My Continued Adventures in Mythic Plus

Back in February I wrote a post about trying out Mythic Plus in retail for the first time. And I had a pretty good time! So we did more in the weeks that followed... but the moment additional affixes were introduced, things got messy quickly. I'm not sure we timed anything past a +10, and the main reason we finished those at all was our friend's brother, who was an experienced retail player and did a lot of carrying. Basically, both me (the healer) and the other two dps would die all the time, and he'd be the one to combat res me and/or just finish killing the boss by himself.

I found it quite stressful. I can't exactly claim that I wasn't having any fun, but it was kind of draining all the same. It's hard enough trying to learn how to get the most out of your healing abilities while also dealing with boss and trash mechanics, but then the dps who are also noobs take lots of avoidable damage and you can't keep up, and also there's an affix that requires you to stack up, immediately followed by another one that requires you to spread out, and it's all just too much.

I remember one week in particular where I was just absolutely spent after our usual afternoon of dungeoning. Looking at the season one affix rotation, I think it must have been bursting (trash mobs explode and deal damage on death) and grievous (once you take damage, you take damage forever until you either die or get healed to full). I think it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how that turned every single trash pull into absolute mayhem. I just kept muttering about how grievous used to be enough for an entire boss back in Burning Crusade (that crab thing in Slave Pens) and now it was just one of multiple trash mechanics. I took little comfort in finding out later that apparently a lot of healers (including much more experienced ones) also hated that affix combo.

After that, we ended up taking a break from running mythics for a few weeks for unrelated reasons, but I was honestly just relieved. I finished the season with this record, if that means anything to any of you:

However, season two came around and we wanted to try again. As a twist, we'd actually gained a fifth noob for our little team, so no more carrying.

In the first M+ we stepped into, Legacy of Tyr, we wiped on the first boss due to dps standing in fire. One of them actually commented: "Wait, that actually hurts?" We finished the dungeon fine after that, but up next was +2 Vortex Pinnacle, and that was another shitshow. The husband and I had been reasonably confident that we'd know what to do in there since we ran that dungeon many times back in Cataclysm, but as it turns out Blizzard added a completely new mechanic to the second boss that kept utterly obliterating us. I think we wiped three or four times before I gave up and googled a guide which finally told us how to deal with that new mechanic. We did finish the dungeon after that, but the timer had long expired.

Despite that rough start, I've actually appreciated this change of pace with nobody there to carry us, because it means that we have to learn from our mistakes together instead of just being carried to higher and higher keys even as we keep messing up. We're currently successfully timing +6s and looking at taking the step up into +7, which brings in an additional affix.

We did actually try Brackenhide Hollow on +7 already, but that was another disaster with a failed timer. The afflicted affix gave me another thing to watch out for as a healer (because apparently healers don't have enough to do?) but our biggest problem was that we wiped three or four times on the first boss fight. The damage was just insane and I couldn't keep up. After the husband started to lose it and threatened to just call it without even finishing the run, we suddenly sailed through the encounter with barely anyone taking any damage on the next attempt. At least that answered my silent question about whether we'd just been wiping due to my inadequacy as a healer.

The husband and I had a good talk after that, and I said to him that I could see from that run why I often see people say that it's actually the low-level keys that make people the most toxic - "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" as the saying goes, and at that level you've probably done the dungeon quite a few times on normal and heroic, leading you to think that you know what's going on, but in reality you've barely touched the complexities of Mythic Plus and are probably messing up left and right.

I remain conflicted about the whole thing. On the one hand, it can be fun. I feel I've gotten better at playing evoker (even if I'm far from great) because I'm forced to make better use of all my abilities and when it all comes together it feels great. I remember managing to heal us through a massively scuffed trash pull in Freehold and feeling very proud of myself. Learning how to deal with all the different mechanics and how to execute them correctly as a team is satisfying.

It's just... there's so much going on, and with the added time pressure I just find it overwhelming a lot of the time. At least with Burning Crusade heroics, you could start by learning slowly and then increase your pace as you got better. Mythic Plus just slaps you down with a whole new pile of mechanics the moment you think you've gotten the hang of anything.

