Legion is a great expansion. In fact, as I've been saying for a while, if they keep things up, we might finally see Wrath of the Lich King dethroned as it were (I know that "best" is a very subjective term, but personally I think the amount of content, accessibility, new gameplay and story were all precedent-setting in Wrath.)
Obviously one of, if not the biggest feature in Legion, and the one that is likely to have the biggest longterm effects (PvPers might cite the new Honor system instead) is the new class, the Demon Hunter.
Having now gotten to a point where players might actually have well-geared Demon Hunter mains, or at least high-priority alts (mine has more or less become a solid number 3 behind my Main Paladin and Chief Alt/Vice Main Death Knight) I think we can talk a bit about how well they're working out.
Story, Flavor, and Lore:
Obviously as a Hero Class, Demon Hunters have a lot going for them. While Death Knights had a very big presence in Wrath (though they shared center stage with Paladins and arguably Mages,) the Illidari are a big presence, but not a ubiquitous one. They've managed to feel important without really hogging the spotlight, but I think that's more about the wonderful focus on class content: in effect, every class feels important in Legion. Demon Hunters just get a few areas to help establish important Demon Hunter characters.
So, speaking of characters: There are a lot of DH characters who pop up as recurring names and faces. Demon Hunters of course have these as class champions. That being said, I don't know if they've done a great job of really introducing them.
Death Knights basically had three NPCs that everyone knew and interacted with. Darion Mograine was the Death Knight counterpart to Tirion Fordring and was the public face of the Ebon Blade as a force for good in the world. Then you had Thassarian - a man of honor with a family to protect and loyalty to his friends who was somehow kind of a good guy even when he was part of the Scourge (he saw undeath as an escape from racism and prejudice, sending you to rescue Koltira.) And of course you then have Koltira, who represented a somewhat colder and callous attitude, but backed it up with great competence and knowledge.
I can't really say that any of the Demon Hunter NPCs have made such an impression. We have yet to find out what the consequence of choosing Kayn or Altruis at the end of the starting experience will mean, and most of the characters are kind of generically broody. I'd like to see more of Korvas, the woman whom you fight alongside on Faronaar and who is the subject of the Illidan Harbinger video.
Really, I think this is one of those situations where they had to create a number of characters to give you enough champions, but a lot of them aren't terribly fleshed out.
There's also a big question, which is what will happen if and when Illidan makes his return. Demon Hunters are part of the Illidari, and so one imagines they'll be working closely with him if he returns to the world of the living. But I also wonder if that will then make the Illidari story really just the Illidan (and some friends) story.
Gameplay: Havoc
Havoc feels very different from any melee spec that has existed before, largely due to the power of Fel Rush. An ability that you'd expect to be a kind of utility spell, this instead is a serious part of your DPS - though I don't know if that's true for all talent builds.
See, the thing about Havoc is that the talents you choose make such a big difference that I don't know whether there's a lot of flexibility. For example, while I've gotten used to it now, I wasn't really crazy about Bloodlet - a talent that makes your Throw Glaive ability apply a very strong bleed. But combining Bloodlet and Momentum (which gives you a damage boost for a couple seconds after Fel Rush or Vengeful Retreat) has such incredible synergy (Bloodlet's damage is based on that of Throw Glaive, so the short-duration Momentum damage boost gets effectively extended over the course of the whole bleed) that I don't know that you can choose any other talents in either row. Then you get Fel Mastery and Prepared to further boost the use of these Momentum-activating abilities, and it starts to feel cookie-cutter.
Synergy is pretty cool with talents, but when it's too strong, or there isn't a competing synergy, you might wind up stuck with one "right" way to play the spec.
Now, I haven't done a bunch of theorycrafting research recently, so maybe there are other options out there, but for now, it seems as if there is one good way to spec Havoc.
Of course, thankfully, it's a lot of fun.
I guess the only other problem is on-demand AoE. You can have nearly unlimited cleave thanks to Bloodlet, but for true AoE, basically everything is a cooldown - Fel Rush, Blade Dance, Eye Beam, Fury of the Illidari - all of these are tied to cooldowns.
Still, they're so powerful that it's not really that much of a problem.
Overall, Havoc is tons of fun, and these are only nitpicks.
Gameplay: Vengeance
I remember people worrying that Vengeance wasn't tough enough, but I'm not finding that to be much of an issue. Being used to playing my Paladin and Death Knight, I do notice the lack of a stun, but it's not that much of a problem.
Vengeance does a lot more self-healing that I figured the DH tanking spec would. It's probably not quite up at the level of Blood Death Knights (where self-healing is basically their primary tanking strategy,) but it's very high.
One thing that can sometimes be frustrating is that the amount of self-healing varies significantly. You're really at the mercy of Soul Fragments - getting a couple of those elevates a Soul Cleave from a significant, but really just moderate heal into something almost like a rotational Lay on Hands.
