Chains of Domination Week 2

I didn't think I'd have another post about 9.1 in me (especially not this soon), but it turns out it's kind of neat to actually be able to chip in about current content for a change, so I wanted to share some more of what the husband and I have been in up to in the second week of the patch.

First off (though in reality this was the last thing we did), we unlocked flying in the Shadowlands (minus Oribos and the Maw) and got a snazzy new mount! I was really quite pleased with this as I was just thinking that I didn't really own a flying mount that matched my covenant attire, but then this free owl-gryphon-robot-thing Aquilon came to the rescue!

I also remembered to take a good screenshot for illustration purposes this time.

In the Maw we did the Kyrian and Maldraxxus-themed assaults. The Kyrian one was a bit dull, like the Kyrian themselves (I love how good and noble they are, but let's not kid ourselves about that being fun at parties), though I did like the Venthyr's quest with the teapot (I can never remember the guy's name but keep thinking of him as "the Mad Hatter guy"). Also, the final boss fight of the Kyrian assault was the easiest thing ever; the NPCs basically did most of the work for us and it was over in a flash.

The Maldraxxus assault looked like it was going to be fun based on the quests but was bogged down by being released in a buggy state. Oh, the many cries of: "Eat, Kevin! Eat!" Eventually I googled "wow kevin eat" and someone had posted a workaround for the buggy quest on the forums, but it still ended up taking much longer than it should have and soured us on the experience somewhat (though I really enjoyed riding Kevin afterwards). I was also confused by Mikanikos giving us this Centurion with some very specific abilities but no quest for it? I tried using the ability to destroy thingamabobs anyway, but it didn't seem to work either? Slightly baffling.

Not much news from Korthia other than that we did two more rounds of dailies and completed the weekly quest for Renown to unlock the next bit of story. Again, there was some bugginess here when the husband and I were watching the NPCs do some stuff but for some reason no dialogue was coming up for me; they were just moving around the room. I had to ask whether they were talking and whether I was missing anything important.

The grand finale (spoilers incoming!) featured the reveal of the Shadowlands' worst kept secret, that the Runecarver is the Primus, and us naturally making a mess by inadvertently playing into the Jailer's hands again (what else is new). By the way, I may joke about the thing with the Primus, but in the interest of full disclosure, I had not realised the obvious connection myself until the husband pointed it out to me a little while back.

Finally, we did a round of Torghast since we'd been given a quest to go there and we had a calling that required us to do a run as well, so we decided "why not". I've previously posted about how the husband and I had decent fun in Torghast, playing in our casual way and visiting it once a week at most, and I was slightly apprehensive about the changes I'd heard were coming to it with 9.1. The removal of the death counter was fine of course, but the addition of these new "torment" debuffs and a timer/scoring system did not sound fun to me at all.

The reality was... okay I guess. The shortening to five floors actually felt slightly odd because it ruined the symmetry of having a broker on the third and sixth floor. Torments were indeed annoying - we got one that caused elite enemies to spawn spinny balls of death while in combat, which forced us to run around like headless chickens and made killing things as a tank/healer combo even slower than it had been before. But the whole timer/scoring thing wasn't that bad because we were basically able to ignore it. When the empowerment button lit up, we used it, but other than that we didn't care. In the end the game awarded us three out of five stars gems for a perfect run in terms of thoroughness (having killed and looted everything), which just tells me that the timer requirements to get five gems must be way out of our league if we basically lost two for being slow. But I guess we can keep coming back to try and unlock the new layers and fill out the new tower knowledge talent tree a bit.

Casual 9.1 Impressions

As mentioned previously, the husband and I more or less abandoned our current retail mains as we ran out of things we wanted to do on them and have been focusing on our demon hunter alts since then. With the release of the patch, it was time to get back to the warrior/monk duo however to check out the new content.

