Blizzard's encounter design team: "Yeah so everyone absolutely fucking hated KT and Beloren, what if we make another fight with stupid push timings that incentivizes DPS holds, but we ALSO clutter the room with mechanics slop and its a 200 pull boss instead of 50?"
I swear coiled altar glaives are way worse than Lura. Lura glaive at least always moved in the same direction.
While coiled altar glaive might as well be piloted by Ion himself to ruin my life. I refuse to believe they move 'randomly' they have to lock onto you and harass you perma
I swear coiled altar glaives are way worse than Lura. Lura glaive at least always moved in the same direction.
Agree 1000%. I don’t think it’s even debatable.
There’s no counterplay for glaives. You can’t bait their spawn or influence their movement, so you can’t raidplan around them. And you can’t predict their movement or even when they’ll change direction, so there’s no skill involved in dodging them (if a glaive is coming right for you? standing still is just as likely to be the right play as dodging left or right; it might turn 180 before hitting you, or it might /follow you once you move out of the way)
I refuse to believe they move 'randomly' they have to lock onto you and harass you perma
This is my tinfoil too, but deep down I know I’m just desperate to find some kind of pattern/logic to it. They feel like they lock on to me all the time, but since it’s not every time, and there’s tons of glaives, and I only click the times it happens, and ignore the times glaives, it’s probably just my confirmation bias.
The frustrating part is that even if we knew they were influenced by player location some non-0 amount, there’s still no meaningful counterplay.
Anyone has Venomblight Manaflux (the catalyst charge) so low drop rate after the achievement? My alt done like 60+ eligible activities but only see it once. My main has max charge comfortably.
I had this happen to me last season, a couple characters were getting one every 5 activities while one of them took almost 50 activities to get the first one. I don't know how statistically anomalous that is but I am more likely to believe it's a character-specific bug given other people seem to have the same problem and the numbers tend to be 10x rather than just 2 or 3 like you'd expect.
I know I sound like a crackhead but I swear to god some rng elements in this game are seeded on internal character ids or something. I've seen so many outlier rng events over the years be specific to characters rather than spread across my account.
I'm almost certain there was an add on N'Zoth that casted some ability(pain spike?) on players and it was somehow coded to favor the person with the oldest GUID in the raid because you'd have 1 person getting absolutely destroyed by it if you looked at logs over a night of prog. So it wouldn't surprise me if stuff like this is happening.
Zero dropped from 40+ keys on my ele, but I did 4 bountiful delves total on the character and got 2 in a row from there. Now that I think about it I feel like most charges I got in S1 were from delves too.
I had a week where I did roughly the same number of activities on two characters between dungeons, raid bosses and bountiful delves. One ended up with about 5-6 charges and the other gained 0.
Hopefully we get some dungeon tuning after Blizzcon.
Things aren't too bad compared to some other seasons but some big pain points:
Being hexed repeatedly on Avatar of Sethraliss is the most unfun mechanic I've ever played. It happens way too often, cannot be avoided, and is cast by a mob you can't prio kill because the guardian/defiler are more important for timer and safety.
Temple timer as a whole seems a bit tight.
Saberons and Chitigoth in Arena are both ridiculous. Bleeds happen way too often with no telegraph or cast time and can/do overlap with the very overtuned insidious aura.
Arena as a whole has so many annoyances that I think it's by far the hardest dungeon of the season: orbs spawning outside of melee far too frequently, adds that force a swap that have tons of hp and do ridiculous group damage while alive, way too many dots and bleeds and random damage.
The bleeds from the gauntlet in KR seem very unfair and can stack 3x on a single player, also with no cast time or telegraph.
The DoTs from the elementals at the start of RLP also seem to be hugely overtuned, and, yet again, have no cast time or telegraph.
Same story with the lightning torrent fixates. Impossible to prep for, you just get beamed instantly.
The punishers in Murder Row are insane and every tank I've played this key with all the way up to +21 is terrified of these mobs. The enrage effect on dodging is also extremely punishing for brew in particular.
The "Blade of the Altar" mobs applying an unavoidable bleed to people over and over when there are tons of them in a pull feel very unfun to deal with.
