So I mentioned some of my frustrations with reputation in Battle for Azeroth in my previous post and I think my feelings might’ve changed somewhat. This I think comes primarily from the vastly different nature of reputation in Battle for Azeroth compared to Legion.

Now, there is still a primary very important faction to get repuation with, this being the Honorboud for the Horde and Seventh Legion for the Alliance since these factions gate a dungeon behind them. What is significantly different from Legion however, is the pure amount of world quests available for these factions along with the speed one gets reputation. In Legion, getting the Suramar dungeons unlocked was something of a significant farm whereas in Battle for Azeroth, I only really started poking at the world quests on Thursday and was done by Sunday or Monday. This significant shortening of the farm naturally leads to it being much less annoying than it was in Legion. This also significantly helps because I think a big source of my frustration with this system came from the uncertainty of me being able to do the dungeon in a timely fashion¹ and now once that stress has been lifted I am also less frustrated with the system itself.

There is also another significant factor to this that I did note in my earlier post, specifically having something to do. In the past couple of days I’ve found myself simply doing every single world quest available just from the continued desire to keep playing the game and trying to find something sensible to do within the game and the world quests have presented the perfect outlet for that. This has allowed me to even surpass the required reputation for the dungeon and actually finish the War Campaign, well for now at least. The game and the quests themselves do state that it will be continued², but this chapter is finished for now. So me being motivated enough to be doing the world quests somewhat unrelated to the rewards they bring kind of negates the whole frustration I might’ve felt with having felt forced to be doing them. Well it isn’t strictly true that I’m doing them regardless of reward, since completing the world quests is bringing me closer to Pathfinder, Part One³ which will allow me to ride faster and eventually be a part of the flying requirements. But the biggest stopper on that achievement will be the Champions of Azeroth which have a very limited amount of world quests available anyway that I would definitely be doing every day so it isn’t really getting me the achievement any faster.

In the end, this is kind of a long way of saying I was stressing out and worrying about things that ended up being fine in the end. Though there is somewhat of a sad end to the story after all: we’ll have to look for one additional player in order to complete Siege of Boralus in the first reset, since one of us hasn’t been doing barely any world quests and is unfortunately not going to have the required reputation in order to participate. It is an unfortunate situation but considering the requirements were known we can’t really blame the game for it but it still feels bad that he can’t experience the dungeon with us.

So Battle for Azeroth was released a few days ago and so far it has been something of a blast, it has been really enjoyable to have something to do again in the game after the quiet times at the end of Legion where I was almost only logging in to do raids with the occasional mythic+ sprinkled in.

The start went by rather quickly, we managed to get to 120 directly on Tuesday and still have enough energy after a small sleep break to clear all of the available dungeons on heroic—that left out two dungeons, Siege of Boralus which was locked behind reputation and Kings’ Rest which is only available on mythic. It was really interesting to see the dungeons for the first time since I hadn’t really spent much time on the beta at all though they were for the most part a bit easy, which I guess is to be expected from heroic dungeons.

There were a couple of notable exceptions though, primarly Shrine of the Storm and Temple of Sethraliss¹. The end boss in Temple even prompted a respec from Discipline to Holy for me, since I couldn’t quite figure out on the spot how to manage the single target healing requirement of that boss without any mobs present.

Temple of Sethralis

Since these dungeons are new, I should probably elaborate. The final boss of of Temple of Sethraliss is basically a healer fight with other roles being in more of a support position: a mob in the middle needs to be healed to full. The problem is that you can’t heal that mob the whole time since it is immune to healing so first some channelers need to be killed after which you have a short window, maybe 10-20 seconds or so to heal the mob. While this window is open and later on in the fight as well, there’s a rain of frogs going on which leave a debuff behind when they touch a player, reducing that player’s healing by 50%. Since we weren’t completely aware of that mechanic, that probably also played a role in my initial difficulties as Discipline in this fight.

It is still a dungeon where I will probably prefer going in as Holy as opposed to Discipline on mythic+ simply due to the last boss and the healing requirement there, though I am interested to see how that fight scales with higher mythic+ levels.

The dungeon also had some interesting moments with some “true” Player versus Environment elements, where you had to dodge arrows falling from the sky or navigate through a labyrinth of moving lightning orbs. Interestingly, these elements also scaled up on mythic which we did later on, the arrows were much harder to dodge with them being close to impossible to dodge without movement speed increase if the circle spawned on top of you.

