Planes, Layers, and Depth

 I love Planescape as a D&D setting.

I come to fantasy for the weirdness, the otherworldliness, and Planescape invites you to play D&D in settings that take you far, far away from familiar, mundane reality, even more than the usual lands of wizards and dragons.

But it does create this odd issue:

As I've written about before, the influence of some outer plane in a campaign set within the Prime Material Plane (as most are) is one thing: a villain's entire plan might be to allow the searing fires of hell to be unleashed upon the world, and in such a campaign, the way that the Nine Hells would likely be portrayed is as some unimaginable nightmare of fire, spiky metal, and tormented souls.

In a Planescape campaign, the Nine Hells is likely to be... well, yes, filled with fire, spiky metal, and tormented souls, but also shops and inns and NPCs you might do quests for.

Planescape allows us into these outer planes, these truly separate planes of existence, but in doing so, forces us to portray them as at least slightly familiar to our regular reality.

I wrote recently about my desire to start a Planescape campaign on the Plain of Infinite Portals, the first layer of the Abyss, and specifically have it start off in the "Worst Bar in the Multiverse." The prompt for each player is to ask what mistakes they made in their past to wind up in such a place, and then have them adventure across the wasteland, in a kind of Weird West/Mad Max-like environment filled with demons.

But again, there's a version of the Abyss that ought to just be endless incomprehensible horrors, like a constant nightmare, where even glimpsing it might drive one insane.

And this got me thinking:

Planes have depth.

There's an idea in those 2nd Edition Planescape books (I think? Come to think of it, I don't have the corresponding PDFs) where the Elemental Planes can be visited by mortals, but only in the shallow depths of them - the elements mix enough in the shallows that, for example, there's air to breathe, or earth to stand on, even if you're in the Plane of Fire. But that the deeper you go into it, the more pure it becomes, and basically if you're not an actual elemental of the corresponding element, there's no real way to exist there in the deepest parts.

I think this can apply to every plane. Except, maybe, the Prime Material Plane.

Funnily enough, in my homebrew setting, the denizens of the connected part of the Shadowfell and Feywild (those parts that overlap my world) refer to the Prime Material Plane as the Flatlands. And while that was just a way of saying "it's kind of nondescript or boring," I actually think it makes a lot of sense if we think of the Prime Material Plane as not having any layers or depth - once you're in the plane, it just works according to some fantasy approximation of real-world physics (I tend to say it's real-world physics unless I call out a specific exception).

In Baldur's Gate 3, the second act takes place largely in the Shadow-Cursed Lands, which have been touched by the Shadowfell. But we do, on a major quest line, go to the actual Shadowfell, and it's portrayed as a swirling vortex of shadow, with no realistic way it could be inhabitable.

The funny thing is that the Shadow-Cursed Lands look more like the way that I'd portray the Shadowfell itself in a game I ran. But what might BG3's Shadowfell be equivalent to (not counting Hades, which does, to be fair, share a lot of vibes with the Shadowfell).

The answer, I think, is that that's "deep" in the Shadowfell, whereas the just dark, spooky version of the Flatlands (it's so much quicker to type than Prime Material Plane) would be the shallow part of the Shadowfell.

And you know what's beautiful about this? It accounts for the Domains of Dread.

While the shallow Shadowfell is the weird mirror world to the Flatlands, the Domains of Dread are deeper in the plane, perhaps not strictly corresponding to any real location in the Flatlands, but resembling them until you notice the foggy border beyond which there doesn't seem to be anything.

Unlike the "Border Shadowfell" (much like the Border Ethereal in contrast with the Deep Ethereal - see, I'm not making this up out of nowhere), the Domains of Dread are a little farther in, a little farther from familiar reality as we know it, and a little deeper into the swirling darkness and mists of nightmare logic. Perhaps deeper still than the Domains of Dread is the kind of swirling endless darkness in which gods like Shar or entities like the Dark Powers reside.

