Devourer Tuning in Recent Hotfix

 I've got to say, the Midnight pre-launch event is pretty underwhelming - just a few world quests and spawning rares in Twilight Highlands (there was some announcement that it would be "across Azeroth," but I don't think they're showing up anywhere else. As such, the pre-patch has largely been about tinkering with the various class changes, and the biggest change of those is the existence of the third Demon Hunter spec, Devourer.

I've made multiple posts about the spec and its issues, mainly that it's surprisingly difficult to actually get off Collapsing Star, the headliner spell that requires a lot of build-up to get to. Something you'd expect to do every Void Metamorphosis multiple times (given that there are talents that trigger off multiple casts in a single Meta,) it's pretty common to be unable to even get one cast of it off - you need to have a bit of luck, honestly, for there to be enough soul fragments for you to gather up 30 before your window runs out.

Now, I will say that I have, on occasion, been able to get two off in a single go, though that's very, very rare. Generally, I have to go against the talent build guidance I've found online in order to do so - rather than Soul Glutton, which lets you go into the metamorphosis at 35 soul fragments rather than 50, but which speeds up the fury loss while in Metamorphosis, I take the one that just buffs you with Haste for each fragment you pick up. Naturally, this means you're entering the metamorphosis less often, but you won't have to fight the time limit as hard to get off at least one Collapsing star.

Evidently, the final Devourer Apex Talent allows you to cast a free Collapsing Star right when you get into Void Metamorphosis, which not only gets you that free cast, but also gives you another spell that delays your Fury degradation (a key, I think, to buying yourself the time to gather another 30). I'd hope as well that other Apex Talents might increase the rate of fragment generation, but none of those are available here during the pre-patch.

However, Blizzard sent out a hotfix last night (around the time they seemed to be hit with a DDOS attack that shut down both my Alliance and Horde servers) that made a few changes. The changes do, I think, increase your soul fragment generation overall, though weirdly there's also a nerf - basically, Consume is going to create more fragments, while I think other abilities are going to generate fewer.

In practice, I haven't noticed a huge change - partially I think I'm just getting better at timing my abilities, so I'm getting off more Collapsing Stars. But I still think this is not tuned well for anything other than max level.

And sure, we spend most of our time in WoW at max level, so by the time I get a Demon Hunter to 90 (more likely my old Night Elf one, who will be sticking primarily to Havoc, but I figure I'll keep around some Intellect gear for when I want to futz with Devourer) I can check in again and see if the spec feels good.

Damage-wise, I do think that hotfixes worked out ok - naturally, my Void Elf has been getting better gear, which helps. But while balancing damage is certainly important in a game like this, I do think the spec needs to feel good to play too, and too often with Devourer I feel like I'm failing to do what the spec is meant to be doing.

Crows and Dungeon-Crawling

 MCDM successfully launched its heroic fantasy RPG, Draw Steel, which, yes, I'm still trying to get a group of players together for (though I'm up to three and will play with four! Scheduling is the next challenge,) and made news when lead designer James Introcaso moved from continuing to develop Draw Steel to the company's next original RPG: Crows.

Draw Steel, famously (though maybe not as famously as their "everything hits" philosophy,) eschews monetary rewards - you have a wealth value, but it's not meant to be the primary motivator, and you're assumed to be able to afford an inn, replace equipment, etc., with "treasure" being limited to magic items that can give you a significant boost.

The idea that Matt Colville presented when pitching Draw Steel was that there was a lot of vestigial stuff in D&D from when it was first designed to be a survival-horror dungeon crawler, but that over the past half-century, the game has come to, well, mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but broadly, the way most players approach it is to tell stories of heroic figures saving the world. Colville felt that a lot of the game's continued reliance on tracking inventory and such weighs down the goal of game meant to make you feel more like epic heroes, and so they pushed to cut that out from Draw Steel.

Crows goes the opposite direction.

Crows will work a little like Draw Steel in the sense that its central mechanic is the Power Roll - rolling 2d10, adding the appropriate statistic (though these are boiled down to just three - Strength, Agility, and Mind) and checking to see if your result is 11 or lower, 12-16, or 17+. A lot of it is different though.

The intent here is for a world that's post-apocalyptic (though I think still in a medieval fantasy sense), gritty, and desperate. You're scrounging for whatever wealth you can find in dangerous old ruins, and so the way in which you earn experience is the value of the stuff you pull up out of there. Fighting monsters might be necessary, but if you can avoid them, it's probably for the best, as you don't get anything for killing them, and they can certainly kill you - part of the design philosophy is that the monsters aren't scaled to the players. (As a side note, I hear a lot of DMs talking about building campaigns like this, which usually implies it's going to be deadlier and with fewer guard rails, but I would say that if you're going to do that, you need to also make it go the other way - if the world doesn't limit its difficulty for low-level players, then it also should not rise to meet high-level ones).

