World of Warcraft: Retail, Classic and Private

[Oyster Sauce]

I like watching these even though I don't play

[J1M]

I can tell people enjoy decorating their doll house, but somehow I still don't consider it gameplay. Probably because it lacks challenge.

[Breathe]

I can tell people enjoy decorating their doll house, but somehow I still don't consider it gameplay. Probably because it lacks challenge.

I hate the housing garbage. It’s just feminization bs. I never enjoy decorating a house in a game.

[Oyster Sauce]

I can tell people enjoy decorating their doll house, but somehow I still don't consider it gameplay. Probably because it lacks challenge.

I hate the housing garbage. It’s just feminization bs. I never enjoy decorating a house in a game.

Was going to say it would be cooler if you could set up a fort, but then I remembered that they did that and it sucked penis

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have been concepting the idea of a castle on my exterior plot. Aside from quickly running out of gold which makes it a start and stop affair, the main limitation is the build limit. The large stone platforms for the walls, the Dark Iron Tents for the turret bases, and the Sturdy Wagons for the turret roofs each cost 5 build points. The outdoor built limit is 250. So if I were to surround the keep with 6 turrets and stone walls, it would cost me 165 points. And that is with the walls and the tents scaled to the maximum of 200% size, which so far I don't think looks that great and is way too huge compared to my already huge bearman let alone a human. It'd look better if I scaled them down, but then I would need way more pieces to complete the walls around the keep.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

but then I remembered that they did that and it sucked penis

Both of the garrisons looked good. Lunarfall being based in the forest, and Frostwall with the communal pit area in front, the juxtaposition of the white snow against the black jagged rocks and the red rooves, and the mountains and the planets in the background. They felt very alive once you had recruited a lot of NPCs to populate it. I also liked how the soldiers saluted you as you walked past.

[J1M]

Warlods of Draenor was good and I don't understand why people complained about the garrison. If they had just added a few more low-effort 2-boss raids with loot pinatas people would have loved it. Just as they loved Legion due to the easy loot in Mythic+ (please don't pretend people did Maw of Souls for enjoyment).

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I don't understand why people complained about the garrison.

People were only thinking surface level. They spent most of the expansion logging in and off in the garrison, wondered why they were bored, and just blamed the garrison as if it was the source problem, and moved on.

The issue with WoD is that there was no postgame. After you killed Garrosh in Nagrand and finished the levelling questline, the only thing left to do was to go talk to Khadgar and get started on the legendary ring questline, which was very barebones and pretty much just amounts to telling you to go farm the raid each week for Abrogator Stones. That was it. That was the entire WoD experience at level cap.

If you were a PvPer, then the colisseum had a limited player pool because it required people to build it in their garrison in place of a different building, and the original Ashran had a lot of problems and did not successfully replicate the Wintergrasp experience.

Compare that to MoP where the legendary questline was much meatier, and there were many reputations with their own questlines. The Lorewalker quests, the Serpent Riders, the Golden Lotus, the Tillers, the Klaaxi, Dominance Offensive, etc. MoP also had Timeless Isle, which kept people entertained for 14 months during 5.4 and Blizzard never successfully replicated the community experience of TI again. MoP also released 3 brand new RBGs during the expansion to keep PvP fresh. No new RBGs were added for over a decade until TWW.

M+ as the current alternative endgame to raiding did not exist yet. Challenge mode did not have an onramp, was not advertised to the masses, and was a one and done affair.

WoD was released unfinished. The planned capital cities of Bladespire Citadel and the Temple of Karabor were unfinished. The city utilities were placed at camps in Ashran which did not feel like a proper city, so most people avoided it. So people were either sitting in their garrison, or sitting in Stormwind/Orgrimmar, which people had already grown tired of after having spent a whole expansion there during Cata.

[J1M]

People would have logged at the mission table regardless of whether those things were done or not. I don't enjoy grinding world quests or AP so I was fine with raiding a few nights and doing non-WoW other nights.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

People would have logged at the mission table regardless of whether those things were done or not. I don't enjoy grinding world quests or AP so I was fine with raiding a few nights and doing non-WoW other nights.

