Dragonflight Season 1 Recap

With the image-problem at the end of season 1, I never actually got around for a season 1 recap post, so here is a very late one.

Played with every spec. Again. Resto Druid being top spot without playing with anyone who mained one is a bit of a mystery, assume it's from pugging.

When the expansion started, I played Dom in all social groups. Which was most of my playtime at the start. The "House of Small Gods Static" from last season of Shadowlands, and the Skrike project. I can't remember how long either of those lasted, but after 1-2 months both groups had lost people to quitting the game or adjusting to playing more or less with other people. A very normal thing to happen for a new expansion. That however led to me playing my non-social characters (mostly Demon Hunter and Hunter), with the Hunter stealing the top gear spot in the end. Solo play won!

It took about 4 weeks to get to +16s. After KSM, the static changed to 3/5 people instead of 5/5. Played less and I didn't want to pug much over +16s, so the other static people went elsewhere. There was a long break during easter, and then Esmënet pugged the season best (a +18) in late april. Not a happy graph.

Dom had the sheer weight of keys done at the start of the season, with the static and the Skrike groups. I played Wutteät enough for KSM and the odd fun key, so a bit surprised the tally went so high. The other alts never really took off. Esmënet having 118 runs, Dominator having 108 runs and Wutteät having 95 runs isn't a very high number for me.

This was the "static" of me on Dom, Ruthevoker, Rae/Sea and Marowak. Clearly the meta. Seeing the season comps, not very strange Resto Druid was the spec I played with the most, assume most pug healers was a resto druid...

Shadowmoon Burial Grounds tops with 57 completed keys, Nokhud Offensive 35 completed keys takes last place. If I had done as many vault runs as I could, I would have just stuck with Shadowmoon. But that place was so boring after 30 runs I would have gone mad if I was doing keys every day with the same people. My best m+ dungeon spread to date, kinda happy with that.

This was the graph I wanted to see be smoother than they tended to be in Shadowlands. So that worked. Some progress from Dec 14 until Feb 22. It mostly stagnated due to the extended break that ruined the graph a bit, but it was a nice break.

Rae at 58 (~16%) and Maro (~8%) at 29 made up top and bottom. The Skrike groups nearly made Lava and Tara beat the "Small Gods static" but that screeched to a halt at some point too, so it ended up very even. It's a bit odd really. That season was the end of both the Small Gods static and the last proper remnant of playing much with people I knew from Twilight Hope. Good to have that pic to show for it, but dear god I am now feeling nostalgic.

One thing to note is that I did not do a single raid in Season 1. I churned through LFR on Esmënet and maybe Wutteät once, but that was it. I didn't really miss it. But at the same time, my entire network was gone and House of Small Gods was not mending after the end of Shadowlands drama so I went looking for something else.

In Summary

One of the goals I set for myself in Shadowlands was to cut down on premades. But not cut it out. So I wanted to have some people at least that I did 10%+ of my keys with. Rae, Lava, Sear and Tara were all over that goalpost. Which is the most important thing, really.

The lack of raiding and the much more reasonable amount of keystone time I had might make this seem like a more laidback season. But RIO obviously omits the fact I both conquest capped through Solo Shuffle and did a bunch of Random BGs on the Hunter for other endgame, and a staggering amount of profession related things. So it was more broad than most of my seasons. I also did some pet battles and questing and stuff. Turned into a right casual effort hardcore timespender I did.

It was an odd season. In hindsight I don't feel like I missed out on not raiding, except getting tier months after everyone else was not great since most of the tryharding happened before the catalyst opened. I also have more memories of people than I have of the content. Like one of the lunchkeys with Perse and Rae turning into a "who would play what instrument in this pug" discussion with the pugs after wiping on the bird boss in Academy instead of the usual toxic frustrations. All the strategy cooking in the Solo Shuffle with 4 BM Hunters and 2 Resto Druids in the lobby.

Think the issue mostly stems from how the m+ dungeon pool is done these days. Before DF I was really happy they would rotate in stuff. But not this way. Had they kept the 8 DF dungeons and added 2-4 old ones, fine. Having 5 months of Ruby Life Pools, Azure Vaults, Algethar Academy and Nokhud Offensive when they are new dungeons and it taking some months to adjust them to be ok, and then they are just gone again. While in season 3 for example the only DF dungeons are the DOTI wings, it's just absurd. As an m+ player, it's just that the professions and hub city is different while the majority of the content is old. What exactly did I pay Blizzard something like €100-€150 for here over the course of buying the expansion and playing the season?

