KSM, m+ "grind" and professions

After my holiday playtime was over, I surprised myself by going for putting in another month. Even if I had "done" all the things that had much meaning in the patch.

Most of the playtime has gone into Esmënet the Hunter, with some side content on Wutteät the Demon Hunter and Esmëralda the Mage.

m+

Esmënet ended up with KSM some weeks ago, after finally bothering to up my score in some dungeons I barely do. This was mostly done through pugging.

But one of the things that made me do another month was that my "primary" guild, Epiphany, is trying out a bunch of new things with the new officer setup. One of those things is a guild m+ night every week. I think that was the best thing Friends With Benefits did when I was there, so I thought I'd check out how it would end up here. Been part of 2 of those nights so far, with a mixed experience. It's been nice to play with the same bunch for a couple of hours, but the gap between people's interests and abilities and whatnot creates some friction just like in raids. I'll sign up for these as much as I can, and will prolly do as little pug m+ as I can until next patch.

I have somehow managed to not take a single screenshot from guild m+... Me and forgetting to take pics, name a more iconic combo :)

Raids

Esmënet and Esmëralda has both raided. Multiple times with the Exiles socials as the barrier to entry isn't really there. I asked if I could do current content raids with Epiphany until end of patch on Esmënet, so for now both characters has a night each a week. Both characters needs a trinket still, since I didn't raid for 2 months and the trinkets comes from the last 2 bosses, so never really farmed for gear.

Right now the Exiles raid is a little over an hours for reclears mostly, while Epiphany had to relearn Ansurek after the raid team shatter a couple of months ago. In general the Epiphany raid times are way less hassle (2 hours ish) but there's more demands, while the Exiles raid times are more of a hassle, more erratic on how much gets done but can just come if you are reasonably geared. Which is the reason I have ended up in more Exiles raids than Epiphany raids this season.

Professions

Done a bunch of profession stuff, but have focused on Leatherworking and Skinning, since Wutteät could craft stuff with the Enchanted Runed Crests for 619 gear you get from rep and Esmënet wanted stuff crafted with Enchanted Gilded Crests for 636 gear. Try to log in every day and do work orders and 10-15 minutes of skinning for the knowledge point drops, and starting to be able to craft the most important stuff at max rank. Hoping to be able to craft both mail and leather versions of boots, belt and wrists at max rank before season 2 starts.

Have also gathered a bunch of herbs and meat to prepare for consumable creation for season 2.

Current feelings about the game

• Tired of delves and m+ dungeons still, think the design in current stuff is annoying and/or dull.

• Raid is ok, but I've done it too much at this point.

• I like the profession system still, but how knowledge points works at the moment is predatory when it comes to farming me for daily logins.

• The fact that I don't have WoW commitments makes it a relief that I can log off for 2 weeks without anyone getting pissed off, but it also means all attempts at doing harder stuff is way more annoying.

For next time

• Take screenshots of guild m+ nights.

• "Finish" gearing Esmënet (All slots 626+).

• Disenchant all the crappy warbound gear stuff in the warband bank.

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...