Problem is that it's a subscription based game. So once you have paid for gametime, people feel that they should be playing to get the value out of their sub. If the game had no sub like a box purchase only game like GW2 or a free to play game like Genshin, then the lack of meaningful endgame WoD content to do would not have been such a big deal. People would have felt free to just not think about WoW for a while and do other things.

This is the same problem that FF14 has been facing ever since ShB and has led to the player base halving, because we do not have meaty expansion endgames anymore like before ShB. So people resub to check out the story which they can get caught up on in a few days, and then there just isn't much else to do but meanwhile their sub is counting down which feels bad. Or worse, they bought a house and have to stay subbed to keep it, so they are only logging in to prevent it from being demolished.

[J1M]

People would have logged at the mission table regardless of whether those things were done or not. I don't enjoy grinding world quests or AP so I was fine with raiding a few nights and doing non-WoW other nights.

Problem is that it's a subscription based game. So once you have paid for gametime, people feel that they should be playing to get the value out of their sub. If the game had no sub like a box purchase only game like GW2 or a free to play game like Genshin, then the lack of meaningful endgame WoD content to do would not have been such a big deal. People would have felt free to just not think about WoW for a while and do other things.

This is the same problem that FF14 has been facing ever since ShB and has led to the player base halving, because we do not have meaty expansion endgames anymore like before ShB. So people resub to check out the story which they can get caught up on in a few days, and then there just isn't much else to do but meanwhile their sub is counting down which feels bad. Or worse, they bought a house and have to stay subbed to keep it, so they are only logging in to prevent it from being demolished.

While you are probably right it's interesting that such a mindset doesn't apply to a lot of other subscriptions. The average WoW player today probably has patreon/twitch/OF subscriptions and doesn't expect those to drop new content every day. The cable subscriber doesn't expect their team to be playing a sports match every day. Even the Netflix cat lady doesn't expect a new episode they will actually watch to drop every day. If any of those were providing 12+ hours of content a week they'd be considered great value. (Which is what you'd get in WoW with 3 nights of raiding plus some miscellaneous time in game.)

[DemoGraph]

I have been concepting the idea of a castle on my exterior plot.

The absolute majority of European castles looked like this.


Curtain walls were exceptions.

[J1M]

I have been concepting the idea of a castle on my exterior plot.

The absolute majority of European castles looked like this.


Curtain walls were exceptions.

This is more disappointing than when I was touristing and learned that "palace" often just referred to what is today usually called a "townhome".

[DemoGraph]

I have been concepting the idea of a castle on my exterior plot.

The absolute majority of European castles looked like this.


Curtain walls were exceptions.

This is more disappointing than when I was touristing and learned that "palace" often just referred to what is today usually called a "townhome".

That is before you realize that most knights and other petty strongmen had their own castle. There were literally tens of thousands of those. Most microfiefs had one. And the ones that didn't often had monastery buildings that also pretty much were castles.
Also, many castles were earth-and-wood ones (g: rammed earth), so they didn't survive to modernity. But it was almost as hard to break them as to break the "proper" stone ones.
ICS was a thing.

[Norfleet]

The absolute majority of European castles looked like this.

I mean, yeah, a castle is really just some rich guy's house, fortified to keep out the riff-raff. Castles were houses first and foremost, otherwise they'd just be forts (which don't actually have an owner living in them, just soldiers stationed there).

[rusty_shackleford]

Disregard lame continental castles, acquire British castles

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The curtain walls with turrets were going to cost way too much of the limited build space to make them look good, so I gave up on that. I put the "keep" on top of a supersized Colossal Amani Stone Visage turned upside down as a "foundation". Used Wooden Outhouses to heighten the "turrets". Stacked Wooden Gazebos on each other to make a tower in the back, but unfortunately there no good, build limit efficient material to fill it with. I wanted to make stone bridges, but there was not enough build limit, so I just used wooden tables and a few supersized boulders. I wanted the trees to be normally sized to give a sense of scale, but unfortunately there is just not enough build limit to fully encircle the castle with normal sized trees, so I had to scale them up. No build limit left over for anything else.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The level cap campaign

► Show Spoiler

Lor'themar wants the Army of the Light gone ASAP. So we go to the Sunwell to move out.




... Only to find Lor'themar's lieutenant, Liadrin, whining about the paladins moving out, exactly as her boss wanted!