Now, the Outer Planes, at least, have what's called Layers. I think the only outer planes without them are The Outlands (the true neutral plane, which most resembles the Flatlands until you notice that each element of the landscape is perfectly balanced - a deep ocean for every mountain, a frigid tundra for each burning desert) and Limbo, the Chaotic Neutral plane, where any such structure would be anathema to what the plane stands for (arguably it either has just one layer or a constantly shifting number of them).

Planar layers are a little weird - on a certain level, it allows DMs to cordon off certain parts of the plane or focus on particular regions and vibes. Often, the deeper one goes into a plane (though in the case of Mount Celestia, unsurprisingly, the "deeper" layers are farther up the mountain) the more extreme the plane's whole vibe gets. For example, in the six layers of Carceri, the first layer, Orthrys (named for the mountain upon which the Titans of Greek myth lived, in contrast with Mount Olympus) the string of planetoids are close enough that there are structures built between them (including the palace of the aforementioned Titans - another name for Carceri is Tartarus, also from Greek myth). However, on the deepest layer, the planetoids of the plane are so far from one another that you can't easily see the next from the surface, the sense of profound isolation taken to an extreme.

But in a certain way, I think that layers and depth might not be quite the same idea: for instance, the Abyss is reputed to have infinite layers (far more than any other plane) though some argue this is just that no one has been able to count them all. Various demon lords have domains that take up one of these layers (though some, like Juiblex and Zuggtmoy share a layer, while Grazz't has three layers all to himself and his minions).

These layers are given numbers, indicating their relative order, but this order is somewhat arbitrary. While the Nine Hells of Baator and the Seven Heavens of Mount Celestia both prevent planar travel to anywhere except their first layer, forcing you to traverse all the layers between you and your destination on the plane, the Abyss requires no such travel - the Plain of Infinite Portals, the first layer of the Abyss, is filled with sink-holes that let you fall down into other layers directly (I really like making anything Abyss-related, like demonic temples, involve a deep, vertical shaft that one must descend).

Demogorgon's layer, the Gaping Maw, is not the lowest layer of the Abyss, even if he's (they're?) generally considered the mightiest of the demon lords.

So it's not a perfect, direct correspondence between the two concepts.

    Now, there's an alternate way of looking at this:

Player characters are, generally, mortal beings. While the creature types that you can play as have expanded considerably over time (Forge of the Artificer gives us our first official playable Aberration by redesignating the Kalashtar, and we also get Constructs and Fey in the Warforged and Changeling, respectively) I think we're generally meant to play these characters as being people first and weird monster second.

Thus, a way you could play the Outer Planes, or even just other planes in general, is that our perception of them is not necessarily what they are. We might see Avernus as a giant, blasted wasteland with an endless war raging across it because that's the closest comprehensible equivalent of what's going on that we can imagine. What does it mean for Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil to clash (in a realm that is the home territory of the former) in a philosophical sense? Well, that's hard to visualize, so instead we see it as clashing armies of regimented tyrannical brutes fighting slobbering hordes of pscyho-killers.

Even fiends themselves might not truly look the way we perceive them, because it turns out that the impulse to pursue one's reckless ambition at all costs doesn't really look like anything - except in this fantasy world, where we see it as a hulking demon with giant pincer arms.

    Still, I think you can get a lot of mileage about thinking of these planes as appearing more like reality on the nearby shores, but as one delves deeper into them, the experience becomes more impressionistic, more oneiric, more abstract.

Demonic Possession in D&D

 Fiends, for those of you who haven't really read the Monster Manual that closely, is the catch-all term for demons, devils, and beings of pure evil in D&D. The cosmos in D&D is built around its alignment system, and so there's a firm distinction between the lawful evil devils and chaotic evil demons.

I actually think that DMs should pay attention to this: it's one of the really interesting quirks of D&D's monsters, and in the lore, devils and demons are at eternal war, with the neutral evil (though I guess lawful-leaning given that they're from Gehenna) Yugoloths working as mercenaries for both sides. Yugoloths were originally called Daemons. In the early 90s, TSR (the previous company to own the rights to D&D) renamed these three categories in an effort to distance the game from accusations by the Religious Right of encouraging Satanism, calling Devils Baatezu, Demons Tanar'ri, and Daemons Yugoloths. When the Satanic Panic subsided and the general culture recognized that portrayal of such things didn't mean endorsing them, they brought back the more familiar names from folklore and myth, but Daemons were probably too similar to Demons in name (they're really the same word) so they stuck with this name.