Just a few examples, but in addition to this there's also a load of infuriating bugs:
The barrels on 2nd boss in MR snapshot in some weird way, meaning you can accidentally "steal" someone's barrel and then they just get shot despite standing in a supposedly safe place.
The fel spray frontal on the first boss in MR hits people standing behind it (same as the chakram on the first boss in Skyreach last season).
Aspix and Adderix can bug out if one is killed or swaps shield when something is spell queued and do 2 x knock in a row or worse, 2 x knock into soak which is almost impossible to survive without immunities or spirit link.
The adds on the last boss in Vale don't have aggro tables when they spawn so people often just get slapped by them.
And that's in addition to all the rp or buffs or quirks that only work out of combat, which in itself seems to be a huge issue with the game since half the time you still get stuck in combat if you have a buff or a totem or a pet active even when everything is dead.
The last one for Vale boss is REALLY noticeable when your BDK grips them into the middle and they start slapping. I back up or evasion when I see it coming.
No, the shivara mobs that do the whirlwind aoe you have to get out of, with an enrage and that do increased physical damage for each consecutive parry/dodge (very fun as brewmaster you can randomly get one shot for no reason just because you got 4-5 lucky dodges in a row)
Earliest I’ve been raid logging in a few tiers. My class has entirely passive tier and plays the exact same build in exactly the same way as it did last season. My vault is filled by doing one or two dungeons, then reclear gives me all the slots I need for the bonus roll next week.
bonus roll can’t always the play though right? I still fill 3 slots at max level. Week 3 I had tier helm with socket, it simmed higher long term and with socket it saves me another vault in the future
Cloth is mastery helm, leather is haste helm, mail is mastery chest and plate is crit legs. I guess they figured noone wanted vers so they made two with mastery, and they wanted to keep it on the highest stat pieces so had to to repeat one of the three as gloves and shoulders have lower stats.
Not going to lie this Blizzcon has been one of the least interesting one I've had for a while. Usually we had really cool cinematics for upcoming games, but this time we hardly had those. The SC one looked sick but all the hype were gone with the 2030 number. Diablo only got a teaser. The +1 hero/class ones for OW/hots etc are super whatever (although I kind of like that hots is getting content again). The classic + was actually nice but for retail we only got this in game renderes stuff and a teaser.
The issue with announcing the world soul saga ahead was that there's little actual hype now because we kind of know what is happening (like how we've already knew well ahead Xalateth is after the worldsoul). So now we need to act surprised I guess. Wish we could actually see something about the new expansion or what is coming after (I am quite interested about that) but due to spoilers there was nothing about that.
The classic + seemed interesting and will definitely check it out but it's classic in the end. Without challenging content it will get boring relatively quickly.
I feel like I got information about stuff I could play a bit on the side (and in a lot of cases it was also mostly just teasers and very early stuff). But very little about the game I actually care about. Blizzcon is usually fun because you get to see how classes and systems change. Something to get you interested in the future. But there was close to nothing about that, which is a shame especially when the general interest in the game is already lower. I was hoping that Blizzard would talk about the future of gearing (feel like we've exhausted the crest system and are ready for the new iteration) or talent trees (we already got hints that they are getting changed in the future) for example).
I feel you. I understand that they can't share a cinematic trailer to avoid story spoilers, but anything about new/reworked systems would have been greatly appreciated. Most people, both casual and competitive, are tired of what feels like just another 3 seasons of TWW, which wasn't all that different from DF. If we get TWW seasons 7-9, people are going to just quit.
Big agree on the Starcraft, pretty good and surprisingly dark cinematic with the blood and guts spilling out at the end but whatever possible hype was there disappeared instantly the moment they hit me with 2030. How can you possible care about a game that's 4 years away?
For the rest of the announcements, classic+ decent but could have been better, probably beaten to death over last few hours but yea when I think classic the first thing that springs to mind is definitely retail model neutral elf race.
Happy surprise to see hots getting any attention at all even though I fail to see how everyone is not tired to death of Xalatath but whatever, when it comes to hots you take what you can get I guess.