Also, four dozen NPC paladins show up out of nowhere. Didn't see these guys during the rest of the story after the Sunwell intro.




Lady, what are you on about? What does going out to kill the enemy that is going to overwhelm and kill everyone, and obeying the will of your king to leave, have anything to do with "faith"? Also, pretty rich coming from Liadrin who was vampirically sucking Naaru for power.




Hrm... given that the Harandar cooking questline text was obviously AI, I am suspicious that this one might be too.




The Harandar cooking questline text:

"This meal is more than tradition--it is a promise."

"You have done more than fill bowls--you have upheld something fragile and vital."

"Let those who share in this meal remember that unity is not ease--it is effort."

Arator's lines during the quest are atrocious.



Huh? How do void monsters "prey upon your convictions"?




What on earth? Arator is mad that dad isn't telling mom that Arator was a moron who leapt in front of an invader? No Arator, that is YOUR fault, not your father's. Stop trying to use your mother as a weapon for your hurt ego and lies.




... What is this dialogue and voice acting? "Oh my Light"? And Turalyon and Alleria were a couple for 1,000 years. They are married. And since when was the modern slang "girlfriend" ever used in this medieval world?

Goodness gracious what is going on with this writing? Turalyon. Did. Not. Attack. Arator. That is not what happened! It was entirely Arator's fault he got struck! And once again with the "Turalyon is bad because he worships the Light and is protecting his people from savages!" messaging again!

Time to do the raid, which released today. Unfortunately, we kept wiping at 10% HP for an hour because the tanks don't know how to do tic tac toe. You just take the soak AoE to wherever the boss is about to get 3 portals in a row to destroy it. We were all in position furious pinging for the tank to come here and he didn't. This is not hard guys. You do not need an addon or a 30 minute FatBossTV video to do this. I might have to switch to blood and do it myself.

[rusty_shackleford]

"Oh my Light"?

oh my soyence

[Val the Moofia Boss]

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The Voidspire raid - normal difficulty

Having progged the raid in normal PUGs on day 1 of release, there were three major roadblock bosses. The first boss, the fourth boss with the twin dragons, and then the last fight. After several hours on the last fight, I have given up and taken a break for now.

► Show Spoiler

The first boss has a tic tac toe mechanic where he begins summoning in three Voidwalker adds. During the summoning process, the two tanks will get a soak AoE. If the AoE detonates on top of the Voidwalker add, the Voidwalker will be destroyed. But because there are only two AoEs for the two tanks, that means the third Voidwalker will successfully summon, and leave behind a portal. If the boss successfully manages to get 3 portals lined up in a row, then he summons his army to massacre the players.




So the tanks have to run to whichever Voidwalker being summoned would cause a third portal in a row to spawn and the wipe. The difficulty with this fight is simply getting two tanks who are paying attention and will do this. It took 2 to 3 hours of wipes and us cycling through tanks to finally get a competent pair. This took way, way, way longer than it should have.





The second boss is a huge devourer, basically wildlife. There are two components to his fight. The first part is that he plays a little bit like a modern FF14 boss in that you have to constantly weave in and out of where he just AoEd, as the rest of the arena will get hit by a followup AoE. Braindead easy to do if you play FF14. Unfortunately, a lot of people haven't played FF14, so this took them a few tries to get down.




The second component is that he will raise two earth walls, which divide the battlefield into three 1/3rd pie slices. He then spawns explosive adds. The adds must be killed to detonate on top of the earth walls to destroy them. This is so that when the boss breathes his instant death laser and sweeps across the battlefield, the earth walls won't be there to trap you.




Overall easy boss. Refreshing after having been walled on the first boss for 2 to 3 hours.





The third boss is King Salahadaar. Again. This boss fight was just right. We got him on our first try, but it was intense and we got by the skin of our teeth.

The room fills up with puddles of Void, and he will summon void orbs that move towards him. If the orbs reach him, it's gameover, so the party has to split to go burst down the orbs. By the end of the fight, much of the room was filled up in void puddles when he summoned the orbs, so it was time for that hero moment where I popped my defensives and ran out to go burst down that orb.