Unlike Draw Steel, Crows will be all about inventory management, and will involve such trade-offs as wearing lighter armor so that you can carry more stuff with you. Equipment can get damaged and broken, and your character's abilities are more about what kind of stuff you can use than what you can do on your own - a spellcaster character, for example, might be able to make use of magic spellbooks found in these ruins, but they won't have magic that they can just use innately.

It'll be interesting to see how this turns out: I think the intent of this sort of game, a bit like Blades in the Dark (and its variants) is for shorter-term stories, unlike the long and epic campaigns you get with D&D or Draw Steel.

Player Agency, Combat Pacing, and Monster Design

 I ran a fight over the past two sessions in my long-running Ravnica campaign (though they had actually planeswalked to Arcavios). They were undergoing five challenges, one from each of the Strixhaven colleges, to earn the right to the shard of the Golgothian Sylex that Urza had left with the elder dragons who created the university (they need the Sylex to destroy a Phyrexian artifact that would allow them to travel across the planes and invade everywhere at once - I came up with this plot before the whole March of the Machines plot in Magic's canon lore emerged).

Anyway, the Silverquill Challenge, the last of the five, required them to race various Silverquill students to a persuade a group of Malleable Minds (Black Puddings slightly altered) that they should be given the shard, while the students (Noble Prodigies) and a trio of Archpriests and two Arcanoloths moved to intercept and stop them.

The party is level 18, and as this was the only fight they were going to have on the day (actually, that's not technically true, but there's a surprise coming their way) I balanced it as a high-difficulty encounter. At level 18, that generally means either some insanely powerful monsters or a lot of quite-powerful monsters.

So, that was why I picked the Archpriests and Arcanoloths, which are not legendary, but probably designed to be the big headliner of their respective encounters.

Here was the problem:

Arcanoloths have a really cool and flavorful ability to trap players in their Soul Tome. If they hit with their Banishing Claw attack, a target has to make a Charisma saving throw (DC 17) or they get sucked into the tome, incapacitated. They can repeat the save on each of their turns, but if they fail three times before doing so, they are stuck in the book until the book or the Arcanoloth are killed.

In addition to that, Archpriests have a recharge ability (4-6, so 50% chance to be able to use it each turn) that deals a bunch of radiant damage in an emanation around them and stuns creatures who fail their Wisdom save.

These creatures combined to mean that in the quite-long encounter (I think it might have actually gotten to ten rounds, or possibly eight or nine) the party's Artificer missed about half of their turns.

Now, sure, the encounter did conspire to make this a little tougher: the party was spread out, so other characters who might have been able to blast the book apart (there are special mechanics to do just that, but you need to do a full 35 damage in a single turn, something one of the Sorcerers eventually did with a Disintegrate).

But it got me thinking:

D&D combat is slow, especially when you get to higher levels. Monsters are more complex, as are player abilities and the breadth of their options.

In a game where each round of combat takes five minutes, losing a turn is frustrating but not that bad. In a game where a round could take forty minutes, it becomes a real problem.

Now, I think that perhaps just the fact that a round takes so long is probably a problem in and of itself. The tactical challenge and complexity, of course, is part of what makes the game fun, but it does make things go pretty slowly (I also have a six-player party, five of whom are spellcasters, which also means I generally need more monsters as well to meet them as a challenge).

There are a lot of arguments about how D&D breaks down at higher levels, and I actually think that it works out ok, it's just that things take a very long time. Even low-difficulty encounters that you'd want to pepper in over the course of a day feel pretty epic just because if they don't, they won't actually challenge the players and drain their resources.

While I love the cool powers I get at higher levels as a player, and you can bet that I'm champing at the bit to get 6th level spells on my Wizard (we're level 9 right now) I also think that there's truth to the idea that 5E works most smoothly at tier 2, and a big part of that is that your options are a bit more limited.

I mean, on a purely physical level, you need to count the values on all the dice you roll. When you are fighting monsters with 200 HP instead of 100 HP, you need to physically count twice as much damage before they fall. Even if your characters are doing twice as much damage in a turn, that act means it will be slower.

And again, slower combat means those loss-of-control moments feel that much more painful.

I'm slowly, gradually getting together a group of players to try out Draw Steel, and I get the sense that both of these issues were in mind when they designed that game. Initially, it's totally bizarre to me that abilities in that deal flat amounts of damage (there are some exceptions,) and that from level 1 to level 10, you really just do the same power roll (you're just more likely to get a better result as you level up).

