Patch 8.1 is upon us since yesterday which I think makes for a good opportunity to talk about some of the changes.

It’s a bit of an odd one, since it somewhat significantly changes class balancing and some abilities while some guilds are still progressing in Uldir, making the experience for the latecomers potentially more difficult which makes me somewhat unsure of how I feel about this. The most prominent example would probably be Zul, since with Rogues getting changed basically because of that fight it does make the fight somewhat more difficult to execute—we still killed the boss easily enough but the fight did last a bit longer than before.

There is also somewhat of a hidden boss buff for Zek’voz, at least in guilds that have a Discipline Priest. Because Evangelism now has a slightly longer cooldown—15 seconds longer, from 75 seconds to 90 seconds—it is no longer ready for every dance on mythic, I ended up with it on approximately 10-15 seconds of cooldown remaining when I wanted to use it. This makes the fight require slightly more coordination between healer cooldowns for guilds still progressing there though the fight is easy enough that it shouldn’t be a real problem anyway. Beyond that the change to Evangelism didn’t really feel noticeable to me since I usually wanted to use it in conjunction with Rapture anyway which has a 90 second cooldown, making the change somewhat moot. Mentally though, the difference is suprisingly big and does mean I’ll be a little more careful of using the ability opportunistically.

In general, I think the nerfs to Discipline felt manageable, it’ll take some time to get used to for sure and the increased mana cost of Power Word: Shield might actually mean that our gearing priorities change slightly against haste since one of the big benefits of haste was being able to blanket the raid quicker which is now much more mana intensive. The general reduced throughput isn’t really something I felt in fight though it was somewhat apparent on the healing meters on all bosses except for G’huun oddly enough. It could just be that it was a off-night for me as well, so I guess we’ll know that better once the next raid comes out.

Now there were some other moderately interesting things in the patch as well, for example the continuation of the war campaign though I haven’t really had the time to take a poke at that yet. Another big change was now crafted BOP items require skill in that profession in order to be used; this was hotfixed to only apply to new recipes coming with the next raid but it’s still an interesting change. It means it will no longer be possible to pick up a profession, say tailoring, craft some fancy pants in the first raid week or two and then drop tailoring and learn a more useful profession like alchemy since those fancy pants would end up being unusable after unlearning tailoring. This seemed to be mostly popular in the higher end guilds so it shouldn’t affect most players but is a somewhat interesting change nontheless.

Another thing of note was the addition of achievements for completing all mythic+ dugeons in time on +10 and +15, unsurprisingly this was bugged. Now unfortunately we didn’t have quite as much time as hoped last week so we were aware that we wouldn’t be getting the +15 achievement, but we also didn’t get the +10 and for some of us it was even displaying zero progress towards completing the achievement. Hopefully this ends up being fixed shortly, would be rather annoying to have to hunt for keys for the dungeons again. Especially so since we can no longer delete keys, run a dungeon and get a new set of keys which was possible up until the patch hit.

Just a minor side rant, that’s one of those changes I find somewhat hard to understand and I’m hoping a question to that get answered on Friday. I understand that it was technically a unintended consequence of the buggy keys in the first week of BfA with them carrying over from Legion that lead to this but it was something that in a sense was actually a very useful feature to people who prefer playing with a set group. We only have five keys per week we can use and getting unlucky can very realistically mean we don’t see a dungeon at all in a given week. This was annoying enough before from the perspective of Raider.io/Wowprogress score since trying to push that was the primary reason we kept doing mythic+, but it’s even more of a problem now with the defined seasons from Blizzard and actual in-game rewards tied to them. Simple bad luck could mean missing out on those which I don’t find a particularily good design decision especially since they now intentionally patched out something that alleviated that problem.

Beyond that though, I honestly can’t quite say what the patch brought since quite frankly the game isn’t holding my interest quite as well as it was in Legion which I find very unfortunate. It’s a hard thing coming from the (subjectively) best expansion to one that just overall feels meh. I’m not even necessarily saying anything is completely broken it just doesn’t feel motivating or inspiring and just that tad bit more boring than what came before and that’s enough for it just to feel bad.

The next raid will hopefully fix that a bit with some actual new interesting content to do and as far as timing goes the holiday season is about the best time of the year for the game to feel a bit boring since usually there’s enough other stuff going on so that one doesn’t notice that too much.

Here’s to better times for World of Warcraft in 2019!

Kind of.

