is rare because it's hard or just because not a lot of people have even set foot into this battleground.

The Prey achievement is funny to me because it's three times as rare as the equivalent achievement for nightmare mode, even though it's easier - but I guess more people felt motivated to do the nightmare version for the gear rewards. The equivalent normal mode achievement is even rarer and I don't have it either because normal mode preys just give terrible rewards.

Still, I think what ultimately got me about all of this is the rarity of all of these achievements compared to some of the more common ones. Sure, you can say that almost every activity in WoW is only done by a (relative) minority, so it shouldn't be surprising that only 10% of players have a single Decor Duel achievement of any kind. But then I look at stuff like Myth of the Dawn, for which you needed to have done either mythic raiding this tier or a lot of M+ at level 10 or higher this season, and apparently one in five WoW players has this achievement. Or look at the achievement to beat the final encounter in the Voidspire raid on any difficulty (which does include LFR and the solo story version) - more than 40% of WoW players have done this! How have less than 20% of players ever clicked on all the Midsummer Fires in any expansion but 70% have timed an M+ key on level 10?

It's just wild to me that the WoW player base as a whole seems to be so endgame progression-brained that being someone who focuses on casual content seemingly makes you a rare weirdo in comparison.

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. 

Casual Midnight Endgame

Considering my slow start into Midnight, I'm really having a lot of fun with it. Now that the expansion's first season has started and (almost) everything has opened up properly, there are a lot of things to do every week, without anything feeling like mandatory chores.

Story

In my post about Midnight's launch I said that "the levelling campaign itself was enjoyable, but isn't it always? And then we quickly forget about it again for the next two years." However, it turned out that Blizzard had other plans than simply letting us forget about the story this time around, with every weekly reset continuing the storyline a bit further.

They were already kind of moving towards something like this in War Within, but back then the story updates still mostly came with the minor patches, and those minor patch updates tended to feel more like interludes or epilogues - basically, not that important.

This time around, they are all in on the storytelling though, with literal weekly updates (Remember when updates this frequent were "the dream" for many MMOs?) driving the plot forward in major ways. I've honestly been pretty impressed, not just with the update cadence but with the content of those story chapters as well. I was worried that Metzen's return would result in the plot retreading the same old tropes, but at least so far, that hasn't been the case. Instead we've just been getting all kinds of callbacks to really old (and probably largely forgotten by most of the player base) lore, with references to previous expansions being woven into a coherent picture of "now" that makes sense and explains why we are where we are.

The only problem is that the story mode for the raid once again released a full week after raiders had gotten access to the final cut scene, so there were spoilers all over the place, and trying not to be told everything about the ending was like navigating a minefield. Even people who clearly didn't consciously want to post spoilers were "vague posting" about events in very obvious ways within days of release. God help anyone who doesn't see everything the day it comes out. I wonder if that will ever get better.

Dungeons

I don't quite know how I feel about dungeons in retail right now. In old WoW, they were one of my favourite things to do, but in retail, they are nothing like the content I used to love and generally responsible for my worst experiences with other players. I had fun trying out M+ with friends for a bit in Dragonflight, but that ultimately didn't end up working out for me either.

That said, Blizzard is still quite capable of making interesting and beautiful instances, and follower dungeons have made it easier to take a look at them and enjoy them at your own pace, even if you don't have enough friends (or any) to run them with. The normal mode pugs I've done in Midnight so far have also all been really nice? Very little "bat out of hell" level rushing - in fact, quite often I'll see people who are very obviously not super familiar with the dungeon and still learning as they go, which is nice to see even if people aren't particularly chatty.

It really feels like Midnight is encouraging more lapsed players to dip their toes back into the game. In fact, I was making this observation to my husband today while healing a Maisara Caverns on my priest, and at the end of the dungeon the tank whispered me to thank me for my heals and we had the most wholesome little chat. Nicest interaction with a random stranger I've had in retail for years!

Also, I may not be feeling the M+, but I did do a few regular mythic dungeons with friends last weekend, and it was interesting to see the updates to the older dungeons that Blizzard decided to put into the mythic rotation this season. Pit of Saron is an old favourite of mine, and it was intriguing to see the mechanical changes they made to bring the bosses more in line with modern dungeons. Also, Seat of the Triumvirate was hilarious - I had minimal experience with this dungeon to begin with but I do know that L'ura was not as insane a laser show originally. We wiped quite a few times (also on Saprish) but it was pretty fun to actually figure things out together.

Delves

In War Within, delves were the shiny new feature that took several rounds of tuning to find its feet, and even longer for me to warm up to it. Since then, it's become a staple of our duo play for the husband and me, and in Midnight it's been fun to jump into things right away, knowing right from the start how everything works.

The new delves are fun, with some minor iterations that seem sensible. For example Blizzard got rid of all those various utility items that you could loot inside delves and that people either tended to vendor or forget that they even had them. The new buffs are things you click on inside the delve and you either use them right then and there, or you simply don't, which feels much more straightforward to me.

You also no longer collect keys for bountiful delves, only key shards, but they are much, much easier to get than they were in War Within, as they drop from pretty much everything, which I expect will make it easier for me to justify doing more of them on alts when the time comes.

There's also a book in the delvers' quarters that straight up tells you which delves are bountiful each day, meaning you no longer need to click your way through all the maps just to see which icons are glowing.