Sigils are cool, but honestly, the one that I'm least happy about is Sigil of Flame. It's not quite like Death and Decay, which creates this nice persistent AoE that is great at catching streaming adds (though nothing beats Consecration for that!) and one could make a pretty solid argument that between Infernal Strike and Immolation Aura (and Throw Glaive for cleave situations,) Vengeance doesn't really need Sigil of Flame. I have the talent that causes Infernal Strike to create Sigils of Flame, meaning that a lot of the time I don't have to manually cast it.
I suppose the one other issue is that sometimes, the rotation kind of falls into a section of "spam Shear." Both DH specs are GCD-locked, with a no-cooldown generator ability. But Havoc can really break up its Demon Bite spams with things like Fel Rush - in fact, I sometimes forget to use Demon Bite given how much Fury I can generate with Fel Rush and Prepared-talented Vengeful Retreat.
Still, while there are other sources of Pain, sometimes you want to spam Shear anyway to get some Soul Fragments.
Still, in terms of tanking capabilities, I'm pretty happy with Vengeance. You have a very reliable (long duration, relatively short recharge and low cost) active mitigation ability. There's plenty of threat coming from your Immolation Aura and Soul Cleave is not bad for snap-threat. Throw Glaive is practically always available to get distant adds, as is Infernal Strike.
There aren't a ton of big damage-reduction cooldowns, though I honestly don't find myself hitting Metamorphosis that often (I do have a talent that sets it off automatically if I'd otherwise die, and of course there's an artifact trait that gives it to you for short durations periodically in combat.)
As someone who plays a Paladin and a Death Knight tank, Vengeance's mobility is really exciting, though I wonder if people who play more with the other tanks feel that as much. Vengeance doesn't zip around the battlefield as much as Havoc, but that's probably for the best, as melee DPS would hate you.
Aesthetics:
Demon Hunters make my Death Knight jealous. DKs, mind you, were unprecedented in having things that distinguished it from other members of that same race. You got glowing blue eyes (less impressive on my Draenei,) your voice got pitched down (making the clattering sound effects in that one male Draenei joke sound super weird) and you got some special rotten-looking skin and face options (unless your race is Undead, who, well, already look like that.)
Demon Hunters are practically a different race (well, two.) Not only to you get horns, a blindfold, glowing green eyes (if you don't go with a blindfold - but this glow goes way beyond the standard Blood Elf glow) as well as scaly or fel-lesion-pocked skin, but you also get a somewhat different face (Night Elf males all get a kind of sneer) and even a bonus hair color (I don't think other Night Elves can get totally black hair.)
But the biggest thing is the voice acting. Demon Hunters have totally different voice acting, along with their own jokes and flirts
We have yet to really see a ton of Demon Hunter armor. So far, we've got basically two questing sets from the starting experience, then the class hall set and the first tier set.
But then we also have a totally new weapon type. This is something I really wonder about going forward. With artifact weapons, it's no problem at all to give DHs Warglaives without worrying about if other classes should get to use them. But in the next expansion, are Demon Hunters going to be forced to use simple swords and axes? Warglaives are a huge part of the aesthetic, but when weapons aren't designed specifically for the class, will Demon Hunters who want to use their glaives be forced to transmog to the few models introduced in Legion?
Into the Future:
I'd really have liked to see more races made available as Demon Hunters. The question is whether that can really ever happen. Basically, unless Naga, Broken, or Shivarra (somehow) get added as a playable race, there's no one else who would appropriately be at the Black Temple to start the Demon Hunter experience at the appropriate time.
I doubt we're going to see a third spec added to the class. In fact, I even suspect that future classes will probably have just one spec per group role (I also highly doubt we'll see any new pure DPS classes.) While I think a ranged dps spec for Demon Hunters could have worked (and would have been the first ranged spec added since vanilla) I think having just the two has actually worked out just fine for the class.
Most classes have undergone huge changes over the years, and so I certainly won't count Demon Hunters out on that count. But for now, things seem to be going well.
Friday, November 18, 2016
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Exiled No Longer - A Return to Argus
We're still probably over six months away from 7.2's Tomb of Sargeras patch, so I'll admit it's a bit early to speculate on this. Still, going to Argus is one of the huge "checklist items" in World of Warcraft - something that we have been wanting and expecting for ages.
A little history of the Draenei: in Warcraft III's Frozen Throne expansion, you actually spend one campaign (ironically the "Alliance" campaign) playing as Kael'thas and then Illidan. Interestingly, Kael'thas is pretty much unmistakably heroic and motivate by good reasons, making his eventual transformation into a totally evil villain in Burning Crusade pretty shocking.
Anyway, you travel to Outland to escape the Scourge and the Alliance forces who wanted to jail you for cooperating with the Naga, and it's there that you meet the Draenei, led by Akama.
The Draenei in that era were depicted as A: having Lost One models, which we now think of as basically Broken-squared and B: as, well, what we now think of as Broken. Akama's probably the most prominent Broken character (him or Nobundo,) and there's no indication of the healthy Draenei and where they came from.