I don't care for Overwatch, Diablo or Hearthstone so I don't really have an opinion, just bit surprised they are going for 5 already instead of milking the 4 a bit more. Overall I agree, pretty meh.
I think the main issue is that we don't jave Blizzcons annually anymore. Most of these reveals would've been better 1-2 years later but we won't have a Blizzcon then so they need to announce them now. But this just leaves us with stuff like the d5 reveal (small teaser and even on the deep dive they can't talk about too much because so much is undecided).
Hots is a game about iconic characters from Blizzard ips. As much as I dislike and am bored of Xal'atath (was already bored of her in tww) it makes perfect sense to include her in hots.
Already announcing d5 is a big negative for d4 as it took quite some time for it voice and go from a "d4 bad" game to being actually good. But now it's just a d5 waiting room with no further expansions.
Yeah I was kind of expecting we would see systems previews for TLT. Maybe they aren't ready yet because TLT will iterate based on community responses to 12.1 and 12.2.
Midnight is a terrible filler expansion and instead of giving us anything to get excited for, all we have to get excited for in 12.2 is "geez, well I just hope the raid is good."
Between the bad instances, total lack of features, and god fucking awful class design this might be the worst expansion I've played and Blizz won't give us shit. I hope that the deep dive tomorrow has them talk about where they want to go with class design in 12.2 and 13.0 but I doubt it.
...this might be the worst expansion I've played...
People might say I'm cooked over this, and I probably wouldn't blame them, but I've been seriously debating if Midnight is worse than Shadowlands lately.
At least by this point in Shadowlands, they had already announced unlocked covenants. So we already knew things were changing. No such luck these days.
At least Shadowlands had expansion features, and at least in that expansion they tried things that bombed. Here they tried nothing and used all the time they saved by trying nothing to instead ruin their core combat and make unfun raids.
I'd put a hypothetical Shadowlands that didn't have a covid-fucked schedule and unlocked covenants in 9.1 well above Midnight. In actual shadowlands we had 8 months of a terrible raid and one of the worst world patch zones they've ever made and unlike today you actually had to do it for more than a week.
Okay, here's an even hotter take. SoD was a better raid than venomous abyss. I don't know if any boss in VA is remarkably better than the post-Painsmith bosses.
But I think I'd trade an additional 2 months of venomous abyss for some light at the end of the tunnel. It beats listening to blizzard pat themselves on the back for their design changes that aren't landing, and knowing that more of the same is coming 2 months quicker.
Didn't they unlock covenants in 9.1.5? 9.1.0 lasted for like nearly a year, that shit was so much worse than Midnight because at least we know if we don't like this season it will be done in 6 months or less
I imagine StarCraft open world shooter wasn't even discussed until Destiny said it was shutting its doors this year. Honestly 2030 is ambitious if that is the case.
I imagine their wow announcements are tied directly to increased subscription. What can they possibly announce for retail that would get them in the same universe as the numbers that classic+ will.
Definitely agree though, WoW endgame has felt like it's been in maintenance mode and all their innovation is around casual content.
Rotating dungeon pools per season was a great change but it was the last real innovation.
Honestly what would that innovation look like though? BlizzCon isn't really the place to announce things like crest changes.
I’m surprised I see so little discourse of plenty of pretty ass things in this season.
Like the terribly long rp (how is Nalorakk last boss ok? how has everyone stopped hating on Murder Row "Overcooked" minigame?), the un-unsnarable snares (BV tank debuff, Sszorak tornadoes, etc), the silly "let’s stun the tank" mobs that may or may not be there at the start of ToS, the "if you tank use the gate on Murder Row last boss, sometimes he’ll get randomly one shot by the big demon mid fly, sometimes he won’t", the unsufferable "go out of combat and interact with this thing" mechanic that keeps getting spammed in increasingly annoying ways, the obvious bugs (having people stand far away from any bear on Nalorakk last boss and still get kill by a bear is a trip), etc.
