Warcraft: Midnight in the Oasis
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.
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).
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.
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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Insert customary plea for a global release, or RWF guild agreement to start together. ↩︎
Warcraft: Manaforge Omega Complete
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!
A row of handsome Umbral K’arrocs
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.
Warcraft: Collector’s Bounty
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.
Lucky night
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.
Invincible
For now I’ll stick with my lovely Onyx Netherwing Drake, hard earnt during Burning Crusade by throwing hundreds of boots at hapless peons.
Warcraft: Manaforge Omega
Largest boss ever? We are so back.
Warcraft: Décor for the Dead
It’s fair to say the incoming player housing update for Warcraft has caught near everybody by surprise with how sophisticated and thorough it appears to be—this is no half-baked feature.
One thing that caught my eye in the Blizzard post about interior decorating was that there would be meta-specific décor on offer:
One thing we’d like to give you a heads up about here is that we intend to offer décor rewards for past expansion “meta-achievements” (A World Awoken, Back from the Beyond, and A Farewell to Arms are the three currently available). If you think you might be a décor completionist, it’s worth starting these in your downtime!
I’d recently finished off the Dragonflight meta when this was announced and enjoyed it so this was a klaxon call to try the remaining two.
As mentioned in the last post, Battle for Azeroth seemed too high a mountain, but I was pleased to find I was had completed around 75% of the Shadowlands meta. So back to the land of the dead I went.
Shadowlands has been much maligned, sometimes deservedly so, but I have been pleasantly surprised revisiting it. That’s probably largely because the majority of the grinds were behind me, but it really was an impressively content-full expansion—maybe too much content.
Four full zones on launch, each with a completely self-contained and unique aesthetic, plus Oribos, and the dreaded Maw and Torghast. The patches brought more still with Korthia and Zereth Mortis. Within each zone there is an entire standalone storyline (that occasionally cleverly meshes with the others) that has its own very distinct flavour. Each of the zone Covenants then have their own game-within-a-game, from the Ember Courts of the Venthyr to the Stitching of the Necrolords. It’s overwhelming and quite different to the far more streamlined and less individual zones we got with Dragonflight and now The War Within.
I found that my main characters naturally fell into a matching Covenant, which I’m sure is by design. Rogues to Revendreth, Warriors Maldraxxus, Hunters in Ardenweald, and Paladins to Bastion (of course). When I swapped my Paladin to Necrolord it felt so wrong I had to swap back and wheel out my Warrior instead. I imagine all classes felt drawn to a specific Covenant, which speaks to the cleverness of the design.
The raids are some of the best I’ve played; Castle Nathria is near perfect as a Gothic Chapel, and Sepulcher has several of the most iconic bosses in Warcraft history (looking at you Anduin and Halondrus).
Going back the Maw made me re-evaluate what Blizzard accomplished there. It feels like a legitimate and interesting take on what a hellish Warcraft Limbo would be like, without being simply fire and brimstone (though there is plenty of that). A river of lost souls, towering constructs, bizarre creatures and punishing landscapes. Even Torghast has moments, particularly when you can one-shot your way through everything. They really tried to do something different and I think it works.
Dragonflying everywhere makes questing much more tolerable; it shrinks the world significantly and that’s important, because one of the real drawbacks of Shadowlands is the amount of zone-to-zone travel that is required. Some of the daily quests would send you to all four zones, forcing you to travel through Oribos each time. There is an awful lot of waiting.
Another thing you need an awful lot of for the meta is Anima and Lost Souls. Thankfully I had a cache of Anima on my Paladin main which could be freely transferred (after Blizzard fixed the woeful Covenant locks that Shadowlands launched with), because having to grind thousands would probably have sunk this mission. But as it stands, after a few weeks I only have one Necrolord daily, one Venthyr Court, and a bunch of Night Fae dailies to complete the meta—now I just need Blizzard to deliver the Revendreth décor we all deserve.
Strange that Player Housing would be the thing to make me take a fresh look at Shadowlands, but I’m glad it did.