Dragonflight Season 3 Recap

Raider IO was making me twitchy waiting for the Season 3 recap, but it came out in the end... After season 4 started maybe?

Another season of playing with everything! Shocker, affliction clenched last spot for specs played with again..

Esmënet rush at start, then got all content I wanted done (KSH + Curve). Then I did vault m+ and raided with Serwa for weeks as I attended raid as mage that led to a Frost Mage lead. Esmënet had a resurgence after Serwa got curve, and took back the lead after getting all portals plus some score change. Dominator did not at any point have the lead which is new for the expansion. In fact, none of my tanks got that well geared in Season 3.

The amount of bosses killed was about double the amount killed in season 2. The guild raid had farm runs for longer, and I also raided outside guild which was the cause of this. I doubt these numbers will be repeated unless they go down the rickety path of doing big m+ changes that backfires.

HC Fyrakk top with 20 attempts for progress. Considering that was during week, it puts the raid difficulty in a weird light. I doubt that short a progression in non-fated season will happen again.

The season 2 tracker was bugged, so I don't know if this season had longer progression time than that. But I would assume so, but I don't know how they count this. (First boss kill until final boss kill? Start of season until boss kill?)

The most unstable "vault" season yet. The first 20 was on Dominator in a premade I set up a couple of saturdays, then score runs on Esmënet later on made up the rest of the 20s and over. Random alts and some aspect crest runs in between makes up for a lot of variation on key levels.

Down from 8 specs in season 2, and same number of specs as season 1. Windwalker Monk and Demonlogy Warlock replaced Guardian Druid and Restoration Shaman. I am pretty happy that I reduced the amount of classes played, but unhappy I did not increase the amount of specs played.

Played the same premade comp for two sessions of a few hours, which was enough to make it the most played comp. The double havoc as part of the comp has been the same for 4 seasons in a row now I think...

Waycrest tops with 113 runs, Galakrond bottom with 38 runs. The rest ~50 runs per.

I know Waycrest very well and it was very easy to get into keys there, which explains the amount. Galakrond was my most successful key in terms of completion rate and timing rate, but I dislike the DOTI dungeon setups (having the portal here and there, RP breaks and "set piece" encounters).

Sad part is this continues the trend of becoming the "Freehold only" guy of my random BFA horde guild instead of having all dungeons be about the same to prevent burnout I am attempting to do.

Lowest amount of weeks with progress this expansion. Exactly 200 less keystones than in season 2 and 133 more than in season 1.

The reduction in progress weeks is much like the dungeon diversity not a good development. Reduced keystones is a good thing, and if I can drop down to season 1 key levels and start finishing backlog of great games like BG3 and other marathon games with the freed up time. Or even watch Stranger Things (I fell off after season 2 of that show)...

And so the most depressing part. Rae tops with 30 runs (~6%) and Fenaii is fifth with 17 runs (~3%). Further dropping Rae from 16% of season 1 and 8% of season 2.

I raided a lot more with RaeSea that makes up for this in some regard. And at least I still keep in touch. At this rate RaeSea will take over the longterm constant m+ teammates for real time, but I don't think I will do enough premade m+ for the rest of WoW's existance to overtake the TH crew. But at some point I will have to count...

Hodgei would have been top if he wasn't an altoholic. And other people than Nighed and Fenaii I played with more - but people that stick to one character always does best on these kinda lists. 3 out of 5 are guildies and there are no alts on the list, which I also think is a first since I left TH 2 years ago. So it took some time for change to happen :)

Summary

This was my peak PUG season, playing at odd hours, erratic frequence, long breaks during the season and raiding a lot more than I usually do. And I think I have done enough of that pug spam now.

I am happy with:

• That I played less keys than last season (but bad content the reason, not self discipline).

• Reached all my character specific goals on Esmënet.

• Properly tried to do progress raiding and parse raiding for once. Including raiding with RaeSea a tier, even if my attendance for that raid was rather bad.

