Spoiler

My understanding is that the Old Gods are dead, but not really. In the "that is not dead which can eternal lie" sense.

They're still around, but passive and unable to directly exert influence on Azeroth anymore, at least until they gather enough of their power to manifest again.

As for Bwonsamdi and Sylvanas' boss, I'm pretty sure that's an entirely new character/faction/etc that we haven't seen yet. The only thing we know with any confidence is that they wield power over death, which means they're likely from/part of the Shadowlands. Anything more is just wild speculation.

 

Wild speculation is the best speculation

 

Finally unlocked Dark Iron Dwarves and immediately race changed my warrior - Furyosa is born!

I never want to do World Quests again...

I'm assuming you need to level a fresh DID to 120 to get the armour? Fucking dumb, I'll never do it - not again after doing it for my priest and the Velf armour. Luckily I don't really want it because Tusks look so much cooler XD

 

Week 3 is over... it's almost hard to imagine that it's only been 3 weeks. Feels like I've done so much... yet it also feels like there's not enough to do. I don't really have any new insights from the last time I posted, but perhaps they've been reinforced a bit.

Gear progression is quite messed up. For as consistent and formulaic as some aspects are, the opposite is true most of the time. For example, I have yet to see a single WQ that rewards a staff. On my enhancement shaman alt, which I got to 120 this week, I've seen FOUR WQ's for weapons already.

There's not enough options for gear. I'm not sure what the solution is. But, I think looking at the "tiers" can shed some light.

<300 Quests
300: crafted gear.
310: normal dungeons
320: honored rep cloak
325: heroic dungeon
335: revered rep epic
340: mythic dungeos
350: world drop boe epics
355: Darkmoon Deck.
355: crafted epic
295-330: WQ

Now, we are getting a few more options, some out today, some later on
340: Uldir LFR
340: Warfronts/arathi highlands stuff
355: Uldir Normal
355-370: World Boss
370: Heroic Uldir
385: Mythic Uldir
340+ Mythic+/ weekly chest

So, there are options. But, the options in the 320-335 range are quite lacking. If you don't hit titanforge procs, you're kinda out of luck. My alt is at 322 ish, and it feels pretty much like a deadzone in leveling, especially since I haven't gotten any of those procs, while my mage got tons. My options are to keep doing heroics (which I did like 30 of this weekend... uhg), or buying a 350 boe. spending 200k on an alt is not my idea of a good time, since it would only be like +2 cilvl.

First, let's talk about the WQ's. I'm so sick of them. First, the rep. The rep grind is annoying, but I figure there's a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm exalted with honorbound, and halfway through revered with all the rest, with the tortollan lagging behind slightly. I know there are people out there who are exalted with all of them already, but whatever. The issue is the actual rewards. What's the point? Even by the time you get revered, you're probably getting gear from mythics. The exalted gear is nice, but again, if you're spending that much time playing the game, there's no guarantee it's going to be an upgrade. But, you know who that gear would be good for? Alts. My shaman would love some 335 gear, but I'm already burnt out on WQs from one character, and having to get that rep again for a second is daunting. Second is the level range on the WQ gear. My mage is 346, but the WQ stuff caps at 330. And even then, I rarely see 330 gear at all. It's mostly all 320-325. I know the cap will get raised, but it's just not high enough when most mythic groups won't even look at you if you're below 335.

It was apparent that there was no answer, at least for the first 3 weeks. Once you did your 10 mythics, you had to pray for WQ titanforge procs (which I think were capped to +15 anyways), or pretty much just go do something else, until there was more content. I suppose you could farm gold for boe epics, but it's not like getting to the next +5 interval would raise the WQ ilvl cap, so there wasn't a point to going any higher.

I guess they don't want to trivialize their own content by having mythic dungeon level gear available just from killing a random named mob. Either that, or they want to preserve the price of veiled crystals. But, I think there should have been a middle ground. The requirement for getting into heroics into getting into mythics is too large, though I guess the mythic part is technically arbitrary, based on the party. But for the most part, it's 325 if you're a healer, 335 if you're a dps.