The one thing I'm still undecided on is Valeera as the new delve companion. I thought Brann was extremely annoying at first, plus a complete joke, but over time I started to find his antics endearing. Comparatively, Valeera is inoffensive but also kind of boring. She has voice lines for various moves, but nothing that feels super quotable. She also seems even more prone to ninja-pulling than Brann was, as she just outright shadow-steps (?) into the next group down the hallway sometimes. On the plus side, she's actually controllable via the ping system now, which I wouldn't have found out if it wasn't for Wowhead, but which is definitely useful once you know about it. 

Prey

Prey/hunts are the new expansion system that I had no particular hopes or fears for, but which has turned out to be decent fun. In a nutshell, you get sent to one of the four new zones to kill a named mob, but it's not a specific location at first. You have to do various activities in the zone to progress your hunt, and sometimes the mob will ambush you mid-combat (and then run away again once they reach half health). After a certain number of these progress events, the enemy's true location is revealed and you can go there and kill them properly.

It doesn't sound super exciting on paper, but it's a nice new twist on open world progression. Plus nightmare hunts count as tier eight delves for the purposes of filling out the Great Vault, so you can increase your number of slots without going completely nuts with delves.

Astalor, the NPC that gives you all the hunt quests, is a complete psychopath by the way, so I'm not surprised that some people absolutely adore him. A bit more concerning to me is when I see comments about how all the blood elves should be like him because they are "too nice" now. Regardless, his voice actor does a bang-up job and I've done quests for worse characters, so I don't mind. It all adds flavour.

PvP

What's this? Yes, I haven't really done PvP in WoW in a while - the last time I got really into it was while levelling my priest during Shadowlands from what I remember (I'm not counting Plunderstorm). What got me this time was a simple incentive quest to "do three battlegrounds" to progress towards a hero quality item - I mean, I didn't even have to win them? Before I knew it, I'd also picked up the PvP weekly and was checking out the weekly brawl.

I still like SWTOR PvP better, but it's made for a nice change of pace to re-visit all those classic battlegrounds as well as to discover some new ones. I was completely taken by surprise when I found out that there's actually a new Midnight battleground called "Slayer's Rise", set in Voidstorm, because I hadn't heard a single peep about it until I actually loaded into it. It's even funnier because I remember having the exact same experience in War Within, where I had no idea that Deephaul Ravine was a new expansion feature until I got put into a match there. WoW's PvP really doesn't get much publicity nowadays.

On the classic battleground front, it was fun to see that Isle of Conquest still has people yelling about glaive throwers fourteen years later, that AV is still about who can rush to the end faster, and that Warsong Gulch still sucks. Good on Blizzard for cross-promoting this content a bit with some simple quest incentives though.

Living in the Moment

One thing I personally find kind of off-putting about the wider retail WoW community is how a large chunk of it seems to spend more time looking forward to the next thing than actually engaging with the current content. Where the Classic community sometimes gets bogged down by nostalgia and wishing they could play the game again like it's 2006, retail content creators often strike me as the opposite, always laser-focused on what the next patch will bring, seemingly in a race to be the first to report on what's new, and by the time it actually goes live, they've already moved on again.

I've been finding it particularly noticeable recently because while we don't have a launch date for Midnight yet, I'd say the expansion is definitely still at least three months away (probably more) but I swear anything WoW-related in my feeds that's not about Classic has been about seemingly nothing else for months already. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pretend that I'm not at all curious about what the expansion will bring, but I don't want to hear about every time an NPC passes wind in the Midnight beta either. I like having a vague idea of what's to come, plus maybe a couple of more specific things to look forward to, but primarily I want to see things for myself once the expansion launches! The other day a weird headline popped up in my reddit recommendations and all I could think was: "That sounds like it must be alluding to some major story spoiler or something; I think I'll just scroll past as fast as I can." At times, it can feel like navigating a minefield.

It doesn't help that a lot of the expansion discourse I have seen has been extremely tedious as well. To give an example, as a more casual player who uses minimal addons, I really don't think the removal of combat addons is that big a deal. There are millions of us already playing that way just fine! It's obviously going to lead to some changes, but if this game is good at anything it's constantly changing things around, so hey, it's another day ending in y. Another example would be people getting extremely up in arms about Blizzard being open about wanting to monetise housing the way pretty much every other MMO with housing monetises it. I can understand feeling a degree of disappointment if you were hoping for something better/more generous, but let's not pretend that anything they've announced is hugely surprising if you know anything at all about how housing works in other MMOs.

Meanwhile, I'm finding it weirdly challenging to find people talking about things going on in the game right now. I'd like to hear how other people are experiencing Legion Remix for example! Or if you're not playing Lemix, what are you doing? I've picked up running a few delves a week on alts again and it's wild how absurdly buggy they've been for many weeks now (in a way that actually benefits players too). Brann has become stupidly OP as one of his abilities can one-shot an entire group on tier 11, and several of the delve-specific abilities have become similarly overtuned to a ridiculous degree, such as the phase cutter ability in Archival Assault or the footbomb dispenser you can get from treasures.

At first I shrugged it off as "haha, patch day, right" but it's been literally weeks now and I'm finding it weird how nobody seems to be talking about it. Are we just keeping quiet in hopes that Blizzard doesn't notice? I would have expected their "fun detected" sensors to go off pretty much instantly, and I keep thinking that surely they must at least be aware of this bug and have it their backlog somewhere. Are they just too busy with Midnight and Legion Remix to care about things being wonky in the mainline game, where it's presumably a bit more quiet at the moment?