I also know that MCDM, starting in Flee, Mortals! but also carrying over to their Draw Steel Monsters book, has pretty much removed any and all mechanics that would take away a player's agency: even going to zero hit points (er, stamina) doesn't prevent you from acting! Sure, you really risk getting yourself killed if you don't act very carefully while dying, and being dead is the condition where your turns are skipped, but I'm really curious to see how the game feels at higher levels.

Still, for the time being, I'm going to be looking more carefully at the monsters I use, and possibly replace various stunning or otherwise incapacitating abilities with something that works a little differently and gives players recourse.

General Thoughts on 12.0 Spec Changes

 I won't be able to touch on every single change here, as I'm giving my basic vibes. Since the Midnight pre-patch launched for WoW, I've mostly been leveling up my new Void Elf Demon Hunter (and finding the Devourer spec to be... basically broken - something I understand will get better with some Apex Talents coming in the next few levels, but probably needs a fix at some core design level) but I've also been hopping on my many alts (see the name of the blog) to get a sense of how the class changes have affected them. Again, I don't play every single spec (I have basically no healers) and some I've just barely touched.

I'll go class-by-class, and within those, touch on the specs I've looked at.

Paladin:

    Protection: At first glance, there are some cooldowns that have been pruned and one big change I actually like a lot, which is that Hammer of Wrath is now just a transformed Judgment, which makes my bars a bit less awkward. We lose Eye of Tyr, which was always kind of an odd semi-cooldown, and now if we're going Templar (and we are) we use Divine Toll to activate it. But for the most part, this plays similarly (though I miss having Weak Auras just to give myself a big visual cue when I'd gotten 3 Holy Power. This applies to Combo Points for Rogues as well).

    I don't feel like this is going to change the way the spec feels all that much, so I'm kind of neutral on all of this.

Death Knight:

    Blood: The big change here is that the "burn Bone Shield charges to get Dancing Rune Weapon back faster" playstyle is no more - indeed, Bone Storm and Tombstone are both gone, so DRW is on just a normal cooldown. Interestingly, Consumption is way more interesting now, working as an empowered spell that can consume varying amounts of your Blood Plague and give you a damage-reduction bonus based on its empowerment.

    Frost: I ran a Delve mostly as this - Frost got, I think, a revamp mid-War Within, so some stuff, like making Remorseless Winter a passive, were already in place. There's an interesting new talent at the bottom of the tree called Frostbane, which causes your Frost Strike to sometimes get transformed into a big meteor-style strike in front of you.

    Unholy: Honestly, lots of big changes that I don't yet fully understand, but you can now summon ghouls on demand, which seems to replace Apocalypse (it's a recharge ability) and Festering Wounds are gone, with new abilities that give you more undead dudes to keep you doing your Festering Strike and Scourge Strike.

Rogue:

    Subtlety: Holy crap. Subtlety has been profoundly simplified. First off, no more Rupture - the only ongoing buff from a finishing move you need to worry about is Slice and Dice, and at least the way I'm talented, you refresh it with every Eviscerate, so once it's going, you're basically good unless you have like, more than a minute of downtime. The bigger deal, though, is that you're no longer building up damage in over a Shadow Dance to buff up Secret Technique as much as possible. Instead, you can just blow that the moment that you have full combo points and drop into Shadow Dance. There is something like the old mechanic, where you'll do some shadow damage for each unique ability you used during Shadow Dance, but these don't buff the abilities you're using - it's an independent source of damage - so the order no longer matters. There are also just fewer buttons to push now - Symbols of Death and Flagellation are both gone, meaning basically you just have Backstab, Eviscerate, Slice and Dice, Secret Technique, Shadow Dance, and of course Shuriken Storm and Black Powder as your AoE Backstab/Eviscerate alternatives.

    While I appreciated how satisfying it was to pull off the gigantic Secret Technique blasts, I did find my hands juggling my keyboard and mouse in awkward ways to do so. Right now, it feels very simple and easy, but we'll see if we miss the complexity.

Shaman:

    Enhancement: Another spec that has gotten seriously simplified (another where I struggled to find a spot for all their abilities on my bars). Lava Burst is out, as is Primordial Wave. You actually still have a fair number of things to press, but it all seems a little more forgiving. You'll only be spending Maelstrom Weapon charges on Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning, and it seems that Doom Winds now replicates the Ascendance thing of speeding up Storm Strike's cooldown and having it consume your Maelstrom Weapon charges to shoot lightning at your foe. I've been playing Totemic, but I imagine that this also makes Stormbringer simpler, not having to juggle Lava Burst along with this.