What I didn't like:

• Wutteät, Navarim and Ihnanna I played more out of alt-habit rather than wanting to do anything with them. Could have been skipped and read a book with that time instead.

• Having so few runs with people I know compared to total runs. A few days into Season 4, I have 2 people beating 4th and 5th place on this season's played with list. Which puts things into perspective.

• Rushing through content fast, with very few progress weeks as a result, resulting in the feeling of hitting the ceiling and losing the motivation to play.

DF Season 3 part 6: Season 4 Date Announced and the nailbiting end of the Parse Project

So season 4 or Dragonflight Fated Season has been announced for April 24th. Obviously everyone wants to do something else instead until then.

Being a fated season, it is just the same raids all over again. With some new weekly quest to get a Spark for crafted gear (a redo of the season 1 one as far as I can tell), the m+ pool being what it should have been in season 1 (the 8 DF available-at-release dungeons) and a test run of the slimmed down dungeon difficulty/keystone scaling. And nothing else. For x amount of months. They skipped the raid affixes this time as far as I can see too.

I am not "hyped". While I want to do the DF dungeons more (especially the 4 that were in season 1 which was both short and I didn't bother trying to learn them properly) and the first raid, paying sub money to regrind the same gear in the same content but have to swap raid every week is kinda frustrating. We will if I manage to not be a dumb customer again.

The Parsing Finale

So luckily I had time (and interest) enough in playing I managed to get in a final raid on Esmënet so we could finally find out which of my characters is the best character. Serwaswathan was in the lead, but after looking at several 15k-25k Fyrakk parse improvements the time we killed it and multiple bad boss mechanic rngs. So this was the most exciting raid personally for me for the season... I even managed to dodge seed carriage on Fyrakk for equal terms despite two carriers being absent.

Without further ado...

The list:

*Esmënet wins Gnarlroot with ~18k dps.

*Serwaswathan wins Igira with ~1k dps.

*Serwaswathan wins Vocoross with ~1k dps.

*Serwaswathan wins Council of Dreams with ~45k dps.

*Serwaswathan wins Larodar with ~10k dps.

*Esmënet wins Nymue with ~3k dps.

*Esmënet wins Smolderon with ~28k dps.

*Esmënet wins Tindral with ~56k dps.

*Esmënet wins Fyrakk with ~1k dps.

Esmënet wins 5 bosses to 4!

(As an aside, Navarim wasn't close on any parse in the end)

What I picked up from this project

Besides the obvious statistical humbug when n = 1, there's some other stuff that is interesting here for someone that never looked at raid parses before last raid. (I had to look up BFA raids on my old hunter to compare the best % numbers once I started, however.) That stuff is:

*Some of the bosses are very obviously made to cater to some kind of dpser. On council, frost mage was really good (and elemental shaman) while for melee and BM hunter Smolderon was really good.

*Bosses like Gnarloot and Tindral the timing of things decide all the dps. Gnarloot end right after vulnerable phase and you have little competition for add cleave damage? Massive parse. Can you snipe the Tindral root cleave and dps the boss shield while others pick up the damage amps? Massive padding. As it were, Esmënet had better runs for both of those.

*Bosses with minor amount of adds like Igira, Larodar and Fyrakk favours the ones that can do great single target while having some aoe burst now and then in the same spec (like frost mage) while the ones that can't (like bm hunter) has to grind their teeth if it's a pull worth doing aoe on.

*Sheer luck plays a large part. I've had lots of pulls with massive increases in the bank on Nymue and Fyrakk, but then it's a wipe and the bad pulls has just been sitting there the entire raid tier. But sheer luck can be offset with increasing n. If I had raided on both characters all season, I am sure Serwa would have won this.