The fourth boss are the twin void dragons. This is the next wall boss after the first boss. There is no one particular mechanic that we got stuck on. It's just that they have a 9 minute enrage timer, and we are doing it on day 1 of the new season when the best people have is veteran gear. They have a humongous amount of HP. You can be 2 or 3 minutes into a pull and they'll only be at 80% HP, which makes you feel impotent. So it came down to practicing it over and over again for 2 hours until we got that one perfect attempt where hardly anybody died, all of the mechanics were executed, and we got them down seconds before enrage.

Once we had an attempt where we had successfully executed the mechanics and wiped at enrage at 20% HP, we all bought flasks (expensive!) and then finally did it two pulls later. Finally beating them was a HELL YEAH! moment. The most memorable encounter of the raid for me.

I think this is a fight where having more players makes it much, much more difficult, because the likelihood of someone botching a mechanic, and that setting the raid too far back, becomes significantly higher:

The black dragon will target a random player to use a fear breath on with a HUGE width. Anyone hit will be feared, and there is not enough time for healers to cast a dispel on everyone before they walk off of the edge of the platform or into an AoE. So everyone has to be paying attention, and if they are targeted, they must immediately begin moving to angle the fear breath away from the rest of the raid.




The white dragon also sends out a damage orb that will become a puddle. The more people who run into the orb and soak damage, the smaller the size of the puddle. I think the number of people required to minimize the size of the puddle increases with the number of players, so if you have too many players on the white team who don't do their job and get hit by the orb, then you will lose 1/3rd of the battlefield. If the dragons aren't tanked too far apart from each other, they will berserk.

It would be cool if we could get mount versions of these two bosses. A purple version of their model was available for a limited time for killing Dimmensius on heroic difficulty before Midnight launched, but these black and white (actually pale blue) versions are not available.





The penultimate boss fight is... *sigh* three paladin NPCs. Remember how Turalyon was vilified in that WC2 flashback for "having too much faith in the Light" and having an adrenaline rush seeing Blackhand kill general Lothar? Well the same thing happens here. The paladins apparently aren't supposed to feel anger towards the void, and believe in the Light too much, so they have become "Lightblinded" and want to kill you. It's ********.

Anyway, it's another relatively easy fight. Refreshing after having been stuck on the dragons for hours. Only took 3 attempts. They were dead within 20 minutes of us having killed the dragons. It's fun with you having to run around a lot to run away from the huge AoEs, and switching targets because different paladins raise their absorb shields. However, the frequency in which the three paladins use their voice lines is very high, and they wind up saying the same stuff every couple seconds. After the dragons boss, it is very satisfying to see the HP bar of these bosses go down really fast.




The boss fight ends with you having killed the three NPC paladins, rather than having knocked them unconscious like with the Blood Elves you fight in the Magister's Terrace dungeon. Rather inconsistent.









We finally make it to the final fight... which is Alleria. Xal'atath does the Ascian thing and snaps her fingers to kidnap Alleria through a portal, which you jump through in pursuit. Xal'atath then overloads Alleria with void energy, which apparently causes her to become evil and want to kill you. However, unlike the Light worshipping paladins earlier, the writers here play favoritism and have Alleria also be somehow cognizant enough to still be trying to help you, warn you to stay away for your own safety, even trying to help you by spawning the silver laser beams that you can aim at the sentinel minibosses. Rather frustrating.

Mechanically, the fight begins with three miniboss voidwalkers. Like the prior fight, it is satisfying to be able to burst them down so fast after having spent over two hours walled on the twin dragons whose HP bars barely moved.

The fight has three phases, but it appears that phase 2 is where the outcome is decided. Alleria enters the fight, and then spawns a shadow clone boss of herself. This shadowclone boss will deal enormous raid wide damage as long as she has the absorb shield. You can remain in phase 2 (and thus continue DPSing down Alleria) as long as the shadowclone is allowed to live. If the shadowclone dies, you enter phase 3, in which it is a DPS race to finish off Alleria within 2 minutes before the whole room fills up with Void puddles.




It seems that our main struggle is that our PUGs keep killing the shadowclone boss and entering phase 3 too early, so Alleria has too much health to be killed before the room fills up with Void and everyone dies. So the solution is to let the Shadowclone live for longer in phase 2, and to spend more time DPSing Alleria. But when we do that, the healers struggle to keep up with the enormous wide raid damage coming from the clone, and then people panick and kill it early. The clone keeps dying when Alleria is at 60% HP.