So the last few months have been great and simultaneously not. Well it is a long time for everything to simply be great, so it makes sense that there have been some less great things in there I suppose.

To get more specific, we killed G’huun a few weeks ago already which was awesome. Unfortunately a day too late to make it into the top 100 for the Horde—or more specifically, to get the associated achievement since the top 100 guild killed G’huun the previous reset and we ended up extending and killing him on Wednesday. Still, the kill was awesome, we kept our integrity as it were and didn’t introduce extra raid days or prolong the raids in order to try and squeeze the kill which actually makes me really happy. Now I really like the guild and the people within in general, but that is one of the things I’m I guess most proud of that the principle of raid times is held to. Sure I could manage the extra hours and would probably enjoy them as well, but there’s just something cool about seeing the guild stick to its rules and still perform well.

Secondly, as noted, the guild has just been awesome. While I liked being in the old guild I love being in this one which is a very important distinction that does affect one’s enjoyment of the game greatly. I am also fortunate in that I still get to regularily play with people from the old guild, so it’s the best of both worlds in a way. There is only one slightly unfortunate part: the “dead game” meme. Now the guild in general seems to be rather meme happy which is fun, but there is this whole “dead game” meme going on partially due to the content being cleared and partially because the core systems of the game at the moment just aren’t as engaging as they were in Legion. Now both of these things are very understandably frustrating people to a degree—especially the latter I think—but to me the whole meme just makes the situation worse. Not by much, mind you and I would be playing the game less at the moment even without the meme but it just kind of unecessarily reminds me of the situation we’re in. At the same time, I guess it helps other people to make the situation a bit more enjoyable so there is that.

Now that specifically is the less awesome part: I’m just not feeling motivated to play that much at the moment. Now there are several factors to this, one is the azerite system feeling unrewarding meaning I’m not really participating in content that rewards azerite but one could argue that is a good thing since it’s not really the sort of content I enjoy overly much—island expeditions and world quests. The other part really is that one of the players in our regular mythic+ team has been unavailable for a while which means we aren’t doing as much mythic+ as before which combined with us not progressing anymore and thus clearing the raid more quickly means there’s a lot less for me to do in the game. Hopefully they’ll get better soon and we can get back to running some more mythic+.

Though mythic+ is actually one of the awesome things that happened recently, if a little late: we finally cleared a +15 in time. It was way later than I’d liked and we are very much behind the curve but we did it even without our full setup—which kind of makes me sad at the same time—but it does pave the way for us to get going stronger than before in the future.

And honestly, fuck the curve. We managed it with some pretty annoying affixes (fortified, quaking and bursting) and had fun doing it, that’s the more important part anyway. Sure a high raider.io score is nice to look at, but considering how buggy the Blizzard leaderboards have been not registering some of our runs the experience of managing it is more important than some number at the end.

Now the reduced motivation to do things on my main has given me the opportunity to level a twink which I ended up finishing sometime early Monday morning. I ended up leveling a Monk planning to play mostly Mistweaver with a bit of Brewmaster thrown in for dungeons since I hadn’t played a Monk at high level yet and it seemed to be a good filler twink for the healer roster after speaking with our guildmaster. Also I already have paladin, shaman and druid at fairly high level so leveling one of those didn’t seem sensible. It’s been interesting so far though I haven’t really had the opportunity to heal anything “real” yet, only a +2 and +3 key which even with my at the time around 290-300 item level gear was easy since we had some other geared people in the party. I’m really worried how I’ll manage my mana in raids though, which generally seems to be my biggest problem playing healer twinks—having no idea which spells to prioritise specifically in raids. Dungeons is generally pretty easy since mana mostly isn’t a concern; keeping people alive is. But raid fights tend to last for a long time and trying to heal the whole raid alone generally doesn’t end well unless the content is trivial to begin with.

Now I just need to gear the monk so hopefully I can sneak into a heroic raid this week. Beyond that though, getting proper gear is somewhat time-gated since I can’t really properly heal a +10 key yet so I’m kind of toying with the idea of leveling a second twink if I keep having so much time available. I have always kind of liked the idea of a rogue and learning to play one would be cool, so that might be the next project. I had even created one before the monk with the plan of leveling one but having a secondary healer character just to precedence so we’ll see.

Battle for Azeroth has now been out for a bit longer than when I shared my first impressions of it and my feelings on the expansion have crystallized somewhat even though it is still early days and I won’t know how it all turns out until the end of the expansion.

