World Of Warcraft

That's my point though.

The story is even further away for the Naga, but that detail doesn't stop you for advocating for Naga as a playable race because it's a race you like overall.

The Vulpera at least have an organized entity that that has much more positive relations with the Horde then it does with the Alliance. Doubly so if you consider their relations with the Zandalari to be de facto relations with the Horde.

The Naga have none of that. Sure we can sit here and come up with a plausible way for an amicable faction of Naga to rise up, and then align with one faction over the other. But we'd just be dealing with hypotheticals, that story hasn't been told yet.

I don't actually think playable Naga work without a lot more work, but at the very least they're a very well developed race. Vulpera don't even have that. Desert survivalist is about all there is to say.

I think the point being made is that none of that actually matters.

That's how I see it anyway.

For some reason, I could foresee playable Naga getting an ability that grants them increased movement speed to make up for the inability to use mounts.

we already have a friendly group of Naga.

The Coilskar who are part of the demon hunter armies/

You know what? I don't really see the point in arguing about this further. I don't actually like a lot of the allied races (void elves existing at all, Lightforged picking sides) or feel they should have just been customization options (dark irons, highmountain, maghar) so I guess this is just one more entry to the list. I suppose it's less annoying than Moira becoming an Alliance leader.

Tbh, I like the idea of allied races. My problem with them personally is theyre insane amounts of work to unlock for races the devs are not putting nearly as much dev time into as previous races, all to sell them to us as "accomplishments"

but in practice it gates people from playing a race they wanna play until they put in months of work on another character

At the same time, most of the requirements for an Allied Race are shared with the Pathfinder achievements to get flight. Pathfinder requires completing specific questlines and getting reputations to Revered. Allied Races require those same questlines and just bumps the Revered requirements to Exalted.

I imagine most players are probably putting in the work for Pathfinder already just to get flight. So then it's just a matter of grinding out that last bar of rep, which isn't too hard of you focus on it. I got Mechagon and Naz'jatar reps pretty quickly, I think. Few weeks at worst.

This might be more of an issue when the expansion is officially done, true, but I think Blizzard made getting the Legion races easier afterwards, so no reason not to expect the same here.

Edited by sgamer82 on Dec 31st 2019 at 11:14:30 AM

It still isnt enough, in my mind.

Imagine you're a new player, and say, the dark iron dwarves really appeal.

well, congrats, you need to roll an entirely seperate chasracter, play all the way to endgame, grind reputation for several weeks, and then you can start playing the character you actually wanted to play

Pathfinder itself is a pretty ridiculous requirement so I don't think that's a good defense of the allied race grind.

My point is it's not really that much more work if you're going for Pathfinder anyway, and most people probably are since it offers the desirable reward of flying.

They may relax the requirements later. Wasn't there a time when you couldn't create a death Knight or demon Hunter without a sufficiently leveled character? I don't think that matters anymore.

Edited by sgamer82 on Dec 31st 2019 at 4:22:51 AM

You still need a level 70 to make a demon hunter, but that's such a relaxed requirement it may as well not exist.

I do not like the Allied Races being rep-locked to the same severity outside of the content they're uninvolved in, that and Blizzard being so vague on what an Allied Race actually is (Are they subraces? Shared heritage? Shared skeleton?) leaving a lot of confusion as to what could be possible and what shouldn't have been possible, they should just say "X will never happen" when it comes up. A very easy fix for the former would be to make it so that once the content is out of being current and a desirable grind (like the Legion rep races) rep tokens should drop like hot cakes and give a ton of rep, or better yet, re-add rep tabards. Doing the silvermoon grind for my exalted (I main a demon hunter, they only start at friendly) took me all of 40 minutes with the cata-era tabard that gives rep, so much less fuss.

Of course, the easy way out would be to make them unlockable for money on the cash store... but even at my most cynical and tired-of-Blizzard moods, I feel like they would never add gameplay modifiers for real money.

With the advent of questing unlocking customization options like the Night Warrior eyes, I feel like things like mechagnomes, lightforged and highmountain should have just been rolled into expanding the character customization from the start, but doing the quest to unlock those options.

Edited by NaraNumas on Dec 31st 2019 at 12:37:25 PM

Well we are only 4 days away from patch 8.3 dropping.

The official survival guide was posted yesterday.

Apparently there will be a questline regarding the Horde/Alliance armistice that was never on the PTR. While a lot of it did get datamined, it'll be interesting to see if there were any parts that were hidden since we now know they can do that now pretty effectively. If not, it will nevertheless be interesting to see it all in it's full, proper context.

No trailer yet, which kind of surprises me. Rise of Azshara had it's trailer released a full week before release. Though there's still a little time for it to drop today.

Edited by Falrinn on Jan 10th 2020 at 4:50:24 AM

I still need to do Mechagon for the Mechagnomes, but otherwise am good to go.

Just waiting on heroic mode becoming available?

Basically. Wasn't the plan but the couple times I got a regular group it went nowhere.

Oh right, I haven't done that dungeon either.

Have they ever said why they gate basic mythic dungeons and normal raids behind manual groups? Having come to Wo W from other games, that's always been the weirdest thing.

Honestly? I think the biggest factor is that the game didn't really have a functional matchmaking system for PvE content until midway through the the second expansion set.

So by then the idea that serious PvE content=premade groups was so deeply ingrained into the community that ever since Blizzard is perhaps overly cautious when it comes to where and when they allow people to use an automated matchmaking system.

Waiting to see the missing context behind a single Sethrak NPC that was added this patch that has no association to anything so far...