After several hours of attempts, we got her down to 9% HP once. I think if we can just stick out phase 2 for longer and get Alleria down to 50% HP by the phase 3 transistion, we could do it. But I don't know if I want to waste more time on her this week until we get better gear, or someone comes out with the ideal strat guide.





The cost cutting continues. This raid takes place entirely in the zone environment you had already thoroughly explored when doing questing and world quests, rather than a new environment you hadn't seen already. WoW had already begun doing this a lot with dungeons since Dragonflight, but now it is starting to become with this raid coming out just two patches after Liberation of Undermine also mostly reused the zone. Despite this raid being called "the Voidspire", you never actually get to go inside and explore the interior of the titular fortress like you would do with almost all prior WoW raids.

Almost all of the enemy and boss models in the raids are reused as well. Aside from the first boss who is a big Dominaar, none of the other enemies you fight in this raid are new assets. This happening once is not a problem, but when combined with the rest of WoW's content over the last few years, it is adding up. It seems gone are the days when you could count on seeing lots of brand new stuff when walking into a raid.

I could not recall any music from this raid aside from the generic heroic Midnight battle track, which we already heard in the Quel'thelas intro questline. It is very saddening how forgettable WoW raid music is becoming (and by extension, the rest of the soundtrack).

[Manny V]

Dancin' ovah Bazzalan's corpse wid da boyz, mon

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I came back and joined another PUG. We got our reps in, and we finally did it.

Voidspire raid ending

► Show Spoiler

If "all Xal'atath just wanted" was to shank Alleria and suck her Naaru into the dagger, then why didn't Xal'atath do this at any point before in the Worldsoul Saga? Why didn't she do it when she first met Alleria in the Dark Heart questline at the end of Dragonflight, when she lured Alleria to the Telogus Rift? Why didn't she take the Naaru from Alleria from inside Dalaran when Xal'atath was disguised as that Kirin Tor archamge? Or when she was raiding the Violet Citadel and Alleria walked in? Or when she got up in Alleria's face at the end of Azj-Kahet? Or when inside the Priory at Hallowfall. Or... etc.


I am surprised the characters weren't vaporized when the Darkwell went off.




Well, the aftermath of the raid is disappointing. People aren't bursting into purple tentacles. There are no terrified masses fleeing from Quel'thelas. I fly around Silvermoon and all of the guard NPCs, the craftsmen NPCs, etc, are still at their spots with nothing to say. Background townsfolk and nobles are still strolling around. Etc. Only difference is that the sky is purple, and Quel'danas has been phased so that there are several cultist and voidwalker mobs there, but no void dragons or jellyfish flying around in the sky like in the Sunwell intro questline to this expansion.

That's it for the story until the next part unlocks next week. Oddly, I think another raid in Harandar also opened today, but the story never sent me there. Guess I should go do that too.

[Finarfin]

From those updates Val sent, I kinda got bummed out and decided to take a break from playing wow. That female paladin with the cali accent and modern talk was the straw that broke the camels back ( I think that's how you say it)

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I killed the Midnight season 1 Delve villain, Nulleus. I was ilevel 249 frost Death Knight, with Valeera set to healer. Pretty straight forward, nothing scary. Interrupt boss whenever he casts emptiness, rotate your defensives, burst down adds, move out of the bad.




He doesn't seem to be anywhere near as frustratingly difficult as the TWW season 1 delve villain, Zekvir. But I attempted him back then in a party with five people and we spent an hour wiping before giving up. My experience with delves is that joining parties just makes things unnecessarily harder. The other people are usually insufficiently geared, while the delve enemies scale presuming everyone has a certain ilevel. While climbing the delve tiers in this season, there is a DPS check on the cultist boss where you have to burst down the orbs. Everytime I did it in a group with other people, they didn't have enough combined DPS to do it, but I was easily able to do it when alone.



Next, I did the other raid, the Dreamrift, which only has one boss. Easy, got it down on the third try. It is odd that there seems to be no story or quest sending you to do this, given that the boss is feasting on the residual essence of the Azeroth Worldsoul where she used to reside. It is also curious that the add monsters use Sha models.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Yeaaaaaah!






