World Of Warcraft

Re: Previous page's last post

So... We agree that it's fine except the most tedious part?

Edited by sgamer82 on Jan 14th 2020 at 12:55:17 PM

Yeah, but thats a pretty silly thing to say.

Why? Nothing wrong with liking/not minding something other than for one detail.

When the detail is in both time and effort the largest part, it kinda comes across as disingenuous.

Honestly, after thinking about it, I'll concede that maybe I am being disingenuous, even if that genuinely isn't my intent.

Partly it's because I sincerely don't see the rep grind as all that big a deal. Rep grinding in general for one reward or another has been a Thing as long as WoW has, and Pathfinder in particular has been with us for the last three expansions. It's tedious at worst, and I'm not even sure I agree with the rep grind being the largest part since the other parts of Pathfinder do a decent chunk of the work for you, anyway, so you can progress on it while doing something else entirely.

Mostly, though, if I'm going to be honest, I'm so genuinely sick and tired of all the negativity thrown at World of Warcraft, be it in this thread or in the wider online world, that I no longer care if a complaint is legitimate or not. That almost certainly affects my ability to discuss things because my reaction when I see someone complain about something is no longer something like "hm, I wonder if this is as big an issue as they say?" and is now "Oh, God, here we go..."

For better or for worse, WoW is what it is.

Edited by sgamer82 on Jan 14th 2020 at 3:54:24 AM

Going to double post just to separate some better stuff from my little rant there.

I just got home and got the patch downloading now. Don't think I'll play until tomorrow, if not the weekend.

Looks like Blizzard's also offering a 30% discount on Race and Faction changes, for anyone interested. I'd hoped to take advantage on a discount of a name change, name my Troll Shaman with the name I use for gaming stuff online, Zeidoktor ^note inspired by the Troll Witch Doctor's "Someone call for the doktah", but remembered with more accent than was actually there, but that wasn't one of the discounted services. Granted it's only $10 normally anyway, but not a huge deal to me right now since my current main is a troll rogue whose name I have no intention of changing.

I got through most of the introductory content tonight. Still have Visions to do, but it looks like we'll be grinding out this new stuff for a while.

Got through the introductory stuff on my Dwarven Paladin and managed to push my cloak up to rank 4, and then just started to scratch the surface on my Nightborne (mostly just wanted to check out the completed Lilian Voss questline).

I plan on unlocking Mechagnomes and Vulpera tomorrow.

I enjoyed the overall story, though I do think that Assaults could do with some mechanical adjustments.

On small detail I really liked is that the Wastewander Bandits have aligned with Ramkahen as part of the Uldum Accord. I always felt there was a bit of untapped story potential with that particular group, and they got shortchanged by the Cata Uldum zones by effectively making them pawns of Deathwing and overwriting their ascetic to make them part of the gigantic pop culture reference that consumed half the zone.

Patch 8.3 corrects this by giving them an appropriate "desert nomad" ascetic and aligning them with Ramkahen against N'Zoth. Much better imo.

As far as I can tell the treaty questline isn't active yet, despite the survival guide implying that it would occur before the release of Ny'alotha. I suppose they might be holding it back for a day or two just to keep people from getting overloaded on day 1, but we'll see.

Created Vulpera Warlock. First sight was a stack of 20 other Vulperas atop me.

The unlock quest chain is longer than that of the previous races, and pretty mellow and funny.

Did the intro quest right up till Wrathion Sends you on your first vision, will save for tomorow.

I dont know how I feel about the assaults? Currently there's so many players they are annoying to do with a lot of the time content being tagged by the other faction. Killing enemies gives only 1 percent per kill so that's out of the table. One of my guildies got weird bugs where they couldn't interact with the WQ that spawn in the assaults, or speak to the dude that spawned the Uldum assault boss...

So the Vulpera recruitment basically boils down to 'Oh good, more warm bodies to throw at problems we could solve ourselves' then? I was hoping for a little more after the Nightborne and Maghar recruitments seemed to actually set up future plot threads.

I guess culturally they do fit in, so it's really more like the Highmountain recruitment.

Edited by Arha on Jan 15th 2020 at 12:29:18 PM

I mean they literally are desert hobos so I wasn't expecting them to link to some dark looming potentially existential thread / hanging plot thread. And I enjoyed the casualness of their story.

Promoting Peons was fun!

On the subject of Assaults, while I don't think they are Blizzard's best work on a mechanical level^note though I think if I don't worry so much about doing every daily and just focus on getting the main objectives done, it should be within what I can handle I actually really love how the Assault zones are set up on a story level.

In short, the Assaults depict a Vale and Uldum where what we as players did back in MoP and Cata mattered.

The restoration of the Vale is a big part of that, but Uldum also reflects this in a lot of big ways. The Neferset never reestablished themselves, and the Wastewander have reembraced their desert nomad lifestyle^note the bulk of Schnottz's troops were former Wastewander lorewise but this time have allied with Ramkahen and now fight in defense of Uldum instead of doing a bit of light raiding.

Yes, new threats have arisen, but it's nice to have an updated zone where things have gotten better since our last visit and we are fighting to make sure they stay better. Rather then a zone that gets wrecked and we are just picking up the pieces.

