War of Thorns: Horde Part 1

I did the first part of the pre-expansion questline, the War of Thorns, on my Horde character last night.

My first reaction:

Picture found through Google

I wrote two posts long ago which are worth revisiting in light of this questline:

• The Nature of War
• Players and the Sack of Theramore

I said that one side has to be the aggressor, and thus in the wrong in the modern view of war. In the War of Thorns, Blizzard has embraced this. The Horde is unequivocally the aggressor. Sylvannas is driven by the old vision of war as a strategic tool.

I think this is the only correct way to do faction warfare, but there are a number of Horde players who are deeply unhappy over this turn of events. Especially the Horde druids who don't want to attack Malfurion. (I, on the other hand, am looking forward to dispatching him.)

The other part is that the Horde players have their fingerprints all over this conflict. Unlike Theramore, their characters are involved from the very beginning. (And there isn't even a Kitten of the Horde to motivate them.) Blizzard finally put the major event into the game, rather than having it in a book.

I quite applaud Blizzard for taking these decisions. If you're going to do faction warfare, commit 100%.

The questline is quite good as well. It's about 45 min to 1 hour or so. Given that there's another questline on the Alliance side, I think that's a solid amount of content for a pre-expansion event.

There are also several World Quests in Darkshore after the quest finishes. Apparently Darkshore is hilarious if you have War Mode enabled, with lots of PvP going on. I haven't tried that yet, though.

I'm looking forward to seeing the resolution of the War of Thorns. I hope Blizzard sticks to their guns. Even up to having the player being the one who burns the World Tree. That would set the forums aflame.

Warbringers: Jaina

Blizzard released a new short in advance of Battle For Azeroth. It's titled Warbringers: Jaina, and it is excellent.

I really like what Blizzard is doing with Jaina Proudmoore so far. I was expecting that they would end up disgracing her character like they did with Fandral Staghelm.

Layering Jaina's anger with guilt, and having her question the choices she made in her youth, is the pitch-perfect way to handle her character. I'm greatly looking forward to seeing how her story unfolds in the expansion.

Mage Tower Challenges

I finally completed the Mage Tower for my Holy Paladin, buoyed mostly by the capped Artifact Power.

Actually, having the Mage Tower be active full-time was probably the biggest benefit. Previously, whenever I thought about doing the Mage Tower, it was never up. And when it was up, I didn't feel like doing it.

In any case, here's the Holy Paladin skin:

The healer challenge was pretty interesting. The hardest part was probably the section where you had to heal the ghosts, and it was challenging mostly because it didn't use the UI. So it felt like a completely new skill you had to learn.

The final section was rather annoying. The Ignite Soul mechanic, where your allies take damage equal to your health when the debuff expires, is supremely nerve-wracking. Especially when I realized--in the middle of the fight--that I was wearing [Highfather's Machination], which heals you when you drop below 50%:

"Alright, I'm standing in the bad, my health is dropping. I'm not healing myself. I'm down to 30%, good. Debuff expires in 3, 2, ... Wait,why did my health just jump back over 50%? OMG, everyone's dying! Heal, heal, heal!"

Ah well, it was a fun experience.

I also did the Retribution Paladin Mage Tower, fighting Sigryn's council. I think this challenge must have been very sensitive to gear level, and got significantly easier with better gear. With the level of gear I had, it was fairly straightforward once you understood the mechanics. Here's the Ret Paladin skin:

I also tried the tank challenge. It looks fairly doable. My problem is that everything is going fine, and then I get punted off the edge. That happened a couple of times, and I gave up for the night.

I think the Mage Tower Challenges were an excellent part of Legion, and I have mad respect for those people who completed them when they first came out. I also like the way Blizzard let increasing iLevel decrease the difficulty while still preserving a lot of the challenge. You still have to do mechanics correctly, even if you have more room for error. The Dev team did an outstanding job here.

WoW Classic Dev Watercooler

A couple of weeks ago, Blizzard released a Dev Watercooler for WoW Classic, talking about where the project is and some decisions that have been made.

