The Return of Esmënet (and Curve)

After 55 days on a break, I ended up clicking "play" on the launcher to do some m+ on hunter.

After playing big crpgs and 4x games for my digital gaming fix during the break, my brain ended too fried in the leadup to christmas to do anything but be a good WoW zombie.

Since the return of Esmënet I did small batches of m+ each day, with a big batch on christmas day of all days (all trains nationwide held up by IT issues leaving me stranded). Going from 0 rating to 1950ish in about a week. The big batch made me remember very fast the dungeons aren't very fun.

I also randomly stumbled over a HC clear run in my mage's guild that I managed to get a spot in, and was promply humbled on the meters since a bunch of mythic raider mains was in that raid. But hey, random curve is a good thing.

There was a patch with a new special ring grind (like season 1 of Dragonflight had) with player hostile grinds and lots of bugs - they changed the hostile grind fairly fast but the bugs haven't been shaken so easily. Old Blizzard avoided doing patches for holidays for a reason, memo to current management...

The big thing that came with the patch wasn't the content - rather adjustments to crests. They increased crest drops based on key difficulty (so a +7 gives 6 more runed crests than a +4 for example), decresed the exchange rate (upgrading crests costs 45 instead of 90) and the cost of getting a gilded enchanted crest was reduced from 90 to 60. Making a max level craft go down in cost from 540 runed crests to 180 runed crests, a third of what it cost most of the season. Add to that crest cap is removed, and gearing is suddenly not a brick wall for people like me.

Meaning that if I cant reliably get into timed +8s for gilded crests, I can do double the amount of +7s and get a max level craft still. Or even spam +4s, but then needing 15 timed runs. Or if you do a full HC raid clear, you get enough crests for a craft just from that.

So I'll chomp away at trying to get ~630 iLevel before next patch, and get KSM while at it.

A Shifty World #9: 20th anniversary patch and break 1 starting

War Within Day 60.

This reset saw the release of a bunch of 20th anniversary events. Classic dungeons like Zul Farrak in Timewalking, a BRD raid and a lot of collect-the-things events like being able to get a HD remaster of tier 2 sets.

And the most bugs and horrible balancing WoW has ever had.

I was already annoyed and bored of playing Balance druid, and getting a more dull rework and a damage nerf on top was just the final straw. So I am dropping the spec, and will go on a break from the game for a while. This often happens ~8 weeks into a patch, so this is the least surprised pikachu face ever.

Nerub'ar Palace

I attended 3 out of the 4 raids the last 2 weeks, there hasn't been any new boss kills. One week it was decided not to even try Ansurek, the week after we were more or less learning phase 1 for 2 hours.

m+

Pugged a single dungeon to get another vault slot, that was it. There's been very few guild m+ runs outside the normal static groups, and I've missed the times they happened - Delves have mostly taken over as an activity for people to get more vault slots as they don't require 5 people with correct roles.

So overall it's not so weird things got boring, some stagnation going on on top of Balance getting more boring.

Esmëralda

Have kept up my 100% raid attendance on Esmëralda. The wednesday raid nights has kept being good, but the sunday ones have been so inconsistent it has felt like a mistake showing up 3 weeks in a row now. We killed Court on sunday after having it on 0.3% 3 resets ago, so it was nice to get progress again.

Managed to join a guild low m+ group once, and it was nice to play and be on voice with 5 rather than the big raid groups. I still really dislike the m+ dungeon pool so I haven't tried to get into a group again since.

General Thoughts

• Since the initial release with all the exploring and profession choices mattering, the only thing I've liked this expansion has been the raids. I am now bored of them, so there is nothing to keep me around. But I'll say it was worth buying the expansion because of the raid, as I have enjoyed that a great deal.

• The lack of QA is showing so much, all the time. There's been big class bugs constantly, game breaking bugs in dungeons, horrible balancing, horrible tuning and generally the opposite of everything Blizzard was famous for in the 90s and 00s. There's no polish here.

• The biggest hurdle of coming back later this season, is that I'm at the brick wall. If I want to gear further, I need to pug/group up for +8s and +10s in m+, which I have little interest in on current characters. Nothing else is available.

So will I PB break length this time, or will this be another typical me break? People have already started betting, and somewhere between 8 and 16 days is the goto, let's see how good Blizzard is at tempting me back this time...

A Shifty World #8: Frustration and Friction

War Within Day 46.

Two weeks has passed since last update, and as usual my interest has waned. And turned into frustration. So what have I done during the frustration times?

Nerub'ar Palace

Esmëriel is still raiding with Epiphany. The raid team is still over 30, but some people are always gone, so nobody had to be benched the last two weeks.

• 8/8 Normal week 4. Normal was dropped for week 5, not even a shortcut run. Assume they keep it for an alternative if Ansurek dies fast on tuesday, or they get nowhere?

• 7/8 Heroic week 4 and 5. I made the progress raid night week 4 due to RL cancellations and we went directly into HC week 5. Princess, Brood and Court were all messy but there's some people that parse orange and pink in the guild which helps.

• Did not make it past phase 1 on Queen the few pulls we had in week 4. The heal check seemed to be pretty hard. Still seemed fun.

• Playing Balance Druid is getting boring. With the melee getting better gear and all the add phases being about burst, all the adds just die before I can do much. So I have started just playing Keeper single target on every boss. And I don't like playing Keeper much, so it gets dull.

• Overall the raid has ended up not being much fun in the long run, which might be related to me showing up to raid 5 nights a week the first 2 weeks.

I'm having the usual raid burnout, and there will be a break around week 8. Will see if I can pick up curve, and if I end up with a 2 week break or longer this time.

m+

I didn't do many keys the last two resets. Last reset I did 3 with guildies, this reset I have done 0. The combination of annoying dungeons, annoying tuning and taking away the reward "stair" of Dragonflight and putting all the rewards at +9/+10 (crests, mythic track gear, portals, KSH achievement) so there is no carrot to do things in steps to lure you further in makes it a whatever experience.

Esmëralda

Esmëralda has kept up 100% attendance, but missed like 30 minutes one night. The reclear nights are still normal, there are still fresh toons that show up. The prog night has attendance issues, needing increasing amounts of pugs. Which is a murder on the normally nice atmosphere and has seen signups plummet even further. So we shall see how that unfolds. Raid prog has stagnated and at the moment Curve seems far away.

General thoughts

The current game experience is pretty lousy, like expected. Mostly the problem seems to be different kinds of people run into a progress wall:

• The solo players gets to tier 8 delves, and dont really get extra stuff over that except crossing of the tiers and the endboss once.

• For raid/m+ people, the more laidback puggers can just do normal raid and +4s with no goal and get the same gear in the end as people that do heroic raid and +7s with the goal of curve and ksm. If you are behind, getting into 9s and 10s is not easy.

• For people that try a bit hard, doing +12s and the back half of the mythic raid is a wall.

• I think they botched the reward structure and the tuning structure at the same time, and missed the goalposts they put up by a lot. They have started fixing, but only by a bit, and that is pissing off the gatekeepers by a lot too. So we shall see how this ends up.

• I really don't like the hero talents. I hope they are gone in Midnight.