Of course, in Burning Crusade we had a big retcon (actually, it was an accidental retcon apparently, as Chris Metzen had forgotten the lore he wrote - I bet they're more careful about that stuff these days.) The Draenei originally had nothing to do with the Eredar, and in fact, in the original lore, it was the Eredar who corrupted Sargeras. Post-BC, the canon (that we have to this day) is that the Eredar were originally a highly advanced race living on the planet Argus, most of whom were seduced by Sargeras' power and transformed into Demons, while a portion of them instead fled, becoming the "Exiled Ones," or Draenei.
The Draenei are profoundly long-lived - in fact, they are the longest-living playable race in the game. The Draenei left Argus either 25,000 years ago or 13,000 years ago (the latter value seems like the more recent retcon,) and many Draenei, including playable characters (definitely all Death Knights) were born on Argus.
Draenei have spent ages - literally ages, because we're talking about having left three thousand years before the Sundering on Azeroth - fleeing the Burning Legion. And that is about to end.
Leveling up in Legion, there's an event that I'd argue is sort of this expansion's Battle of Undercity (though thanks to scenarios, it should survive even if Azuremyst Isle winds up getting revamped.) You bring Light's Heart to the Exodar, only to find the ship-city under attack. You eventually discover that the leader of the assault is actually Velen's son - a son that was stolen from him by Kil'jaeden after Velen rejected the Legion's offer. After he is forced to watch as his own son destroy a Naaru and then get killed by us, Velen declares his new intention: they will have the Exodar repaired and they will return to Argus. (If you haven't seen this dialogue, when you do the scenario on a subsequent character, click the teleporter item Velen gives you at the end but then cancel the cast to see a little extra scene.)
For a Draenei, this is what you have been waiting thousands of years to do.
So, looking forward to 7.3, here's what I'm expecting and wondering about:
Everyone On Board the Exodar:
Given that we'll be presumably closing the portal at the Tomb of Sargeras when we do that raid, it's not like we're going to be using that portal to get to Argus. Thankfully, we have a dimensional ship that we're about to get in working order. I wonder, then, if the Exodar will serve as a sort of hub on Argus. Would it simply become a new neutral city? Or does the Horde have some alternative means of conveyance? Come to think of it, what about the Botanica, Arcatraz, and Mechanar? I mean, we cleared those out years ago, and they never crashed.
What Remains of Mac'Aree:
Argus was apparently a nearly utopian society before Sargeras came - the only thing he could offer the people there was knowledge. But it has been, you know, thirteen or twenty-five thousand years since the Legion took over there. Hell, a lot of the Legion's "look" may have been pioneered by the Man'ari Eredar (the demons sure use plenty of crystals.)
On the other hand, wouldn't it be ironic if, while the Legion spreads fel flame and corruption around the universe, Argus might be preserved.
Frankly, given that the Tomb of Sargeras is likely to be the most straight-forwardly "Felfire and Brimstone" looking raid, it would be pretty interesting to see if Argus looks nothing like what we'd expect.
In fact, given that Sargeras is a Titan, you could imagine that Argus looks less like the Broken Shore and more like Ulduar.
You Can Go Home Again, But Can You Stay?
Here's the really big question for the Draenei: They have spent all this time hoping that they can prevail against the Legion and finally reclaim their homeworld. But after so many thousands of years of demonic corruption, is that completely insane? Is Argus a world that can support life of the non-demonic variety? And is anything that the Draenei left behind still really there?
Obviously player characters are going to stay on Azeroth for the long run, but if there is an Argus left to salvage, wouldn't a lot of Draenei seek to return home and start the process of healing their world?
Our World or Theirs:
Ok, the next part has some spoilers from the Illidan novel (I haven't read it, but I've found out about these spoilers.) We know that demons can only be killed in the Twisting Nether - in a sense, that's where they always are, simply projecting themselves into physical reality. But apparently, if a world is so saturated in Fel energy, these worlds sort of count for that. And Illidan managed to travel to the Dreadlord homeworld, Xorroth (home of the Dreadsteed mounts that Warlocks get) and destroy it. Those Dreadlords who were on the world were, I believe, truly destroyed.
The Dreadlords have been a pretty key part to the Legion, and losing Xorroth must have been a huge blow to them. But if the Legion has a capital world, it's probably Argus.
The Draenei might be looking forward to returning to Argus and healing the planet, cleansing it of the Fel corruption. But Illidan might have a very different plan.
If we wind up destroying Argus, it could cripple the Legion in a very permanent way, or even destroy it. In fact, destroying a planet might be the only way we can truly kill Sargeras.
Could that be our ultimate goal? Are we going to save Azeroth by destroying Argus?