Some thoughts:

• Blizzard has decided on 1.12 as the baseline version for WoW Classic. As much as we will all regret missing out on the days of 5 minute paladin blessings, 1.12 is a good choice. Far enough in so that a lot of the really wonky stuff got ironed out, but still with the classic feel. I understand that most of the private servers use 1.12 as well, so it is in line with community expectations.

• The team has the 1.12 code and 1.12 data. Important, because it means that team doesn't have to recreate it from old memories.

• The team has a 1.12 build running internally. This means that they have a "source of truth" for the project. No matter what path they go, they can always compare their latest version with the 1.12 build and know that they are faithfully recreating the classic feel.

• Blizzard has decided to go with the modern WoW engine, but use the 1.12 data. This is mostly good, because the modern WoW engine has all the bugfixes and is tuned for today's computers. For example, the 1.12 was 32-bit, if I recall correctly, but modern WoW is 64-bit. The only issue might be if the older data trips the modern anti-cheat measures.

There's also some details on the different formats of data. Old WoW data is apparently "de-normalized" in many ways, probably for peformance. Meanwhile modern WoW uses a more normalized form.

All in all, WoW Classic appears to be pretty far along. I wonder if Blizzard will surprise us with an early 2019 release.

Leveling Dungeons are Fun Again!

The last time I dipped into leveling dungeons in WoW, it was a terrible experience. People in heirloom gear completely overpowered the instance, making it the zergiest of zergs. You didn't even have enough time to hand in quests.

In the leveling revamp of the last patch, heirlooms were reined in. They're still quite good, especially with the experience bonus, but they're comparable to dungeon blues.

Low level dungeons are actually a great deal of fun now. I've even rolled a newbie tank just to do instances. It's not excessively difficult, but the game rewards steady killing of group by group. Sometimes you can handle two groups, but it can be a bit stressful.

I healed a Stratholme run and we wiped a couple times due to accidentally pulling extra packs. The group even spontaneously started using crowd control to make life easier!

If you haven't tried a low-level instance in a while, I strongly recommend giving them a shot. Create an Allied Race character, and you'll start at level 20, making you eligible for instances right away. Queue times are pretty good, too. I'm seeing around 8 minutes for a DPS, 1-2 minutes for a healer, and instantaneous for a tank, of course.

Updates

This is probably the longest I've gone between posts. I really should just sit down and write, instead of thinking about writing.

Warcraft

We're clearing Antorus every week. I guess now we're just waiting for the next expansion. The officers are trying to get a taste of Mythic, but we just don't have the numbers.  Even our heroic runs usually only have around 18 people.

Rift Prime

I finally got Trion's website to work. The adblocker I run was interfering with their payment provider. I signed up for a package, and have been leveling a Guardian Warrior. Hopefully I will go into it in more detail in a future post. But by and large, pretty much everything I said when I first tried Rift still holds. 

Which does make sense, as it is a Prime server. But that also means that the reasons I stopped playing Rift before are going to cause me to stop playing Rift now.

Other

Otherwise I'm not really playing anything. I guess Bless Online is coming out shortly, maybe I will give that a whirl.

Updates

I haven't posted in a while, so here's an update on how things are going.

Rift Prime

There's a fair amount of hype and nostalgia going around for Rift Prime. I decided to give it a whirl and downloaded the Glyph launcher again.

Unfortunately Trion's website won't let me add my credit card as a payment method for some reason. It just stalls with no errors or response. So that's the end of that plan.

World of Warcraft

My guild has cleaned up our act on Coven, even one-shotting it a week ago. Unfortunately, this has also been accompanied by serious regression on Aggrammar in the last two weeks. We've been wiping much more than we did on our first two kills, making it very hard to actually get attempts in on Argus.

We did finally get a chance to make three or four serious attempts on Argus last raid. We even had a 1% wipe.  We just have to clean up that last phase and reliably get the Titanforging buff early.  Hopefully Coven and Aggrammar will go well next week, and give us enough time to down Argus.