There's a couple of solutions I would do, that don't involve changing the WQ caps. First, a war campaign reward. In Legion, for completing the Suramar stuff, you got a raid-level epic. The suramar stuff was gated behind a lot of rep, perhaps even time gated as well, I don't exactly remember. Secondly, I would squish the ilvl gap between normal/heroic/mythic. 15 levels each is a lot. Make it 10. Secondly, the rep rewards. Honored rep shouldn't just be a cloak for all factions. I get that honored and revered are both 5 levels lower than that tier of dungeon, which is fine, but kind of odd. Third, profession items. The idea of them not wanting to give out normal dungeon ilvl gear is funny. Like, arbitrary gatekeeping because there's a lot of casual players out there who never advance beyond normal difficulty dungeons. But as such, professions are nearly useless, and the ilvl 300 stuff is expensive for some. I also think I prefered the obliteratum leveling to the expulsom thing.

Ok, moving on. Azerite power. I was on the fence before, but now I hate that shit. It's going alright for my mage, who is nearly at 21. But, level 21 isn't even high enough to unlock the final ring on *heroic* level gear. And having 3 pieces of gear plus an amulet locked behind that stuff is frustrating. It's technically possible to grind AP, but I have flashbacks to legion where there were people who had literally done *thousands* of mythics to grind AP. And the reward for spending hours upon hours of grinding AP in 200 point chunks.... +2 ilvl on your neck in most cases. And despite all that, it's much worse on an alt. When I got my first heroic Azerite piece, I was not high enough to unlock even the first level ring. That's just ridiculous. But I guess now, the catch up system has been turned on again, so it won't take as much azerite to level up. It just feels bad getting this piece of gear that is just agility and stamina and no other traits.

Okay, rant over.

So, despite all that, I did find the time to start leveling another alt, a Mag'har Orc rogue. First, the unlocking quest is needlessly hard. Not the entire questline, actually, just the very first part. I won't spoil it, but you have to fight a series of bosses. The first one has around 750k health, and you have to solo it. For ranged classes, it's probably not *too* bad, but I can see it being an actual nightmare for melee. I'm assuming it's bugged, since the other bosses are much easier, and you even get npc help.

As for that levelling experience, well, it's been awhile since I've levelled a starter character. It's mostly the same as I remember, except everything scales to your level now, even in the old world. On paper, that sounds excellent, but in practice, I kind of miss being about to go to a zone 4 levels lower than you and just plowing through the quests.

Also, heirloom gear is *expensive*. Like, I have a seven figure amount of gold, and I was hesitating on how much that stuff costs. I guess it's my fault for not having more of it unlocked when you could spend justice points and whatever for them. It's like 100k to completely unlock weapons, armor, jewelry for a rogue.

I probably won't have that much time to actually level it, not since I'll probably be struggling all week to find a pug Uldir group (though one would hope that being 346 is good enough to get into one). If that's not going on, then hopefully I'll be doing a lot of Mythic+. And, I think the plan with my alt is to hopefully get in on some guild mythic0 action with it, while saving my main for the pugs, since 346 can get into any of them easily.
--- Post automerged ---
Looks like servers are super bugged now. people who did pvp and mythic plus in the last week of legion are getting loot for this week, except it's BfA gear. I've seen pics of several items over ilvl 400, as well as crazy keystones, like +29 siege of boralus, or +22 waycrest manor. Blizzard should roll back the servers, but some guilds have already cleared normal uldir, so they may just say fuck it.

 

Lol hit a 370 waist Titanforge on a normal Mythic just now, while doing temple for 340 sword WQ. XD

 

Pugged a bit of Uldir normal today. It actually started as a heroic run (because fuck it, if I can get in a guild pug, why not try?) but we couldn't finish the first boss, so we switched it to normal.

Honestly, for anyone who has raided before, it's not bad. But, in a pug, you get retards, even a guild pug. In 2 and a bit hours, I only ended up with Taroc and Mother down. They were both pretty easy. On heroic Taroc, it doesn't look like he sucks up the bloods in phase 2, while in normal he did, giving you plenty of room to move. Even so, should be doable in a pug on heroic. Mother is pretty easy too. Just need to make sure the oozes get killed or stunned before they can aoe, and then it's just movement gimmicks. I tried a couple of the other bosses, but with no luck. Zek'voz seemed very hard, but we had some exceptionally retarded people in the group. You really need to move out of the group fast when target with chain lighting, and people failed at it constantly. We couldn't make it through phase 2, but we spent a lot of time trying before calling it. So far, I like the raid. I was also consistently #1 or #2 in dps, though I think that says more about the pug than me.

