After our best raid performance in Aberrus, we clobbered Amirdrassil without breaking a sweat. All nine bosses dropped in only 19 attempts, which is crazy low.

In some ways it was a bit of a let down: it was too easy1, with even penultimate boss Tindral only taking a single attempt, and Fyrakk four. Four runs for the final boss of a tier is a little ridiculous.

A Tauren Paladin standing in front of the dragon Fyrakk after his defeat

Farewell Fyrakk

It’s clear Blizzard has decided Normal Raiding should be a pushover even for casual weekly guilds like ours. Which means Heroic is the new Normal, while Mythic is still nigh-impossible: some Race to World First guilds took over 1000 attempts to clear Mythic Tindral before nerfs!

(Speaking of RWF, this was one of the great tiers: watching Echo and Liquid neck-and-neck on Tindral and Fyrakk was amazing and really either guild could have grabbed the win. A great relief after the stunted Aberrus race. Grats to Echo for retaking the crown (and for the welcome return of Scripe’s headset smashing victory cry!).

In Aberrus our guild made a late push into Heroic for the first time, advancing all the way to Sarkareth before we ran out of time to get Ahead of the Curve. This time we would have plenty of time to get the AotC achievement, but strangely my motivation to continue vanished after the Normal clear. Despite raiding being my favourite WoW activity, the idea of eking out gear point-by-point to run the same-bosses-but-harder was a grind too far. As a consequence I stepped down from Heroic progress, which was a hard decision but I think the right one. I’m looking forward to being jealous of all our raiders on their Heroic mounts :-)

Flying toward the entrance to the raid, a green temple surrounded by invasive flows of lava

Approaching Amirdrassil

Dragonflight has been an excellent expansion with plenty of content, but interestingly for the first time in a long time I found myself drifting way from following the storylines closely, and I didn’t bother with all the collectibles and side quests as the point releases rolled out. I was finding that the scaffolding behind an MMO like Warcraft was starting to show through a bit too much: point releases with predictable and easy gear catch-ups, ilvl increases because things have to go up, strange loot blockers and rules (e.g. not being able to upgrade with higher level tokens without also grinding lower level ones), etc.

Ironically enough I think the announcement of the Worldsoul Saga expansions is a key reason for my disenchantment, despite (or because of?) the Saga plans sounding excellent. Knowing it would be a nigh on a year before genuinely new content arrived, with only fated raids to fill the gap, was pretty demotivating. Blizzard obviously realised it was a big ask to keep people subscribed for that long a gap without a new raid, and their 2024 timeline was a good attempt at filling the void with promised activities, but in the end I think I felt that maintaining interest for that long was too hard.

The bug may bite again after a short break, but for now Warcraft is on hiatus until the War Within gets close. After all that was a killer cinematic!

  1. So easy that I am almost tempted to withdraw my ‘normal raiders deserve a mount’ plea…but we do! ↩︎