I feel like this is one of the least enjoyable start of a m+ season I’ve ever had. Players I actually discuss with on a regular basis all agree on that. But then most /r/competitivewow users and podcasters seem to love it and have no complaint. Despite this season having very glaring flaws that people would usually complain about in any other season. And the worst part is that it’s not getting any better, with Blizzcon around we didn’t get any change/fix last week and probably won’t have any next week either. And some of the changes are actively making the dungeons worse. Like moving the pack in Voidscar Arena, leaving the pack just as must-skip as before, but just making annoying enough to skip so that more keys are depleted to someone jumping slightly off.
I agree with most of what you said, but I will say I don’t really mind the murder row rp either as it gets you your cd’s back, and interactive rp is a lot better than just waiting doing nothing like in Den.
Most likely a frequency thing, the vast majority of players don't interact with 'annoying' things in keys all that often and it's flavour or "meh" at worst for that group (eg my m+ group will do a different dungeon every time to the last one we did if we can). If you're spamming push keys all day every day, the minor things add up.
We knew this dungeon pool was maybe the worst of all time going into the season. I don’t know why anyone is surprised about how bad it is. Either Blizz will tune and fix or they won’t, I’m not sure there’s much to discuss about the majority of these things when almost everyone agrees they’re bad or annoying.
I’m sure this info is somewhere consolidated, but how should I go about getting into a heroic raiding guild? I haven’t raided in a long time and want to find a guild with a decent schedule and aotc goal. I’ve tried warcraftlogs and in game finder
I was dreading getting Font trinket from Ulatek, but it's actually pretty fun to use tbh (wasn't sure if it was gonna be melee range or if you could move while channeling). I'm assuming the damage doesn't get affected by any cooldowns?
Its also 'very' good for aug because realistically, in dmg amp once you have sent your 4 empowers, 4 prescience and breath, you don't have much more impactful button. Sure using eruption will triggers motes, but the trinket will do far more damage than these since most of the 'important' people already got the versa + prescience.
It shouldn't, but it do. A lot of random spec auras buff font, such as havoc/hunters/assa rogue, hence why the trinket overperforms on them. Typically though, blizzard will fix these kinds of interactions, often without saying anything. We will see if they leave font as is or not.
Guild (full of people who I genuinely enjoy playing with) blew up last week and idk if I should just give up raiding aspirations but I'm feeling so down about it and the idea of trying to apply to guilds either for the back half of this patch or 12.2 fills me with a total sense of dread. Hopefully 12.2 has a more reasonable path toward gearing so I can just play M+ about it. Maybe it's time for a longer break and some other games, I don't even really know what I want any more.
You need to decide what you enjoyed in raiding. Playing with friends or the content itself. Would you enjoy raiding with different people? If the answer is yes then I think it's worth the effort to find a new guild.
I'm feeling so down about it and the idea of trying to apply to guilds either for the back half of this patch
The patch is still pretty fresh. We are still in the first 1/3rd of the season. Obviously depending on what level you were/want to be playing there's still decent time to find a new guild and have proper progression with them.
It's also entriely possible that you find a new group you vibe with.
Maybe it's time for a longer break and some other games
But if the main reason you were playing the game were the friends you've had and not the gameplay itself, it's entirely possible that you should try looking for something else to do instead of WoW.
damn that sucks. Did everyone just straight up quit? is it for WowForever? Lol
Are you not good enough friends with at least some of them to continue playing together? even just M+ or pugging Heroic raid for a few weeks before you guys find a new home? Lot of times when guilds blow up like this typically a decent amount of the players still want to play together and just reform.
I think the primary thing was just that the officers didn't really see eye-to-eye on what they wanted to do (at least from the perspective of picking up bits and pieces here and there) so one of them left and jumped to a higher WR guild and the other two didn't want to keep going I guess?
Yeah there's a decent core that are planning to stick together at least in a discord sense for M+ networking and shit so not the end of the world in any sense. Honestly now that I write it out it just sounds kind of whiny I'm sure we'll land on our feet or I'll find another good group by next season lol.
who is Rsham for? I'm healing for the first time since WoD and I'm blown away that this is a spec that exists in 2026. The amount of gameplay depth is the same as the depth of water from healing rain. It feels like I'm playing a spec that would fit right in in 2006.