Mythic+

So far, doing dungeons has been rather fun in Battle for Azeroth. We are still very much in the learning stage and tend to run into some packs or bosses whose difficulty or mechanics surprise us—third boss in King’s Rest comes to mind as an example. I had barely noticed the DoT from the axe lady before this week with tyrannical and now that boss seems to be one of the hardest ones in the dungeon since it combines heavy movement due to the axes with heavy damage on one player due to the DoT.

As noted though, the fact that we are all still learning does mean that the rate of mistakes being made can mean that keys unfortunately don’t get played in time that very well could have been. But that is a part of learning and becomming better which in the end is what makes all of it fun. Sure, the accomplishments as well, but those mean so much less without the learning process and obstacles that come before.

Azerite gear

Now azerite gear is a strange thing, and I touched on my early impressions of it before. Going from Legion to Battle for Azeroth, we lost tier sets, our artifacts (with their relics) and the legendaries from Legion. All of these things provided different bonuses to our character that either made them play different or provided utility for certain situations—as a Priest, the cloak legendary for Holy stands out as an excellent example of extra raid utility that was very nice to have.

With Battle for Azeroth, all of these things in a way get rolled into a single system: Azerite Gear. Now for me, this system has a few flaws that stick out rather obviously:

1. Limited sources of gear.
   Since azerite gear is only available from sources with a weekly lockout, there is a very limited amount of the gear you can try to acquire in a week.
2. This becomes a big problem, when the trait(s) you need might only be available from the weekly mythic+ chest, meaning the chance of you getting the right item are very low.
3. Certain traits are just more fun.
   And when you gain a performance upgrade that then removes those traits, it’s not a great feeling.
4. Traits are selected per character, not per spec.
   This means in order to play many specs on a single character, you actually need multiples of the same difficult to get gear in order to perform well or intentionally make all of those spec potentially significantly weaker by selecting generic traits.
5. Utility traits will probably be locked when you get new gear.
   Some of those traits that are fun or just give nice utility—like the Prydaz trait—might not be available to you when you get a new piece of gear since your neck isn’t yet of a high enough level.

Now all of these problems kind of feed into each other except for the last one. But the limited availability of gear just makes it really hard to actually get an azerite piece of decent item level and even harder to get the right item level along with the traits one wants. This along with an upgrade meaning a trait one enjoys potentially disappering just makes acquiring new azerite gear feel kind of bad; the system inherits the worst traits of the three systems it’s replacing: the slow progression of the artifact, combined with the difficulty of acquiring gear sets comined with the frustration of the randomness of acquiring legendaries. Sure, with raids the third point is largely diminished since you know what the traits are on the piece of gear this specific boss drops, but considering how late into the raid some of the pieces are it may not be a realistic way to get that piece of gear anyway. Also assuming the raid piece is actually the one you want as far as traits are concerned.

Now they are working on the acquisition part, which hopefully fixes some of these concerns but we don’t know what the plan is yet and when they are going to implement it. Hopefully it ends up being something good since the current state seems to be frustrating a lot of players. But I don’t think anything less than a rework of the system can get rid of the bad feeling of getting a numbers upgrade that removes a trait you enjoy having.

Preach also made a video raising some other concerns, namely regarding the balancing of the traits and how some of them can be rather unstraightforward to figure out if they are good or not. Now this specific point doesn’t really matter much to me personally—since I would probably be looking up the ratings and rankings of the separate traits anyway and not just go by gut feeling—but it still does mean that I can’t just go and equip a new piece of gear and select the traits therein in any meaningful way without having to do that which also doesn’t really feel right.

I’m excited to see what if anything they end up changing with the system though, it feels like one of those things where the backlash might be big enough to actually cause some change to be made but we’ll see.

Guild

I don’t think I’ve ended up mentioning it here yet, but I’ve changed guilds (again…). This time around it was a bit different though, since it was less out of a desire to leave the old guild—have actually been playing relatively actively with some of the people from there—and more out of an opportunity to raid again with a good friend of mine.

The change has also felt different in a completely other way, namely I’ve felt quite at home here very quickly. Sure, it helped that I already knew a person in the guild and that I’d been along of some of their alt runs with one of my alts previously, but the general feel and attitude of the guild seems to be better aligned with me than in the previous guild. I guess that is to say, I feel like I’ve found my place here quicker and have been enjoying the raids tremendously so far. Hopefully that means I can stay here happily for a long time!

