DF Season 3 part 4: Ranking Dungeons and Parse Update

One tradition I've been bad at upkeeping, is ranking dungeons within a season. It was much easier when you had them for an entire expansion, as you only had to do it once...

"Reviewing" anything has lost all meaning, and given what I think of the dungeon pool this season I will do things in a different manner this time. Anyway, from best to worst:

8: Throne of the Tides

A Cataclysm

Of oily death and canines

Sink it to the depths

7: Everbloom

Let us pull a lot

Why nobody kick naturalist

Go outside and leave

6: Murozond's Rise

Tyr goes down real fast

Morchie dead with no leavers

Chromie bugging out

5: Galakrond's Rest

Nice big pull at start

If you do not die to Time

You die to blight orbs

4: Darkheart Thicket

You go straight ahead

Except someone pulled side group

Do not release please

3: Black Rook Hold

Camera struggles

Scrape by the arcanists well

Someone lusted Kur'talos

2: Waycrest Manor

It used to be great

Then they opened all the doors

Buffed Soulbound Goliath

1: Atal Dazar

The timer is good

I ran over a spider

Group cold as winter

To drop the silly attempts at haiku for a moment. The only dungeon in this pool that has actual route variation is Atal, just like back when. The fact that it is one of the three easy ones on top, and is the only one that has actual variation, has made it a go to again. Just like Freehold was last season. Not sure how good it is for me that 4+ year old dungeons I have done hundreds of times gets another long run.

Most dull set of dungeons (mostly due to them being old and used up) so far in my m+ career.

Parse update

Navarim:

The guild run this reset was small, which made our usual alt run nemesis Smolderon doable. A bunch of people swapped for Fyrakk, but I managed to sneakily stay on Navarim and got curve.

Somehow Navarim outparsed Serwa on Tindral. And would have outparsed Esmënet on Fyrakk if I hadn't died due to greed during CDs in p3 and got knocked off the platform by a tornado.

Bit unsure if Serwa is "topped" next reset or the next for final mage parserun or not. Esmënet isn't. At this point, it looks like Season 4 will happen in April (and last until August/September, then prepatch and expansion in September/October maybe?) - so if guild keeps raiding should get ~4 more parseruns in.

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.