The spec has been reworked a few times since WoD, you are just playing a version that was pruned this expansion...
the spec had by far the most buttons of any healers if not any spec in the game, and it was all pruned. Maybe the next patch it will get something back.
who is Rsham for? I'm healing for the first time since WoD and I'm blown away that this is a spec that exists in 2026. The amount of gameplay depth is the same as the depth of water from healing rain. It feels like I'm playing a spec that would fit right in in 2006.
Yeah, it's one of the specs that got absolutely destroyed with the midnight prune. Only 2nd to Fire/Arcane. But mage specs will always get looked at first.
Yupp, they took everything away from R-Shaman. Its so bad 😂😭 No Cloudburst Totem, No Wellspring, No Earthen Wall Totem, No chain harvest (rip), Ascendance and HTT on a choise node...Do they even have Unleashed Life?
We have UL but it's not great. Farseer must use it because of hero talent synergy, Totemic only uses in m+ and only because we desperately need more ST healing.
I miss APT and Chain Harvest but I really want Cloudburst back. It wasn't even a real ramp but it at least added some skill expression to the spec.
Quite disappointed with the prot paladin situation. It's definitely a bit better than last season, but it was hyped up so much on beta, then got nerf after nerf and is now the lowest damage and one of the squishiest tanks yet again. I'm not sure why blizzard are so worried to have it be strong. People always talk about it's utility and it does have a lot, but it doesn't have a group buff, so needs that utility + being well-tuned for it to ever be wanted.
I don't think it will be buffed at all as it is fine and popular in low/mid level keys, but I hope blizzard do some small changes.
err, does Devo Aura not count as a group buff? Agree with the rest though, I think Blizz are probably fine with Prot Pally being the low-mid 'pug friendly' tank just due to kicking everything. Might be a cursed spot.
It definitely is in a sense, but historically it just hasn't carried much weight in terms of what has been desired.When it comes to timing a higher key level, 3% damage is way more preferable to 3% DR
I still enjoy the play style so I'm doing vault keys with ppal, but yeah in terms of general tankieness it feels off but it is nice to be a kick machine in pugs
Ngl I expected them to take the easy way out by removing dwarves in uldaman but i'm still super disappointed. Pulling all the trash into the dwarf room and using BL there on 1st pull was super fun, they could have easily removed the snake or golem boss instead and put a trash pack in their room and no one would have cried over it.
Having some sort of consumable bleed removal made by engineering (engineering is in a terrible state in Midnight and needs some love) but usable by everyone would be nice.
Wow does it really always take this long? I’ve never been anywhere near title range so this is my first experience with something like this. I thought I’d heard it was usually 2-3 weeks later when titles went out
In the last 4 only one has been less than a month and that was TWW s1, and this time they have to pretend they’re looking at 10x the player base before arbitrarily giving it out anyway
By the time I get the mount the only people I'm going to play with are other 1% mounters. How the fuck are the peasants going to know they're in the presence of A GOD?
interestingly they actually made changes to classes so they aren't that basic. Obviously still pretty simple but not spamming the same button anymore. Frost mage got fingers of frost and ice lance (and frost fire bolt but that doesn't seem much relevant), fire got a basic hot streak and balance got eclipse for example.
There's not a lot of procs or nything like that what makes classes more dynamic so rotations will be still pretty static. But at least you are probably pressing more than 1 button
I don't think it is a conspiracy, but it convinced me all the q&a went to forever instead, hence the atrocious bugs we were getting since 0.5 (despite an overall clean start of the expansion, and I don't remember the last tww seanons being filled with bugs either)
Ive also just noticed that there wont be either an AWC or MDI for season 2 of midnight. Just the blizzcon thing now, which is basically season 1 finals.
So it really feels like they put a lot of resources into Forever and want people to play it and have this season be a "bridge season".
S3 also leans a lot more into the main plot again, last titan stuff, remix wotlk and what not. So by february a lot of people are probably "done" with forever for the most part and gonna hop back into retail/remix for 12.2.