The funny thing is that it's only because of this bug that I've actually started doing delves on my healers again - I'd previously stopped because while they were doable, they were just too slow and tedious. With Brann one-shotting things occasionally (not all the time, but frequently enough), the pace actually feels much better and fun. I now kind of dread Blizzard actually fixing the bug and taking that away again. With how long they've left it in the game at this point, I honestly hope they just leave it in for what remains of the expansion as well. When Midnight arrives with its gear reset, it's going to be enough of a slog to get geared up and powerful again anyway.

Season 2 Roundup

With War Within's next/last(?) major patch coming out this week, I wanted to take a moment to look back at some of the things I've been busy with over the last couple of months.

I already talked about how I achieved my goal of beating the Underpin on ?? difficulty, but I also did a lot of delves in general. It's kind of funny how hard I've come around on this feature after really disliking it at the start of the expansion. I wasn't particularly interested in the special "delve belt" they added towards the end of the season and the new overcharged delve type, but as it turns out I ended up maxing out all its traits in no time anyway, simply due to just how many delves I was constantly running on alts.

Not really tied to the season, but I also got my "Algari Master of All" achievement the other week - jewelcrafting was the last profession on which I hadn't hit 100 yet. Mind you, the real progress nowadays is in the profession knowledge, and on that front I've only maxed out mining and enchanting so far. Still, somehow that's less important to me and the achievement was still something I was very proud of.

Back in June I wrote about how I wasn't all that interested in the revamped Horrific Visions, but I actually ended up becoming more invested once I took some time to fully understand how they worked (instead of simply letting my husband herd me through them while constantly being yelled at about how I was standing in the wrong place or pulling the wrong mobs). I liked learning about all the hidden mounts and achievements and ended up earning most of them.

For a little while I was worried that the Revisited Horrific Visions were going to go away as well at the end of the season (because with how many things are temporary nowadays, it can be hard to tell) and started grinding them like crazy, but then I learned that they should hang around and eased up on that again. I got up to full completion with six masks, and I think I managed three districts with seven, but that was already quite stressful and I figured there was no way I was going to be able to add the eighth mask for 400% additional sanity damage without putting a lot more work into it than I was willing to invest, so I gave up at that point.

Throughout the month of July in specific, there were also two more temporary events, the Greedy Emissary event and the Collector's Bounty event.

The former was a promotional Diablo crossover, which is something that I'm vaguely aware has happened before and that I never could get myself to care about, but this time I was really intrigued by the recoloured armour sets from the anniversary celebration. Then my husband started grinding shards for them and for some reason I got weirdly competitive about the whole thing (I can't let him have all the mogs before I get them! Or something.) and did the same, and in the end I'd collected all the rewards except one of the rare drop transmogs. It ended up being surprisingly fun.

Finally, there was Collector's Bounty, an event that was slightly controversial in the way almost everything the devs do is nowadays: for the month of July only, loot drops in old raids were doubled (or even tripled?), and rare, coveted items such as legendary weapons or ultra-rare mounts had their drop rate increased by 5% each - which may not sound like much, but when the base drop chance was a lot lower than that to begin with, it was still a significant increase.

I mostly thought this was interesting in so far as I don't recall Blizzard ever having any kind of event for the collectors in their audience before, even though it's widely known that this is something a lot of people engage in. I'm even one of them, but a lot more half-hearted than most others I saw talking about the subject.

For example I watched a guildie of mine literally spend his whole Saturday afternoon cycle every single one of his alts through Eye of Eternity in pursuit of the drake mounts from there, and on social media I saw similar comments about how people were taking dozens of characters through old dungeons and raids every day in an attempt to maximise their odds. Personally, I did a few more runs of this type than I would usually do (which added up to maybe half a dozen old raid clears in total during a given week) but I couldn't muster anything close to the same level of enthusiasm.

The one thing I really would've cared about, getting the second Thunderfury binding on my warrior, didn't happen, and I didn't really do enough other raids and dungeons to significantly increase my odds. Aside from some "bonus transmog", my ultimate haul consisted only of one Warglaive of Azzinoth from Black Temple and the panther mount from the Cata version of ZG.

Oh, and I got the Deathcharger's Reins from Stratholme, though that was more of a bizarre accident than anything - you see, Blizzard claimed that timewalking dungeons weren't affected by the Collector's Bounty buff, but that didn't seem to be true. The drop happened during a Strat timewalking run, and not only did the recipient already have it, another person in the group also did and also claimed that they'd already seen it drop three times that week. The person who looted the mount and couldn't use it asked if anyone was willing to bid gold for it (something I'm not a fan of personally, if you're gonna give stuff away just let people roll for it in my opinion), so I jokingly bid 100 gold and ended up "winning" it! That sure felt strange, but I'm certainly not going to complain.

One thing I will say for the event though is that it really made me think about the meaning of travel in WoW again. I saw someone comment that they liked how the buff "brought people out into the world again" and my first thought was that this sounded ridiculous, seeing how the whole point of it was to farm for drops inside instances. But as I started travelling to different locations myself, I realised what that person had meant: many of these destinations were not exactly linked up to super-convenient portals, so there was sometimes a fair bit of travel involved, and you would indeed notice other people around you as you approached the instance portal, whether they were also just arriving or sitting on their vendor mount outside to clear out their bags.

