Our team has just finished The Venomous Abyss, the mid-expansion raid for Midnight. It was an ok raid, with a few highlight fights—namely The Lost Explorers which was a chaotic scramble, and Ula’tek, the final boss, a three-phase fight with enough mechanics to keep it interesting. Overall not a memorable raid tier, so much so that we neglected to bother taking a screenshot of the final boss defeat. I dream of another Sepulcher, but I think the days of super hard ‘Normal’ tier bosses are gone.

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The RWF was a small debacle this season, with both Echo and Liquid fairly vocal about the number of terrible bugs and general tuning problems. There was also the fairly ridiculous spectre of Mythic Raid splits, meaning much of the ‘race’ was just watching players run their 15th character through the raid for gear.

In the end it was yet another victory for Liquid, though Echo killed the boss about an hour after the US team, so they theoretically ‘won’ based on timezone. But of course that’s not how it works.

More interesting than the race itself is the aftermath: it appears that the two main contenders (and Method) are finally sitting down and trying to nut out a way to make the race more sustainable: less splits, less characters, etc. And, maybe, just maybe, a way to level the timezone playing field?

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The big Warcraft news is of course Forever, which has created quite the impact. I’ve been delighted to discover some old bloggers crawling out from beneath the woodwork as a result—the benefits of maintaining an ancient RSS feedlist means they have popped up quite unexpectedly. Garwulf at Huntsman’s Lodge was the biggest surprise—I remember downloading his UI and learning a lot about both Hunters and how to make a more usable interface.

There’s also the amazing spectacle of The Forever Open, a US$100k 1v1 tournament that is being played out in the beta of all things. It has attracted a huge number of streamers and players, all inside an unstable environment that is changing each day with hotfixes and patches. People are min-maxing and gold-buying and creating general havoc, all on characters that will be wiped in ~30 days. Forever must be doing something very right.

It will be fascinating to see if Blizzard can save Forever from the over-complexity of Retail, and just how the promised ‘horizontal not vertical’ content growth will work. There are plenty of templates of course, from GW2 to Final Fantasy XIV, and Holly Longdale is probably the best leader Warcraft could have for this kind of venture.

Our retail team are all interested in playing, and thankfully Horde is the faction of choice (though there are some diehard Alliance players who may defect). It will be a good test of Forever’s appeal to see if everyone sticks with it, or if the lack of convenience wears the welcome thin. I almost feel sorry for the Retail team at the moment: they are buried under the Forever news. The Last Titan will have it’s work cut out to attract players back, let alone the final patch of Midnight (surely finally fighting Xal’atath should be enough of a draw?).

I suspect a large number of players will drift back when faced with the Classic-style slowness of Forever. Others will love that same simplicity.

I can’t wait to roll up a Tauren and start galumphing through old Mulgore again, complete with the never-launched-always-wanted Plainsrunning racial trait, which gives up to a 30% movement boost the longer you stay, well, running. Flavour over balance is very appealing, and hopefully that’s what Forever sticks with.

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We’re on the cusp of Midnight Season Two, so here’s the very late report on Season One.

Three launch raids was certainly an interesting tactic, and I think it worked for the most part. It was fun to progress a story through quite different environments, though the one-boss Dreamrift was barely a raid. It might have been fun to have a old fashioned (mini) reputation grind behind each Raid, only unlocking the next once complete, but I can understand the modern player-base might not accept such a fake wall.

The Voidspire was an good raid with interesting bosses, and March on Quel’Danas, despite only having two bosses, was excellent. Belo’ren was a visually spectacular boss, and Midnight Falls a suitably complex finale. Having said that, Blizzard seem to have even further nerfed Normal raiding as we one shot L’ura to complete the raid trio.

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The Race to World First was entertaining, starting with controversy when Mythic Alleria Windrunner, the final boss of Voidspire, fell almost instantly. A repeat of the anticlimactic finish to Undermine threatened, but the Race was saved by an epic and super close progression through March. Liquid completed their sweep, barely, as Echo were again pipped at the last¹.

The next race starts in a few days, hopefully another close one. Having a US and EU team as the front horses means there’s pretty much always something to see no matter the hour. And I’m looking forward to Dratnos and Tettle’s recaps which are always entertaining and educational (here’s a primer for the race as a start).