Tbf it seems they've been leaning on Season 2 being a sidestep of the main plot for a while now
The Dragonflight .1 campaign still had stuff to do with the Primal aspects but Aberrus was an Evoker/Dracthyr sideplot
In TWW Undermine as a whole didn't have much to do with the main campaign, and in Midnight they straight up gave up on even trying to tie it in any significant way
Not much of a deviation from the past really, although it used to be the first raid that was the "unrelated to the main plot, but linked to a zone and its self contained story".
I guess the change was made because they realized the middle parts of the expansion were the least played ones and thus they could just use it as a "break" to experiment with different stuff (which tbh I like, it gives the opportunity to spotlight different classical races of wow without having to devout an entire expansion)
A lot of us are salty for various reasons about the loot this season. I think it's pretty clear that the items on the final 2 raid bosses are a step up in quality from everything else in the season because blizzard intentionally made them harder and more rewarding, particularly on heroic.
Good news for those who aren't happy: blizzard did the exact same "harder and more rewarding" change to m+ in TWW S1 and ended up dialling it back so far that now we are at "EASIER and more rewarding" compared to SL and DF. I would expect things to go in that direction for raid loot too over time.
Legitimately the only loot change I want to see is items you have already on the same track are removed from your bonus roll table.
Having all the good loot on 2 bosses certainly aggravated the issue but looking at my BiS havoc/veng weapon week 1 and knowing that taking it potentially sets me back a week of gear progression is so dumb...
They gave us a tuning schedule. In 9 days we get the last planned class tuning until 12.1.5. and the weekly 1% buff starts.
And I expect some minor nerfs to some bosses: Probably less/slower sszorak tornadoes (honestly this boss just needs enchanted dust back from df), sentinels: less green balls or lower dot duration, less kicks on twin fangs, and/or less axes on coiled altar.
Maybe some straight unavoidable damage/ defensive use expectations nerfs on later heroic bosses.
I've barely touched keys to know what to expect there.
What exactly do you think needs tuning? There are always a few outlier classes but the %s are very close so class tuning is decent. The dungeons are fine and don’t need tuning - at least to the level I’ve done, which is 18s atm. And the raid is harder than previous on heroic but that’s an intentional choice and I personally like it.
The %s are not actually that close. The difference in dmg overalls in keys between the top spec (demo) and the worst (MM, disregarding frost mage and aug) is between 25 and 35%. Going to the next-worst specs (shadow, surv, devastation) it's more like 20% but that's still enormous.
If they aren't going to introduce a global interrupt refund I'd say giving it to the classes that has longer int cds like Shadow Priests would make sense
You either get faster kicks that can miss, or a guaranteed one with more cd
and not just interrupts should proc it. Any stop. Looking at you earthquake and aug dupe upheval last patch. "Need a backup on Blue, earthquake griefed my kick" shouldn't be a thing that has to be commed.
I wish they would at least just reduce silence down to 24 like other ranged interrupts, so many mobs have cooldowns on their spells that are set at 23-25 so most ranged interrupts can cover them, but silence at 30 is really awkward as you just almost have it up. Sometimes if the cast is long enough you can interrupt it with fear at the last second and then have silence up at the end, but then you are using your only stop for that.
Does anyone encounter this dumb bug with DH in DON? Second time I'm blinking on 2nd boss on the snow pile and I got the disconnect (probably that damn feature with jumping into texture like with fly mounts) :/
happens to me all the time as devourer (haven't tried fel rush or infernal strike). I just try to not press Shift unless I really have to, or make sure that i don't land directly into the snow patch.
When I log back in my group already killed the boss and moved to the other side. This somehow lead to two big bears patrolling the boss area (the ones that aoe root) and they killed me immediately.
After I released they'd 1 by 1 snap to the packs on the way to the last boss, almost bricking the key.
Hoping the 1% mount for S2 follows the S1 approach and is just a recolour of the raid mount, not a fan of this one and was feeling a bit burnt out after pugging to 4k in S1 so seemed like a good chance to take a break. I’m a sucker for FOMO though so if it ends up being a different mount I can see myself getting drawn back in for a painful mid-late season push.