There are also plenty of other fiend types. At least in 5E, they haven't really fleshed out the fiendish inhabitants of the other Lower Planes, though we did get the three kinds of Demondand from Gehenna. Most fiends belong to the devil, demon, and (in distant third) Yugoloth category, but there are also plenty of uncategorized fiends like Succubi/Incubi, Rakshasas (which are really interesting because they're from the Nine Hells just like devils, but somehow aren't part of that hierarchy,) and Night Hags, as well as some newly-inducted fiends as of 2025 of the prime material plane, Sahuagin and Gnolls.

As a DM, how do we want to use these?

One thing to start off with is that fiends are universally evil. I think the only possible exception is things like the Fiendish Spirit from the Summon Fiend spell, which, like all such summoned beings, is Neutral. Now, I think that there's some room to play with this - if there can be fallen Celestials who turn evil, oughtn't there to be some fiends who have turned to good? However, with some changes in 2025, it does look like Celestials can be Good or Neutral, but what used to be an evil Celestial, such as some Empyreans in 2014, are now categorized as Fiends.

So, I think you could reasonably think of Celestials and Fiends as almost the same creature type - just planar outsiders (though that leaves creatures like Sahuagin or Gnolls in a funny position) but when they're evil, they're fiends.

The point, though, is that if you want players to face foes that they don't have to feel remotely conflicted about fighting and killing, Fiends are arguably the best options: unlike a monster that is evil, where evil is an adjective, fiends are evil in the sense of evil as a noun: they are made of the substance and idea of evil.

You're going to find fiends at every challenge rating. A 1st level party can easily fight Lemures, Spined Devils or Manes, Dretches, etc. And a demon lord like Demogorgon or an archdevil like Zariel can make a perfectly good campaign final boss, with tons of monsters that can fill in the gaps between.

A fight against fiends as a kind of evil army is totally valid. Simultaneously, an evil cult or other sort of enemy faction can have a fiend bound to their service in some way that acts as a powerful living weapon to use against their foes - either as a boss-like encounter, as cannon fodder, or maybe a powerful lieutenant to a mortal villain.

Fiends tend to have pretty powerful stat blocks, but I think if you use them as just monsters to stick in a dungeon room, you're not getting your money's worth out of them.

First off, I would say to look at the Monster Manual (the new one) and how it describes what kind of evil that each fiend represents. Not all of them have such evocative descriptions, but, for example, the Glabrezu, a good mid-CR demon, is described as embodying delusion and predatory guile.

I think you can characterize the demon itself as acting in this way, but you can also associate them with an NPC that holds these dark elements in them.

Fiends are generally corporeal entities (with a handful of exceptions, like Shadow Demons) that might be assumed to move and interact in the world like any other creature. But I think there's a real potential in treating them differently:

In cultures across the world, there is a belief in invisible spirits that might be benevolent or malevolent. "Unclean," wicked, evil spirits have been blamed for malicious behavior, illness, and misfortune.

Among the most popular horror movies of all time is The Exorcist, in which a demon possesses a little girl, and a pair of priests perform an exorcism to try to free the girl from her possession. The most disturbing aspect of the movie is the horrible way that the girl behaves under the influence of the demon (something that a 1970s audience was scandalized by, which only enhanced the legend of the movie).

But it creates a really interesting tension, because the demon cannot be dealt with in some straightforward manner - the body it inhabits is an innocent, after all.

Let's talk about planes:

In a certain way, planes in D&D are just other worlds - other universes, yes, but ones to which you can travel and kind of go about your business as you would on a normal world, even if the sights you see there might be surreal and alien.

Most fantasy (and some science-) fiction that concerns other planes view this in a more spiritual sense - your mind might ascend to some higher plane of existence, but merely being on that other plane means a different kind of existence beyond the physical.