I'd also forgotten how miserable it feels when your job as a healer is to constantly make up for damage dealers' mistakes, even more so when you're not entirely sure what's even going on and aren't confident that it isn't your fault somehow. So we'll keep at it for now, but I'm not sure how long it'll hold my attention - I expect I'll either feel burnt out at some point or we'll all just throw in the towel after getting mad at each other one too many times.

Little Moments

It was Thursday evening and I was in Undercity trying to get ready for Naxx. To be honest, I was supposed to be ready already, as I'd logged out at Light's Hope Chapel in preparation for the raid, but then I realised at the last moment that I'd forgotten something and had to fly back to Undercity to retrieve it.

As I was flitting around the central area surrounding the bank, I noticed a low level character emoting /wave at me. I didn't recognise the name, but I figured it might be an alt of someone I knew, so I politely /waved back, not really thinking anything of it.

As I continued my running around, trying to get my act together, I noticed that the lowbie had done a /kneel where I'd just stood a moment ago. Was he... trying to kneel in front of me? Why? Was he roleplaying a beggar?

Several thoughts wrestled for my attention in my mind. The Pyrewood cluster isn't officially an RP server, but as a former RP server refugee, it still delights me whenever I see people with more of a roleplaying mindset. Then again, I'm generally not too keen on people begging strangers for money or boosts - though my response does kind of depend on my mood and how exactly they're going about it.

I walked back to him and quickly inspected the character. He was an unguilded level 10 rogue, dressed in nothing but some grey and white rags - definitely looking like a genuinely new player. "You look kind of poor," I commented in /say, before opening a trade window, handing him one gold, and then once again returning to the task of finding all my stuff.

This is when I noticed that my whisper window was flashing. I've separated whispers from the rest of my chat so I don't miss any messages scrolling by during the announcement spam that happens during raids, but what happens in practice is that I often miss my whisper window flashing instead and don't immediately see direct messages when I first get them. I'll usually see them eventually, but it might be much later.

In this case, I found two whispers from the little rogue. First: "Huhu, do you have 5 silver for me, that I can learn how to fight with a sword?" And then: "OMG, thank you very much!" I had a good chuckle and responded that I hadn't even seen his whisper; he'd just been too good at RPing being poor. "This is something I hear very often 😑," he replied. Finally, I told him to go forth to train how to stab things, and he promised to do his best.

I just loved this little encounter because situations like these are the sort of thing you just don't get in more modern MMOs. They have other parts that are fun, sure, but random community interactions like these are usually lacking.

Though I did wonder whether I had somehow placed a mark on my head now, as literally the next day, a level 38 from another guild whispered me to ask whether I was up for donating to his personal fund for his first mount. I gave him five gold. Is it all the Naxx gear that makes me look rich?

In totally unrelated news, except that it's also an example of a "little moment" I guess, we've got a new guild on the server that advertises as follows: "Are you a boomer? Have kids? A job? Big cock? Then <Quitting In A Month> is the guild for you. We've got an honest name to match our realistic expectations. Join us and be welcomed into a casual guild where you'll get some free rose tinted glasses." For obvious reasons, I'd love it if they actually stuck around.

Interesting Classic Era Developments

Classic era being what it is, I don't really expect it to have any kind of active development. We can have different kinds of servers that try new things (Season of Mastery, hardcore mode) but the era servers are a museum piece in maintenance mode and that's fine.

That said, sometimes even the maintenance (aka bug fixing) can be slow. At some point in autumn last year, a client update that was made primarily for Wrath of the Lich King introduced an odd bug to era when it comes to NPC pathing near water. Basically friend and foe alike would get very confused about where the ground was when near a shoreline, and they'd either evade or randomly disappear underground.