A little history of the Draenei: in Warcraft III's Frozen Throne expansion, you actually spend one campaign (ironically the "Alliance" campaign) playing as Kael'thas and then Illidan. Interestingly, Kael'thas is pretty much unmistakably heroic and motivate by good reasons, making his eventual transformation into a totally evil villain in Burning Crusade pretty shocking.
Anyway, you travel to Outland to escape the Scourge and the Alliance forces who wanted to jail you for cooperating with the Naga, and it's there that you meet the Draenei, led by Akama.
The Draenei in that era were depicted as A: having Lost One models, which we now think of as basically Broken-squared and B: as, well, what we now think of as Broken. Akama's probably the most prominent Broken character (him or Nobundo,) and there's no indication of the healthy Draenei and where they came from.
Of course, in Burning Crusade we had a big retcon (actually, it was an accidental retcon apparently, as Chris Metzen had forgotten the lore he wrote - I bet they're more careful about that stuff these days.) The Draenei originally had nothing to do with the Eredar, and in fact, in the original lore, it was the Eredar who corrupted Sargeras. Post-BC, the canon (that we have to this day) is that the Eredar were originally a highly advanced race living on the planet Argus, most of whom were seduced by Sargeras' power and transformed into Demons, while a portion of them instead fled, becoming the "Exiled Ones," or Draenei.
The Draenei are profoundly long-lived - in fact, they are the longest-living playable race in the game. The Draenei left Argus either 25,000 years ago or 13,000 years ago (the latter value seems like the more recent retcon,) and many Draenei, including playable characters (definitely all Death Knights) were born on Argus.
Draenei have spent ages - literally ages, because we're talking about having left three thousand years before the Sundering on Azeroth - fleeing the Burning Legion. And that is about to end.
Leveling up in Legion, there's an event that I'd argue is sort of this expansion's Battle of Undercity (though thanks to scenarios, it should survive even if Azuremyst Isle winds up getting revamped.) You bring Light's Heart to the Exodar, only to find the ship-city under attack. You eventually discover that the leader of the assault is actually Velen's son - a son that was stolen from him by Kil'jaeden after Velen rejected the Legion's offer. After he is forced to watch as his own son destroy a Naaru and then get killed by us, Velen declares his new intention: they will have the Exodar repaired and they will return to Argus. (If you haven't seen this dialogue, when you do the scenario on a subsequent character, click the teleporter item Velen gives you at the end but then cancel the cast to see a little extra scene.)
For a Draenei, this is what you have been waiting thousands of years to do.
So, looking forward to 7.3, here's what I'm expecting and wondering about:
Everyone On Board the Exodar:
Given that we'll be presumably closing the portal at the Tomb of Sargeras when we do that raid, it's not like we're going to be using that portal to get to Argus. Thankfully, we have a dimensional ship that we're about to get in working order. I wonder, then, if the Exodar will serve as a sort of hub on Argus. Would it simply become a new neutral city? Or does the Horde have some alternative means of conveyance? Come to think of it, what about the Botanica, Arcatraz, and Mechanar? I mean, we cleared those out years ago, and they never crashed.
What Remains of Mac'Aree:
Argus was apparently a nearly utopian society before Sargeras came - the only thing he could offer the people there was knowledge. But it has been, you know, thirteen or twenty-five thousand years since the Legion took over there. Hell, a lot of the Legion's "look" may have been pioneered by the Man'ari Eredar (the demons sure use plenty of crystals.)
On the other hand, wouldn't it be ironic if, while the Legion spreads fel flame and corruption around the universe, Argus might be preserved.
Frankly, given that the Tomb of Sargeras is likely to be the most straight-forwardly "Felfire and Brimstone" looking raid, it would be pretty interesting to see if Argus looks nothing like what we'd expect.
In fact, given that Sargeras is a Titan, you could imagine that Argus looks less like the Broken Shore and more like Ulduar.
You Can Go Home Again, But Can You Stay?
Here's the really big question for the Draenei: They have spent all this time hoping that they can prevail against the Legion and finally reclaim their homeworld. But after so many thousands of years of demonic corruption, is that completely insane? Is Argus a world that can support life of the non-demonic variety? And is anything that the Draenei left behind still really there?
Obviously player characters are going to stay on Azeroth for the long run, but if there is an Argus left to salvage, wouldn't a lot of Draenei seek to return home and start the process of healing their world?
Our World or Theirs:
Ok, the next part has some spoilers from the Illidan novel (I haven't read it, but I've found out about these spoilers.) We know that demons can only be killed in the Twisting Nether - in a sense, that's where they always are, simply projecting themselves into physical reality. But apparently, if a world is so saturated in Fel energy, these worlds sort of count for that. And Illidan managed to travel to the Dreadlord homeworld, Xorroth (home of the Dreadsteed mounts that Warlocks get) and destroy it. Those Dreadlords who were on the world were, I believe, truly destroyed.
The Dreadlords have been a pretty key part to the Legion, and losing Xorroth must have been a huge blow to them. But if the Legion has a capital world, it's probably Argus.