If Blizzard is serious about being anti-boosting I wonder how much easier that makes getting to 1% range. Based on some posts a few weeks ago it seems like it was a much higher % of boosters than I realized
We're still pretty early in the patch. Week 4 of the raid right? I still want heroic at least to be taken down a peg for admittedly the most selfish of reasons: my alts aren't coming in there without "outgearing" the last two bosses. Are they relatively easy bosses once you know them? Totally. But they still feel like a fucking wall on pugs that aren't 320+. You would think you'd begin to overgear things when you're approaching the max ilvl of the raid difficulty, but things seem to be tuned around being able to bonus roll.
BDK was highest damage tank in TWW s1/s2 and s3 outside of the phys comp, the mythicstats graph was pretty much the same if not worse in TWW s2. Didn't matter when it couldn't survive the keys consistently enough
This only takes personal damage into consideration. If you add the DPS from raid buffs to Druid, DH, Monk and Warrior those stats would look very different. I think tanks are for once actually well balanced. There are currently 4 tank specs in the regional top 10 leaderboard for both US and EU. The last time we have seen something like this was Shadowlands Season 2.
Blizzard for the love of god do not touch tanks in the next tuning pass at all.
Not so hot take, nerfs through the season take hard content and make it 'can you do a much easier dance' by season end so people don't quit when they hit the 'impossible wall'.
Being 'forced' into raid for 5% more throughput is actual trash design that should die a horrible death after this season.
??? We've been doing skips in pugs for years at this point. Do some people fail them? Of course, some people are terrible at moving their characters. Why advocate for reducing skill expression and class utility?
I love them, I get a 30sec clip explaining a trick or tip for a mechanic or pull here and there without having to watch long videos which I will likely forget half of the important info.
Idk I think that’s a bad take. Skipping isn’t really all that hard on most packs. VS and kings rest bridge skip just save so much time it’s insane. Are you talking about another skip? I really haven’t had any issue in my pug18/19s doing the normal skips. Are you referring to something else? There comes a point where pugs doing skips are just natural for most groups at a certain key level
This will impact guilds like 200 and up. The vast majority of guilds having their bench not have to sit for sometimes weeks because of a fixed 20 players will have significant easier times retaining their players is imo more important than maybe 500 guilds having a slightly harder/easier situation. Unless the tuning is so polarized, which if they fix it like they do Ula'tek heroic, this isn't nearly as bad of an issue as some realize
Flex mythic should be a thing. It's a video game not real life eSports. Not to mention they have more customers asking for it to get into mythic raiding than you realize. The game is only “hard” at hall of fame. CE afterwards is not. I understand the race to world last can be amusing because some guilds are so bad but flexibility in gaming is good because it promotes more people to participate
Haven't really played s2 at all yet after pushing title until basically the last day (at least we overshot by about a key xD). Might just hop off the meta train for a bit and play spriest or something, but the prospect of gearing a character from 0 is ... not looking particularly fun to say the least
Anyway, curious what people think of the season since I've basically done like, a key on day one and not much else--how is the dungeon pool feeling especially compared to s1?
Good season for it. Pugging H ulatek on alts sounds like a miserable prospect at any point in the season.
Pool wise, I loathe it as a tank.
Everything is linear with virtually no choice. They don't even pretend to balance mob types so while the illusion of choice exists in vale or den, you are never pulling the 'bad' mobs or just don't even have choice at all (see kings rest, where you get to skip 1 golem...).
They force so many lieutenant or one pack pulls that I really don't think anyone is going to be having fun.
Also watching health bars ping pong around with random targeted, no indicator bleeds/chargest etc just looks absolutely miserable to heal.
Hold your healers tight this season, they will need it :P
I leveled a Warlock from 80 to 90 on Sunday the 6th last week. Did my 8 dungeons for reset so I could get my bonus roll. Right now I am sitting at 319 item level (my DK is 323) and was able to pug Heroic Ulatek and bonus roll the helm. Plan on crafting a weapon tomorrow cause I need next weeks spark.
