Showing posts with label neltharion's lair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neltharion's lair. Show all posts

26/12/2025

Starting to Wrap Up Legion Remix

Legion Remix has less than four weeks left to run, and I'm slowly starting to think about how to wrap things up. The phased approach Blizzard has been taking with Lemix makes the whole experience a bit odd, as they added a couple of quests with the release of the last phase that are all about how the timeline is collapsing and we need to say goodbye! Except then we still had more than a month left at that point.

I've ticked off all the Lemix-specific achievements except for needing to level four more classes to 80, and there's one lesser invasion point commander that keeps eluding me. Not much to be done about that last one other than going back to Argus over and over again for another roll at the dice.

The whole "levelling all the characters" experience has been nothing but wacky. By character four or five, thanks to the stacking XP bonus, it was no longer a matter of timerunning but more like... time-tumbling. XP was just happening to me. You could no longer call it "earning" experience by any stretch of the imagination. Even with every quest rewarding a gear box, the constantly rising levels made it impossible to keep up with even the game's most basic gear requirements, and the last leg of each levelling journey was once again a painful struggle even in normal world tier as I tried to kill things with gear that's thirty levels too low for the intended difficulty. Your best bet at that point is to hope for an easy carry through some random dungeons and raids, which does work a lot of the time (it only takes one extremely OP person in the group) but not always. Not exactly my idea of fun, which is one of the reasons I've been stalling on the last four characters. But I'm still working on it.

Most other achievements have been easy and unremarkable enough. Do all the quests once, do all the dungeons once etc. I did want to take note of a few that stood out though.

First there was "Building a Heroic Army", which required you to earn 200 points in Withered Army training in heroic world tier. The trick there is that your Withered don't scale at all and are basically a bunch of fragile little dudes that will die almost instantly if any mob so much as sneezes at them. This turns the whole thing into a challenge of avoiding mobs that do AoE damage and/or that take a while to kill, while guiding your little "army" through the area in a way that allows you to more or less one-shot any opponents you encounter so they don't have a chance to hurt your guys.

I only really engaged with the Withered Army Training briefly during my first run through Legion, meaning I was vaguely familiar with the system but with no real understanding of the details. I had quite a bit of fun running through normal difficulty a few times to learn the lay of the land and collect the various upgrade chests (even if it's my understanding that these don't really make a difference on heroic mode either). Once I finally felt like I knew what I was doing it only took me two or three more tries to get it right and I felt quite accomplished for finding a good route.

The "Building a Heroic Army" achievement pops up at the end of Withered Army Training
The other achievement that truly excited me was the one to either earn 999 ranks of the inifinte power progression or beat a M+ dungeon on level 49 or higher. I didn't think I was likely to have the motivation to grind out the power ranks (even at the time of me writing this, my Lemix main is only sitting in the 300s), but the M+ way seemed achievable. Together with the husband and a guildie we slowly increased our key level over the weeks as our power levels increased.

Ironically, at the higher key levels I saw way more boss mechanics than I've ever seen while running any of these dungeons in other modes. We failed the timer on our first Return to Upper Karazhan because we'd gone in blind and hey, it turns out you actually need to do mechanics on Medivh!

Our worst week though was the one when we had an Eye of Azshara level 40-something, failed the timer but decided to power through to the end anyway, just to then have to abandon the key at the very end as it turned out the final boss had an unavoidable mechanic that had buggy scaling and would one-shot even players at max gear and power level. (We confirmed this on the forums after a few wipes.)

However, the very week immediately afterwards I got a really easy key, which when we timed it turned into another easy key, which finally turned into a Neltharion's Lair (another easy key) 49, which we managed to time for the achievement. That felt pretty great. 

A pop-up announces that Dagrul the Underking has been defeated, earning the achievment "Putting the Finite in Infinite"

The reason we were always three-manning was that there was unfortunately less interest in this version of Remix in our little guild than last time. For raids we could also only get three to four people together. Still, we managed to make our way through all the mythic raids including Tomb of Sargeras (Archimonde was a pain but we got him eventually).

Mythic Antorus turned out to be the final obstacle and we were pleasantly surprised that we managed both Enonar and Imonar (though the latter was a hilarious shitshow - definitely a memorable experience, especially me always having to push him through his first phase by myself while the other two were put to sleep). The unexpected dead stop came at Aggramar, since we couldn't burn through his first phase before he did his knockback, and since the strength of that move is inversely proportional to how many people it hits, the three of us were always yeeted into space the moment he used the ability.

We eventually ended up building a normal pug for it, which I simply titled "Antorus for all" (since we knew we were capable of doing most of it with the three of us anyway and just needed more bodies). People applied faster than I could click "accept". It was a fun breeze that eventually ticked off my last raid achievements too.

I'll probably want to write another full post or two about Lemix once it's over, similarly to how I did for MoP Remix. The experience of levelling all these characters and playing through their class order hall campaigns has definitely been something. It's also been another generally enlightening reminder of what worked and didn't work about Legion in general - some of which I already wrote about a few years ago, but I think I have an even clearer picture of it now.