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The zones in Midnight are fine, if a little disappointing in that much of it is a reworked Eastern Kingdoms. Zul’Aman surprised me by being the most interesting zone, the Trolls never having grabbed me. The story of re-establishing the Loa was great, as was seeing a grudging respect evolve between the Alliance Elves and Horde Trolls. Not convinced yet on the Harandar ancestry revelation, but perhaps it will work out.

I found myself a little detached from the world and wasn’t sure why until I realised it was because we were flying from the start. Jumping directly from quest to quest without having to gallop along overland made the entire thing a bit flat. Why explore when you could plonk down directly on the objective. Someone (Dratnos?) suggested a possible solution to this, which is an Achievement that could be granted for levelling without flying (and, obviously, awarding a ground mount for completion!). Fly your first character through everything, then spend a leisurely time with an alt learning how the land’s heart beats.

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Overall I have found Midnight to be on the wrong side of too much. There are now so many sub-tasks, systems, and complications that it is overwhelming. Delves, Prey, M+, Abundances, The Arcantina, Omnium Folio, Altar of Corrosion, Cursed Surges, Prey, Weeklies, Dailies, Bonus Rolls, oof. Then the sub-patches introduced even more, from Void Assaults to Ritual Sites to new mini-zones to the one-boss Sporefall ‘raid’ (so far the two single-boss raids haven’t deserved the label).

It became so much that I immediately stopped playing after the Raids were done. Even the lure (ahem) of the Abyss Anglers wasn’t enough to keep me interested.

I wonder if the Blizzcon rumoured Classic+ is an opportunity to reset this chaos and return to a more straight-forward approach to systems. We can only hope.

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1. Insert customary plea for a global release, or RWF guild agreement to start together. ↩︎

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We cleared Normal with no difficulty, as is the new way. Heroic was a better challenge where, after the first four bosses, we were often right on the DPS check edge. The Soul Hunters and Forgeweaver Araz were the funnest fights, with many 1-3% wipes as we were all pushed off the platform on Araz before we cracked it.

Alas we were stopped short of getting a second AOTC by Nexus King Salhadaar when the DPS check outpaced our gear by about 15%. Even with the late nerfs coming in most of us had hit a gear wall and the deadline struck before we could.

As compensation we instead did the entertaining Glory of the Omega Raider achievement instead. A lot of fun, with Soul Hunters again a highlight: everyone in the raid having to be blindfolded for a full minute (thank goodness for being overgeared in Normal!). The most challenging was Fractillus, a doddle to kill normally but the Hard Mode was Breaking the Fourth Wall which meant allowing four walls to build before breaking any. It needed some math and positional genius, and luckily we had one in our raid: thanks Illandri!

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That closed out the War Within, an expansion that started and ended well, with a skippable middle. Midnight is next and until then I’ll be taking a break from Warcraft.

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The Collector’s Bounty event in patch 11.1 was certainly interesting. Boosting drop rates of rare mounts (and doubling transmog loot drops) by 5% meant a mount that might drop once every 200 runs was suddenly, if my maths is right, dropping every 20.

This had Blizzard’s desired consequence of sending everyone into every old raid and dungeon with a rare mount drop, completely destroying M+ and Raiding numbers for the duration.

Running four characters through old and new Karazhan, Firelands, and Tempest Keep led to me adding OG Midnight, Ashes of Al’ar, Flametalon of Alysrazor, and the Smoldering Egg of Millagazor. I jumped into Zul’Gurub and picked up a Swift Zulian Panther for good measure.

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The only things that didn’t drop despite trying were the new Midnight from Legion Kara, and Sharkbait from Freehold.

All of this was terrific! Mounts for everyone!

Except.

Except I almost feel embarrassed to use the Ashes of Al’ar. There are people who spent actual years trying to get this to drop, and deserved the awestruck looks when Al’ar took to the sky (those skytrails!). Similarly with the pair of Firelands mounts: they’re so ostentatious that it feels cruel to have received them so easily.

This is of course fairly ridiculous, given modern Warcraft’s predilection for giving away things once considered precious. I suppose it’s an interesting psychological study: guilt about getting something too easily. And I was genuinely pleased for a guild friend who had run hundreds of weekly Icecrown Citadel runs to finally be able to mount Invincible; genuinely deserved.

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For now I’ll stick with my lovely Onyx Netherwing Drake, hard earnt during Burning Crusade by throwing hundreds of boots at hapless peons.

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Largest boss ever? We are so back.

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