    This, honestly, I think, feels a little more like what the spec is supposed to feel like. There are still some things to monitor and look out for, but it feels manageable.

Demon Hunter:

    Havoc: Honestly, very similar to how it was before. Havoc has always been one of the simpler specs, so they didn't really need to pull much out of it.

    Devourer: Well, see the previous two posts.

Mage:

    Frost: We've gone a couple expansions, I think, without major changes to Frost (maybe not since Legion, actually, which launched a decade ago this year. Dear lord) and I've largely had an attitude of "not broke, don't fix." But they have now made quite a lot of changes - the biggest is that everything is built around applying a "Freezing" debuff to your target, which you can then consume with Ice Lance to shatter. Weirdly, spells that used to benefit a lot from shattering, like Glacial Spike, now apply Freezing rather than consuming it. I need to get a sense of how much I need to weave in Ice Lances, especially because Fingers of Frost seems to prevent it from consuming stacks, so presumably we do want to consume them outside of that proc. Also, Icy Veins is gone, with Ray of Frost now your main cooldown (and kind of your only major cooldown outside of Time Warp). Also, Glacial Spike now replaces Frost Bolt rather than being its own button.

    I think it largely plays the same - the big thing is that you'll, I believe, be weaving in Ice Lances constantly to eat up Freezing stacks. I know that Comet Swarm can also shatter the stacks, so you'll sometimes be using them in other ways.

Warlock:

    Demonology: Actually a fair number of changes, even if you're going to look pretty similar in the end. One big thing is that Soul Siphon and Implosion are now mutually exclusive - different ways to use up your Wild Imps. Summon Dreadstalkers is now always instant and always free, and your Demonic Tyrant now checks how many demons you have out to improve its damage (I don't know if this snapshots or just acts dynamically). Actually, Implosion now has a cooldown, so it's less about figuring out how many Imps to sacrifice than just doing so when you've got the ability (it also only sacrifices I think a set number per cast). You can also summon an Imp or Felhound as a long-lasting temporary summon that then lends you its activated ability - so with the Felhound you finally get an interrupt.

    There are other changes here, but I think to a large extent it's mainly just less fiddly. You don't have Grimoire: Felguard or an actively summoned Vilefiend (though you can still talent to get the latter) but the Doomguard and Felhound/Imp options kind of replace those. It'll take some adjustments, but even if there are a lot of changes, the core of the spec remains the same.

Warrior:

    Arms: There are some changes here, like getting rid of Dragon Roar (which did feel a bit redundant with all the other cooldowns we might use). Execute also now seems usable at any health percentage - I'll admit this is one that I haven't really looked under the hood at so much.

Priest:

    Shadow: Huge aesthetic changes, as they're really doubling down on the cosmic aspects of the void. Devouring Plague, which made sense when Shadow kind of applied to any "dark" magic, is now Shadow Word Madness, but works similarly. Shadow Crash is now Tentacle Slam, with a whole new visual. And Dark Ascension is gone, so everyone will be using Void Eruption/Void Form, which I'm honestly good with.

    To me, the biggest thing is that there's a talent that vastly improves the damage of Shadow Word Pain, which is fine except that it's mutually exclusive with the one that causes any instance of Vampiric Touch to apply the DOT. That means managing SWP more important to a rotation that I feel long ago moved away from "DoT management" as its primary focus. The Old God theme is still there, with the Idol of "insert Old God here" talents at the bottom, but, for example, I have a talent that sometimes pops out a void entity to attack my target (I think it's some variant of Shadowfiend).

Hunter/Monk/Druid/Evoker:

    To be honest, I haven't really given much thought to the way that these classes have changed.

Naturally, the big caveat to this is that we won't really get to see how these play until we're level 90, with the hero talents filled in and the Apex Talents acquired. I know that Devourer is basically broken until we get get the latter, and I could imagine that these might entail big changes to how each spec feels.

Devourer Still Not Quite Working at 80, And How I'd Redesign It

 The problem with class design focusing on max level is that you have to level a class first.

Let me just put my biggest issue front and center, touched on in my previous post:

The promise of Devourer Demon Hunters is that you're going to gobble up a bunch of void/soul fragments like Hungry Hungry Hippos and, once you have enough, you're going to throw a giant ball of void energy (Collapsing Star - which I think I was erroneously calling Collapsing Void in the previous post). It's the cosmic black-hole spec, right?

Looking at Icy Veins, their single-target raid boss talent build doesn't even take that ability. Again, this is for the pre-patch, where we're missing some pieces, like the Apex Talents.

But I think that there are a number of issues with Devourer's design. I truly would not be shocked if we got a major overhaul as early as the 12.0.5 patch, unless those Apex Talents completely smooth over the rotation.