First off, I gotta say it was a bit weird that as champions of Bastion, we had to go to Oribos to be told that something terrible had happened to the Archon. Couldn't they have told us at home?

Anyway, it took us about three hours to plod through the introductory quest chain together and it was... pretty neat? There were some nice cut scenes and I was pleasantly surprised by how much ground the story covered, such as having that callback to Odyn and Helya - good thing we've been playing Legion content recently or I wouldn't have known who these guys are (beyond obvious Norse mythology knock-offs). Killing the Eye of the Jailer was cool, even if the fight was kind of annoying. To be honest I'd always thought of the Eye as something metaphorical, not a literal giant eyeball that you could fight to blind the Jailer!

Nonetheless we felt kind of exhausted and like we hadn't actually achieved very much by the end of the quest chain. I find it hard to say why... I do find the current story interesting but... I guess not that emotionally engaging? It all feels a bit too removed from my character to be honest. It's a very stark contrast to the Legion content, where the stakes were always blindingly obvious. I mean, the whole reason we went to the Shadowlands was to rescue a bunch of important people, which we did except for Anduin - but he's corrupted now so he's kind of a write-off unless you're a big fan I guess?

We also learned that the "machinery of death" is broken, which is obviously a big deal, but beyond being mad at the Jailer because he's the obvious benefactor and likely to be behind it all, we haven't really tried to find out more about how to fix it (unless I missed some important plot points somewhere, which is not impossible). So now it's all this NPC soap opera about Tyrande vs. Sylvanas, the corruption of Anduin etc. - which again, isn't uninteresting but I'm not sure why my character would care that much about any of these guys. They're important lore characters, but they're not my friends.

Anyway, we picked up our first weekly fill-the-bar quest in Korthia and did an Ardenweald assault in the Maw and it was... okay I guess, if a bit buggy. For example the final boss fight took forever since it seems to be tuned around having all the friendly NPCs help you, but they just followed us around like sheep and refused to attack anything. I also didn't really enjoy the part where you have to sneak around with Lady Moonberry to free your captured companions - I got thrown back to the start so many times it was frustrating. Some of it was just me being bad at this particular mini-game, but things like other players being able to distract the eyes onto you, or outside mobs aggroing on you in your defenseless vehicle mode if you accidentally cross the area border didn't help.

We were also a bit put out that completing that first assault only counted for 25% of our bar progression because having to do four of them each week sounded like a lot, but it later turned out that the rest of the bar fills up pretty quickly anyway if you just do the Korthia dailies and make sure to run towards any shinies you spot on the mini map while doing so. We were also lucky in that we were able to do another assault the next day - I found out via Gnomecore's blog that assaults only reset once halfway through the week, but we had basically caught the Ardenweald one at its very tail end, so the next day a Venthyr-themed one was up instead. I thought that one was a lot more fun personally.

The husband was oddly down on the whole experience, moaning that he'd expected more than "just another daily area". It was very strange for me to end up being the one to defend retail WoW, but this sort of content is its bread and butter, isn't it? At least from my limited first impressions, it seems to do a good job at being what it's meant to be and strikes a good balance between giving you distinct tasks and offering "explorable" content to discover while working on the former.

As our characters were also sitting around only item level 200, every gear reward we got was an upgrade, so that felt good as well. I like the idea of having this new bit of content to work on with the husband now that playing a bit of retail has become part of our weekly routine. About the worst thing I can say is that Korthia is visually somewhat drab, but then we are still in WoW's version of hell, so you can't really expect it to look very welcoming.

I was looking for a nice screenshot to illustrate this post, but found that the only thing I'd taken a picture of was me being transformed into a mushroom person after ingesting a questionable mushroom. It's a running joke between me and the husband that I'll click on anything that the game will let me click on, even if it's some sort of edible that's marked as poisonous. He's not wrong, but I have no regrets. Except for spam-healing myself for 20 minutes after I ate that cheese in LOTRO when I could have just died and lost nothing.