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.

A Tauren on a flying moose is silhouetted by a mountain and dusk skies rich in pink and orange

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?

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.