I think at the core of it is this: you need to build up to do anything cool with Devourer.

Let me compare this to another fairly build-up heavy spec, Demonology. Demonology of course also got its own simplification and redesign, such as making your Dreadstalkers never cost Soul Shards nor have a cast time, but even if we rewind back to before the Midnight pre-patch, let me tell you what I would do as an opener (which I think was at least close to optimized):

Starting with 3 soul shards, I'd summon my Dreadstalkers (down to 2) then summon my Vilefiend (down to zero) then Shadow Bolt four times to get my Grimoire: Felguard and a 3-shard Hand of Gul'dan out, and then I'd summon my Demonic Tyrant, which would then extend the duration of all those demons (7 total, not counting the tyrant themselves) by 15 seconds and give me my really powerful burst of damage at the start of the fight. All of this takes, I'd guess, around 10 seconds or less, and by this point I've cast my big, showstopper spells.

The problem is that for me to get to the showstopper on Devourer, I have to generate so many soul fragments just to get into the state where I can cast Collapsing Star, and then it's this insane race once I am (something that I'm going to generously say I can do in 30 seconds if I'm lucky in a sustained, single-target fight where there's no downtime) to build all the way up to the 30 I need to cast Collapsing Star before the accelerating Fury decay pulls me out of that state. Void Metamorphosis lasts, I think, maybe 10 seconds, and I can maybe push that to 15 if I'm timing my Void Beams, Voidblades, and such well. If it takes me 30 seconds to get 50 soul fragments, I'm getting to around 25 fragments in metamorphosis, which you'll note is not enough for a single Collapsing Star.

There are talents that expect you to get multiple Collapsing Stars off in a single metamorphosis. Surely, they jest.

So, here is what I'd propose:

First, a less extreme redesign:

Make Void Metamorphosis last a set duration. Your challenge is now to generate as many soul fragments as you can in that time as possible. Fury can still be used on Void Beam to generate more fragments (and do damage) but works as normal. Cut the cost of Collapsing Star to, like, 10 fragments, and nerf its damage if necessary to make that work.

Now, a more radical redesign:

Decouple Void Metamorphosis entirely from soul fragments. Just make it a normal cooldown like Metamorphosis is for Havoc and Vengeance. The ability can enhance your damage and alter abilities like it does for Havoc, and maybe have it increase soul fragment generation. Then, the only thing you spend soul fragments on becomes Collapsing Star, which you can cast in and out of Metamorphosis form and is its own separate button.

I think that either of these changes (though I'd prefer the latter) would make the spec far, far more satisfying to play. Collapsing Star looks cool as hell. Indeed, the spec's visuals are fantastic. I just wish that it wasn't so damned frustrating to play.

Devourer Doesn't Seem to Work While Leveling

 Oh boy.

I've been putting in a lot of hours on my new Void Elf Demon Hunter. I've basically quested through the main campaign of each of the four main Dragonflight zones and gotten her up to 56.

Conceptually, there are cool ideas here. The problem is tuning and pacing.

Here is how, as I understand it, your Devourer is supposed to work:

You cast Consume as your primary filler. This generates Fury, does damage, and spawns a little void-y soul fragment. You can cast it while moving, and you're meant to, I think, be moving around to grab the fragments as you go (this is not a gameplay style I love, but it's a valid choice). Walking over a soul fragment heals you (though for an incredibly tiny amount - just 1% of your max HP) and also grants you some Fury and fills a bar under your Fury bar. You can also pop out soul fragments on any other damage you do, but you get one guaranteed from Consume.

Reap is an ability with a fairly short cooldown that does a bit of instantaneous damage and sucks up to four fragments near you.

Voidblade has you charge at the target and strike them, generating a fairly big amount of Fury as you strike them with damage.

Your first goal is to build up to 100 Fury, which you then unleash with a Void Ray - basically Devourer's equivalent of Eye Beam. This carves off a bunch of soul fragments, and with some talents, it resets your Reap cooldown and I believe has it suck in all nearby fragments, not just four.

Now, once you hit 50 fragments (you'll get this talent early, but you need Metamorphosis for it to work. I don't even know why this is a talent given that I think this is the only version of Metamorphosis you get,) you will be able to hit Void Metamorphosis.

This (I believe) sets you to 100 Fury and will enhanced the damage of your other abilities (Consume becomes Devour) and notably resets your soul fragments to zero. Your Fury will begin to drain, and drains faster the longer you're transformed, until you hit 0 and pop out. While channeling Void Ray or casting Collapsing Void, the fury drain is paused.

