Prey is a new gameplay system in Midnight. Conceptually, it's pretty cool: we're sent to hunt down particularly dangerous individuals, and it makes activities out in the world more challenging as we occasionally get ambushed by them and have to deal with additional "affixes" that make outdoor questing more difficult.
It is also a system that, only a few weeks into the expansion, I'm growing tired of.
Let me first get this out of the way: philosophically, I don't believe that games need to be played "optimally," but particularly with a game like WoW, there's a kind of gravitational pull toward doing so. And currently, if you're not someone who does heroic raiding or high-rank mythic plus dungeons, the optimal way to gear up is to do three Nightmare Prey scenarios and then run a Delve each week.
The reason for this is that Nightmare Prey count the same for tier 8 delves in the Great Vault, and thus doing two will net you a Hero piece of gear from the vault after the next reset. Doing three then completes a weekly quest for Astalor that grants you a Beacon of Hope, which allows you to summon the Delve nemesis and thus get your guaranteed Delver's Bounty Map for another Hero-level piece.
Beacons are purchasable for Undercoins, but they're expensive enough that, especially this early on, you won't be earning enough to buy them (and on top of that you'll be preventing yourself from purchasing all the cosmetic rewards you might want).
Now, that's the extrinsic factor: there's a strong pressure to do these because it's the guaranteed way to get a key item to help get you the best gear you can get. But let's talk about intrinsic factors:
Again, conceptually, Prey is cool in theory. But in practice, there are a couple of problems:
First is just the number of hunts you have to go on each week: to complete Astalor's quest, you need to do three Nightmare hunts, of which there are four each week. Thus, if you're trying to do this on alts (maybe... a bunch of alts - see the name of the blog) you're inevitably going to be doing the same hunts. But even just on one character, each individual hunt becomes something you want to achieve as quickly as possible so you can get onto the next one. This, then, pushes you toward optimization.
Prey is supposed to happen while doing other activities out in the world, but I've found myself gravitating toward going to the single Prey-specific world quest and doing that and then just popping open traps there until I reveal the Prey's location. It doesn't, thus, get me doing World Quests or other outdoor activities outside of the hunt's specific activities.
Next, let's talk hunt progress: the system is (probably intentionally) opaque: when we have done enough things (popping traps, fighting coalesced anguish, doing world quests, killing rares) we upgrade through three hunt stages before the Prey's location is revealed. I suspect that there's a randomized factor here, as sometime I blow through these stages quickly while other times I feel like I've done three whole world quests and I'm still in the first stage.
This is particularly annoying because dying at any point resets your hunt progress. I don't know if there's some merciful mechanic where it's easier to regain progress after this happens because the system is too obscure to actually determine if that's the case.
The affixes are interesting, but there's one in particular I truly detest, which is Bloody Command. Found in Nightmare mode, this has Astalor randomly shout at you any time you're on the ground (and I think not in a rested area) to kill something, anything. But if you just happen to be in a part of the zone where either there just isn't really anything there, or you've literally just killed the last creature in a several-hundred-yard radius, you're SOL. This also really punishes specs that aren't as bursty in their damage, as I've struggled more on this with my Demonology Warlock, who needs a few seconds to ramp up his damage, and so if I spend half the time I have just finding something to target, I'm in deep trouble. The bleed punishment can be survivable, but only if you have a lot of defensive cooldowns and healing lined up when it happens. Failing to follow Astalor's Bloody Command feels mostly like punishment for bad luck.
And then, let's consider the Prey targets themselves:
While each Prey target fights differently, the hunts themselves are basically indistinguishable - we have the same challenges - the world quests are always either just chasing them while dodging puddles on the ground or destroying objects while slow-moving big creatures who can catch you and send you to the edge of the world quest area get in your way. The zones they appear in are arbitrary, and they don't really make use of any special feature of the zones. Each hunt is the same. This makes doing three of them per week really frustrating.
So, what would I do to fix this?
Well, first off, I think there should be just one Nightmare Hunt available per week. These will feel more special if we aren't spending all our time doing them.
Next, make each Prey target's hunt distinct in certain ways. Maybe the evil ranger leaves traps around for you to investigate, while the ethereal rogue ambushes you. I'm just going with mechanics that already exist, but naturally there could be others. If all Prey use all of the mechanics (as they currently do,) the mechanics no longer feel tied to the individuals.
Give us a reasonable alternative to earn Beacons of Hope.
Make tracking our hunt's progress clearer, and then also give us some merciful head start if we should fall mid-hunt.
Make the affixes only affect us when we're actively engaged in combat. Hell, maybe only when we're engaged in activities that involve our hunt.
In terms of flavor/lore, I don't mind how off-puttingly sinister Astalor is. You could have easily based Prey around a simple bounty-hunting guild, and while I don't hate that as a concept if this makes it into a future expansion (though in its current state, I wouldn't mind it if they dropped it in Last Titan) I also don't begrudge Blizzard making this insane version of it that also feels very Blood Elf. Over the years, the Blood Elves have started to feel more benevolent and more like just High Elves with a slightly different name, but I like that Midnight has brought back some of the initial somewhat-sinister vibes established in Burning Crusade (vibes that made it make more sense that it was the Forsaken who brought them into the Horde).
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