The Draenei might be looking forward to returning to Argus and healing the planet, cleansing it of the Fel corruption. But Illidan might have a very different plan.
If we wind up destroying Argus, it could cripple the Legion in a very permanent way, or even destroy it. In fact, destroying a planet might be the only way we can truly kill Sargeras.
Could that be our ultimate goal? Are we going to save Azeroth by destroying Argus?
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Return to Karazhan - A Night at the Opera
After a concerted effort to get players in my guild attuned for Return to Karazhan, tonight we finally stepped inside.
The rewards of RtK are significantly higher than those of ordinary Mythic dungeons, and there's a good reason for this: Return to Karazhan is less of a dungeon than a 5-player raid.
While Mythics can be unforgiving (Cordana Felsong, one of the prerequisite bosses to gain entrance to RtK, is a good example,) RtK is the kind of place that you're going to have to progress through. Obviously, part of the reason for this is that there is no lower difficulty for the instance - much like the original, there's just one version, and you either beat the bosses or they beat you.
I will be very curious to see how things work out when there is a Heroic, queueable version of the dungeon, but for now, you're going to have to be careful on each trash pull and really strategize on every boss.
Opera Hall - Wikket
This week's Opera boss was Wikket, in which you fight Galindra and Elfyra along with the latter's flying Hozen. We managed to one-shot this (despite losing our hunter rather early on,) but I also suspect that this one is the easiest of the three Opera bosses.
The two bosses share a health pool and mostly cast spells at the tank. As a Paladin I could frequently use Avenger's Shield and thus was able to move the bosses around when needed.
Elfyra (the Troll) will periodically cast Defy Gravity on the ground, making a purple swirling vortex. You want to avoid stepping in these (for now.) Galindra will cast these arcane runes underneath you that you want to step away from.
Periodically, Elfyra will summon her flying Hozen. While these guys do have an aggro table, I don't believe they will do anything except throw "stuff" at random players, so as a tank you don't have to worry about them too much (still, tossing some damage their way isn't a bad idea.)
DPS will want to kill the flying monkeys, as more will keep coming over the course of the fight and you don't want to get overwhelmed.
The main event, as it were, is that Galindra will cast something called (I believe) Magical Magnificence, which does nearly 2 million damage to anyone on the ground when it goes off. At this point, you'll want to hop onto the vortexes created through Defy Gravity, lifting off the ground for a couple seconds and taking a much more modest (around 300k) damage instead.
Any DPS that can should try to multi-dot both witches, as it all contributes to the win.
After the Opera event, you'll be able to go in a few different directions.
We initially went for the Maiden of Virtue. This boss is very unforgiving, and after three attempts, we decided to explore a bit more.
The other two bosses (assuming it's only two) that are accessible at that point are Attumen the Huntsman and Moroes.
Unfortunately, we were running out of time, and we had accidentally left up some trash near Attumen when we pulled, causing a very swift wipe.
I'll make updates while we progress through the dungeon. Also, look out for my Trial of Valor raid finder impressions as soon as I've run it.
The rewards of RtK are significantly higher than those of ordinary Mythic dungeons, and there's a good reason for this: Return to Karazhan is less of a dungeon than a 5-player raid.
While Mythics can be unforgiving (Cordana Felsong, one of the prerequisite bosses to gain entrance to RtK, is a good example,) RtK is the kind of place that you're going to have to progress through. Obviously, part of the reason for this is that there is no lower difficulty for the instance - much like the original, there's just one version, and you either beat the bosses or they beat you.
I will be very curious to see how things work out when there is a Heroic, queueable version of the dungeon, but for now, you're going to have to be careful on each trash pull and really strategize on every boss.
Opera Hall - Wikket
This week's Opera boss was Wikket, in which you fight Galindra and Elfyra along with the latter's flying Hozen. We managed to one-shot this (despite losing our hunter rather early on,) but I also suspect that this one is the easiest of the three Opera bosses.
The two bosses share a health pool and mostly cast spells at the tank. As a Paladin I could frequently use Avenger's Shield and thus was able to move the bosses around when needed.
Elfyra (the Troll) will periodically cast Defy Gravity on the ground, making a purple swirling vortex. You want to avoid stepping in these (for now.) Galindra will cast these arcane runes underneath you that you want to step away from.
Periodically, Elfyra will summon her flying Hozen. While these guys do have an aggro table, I don't believe they will do anything except throw "stuff" at random players, so as a tank you don't have to worry about them too much (still, tossing some damage their way isn't a bad idea.)
DPS will want to kill the flying monkeys, as more will keep coming over the course of the fight and you don't want to get overwhelmed.
The main event, as it were, is that Galindra will cast something called (I believe) Magical Magnificence, which does nearly 2 million damage to anyone on the ground when it goes off. At this point, you'll want to hop onto the vortexes created through Defy Gravity, lifting off the ground for a couple seconds and taking a much more modest (around 300k) damage instead.