If you get to 30 fragments after transforming, you'll be able to cast Collapsing Void, essentially tossing a black hole at the target.

The goal, basically, is to try to get Void Metamorphosis to last as long as possible and to gather as many soul fragments as you can while it's going to shoot out as many Collapsing Voids as possible.

I have cast, in 56 levels of playing this spec, I think three or four Collapsing Voids.

It's rough. Basically, if you aren't gathering fragments and managing your Fury perfectly, your metamorphosis ends before you get to cast the spell. I've had several instances where I got 29 fragments right as the thing ended, but more often than not I'm under 20 before this happens.

It just feels like the tuning is off - and I'm not talking about damage (though I think I'm struggling - the NPCs in follower dungeons often out-damage me) but rather the pacing of the spec.

I think the Fury drain is far, far too punishing, and also, I think that Fury generation is too slow, and that we need to massively cut the number of soul fragments you need to gather. (Or we need a radical redesign of the spec, which I honestly could see happening early on in Midnight if the high-level talents don't fix and smooth this all out).

Unless I'm doing something terribly wrong here (and it's a new spec, so I could be - though given how they've redesigned old specs to be more approachable, I'm shocked at how complex the rotation is on this one) this feels just broken.

I feel like - and this should be true by like level 15, or 20 at least - that played reasonably, you should be able to get at least two Collapsing Voids off per metamorphosis. It certainly shouldn't be a struggle to get a single one off (there is apparently a talent later on that lets you do it immediately after using metamorphosis, but that's not going to be available until we can go past the current level 80 cap).

There's an interesting idea at work here: there aren't any long cooldowns in the spec. Metamorphosis could theoretically be used very frequently if you could somehow suck in tons of soul fragments, and likewise, Void Ray can be used as long as you have 100 or more Fury (except in Metamorphosis, when it doesn't cost Fury but instead does have a cooldown).

But it's just so frustrating to me that you can barely ever do the really cool thing the spec is supposed to do, and instead are juggling just like four abilities (Consume, Void Blade, Reap, and Void Ray) for the vain hope of being able to pull it off next time.

It does feel like the spec is built for the endgame, which, sure, is where most of gameplay in WoW takes place, but the leveling has been a slog.

Also, given that it's an Intellect class, it has become shockingly apparent how few one-handed intellect swords, axes, fist weapons, and warglaives there actually are in old content.

Aesthetically, the spec is cool as hell. But I think they need to really get in there and do some serious fixes, because right now it just feels like it is not working. My main DH is going to stick to Havoc (which he was probably going to anyway).

What Might an Elden Ring Sequel Be About?

 I'll concede immediately that the premise of the title of this post is flawed. Arguably, Elden Ring has a sequel, with Nightreign.

While I've been doing my best to follow the lore of Nightreign as best as I can, I have a certain allergy to live-service style games - I play WoW, which is kind of the exception that proves the rule, as I don't want to get sucked into the weaponized FOMO that such models of gaming use to keep you stuck with them (WoW got its hooks into me twenty years ago, when such models were far rarer).

Still, I'm also given to understand that Nightreign is sort of apocryphal - imagining an alternate timeline for the Lands Between. The lore that it explores - again, as I understand it - is less about fleshing out more about Elden Ring's lore, but more about exploring the individual characters' stories within that lore.

Naturally, this is all up for debate - the nature of FromSoft lore tends to be that any aspect of the lore is open to interpretation, to the extent that sometimes I wonder if they put references to lore that intentionally contradicts itself: for instance, I wonder if the Nox and the Shamans are both off-shoots of the Numen, or if Marika's past as a shaman is actually inconsistent with her being a Numen.

I think one could potentially read Nightreign as what would happen with Ranni's Rain of Stars ending, which has apparently been the most popular ending people have gone for when playing Elden Ring (the fact that it's the one with the most involved quest chain does help it feel like the "truest" ending). But maybe not.

Let me make this clear: Elden Ring's lore is my favorite FromSoft has given us. I like it better than the lore of Dark Souls and Demon Souls, and even though I adore Bloodborne, I think I like Elden Ring's lore better.

Now, that might be in part because I got on at the ground floor with Elden Ring, playing it only a month or so after it came out (the only reason I delayed was because I thought I could only buy either the PS4 or PS5 version, and hoped to upgrade my console, but then realized I could get it for both as a single purchase). I never beat Dark Souls, getting stuck on Ornstein and Smough (I got much farther in DSIII, only leaving Midir, Gael, and Soul of Cinder - the latter out of fear that it'd lock me into NG+ if I beat it).