Raids

Speaking of raids, Uldir has been out for a while now and we’ve had the opportunity to poke down some of the bosses there, more specifically we are ⁶⁄₈ mythic since yesterday! We had a bit of a surprising stumbling block on Fetid Devourer and one day of somewhat slow reclear—as in, we didn’t reclear in a single day of raiding and needed to continue clearing the next raid day. But despite that, I’d say it’s been going rather well especially our latest catch: Zul.

The Zul fight is a strange one, since it ends up being so short it is quite simple but it seems so confusing on the surface with all the adds going on as well as having to move out of the raid, dispels and then something of a damage race in phase 2 with the AoE on the floor. The fight was really enjoyable though once we started to get it down, since progress was so clear to see and the healing required during the fight was also rather intense, kept me optimizing my cooldown execution at least. The fight also gave me an opportunity to use Divine Star for once, which was a nice change up from Halo since the cooldown is so much lower meaning I have more to do.

Uldir has been really good so far overall once you’re past the first two bosses. I didn’t hugely enjoy Fetid since there is more of a focus on positioning and damage there than healing and execution, but Zek’voz I also enjoyed since it required proper execution of cooldowns on my part for the dances along with playing the dance, eye beam and add mechanics properly. Especially the overlaps with the debuff/eye beam and dance provided some interesting moments in the fight.

Vectis I also found somewhat interesting—especially now that I can play Discipline there—even though it was a somewhat boring fight from an execution standpoint as Holy. Just spamming Binding Heal so that Salvation is ready in time isn’t the most engaging gameplay, but the healing requirement still made the fight interesting. Especially in the intermission where one needs to avoid stacks and still keep ones party topped from the debuff that keeps jumping around.

Discipline

Now I’ve briefly touched on this before but I’ve also really been enjoying Discipline. It plays a bit better in raids than in dungeons since you can better plan for cooldown usage with more predictable damage, but the spec in general plays quite good at the moment I feel and really fits my damage-happy playstyle as well. It wasn’t unusual to see Smite as my most used spell even as Holy, so playing a spec where it actually contributes to my healing as well makes a lot of sense. As noted before as well, Holy just feels so slow with the changes in Battle for Azeroth that Discipline becomes a even more welcome change to me.

I have been playing mostly Discipline since the pre-patch and it has been really nice if a bit new. Not as new as one might think, since I really liked spamming Smite as Holy as well, but it does take some different thinking to play Discipline, especially when preparing cooldowns.

However, now I have had a couple of opportunities where it simply made more sense to play Holy which one would think is great since I loved the spec in Legion—so much so, that I basically didn’t play Discipline at all in Legion even to my detriment at times since it was such a strong spec—unfortunately, Holy just doesn’t play very fun at the moment.

Legendaries

The smallest contributor to this is the lack of legendaries from Legion. Holy didn’t have the most exciting legendaries in Legion, in fact one of the most used ones was just a worse version of Reincarnate from Shamans¹. It was however, still a very nice wipe recovery mechanism in raids allowing you to get back to trying the boss again faster in many cases. It also functioned as a powerful cooldown through Spirit of Redemption, since it essentially gave you free rein to heal for a short time with Spirit of Redemption making you invulnerable and giving you infinite mana. It was also a way to use two potions in one fight since death starts your potion cooldown. This made it a very strong utility legendary.

However, the legendary I miss far more and that ties into the next point, are the legendary bracers that reduced the cast time of your primary healing spells while you were over 75% health. These were a mythic+ favourite of mine.

Haste

Now the lack of that legendary along with the tiny amount of haste we have in the beginning of the expansion makes the spec feel extremely slow and sluggish. This will hopefully be fixed to a degree with more gear, but it does give the spec a terrible feel at the moment for someone used to the extremely fast pace at the end of Legion—I had sub one second cast time on some of my primary spells with the legendary bracers, going back to almost a second and a half is a huge change in pacing.

The lack of haste is made even worse since Light of the Naaru is, well, not missing but basically unpickable at the moment which brings me to my next point.

Talents

The talents are kind of terrible though maybe actually a bit better than they were in Legion. We still have Enlightenment/Trail of Light and Binding Heal/Surge of Light to switch between for raids and there is actually a choice between Benediction and Halo depending on the encounter—maybe even Divine Star if people are stacke enough or the damage pattern is correct.