Shadowmoon Burial Grounds is still my favorite dungeon in the game (or any mmo really) when it comes to atmosphere. Does it work well as an m+ dungeon except be a good vault filler? Not really.

if someone asks me 3 years from now what happened in DF season 1 I will say I had my last hoorah with some good online friends of mine. But I could not give them a favorite content piece from it. And I can't now either. Nor can I point at anything that was horrible. A first!

10.2 Faffing part 2: The rabbit hole of hunter pets

One of the things I wanted to do this patch was to update the hunter pet collection. Emerald Dream seemed to have lots of cool new prospects, and the other guild hunters were hyped up which rubbed off a bit on me.

How it's been

Ever since I started playing hunter "properly" in BFA first with Spiritblight and then Esmënet I picked a pet with Bloodlust as the main pet. Unless there was someone else with Lust in the group, where I would use a Spirit pet for the heal. And then have the second pet (which you didn't want in BFA iirc) just be something that looked cool. For something like 4 years, Esmënet has mostly used these two configurations:

Not at any point when actually playing I've thought "dear god this does not match at all". Mostly because the pets are obviously lost in the combat/spell effect clump so I don't see them much. The other is that whenever I play I don't really see my character much either. In Classic and so on, you watch your character and pet a lot more, but obviously then you don't have all these options for how you and your entourage looks.

Taming the new pets

While I tamed a few new pets while doing the Emerald Dream weekly quest grind, none of them really stuck with me. So I did a few laps of the place and picked up another 4-5 new ones. I ran into a few problems however...

These could not be tamed because I lacked the ability to tame them. Which after a petopia lookup requires me to do the Legion Class Hall Hunter quests and buy a book. This is fair, if there is something I really want I can just go and do it. Some pets however, was simply not tameable full stop (the ones with the druid bear form shape for example) which was a bit disappointing.

The second problem is more in line with what I am trying to fix - the look. The easy solution is simply tame two of the same pets so they match. However, I feel that is a bit boring.

The second is then finding some kind of combo that match. Just flying around taming things, does not easily translate into pets that match. If I just want a duck and an owl that match, that is not a straightforward thing to accomplish.

The lack of wholeness

I don't know enough words that deals with style to have a word that actually means anything to anyone. But besides the idea of having pets that match... The idea seems to be to match the transmog, your mount and your companion pet too round the whole thing out.

The only game I have ever done matching anything, was in Heroes of the Storm. Most skins (besides the basic ones) usually was dominated by the same colors, and most mounts had the same trend. So obviously you picked the mount color that matched your skin color.

So I decided to start with that. For the entirety of World of Warcraft, hunter class sets has been a disappointing affair, especially for dwarves. So I had to do something different to start it off, namely mix and match some red dominated stuff. To not get too complicated, I pretty much took the blood hunter "set" and added the crimson hood/cloak. For someone that has either used class sets and/or lumberjack shirts as the only things for 3 expansions, even that is a big leap :)

Very stylish. To add, I brought out the only store mount I ever bought (when the ingame store was still new), the Armored Bloodwing.

One of the reasons I picked it, was because bats has Bloodlust. And red/black bats were the least amount of work to get. I got a dreadbat from Revendreth and a regular bat from Spires of Arak.

Not entirely sure if I would say this "matches" looking at the screenshot. But I'll grade is as a good attempt.

Finishing thoughts

This went from "just tame some pets" to trying to dabble with unified looks. For people that care a lot of about transmogs, I am starting to understand that you don't need more game than collecting and sort out looks if that is something one is interested in.

I doubt I will ever outgrow just trying to match things (and not really managing that either), but I might spend some time going forward to at least try to get some alternative looks on other characters that isn't a lumberjack shirt or season 2 TBC Arena sets.

DF Season 3 part 3: Done with organized main characters play for the season

I completed all of Esmënet's goals the first four resets, which led to an almost immediate WoW burnout. Then came the holidays where I didn't really play much for weeks, which gave me a small dose of motivation. Which was needed to try to complete the the long haul Serwaswathan organized play goals...

Which I didn't really manage. I managed to keep a good attendance up to and including January 15th. Which was the date of the second guild HC Fyrakk kill, having achieved guild curve the week before.

After that raid night, I stopped attending organized raiding on Serwa, as showing up for 2x 2h 15m raids for no item rewards and trying to squeeze out some parses without power infusion and augvoker isn't going to do much. And at around this point, I stopped doing the organized m+ group with the two people I had played with for almost a year, Sea and Rae. Had kept doing saturday afternoon for that, which is an iffy time if you are doing real life stuff at all during the weekend.