The first time I came across this myself was while doing the chicken escort in the Hinterlands on my druid, because the chicken is stranded on a little island surrounded by water and has to go through a little moat before continuing its journey on land. The first time I started the quest, the chicken walked into the moat and then just disappeared. I ran in circles for a bit, wondering how I'd managed to lose sight of it, and eventually the quest failed as it got too far out of range of me. When it respawned and I tried again, I made sure to put a star marker on the chicken's head to make sure I wouldn't lose it again. Again it traipsed into the little moat, and then I could see its star slowly descend into the abyss under the world until it once again disappeared and the quest failed. I got lucky though, because when I tried for a third time, it just walked through the moat as normal, showing that the bug wasn't 100% consistent. I later learned that people also reported seeing it a lot when fighting mobs near rivers and lakes, such as the turtles in Hillsbrad, crocolisks in Durotar, or water elementals in Eastern Plaguelands.

It was the kind of bug that isn't exactly game-breaking, but still noticeable enough to be encountered regularly and to be quite annoying, and it didn't get fixed for almost a year! Needless to say, we got very excited when Aggrend shared on the Classic era Discord that the dev team had finally deployed a solution to the problem about two weeks ago. He also had this to say about it: "Apologies that this took as long as it did to resolve. Won't bore you with the technical details, but it was a very very unique bug that took a lot of time and testing to untangle and find a safe fix for. I hope we are someday able to write a tech blog about or something as its very interesting if nothing else." So, you know, yay!

Bug fixes are one thing though... what I didn't expect was to get news about the devs planning to actively make a larger change to Classic era at this point. We don't even know what exactly it's going to be yet, but Aggrend also took to the forums two weeks ago to warn players that they are going to make a "large update" to the Vanilla honour system and that this will include a complete honour reset - something that's quite a big deal in a system that requires weeks of furious grinding to work your way up a ladder.

I'll say up front that I have no real horse in this race, as PvP is one aspect of WoW Classic I don't really like. I had fun dabbling in AV but that's at least partially PvE, and any other battlegrounds I tried quickly reminded me of all the things I really don't like about the way PvP works in Classic. That said, I've seen my guildies struggle with the way ranking works on Classic era and have witnessed a fair bit of drama surrounding this system. (Bracket breakers, anyone?)

Basically, your PvP rank determines your access to certain rewards from vendors, and to rank up you need to grind a certain amount of honour for several weeks. You also compete with other players though, and for the highest ranks, only a limited number of spots are available each week. In fact, if the overall population taking part in PvP on your server isn't large enough, the top ranks aren't even available.

This has led to a practice called "pool boosting", where people create an army of low-level alts and kill each other over and over again at the Ratchet or Booty Bay graveyard (for instant reviving and re-killing), just to earn enough honour to count as "PvP participants" and increase the overall PvP pool size. If your server is big enough to have the top ranks available "naturally", this also works to open up additional positions.

Now, we don't really know what exactly Blizzard is planning to do - I've seen some speculate that they could do away with the Vanilla ranking system entirely and replace it with something similar to Burning Crusade's honour grind, but personally I don't think that's likely to happen. Whatever you may think of the state of "progressive" Classic, the dev team has been pretty respectful of keeping things authentic for era's small but dedicated population, so I don't think they'd do anything that drastic.

I do suspect that they'll want to address the issue of pool boosting though - while I'm not sure I would call it cheating exactly, it's definitely a case of degenerate gameplay, with people engaging in a very dull activity that was never intended to be there just to gain full access to the ranking system. So if I had to guess, I'd expect Blizzard to either decouple the ranks from population size somehow, or at least change the ratio so you don't need quite so many characters in the pool for a single person to be allowed to become Grand Marshal/High Warlord.

I'm very curious to see what they've come up with and how it'll be received by the PvP player base. I actually think that a lot of PvPers aren't hugely in love with the way the system works right now and will be quite open to some sort of tweaking as long as Blizzard doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Timewalking to an Unexpected Achievement

I only talked about timewalking on this blog once before, a little over a year ago. As I noted then, it's a feature I quite like, as it's one of Blizzard's (generally limited) efforts to let people enjoy old content as part of their normal gameplay. Sure, a group rushing through a heroic in ten minutes while AoEing everything along the way is not necessarily anything like the way that dungeon was experienced when it first came out, but it's still better than running it solo while over-levelled and just one-shotting everything. At least you get to see mechanics sometimes.