That aside, I'm really iffy on this patch overall, I'm happy we're revisiting old zones and elated the Vale is being fixed, but this just feels... I'm not sure, really, something feels off about it to me. It doesn't help that apparently the way horrific visions function if you don't manage to get your cloak upgrade before the Horrific Vision ends, you've permanently lost that week of progression.

A lot of this patch, at least laid out in typing, feels like "let's just get the rest of this swept under the rug to start working on Shadowlands", hopefully it's just my cynicism coming through though.

Happy to have my vulpera though, just need to find good armor. Surprisingly few choices of mail that looks alright but the PTR doesn't give me my full armory

Edited by NaraNumas on Jan 10th 2020 at 1:47:36 PM

Update on leveling up the Legendary Cloak

The bottom line here seems to be that it's actually much harder to find yourself permanently behind on your cloak then was apparent from PTR testing. Since you can very readily earn 3 shots at a Horrific Vision in a single week, you can get 3 cloak upgrades in a week if you are lagging behind.

Having started playing the game after quitting in Vanilla last november, is 100% agree with you. That said, I find the gating of flying a much more large annoyance. Especially when the game expects you to log in daily and do daily quests spread hodge podge all across the various zones. Having to finish the game to get flight can do die in a fire. If I had not had a friend with flight already and a 2 player mount to ferry me every day I'd have hard quit the game. Especially in Nazjatar. That map, on foot, can rot in hell. And anyone who thinks on foot navigation in wow isn't that bad has some sort of stockholm syndrome after 15 years.

Like, grinding new races was work, but doing the story gets you really close to exalted. It's doing the daily quests on foot that's some sort of purgatory made of un-fun.

Also, I went back to unlock the Legion allied races and holy shit Legion is so much more generous. Those daily quests "Kill a rando named elite" in Legion literally give 9X the rep the same kind of quest gives in BFA ^note Those quest tend to give 75 in BFA, while they give 350 to TWO factions in Legion, for a total of 700. Holy shit Blizzard, who hurt you? In Legion i ground from 0 reverred to exalted in 4 days with Army of Light, and 5 days with Argussian Reach.

Edited by Ghilz on Jan 13th 2020 at 10:43:15 AM

During Legion, the World Quest rep gains were about the same as they are now in Battle for Azeroth. They indeed made it more generous once Legion as no longer the primary expansion.

Outside of the rep grind, I've never minded the flight unlock requirements. The logic behind it makes sense, before you start flying over and skipping everything, at least play the game first. Also, speaking for myself, most of the requirements for flight (and, to a lesser extent, Allied races) are things I'm inclined to do anyway (again, excluding the rep grind).

Still, at least you only need to unlock it once to have it on all characters going forward.

I literally haven't played since unlocking BFA Pathfinder. It burnt me out so bad I don't want to play anymore.

Pathfinder is a ridiculous, inexcusable system. It takes so long to unlock and the tasks are so tedious that I can't believe we're in the third permutation of it.

I can understand not wanting people trivialising the content or skipping the zones they worked hard on, but the pathfinder requirements are far beyond what it would take to be familiar with the zones on foot. IMO completing the main questlines in each zone and doing an emissary quest in each zone would be enough for players to 'experience' the zones.

Also, if you don't like that people don't want to appreciate your zones on foot, stop making zones feel so shitty to traverse on foot (Naz'jatar is so godawful without flying).

Millenium got an interview with Ion. The main points (there's not many).

No 8.3.5, hope of any extra allied races, or any kind of wrapup after Ny'alotha are very slim unless they change their mind. The patch tomorrow is the end of BFA, full stop.

No plans for account-bound essences, acquisition rates may be adjusted case-by-case.

He thinks the negative effects on corrupted gear will be enough of a balance factor to keep it from becoming the same issue as war/titanforging.

Honestly. I think it's less about what you do in itself and more of the grind in it. Doing the storyline? Reasonable. Exploring? Reasonable? Reputation grinding? Reasonable*. The part that makes it suck is with world questing being the most consistent way to get reputation outside of emissaries and being such a small amount of it, so if you're wanting to get it right away you're gonna burn yourself out.

BFA felt especially bad, in my opinion, entirely because after a point Mechagon rep was flat out unfun to farm. In Legion the aggravation was besides being rep locked, the initial stuff to do for Broken Isles flying was also time-gated by the weekly quests at the Legionfall base, most of which besides getting your new Order Hall champion was just "Kill X enemies, gather X things, do X event" which also made it aggravating to have it time-locked.

Edited by NaraNumas on Jan 13th 2020 at 11:14:01 AM

Excluding the rep grind is sort of going "Excluding the largest requirement". Sort of like saying one doesn't mind the ocean excluding the water part. And I could be on board the "They want you to experience the content first" if Wo W's methods of navigations weren't antiquated and awful. Maps that aren't taking artistic licence with what the map actually looks like. A map that contains useful terrain feature like cave entraces, where the paths up mountains are. Detailed quest navigation markers. Quests that don't refuse to be tracked even when you're next to the objective. Maps that aren't built around verticality. Roads that go directly from point A to B without meandering. Roads that don't have enemy mobs using them so I can go places without stopping every 10 inches to deal with the train of mobs following me.

I'm fine with "You gotta experience the content before they give you the ability to skip it". But then don't make it a chore to do so.

And that's without going that grinding rep by foot is such a giant time synch. It literally takes about 5+ times longer for no reason. When I'm redoing the same daily quest for the 10th time, I've "Experienced" the content. I just wanna be done with it and the ability to fly from points to point would be welcome.

Edited by Ghilz on Jan 13th 2020 at 12:37:31 PM