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...

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 :)