I think with some mechanical polish, Assaults could become a way for Blizzard to update the occasional old zone without needing to destroy the thing.

I dug the Vulpera recruitment chain a lot, because unlike the others it wasn't "They'll be a good fit for the horde, go help them with whatever problems are keeping them from joining", it was "They don't want us but let's show them why they need us", which was such a welcome change of pace that, in my opinion, helped flesh out the Vulpera so much better than the former did for the other A Rs.

So far I'm not minding 8.3 as much as I thought I would be, getting a good friend who I know is half-competent for nightmares has made it fun and relatively simple so far. However I see just over the horizon the entry fee for visions, daily requirements for the Vale and Uldum while trying to balance a work life is going to make me either fall behind or burn out trying to keep up, but I'm enjoying it enough to climb that hill when I get there.

I still need to unlock mechagnomes but... ech. I haven't enjoyed any of the dungeons this expansion, what little of Operation: Mechagon I tried on mythic (spent 2 hours for 4 boss kills) doesn't have me in any rush to really unlock them. If anything - speaking from my own perspective of course - they're even worse/creepier in action than I thought they would be from the previews.

Edited by NaraNumas on Jan 15th 2020 at 1:47:38 PM

I got a slightly different feeling from the recruitment. It's not 'The Horde needs the Vulpera' but rather that Baine didn't see them as being anything more than dirty refugees stealing our jobs or whatever rather than being clever and resourceful enough to pull their own weight. Nothing they did was something the player or other NPCs could not have done on their own if the Horde had its normal resources and personnel available. But they don't, so Baine was stretched thin with far too many new problems to deal with and not enough people to fix them. He categorized the Vulpera as another problem, not another group of problem solvers.

Which is really part of what makes them fit the Horde, though I do maintain I wish they'd gotten more development before this. The Horde has pretty much always been the group with less resources and people and a race that has always had to make do with living off of scavenging and careful resource management is a good fit for that aspect of the Horde. So I acknowledge that that part of the Vulpera recruitment was well enough written even if there were no grand reveals or hints of potential future conflict. Basically, better than the Void Elves or Lightforged but not as interesting as, say, the Nightborne.

Loot from Horrific Visions clarification

In short it's not actually random whether you get a piece of equipment or not. Instead there are 8 tiers of rewards ranging from an ilevel 420 for just killing the main boss, to ilevel 470^note just 5 levels short of a mythic raid drop from a non-N'Zoth Ny'alotha boss for doing a full clear with all 5 faceless masks active.

You can obtain one reward per tier per week. If you earn the same reward tier twice in a single week, you will instead be given the reward from the tier below.

It'll be interesting to see how much gear I end up getting from this compared to Mythic+.

Kinda feeling it after tonight. My major gripe so far, which I'll hold off on actually using it as a judgement until Blizzard says if it's intended or not, is going back to spawns/objectives tapping to a single player and despawning, forcing you to keep searching or wait for a respawn. Faction tagging on Rares also needs to go away.

It feels like such a weird consistency break in the internal logic of Anti-Frustration Features to take a step back from free-for-all rare mobs and shared objectives I can't possibly see it being intended, right?

My biggest gripe is Visions are fun. But also visions are so gated behind weekly grinding and are over so quick that it feels like 30 minutes of fun a week is all theyre giving you, and even then, only if you grind all the tedious shit religiously.

I've done the new content. I'm already bored with the new content. /sigh

Story stuff is great but it only takes us so far.

Yeah. Like,. the assaults are cool. the new essencesd are neat. but the fact everything is tied to the extremely dimi nishing returns of doing visions is..concerning./

If I could run Visions far more often but just have cloak progress gated I'd be far happier

Edited by Midgetsnowman on Jan 20th 2020 at 7:56:24 AM

The fact that you can fail visions and get thrown behind cloak upgrades is super stressful for me.

I already failed one vision because we didn't knew about that one debuff that kept spawning small tentacles which kept us in combat for longer than expected.

I also lost one lesser vision to a transition error when the EU world servers where crashing this Saturday.

One Vision I did with a PUG where the tank was a 452 Pala with a 3k R.io score and I thought "well what could go wrong"

The Pala: "I gonna pull big :)"

Me◊

Cue him pulling the entire Drag section at once. We ended up orbing with sub 50 Sanity and me getting a minor heart attack.

Edited by Kiefen on Jan 20th 2020 at 6:55:49 PM

to me the annoyance of it is if you want me to push deeper into the visions then its a perverse incentive that failure is so costly becaiuse we get at best 3 runs a week.

Lemme have infinite runs but only giove me loot rewards for doing well, and gate capes to so masny upgrades a week.

Edited by Midgetsnowman on Jan 20th 2020 at 11:33:55 AM

cutscene's been released https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_iHOJ1Ezr0&feature=emb_title

Funny thing is, when it was first linked in the story forums, only the final thirty seconds were in the video, so it looked really disappointing.

And ofc even with the full version available the forums are still bitching about how this is "the worst end cinematic".

I mean yeah it isn't much but it is not

"Oh our eyes stopped glowing, well you're pregnant > fireworks"

or

"Dreanor is free!!"

Naaaaah, nothing beats how salty I was with Cataclysm's ending in Dragon Soul.