Shrine of the Storm

Now the other notable dungeon was Shrine of the Storm. This one was less about the bosses and the environment and more purely some rather difficult trash. There are some particularily difficult mobs in the beginning, a form of water elemental which stuns the whole group, throws you up into the air and then damages you with falling damage. For mythic we figured out some ways to skip most of these mobs which of course was less helpful after some wipes, but it will probably still be a very useful strategy for mythic+.

There was also a rather annyoing mob later that did an extremely painful beam on a single player, which I had some difficulties dealing with though luckily it was heroic and still manageable especially once we noticed the rune the mob left behind which reduced damage taken significantly—at least when people were attentive enough to actually move into the rune.

Beyond that most of the dungeon was smooth sailing, excepting the last boss on mythic but even there we quickly figured out what we needed to do.

Reputation

There is one slight thing that is annyoing me though, much less so than in Legion but still. As noted, there is one dungeon that is locked behind reputation and Blizzard decided to once again do a reputation gated questline in order to unlock this dungeon. Now my problem comes from the fact that one needs to keep doing world quests in order to acquire this reputation while I would much rather just be able to sit down and farm it out in a group in a single or several sessions. Instead it seems necessary to check in on the world map often to find available world quests for this faction, which I suppose increases the engagement statistics for Blizzard but is a bit iffy as a player. On the other hand, it’s a much lower reputation requirement than in Legion with Suramar which is a big improvement and I guess it is one of the things contributing to me actually having something to do in the game again which is a positive.

Simultaneously, for “slow burn” reputations that one simply wants to get in due time which don’t gate critical content, I do prefer the whole world quest model since we are encouraged to do those anyway for emissaries and Azerite.

Azerite armour

Which does nicely bring me to my next point, Azerite armour. Now so far I’m not that convinced by it, since most of the bonuses I’ve seen so far have been rather unspectacular and I can’t use the bonuses on most of my gear yet since the requirement on mythic dungeon gear to unlock those traits is so high even after they reduced the requirements. I am however really curious to see what ends up happening with the raid gear, and there is an interesting trait or two already available so there is certainly promise. I’m also interested to see how the “Prydaz” trait scales, there were some people on the beta noting that it doesn’t scale very well but maybe it will be less mandatory for mythic+ than Prydaz itself was in Legion as a Priest.

Conclusion

All in all, there is still very much wait-and-see going on, mythic+ isn’t available yet and neither are the raids which is the content I primarily enjoy. But the expansion has started of really fun and it is nice to be able to do some of the more casual stuff from time to time without too much stress about time and performance. That said, I’m still looking forward to more content unlocking and getting to do the things I enjoy most, but the start of the expansion has given me a good feeling about coming times and I hope that lasts.

The pre-patch has been out for almost a week now and so far it is actually feeling rather good despite all the scaling issues and bugs.

It has been really nice to be able to do some mythic+ again since there is something of a renewed interest for that type of content, primarly due to everyone needing to learn their classes and specs again. It has also given me the opportunity to start poking at Discipline properly which has been a nice change of pace—especially since Holy seems to feel rather similiar to before except I now have on more big cooldown, and that is one really big cooldown potentially one of the strongest healing cooldowns available at the moment. That has been especially nice since unfortunately cooldown wise Holy was very weak during Legion so it is nice to see a bit more utility in that sense being available. I’m still not quite sure how to properly manage getting that cooldown reset though, there have been murmurings of it being doable in 3-4 minutes but I can’t seem to reach that, maybe the circumstances that are being assumed just haven’t been available in raids so far.

Discipline has also been really nice to play, so far only in mythic+ and nothing particularily high, I think the highest key was a Arcway+21. But it has been nice getting a feel for Discipline and I think it plays a bit better now without Plea since the descision what to cast feels a bit more straightforward. Having played my Restoration Druid twink I think also helped a lot with getting started as Discipline, since I had gotten used to the playstyle of being prepared for damage ahead of time instead of simply reacting to it as I can rather easily do most of the time as Holy.