For me personally, it was a bit of a reminder of why travel in WoW was such an important part of Classic and can still make a difference to your experience in retail too. You see, I was also going to fly to the Eye of Eternity for a quick clear when I flew over Wintergrasp and saw that it was about to start. Not having done Wintergrasp in ages, I thought it would be fun to join it for a lark just to see how much I remembered and how much I could do by myself as a max-level character. The surprising answer to the second question was: not as much as I would've expected, as everything was actually scaled to 80.

However, now I was intrigued and actually ended up coming back for the next battle, to see whether I could do better with a bit of prep. The answer was yes, but I still couldn't quite reach the central keep by myself (Horde seemed to be permanently in possession of the fortress, meaning all I could do as Alliance was attack). I told my husband about this and asked him whether he wanted to come along so we could see whether we'd do better with two, and he was up for it! We did indeed make some more progress, but still came up short once again (the fact that a Horde player was actually going around taking down all the towers to shorten the battle that time didn't help). After a little more research and planning we finally managed to conquer the fortress with the two of us in our fourth battle. It was silly and pointless but an incredibly fun little adventure, and I never even would've thought of it if I hadn't flown over Wintergrasp at just the right time on my way to the Eye of Eternity. Which is a weird thing to take away from Collector's Bounty I guess, but it did remind me of the sorts of random adventures that I always used to love best about WoW.

Comparing Zekvir and the Underpin

Towards the end of War Within season one, I made a whole post about my journey into Zekvir's Lair, from being largely oblivious to what it was all about to finally beating him on double question mark difficulty. I figured that season two was going to be less exciting now that I knew what this whole challenge mode thing was all about, and that turned out to be true, but that's not to say that it wasn't interesting at all.

Fighting the Underpin (the season two delve boss) on normal mode did admittedly turn out to be a bit underwhelming, as I defeated him on my warrior on what I think was only my second or third attempt. I wouldn't say that's because he was much easier than Zekvir though, it's just that it made a big difference that I actually had some gear from the previous season as well as a better idea of what I was doing.

The Underpin also seemed to be a lot more imbalanced in terms of how the fight played for different roles, and playing tank was actually one of the easier ways to do it. Based on how easy of a time I'd had, I immediately jumped back in on a healing alt and was horrified at how different an experience it was. I think I wiped about half a dozen times and then just gave up, because it was impossible for me to break his healing shield with my piddly healer dps, and dps Brann's AI was seemingly not smart enough to help me focus on the shield, instead getting distracted and shooting at adds instead. I was really put out by that and there was little helpful advice on this problem to be found online at the time, so I kind of just left things there and largely forgot about the Underpin again.

But of course! We're now at a point where the next major patch is barely two weeks away, bringing with it a new season and the removal of a bunch of content and achievements that are currently still live. With my FOMO kicked into overdrive, I remembered that I had yet to beat the Underpin on hard mode, and that I should better get to it.

I don't know exactly how long or how many attempts it took me, because the attempt counter is part of Deadly Boss Mods, which for some reason I just couldn't get to work on this encounter. Reading around, it sounded like there should've been a module for it, but even though I had the latest version installed, the Underpin just wasn't on the list of available delve fights in the addon. I made do anyway.

I still spent more than a few hours wiping on ?? difficulty and trying to improve my gameplay, but compared to the weeks-long project that was Zekvir ??, I got there relatively quickly. I wouldn't say the fight is necessarily easier than Zekvir, but it helped that this one actually played to the strengths of my warrior main, and that she was about as well geared by this point as a character not doing M+ or raids can be (not counting her cursed boot slot). This meant that unlike last season, I didn't have to worry about learning to play a different class/spec or gearing up an alt.

I managed to record my victory again and uploaded it to YouTube since I did the same last season:

You can see that I was still far from perfect, and there's one point around the 4:11 mark where I ate a huge chunk of damage that probably would've been a one-shot in lesser gear or on a non-tanky spec. But still, it was good enough and I'm happy that I was able to check this particular achievement off my list.

So how do I think the Underpin and Zekvir compare? Honestly, I'm a bit conflicted. Thematically, I found Zekvir kind of annoying and loved the Underpin. Zekvir wipes were really frustrating to me because I hated the way he went "Yeees, she will be pleased" whenever I died, because I didn't want Xal'atath to enjoy my wipes! (I guess that's a credit to Zekvir's voice actor though.) Meanwhile the Underpin was the complete opposite in that I loved the goofy music and all his silly voice lines. ("Tick tock, tick tock, ya interlopin' mooks!" is without a doubt my favourite.)

Also, it may sound a bit lame, but I can't deny that I liked the fact that he didn't take me as long to kill and that the fight was actually very doable on my main, even if that feels more like luck on my part than anything to do with good balancing and encounter design (refer to my horror at what it felt like to do even the normal fight as a healer as mentioned above).

Purely in terms of mechanics, the Underpin was a lot more messy and random, which I don't necessarily consider a good thing, though it did feel to me like there was also a bit more leeway there than there had been on Zekvir - on the latter, a single mis-timed interrupt could mean that it was a wipe. I did enjoy that the Underpin's "dance" was a little less rigid and more fluid in comparison.

That said, one thing it really suffered from was the fact that it forced you to spend a lot of time fighting your UI instead of the boss. The mechanic that requires you to kick bombs into the adds is just extremely clunky, as it's literally impossible to mouse-target them sometimes due to boss and camera positioning, meaning you had to enable the "interact key" to be able to kick blindly sometimes, and even then - well, it's right there in the last sentence, kicking the things around blindly was not very satisfying or fun.