I also got the Lightbringer title from Argus (the zone) last week. For some reason, I could not get the hang of the goblin glider, as this was the first time I've really used it. Normally I just bubble when I need to fall a long distance. I fell off the edges of Argus and died numerous times while trying to get the hidden treasures. I finally got them all, and got a nice title for my paladin.

A Neat Ranged Paladin Idea

I came across this Reddit post describing ideas for additional class specialisations. One was for a ranged paladin, and I thought it was particularly interesting.

Normally ranged paladin variants play up the idea of paladin as holy spellcaster, the "shockadin". In the past we've even had spells like Denounce which allowed Holy paladins to try this playstyle. And it worked reasonably well for questing, but was never raid-viable. In Legion, Blizzard moved Holy paladin dps back to a melee-style, which I've found quite fun for questing. (Still not raid-viable, though.)

In any case, this ranged paladin variant isn't a spellcaster, but instead uses a two-handed crossbow. It fuses elements of a "witchfinder", inquisitor, or Van Helsing-style vampire hunter into the paladin. Having the paladin focus on a weapon reinforces the martial aspect, and witchfinders reinforce the religious overtones of the class.

Though crossbows would be the signature weapon, I imagine these paladins could also use bows and guns. It would also be nice for ranged weapons to be used by a class other than hunters. Though Blizzard would have to add Strength to ranged weapons.

A witchfinder might be an interesting idea for a new non-caster ranged class well, maybe wearing leather instead of plate. However, I wonder what specialisation options it would have. A paladin variant would be simpler.

All in all, this was a neat paladin variant, and one I'd love to see in-game.

Heroic Aggramar Defeated!

Heroic Aggramar fell surprisingly quickly.

We spent over an hour trying to get our second kill on Heroic Coven. We finally got them down and reached Aggramar with about 50 minutes left in the raid. I think we resigned ourselves to going over the basic strategy and then pulling it a few times to see the fight.

Instead we killed Aggramar in five pulls.

I think that part of it was that we use a lot of assigned CC on Coven, so it was pretty easy to do the same thing on Aggramar. Then the rest of the fight is straightforward.

I think our guild's major weaknesses are movement and spacing. If a fight doesn't require precise movement and positioning, we're decent enough. I'm not really sure how we can get better at movement and spacing. From previous guilds, it's not something which is really discussed, but more something which is done naturally.

In particular, I sometimes think that many players have a "home" position in a given fight. That's where they stand, and where they return to after a given mechanic ends. I feel that there are several players in our raid who don't do this naturally. They don't go back to a standard position, instead moving to new positions, often based on the position of different mechanics, all the time. It's not like this is wrong, exactly, but it does make their movement unpredictable. This ends up hurting us in fights where predictable movement is more useful.

Allied Races

With 7.3.5, Blizzard released four allied races if you pre-order the next expansion, Battle For Azeroth. There are two races for the Alliance: Void Elves and Lightforged Draenei; and two races for the Horde: Nightborne, and Highmountain Tauren.

Each of these races played a part in the Legion storyline, and recruiting them is a very organic development in the story. Each race requires a certain amount of reputation and achievements, which you basically have if you've been playing Legion.

I'm really happy that Blizzard chose to make playable scenarios about recruiting each of these races. A long time ago, I complained about Theramore, wishing its destruction had happened in game, rather than in an associated novel. It's heartening to see Blizzard put important story events in game, and give the player a role to play in those events. It feels like the Blizzard of a couple expansions ago would have just made the Allied races available to play, and put the story of how they joined in a novel or story online, or a cutscene.

Perhaps this change was prompted by competition with FFXIV, which is all in on the storyline occurring in game. Regardless, it's a good change. Hopefully the same thing will happen with the scenarios for Battle for Azeroth, especially the triggers for the war. I hope players have their bloody hand prints all over the burning of Teldrassil or the attack on Undercity, or whatever other events happen.

In any case, I created a Void Elf shadow priest, and have been very slowly levelling her up. She's currently level 35. I really like the scaling changes made to levelling, as well as having zone completion tied to the story lines. I've been levelling in Kalimdor, as I have not seen most of the post-Cataclysm stories there. The new levelling is very enjoyable.