*Then there's obviously what the pure parse doesn't tell (taking away the luck bit, which obviously isn't factored in either) - Serwa brings Arcane Intellect and if you factor in the extra damage from the casters and healers (although that isn't much in our raid) it's not a stretch to say it would make Serwa win Nymue and Fyrakk if it was counted in. Esmënet was just another hunter in an ocean of hunters, and the raid would have Hunter's Mark whether or not I was there.

*At the end of the day though, this might be the most useless part of the game? DPS in reclears is nice because you can do it faster obviously, but if you take doing mechanics right (especially the ones doing chores like the watering on council or seeds on Fyrakk) and doing ok dps that's what gets progress and has a point. Not getting 480+ ilevel and being fully gemmed 2-3 months after first kill and know what to pad on.

I'll try to go back to not caring now.

m+ Score update

Esmënet managed to get a score bump with some lunch keys. The amount of wasted time on disbands has increased a lot over +20s, and most of it consists of tanks pulling stuff the group can't handle, swear at someone, do it again, leave when it didn't work out the second time either. People are so genuinly angry at this key level too. Right now I'm thinking whatever dungeon I end up getting the first +22 in wins the patch, and that's me done for the season.

DF Season 3 part 5: Review and Parse Update

This week has the final patch of the season. And for once Blizzard blindsided just about everyone: they added a (Pirate) Battle Royale mode. I get the impression it's a time limited thing.

It's not my cup of tea. But adding more things to do in a game is never a bad thing. It's prolly fun for the more competitive minded WoW people, especially the ones that don't want to do the grind for gear and stuff. At the same time, a lot of the gameplay isn't very WoW, like skillshots and no autoattacks. So will be interesting to see what the verdict is once the event is over.

If you are a collector in retail WoW and get FOMO easily, the grind to get every transmog, pet and mount here is plain disgusting. Especially for a time-limited event.

With that out of the way, it's time to review the season content, the stuff that affected me at least.

The Things That Worked

The in-season gearing

Just as I enjoyed the crest system last season, I enjoyed it this season. They made some adjustments so I couldn't get BIS by playing it the fast and easy way by crafting stuff every other week. I can understand why they made adjustments, but it also makes crafting more pointless again which I don't like. I'd prefer a complete loot overhaul after 4 expansions with the same haste/mastery/crit/vers gear to something more exciting, but as long as that isn't happening, this might be as good as it will get.

The world content not getting in the way

Another season with no AP, no Torghast, Corruption and the like you have to do to do the thing you want.

The raid (on heroic)

I enjoyed the raid a fair bit. It was scaled so Curve guilds neither could clear it week 2 nor end up spending 12+ weeks and 100+ wipes on last boss to clear it. It might have been on the easy side, and some bosses other than Smolderon could've been a bigger hurdle to make it more exciting on progress. But for me that is more of an m+ enjoyer, I enjoyed the raid more than the m+ this season. Which doesn't happen often.

The Things That Didn't Work

The season-to-season gearing

This was the season the meaning of having gear from the last season became utterly pointless. The "Veteran" tier of gear you could get as drops from +2s, LFR and Emerald Dream/Open World content was a big upgrade over mythic raid and the best crafted and m+ gear from Season 2. While you are always changing out gear fast with a new season, being able to swap out your BIS gear in the offseason is a bit too much for me. It also kills the meaning of gearing up topping up your main once you have completed the content you want (Curve and KSM for me). Or gear up alts in case you want to use them next season, as you'll have better gear in 2 resets from open world the season after.

The m+ dungeons

There were two things that made the m+ dungeons a letdown this season. Primarily it was the 6 out of 8 old dungeons in the rotation that made for "I've done this too much before". Combined with the 2 DOTI dungeons being in my opinion the worst DF dungeons, it made for a dull experience. The other detractor was the scaling and adjustments. You were cruising through all that could be considered low and mid tier dungeons (between +2 and +14). You could wipe a bunch and still time the dungeon for most key levels, and then at one key level you just couldn't live some pulls. Or it would turn into a 1+ hour wipefest. Routes didn't matter much either, as every dungeon was mostly move press W - except Atal which saved the day AGAIN. Doing mechanics either didn't matter or were very punishing. You were invincible as a tank except for a small amount of pulls. DPS had to mind their defensives, health, LOSing and all the stuff that is mostly expected of the tank more than the tank had to. Healers didn't have to heal large parts of the dungeon, only to run into sudden BLOW ALL CDs AND YOUR OWN DEFENSIVES to get through the pull. If you didn't know about it beforehand, you have no chance. And healers being in such high demand, lots of them were the reason some runs disbanded because they could just jump straight into key levels you have to have learned, but they hadn't.

