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.

A Shifty World #7: Nerub-ar Palace, m+ and alts

War Within Day 32.

Nerub'ar Palace (aka The raid) has now been out for two and a half weeks, and m+ has been out for a week and a half. My playtime focus ended up all over the place, and so it is time for the first wall of text post of the expansion.

To reiterate, I had great hopes for the raid, and very negative towards m+. I also wanted to set up the possibility of playing one character as little as possible, so I wouldn't burn out before I got Curve.

So what happened in actuality?

Nerub'ar Palace

Esmëriel is currently raiding with Epiphany, which I've been in since start of season 2 Dragonflight. Managed to attend both (essentially one reclear night and one progression night, with the latter being more strict on enchants and whatnot) raid nights week 1/2 and and the reclear raid week 3.

Current status and thoughts:

• 8/8 Normal all three weeks. Silken Court was hard on the first thursday, but gear made it easy later in week 1.

• 1/8 Heroic week 1, 4/8 Heroic week 2 and 3. They might go further in prog on week 3, but I won't be there so doesn't count for me.

• Not sure about best pull % on Broodtwister, but ~40% I guess. Tended to wipe to parasites.

• Balance was in a bad state tuning wise at release. Has since been buffed twice and has made it closer to middle of the pack so it's okay. But the big meta specs are still out of control so it still looks bad. I changed my metric of keep raiding to "have blue parses on 3 bosses before current" instead of relative placement on meters in raid.

• One note about the raid is that the roster is overfull at this point in time. There were 31 signs for one raid so someone had to sit out, even. Bit surprised that in week 3 there's still loads of people around, pleasant surprise really.

• I have really enjoyed the raid so far. There are no really annoying bosses. The majority of the bosses are fun redoing and so far during heroic progress it feels like learning the fights feels more important than pure gear checks - gear just makes it easier since you skip more mechanics.

• Part of that comes from the raid teams, I think. I greatly enjoyed raiding with Epiphany in Dragonflight, and it's still great most of the time, but the social dynamic has changed a great deal after the influx of new people. Also raiding with the Exiles socials and Exiles alts makes both the social bit and the progress bit more varied. More perspective.

• While I normally abhor people that micromanage others, some of the people shotcalling/leading Exiles boss pulls have a gift. The same with the one in charge of the social raid being a gift when it comes to both being humble and be direct and whip the crew into shape. Curve guilds I've been in so far tends to have officers that treats members like they are 5. And treat the only way to clear things is to set iLevel, enchant and consumable demands, while some of the raid tactics are objectively wrong and call out other members for doing a thing wrong while they have been obtuse or not said anything at all about tactics. It's been a breath of fresh air, to be sure.

I played Keeper on Sikran and Princess, Elune's on everything else. I keep struggling with Keeper buttons a bit despite it being super simple, but playing a spec less than 10 minutes a week is not a lot of practice :) Might just play Keeper on everything besides Silken Court and Broodtwister since the adds on everything just falls over to the paladins and warriors in the raid.

m+

I don't really have to go on at length here - m+ is as bad as I was expecting and my interest in it dwindled after I spammed some in opening week to not have to worry about valorstones for upgrading gear anymore.

What I've been doing so far and thoughts:

• Tanked 4x +2s with pugs.

• Tanked 2x +2s and 1x +3 in a guild group.

• DPSed 2x +5s and 1x +2 in a guild group as Balance.

• The old dungeons were dull to begin with, with current tuning they are annoying on top of that. And the new ones aren't that much better.

• Add to this that Gilded crests drop from +9s and higher and Mythic track gear comes from +10 and higher vaults, meaning there's literally nothing for people that want to moderate keys anymore. Delve vaults are as a good and less hassle, and the raid has easy bosses to get 2 HC raid vault slots and 70/90 rune crests.

• So why do any?

Progress status after 3 raid weeks and 2 m+ weeks

• 611 Balance iLevel / 609 Guardian iLevel.