Nonetheless, all in all I still enjoyed this encounter as well, and I've now made it my new goal to at least do the normal mode on all classes again, like I tried to do with Zekvir. I do kind of have to wonder how sustainable this "delve challenge boss" model is going to be in the long run though. I mean, isn't it bound to get kind of repetitive? I suppose you could say the same about raids, but at least there you have different roles and a much larger number of players to mix things up mechanically, while any fight that's meant to be something to do for solo players of any class is by necessity always going to be much more limited in terms of what it can demand. 

Delving in Season 2

After the rough start I had with delves at The War Within's launch, I slowly warmed up to them over time, and have in fact been really getting into them this season. I completed the seasonal reward track much faster than last time, and also got Brann to the new level cap of 80, after not even hitting the previous companion level cap during Season 1. I'm currently working my way towards the achievement to complete all delves on tier 11 as every role. Tank's all done, dps is mostly there, and healer still has a way to go, but it's only a matter of time.

Blizzard took an (in my opinion) interesting approach to the new season with delves. While they added two new ones, and they are bountiful more often than the old ones, the old delves are still just as valid as a means for gearing up. I still remember when they added the two revamped troll dungeons back in Cataclysm and how burnt out people got on them due to the reward structure encouraging you to run just those two dungeons over and over again. It's nice to see that the devs have learned from some mistakes over the years.

In fact, they put a surprising amount of effort into giving the old delves a seasonal refresh as well, by adding lots of new (mostly goblin-themed) variants to them. I'm still not sure whether I've already seen them all, as Blizz made the strange decision to just add them to the existing "stories" achievements without requiring you to actually tick them off if you already completed the achievement in Season 1. I guess it makes sense to not make achievement hunters lose points (even if temporarily) but as someone who primarily views achievements as a way of keeping track of what I've done and what I haven't, the lack of an actual new achievement to track has been rather unhelpful.

They also made some changes to various delve mechanics, seemingly in an effort to make them less annoying based on player feedback from Season 1, but I've mostly got mixed feelings about those. The addition of the goblin vendor to the underwater delves who sells you underwater breathing for a hefty markup feels like a tacit admission that the "run through air bubbles to keep breathing" mechanic is not very fun and that people just bought underwater breathing potions to simply negate the whole mechanic anyway. It's still much cheaper to bring your own potions than to pay for the goblin's services, but it's helpful if you find yourself running out of consumables due to deaths or simply find yourself at the entrance of the delve realising that you forgot to buy potions entirely.

The way candles and totems were changed from an item you carry with you to a consumable buff that you plop down where you want them to sit feels like an adjustment to the reality that people were always dropping the candle/totem anyway to be able to move freely during combat, but I miss being able to pick it up again for moving, as the new system basically forces you to move in the dark/through poison a lot, which I'm not a fan of.

I also dislike what they've done to the spores in Fungal Folly and Mycomancer Cavern. I actually really liked the way they were a risk vs. reward mechanic in Season 1, where I actually enjoyed aggroing them and dragging them onto enemies to use them as an additional source of damage. Now they are no longer attackable or move, plus their damage to mobs has been dramatically reduced (if they even still do any at all), so they are just a nuisance that means you can't stand still for too long in certain spots.

And the new web mechanics in the Nerubian delves are just more annoying all around, whether it's the little unkillable egg things that you have to keep hitting every so often or else they'll cover the whole floor in webs again, or the respawning flying web spreaders that you can't fully prevent from dropping webs on you at the most inconvenient times.

Of course, the biggest change to delves this season is that Brann was given a tank role. I'm still not entirely clear on why he was only able to support you as dps or healer in Season 1 anyway. I thought it was very telling when I saw someone comment in a discussion about this topic that duh, he can't be a tank because that would completely trivialise the content. This is amusing to me because it does align with my own perception that tanks in modern WoW are way too overpowered. However, I didn't think it was a sufficient explanation because the devs seemed to have similar concerns about healer Brann and worked around those by making it so that he does relatively little direct healing but instead just plops down all these healing potions that the player has to actively pick up.

It's interesting to see WoW wrestling with these sorts of companion issues when I've mainly been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic for the last thirteen years, which has had permanent companions since launch. The SWTOR devs did seemingly also have concerns about companions being overpowered at launch, as healer companions were originally much more limited in what they could do. Specifically they were pretty good at rolling heal-over-time abilities on multiple players at once, but their biggest burst heal put a debuff on the player that prevented that person from receiving another burst heal for fifteen seconds or however long it was, meaning that companion healing was very hobbled compared to that of an actual player. After they threw all of that out the window with the big companion revamp of the 4.0 expansion, healer companions in particular did indeed become very OP, and it's been a long-running complaint that this makes content too easy/prevents new players from learning how to play because their healer comp will just heal them through absolutely everything.

Anyway, I digress - let's return to tank Brann. I tried him out relatively early on and my first impression was mostly positive. It certainly was a lot more fun when doing delves as a healer to actually be able to stand there and heal than to constantly kite and hit self-preservation cooldowns because everything's always aggroed on you no matter what. He did seem to take a lot of damage, way more than a player tank would take under the same circumstances, but I figured that was fine as a way of making the healer work for it in a way that aligned with their play style.

Then Blizz decided to nerf him massively, increasing his damage taken by 60% (among other things) because the spec had "simply proven to be too powerful when players hang back and just focus on healing him" aka when you simply play a healer as intended. This was a massive facepalm moment, though they did roll some of those changes back later on I think.