Anyways, no loot for me. Well, I did get something off the boss for my mage, but it just happened to be in one of the slots I already had a 355 in, so it was kind of a waste. Shaman got nothing. I did notice that one of the dungeon WQ's had a epic 340 reward, which is cool. Seemed to be a random mythic dungeon item. At some point, I'll have to try the warfront with my shaman, because it looks like a lot of 340 stuff drops off rare mobs out there or something? Not 100% sure.

 

Did a normal Uldir run with my guild today, went decently well. Whole raid was pretty easy at 340 ilevel up until Zul. Mother and Zek'voz need a minimum of raid coordination, but there's nothing terribly difficult in any of them. Then Zul gets a bit clusterfucky if you don't keep on top of the adds, but it isn't that bad on the whole.

Mythrax is where things go full clusterfuck, mostly because the start is weird (the whole raid has to fall into a pit to pull the boss) and my guild had difficulty keeping on top of things. I think that was mostly just lack of exposure to the mechanics and people getting that sorted, so it should be smoother next time, but we just barely killed it.

And then G'huun. G'huun is just a shitshow and I don't think pugs are going to be able to kill it, even on normal, for a while. You need pretty substantial group coordination and at minimum 12 people in the raid with some combination of high mobility and doing broad AOE/rapid damage reliably. The whole battery mechanic simply doesn't allow for anything less, and I really don't see many pugs being capable of it.

My guild certainly didn't manage to kill it yet, in the four pulls we had time for tonight, though we should be able to kill it relatively quickly tomorrow. It's not pug friendly at all though, and I'd be extremely cautious of that for at least another couple weeks of gear circulates around.

 

So, Uldir patch hits. We ended up hitting Heroic Uldir for 2h30 hours with 30 raiders. Taloc went alright and is fairly easy.

- That's incorrect. The mechanics to make blood disappear is handled by the tanks (they need to move to the blood when targeted by the Cudgel). It's probably just that your tanks didn't understand it either, or decided not to bother with it since there is a lot of room in P2.

Mother was tough just because of raid size. With 30 people, we had to start sending people over very early because we couldn't send more than 3 at the same time (raid wide damage was just too much for the current amount of HP people have). We barely could make it through in time every pull. I'd suggest aiming at around 15-20 max. It will allow you to switch rooms at about 40 energy, which just allows more dps on boss. If you guys are unaware she "dies" at 10% HP. Was a nice surprise. But yeah, otherwise it was pretty fine.

Fetid was surprisingly hard. We had to trimmed the raid down because dps should couldn't keep up with this mechanic. The Add have 2M hp and I'm pretty sure it's currently impossible (or almost) to get both of them down in time. I've been watching streams, and even top tier guild are struggling with that part. We got Fetid down just by killing one add and focusing down the boss after that. He healed for 10% of his HP, but we did about 5% of his total HP as damage during that period. Was well worth it. I got a nice 370 Azerite chest from him. My friend got a titanforged 390 weapons >.> I'm so not looking forward to Mythic where he spawns a 3rd add.

We hit Vectis after that. Bit of a clusterfuck there. Debuff management is tricky and I would suggest just handling it as most guide say: make three groups, handle the debuff in every group. We got him to like 10% but had to call it a night. I'm pretty confident we'll get him tonight.

All in all, Uldir is pretty enjoyable so far. The amount of trash (up to Vectis) is easily manageable and doesn't eat too much time so you can focus on the boss. The complexity of the fights increases as you progress further into the instance and that's great as well. I'm really looking forward to Zul myself.

 

Pugged first 4 bosses pretty easily. I think we did pretty awesomely for 3 healing it in a 23 man (I would say that, being a healer).

Would have gone further but server shutdown and random 15m breaks mid raid slowed us down.

 

I know that. What I thought was happening was that he was sucking up the blood and putting it in a puddle beneath him. Instead, he's just putting a puddle beneath him and whatever blood didn't get cleaned up is still there for the elevator down.