The world content (Emerald Dream)

Get dewdrops -> click on plant a few times during 3 minutes - > follow tree around - none of it without any risk, just boring. The campaign quest storyline didn't do much for me either. Upside was that getting the crafting ingredient was fairly fast to get. But altogether a forgettable experience.

The Parse Update

So I did a full clear with Navarim three resets ago, and Serwa two resets ago. Most of the pulls were pretty much as expected when it came to improvements and which weren't gonna be. With the one exception being Fyrakk on Serwa, where I had 10-15k parse increases every pull for 5+ pulls, but we wiped due to seed management. And then I died on the first intermission during CDs after using all my defensives, and then I wasn't CRed for 30-40 seconds. Obviously that ended up being the kill that reset, and it wasn't a parse improvement to put it that way. Which reminded me that playing for parses is pointless. And I only get mad where I normally wouldn't be, so I stopped the project.

There is a slight chance I will sign up for a raid after easter so Esmënet will get a chance to redeem the hunter as my expected best performer. Or I might play Pathfinder 2nd edition every thursday and never raid again, it will be rough to decide.

My biggest takeaway from the reclear parsing is how much correct timing of cd use, killtime and what the rest of the raid is capable of. Having raid buffs like DH for 5% more spell damage is an obvious thing. But stuff like how much AOE burst the rest of the raid does on Gnarloot, Igira, Larodar, Tindral and Fyrakk has massive impact on how well you can pad on the adds. If Gnarloot dies right after the vulnerable phase and you are single target, and if Gnarloot dies right after add spawns and you don't have aoe burst, the results are massive for both parse and how Details look.

Having n = 1 for a competition like this then doesn't really give any information. Competing against myself the entire season and using all consumables, and then compare performance on first kill and best parse at end of season would be a more informative way of doing it. But raiding 10-20 hours a week and doing the same amount of m+ (and other things that boosts character power) equally is not something I want to do. Maybe I could have in Shadowlands or BFA (to some extent I did in BFA, but never looked at a parse, ever), but I have way too much WoW fatigue now.

m+ pushing

Since I gave up on parsing, I decided to test myself a bit on Esmënet by doing some m+ for score again. It was pretty fun up to and including doing +20s. +21s and over I got personal experience of how frustrating puging can be.

The amount of time spent on getting a group that would time the dungeon is massive. One evening, I was 75 minutes in groups that never actually started a dungeon.

The one +21 I've gotten into this patch that finished, had two rat characters and two people who did not know mechanics (including tank that missed count by skipping as much as possible, as if he had never been in Waycrest before) - and depleted, but only by a little.

A couple of +21s was disbanded shortly into the dungeon because someone got mad at someone else doing things a certain way. It's just massive timesink to get up to 10 score, and no other benefit.

So the amount of time spent on crap that is not trying to improve myself, improve score or get gear is very high. And not worth it. But I already know this, which is why I am down to 1 week a season of trying this.

So at this rate Esmënet is looking like will be my best character this season again, with this:

At this point, I have better score than last season. But have dropped 40 spots on the ED/Terenas Hunter rankings.

I generally think I could do +22s for most dungeons (maybe some +23s), making this one of the worst seasons for getting score that reflects where I think my character is and my ability to play it.

Having had a set group would have solved that. And that is what everyone always told me in Legion, BFA and Shadowlands :)