This week has the final patch of the season. And for once Blizzard blindsided just about everyone: they added a (Pirate) Battle Royale mode. I get the impression it's a time limited thing.
It's not my cup of tea. But adding more things to do in a game is never a bad thing. It's prolly fun for the more competitive minded WoW people, especially the ones that don't want to do the grind for gear and stuff. At the same time, a lot of the gameplay isn't very WoW, like skillshots and no autoattacks. So will be interesting to see what the verdict is once the event is over.
If you are a collector in retail WoW and get FOMO easily, the grind to get every transmog, pet and mount here is plain disgusting. Especially for a time-limited event.
With that out of the way, it's time to review the season content, the stuff that affected me at least.
The Things That Worked
The in-season gearing
Just as I enjoyed the crest system last season, I enjoyed it this season. They made some adjustments so I couldn't get BIS by playing it the fast and easy way by crafting stuff every other week. I can understand why they made adjustments, but it also makes crafting more pointless again which I don't like. I'd prefer a complete loot overhaul after 4 expansions with the same haste/mastery/crit/vers gear to something more exciting, but as long as that isn't happening, this might be as good as it will get.
The world content not getting in the way
Another season with no AP, no Torghast, Corruption and the like you have to do to do the thing you want.
The raid (on heroic)
I enjoyed the raid a fair bit. It was scaled so Curve guilds neither could clear it week 2 nor end up spending 12+ weeks and 100+ wipes on last boss to clear it. It might have been on the easy side, and some bosses other than Smolderon could've been a bigger hurdle to make it more exciting on progress. But for me that is more of an m+ enjoyer, I enjoyed the raid more than the m+ this season. Which doesn't happen often.
The Things That Didn't Work
The season-to-season gearing
This was the season the meaning of having gear from the last season became utterly pointless. The "Veteran" tier of gear you could get as drops from +2s, LFR and Emerald Dream/Open World content was a big upgrade over mythic raid and the best crafted and m+ gear from Season 2. While you are always changing out gear fast with a new season, being able to swap out your BIS gear in the offseason is a bit too much for me. It also kills the meaning of gearing up topping up your main once you have completed the content you want (Curve and KSM for me). Or gear up alts in case you want to use them next season, as you'll have better gear in 2 resets from open world the season after.
The m+ dungeons
There were two things that made the m+ dungeons a letdown this season. Primarily it was the 6 out of 8 old dungeons in the rotation that made for "I've done this too much before". Combined with the 2 DOTI dungeons being in my opinion the worst DF dungeons, it made for a dull experience. The other detractor was the scaling and adjustments. You were cruising through all that could be considered low and mid tier dungeons (between +2 and +14). You could wipe a bunch and still time the dungeon for most key levels, and then at one key level you just couldn't live some pulls. Or it would turn into a 1+ hour wipefest. Routes didn't matter much either, as every dungeon was mostly move press W - except Atal which saved the day AGAIN. Doing mechanics either didn't matter or were very punishing. You were invincible as a tank except for a small amount of pulls. DPS had to mind their defensives, health, LOSing and all the stuff that is mostly expected of the tank more than the tank had to. Healers didn't have to heal large parts of the dungeon, only to run into sudden BLOW ALL CDs AND YOUR OWN DEFENSIVES to get through the pull. If you didn't know about it beforehand, you have no chance. And healers being in such high demand, lots of them were the reason some runs disbanded because they could just jump straight into key levels you have to have learned, but they hadn't.
The world content (Emerald Dream)
Get dewdrops -> click on plant a few times during 3 minutes - > follow tree around - none of it without any risk, just boring. The campaign quest storyline didn't do much for me either. Upside was that getting the crafting ingredient was fairly fast to get. But altogether a forgettable experience.
The Parse Update
So I did a full clear with Navarim three resets ago, and Serwa two resets ago. Most of the pulls were pretty much as expected when it came to improvements and which weren't gonna be. With the one exception being Fyrakk on Serwa, where I had 10-15k parse increases every pull for 5+ pulls, but we wiped due to seed management. And then I died on the first intermission during CDs after using all my defensives, and then I wasn't CRed for 30-40 seconds. Obviously that ended up being the kill that reset, and it wasn't a parse improvement to put it that way. Which reminded me that playing for parses is pointless. And I only get mad where I normally wouldn't be, so I stopped the project.
There is a slight chance I will sign up for a raid after easter so Esmënet will get a chance to redeem the hunter as my expected best performer. Or I might play Pathfinder 2nd edition every thursday and never raid again, it will be rough to decide.
My biggest takeaway from the reclear parsing is how much correct timing of cd use, killtime and what the rest of the raid is capable of. Having raid buffs like DH for 5% more spell damage is an obvious thing. But stuff like how much AOE burst the rest of the raid does on Gnarloot, Igira, Larodar, Tindral and Fyrakk has massive impact on how well you can pad on the adds. If Gnarloot dies right after the vulnerable phase and you are single target, and if Gnarloot dies right after add spawns and you don't have aoe burst, the results are massive for both parse and how Details look.
Having n = 1 for a competition like this then doesn't really give any information. Competing against myself the entire season and using all consumables, and then compare performance on first kill and best parse at end of season would be a more informative way of doing it. But raiding 10-20 hours a week and doing the same amount of m+ (and other things that boosts character power) equally is not something I want to do. Maybe I could have in Shadowlands or BFA (to some extent I did in BFA, but never looked at a parse, ever), but I have way too much WoW fatigue now.
m+ pushing
Since I gave up on parsing, I decided to test myself a bit on Esmënet by doing some m+ for score again. It was pretty fun up to and including doing +20s. +21s and over I got personal experience of how frustrating puging can be.
The amount of time spent on getting a group that would time the dungeon is massive. One evening, I was 75 minutes in groups that never actually started a dungeon.
The one +21 I've gotten into this patch that finished, had two rat characters and two people who did not know mechanics (including tank that missed count by skipping as much as possible, as if he had never been in Waycrest before) - and depleted, but only by a little.
A couple of +21s was disbanded shortly into the dungeon because someone got mad at someone else doing things a certain way. It's just massive timesink to get up to 10 score, and no other benefit.
So the amount of time spent on crap that is not trying to improve myself, improve score or get gear is very high. And not worth it. But I already know this, which is why I am down to 1 week a season of trying this.
So at this rate Esmënet is looking like will be my best character this season again, with this:
At this point, I have better score than last season. But have dropped 40 spots on the ED/Terenas Hunter rankings.
I generally think I could do +22s for most dungeons (maybe some +23s), making this one of the worst seasons for getting score that reflects where I think my character is and my ability to play it.
Having had a set group would have solved that. And that is what everyone always told me in Legion, BFA and Shadowlands :)
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