Unfortunately I haven’t yet taken the chance to play my Druid, but that somehow feels a bit less interesting now that I also have Discipline to learn and as such something new and interesting to do with my main. I did however get to tank a couple of dungeons with my Warrior and it went reasonably well though the changes there were felt a lot harder especially when it comes to the global cooldown. Ignore Pain, in other words my primary damage mitigation mechanic, being on the global cooldown was a rather frustating experience. It wasn’t really helped along by Devastator and the talent that gives you rage through Demoralizing Shout now sharing a tier, since I was used to the rage gains of both I felt a lot less survivable than before which is a feat considering Warrior tanks were rather easy to bring down. This unfortunately lead to me not enjoying tanking with the Warrior as much anymore, which is unfortunate since it has been nice to have an Alliance character I could play with from time to time along with being able to tank. Having a feel for both the healing and tanking aspects in dungeons I feel really helps me in becoming a better healer and being able to better predict the damage the tank should be taking, which will of course become even more important if I plan on playing Druid or Discipline more since those are both rather reliant on being able to predict incoming damage. It was only a short test so far though, and I definitely want to try the Warrior a bit more but the initial impression was unfortunately not that good.

The pre-patch also has me really looking forward to Battle for Azeroth now since that’s when the specs will be really fleshed out with the Azerite traits. Also that is probably when I get the chance to start raiding a bit as Discipline once I have some more experience playing the spec, which I’m looking forward to a surprising amount considering I barely played the spec during Legion. I’m even considering deviating from my normal leveling routine and going Discipline for leveling instead of Holy, since that would probably be more useful with the DoTs available though I’m not sure how much that will matter since we’ll be leveling in a group anyway meaning my damage shouldn’t be of consequence.

All-in-all though, the pre-patch was really reinvigorating and has given me and my friends renewed motivation to play the game which was sorely needed and now we can start preparing for the launch of Battle for Azeroth!

There’s actually a surprising amount going on lately, much of which I haven’t written here about. To be fair some of that stuff is fairly recent, like the recent confirmation that the pre-patch is coming next week which is something of a big incoming change that I feel didn’t have a lot of official notice. I mean, it’s already Friday as we learned, which means that the patch is coming in less than a week. That feels like really short notice for something that so significantly changes the game. To be fair, it was somewhat foreshadowed with them saying the PVP season will end soon and with it being four weeks before the expansion launch, it can’t end up being much later.

Pre-patch

So let’s talk about the pre-patch a bit more in detail. I’m excited to see it coming even though I am miffed about some of the changes, since that will be the first feel for many of how Battle for Azeroth will play out. Now I have been poking a tiny bit at the beta myself, but a lot of people don’t have access to that. Of course we will be missing the new artifact along with the azerite armor, but all of the skill changes along with the loss of our artifact weapon are coming with the pre-patch. This will give a good opportunity for people—me included—to familiarize themselves with the class changes in preparation for Battle for Azeroth. I’m also kind of excited since this means I’ll be able to raid with the new talents and so on, and while those aren’t balanced around 110 content it’ll still give some indication how the end-game will feel like.

It’s also a good opportunity for me to maybe start taking some bigger pokes at Discipline, a spec I’ve so far pretty much completely avoided playing. I’m not conviced I’ll hugely enjoy playing Discipline but with the level of raiding I seem to be going to do with Battle for Azeroth it feels it makes sense at least being familiar with my second healing spec even if it’s not my first choice. I just hope that doesn’t end up with me pidgeonholed into playing Discipline the whole time.

There is one change that makes me sligthly miffed about the pre-patch coming though, namely the removal of master loot. Now I’m not sure I’m a huge fan of this change in general but it seems to be one we have to live with. But why it specifically bothers me, is that we are still in the process of trying to get the mount from Argus to players who participated or were in the guild during progress and have received some new recruits along with promotions to raider since then. This change now means that some of our raiders who contributed to the boss actually being downed might end up being out of luck and some person we aren’t even sure we want to keep in the guild might end up getting it. This is one of those situations I feel makes it a big mistake for Blizzard to force this change upon guilds.

Druids

Or rather, one specific druid, namely my twink. So a month or so ago by now I ended up boosting a druid for myself to 110 in order to have something to play for our planned split-raids. We are going to be doing split-raids to be able to get everyone the mount in time before the launch of Battle for Azeroth. Now as mentioned above we’ll have to see how that turns out with the loot change, but hopefully it all ends well.

