A Shifty World #5: Professions (tWW day 13)

Some days have passed, and Esmëriel's status has changed a little bit:

What Esmëriel did since last time:

• 30-40 HC dungeons as Balance.

• Some profession skill ups. But Alchemy progress is locked behind experiments and Enchanting mats are hard to come by, so slow going. Focus on flasks for Alchemy, and Rod/Mana Oil for Enchanting.

Most of the playtime sindce last time has been doing professions on alts:

• Esmënet done some herb/mine runs (leveled to 80 by doing that and the odd dungeon). Gone for wide knowledge spending, but short on Luredrops and Arathor's Spears, so will pivot Herbalism knowledge spending.

• Esmëralda is doing Tailoring and Inscription. Tailoring focus on Resourcefulness and Cloth drop yields, developing into Spell Thread/material knowledge. Inscription mostly Resourcefulness, developing into Staves and Missives - but spread a bit thin. Should have gone materials first.

• Esmë is doing Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting. Blacksmithing Resourcefulness, Shields and Tools - but the weird consumable they have to make makes doing any Blacksmithing a bit annoying. Jewelcrafting is flat out weird, and been coming to grips with it, but doing the prospecting tree has fixed it somewhat.

• Wutteät has been doing Skinning and Leatherworking. Leatherworking Resourcefulness and Tools, going into Mail a bit which was a mistake as I was looking into going Hunter when picking it. Skinning is a bit odd; the Sharpen Your Knife recharge of an hour makes skinning a couple of minutes every hour better than just spending 20 minutes when you have time.

• Stormlufser was late to the party with Engineering, and is going into Guns and Tools. But there's research like with Alchemy and I started late, so not gotten very far.

Professions has been the most fun part for me of the expansion, just like the start of Dragonflight was. The constant researching, finding things out, learning and so many useful crafts was so rare two expansions ago. I think they should have streamlined it a bit more instead of adding even more degrees of quality - do we really need 3 enchanting dust qualities? But eh, it's fun either way.

The raider question

So there has been a lot of thought over if I actually want to show up to raid as Balance Druid.

• Druid is the still the more practical. But I'm kinda feeling what Tettles said about boring and undertuned in his video about them. The fact that it's getting a rework in the first content patch is very telling. I will enjoy preparing for raid with Druid, not doing the raid.

• BM Hunter is just garbage at the moment, so it's out of the race. Can still do work orders with sparks and LFR for set chances and if there's balance changes before the next content patch where both the spec and a hero tree is getting big changes, I might at least play it a bit.

• Mage is opposite of druid. I really want to raid with it, but doing m+ and delves and overworld content is not tempting at all.

• The other raid group I raided with the past 2 raid tiers has changed raid days and raid leader, and it's looking like they will keep it inhouse as long as there's so many people around. I am considering swapping a character over to be able to sign as the raid days actually work for me.

So as of right now I haven't landed on the raider character yet. I guess it will boil down to doing LFR and see what getting groups is like on wednesday when season 1 starts what I play. And who I do it with...

A Shifty World #4: Completion (tWW day 4)

After the letdown day 3, day 4 started well with one bugged questline (Memories of the Sky) for the Hallowfall Sojourner achievement being fixed so it was marked as complete. The other questline I had issues with (Striking Steel) either had a wait time to do the last quest, or there was a bugfix that went live. So Loremaster was within reach...

Side quests

That was the questlog sorted out.

• I will mark the goblin ghost use mishap questline in Ringing Deeps as my favorite.

• With the worst being the Moira questline in the same place.

• There was a lot of them this time, but not too much so you drowned in them. Good spot for them to be in, I think.

• Not entirely sure what I think of the reward structure however. There was a single pair of boots on the Explorer track as a reward from all those quests, and I feel the number of items available are really low? You get a rep thing (once per warbands) per questline, and something else, and once the warband rep is gotten there's not much incentive to redo.

Delves

The two last Delves I missed now done, I forgot to take a screenshot of the achievement though.

• The two last delves I did was Underkeep and Skittering Breach. It was the two I enjoyed the most, as it had a fairly straightforward objective the times I did them, reminding me more of m+ than the others. Not sure how much variation there is in a delve, though, as I've done each once and the achievements listing different versions?