Anyways, instead of messing around in pug Uldir yesterday, I ended up doing several mythic+. Did +2 Freehold, +2 Atal'Dazor and +4 Waycrest Manor. Nothing crazy or impressive. First 2 had 10-12 minutes left to spare, and more or less felt the same as normal mythic, with the tank just having to move shit out of blood puddles. +4 Waycrest.... our healer forgot to repair and kept trying to do the first boss with broken gear. Ended up costing us the run, but I personally never really felt threatened by anything in there. Bloodlust on the witches still makes it pretty easy, though I'd probably wait after the first MC. Most annoying thing is how many mobs you have to kill to get 100%. Feels like most of them just give 1%, though the ones after the 4th boss seem to give more. I wonder how high of a + it needs to be for the 4th boss to actually be difficult. I usually have pretty bad luck with gear, as if you have 1 piece that is higher than everything else (say, a 355 titanforge wrist) it seems like it's a lightning rod and every high level piece of gear from then on out is going to be the same slot. But, I did end up getting a new belt, which is nice, putting me to 347. I expect I should be able to do +6 within time, though of course I would love to get into a +10 simply for the loot chest for next week, but that might be too ambitious for me personally on week 1, even if it takes 3 hours to complete. +7 is probably more realistic, and get's you heroic Uldir level gear. Random aside, the end of dungeon chest is level capped for the first week at 355, but probably not an issue.

I also played around the the warfront stuff. What little of it there actually is. Really weird implementation. I spent like 20 or 30k on all the materials for the warfront azerite quests. I'm a little flush after selling a couple of boe epics, but even so, that's a significant amount of change for like 20% of a level, though it did put me to 21. Probably won't do anything but the easy ones from this point. I don't mind that the whole thing is on a fixed timer, or that it's impossible to lose the scenario. It's just not very intuitive. Like, as a Horde, supposedly we can still fly over to Arathi and farm the rares there, even though we don't control the zone. I guess that's what the group finder is for, but I'll definitely have to try that out when I get home. I suspect the actual scenario won't unlock until like saturday, after which Horde will control the zone unto the scenario unlocks on saturday again. Or hopefully, the time unlocks it late on friday. Hard to tell, it was only at like 36% when I logged off last night.

Lastly, I was thinking about my history. Well, not really history, as that itself is like a 10k word document I wrote up during legion, but rather my play trend.

60) Played vanilla all the way through without breaks. Still the honeymoon period of the game, where everything is new and exciting. Alliance guild splintered apart, some of us rerolled horde on a brand new server, did AQ gate opening and stuff, got stuck on Twin Emps and didn't make too much of a dent in Naxx before that lull hit of waiting for TBC to drop.

70) Horde guild broke up after initial raiding content. I don't even remember why at this point. Took a break (3 months maybe?), but never let my subscription ran out, Came back, joined a new guild (I was pretty well known on server, so they were glad to have me) for T5, and eventually t6. Played all the way through the end.

80) Played up until near the release of Ulduar. Actually played it on the PTR, but I took a break before it went live. There just wasn't enough content on launch for me. One re-used dungeon which I quickly grew bored of (since I had seen a decent amount of it previously), and a couple of standalones. Came back at the end of the expansion, long after most guilds had ICC on farm, to prepare for next expansion. I did get an Arthas kill while still at 80, which is cool I guess.

85) I got the bug again, and played shittons. Made bank off leatherworking. More gold than I have now, actually. Kinda crazy to think about. I actually got banned pretty early on (for selling the aforementioned gold), many months before Firelands came out. The expansion was just super boring without a raiding guild, and I never completed Blackwing Descent.

90) Eventually, I got the urge to play again. To my surprise, despite a 3 year or so hiatus, I didn't miss an expansion. I actually came back shortly after the release of SoO, I think? There's probably a post in this thread about it, but Syao and I ended up rolling on Ner'zhul for some reason. IIRC, Warlords had already been announced, so it was all nostalgia for me. I spent my time playing catchup and enjoying all the old content I could now solo, but my serious raiding days were long gone. But, time just kept going. and going, and going. Eventually, I stopped playing again with Warlords still nowhere in sight. A release date did eventually get announced, but it was nearly another year before I came back, and when I came back SoO was still the newest content. Crazy.

100) Warlords was a blast from the past... for all of five minutes. You barely even see them. The garrison shit was cool at first, but it became quickly apparent that it was just a mobile app. Way too much micromanagement, and I ended up burning out during the beginning of Blackrock Foundry.