Managed to beat him on hard difficulty, and I got the mount!

I initially tried it as Blood for more survivability. I would get killed by Imploding Strike, which seems to do more and more damage each time he uses it, until it deals more damage than my total HP bar even when using Vampiric Blood to increase my HP by 30%.




Apparently the boss does not use Imploding Strike if you go in as a DPS spec, so I tried it as Frost. Unfortunately, I can't quite DPS down the adds fast enough before the boss returns to start attacking me, so I would die to the combined might of their damage. Then I tried it as Unholy. Unholy can burst down the adds more quickly, and gives you a little better survivability.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

by WkoKbu


Astalor's questline - Nightmare difficulty Prey hunts

► Show Spoiler

Previously, I had begun working for Astalor, a Magister in Quel'thelas who is interested in sucking out people's ANGUISH and converting it into a powerful magick.

Apparently he has been handing out little bits of anguish to the townsfolk and wants me to check in on them.




This person seems... okay-ish.






I ask this guard how he is feeling. He hits me and runs off.




These two Silvermoon soldiers are fighting over Astalor's trinket containing anguish.




We report back to Astalor. Eh, the professional thinks it's okay.




*a little while later*

Uh oh




There are fires, anguish elementals wandering around, and Silvermoon soldiers fighting each other in the middle of the street! No biggie, we'll just vacuum back up that anguish.










The government official experimenting with this new anguish magic takes no responsibility for handing out trinkets that resulted in drugging/berserking the populace.




Hold up.

Magister Umbric experiments with volatile void magick, and then gets dragged before the magisters and banished. Notably, no actual incidents involving void magick occurred during his experiments.

Magister Astalor experiments with volatile anguish magick, hands out crystalized anguish magick to the populace, which causes people to become euphoric drug addicts or berserkers and people are suddenly becoming arsonists and fighting each other in the streets. And no one comes to hand Astalor his summons to appear before the Magisters in court?



Anyway, Astalor notices that I too have a lot of Anguish, and asks me to come down to the basement so he can suck it out of me.




I did not ask to be strangled!




And with that, I have unlocked Nightmare difficulty prey hunts.

Up until now, I had never died on a prey hunt, not even on the hard mode ones. With nightmare difficulty, well, it's not the bosses that are the problem. Though for someone wearing ilevel 249 champion gear, they do hurt enough that I have to engage with their mechanics rather than just standing in the bad.




It's Astalor that's the problem. Once you have accumulated enough Anguish during your pursuit of the target, the now drugged up Astalor will randomly, suddenly tell you that he needs his anguish RIGHT NOW and that you need to kill something within the next 20 seconds, otherwise he starts sucking you of your Anguish, causing massive HP damage over several seconds.




What this means is that you cannot AFK while in the zone with a Nightmare prey hunt active, and definitely DO NOT mash spacebar to fly super high while dragonriding and then glide towards the other side of the zone. Astalor suddenly started demanding that I kill something, but I was so high up that I couldn't reach the ground and find a mob in time before he started sucking me and killed me. I would also be doing a non-combat world quest like swimming underwater and clicking on fish to bag them, and then he'd suddenly start shouting at me to kill something now, but there are no mobs within reach, so he sucks me and I die.




This is the most memorable WoW NPC I have seen in a long time.

[Karwelas]

"Hurr Bwonsamdi is based on Legba"
>Bwonsamdi
>Baron Samedi

WoW 'players' are ******* *******.

These people wouldn't find some references even if they jumped out of nearby bushes and kicked them in the ***.

[Karwelas]

The level cap campaign.

As an avid reader and tabletop player seeing this **** hurts and makes me want to run ******* tabletop campaign in W3 or early WoW. My magnum opus idea project is to run W3 campaign (with people who never played Wow or W3) as Lordearon guard squad investigating weird happenings around grain and then the undead cult... Only to sent them rest at Stratholme some fateful evening, asking them carefully what they ate (which I would do randomly during campaign to make them less suspicious).

[Manny V]

fightin alongside da Warchief (and the wretched banshee hag, should've cut the ***** down )