But having played Dark Souls III, I wonder if there's a message there about sequels. DSIII is a game I read as an allegory for franchises and sequels losing their potency over time. The world has constantly been refreshed and rebooted as countless Lords of Cinder have reignited the First Flame, and you can feel the entire world straining under the ashes of an Age of Fire prolonged far, far beyond its intended period. Even the first game shows a world struggling with stagnation due to Gwyn's linking of the fire, but while that game perhaps leaves open some interpretation that following in his footsteps might at least grant the world some good times once again, the final game truly makes the linking of the flame feel futile.

Both Dark Souls and Elden Ring are about the dangers of stagnation, of trying to keep a good thing going past its time. That being said, I don't know that Elden Ring is as primarily concerned with stagnation as a natural inevitability.

The truth is that there's so little we know for certain about how Marika's age turned sour. Shadow of the Erdtree suggests that the seeds of its downfall were there from the beginning, the madness of Metyr and her Two Fingers setting things on a catastrophic course, and the cycle of hatred and violence and revenge making freedom-fighters into tyrants.

Still, my reading is that the most important event in the timeline that is never addressed directly is when the Erdtree burns down the first time. That might surprise you if you hadn't heard this argument before, but basically, Leyndell is already filled with ash when we get there, and the tree we see looks more like a ghostly spirit than a physical organism made of wood. There are references to Marika distributing the Erdtree's sap as a blessing in some earlier age of abundance, but with the tree in its incorporeal state, its tangible, direct benefits have literally dried up, making the world's devotion to Marika an article of faith alone.

I suspect this is also what precipitates Godfrey's exile and his replacement by Radagon, which would neatly tie the two Elden Lords to their respective eras.

If we assume that the player is a completionist, finishing both the base game and the DLC and defeating every boss, we can probably check off most of the key figures of Elden Ring's pantheon. Miquella is dead. Radahn is dead twice over. Mohg is dead. Morgott is dead. The last of the Fire Giants is dead. Placidusax is dead.

But who is still alive?

Well, Ranni, at least in her doll body, is still alive. Even if we don't go for the Age of Stars ending, I don't believe there's any way to kill her.

Marika might still be alive. If you get either of the two special endings, the Lord of Frenzied Flame or the Age of Stars, she seems to pass away (more peacefully in the latter). But if you use any of the Mending Rune endings, or the Age of Fracture, Marika is presumably still a god and still the vessel of the Elden Ring, though likely bereft of agency similarly to how she is when we find her.

Interestingly, though, I wonder if, even if Marika persists, if Radagon is dead. His body becomes the sword wielded by the Elden Beast, and we don't see it change back. But his body is Marika's body, so... It's not clear.

Rykard is dead... probably. Arguably, he was dead before the game started when he fed himself to the God-Devouring Serpent, but that allowed him to become a part of it, and a rather dominant part of it. We see Lady Tannith eating what remains of him in an act that I imagine is meant to allow him to live on within her. As Rykard says, "a serpent never dies," which is actually a weird thing to say because serpents for sure die in the real world. But the God-Devouring Serpent is, I'd guess, linked to the idea of an Ouroboros, the snake devouring itself that symbolically represents eternity. I suspect that Rykard's dominance of the serpent's will might be over, the the serpent itself is probably still around in some form (I wouldn't be shocked if Tannith transformed after consuming it. We can kill her for some special loot while she's doing this, and fight off her Crucible Knight bodyguard, but I'm not as convinced that that event would be treated as canonical).

Malenia is also an interesting story: the hardest "superboss" in the base game (I haven't gone back to fight her again, but boy after fighting Consort Radahn, I suspect she'd feel easier,) there also seems to be some implication that she's not truly dead, with the Aeonian bloom she leaves behind perhaps giving her a path to rebirth. (How literal should we take it that her second phase calls her the Goddess of Rot? We don't get a "God Slain" victory toast when she falls, but is that because we haven't actually killed the goddess?)

Melina is also in an interestingly ambiguous position. Ironically, despite the state of the world in it, the Lord of Frenzied Flame ending quite emphatically portrays Melina as alive, because she's on her way to put you down. (Is she the Gloam-Eyed Queen? Possibly, but I had some other theories about how she got that indigo eye). However, if we don't have the Frenzied Flame, she uses herself as kindling to burn the Erdtree, seemingly perishing in this conflagration.

(I've never tried this, but if we want to be cheeky, I think we can have her burn herself to burn the Erdree and then get the Flame of Frenzy, which I believe removes the stinger on the end of the Lord of Frenzied Flame ending.)

