Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Shadowlands Pre-patch Event

The Shadowlands pre-patch event launched yesterday. Since Sylvanas broke the Helm of Domination, the Scourge are running rampant. The Argent Crusade and the Ebon Blade make another appearance. I broke out the "Argent Champion" title for this event.

The event is fairly short. A quick loop around the home territories and then you're sent to Icecrown in Northrend, where there are a few quests and a couple dailies. There's also a side-quest to go kill Nathanos Blightcaller in Eastern Plaguelands.

Also, a couple of the NPCs near Genn Greymane, Taelia and Shaw, have "Stay a while and listen" dialogues that are easy to miss. I also found a dialogue between Turalyon and Alleria at Alleria's statue on my paladin, but I haven't seen those two there on my other characters.

There are also about 20 rares in Icecrown, bosses from the raid and dungeons there, summoned outside. The implementation of these rares is pretty interesting. A rare spawns every 20 minutes, at 00, 20, and 40 of the clock. Once they spawn, there's a 2 minute grace period before they go active. So you have a bit of time to get to the current spawn marked on your map.

The 20 minute period is interesting. The people who are trying to farm rares are unhappy with it, because there's a lot of waiting around.

However, if you're not explicitly farming rares, it's actually a very good cadence. You get to Icecrown and pick up the dailies. You start on the dailies, and timer comes up for rare. You go and kill the rare, then back to the quests. You usually finish or just have a little bit more when the second rare comes up. Go and kill that, then finish up.

I rather like that half-hour mixture of rares and dailies. I find it also very alt-friendly, as it's better to switch to an alt for the next 2 rares and set of dailies rather than wait around on a single character.

But we'll see what the community thinks. I think the vocal farmers are going to drown out anyone who is happy with the system as is.

4 comments:

  1. Turalyon and Alleria have been there since the end of Legion. I suspect you need to kill Argus to unlock them.

    I don't mind the 20 minute wait, but given all the rares are on a strict rotation it is a long wait until you can see one you might want again. I kind of wish they would put up more at the same time so that you can work through them faster.

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    1. It's 6 hours 40 minutes (20 rares x 20 minutes) cycle, so it is easy to predicts when your rare will be up. Most of my guild farms Bronjam by alarm clock. :-)

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    2. Oh, that would explain it. My paladin is the only one to kill Argus. However, the dialogue is new, referencing N'Zoth's death, among other things.

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    3. Ah, I did not realize they had changed the dialog. I forget what it said, but I had heard it so I didn't bother to click on Alleria to see if there was anything new.

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