Playing a druid has been an interesting experience so far and has given me a somewhat new found appreciation of why they were so popular for mythic+ during Legion and that reason is rather simple: I’m already surviving abilities without cooldowns that my priest would die to without cooldowns. I mean minor cooldows or trinkets, sure, but priests don’t have very many of those to go around especially if one gets unlucky and Desperate Prayer decides not to reset its cooldown. This really makes me hope they get the balancing around not only throughput but survivability and utility down much better in Battle for Azeroth since it kind of sucks being somewhat excluded from a major part of the game that is my favourite part of the game along with raiding. Mythic+ is probably one of the big things that has made me play and kept me subscribed throughout Legion and seeing first-hand how broken the balance is makes me somewhat frustrated. It might even end up with me making my druid my “mythic+ main” which would be a really sad turn of events. I’m also not sure how viable that strategy is with the changes to the druid talents which I feel makes healing mythic+ as a druid significantly harder, though I have no actual experience of those changes yet.

Guilds

Now there is one final strange thing that actually happened just a few days ago: I ended up being contacted by one of the guilds I applied to way back when. Now this puts me in a rather interesting situation, since I wasn’t really looking to change guilds and I kind of hate doing it. It is with some sadness I counted that this would be my fifth guild change during Legion which feels like a ton. Now two of those were leaving at the time basically dead guilds which is of course justified and a third was due to some rather heavy disagreement with the leadership of some decision being taken—I also wasn’t the only person leaving. So while it is all rather justifiable and it is a game after all where the primary purpose is to enjoy one’s time which does mean being in a group one enjoys playing with and has similar goals, it still feels somewhat wrong for that number to be ending up so high.

At the same time, I had hoped for this outcome since I know some people in the guild and would be very happy to be able to raid with those people again. This is why I made the decision to at least go forward by expressing interest in their offer. Nothing is final yet and they still have some internal discussion to do along with probably a interview with me to do assuming everything goes well, but I’m feeling really good about the direction this all is going in. It’s also something of a win-win scenario for me, since even if they don’t end up taking me in I’m rather happy where I am now and having to think about this potential change of guilds has really solified that feeling for me since I have at times been unsure how well I like the guild and now I feel certain that I enjoy raiding here and will be happy with either outcome—changing guilds or staying put—and that is obviously a rather good position to be in.

Somehow it’s been a while again, but that’s probably because it feels like not a lot has happened though that might not be quite true. I’ve picked up streaming as a fun little thing to do, still expanding on it and not quite sure where exactly I want to go but so far it’s been fun though also frustrating at times since I’m so directionless. This has also led to me being somewhat motivated by statistics, which while they seem decent on the surface since I know many awesome people that want to support me also show that the stream isn’t really interesting people since they don’t stay or follow so I’m left wondering what I can do to improve there. But I guess time and experimentation will bring me somewhere, hopefully.

Streaming is also a really different experience from writing this, since firstly it’s all real time and secondly I have those statistics available. For this blog, I’ve made the decision to not really promote or link it anywhere which naturally restricts the amount of people coming in. I also have no analytics running so I have no idea if people are reading anything I write combined with no comments. That makes it a very “putting something out into the void” experience, which is distinctly different from streaming though is the approach I took when starting the stream—since then I’ve expanded to people actually being able to hear me on stream along with whatever VOIP we happen to be using at the time, usually Discord but Teamspeak at times as well.

I think that history might be what also confuses me about what I want from streaming, I know I like playing around with technology and streams and video production and so on are exactly that which makes it enjoyable to me so the whole “putting it out into the void” approach should be appealing in and of itself. I also don’t believe I want to start with streaming as any sort of primary income, since it seems it requires quite a different personality from what I have along with requiring quite a lot of dedication even on days one isn’t really feeling like it. Simultaneosly as stated, I notice myself focusing on and following the metrics and give at least some thought to how I can improve the stream for viewers and hopefully gain some more followers potentially leading to me being able to be partnered on Twitch which would be kind of cool—50 followers being the last milestone I’m missing there. I guess this is where the whole networking thing would come in, getting to know other streamers and getting hosts and so on but that’s also not something I particularily enjoy doing. This has led to me just hoping the random people stopping by due to the viewer count end up liking it and following and that isn’t working very well so far. Maybe it will work better in the future, since viewers tend to bring in more viewers in kind of a positive feedback loop, but for now people don’t stay or follow.

It could also just be down to setup or content of course, I got some reports that apparently the VOIP was really loud at times, so hopefully I can fix that and make it all more even—that should actually be a somewhat easy thing to fix so maybe I need to get on that since I basically know exactly what to do.

I do think I’ll keep streaming though, some of my friends seem to rather enjoy being able to look at what we’re doing even though it’s content they themselves don’t want or can’t participate in at the moment so it is providing a service to them at least. And somehow it feels a bit fun having it running in the background, just from a tech enthusiast point of view as well.