Still, I'm not even convinced that Melina is actually dead even if she does burn herself. Again, there's strong evidence that the Erdtree burned once before, when it was still a physical tree that granted tangible sap. I think it's very possible that Melina already performed this role once, which might be why she's so emphatic about not worrying ourselves about the role she has to play. The Flame of Ruin that she is kindling is not the spirit-burning Frenzied Flame, after all, so maybe she's literally fine (though we never see her again after she kindles the flame). Sure, if she were around, she ought to still be around to threaten the Lord of Frenzied Flame, so... Hm.

(If we're considering a full clear canon, we might imagine that the Tarnished does save her by using the Frenzied Flame but then uses Miquella's Needle to cleanse themself, leaving her pissed off that they did something so dangerous but without the need to slay them.)

Rellana's alive - a character that I think we are truly unable to kill, even though we fight her in a boss fight. While she's in a sadly pathetic state of mind, one wonders if Radagon's defeat might break her out of her funk, and if Ranni has truly ascended to godhood, I could imagine one of the first items on her agenda would be to restore her mother to her former state of glory (though we should also probably expect Ranni to be a distant and non-interventionist deity).

Friendly NPCs that survive the game are somewhat few in number. Kenneth Haight and Nepehli Loux are still around, now presiding over Limgrave (along with Gatekeeper Gostoc). Jarbairn is still there in Jarburg with the surviving Warrior Jars. Boc the Seamster survives if you convince him not to undergo a rebirth ritual. Selen is... kinda sorta alive if you complete her quest and side with her, though if you go against her, I believe Witch-Hunter Jerren survives as well. Other than a whole bunch of merchants, though, that... uh, that might be everyone. (Oh! Sage Gowry as well, whatever the hell he is.)

Of course, listing the surviving NPCs is hardly going to tell us whether you could make a sequel. If there was one, it might be ages later, and the NPCs that we know might be long dead, even just of age (assuming that the end of Marika's age means that that happens now).

The question is what threads could be picked up.

Godwyn feels like a huge dangling thread. Many assumed the DLC was going to focus on him (though had it done so, I feel that there would be an equal if not greater contingent wondering what was going on with Miquella). While his horrifyingly distorted body is kind of just a stationary object, it is his soul that is said to be dead, while his body yet lives.

What... uh, what does that mean? Is that what it means to "live in death?" Is soulless life what the Deathroot is and spreads?

Perhaps I'm conflating the works of George R. R. Martin too much, but I feel like Godwyn plays a similar role to Rhaegar from A Song of Ice and Fire. Rhaegar comes off as the most ideally heroic would-be protagonist of the series, only he died like fifteen years before the books start. Like Rhaegar, Godwyn seemed to be an honorable man, turning the dragons from enemies into allies, and was seemingly universally beloved. His diplomacy with the dragons and his horrific assassination with the curse that spread from it, but also his apparent offspring and lineage, mean that Godwyn touches a ton of the lore for a posthumous character.

It always seemed he ought to have some greater presence in the lore, and that he deserved some time in the spotlight.

Of course, the other figure utterly shrouded in mystery is the Gloam-Eyed Queen, only ever mentioned in item descriptions and never mentioned (to my knowledge) by NPCs. The GEQ is the ultimate "center of the conspiracy corkboard" figure (I believe Gwyn's banished son held a similar place until we fought him as the Nameless King in DSIII - kind of the Malenia of that game). Said to have been "defeated" but not explicitly slain, From's got the narrative elbow room to have her show up if they want.

Another figure who remains mysterious but I think gets far less discussion is Renna, the Snow Witch who mentored Ranni, and whose appearance the doll is based on. Given the structure of her name, it would not be unlikely to find that Renna was a Carian, perhaps the mother of Rellana and Rennala and thus Ranni's grandmother. Or, perhaps, given that her tower is one of the Three Sisters, perhaps she is Ranni's aunt, and sister to Rellana and Rennala.

Hell, she could be the Gloam-Eyed Queen.

The truth is that an Elden Ring sequel could introduce a lot of its own new lore. We have seen some interesting new ideas brought forth in Nightreign, especially with the Forsaken Hollows DLC giving us the Balancers and the Dreglord. Again, I don't know how seriously to take Nightreign's canonicity, especially when it brings in figures like the Nameless King and Artorias from Dark Souls (I'm given to understand these are more like world bosses, rather than actual Lords of Night).

The mass and breadth of Elden Ring lore is fitting given how huge the game's world is. At the same time, though, I wonder if the creators at FromSoft might be burned out on it, having had to come up with so much stuff for it.

Only Dark Souls ever got direct sequels (again, not counting Nightreign) of From's souls-like games, and like I said before, I think that the third entry is itself an argument against sequels. But I'd still be really excited to see what they did with a revisit to the Lands Between (or Yharnam/wherever a Bloodborne II would take place).