Either way, I've actually found that tank Brann's biggest issue aren't damage numbers but that his general behaviour can simply be extremely erratic and buggy at times. When he works as designed, you aggro a couple of mobs, he rounds them up around himself, and you spam heals on his rapidly dropping health bar until all enemies are dead.

In reality though, I've found that pretty much in every other delve, there'll be a situation where he rounds up the mobs you pulled but then decides to charge off into the next group of mobs... and the next one... and the next one... until you've aggroed way too many enemies and end up wiping. Playing a priest, I've tried to use Leap of Faith on him on those occasions to pull him back, but he immediately runs off again and there's nothing you can do to stop him. At first I took this in stride and joked about how he was training you up for bag pugs, but it's happened so often now, it really feels like this should be something that should be avoidable. In dps and heal mode, there are safeguards in place so that if/when Brann decides to randomly drop an AoE on a new mob group you didn't even want to pull, they just ignore it unless you engage them in combat yourself. I'm not sure why tank Brann is allowed to pull all over the place and doesn't follow the same model.

In rarer but no less infuriating instances, he'll do the exact opposite and just decide not to do anything at all. Just this morning I did a Tak-Rethan Abyss, and on the last boss, Brann just refused to engage for some reason. He somehow held aggro, but barely took any damage and did absolutely none himself. Do you have any idea how long it takes to kill a tier 11 boss with a lot of movement requirements by yourself as a holy priest?! The fight lasted for about fifteen minutes until my concentration finally failed me, I stepped on a mushroom and got one-shot. I then changed Brann's role to dps and on the next attempt we killed it just fine, but not until after I'd subjected my husband to a lot of ranting about what an absolute maniac and "bearded menace" tank Brann was.

I can only hope that Blizzard will be able to fine-tune his performance over time, or even better, that they'll give us some means of actually controlling him in the future. I presume that there are additional concerns here that this might make him too OP or be abusable in some way, but being unable to stop him from pulling or to make him attack when you're in a fight and he just twiddles his thumbs is way worse in my opinion.

Zekvir's Lair

If I recall correctly, Zekvir's Lair was promoted pre-expansion as being somewhat similar to the Legion mage tower challenges. I didn't play during Legion, and as I've stated previously, I'm generally happy to play at a somewhat more chill pace nowadays, but I do like a personal challenge occasionally. My personal journey to and through Zekvir's Lair has been quite an interesting one I think.

The husband and I didn't exactly rush to level cap, so it took a little while until we even considered visiting Zekvir's Lair for the first time. I think it was around the time that people were farming it to get quick vault credit for completing eight delves a week. If people are farming it eight times a week because it's easy, it can't be that much of a challenge, we thought. We went in together... wiped a few times on normal difficulty and then left again, deciding that clearly what we were doing wasn't working.

I decided to read up on the fight a bit and soon decided to give it another go by myself on my protection warrior, which quickly led me to success. Curious about how other classes/roles would fare, I then proceeded to do the fight on several of my alts as well.

As I levelled more characters to 80, it became a sort of tradition for me to have them fight Zekvir. It may not be that hard a fight on normal mode, but if you're someone like me, with a lot of alts you don't really know how to play, it pushes you towards learning a bit more about your class and spec. It won't teach you your optimised damage rotation, but it does encourage you to take a look at your action bar and figure out which buttons increase your mobility, which ones reduce your damage taken, and which ones temporarily increase your damage output.

At the time of writing this, I have all but one class at 80 (the slowpoke is my mage) and they've all done Zekvir's Lair on normal.  Even my crappy subtlety rogue, whom I still don't know how to play, got him down eventually, even though it took more than a few attempts. The point is though that you don't need to do great dps to beat him, you just need to figure out how to move and memorise both your offensive and defensive cooldowns, which I eventually managed to do.

I didn't give the hard mode much thought for the longest time. A guildie posted about beating it relatively shortly after the expansion launch, but at the time I didn't even know what the heck they were talking about so it didn't mean much to me. At some point I must have stuck my head in the door out of sheer curiosity, was probably killed by auto-attacks within a few hits, and decided that this was something to come back to at a later time.

With patch 11.1 creeping ever closer, I decided a few weeks ago that it was finally time to look into beating Zekvir on ?? difficulty properly (since there are feats of strength tied to doing so before the next season). I figured it couldn't possibly be too bad now with my prot warrior having geared up a bit to about 620 item level - but I failed horribly. I could just not do enough dps to get the egg down, and the slows from Zekvir's spit were also giving me trouble.

I decided to do a bit of research again, and while people had a number of tips for how to do better as a warrior, the general consensus seemed to be that the fight is a very different experience depending on your class and spec, and that prot warrior was one of the weaker ones for this particular challenge. Maybe I levelled all those alts for a reason after all, I thought... and decided to put them to the test.

I gave the fight a try on my warlock next. You may recall that warlock was another class that I didn't get on with while levelling... but when she hit 80, it was strangely as if somebody had flipped a switch and she suddenly turned super powerful overnight. I did an Awakening the Machine and everything absolutely exploded, even though I had no idea what I was doing. I tried Zekvir on normal mode and it was an easy one-shot, even though I had never even cast Demonic Circle before.