Last week was Cataclysm Timewalking, and there was a quest to run five of them for a gear reward box, so our little retail-playing friend group signed up for a full tour. It went well and I was actually reminded of how much I enjoyed the Cata dungeons at launch, so I decided to do the run-five-timewalking-dungeons quest on my demon hunter as well.

I've kind of reached the point where I'm reasonably confident queueing up to pug certain content in retail. I still think that the way people rush through dungeons is less than ideal, and makes for a terrible new player experience in particular as it means newbies just spend their time racing after the more experienced players without having the slightest clue about what's actually going on (thematically or mechanically). However, if you know the content you're queueing up for and mentally prepare yourself for the experience, it's generally tolerable.

One of the dungeons my demon hunter got thrown into was Lost City of the Tol'vir. The group rushed through AoEing everything as you'd expect, while I reminisced about how deadly many of those pulls used to be. However, when we killed the last boss, Siamat, something unexpected happened: I saw the Glory of the Cataclysm Hero achievement pop up, as well as a notification that I'd just earned the Volcanic Stone Drake mount.

I was briefly baffled but didn't have time to think about it too much, as I had to leap off the boss's terrace to quickly hand in the dungeon quest I'd picked up at the entrance (what with it being my demon hunter's first time there), and the rest of the group was already hitting the re-queue button.

It was only after completing my five runs that I could really sit down and take in what had happened. WoW's achievement system is a bit confusing with the way it mixes character-specific and account-wide achievements in some situations but not others, and my first thought had been that surely I just got some sort of character-specific achievement on my demon hunter that I'd already earned on another character. I even logged into my old troll priest, the original Shintar, to check her achievement log for comparison.

What I found though was that it was indeed true that it was my demon hunter who had earned me the Volcanic Stone Drake. Looking back at the various achievement dates, it looks like I made a bit of a push for Glory of the Cataclysm Hero in early 2011 and did in fact get all the achievements bar one: Headed South. I don't know why I didn't get that one in specific - I can only guess that it must've been challenging in some way, even if many of the Wowhead comments claim that it's super easy and barely an inconvenience. And then I never went back to try again even though I continued to play Cataclysm for another year after that.

Either way, getting that last achievement purely by accident twelve years later, in a timewalking pug that was just steamrolling the content, created a very brief flash of a connection to past me (who actually cared about this stuff) and made me feel very, very odd.

Wrath Classic Adds WoW Token, Community Goes Ballistic

I thought that my next post on here was going to be about some interesting changes that are coming to Classic era, but then I found out this morning that Classic Wrath is basically on fire, and that seemed like it might be worth talking about as a priority.

It started innocently enough for me, when I noticed a tweet from loyal commenter Pallais on my timeline, which contained a link to this Wowhead article and the comment: "I have to say I'm enjoying the popcorn-worthy drama some Wrath Classic players are experiencing because of this. ^_^" Funnily enough, I didn't even have any reaction to the WoW Token announcement itself, I just thought "well, that's not very kind towards people who might not like that" and scrolled past.

But then I got curious and checked the WoW Classic subreddit, just to find that it was basically one giant dumpster fire. I can't claim to be enjoying the show, but like a train wreck it's just hard to look away from (and I get what Pallais meant now). The mods have officially dropped the rule that previously forbade talking about private servers, and of course said private servers have happily taken up the opportunity to advertise. In general, people are mad at Blizzard and shouting a lot. And it's weird to me because while I think you can have plenty of reasons to dislike Blizzard or WoW, this seems like such a random hill to die on.

I searched my blog archives to remind myself of what sentiments I expressed about the WoW Token in the past, but I couldn't actually find a single mention of it. It came out during WoD when I wasn't playing, and I clearly didn't have sufficiently strong feelings about its introduction to comment on it in any way.

I can't say that I've taken any real notice of it since picking up retail again either. Obviously there's been a crazy amount of inflation during the years I was away, but I feel that I'm earning more than enough to cover everything I need. In the services channel in town, I often see people advertise carries through heroic raid clears for a mount or achievement, and I'm always surprised that these are actually cheap enough that I'd technically be able to afford one even with my super casual level of play. (Though I would be completely broke afterwards, not gonna lie!) Either way, my point is that it doesn't feel like buying gold confers a significant advantage to anyone; presumably it's something for the impatient or people who want to collect expensive cosmetics without putting too much effort in.