• 1311 m+ score. (LOL)

• 4/8 HC Nerub'ar cleared.

Alts

Not breaking bank on transmogs, that's for sure.

• Esmëralda is now in Exiles (raiding with the socials), and taken over as de facto main for now. Just more fun to play Frost Mage than Balance Druid. Currently sitting at 4/8 HC Nerub'ar with progress night week 3 left. Did a bunch of m+ in week 1 (12-14 somewhere) for valorstones, attended 2 raids a week and working on Tailoring and Inscription professions.

• Esmënet leveled to 80 by spamming dungeons and herbing/mining. Has attended 2 alt raids with Exiles besides doing herb/ore runs, and kept the Dragonflight luck and have 4-set and a god trinket before the characters I actually try on. Still boring, but after going from 6% to 12% Haste at least it's not miserable anymore.

• Esmë got a few levels simply by doing Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting, and 2-3 levels by doing random Normal dungeons with rested. The material cost of crafting the spark items with Blacksmithing is insane at the moment, so no rush to get to 80 to get myself broke crafting my own gear.

• Stormlufser had to level a bit since one needs rusty parts to invent stuff with engineering (which gives you random recipes), so mined some EZ nodes and got drops in dungeons to keep the whole thing going. Still haven't gotten the recipes I want, which is profession tool stuff for my other characters... So I will still need to log in and click a button once a day and do some random PVE stuff now and then to be able to click that one button.

• Wutteät has leveled to 76 purely by skinning and leatherworking. And some discovery xp, I suppose. Leatherworking (together with Inscription and Tailoring) has the most tight knowledge trees and no hideously expensive materials (at least so far) so I've enjoyed just skinning some and getting better at the trade. But no rush to get to 80.

• Esmënehr was my highest level Timerunner, and I'm not sure about the name which is why I never spent the level boost on the character. It would be handy to simply get another character to 70, live in Dornogal and get into Thaumaturgy (Alchemy) and Designated Disenchanter (Enchanting) to make the knowledge point strain a bit less bad for those professions.

A Shifty World #6: Dungeons and Delves

War Within day 21

This week saw the release of the first War Within season, where Blizzard had made the choice of not having m+ be released at the same time as a first since it's inception I think. So biggest change up in how things were done since Legion, maybe?

Dungeons

New this time was that the season 1 dungeons were also the dungeons you can do in Heroic and Mythic 0, instead of the new ones. I have already moaned a lot about how shit I think the dungeon pool is, but better to show in numbers:

• Did 4 m0 as Guardian Druid with a guild group (might have had a pug in this Mists one).

• Did 6 HC dungeons, 4 of which had a Tank bonus I did purely for the gold income.

For a first week of dungeoneering, I think that speaks for itself compared to my normal volume. The fact that m0 also gives bad gear again - and really bad compared to Delves - undoes all the good changes they did before the Fated season in Dragonflight. It's dead content even when m+ isn't open.

Delves

One of the big selling points for the expansion was Delves - finally the solo player should get their own progress path.

So obviously the optimal way of doing them was to go in with 5, and you could do bountiful tier 8s to get champion track gear, hero track vaults and runed crests. Meanwhile if you do them solo as a tank you get hit for more damage than when going with 5.

They have had reworks for Delves twice already the first reset. Central point I think is that the developers still haven't decided how they want them to work... On top of trying to balance the content for solo players of all specs on top of groups up to 5. Good luck to them to work that problem out :D

• Done 4 tier 8s with Rae and Sea.

• Done 4 tier 7s with Rae.

• Did 2-3 tier 7s solo.

Delves also happened to be one of those gotcha moments in game design. If you used your coffer keys week 1 or 2 you got short changed for gear for doing the same content with a limited resource spender.

I didn't mind them, but also I didn't enjoy them much. Main selling point is that there's dungeon content I can do alone, so I hope they develop them more down that route.

Overall both Dungeons and Delve ended up like expected, not sold on the experience for this season. Raid would have to be the saviour...