Giving Zekvir ?? a try on the lock didn't seem like that much of a stretch as a result. And I did feel immediately that it went a little better than on the warrior, but killing the first egg was still a bit hit and miss. Now, this character was actually around 35 item levels below the warrior, but I thought I had read somewhere that the fight scaled with gear anyway. I decided to double-check that, and it turned out to be wrong, so I took a break to do a bit of gearing up. I returned with an item level of just above 600, and my performance at egg killing did feel improved... but still not 100%, and other weaknesses of the class became more apparent now:

• Zekvir's melee attacks hit ridiculously hard, and as a clothie I would often die to random auto attack crits that had nothing to do with mechanics.
• My movement speed felt slow and I had difficulty dodging out of the deadly one-shot cones.
• While Demonic Circle worked to cleanse the snare from Zekvir's spit, it was only off cooldown for every other cast. Now, the theory here is that Brann in healer mode can cleanse the others, but his AI is kind of... inconsistent. I'd get the debuff, wait for a second to see if he'd cleanse, he didn't, and since it ticks for so much damage that you can't just wait around, I'd teleport back to my Circle, just to see his cleanse go off at the exact same moment after all... and then I had nothing for the next cast and would wipe. It just felt too unreliable and I found myself wondering whether there wasn't a class with an even better toolkit for this.

I eventually landed on windwalker monk, since this was a class/spec I actually felt I could play at a decent level. (I later read that ret pally might be even better, but my paladin is holy and I have no idea how retribution works at the moment.)

There was a bit of trial and error here too as I had to adjust my talents, but the experience immediately felt a lot better. With Tiger's Lust and no fewer than three charges of roll I had great mobility and didn't have to worry about Brann's skill at cleansing. Touch of Death made every other egg trivial to kill. However, progress still felt glacial, and after seeing comments that the recommended item level for hard mode Zekvir was apparently around 620 or so, I decided that more gearing up would still be helpful (I believe my monk was around item level 608 when I started).

So the next week I spammed bountiful delves pretty much daily. I had taken part in a lot of world activities but hadn't actually done that many delves, so I had dozens of keys saved up. It was remarkable how quickly I was able to get myself into a full set of champion gear, even while being dependent on RNG to an extent. I couldn't help but wonder if this was what my delve-loving guildies' experience of the expansion's early weeks had been. Aside from the delves, I also farmed valorstones wherever else I could get them, from buried wax and Siren Isle weeklies to world quests. After claiming my prize from the great vault the next week, I stood at a pretty solid item level 616.

And then I got serious about progressing the fight, parking my monk at the entrance to Zekvir's Lair and getting some attempts in whenever I had some time and could stand it.

This turned out to be... an experience. The extra gear meant that I was finally able to kill all the eggs almost all the time, but that didn't stop me from still finding other things to die to. It didn't happen nearly as often as on my warlock for example, but there were still times when Zekvir would just randomly crit with his auto-attacks and flatten me for no particular reason whatsoever. Sometimes I just failed to dodge a cone... usually when an add spawned on the little raised dais at the back of the room, which made moving to and from it less smooth. At other times, he just had to spawn an add at the complete opposite of the room and then cast every single ability to block my path consecutively. It felt so random and was infuriating.

Now, the truth is, there is a lot of randomness to the fight and you can absolutely get screwed over by RNG, but you can also mitigate some of those issues by just playing better. Positioning matters a lot for example - by keeping Zekvir in the middle of the room, the egg should never be too far away, no matter where he spawns it. But there was just so much going on in terms of dodging, running away, closing in again, finding where the heck Brann dropped his last set of health potions... it was exhausting and made me feel very old.

On Saturday I dedicated several hours to practising the fight, but quickly found myself demotivated. After more than fifty attempts on my monk it still didn't feel like I had made significant progress. Sure, I'd get into phase two every so often, but then I'd just wipe within ten seconds on the next attempt. It didn't feel consistent and like I was progressing at a good pace.

I thought about just abandoning the whole idea, but the sunk cost fallacy kept pulling me back in. Surely I hadn't spent all those hours grinding gear for nothing? Would I really have to go into the next season admitting failure after coming this far?

I kept looking for more ways to improve. I actually enchanted my gear and cooked some buff food, something I usually never bother with. I looked up a guide for how to dps as a windwalker - I thought it was interesting that every guide for Zekvir tells you that it's a marathon and not a dps race... but because you need to dance so perfectly for close to ten minutes, being able to shorten the fight even just a little, having one less egg phase and so on, made quite a noticeable difference to me.

I also decided that instead of banging my head against the wall for hours, I was going to limit myself to just a couple of attempts at a time, and then do something else for a bit, as I'd noticed that my first try of any given play session was usually the best, with my performance in subsequent attempts often deteriorating. By enforcing these breaks, I was able to make more attempts with a calm mindset and started to get to phase two more consistently.

The thing that killed me there most frequently were the "fucking fear balls" as I once swore out loud while my husband was looking over my shoulder. I even kept thinking about what an unfair mechanic they were, shooting out of his body at random angles at high speed, without giving you as much as a chance to dodge. Imagine my amazement when I finally realised that there was actually a visual indicator for where they would appear before they spawned, and that I could therefore dodge them reliably after all.

And today, it finally happened. I logged on in the early afternoon with the goal of just giving it one or two tries... and finally got him down after what must've been around 150 attempts across all characters over the last few weeks. My hands were shaking when the achievement finally popped, especially as I'd made a big mistake during the last few percent of the fight that had almost killed me.

I may be getting on in years but it's comforting to know that I haven't lost my reflexes completely yet, and I can still be unnecessarily stubborn as ever. I also feel properly ready for the patch now.