But both of those things could have been overcome, if the season content was more fun. The raid was perhaps the easiest tier I've been part of. Curve week 4 and 2500+ rating on hunter same week, would have had in week 3 if I had bothered, will be hard to beat in any other WoW season. Both the dungeons and the raid has this very streamlined feel, with the danger coming from dying to unavoidable damage when you are undergeared for some stuff than anything else. The timers are lenient for doing 20s even with fairly lackluster gear and allows some wipes, especially on fortified. So you don't need to gear much unless you are doing CE and want to do over +25s it would seem.

The whole concept of mostly having old dungeons, and sticking to 8 per season is getting really tedious. Had the first 4 DF dungeons for 5 months. Had Atal and Waycrest for over 2 years as m+ dungeons on top of them being leveling dungeons both in BFA and SL. The cata dungeons were shit even in cata, so Throne of the Tides is being a contender for most tedious and annoying m+ dungeon so far. The fact that the DOTI dungeons brough back the Shadowlands design of constant breaks between pulls made them the least interesting dungeons of the expansion to me as well. Swapping the dungeons around constantly makes having portals a bit moot unless you are farming 20s each week for vault, and then it stops being the goal of the season anyway.

It's a bit meh that it ended up like this. But on the plus side, it cured me of the massive playtime problem that has haunted me since BFA season 4.

Looking at the actual goals of the season, I can make a summary:

Season 3 Goals

• Get Ahead of the Curve and 2500+ m+ score on Esmënet (BM Hunter). [Challenge from elsewhere].

• Give Serwaswathan (Frost Mage) an honest try in guild raids and m+. By honest mean try to improve, have 75%+ raid attendance the first 3 months and have at least 2 vault options every reset the first three months.

• DON'T play Dom or Wutteät (or other tanks) at a level with other people's mains. Especially the mythic raider mains that some of them have turned into!

Esmënet nailed the clear goals in 4 weeks and then I moved on.

Serwaswathan managed the attendance and vault stuff the first 2 months. Then my usual burnout happened and the third month ruined what was fine until then.

I played Dom with other people's mains in week 3, 4 and one time after new year's. I had some nights where I played with other people's alts, but at some point during those alt runs people swap to mains. And if I try to make a group where I dps, people become scarce.

The Alt Switch and Casual Parsing

One of the things that "shocked" me the most when writing this post, was that when I looked up the parses of Esmënet and Serwaswathan, Serwas was best on 7 out of 9 fights on HC. Since I hadn't gotten augvoker buffs nor power infusion on any those parses that I could see, I am not entirely sure how that happened. To be fair, Serwa had better overall iLevel, but still...

While I haven't really been much of a competitor in WoW when it comes to comparing myself with others, for some reason I get REALLY competitive against myself. Some time in SL Esmënet had better score than Wutteät, which led to me playing the game a lot for two weeks to gear and get score to remedy that. And this competitiveness triggered again here. While getting good purple parses on all bosses requires "pollution" from PI and Augvoker for me, I can however see how well I can do on Esmënet with similiar conditions. No external buff pollution, guild raid, same quality enchants and consumables.

I also have an underdog contender going; Navarim the Warlock. I attended the guild last week on it, and will do so again this week (and switch to Serwas for last 3 I am assuming). I have a standing invitation to play with the raid group I played Esmë in, so I might join those once one or both of Serwas and Esmë is kitted out so they can run their competition there. The question is: can Navarim beat either of the two mains on any boss before the raid tier ends? The raid comp of that raid is not static, so there might be pollution from augvoker, but I will check logs if that happened.

The race is one, here is how it starts:

From the point I started writing this post until now, the scoreboard has changed a little. Serwaswathan currently leads on Igira, Council, Larodar, Nymue and Fyrakk. So leading by a single boss.

I don't think Serwa will ever beat Esmë on Smolderon or Tindral. If Navarim is going to win on any bosses, I'm going to guess Nymue.

Poor Navarim had really low iLevel for his first set of parses, I am assuming they will jump quite a bit after tonight's raid.

But what happened to the tanks?

Since I no longer have any "premade" groups going, I don't feel obligated to play them all the time. So they are back to the early BFA ways of mostly doing low dungeons, and more of a "I wanna try this trick I have thought of or watched" rather than fill vault or gear up to push or be able to chill in whatever key level the group is doing.

So the time of the tanks dominating the RIO season in review graphs is over, long live the ranged dps!