It's funny because on some level I feel like I should dislike the WoW Token more, simply because it's another micotransaction and in an ideal world I'd prefer a return to a pure subscription model. Considering it's very hard to find an MMO without a cash shop nowadays though, I've become pretty desensitised to it, and the simple truth is that not everything you can buy in a cash shop has the same impact on the game. Something like the WoW Token feels like it should be a big deal, but the more I thought about it, the more it hit me that basically, buying gold (whether from a cash shop or a gold seller) only causes problems if that gold in turn buys you things that we feel perhaps shouldn't be for sale (with either currency) but should have to be earned through gameplay.

To bring up an example that I mentioned before, someone who joined the Forks in Burning Crusade as a brand new player and bought gold to be able to power-level leatherworking and enchanting to max within days of creating his character. He was then super generous by always handing out free goodies to other guildies. When I found out about what happened, it ticked me off because I'd been trying hard to work on my professions to help the guild, and here this guy basically bought himself not just a pay-to-win shortcut on the profession front, but it also bought him clout with the guild, which just felt unfair.

In Classic, on servers where GDKP runs rampant, it essentially makes the game pay-to-win in terms of gearing, as the person with the biggest pile of money gets the best gear. As far as I can tell this is particularly prevalent in Wrath, which I guess does make the WoW Token a problem for players in that situation, especially if they bought gold from gold sellers before in order to gain an advantage. With everybody being able to buy gold legitimately, it will likely drive prices in these kinds of runs through the roof.

It doesn't really matter in retail because there are no GDKPs and loot just generally works differently. It wouldn't even matter that much on my server in Classic era either - when the news broke, someone in my guild Discord asked whether we were worried about the Token being added to era as well, and another guildie asked in return what you would even buy with it, which I thought was an excellent point. A new player might purchase a shortcut to their epic mount, or someone might use it to finance repeated respecs, and obviously that wouldn't be ideal... but it also wouldn't be a huge deal.

So I'm not worried. Again, that doesn't mean I think the WoW Token is a good thing, but I'm not going to pretend to feel sorry for people who opt to play in an environment where you can buy your way to victory, being upset that they'll now have to spend even more to keep up. If you think playing WoW should be all about how much money you have, I can't exactly blame Blizzard for agreeing.

Dragonflight and Patch 10.1

Dragonflight had its 10.1 patch the other week, which added a new zone to the Dragon Isles, the Zaralek Cavern. I have to admit I was a bit suspicious of having an underground zone in an expansion about riding dragons, since those things seemed kind of thematically at odds with each other, but the cave is huge and you don't really feel boxed in at all.

In fact, I was very impressed that this addition, too, has been integrated into the Dragon Isles seamlessly. I thought that this one would require a loading screen for sure, but nope! The tunnels into the cavern wind back and forth a couple of times, presumably to give the game time to load all the assets, but aside from a little error message that currently pops up when you go through, the transition between underground and overground is seamless. There are even entrances to the cavern at several different points of the map, to add to that feeling of it really being right underneath the zones we already know.

The new faction of mole people is a bit silly, but I like them, plus the little treasure hunting expeditions you can go on a couple of times a week are once again a fun little distraction with more of a puzzle than a combat focus. I really appreciate that the devs have been trying to give us more things to do that aren't about fighting all the time.

The main storyline also continues, and it was nice to actually be caught up for a change (the husband and I took forever to complete the base campaign because of how much of it was tied to hitting certain renown levels with some of the factions and just a general feeling that it was a bit all over the place). After all the moaning people did about how terrible they thought Shadowlands' writing was, I've seen relatively little discussion of the Dragonflight story, and in a way that's a shame because I think it's quite good. It reminds me of the Jaina story in BfA at times in the sense that the characters feel a bit more mature and like their reactions to events are more nuanced and not as cartoonish. During one of the recent chapters I actually said to the husband: "What is this, everyone acting like adults and actually apologising after saying something stupid?"