I have some thoughts about the "depths" of planes that I'll probably write about in another post, but while a plane like the Abyss ought to feel very distant to someone on the prime material plane (or one should hope it is,) I think that the fact that there's no physical spatial relationship means that it can be both near and far at the same time.

We often think of a demon possessing someone in fiction in the following way: the demon, if it has a physical form at all, forgoes manifesting that physical form in favor of becoming a non-physical presence within a host.

Oddly, the only demon I can think of that possesses someone in 5E is the Dybbuk, and it only possesses corpses (as someone of half-Jewish ancestry, I love getting bits of Jewish folkore in my fantasy. I have a strong affinity for Golems, as well).

But we need not be limited by stat blocks - your Lich can for sure cast the occasional Meteor Swarm even if it's not in the stat block.

And if we want to give demons and other fiends the ability to possess people - or places - we can think of the mechanics.

(As a side note, I think giving all sorts of fiends the ability to possess targets is fine, but it might be a fun thing to give to demons specifically, as I feel like devils honestly get a little more of a spotlight in 5E and have cool ideas like Soul Coins and all their contracts.)

Now, what is this about possessing a place?

As I often do, I'm thinking of a part of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. In the first book, The Gunslinger, the eponymous hero (really very much an antihero in this volume) finds a building out in the desert that is the lair of a "Speaking Demon," which he is able to force into giving him information by finding the hidden demon jawbone in the walls. The demon can speak within the basement, but has no physical or visible form.

I think the lore mechanics for demonic possession could work the following way: while possessing someone or something, the demon itself is still in the Abyss. Demons are such an infectious presence in the D&D multiverse that summoning them is both risky and difficult. I think the likely reason a demon would try to possess something on the prime material plane would be to get a foothold there.

Now, in terms of in-game mechanics, this is pretty simple: the demon isn't a creature you can fight. If they're possessing a creature, that creature might act in a way directed by the demon, but this could also manifest in varied ways:

Most straightforwardly, a possessed person might be puppeteered by the demon, every action under the demon's control. They might attempt to cause their host to act normally to avoid suspicion.

The other options is that possession isn't direct control, but a subtle influence and even torment. A demon possessing a creature might cause them to see things that aren't there, or even take over the body from time to time and push the host's consciousness into the depths of their mind so that they lose time and wake up having done things they don't remember doing.

Now, this opens up a lot of options for you:

First, it can be tricky as a DM to let a cool villain develop, because players will often try to strike at them as quickly as possible, even trying to cut off their villain monologues in the hopes of getting off an attack before initiative is rolled (DMs, by the way: if the party is just trying to yell out "I cast Disintegrate" before you can say roll initiative without being hidden or taking the villain by surprise, you can tell them they can do that on their turn). If the demon isn't actually physically there for them to attack, you don't need to worry about losing your bad guy.

The other thing it opens up is having a really powerful demon showing up early in a campaign, before the party would be capable of facing them. Just as the possession prevents the party from killing your demon, so too does it prevent your demon from killing the party.

While you can certainly make fun villainous NPCs of any kind of demon, you could even have the possessing demon be some powerful demon lord. Given that they're not physically there, it's quite easy to make a mystery out of what demon it is the party is dealing with. And you can have fun foreshadowing things by having oblique references made to, say, Grazz't.

It's also a way to have recurring fights against the villain: a possession might be thwarted by killing the host, or by using spells like Dispel Evil and Good. But each defeat or casting out of the demon only means delaying things. Certainly, the demonic restoration feature in 2025's Monster Manual demons already gives you something of this functionality - killing them in any other plane just sends them back to the Abyss.

One way you could play this, actually, is that a possessed creature gradually (or perhaps very suddenly) transforms into the fiend, using their stat block and describing them as taking on the fiendish appearance. But easily enough, you could have a demon possessing your Bandit Captains, your Mages, or even a non-humanoid creature like a particularly vicious Hill Giant or oddly cunning Bulette.

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.