Thursday, July 19, 2018

A Messy Patch and An Era Closes

Well, 8.0.1 didn't land softly - there are still some issues with the pre-patch to BFA, but in a way this makes me glad that they held off on the quest content for next week.

One pleasant surprise I came across was that, with the new way Honor works, I actually qualified for the first of the PVP artifact appearances, and because that's account-wide, that's on all characters. I really didn't think I was ever going to get those Nightmare-themed druid forms, but now I've got them! (Too bad I never play Feral - the nightmare cat form is fantastic.)

Of course I regret not getting more Mage Tower appearances, though getting the one for my main character's main spec (the blue/gold variant is my favorite look for Truthguard) softened the blow a bit.

Most specs I'd say are just a bit tweaked, but the ones I've been having the most fun exploring are the new Survival Hunter and the new Demonology Warlock. The former has really had an extensive rework that turns Raptor Strike, previously a way-bottom-of-the-priority-list filler into a major source of damage. As a result I've started leveling my Nightborne Hunter again and she's gone from 66 to 71 (still slow going, but more fun now.)

Demonology's whole rhythm and feel is different now, despite having a lot of the same abilities it had previously. You're still summoning Dreadstalkers in pairs and filling in with Hand of Gul'dan, but with the removal of Demonic Empowerment and the addition of Demonbolt (which you cast instantly with procs that you get frequently,) as well as a bunch of talents and stuff that summon more demons, Demonology is really leaning into the "swarm of demons" model, and is a lot of fun.

Hey! If you hated checking websites every time you got a new relic, well, you're in luck. Relics are now purely item-level boosts for your de-powered artifact, and thus you can just plug in whatever has the highest item level without feeling worried you're somehow screwing up.

Everyone gets a free legendary! If you go to the Mythic+ cache in your class hall, you'll get 1000 withering essences, which you can now use to purchase specific legendaries from the guy in the blacksmith shop at Dalaran. If only we'd been able to do that earlier...

You'll also notice that not only is gear squished, but item level is too! So if you were rocking 930 gear before, that stuff is now I believe 210. We're going to seriously have to reassess what good dps is, but Recount is fixed so at least we can measure it!

Naturally, like a lot of pre-patches, once you've rebuilt your talents and fixed add-ons, we're now in kind of a holding pattern. One thing I've noticed is that the scaling stuff is a mixed bag - I've been able to pretty easily solo a lot of Blackrock Foundry (Mythic's a bit of a challenge still, but I doubt it will stay that way long.)

As of next Tuesday, we'll have three weeks from the launch of Battle for Azeroth. So gear up, make sure you've got some free sick days lined up (if that's your style) and take it easy out there.

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