Heroic Coven of Shivarra Defeated!

Coven of Shivarra was bidding to become our fight with the most wipes so far in this expansion. We finally got it down this week, only a few wipes short of our Heroic Avatar count.

Heroic Coven is an interesting fight in that the individual mechanics are not very hard, but dealing with the combinations can be very difficult. Some mechanics push you to spread out, some mechanics push you to collapse, and there's some randomness as to which mechanics happen when which makes it hard to learn the fight. You may see a certain combo only a few times a night.

For us, our big change was how we handled the marching adds. We switched to a strategy where we tried to lock down all the marching adds. This delays running behind them as long as possible, and makes it a lot easier to find safe spots during darkness.

It took us a little bit of practice, including several attempts where we got fairly close. But something always happened in the last 20% and the attempt fell apart. The final kill was fairly smooth. Hopefully we will be able to repeat this next week.

This is the one fight this tier that has really tested my mana. I was running on fumes for much of the last bit of the fight.

The only other thing to note is that the Legendary Prydaz makes a large difference this fight. It's well worth bringing it out for this fight if you have it.

Patch 7.3.5 Tomorrow

Patch 7.3.5 comes out tomorrow. I've been really impressed with Blizzard's release discipline this expansion. Each patch has come out like clockwork 11 weeks apart.  Amazing job by the team, especially the project managers.

Now hopefully they can bring Battle for Azeroth in with the same discipline.

Patch notes for 7.3.5 can be found here.

From the notes, it looks like this patch is all about revamping the mechanics of the leveling game. Level scaling is being introduced everywhere, and there look to be lots of changes to improve that part of the game. I think it's about time. Out-leveling a zone while you're still questing in it is annoying.

The other part of the patch looks to continue to the story in Silithus. It will be interesting to see how the denouement of the Legion story plays out.

There's no mention of the Allied Races, so I imagine that they are saving them for BfA, or possibly as a pre-order unlock.

Finally, if you have authenticator, 4 extra bag slots! Blizzard CS even got in on the latest meme:

Perfect. [https://t.co/bbyyZ6Ny44]
🎨 /u/SymbolicHuman pic.twitter.com/PGqkzUSsTB

— BlizzardCS (@BlizzardCS) January 15, 2018

Heroic Kin'garoth and Varimathras Defeated

In this week's raid, we continued advancing, this time getting Heroic Kin'garoth and Varimathras down.

Kin'garoth

Here we made a couple of adjustments to our strategy. We aimed to kill an Annihilator robot first. We were having problems with having Ruiner targeting the people who were soaking the annihilation pools. The other change was to split the dps into 3 groups, and each group go after a different robot. The group going after Annihilator was weighted with more of the top dps players, to guarantee that robot died before the end.

It worked pretty well, as it minimized a lot of movement in that phase, and we got a kill a few attempts later.

Varimathras

This is kind of an easy fight, really only a challenge for the healers to keep everyone topped off before they have to run out of the group. It was really just a matter of getting everyone to recognize the two debuffs, and to stay in for Marked Prey, and run out for the Necrotic Embrace.

Coven of Shivarra

This is the fight we're working on. It's pretty crazy, with lots of abilities overlapping and coming in a random order. I think it will be our Avatar for this tier, as it hits a lot of our weaknesses with movement, positioning and dealing with multiple abilities simultaneously.

Loot-wise, I really need a helm, as I'm still using an i915 tier piece from Tomb of Sargeras. Other than that, everything is going well.

Fishing Legendary!

I got the Fishing Legendary Artifact Weapon, the Underlight Angler, today!

Coriel with the Underlight Angler at the Fountain in Dalaran

It wasn't that hard to get. I got 20 Arcane Lures from Conjuror Margoss (in the pool near Dalaran) and then went from zone to zone, fishing in the pools until I got all the rare fish. It didn't really take that long.