Any DPS that can should try to multi-dot both witches, as it all contributes to the win.
After the Opera event, you'll be able to go in a few different directions.
We initially went for the Maiden of Virtue. This boss is very unforgiving, and after three attempts, we decided to explore a bit more.
The other two bosses (assuming it's only two) that are accessible at that point are Attumen the Huntsman and Moroes.
Unfortunately, we were running out of time, and we had accidentally left up some trash near Attumen when we pulled, causing a very swift wipe.
I'll make updates while we progress through the dungeon. Also, look out for my Trial of Valor raid finder impressions as soon as I've run it.
Monday, November 14, 2016
Sargeras and the Void Lords
While the Warcraft universe is multifaceted - a universe with myriad powers that might be opposed or cooperative with one another - if there is any Big Bad to the whole franchise, it's Sargeras.
Sargeras fits the Western Satanic archetype - he was once the paragon of a benevolent group of beings. While Aman'thul was the leader of their order, he wasn't a fundamentally different being than the rest of the Pantheon - more akin to a Zeus or Odin-like figure than the Abrahamic God.
Still, Sargeras fits into the analogy of the Devil in that he was once a great force of good that then turned to evil.
What is interesting here is that Sargeras considered his actions necessary - at least at first, he believed that he was serving the greater good.
Because in some fundamental ways, Sargeras does not fit this Satanic archetype. He is not the source of evil. That is really more accurately the mysterious collective Void Lords.
We know very little about the Void Lords. They are beings of pure shadow, and given they are the creators of the Old Gods, we can only assume that they are utterly alien. Indeed, while we're using a plural to refer to them, for all we know their nature might transcend the difference between singular and plural states.
It is clear that they have influence upon the universe (hence the Old Gods,) but if we take the description of their home - the Void - literally, they seem to exist outside of comprehensible logic. A Void is by definition empty, and so to say that the Void Lords exist within the Void is to say that, in a sense, they don't really exist.
More precisely, though, we might say that they are the embodiment of non-existence.
While this actually means they play a very similar role to stuff within my own fiction, I'll hold off on referring to that as, well, it's significantly more obscure than other things I could reference (and it's also weird to refer to one's own inventions in this way.) Instead, I think a good analogue would be figures within the podcast Welcome to Night Vale.
If you haven't listened to it and you like dark humor, Lovecraftian horror, and tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories, I highly recommend it.
Anyway, they had a plot recently in which the town is under attack by "Strangers" who serve an evil force taking an unexpected form. The evil force wants nothing - it's not that it doesn't want anything. It's that it literally wants nothing. There are things everywhere, and it would rather that those things were no longer there.
I suspect that the Void Lords in Warcraft are looking for something similar. The Old Gods and their corruption are a means to an end. Eventually, they want the universe to be a lifeless void like their own home.
Sargeras wants to burn the universe - in theory to deprive the Void Lords and the Old Gods from having access to any Titan world souls that they could corrupt.
But is Sargeras actually doing exactly what the Void Lords want? By destroying the universe, he is creating the absence of life that the Void Lords presumably want to create.
We've seen that the Old Gods don't really have any problem helping the Legion. They created the Emerald Nightmare, and when Xavius - a demon - came in, rather than destroying them for threatening their project, they instead seem to have handed him the reins.
The Legion wants to destroy everything to keep it from falling into the corruption of the Old Gods, but the Old Gods don't actually have self-preservation as a goal or desire. When their job is done, whatever flesh or sentience they have would presumably be lost in the endless void along with everything else.
So that's one possibility - that perhaps the Old Gods are actually rooting for Sargeras, even though Sargeras holds them in contempt.
But there's also another possibility:
On the Chronicle diagram of the primal forces of the Warcraft universe, it was somewhat surprising to see that Light and Chaos were right next to each other, while Order and Void were neighbors.
Yet there is, in a sense, a kind of logic to that.
For one thing, if you go another step down, you can see that the Element of Fire is roughly equidistant from Holy and Fel magics. And that's reflected in game. Priests have Holy Fire, and Ret Paladins use the Ashbringer to disintegrate demons and the undead. The Light burns the undead. Light itself is, of course, a form of energy (nitpicking physicists might argue that's not strictly true, but you get what I mean.) Likewise, Warlocks and Demon Hunters do a lot of burning with Fel fire.
And in fact, you could argue that while they're usually in opposition to one another, demons and paladins are both zealots - they channel a passionate fury to use agains their enemies. Emotion plays a huge role in both the power of the Light and also the wrath of the Fel (consider that Demon Hunters use Fury and Pain as their resources.)
On the opposite side, however, you can also draw connections between Order and the Void. Arcane magic is practiced with care - Mages are scholars, deriving their power not from faith or passion but from study and intellect. While a Paladin will fight at her best when she sets aside all doubts and fears and submits to her faith in the Light, a Mage must remain calm and think logically, presumably performing all sorts of complex calculations and adjustments as he casts each spell.