110) Legion launched, and I was still slightly burnt out, or I was still in the middle of playing a different game, I don't exactly remember, but I remember that Warlords sucked. But, I came back a few months in, caught up in the Emerald Nightmare just in time for Trial of Valor to come out. Ended up getting through that on heroic in my casual guild, which was cool. Nighthold comes out, and I love the place. But, my casual guild breaks up and reforms THREE times, before dying completely. Apparently a lot of the people couldn't handle the idea of wiping on heroic Gul'dan for one entire night. Like, 10 whole wipes and people were just done. I couldn't help but think back to Kael'thas, and wiping to that guy for about 2 months straight. This ended up being it for me in legion, and I think Tomb of Sargeras didn't come out for another 3 months.

120) Now.

So, there's an obvious trend. And that is that I seem to quit a few months into each expansion, sometimes around the release of the next raid. Almost like clockwork. Happened in TBC, WotLK, Cata, WoD, Legion. Kinda funny to think about. But, I hope history doesn't repeat itself.

 

Played bfa now close to 2 weeks and so far I am incredible dissapointed. In this addon is currently very few things I actually enjoy. First of all, I knew that I would not like the zones. I play horde and I haaaate troll zones. And I stood correct, I hate Zandalar, would have changed to alliance if not for all my chars and my guild. This also means bfa is the first addon where I dont follow the story, I just cant bear this troll accent, absolutely terrible. On top of that I didnt liked the zones layout, Zuldazar being one of my least favourite zones in the hole game. Also who the fuck designed that pyramid.
Because of this all, I also dont like the current world quests. Could be that in Legion they were simply new but back than I had really fun doing them even later in the expasion, here I already cant stand them anymore.
The Azerite system is okay I guess, biggest problem is getting better loot currently can be a downgrade thanks to the locked traits, but I think this should be getting better in the next few weeks.
War mode is pretty much the only thing that I really like. On the one hand I enjoy world PvP but I also like the trade with being vulnerable and getting 10% more loot on WQ. But I would use it anyway, just like the occasional PvP.
Also don' really like the new class designe. For one I switched from tank warrior to dh given how weak the warrior current is. The dh however is pretty fun. But the arcane mage is incredible linear, onesieded and boring. I literary have 3 dmg spells, one procc and 3 cds I use on cooldown.
But the biggest thing currently (beside not knowing the story which is rather sad as I usally like the wow story) are the 5 man instances. I havent played the two reputation locked ones so far but in the other there isn't a single on I really enjoy. The best one so far was Waycrest Manor. In Legion there was no dungeon I really didn't liked. Okay Halls of Valor was annyoing on higher mythic+ but I was always willing to go all inis but not in bfa. A part of that is I admit that my guild groups aren't the best (and propably neither am I) skill and itemlevel wise but that is only on top of desgine I didn't like. Motherlode has so much annyong thrash, Shrine needs a really unhealty amounts of interrupts, the endboss of Temple is one of the worsts bosses blizzard ever put out, Atal'dazor trash on the first boss is too extremly annoying. I could go on. In contrast to legion this expansion so far is for me atleast very weak. It is possible that I and my guild are currently still to bad geared but this dosen't change that the entire desgine of the expansion in nearly every aspect is worse that Legion. Island expetionds are boring. Also currently it has pretty much zero impact which of the maps you get.
Warfronts I dont really know as of yet, my server is still gathering ressoucres.
All in all the only thing I thing is better in bfa than in Legion so far is the war mode. Will see Uldir later today and I have high hopes atleast, what I saw so far looked rather good.
I hope maybe the instances will be more fun in a few weeks with better equip and more experinced player but so far I don't see myself playing bfa much, which is rather sad.

 

I can't really say much about your own personal enjoyment of the dungeons, but I can address the first part. The reason that you can't follow the story is that there really isn't any story. There's an arbitrary war going on over an arbitrary resource, but even so, it just doesn't feel like a war. Like, we're fighting all these trolls in Zuldazar, yet apparently still have enough forces to invade Kul'tiras as well, to the point of completely smashing up the 7th legion and SI:7, who are their best of the best. It just doesn't really feel like a war is going on, and the war campaign is laughable bare. The whole thing is like 10 minutes to make an outpost in each zone, then there's a few additional outposts you get through reputation and a 6 hour mission, and then all you get from them are some more quests that require you to kill random elites. There's just nothing to it.