After that you fish up a Pearl from a pool, and then eventually get a quick scenario from Nat Pagle. Kill some murlocs, fish in some pools, kill a giant murloc, and then the skeleton gets fashioned into a fishing pole. Now that I think about it, it's kind of creepy.

I also found a useful macro for fishing:

#showtooltip
/cast [nomod] Fishing
/equip [noequipped:Fishing Poles, mod] Underlight Angler;[spec:1, mod] The Silver Hand;[spec:2, mod] Truthguard;[spec:3, mod] Ashbringer;

Normally, it acts as the fishing cast. But if you hold down a modifier button like Shift or Alt, it switches weapons between your fishing pole and the correct weapon for your specialization (substitute different weapons for different classes, the spec order is as listed in the specialization window).

I have to say that this took a lot less time than I was expecting. Perhaps there's a lesson there.

Edit: Just realized I made a mistake. It's not a Legendary, it's an Artifact Weapon with a talent tree. You have to fish up rare fish to get Artifact Power.

Progress in Heroic Antorus

With the holidays over, my guild has returned to Heroic Antorus. We've moved Normal Antorus off to an optional or with alts weeknight. We did leave Normal Argus alive, and killed him first, so that all of our heroic raiders would get the Argus trinket upgrade item.

This week was a pretty good week. We got first kills on Heroic Antoran High Command, Essence of Eonar, Portal Keeper Hasabel, and Imonar the Soulhunter.

Antoran High Command

I rather like this fight. It's not so bad once people get the hang of the pods. The only thing is that a guild coming from Normal might have only one or two people who regularly do pods. And now you suddenly need six, so it's possible to have a learning curve. Especially for the first guy into the Engineer's pod who has to drop a shield device asap.

I'm the healer who gets to activate the shields, which I find very fun for some reason. Wait for the voice line, activate the device, shield comes up and protects everyone.

Essence of Eonar

We actually had more trouble with this fight than with Antoran High Command, mostly because we kept getting mixed up where to go. Once we get the activation sequence down, it should become a lot smoother.

This fight is kind of annoying as a healer because everyone is taking constant damage, but people are in and out of range and line-of-sight all the time.

Portal Keeper Hasabel

Not much to say about this fight. I was the healer who went up with the portals. The first two portals were pretty easy, but the third one was very confusing with all the debuffs. To be honest, I don't really understand why our kill attempt was so much smoother than the preceding wipes. We must have fixed some mistake, but I have no clue what the mistake was.

Imonar the Soulhunter

This fight was pretty amusing. After working out the P1 and P2 kinks, we made several good attempts.  But after phase 2, as we were roughly in the middle of the bridge, Imonar would suddenly appear and start attacking. In the confusion, we kept losing half the raid. We were wondering if we weren't going fast enough, or if tripping one of the traps caused him to come after us, or even if it was bugged.

We were leaning towards bugged, because on some of our earlier attempts with a lot of early deaths people could get across the bridge fine. After looking through logs, the cause was finally tracked down. Our feral druid was wearing a mythic+ Ember of Nullification, which has:

Equip: Taking magic damage has a chance to apply Choking Flames to the attacker, silencing them for 2 sec.

So taking incidental damage while crossing the bridge triggered the trinket, and it interrupted Imonar from very far away. On the early attempts, the druid had died, so the trinket didn't come into play. Once the trinket was removed, Imonar died in short order.

All in all, a pretty good week. Hopefully next week we can get everything down quickly and get some decent attempts in on Kin'garoth.

Fishing in Legion

For a secondary goal, I've decided to take up fishing in Legion. Today, I did the fisher friend in Suramar. I rather like the reputation mechanic used.

For those who don't know, there are several fishing NPCs scattered around the world. To gain reputation with them, you need to fish up a special item nearby and turn the items in. Every so often, you will get a special item which summons a boss. Killing the boss gives you about 25 of the reputation item.

So what happens is that there will be raid going. Everyone fishes peacefully until someone summons the boss. Then the raid kills the boss and everyone gets the reward. The infrequent combat breaks up the monotony of just fishing. For the most part you're doing your own thing, but you come together as a group. There's also a sense of camaraderie with all your fellow fishermen.

