World Of Warcraft

More new PTR lore! After Azshara's death(?), N'Zoth is apparently released (or at least is in the process of tearing down his seal), and Lor'themar and Jaina, who apparently work together throughout the raid, realize that the Blood War has essentially been a giant cover for N'Zoth's master plan. With Sylvanas showing absolutely no signs of stopping her deranged war mongering even in the face of annihilation, Lor'themar and Jaina resolve to form a coalition of Horde and Alliance soldiers to try and put the Blood War "on hold" until N'Zoth is defeated.

RE: Fighteer

The problem is that the story still forces the Horde player to be Stupid Evil or be a Satellite Character to the Alliance's lead role.

Before Mists of Pandaria, the narrative did not constantly shame the player for leveling a Horde character and gave them reason to oppose the Alliance, whilst making it easy for the Alliance players to feel heroic as well.

Its a common criticism players have given since that expansion and the writers have kept ignoring all criticism to do this reviled storyline a second time in BFA.

Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy is a real problem. The writers should focus on making it possible for the Horde player to feel good about the story for once rather then forcing them to choose between being Stupid Evil or blatantly siding with the Alliance to kill more Horde characters.

I do like how, in the stuff I've read, Lor'themar, at least, is remembering Taran Zhu's words in Pandaria. For all that the biggest complaint of this storyline is it being "Garrosh 2.0", at least the characters seem to be recalling the lessons they learned then, even if, at worst, belatedly.

World Quest/Emissary rewards getting buffed next week

Not sure how I feel about this honestly. While I appreciate being able to easily gear alts, it doesn't feel right that I have several alts that I barely play outside of running the Warfront when it's up that are within 10-15 ilevels of my main and this change will only worsen the issue.

Edited by Falrinn on Apr 20th 2019 at 1:23:10 PM

15 ilvl is a huge difference, to be fair. Your alts will never be as strong as your raiding main, all this does is to make your alts raid ready.

To put it another term, I think it's a little weird that characters I've played an average of maybe a couple hours a month once I finished leveling them up and completing the major storylines have a higher average ilevel then the drops in normal mode raids.

This has been an issue to some extent since BfA launched, but it's only gotten worse over time. In 8.0 Emissaries scaled to the same ilevel as LFR, now they scale to the same ilevel as normal mode, and with the change next week they'll scale to just 5 ilevels short of heroic mode gear (except for mythic, where they scale to actual heroic ilevel gear).

Just thinking that maybe high ilevel gear has become a little too readily available in BfA.

Something strange is what's happening with incursions. Their ilvl didn't increase along with the other ilvl boosts at the start of Season 2. And now, it isn't increasing either, it's still stuck at 370. So, next week, we'll have a situation where plain world quests give the same ilvl as an incursion that requires 4 world quests and a scenario to complete. What's more, in the former case you know beforehand which item slot you're getting, which doesn't happen with incursions.

Blizz plz. This is just like how Battle for Stromgard still gives 370, because I like to play a 20 min waiting simulator for vendor trash.

Does uldir lfr still give out 340? That worries me a bit for Battle of Dazar'alor and those who use LFR, since the Horde War Campaign, at least, requires it and there's little incentive to run something that won't drop anything useful.

With Incursions, I think Blizzard sees them as content that's not truly meant to be "evergreen" in the context of BfA.

Incursions are likely meant to be specific to the early 8.1 phase of the expansion. They are very story-relevant in an environment where the Alliance is launching a massive attack on Zandalar in the principle raid, but less so in an environment where neither faction are launching any new large-scale offensives and in some cases working together, either through alliances of conveniences or, in the case of Mechagon, because the Rustbolt Resistance holds enough of the cards on Mechagon to simply demand it of the factions

They will still be useful for leveling and to build up honorbound/7th Legion rep, but I don't think they were ever meant to be a source of viable gear for the whole expansion.

I'm not too worried about that actually. Sure the pool of players will technically be smaller, but in general the biggest determining factor in queue times isn't the pool of players but the ratios of tanks/healers/DPS.

Edited by Falrinn on Apr 21st 2019 at 11:42:31 AM

Blizzard sure loves abandoning content the second it isnt relevant to the story, thats for sure.

That's pretty much every RPG and especially every MMO, though.

When was the last time you visited your farm in Halfhill? Holding some content up to the relevance standard and not other content is hypocritical.

The invasions are good for farming Conquest in War Mode when I don't feel like running battlegrounds. It was nice that they provided marginally better gear, but I wasn't relying on them for it.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 22nd 2019 at 4:28:23 AM

I was gonna hold up FFXIV as an example of that, but then I remembered Diadem exists, and soon enough Eureka will go the same way. Just content that kinda existed on the side but got forgotten because it wasn't appealing.

There's a TON of examples in Warframe too, the dev team outright admitted that if a new feature flops, they're not fussed on updating it and let it fall by the wayside, the pet/companion system is the biggest hit there I can immediately think of.

Eureka only exists for this xpac's Legendary weapon grind, the grind is the only thing in FFXIV that really depreciates over time. And is purposefully made to be completely optional.

You can compare the place to an instanced and scaling (with the amount of people in the zone) difficulty Timeless Isle with group content. And seeing how I am still missing some Timeless Isle drops even now I don't think its going to go away completely.

Edited by Memers on Apr 22nd 2019 at 3:37:55 AM

My point is, blizzard is exceotionally good at it.

literally almost never does any feature at all survive an expansion

I think minor features like incursions are fine, they serve a purpose for one or two things and they do it fine.

What I definitely don't agree with is loaners being the entire focus of the expansion, with Artifacts it was fine because it was the first time, but the Heart of Azeroth pushed it a bit too far, all the power we gained from our artifacts just poofed, and we had to work our way back up from step 1 to get back to... oh, half of that potential from a fully upgraded heart and good Azerite gear?

Loaner mechanics as the focus of gameplay is something that needs to be way more involved and interesting than the Heart is, or just dropped altogether.

Honestly, I agree. Artifacts were one of the best parts about Legion, and the way they were just...shunted to the side as soon as the Heart came around sucks royally.

Yeah, I don't think the whole setup of "gain powerful artifact at start of expansion" -> "spend expansion empowering artifact, gaining passive/active abilities along the way -> "depower artifact at end of expansion" is going to make sense on a 3rd go-around.

I'm starting to think that having a secondary leveling system that resets at the end of every expansion might just be a fundamentally flawed concept in the long run.

Edited by Falrinn on Apr 24th 2019 at 12:13:26 PM

It really sucks for players to build up their power each expansion and have it ripped away at the start of the next one. This is a problem Blizzard seems unable to solve in the long term, since their basic gameplay model is based around it.

At least with gear is still useful for a little while going into the next expansion.

Yeah, how long did it take for the Artifacts to get outclassed by BfA gear?

...no seriously, that's a legitimate question. I'm still working my way through vanilla because I'm a completionist.

It depends on how high you get the item level of your artifact prior to it "burning out". My main, with the highest item level, replaced the artifact around 114-115, along with most other gear. Other characters replaced it at 111 with crafted weapons.

Aww, man, you just reminded me of losing Light's wrath as a skill. I had so much fun using that.

So uh...I actually got the Noblegarden Strider mount and the green rarity bunny pet as an egg drop.

That will drastically reduce farming for me since now all I need is the blue bunny and the Hearthstone toy.