I would imagine that those who employ the power of the Void, such as Shadow Priests, have a similar mindset. Shadow Priests assault their opponents' minds with horror and madness. Now, their resource is called Insanity, but is it the Shadow Priest who actually goes insane? Consider that the farther into Void Form they get, the harder it is to hold on to that "Insanity."
Instead, perhaps we can imagine that a Shadow Priest must confront the paradox of the Void - that there exists this emptiness that nevertheless has something within it - something that exists only in that it does not exist, yet clearly does exist enough to influence the universe. I suspect that "Insanity" is really the Shadow Priest's ability to think in such abstractions that they are able to conceive this paradox, and eventually channel this paradox with their mind. But as it goes on, their hold on the paradox begins to slip, which accounts for why they cannot stay in Void Form forever.
The point being - this is not an exercise in Faith and Passion, but rather in the ability to forcibly set aside instinctive intellectual tools like, for example, the emotion of fear, and instead remain coldly logical, thinking entirely within extreme abstraction.
The Titans struggled to deal with the Old Gods because their own "orderly" universe was, in fact, too similar to the lifeless one that the Void Lords desired. Sargeras sought out a means to counter the Void.
The tragedy is that he only barely missed the mark.
In a better (though far less entertaining for those of us on the outside) universe, Sargeras would have turned to the Holy Light in order to fend off the Old Gods. He would have infused the threatened World Souls with such Holy radiance that it would have burned these eldritch behemoths away. The Light burns, but in doing so, it purifies, leaving behind the good and healthy while the corruption is eliminated.
Instead, Sargeras turned to the Fel.
The Fel is almost like radiation (again, physicists, I know that light technically is radiation, but you get what I mean) - it burns things away, yes, but it leaves harmful energy in everything it touches. It is an imprecise tool, and its unpredictable and chaotic destruction winds up becoming its own kind of corruption.
A triumphant Sargeras might, in fact, create a universe that is the opposite of the will of the Void Lords - they seek a cold and lifeless universe. He will give them an endless raging inferno.
Sargeras fits the Western Satanic archetype - he was once the paragon of a benevolent group of beings. While Aman'thul was the leader of their order, he wasn't a fundamentally different being than the rest of the Pantheon - more akin to a Zeus or Odin-like figure than the Abrahamic God.
Still, Sargeras fits into the analogy of the Devil in that he was once a great force of good that then turned to evil.
What is interesting here is that Sargeras considered his actions necessary - at least at first, he believed that he was serving the greater good.
Because in some fundamental ways, Sargeras does not fit this Satanic archetype. He is not the source of evil. That is really more accurately the mysterious collective Void Lords.
We know very little about the Void Lords. They are beings of pure shadow, and given they are the creators of the Old Gods, we can only assume that they are utterly alien. Indeed, while we're using a plural to refer to them, for all we know their nature might transcend the difference between singular and plural states.
It is clear that they have influence upon the universe (hence the Old Gods,) but if we take the description of their home - the Void - literally, they seem to exist outside of comprehensible logic. A Void is by definition empty, and so to say that the Void Lords exist within the Void is to say that, in a sense, they don't really exist.
More precisely, though, we might say that they are the embodiment of non-existence.
While this actually means they play a very similar role to stuff within my own fiction, I'll hold off on referring to that as, well, it's significantly more obscure than other things I could reference (and it's also weird to refer to one's own inventions in this way.) Instead, I think a good analogue would be figures within the podcast Welcome to Night Vale.
If you haven't listened to it and you like dark humor, Lovecraftian horror, and tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories, I highly recommend it.
Anyway, they had a plot recently in which the town is under attack by "Strangers" who serve an evil force taking an unexpected form. The evil force wants nothing - it's not that it doesn't want anything. It's that it literally wants nothing. There are things everywhere, and it would rather that those things were no longer there.
I suspect that the Void Lords in Warcraft are looking for something similar. The Old Gods and their corruption are a means to an end. Eventually, they want the universe to be a lifeless void like their own home.
Sargeras wants to burn the universe - in theory to deprive the Void Lords and the Old Gods from having access to any Titan world souls that they could corrupt.
But is Sargeras actually doing exactly what the Void Lords want? By destroying the universe, he is creating the absence of life that the Void Lords presumably want to create.
We've seen that the Old Gods don't really have any problem helping the Legion. They created the Emerald Nightmare, and when Xavius - a demon - came in, rather than destroying them for threatening their project, they instead seem to have handed him the reins.
The Legion wants to destroy everything to keep it from falling into the corruption of the Old Gods, but the Old Gods don't actually have self-preservation as a goal or desire. When their job is done, whatever flesh or sentience they have would presumably be lost in the endless void along with everything else.
So that's one possibility - that perhaps the Old Gods are actually rooting for Sargeras, even though Sargeras holds them in contempt.
But there's also another possibility:
On the Chronicle diagram of the primal forces of the Warcraft universe, it was somewhat surprising to see that Light and Chaos were right next to each other, while Order and Void were neighbors.