It's a simple mechanic, but I think it works quite well. It's also a perfect fit for the fishing profession.

WoW Videos: Eternal Legend

I was wandering around YouTube, and I ran across this old video. I'm posting it in anticipation of WoW Classic.

It certainly drips with that Vanilla WoW flavor. It's probably the lack of shoulder pads.

One thing about this video is that it really gives a sense of many different smaller stories happening. A modern WoW expansion is really focused on one major story line. Now, Blizzard does a pretty good job with that one story line, but I kind of miss the old way where each story was somewhat separate from the others. I suppose Pandaria was the last expansion like this, at least before the Garrosh story kicked into gear.

A Hard Time With Secondary Goals

I'm currently having a hard time choosing a secondary goal in WoW. There's many options, but I'm not really enthusiastic about them.

My main goal is raiding of course, but that's reserved for a couple of specific nights a week.

Possible goals:

• Finish the mage tower challenge. I've tried it about 4-5 times. I usually get up to the point where you have to heal the ghosts, and then I die there. I'm really not used to healing outside of the UI. I probably should practice and finish this though.

• Get the Retribution and Protection hidden artifact weapon appearances. Retribution in particular is supposed to be an interesting quest line.

• Get the artifact fishing rod. I have leveled fishing to 800, so I could continue on and get the Underlight Angler.

• Get the PvP Prestige rank 1, or whatever they call it. I only have about half the PvP talents unlocked.

• Continue working on one of my other max-level characters. I have a mage, warrior, demon hunter and shaman at 110, but I haven't really concentrated on any single one. Instead I desultorily play one or the other at random.

• Level a new character. I'm waiting for 7.3.5 and all the changes to leveling before trying leveling again. 

The thing is that I don't really value one of these options more than the others. So I try different options and random, and don't really make any real progress.

What goals are you working on in WoW (or any other game)?

World PvP in Battle for Azeroth

One of the most interesting elements in Battle of Azeroth is that Blizzard is doing away with PvP and PvE rulesets for different servers. Instead, any character on any server will be able to flag or unflag PvP in a major city. Then when they go out into the world, they will be (seamlessly) put into a cross-realm zone where everyone has the same PvP state.

This is a really interesting way to handle PvP. Limiting changing state to major cities encourages people to try out world PvP. If they decide it's not for them, it's fairly painless to switch back.

There are also lots of interesting things Blizzard can do with this system. For example, they could ensure that each PvP cross-realm zone is balanced between Horde and Alliance. It won't be like modern PvP servers where one faction outnumbers the other ten-fold.

Blizzard could also eliminate ganking entirely. Simply put the max level players into a different cross-realm zone than the lower level players. Absolutely unfair fights simply can't happen without the players forcing it through grouping shenanigans.

About the only major loss I can see is that PvP fights at raid entrances will probably go away. It would be very likely that a group intent on raiding will unflag before heading over to the instance.

All in all, I think Blizzard's plan for PvP is a good one, and it will be very interesting to see how it plays out.

Battle for Azeroth Trailer

The next WoW expansion, Battle for Azeroth, was revealed at Blizzcon, and the cinematic trailer made its debut.

We make the standard observation that it is not as good as the Wrath trailer. But it's still quite good, and honestly, is a lot more understandable than the last couple of trailers. The graphics are excellent as always.

It's got some good moments for both factions. Sylvanas reminds everyone that she's the Banshee Queen and discovers Horde pride. Anduin, on the other hand, has a really cool helm, and realizes that healers win battlegrounds, thus putting him ahead of 80% of PvP players.

As for the theme of the expansion, way back in 2009 I wrote a post on The Nature of War, and I think it still holds up today. I don't think Blizzard can make this work without fully committing one side as the aggressor.

I do hope Blizzard doesn't make Jaina Proudmoore into the bad guy though, and butcher her character like they did to Fandral Staghelm. Her perspective is interesting, and I don't think it's wrong.