Plus, I actually just... care? I said during Shadowlands that I still found its story entertaining, but it was a bit like a soap opera where you're kind of laughing at how ridiculous everything is. Dragonflight doesn't feel that way, and there've been several story beats that have actually made me feel things, most recently the attack on Loamm. It's good stuff.

In terms of activities, Blizzard seems to have managed to find a good balance between world quests, regular quests, and limited-time events, and they continue to add more content following that formula. There's a lot of new mini events in particular on the Zaralek Cavern map, often quite small in scale, but they can be fun to hop in and out of.

On the surface there are now also Fyrrak assaults, which seemed to be super bugged during the first week but seem to mostly have been fixed now. Sometimes Fyrrak just flies over the zone, yells a lot and burns a bunch of people, as a throwback to Deathwing scorching whole zones during Cataclysm. You can tell the primal incarnates are a lot less powerful than the old Earth-Warder though, because when he caught my demon hunter fighting a rare, she actually survived the burn and didn't get the achievement, only dying to the mob she was fighting moments later due to how much her health pool had suddenly been depleted.

I keep thinking how much of a shame it is that Dragonflight doesn't seem to have been a big financial success (by Blizzard standards) when it gets so much right. Is this how people felt during MoP, which a lot of people hated because of the pandas but which seemed to get a lot of praise in retrospect? Mind you, I did play at least for a few months during MoP and I think Dragonflight is better than MoP so far...

I have to admit that it's slowly transforming my attitude toward retail. Whenever I log in and start playing, I find it easy to keep going for hours because there's just always something fun to do, and of course there are now also the weekly dungeon runs with my mini guild to keep me busy. It's not a replacement for Classic or SWTOR, but I'm increasingly seeing it as pretty damn decent in its own way.

Official Hardcore Servers and a New Season Are Coming

Blizzard used to have a reputation for scheduling all their announcements in such a way as to take attention away from anything interesting their competitors might have been doing. I don't know if that was ever really true, but I couldn't help thinking of that this past weekend, and what a contrast it was to see them be foolish enough to make a major WoW Classic announcement at the end of an unofficial stream just as a large part of Europe was in the throes of Eurovision. I didn't even see people talk about it in my guild until the next day, and even then the tone was rather disinterested.

The big announcement was that they'll be releasing an official hardcore server this summer, and a new season of some kind is planned for later in the year, though they don't want us to expect it to be "Season of Mastery 2".

The hardcore announcement was no surprise considering that the addition of the hardcore flag was datamined a couple of months ago, and I guess it's nice to see Blizzard taking something that's popular with the community and running with it. I might check it out briefly once it launches just to see what the experience looks like in game - then again, maybe not, considering the starter zone hell that is Hydraxian Waterlords right now. If nothing else, it will be interesting to watch the drama as people argue about what exactly the rules on these official servers should be. Permadeath is a given, but the hardcore addon has so many extra rules that at least some people would like to see implemented and that Blizzard is never going to bother with, the arguments about the "right" way to play hardcore are already raging on reddit.

Either way I don't expect this new server to really affect my gameplay, as most people on the EU-PvE cluster just play the game normally and have no reason to leave. I guess it'll be interesting to see whether Hydraxian Waterlords will just be abandoned again instantly or whether some players will remain.

The new season on the other hand is more likely to affect my personal experience. I'm not really worried about everyone jumping ship for this new mode either - the Pyrewood cluster has grown so much in recent months that even if half the population left to play the new season instead, it would still be three times as large as it was when I started playing.

The only thing I find slightly concerning is that it might throttle the "organic newbie hose" for Classic era. Until the big population surge I hadn't really thought about it, but apparently Classic era is kind of hard to find even if you're looking for it, as the game defaults you to the "seasonal" tab on first login, and you have to notice that there are tabs to switch to other versions of the game at the bottom of the window. Right now people make their way to era anyway because while the SoM servers still appear, they are inactive and locked. However, once a new season starts I can imagine those new servers metaphorically sucking the air out of the room by hoovering up all the newcomers logging into Classic for the first time, simply because they are what the game presents to a new player by default. That would be a bit of a shame.

Still, era is about the long game and no matter how popular this new season ends up being, it too will end and ultimately people will have to come back to era yet again.