07/11/2023

A Noob's Review of Dragonflight M+ Season 2

Yes, I'm still doing Mythic Plus with my guildies. I'm honestly feeling kind of "eh" about it - I don't mind it, but I could also do without it. At least one person in our little friend group is quite into it though, so we keep at it for now. Doing a couple of mythics each weekend isn't the worst way to spend some time (assuming we can all remain chill about failure, which hasn't always been the case).

With tomorrow's patch, Dragonflight's second M+ season is coming to an end, and I wanted to make some notes about it. Mainly, I'm kind of proud that I finished with a rating more than 500 points higher than last season. We're still bad, but slightly less so now I guess? Jumping in right from the beginning of the season, we had more time to learn this time around and I dare say we did get at least a little bit better at playing our classes and roles.

Here's how I'd rate my experiences with the season's eight dungeons, from favourite to least favourite:

Neltharion's Lair

I was kind of surprised when I heard in a video that this dungeon was apparently incredibly hard on higher keys, because on the difficulties we played it on, this was in my opinion the easiest dungeon of the set by quite a margin. The bosses all have fairly basic abilities and the trash is very straightforward as well and always seemed to go by quickly. As someone who didn't play during Legion, I got neither recycling nor nostalgia vibes from this one; it was just another dungeon that was (mostly) new to me. I just enjoyed that it didn't stress me too much as a healer, plus I liked the ride on the river and watching the hubby on his tank run on the spot while trying not to get eaten by the worm boss.

Halls of Infusion 

This was my favourite of the Dragonflight dungeons this rotation, as it's a place with varied trash and interesting bosses, without any single mechanic feeling overly punishing. Frogs are fun. I did have one run here that initially made me feel very bad, when we tried to push a slightly higher key and eventually had to give up due to continually wiping on Watcher Irideus. However, I felt less bad about that once I realised that there's only so much I can do in terms of AoE healing when the party decides to scatter to the four winds all the time, and I'm more assertive now about telling people to stack up if they want to stay alive in an AoE damage situation.

Freehold

Just thinking about Freehold immediately gets its soundtrack playing in my head. It's just a fun place to be, from the music to the pirate theme to the pig chasing- even if the trash is pretty dense and we had a lot of wipes due to accidental overpulls. Also, I died so many times on the Council of Captains when I'd miss the Vulpera lady jumping across the room and doing her massive conal attack... but I did get at least somewhat better at keeping a close eye on her and moving along at the right time after a while.

Neltharus

I think we probably did Neltharus more often than some of the others because one of my guildies was after a trinket from there for a while, and it was always... okay? The mammoth boss and the last fight sometimes wiped us if we messed up, but they never felt insurmountably difficult. All in all, it was a dungeon with the pretty classic WoW theme of "bad guys surrounded by fire" - which was okay, just not particularly exciting to me.

Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr

Legacy of Tyr was another dungeon I didn't mind, but I just thought it was kind of dull due to being (in my opinion) way too similar to the truncated version of the original Uldaman.

Brackenhide Hollow 

I kind of liked the overall theme and ambience of this one, but the trash leading up to the first boss is pretty annoying and was responsible for quite a few wipes on our part. We also messed up on the first boss fight many times, including that one time that nearly caused my husband to lose it. Overall I have more not-so-happy associations with this one than good ones.

Vortex Pinnacle

I was initially excited to return to this Cataclysm dungeon, but the extra mechanics they added to Altairus made him crazy hard in my opinion, and we wiped on him sooo many times - just too many sometimes contradictory movement cues going on. I just really came to dread this dungeon for this boss alone, even though the other two were easy. Also, we once failed a run in this one by literally a single second, which was a bit of a bummer.

The Underrot

Easily my least favourite dungeon by a mile, with annoying diseases I couldn't cleanse, trash mobs with absolutely lethal, randomly targeted frontal attacks that I wouldn't see in time due to being too focused on healing, and we remained absolutely god-awful at the mechanics of the last two bosses all season. Just... so many wipes and depleted keys. Ironically, on our last run of the place last week, we had our guildie's more experienced brother along again, and he actually took the time to teach us how to do those two problem bosses "properly" - revealing that we'd done them wrong all along, which explained the extreme difficulty. He then joked that of course, all this newfound knowledge was about to become useless, as season three will bring a whole new dungeon rotation for us to learn from scratch. C'est la vie.

I'm curious to see what season three will bring. The only dungeon from the new mythic pool that I feel I know well is Cataclysm's Throne of the Tides, though who knows how the devs have decided to spice that one up for mythic. I look forward to seeing more old dungeons that I only know from Chromie Time and Timewalking in their "proper" format, but I'm also worried about Dawn of the Infinite being included in the dungeon pool, since that one was insurmountably difficult for us even on M0 when it came out. (We couldn't even kill the first boss.) I guess we'll find out soon enough.