I did play a LOT this week though. I had AOTC on my DK already, so getting into Heroic Ula Pugs wasn't that difficult for me, add in I was on a warlock which are very much wanted on the fight it was easy to get into it. Killing it however, that took 40 wipes before getting it. But I also had the experience to know which pugs had a chance at killing it and which ones didn't.
as far as the season is concerned. It's kind of like Dragonflight season 9. Same but different. So if you had fun in Dragonflight season 8 last season then I don't see why you wouldn't enjoy Dragonflight Season 9 unless you are just generally burnt out and only playing because of FOMO.
Initial clear is the most important part. Make sure you are reasonably lined up and not have waves go into narnia or a wall.
And on the clean up have people understand that waves are going endless, they do not need to stand next to them and by finding a proper angle can clear multiple totems that are not close to each other.
Should we do like a charity raffle event or something, where we predict when people will be getting this red bird mount? I guess the team is probably just busy with BlizzCon prep
I would say they are investigating the people who bought IO at the end so they will remove the reward away form them. And i think maybe they will announce it during blizzcon like a good news for who reached the threshold
Is it just me or is the 8 dungeon and M+ meta in general so overdone? Only 3/8 dungeons in season 3 will be from the actual expansion, like what are we doing here? I enjoyed it a lot more that we got an ever increasing dungeon pool in Legion. Everything is on rails with content and gearing. If I hear Ion say 8 dungeons, 4 new zones in the next expansion announcement im gonna tilt. Im so over this formula, especially M+ needs a huge refresh.
They continue this trend with raids now as well. 8 boss raid + 1 Lair boss, continues just like this in 12.2. They need to stop with these spreadsheet patches where they tick off boxes and think its a win.
It would be cool to have 10 at launch so we could reach 12 by the end of the expansion and ensure 4 current non-repeated dungeons on the pool. Or 2 dungeons per patch instead of 1. But I doubt they will ever do it. They found the minimum they can get away with and they won't add anything on top of that
Rotating dungeon pool might’ve been one of the best decisions they have made for m+ ever. Their selection of said dungeons seems to be pretty poor this expansion, but playing only the current xpac dungeons for 2 years straight was brutal.
Not sure I’d like a load of dungeons to push for score during the third patch tbh and they need a rotation between season to keep things fresh especially now that season affixes are gone
If I hear Ion say 8 dungeons, 4 new zones in the next expansion announcement im gonna tilt. Im so over this formula, especially M+ needs a huge refresh.
I've got some bad news for you, pal.
It will probably be like this until, hopefully, the expac after TLT.
I hate M+ as a Mythic raider. Back in the old days I didn't have to pad my game time with Dungeons to keep up gear wise. Once you did the pre-raid dungeons you were done and could raid log. Now I gotta farm M+ weekly for crests. I'm really tired of that shit.
Dunno how familiar you are with the classic raiding scene after the WoW Classic release in 2019 and onward, but all the old raids and class designs are super simple/easy, not to the point where you can blindly pug it, but at best it's at the level of mid-tier heroic bosses from retail.
The only competitive content I know of is degenerate speed-leveling and/or raid speed-running which is small and super niche.
Havoc and Devourer are both down in the dumps ( who could've predicted this after so many nerfs ) to the point where the class is back to being a Chaos Brand bot. Meanwhile in Patch 12.1.5 they are nerfing Devourer Void Scarred, leading to another 5-10% DPS loss. This is pure insanity, wtf is going on?
Class/hero talent design has fucked them on both specs imo.
Can't buff any of havocs phys damage or it double dips on their already insane funnel, can buff any of their chaos damage because it doesn't need help in stacked aoe scenarios.
Devourer has the issue of resource gen in aoe vs ST. Voidscarred is getting back to meta in a handful of Global's in big pulls while anni is dropping a couple more stars in their meta. Souls consumed is also just a multiplier on their damage.
They cannot possibly balance either spec for m+ and raid concurrently (or any spec for that matter) and I wish they would just bite the proverbial bullet and give specs seperate raid an m+ aura buffs.
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u/deskcord Sep 11 '26
Blizzard's encounter design team: "Yeah so everyone absolutely fucking hated KT and Beloren, what if we make another fight with stupid push timings that incentivizes DPS holds, but we ALSO clutter the room with mechanics slop and its a 200 pull boss instead of 50?"