In addition, from what I've read, we apparently have vampires (the San'layn) on our side. But, there's nothing in game that actually says this. We only know this from the Alliance side because apparently they're getting fucked up by one of them, but the Horde know nothing of this. Instead, we find Derek Proudmore's corpse on the bottom of the ocean, completely intact somehow. This guy was burnt to a crisp by a dragon 25 years ago in the Second War, yet somehow his corpse is intact. Terrible writing. Not to mention the completely arbitrary nonsense they've done with Lilian Voss and Rexxar, let alone actual major characters. And for the Alliance... they have no connection to Uldir at all. Supposedly, Ghuun is mentioned in exactly one of their quests, but it's never mentioned what it actually is or why they should care. In fact, I'm not even sure if Uldir is mentioned in any Horde quests. Like, what is this place and why should I care? Ghuun is mentioned by every blood troll in the game of course, but I don't think it's actually tied together. It's a far cry from the Emerald Nightmare where there was loads of shit connecting us to it, built on well established lore, with plenty of tie ins to the zone.

And then there's the world quests. They barely tie into the non-existent storyline at all. The alliance supposedly have a handful of WQ that involving defending their towns from the Horde, but that's it. The horde has like 2 annoying quests in Boralus, and the rest is stupid shit like saving turtles, or killing named grizzly bears and spiders. There's a large disconnect. In Legion, a lot of them were similar style, versions of quests you do while levelling, but at least those quests actually felt connected to the game most of the time. Fending off the legion is a tangible thing.

 

The Alliance is involved because Brann chasing after shiny Titan shit, and that's about it. There's really nothing else to it.

That said, the next raid is going to be Nazjatar/Azshara's palace, and the Alliance has a shitload of connection to that, while the Horde has precisely 0 connection. It was a weird design choice on Blizzard's part, but that's how they're doing it.

 

Supposedly the reasoning is actually pretty straight forward from Blizzard, in that there's simply two different teams working on the product, one for Alliance stuff, one for Horde stuff.

 

Oh I get why it's like that, it's just that it's a weird decision from a game design perspective. You generally want everyone who does the raid to be invested in it, and that's what the narrative does. So it seems strange to only have half the players get any build up for a given raid.

 

I can't speak for the Horde side tbf, but my only complaint about the story on the Alliance side is, as you said, the complete detachment of the Alliance from the Uldir disaster.

It also seems pretty stupid for the Alliance to bother with Uldir. Let Ghuun wipe the Horde out THEN kill him. We're at war, remember?

It would have probably been too much work, but if Alliance and Horde had completely different factionally relevant raids in act 1 of bfa, that'd have been mind blowing.

But for the Alliance story? I found it really engaging, borderline incredible tbh. Even the war campaign delivered with Rambo and his pet loli, recruiting Shandris and killing Dracula.

Overall though, I found the non-war campaign story awesome. Specifically how Jaina/Talanji and Zandalar/KT mirror each other.

As for the raid, I think I'm done try harding already. I don't want to go back to the days of endless wipes with on par or below geared raids. I did my time, lol. Might transition to m+ more. I'll try for +5 this weekend.

 

I mean what they could do is kinda what they did in the old caves of times dungeons, where you took the appearence of a human. Simply have the entrace of the raid for the opposing faction be a dude with a dialoge saying somehing like "please tell me what the horde/alliance did." Not the best way but I always liked that idea.

So I have done Uldir today and I really liked it. We were going in on normal and noticed later on that we were severly lacking equipment. While the first three bosses were down pretty quick (Mother in particular who was down first try) we stood no chance against Vectis or zek'voz. But so far I liked every boss desgine, especially Mother was pretty cool.
I also noticed that the 5man dungeons are far more enjoyable with a better group, so atleast there is that.


On that note, Invincible finally dropped, fuck yeah!

 

Fuck you I hate you die now.

 

Oh the good times. I farmed invincible for months on three toons before it dropped for me, a mate got it after one reset on one toon after she started farming.

 

If it makes you guys feel any better, I went back to Throne of Thunder the other day to try for some xmog items, and my very first Heroic Ji'Kun kill ever dropped the Clutch.