• As it stands, Delve usefulness in gearing will be decided by the keys for the bountiful chests it seems. The rewards without them doesn't amount to much.

• Leveling Brann does seem to have an impact - some of the Delve trash he didn't dent at level 1 is another matter at level 10. So there might be some farming needed besides own gear to make the Delves doable at an 8 reasonably fast?

Dungeons

I capped Weathered Habringer Crests, and wasn't very keen on just doing dungeons for valorstones, so I stopped for the week with heroics. Overall I don't think doing dungeons as Balance was enjoyable, so it was good to have an excuse.

End of day status:

One of the last quests I did had boots on the Explorer track as a reward, so with valorstone farm I can reach 580. Which also happened to be the raid requirement. Not a fan of that requirement. The fact that the raid leader posted it with "doable in an afternoon or two", and when confronted with this the entire tryhard early access part of the guild went "don't worry about it" made me remember Fighting Mongooses in Wrath of the Lich King... Nothing really changes with heroic raid guilds :)

Since I was done with overworld content (including the main quest, which was a snoozefest), I swapped out Herbalism for Enchanting. And freed up all the bagspace made up of quest rewards and BoEs I had collected while leveling. Didn't get me very far, but at least all the excess loot from m0s and m+ will be put to use once the season starts.

There's a buff coming on next reset with a 20% buff to Starfall and 12% buff to Starsurge - we'll see if it's enough to actually make me go through with raiding as Balance :)

A Shifty World #3: Dungeon Downers and Stupid Sojourning (tWW day 3)

After the overwhelming reset day with a lot of random activities, I had a more focused approach on day 3. Since Loremaster, clearing quest log, farming herbs and getting big gear upgrades from renown all came from doing more side quests and wandering around the overworld that's what I did. And some odd heroic to get some variation and valorstones.

Side quests

• Quality of side quests still variable. Some really good sad ones, the odd npc powertrip and some hopeless fetch quests.

• Getting the renown for gear was pretty easy, I managed to get all the veteran pieces today.

• Getting the Sojourner achievements for Loremaster was harder. Two of the Hallowfall ones were bugged for me; I have done them (and confirmed with youtube and wowhead) but they were not tagged for achievement. The other zones has quests I can't find, and I'm not in the mood to have to google them up just yet.

• Got Pathfinder, which was really nice. Herbing in the expansion has been a bit annoying since everything is so vertical, so if you have to land on the ground to pick a herb and run out of vigor you can't back up and have to wait. It was a nice quality of life.

• At the end of the day, my quest log is still mostly full. But I still have hope to clear it out before the season starts.

• Overall still happy with the quests, except the bugs for tracking things.

Dungeons

• Mostly stuck with Heroics today, and completed about 5. The amount of failed runs though...

• Problem 1: Loads of people are targeting loot in heroic with reduced ilevel drops on day 3 of them being available, and leaving if they don't drop. Usually that's a tank/healer duo that leaves the dps stranded and facing a new 10 minute wait after waiting 10 mins to get into a one boss dungeon run.

• Problem 2: Rage. Tanks pulling all trash between bosses. Tanks not pulling all trash between bosses. Not trading. Trading. Doing quest. Not doing quest. Not doing mechanics fast enough. Doing mechanics fast so they can't see. Literally everything causes someone to snap. I don't think I've ever had this large a percentage of dungeons runs have someone be mad, and even my ranked League of Legends games in silver was calmer.

• I simply don't like half the dungeons, so I am already weary of doing random HC. Not great.

• At this point, I am hoping Delves will save me from dungeons.

End of day status:

I think I am getting to whatever the ilevel requirement for the normal raids will be. I need some boots that is at least on Explorer track to drop from anywhere, and then I can just farm some Valorstones to pump my gear up to 580 if I need to.

I don't know about playing Balance so much though. Playing Druid is very practical for doing all the content, but the current Balance rotation is... odd. Might be that everything in dungeons die so fast normal rotation doesn't really apply, so can hope it gets better in raid, but seeing how all the Balance mains fled the spec I'm not so sure...