But the problem—though I guess that was the design intent—is really the last row. Now there is actually a cool choice here between Apotheosis and Holy Word: Salvation and they are both nice powerful cooldowns to use though they both have their clear niches—mythic+ and raids respectively. The problem really, is that Light of the Naaru is competing with them and can only win for players that want a really passive playstyle and while it’s cool that the choice exists for such players, it makes the rest of us suffer with a spec that just feels insanely sluggish when compared to Legion which as noted is made worse by the limited haste available at the start and lack of legendaries to speed up casting.

Conclusion

The core mechanic of Holy, the powerful Holy Words is what makes these long cast time and lack of extra cooldown reduction feel so bad. I want to be casting lots so that my fun spells are available again but the time in between just feels extremely drawn out and I feel kind of useless since my spells don’t do much in the meantime. As Discipline, sure I’d like some more haste but I also have a ton of smaller cooldowns I can stagger to do useful things and they aren’t dependant on me casting certain spells to come back within a reasonable time. Those cooldowns are also powerful enough that they give me a more clearly defined role within a raidgroup which means I know I can take it a bit easier when I’m waiting for them to become available again. As Holy I don’t have this luxury since I need to keep casting and using mana in order to have my cooldowns available in time again.

It’s a strange feeling, going from feeling it was almost a necessity to learn Discipline in order to remain competetitive to feeling I much prefer the spec after all these years due to the changes made in Battle for Azeroth to Holy. I guess it was about time for me to change things up a bit though and not be so constrained by my past feelings of the different specs. Now I just hope I don’t have to play Holy too much until the spec starts feeling a bit more fun again.

Blizzard added something really cool for tailors in Battle for Azeroth: Resilient Spellthread. It prevents you from being dazed in Kul Tiras and Zandalar, which is a really nice perk to have before flying is active and while outdoor content like world quests and herb farming are the most relevant.

Unfortunately, Resilient Spellthread hasn’t worked for the whole expansion and recently got a silent nerf to the description¹ stating it only works while walking and running, not mounted which would be the most useful part.

Permanently embroiders your cloak with resilient spellthread, preventing you from being dazed while in Kul Tiras or Zandalar. Only the tailor’s cloak can be embroidered, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound. – Original text

Permanently embroiders your cloak with resilient spellthread, preventing you from being dazed while running or walking in Kul Tiras or Zandalar. Only the tailor’s cloak can be embroidered, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound. – Updated text

This change has understandably left many tailors somewhat miffed with me among them. Now, tailoring has for a long time been a profession with little long-term usefulness though an expansion like most professions where you primarily craft gear but this just leaves one feeling robbed of something that was clearly inteded to be there and it just kind of seems they couldn’t be bothered fixing.

Now that is possibly unecessarily harsh language; I recongize that software development must have priorities of what gets fixed and in the grand scheme of things one broken utility effect for a profession that the majority of players probably does not have isn’t high on the list. Or maybe it was always inteded to only work while on foot. That does not change the feeling this change leaves behind.

Now there are two other utility spellthreads for tailors, one that decreases threat and another one that decreases falling damage and I am running around with the reduced falling damage for now to at least get some utility out of the profession. However, being immune to daze really was one of the cool things I was looking forward to with tailoring in Battle for Azeroth, and now with that gone and the rarity of Anchor Weed and the despawning nodes which are becoming a meme I am seriously considering switching professions. I have mixed feelings about this since I’ve had the profession for so long but looking at it logically the doubled flask duration of alchemy is the only profession perk that makes any sense at the moment.²

It’s really unfortunate that the other spellthreads feel so lacklustre since we as tailors haven’t really had anything new and useful to craft since the Frostweave Net in Wrath of the Lich King. Now I have been using those rather actively since the extra 3 second root is a nice thing to have, but the tiny amount of utility it brings just does not feel worth the price of keeping the profession around for me.

Now, before someone argues “but you can craft gear!”, that is really low on utility for two reasons. Firstly, it is rather slow with the materials for that gear being timegated by dungeon and later raid lockouts. Secondly, once the raid releases on Wednesday, that gear is completely irrelevant since the raid will drop as good—or better once mythic releases—gear anyway. It might bring some small utility to players who are focusing on the easier tiers of raiding or not raiding at all, but with titanforging I’m not even sure that applies. I’m also ignoring the item level 300 gear since that can be bought and is so low item level anyway as to be completely useless.

In the end, I think I’ll watch out for hotfixes until Tuesday or so hoping this gets fixed, and if not I’ll start leveling alchemy so I have that skilled enough to get the extra hour on flasks before the raid on Wednesday. Might need to do some extra herb farming, so probably good to get at least a days head start on that.