P.S.: The husband and I also did all delves on tier 11 over the course of the past few weeks. That was less of an adrenaline rush, but still required some care and patience at our item level, and I was still quite pleased with that achievement as well. According to Data for Azeroth, fewer than 1% of people have that achievement right now compared to 6% for Zekvir.

Delve Week

I mentioned a few weeks ago that delves weren't off to the best start with me, or I with them. After I wrote that post, I did a few more delves on low tiers on levelling alts, for whom they really were the advertised fun 15-minute romps, but otherwise I mostly stayed away unless the husband needed help with a tier eight on his mage. Some things you just don't get to say no to.

More generally speaking though, I continued to feel vaguely annoyed by delves and didn't want to bother with them. For some people they may be the greatest new feature ever, but I figured Blizz couldn't pay me enough to put up with them. Except... maybe they could.

Which is to say that this past week was "delve week". Not only were rewards from delves increased for seven days (as if they needed to be any more rewarding than they already were!), there were also not one but two weekly quests available for max-level characters in Dornogal to complete multiple delves. I know I didn't have to do those, but I really like ticking off my weeklies... fine, Blizzard, I'll play your game.

With four characters at level 80 by this point, I was potentially looking at twenty delves or more, so I knew I needed help. I searched for advice and found this video by SignsOfKelani particularly helpful. The "use your utility" section was what stood out to me the most. Careful pulling? Using crowd control? That sounds like heroic dungeons back in Burning Crusade and I used to like those! Maybe I just needed to let go of this notion that because Blizzard promoted delves as this quick and easy activity, that's what they were actually meant to be. I mean, I guess they could be if you were sufficiently overgeared or doing them at a low enough tier, but if you were actually trying to use them to gear up, they were something else. Maybe it was just a matter of accepting and embracing that.

I decided to make my holy priest my dedicated solo character for this purpose and started with a round of Fungal Folly, since I'd heard that the exploding spores in there actually do damage to the enemies as well, something I hadn't originally realised. Soon my go-to strategy became to simply aggro everything on a given platform, including all the spores, and then run screaming in hopes of making it out before they exploded. It worked surprisingly well and was - dare I say it - strangely fun.

In Kriegval's Rest, I progressed one tiny step at a time, using mind control to make the mobs beat each other up from a distance so I had fewer of them left to finish off at the end. I actually used abilities like Mind Soothe and Psychic Scream, which I hadn't really found a use for in forever. Without exploding spores to help with the dps, killing things took a really long time (I sadly had to find out that many of the mind-controlled mobs' abilities gave the error "target not a player" when I tried to turn them against each other), but I did get there in the end.

I had absolutely hated my last experience in an underwater delve, so that was next on my list of fears to face down. I made sure to grab some underwater breathing potions this time to get rid of the constant pressure of drowning and that immediately helped a lot. In the middle of a pull featuring more mind-control, Zekvir breached the delve and I had barely time to go "oh no" before he swatted me. Weirdly enough the fight didn't reset though, probably because I went into Spirit of Redemption form and had the talent that brings me back to life for free once every ten minutes. When I got up again, blinking in confusion, Brann was still fighting so I joined in, and with a lot of frantic kiting and spam-healing, I managed to stay alive long enough for Brann's dps to push him back. Now that was satisfying.

People have very different attitudes to challenge in MMOs, or video games in general for that matter. Some don't really want to be pushed at all, desiring only relaxation from their gaming experience. Others want challenge and thrills as often as possible. I'm more in the "taking it easy" department myself nowadays, but there are definitely times when a game pushes me that I will push back. I'll always remember that time I spent something like half an hour fighting a beholder boss in Neverwinter just because he was standing between me and completion of a quest. This situation with delves has felt similar in that at first I was just put off, but somehow this week's event was the push needed to nudge me back into action and it actually felt satisfying to go back into delves and be successful.

It's also been a good opportunity to do more duoing with the husband. I mostly talked about the solo challenge so far, but we also did more delves together. The main lesson we took away from this is that one person just has to be on a sturdy character that has the cooldowns to stand still and take some hits. When we tried the Underkeep as an evoker/mage duo it was just a disaster because we were both too squishy. Sure, sometimes you can kite, but sometimes you can't, and then you're stuck. In this instance we'd got the variant of that delve that requires you to defeat a row of ambushes within a small circular area, and there just wasn't enough room to make kiting work, and neither of us could survive getting hit more than a couple of times. After losing all our lives, we went out and redid it twice as evoker/death knight and mage/warrior instead and both of those were a breeze. In fact, that was the first time we did complete a tier eight delve in the advertised fifteen minutes, because with the right combination of classes it was just a whole different game.

Warrior and mage taking a break at the campfire after surviving an ambush in the Underkeep

I guess the point of all this rambling is that you only get to make a first impression once, but sometimes a second look does change things. I'm glad I gave delves another try because approaching them with a different mindset made a huge difference to my enjoyment. That said, I'm not planning to suddenly start running them by the dozen like I did last week. They are still time-consuming, and (in my opinion!) overly rewarding to the point that they can feel like a chore that you must do because the rewards are too good to pass up. 

This past weekend my guildies and I also stepped into Mythic Zero dungeons for the first time since the expansion launch, which was definitely the right choice based on the challenge level we encountered (which is to say we cleared them in decent time, but we did wipe and generally die more than a few times, showing that we weren't really ready for M+ yet), but most of us got no gear rewards out of the exercise since all the item drops were about ten item levels lower than what people already had.