While you visit both the Maw and Torghast, the Tower of the Damned (which is in the Maw) during your leveling quests in the main story campaign, naturally neither really starts up properly until you're at level 60.
The Maw is, as I've said before, intentionally a very inhospitable place. It's grueling, dangerous, and encourages you to get in and get out as quickly as you can. You can't mount there, and the enemies seem to hit harder. If you want to reach a remote location, you need to act carefully, as you can't just corpse-drag, because you just revive at the "graveyard" and have to make your way back. In fact, there's a currency called Stygia that you'll lose half of if you die, though you can recover it if you make it back to where you died (in a mechanic that feels lifted directly from the Soulsborne games.)
Ironically, Torghast, by contrast, is an area in which you'll get to super-charge your power fantasy. I've only been doing what I believe are pre-determined layouts for story quests, but overall the place is a procedurally-generated infinite dungeon. As you ascend its levels, though, you'll also pick up various powerful buffs that will make you feel like you're decked in late-expansion epics while you're still wearing a bunch of questing greens.
In Torghast, the enemies drop Phantasma, which can be traded to various brokers (the Shadowlands equivalent of Ethereals, basically) for additional buffs, and you can often find other anima powers after defeating foes or sometimes just by smashing pots.
If the Maw is like a Soulsborne game, Torghast feels much more like Diablo. While things can turn south if you're not careful, the buffs you get stack up to make you feel like a whirlwind of death for the... er... death monsters inside.
Torghast's gameplay loop will eventually reward you with legendary items that you can power up over the course of the expansion (and I believe customize.) After completing three runs (again, of the standard, "story quest" versions) I'm only at 150 out of 1000 of the currency I believe you'll get to make your first legendary with, but we'll see how that ultimately goes.
Torghast is some very solid solo-content, but I do hope that as I explore further (and especially over the course of the expansion) that we'll see some new monsters and environments within. I really liked the Horrific Visions, but they were certainly not without their flaws (particularly the way that their difficulty and scaling was mostly built around a timer - something Torghast, blessedly, does not use!)
For max-level content, I'm finding myself flooded with things to do, and while I'm not sweating it on the Beta, I do think it'll mean that you'll have a pretty serious time getting your main set up with all the tutorials for the level-cap systems - I've only done a bit of the Venthyr covenant campaign, I haven't run any max-level dungeons, and, well, there's just a ton to do.
This, of course, can be a good thing. I think on live I'm going to push those dungeons first to get myself some halfway decent gear so that the other stuff goes a little smoother. The fact that Castle Nathria launches just two weeks after the expansion means that serious raiders are going to be playing a LOT when the expansion comes out.
I'm happy to say that, while I still need to figure out the Soulbond systems a bit, my sense is that they are not as obnoxious or obtrusive as Azerite Armor. Gear is just gear this expansion, and the additional gameplay systems... well, it's too early to tell, isn't it?
Naturally, I'm getting to that point as a beta tester where I'm, on one hand, excited to see what the expansion has to offer, and I'm also eager to report bugs and see them fixed before the expansion goes live, but I'm also hesitant to put in too much effort on the fake version of my character that's just going to get wiped when the beta ends, and to avoid filling up before the real meal arrives.
Overall, I think that conceptually, gameplay-wise, and lore-wise, we're in for a good expansion. But again, there are some things that don't really become clear until we've had the thing out for a few months.
There are some big bugs in the Beta and I'm hoping they'll resolve those soon, but at least the big systems are up for testing, and that's pretty crucial.
No comments:
Post a Comment