Yet there is, in a sense, a kind of logic to that.
For one thing, if you go another step down, you can see that the Element of Fire is roughly equidistant from Holy and Fel magics. And that's reflected in game. Priests have Holy Fire, and Ret Paladins use the Ashbringer to disintegrate demons and the undead. The Light burns the undead. Light itself is, of course, a form of energy (nitpicking physicists might argue that's not strictly true, but you get what I mean.) Likewise, Warlocks and Demon Hunters do a lot of burning with Fel fire.
And in fact, you could argue that while they're usually in opposition to one another, demons and paladins are both zealots - they channel a passionate fury to use agains their enemies. Emotion plays a huge role in both the power of the Light and also the wrath of the Fel (consider that Demon Hunters use Fury and Pain as their resources.)
On the opposite side, however, you can also draw connections between Order and the Void. Arcane magic is practiced with care - Mages are scholars, deriving their power not from faith or passion but from study and intellect. While a Paladin will fight at her best when she sets aside all doubts and fears and submits to her faith in the Light, a Mage must remain calm and think logically, presumably performing all sorts of complex calculations and adjustments as he casts each spell.
I would imagine that those who employ the power of the Void, such as Shadow Priests, have a similar mindset. Shadow Priests assault their opponents' minds with horror and madness. Now, their resource is called Insanity, but is it the Shadow Priest who actually goes insane? Consider that the farther into Void Form they get, the harder it is to hold on to that "Insanity."
Instead, perhaps we can imagine that a Shadow Priest must confront the paradox of the Void - that there exists this emptiness that nevertheless has something within it - something that exists only in that it does not exist, yet clearly does exist enough to influence the universe. I suspect that "Insanity" is really the Shadow Priest's ability to think in such abstractions that they are able to conceive this paradox, and eventually channel this paradox with their mind. But as it goes on, their hold on the paradox begins to slip, which accounts for why they cannot stay in Void Form forever.
The point being - this is not an exercise in Faith and Passion, but rather in the ability to forcibly set aside instinctive intellectual tools like, for example, the emotion of fear, and instead remain coldly logical, thinking entirely within extreme abstraction.
The Titans struggled to deal with the Old Gods because their own "orderly" universe was, in fact, too similar to the lifeless one that the Void Lords desired. Sargeras sought out a means to counter the Void.
The tragedy is that he only barely missed the mark.
In a better (though far less entertaining for those of us on the outside) universe, Sargeras would have turned to the Holy Light in order to fend off the Old Gods. He would have infused the threatened World Souls with such Holy radiance that it would have burned these eldritch behemoths away. The Light burns, but in doing so, it purifies, leaving behind the good and healthy while the corruption is eliminated.
Instead, Sargeras turned to the Fel.
The Fel is almost like radiation (again, physicists, I know that light technically is radiation, but you get what I mean) - it burns things away, yes, but it leaves harmful energy in everything it touches. It is an imprecise tool, and its unpredictable and chaotic destruction winds up becoming its own kind of corruption.
A triumphant Sargeras might, in fact, create a universe that is the opposite of the will of the Void Lords - they seek a cold and lifeless universe. He will give them an endless raging inferno.
Saturday, November 12, 2016
The Power of Death
WoW Chronicle outlines six primary forces that govern the Warcraft universe. Each has its opposite, and the six of them seem to exist in a kind of circular (or oval, in the illustration) system.
While each primal force and its opposite make sense in contrast with each other, some neighbors can be a little odd. Going counter-clockwise on the Chronicle chart, you have the Light, with its affiliated Holy magic, then Nature, with its affiliated Life magic. Following that is Order, with Arcane magic.
These three seem to embody the "good" forces, but what's interesting is that they aren't the top three on the chart, but rather the top one and then the upper left and lower left.
Circling around, the bottom is Shadow/Void, with its affiliated magic of the same name. The next is Death, with Necromancy as its affiliated form of magic. Finally, in the upper right, there is Chaos, with the affiliated Fel magic.
It isn't exactly clear what meaning there is behind certain forces being next to each other on the chart - one could imagine popping it out into three dimensions and thus having each force equidistant from all the other forces other than its opposite. But if we assume that this is truly a cycle and not just a flattened cube-like shape, there are some surprising implications - like the notion that Holy Magic is more closely related to Fel magic than to Arcane, and vice versa for Shadow.
But it also introduces an interesting new wrinkle - that Necromancy is just as primal a form of magic as Fel, Shadow, or Arcane.
Oddly enough, when Trial of the Crusader came out, players were surprised that the Alliance version of the Warlock tier 9 set was called "Kel'thuzad's Raiment." The Horde version was named after Gul'dan, who of course embodies the classic Warlock archetype. But Kel'thuzad? He wasn't using Fel magic. If anything, he was using Arcane, and in fact a lot of his WCIII spells became Mage spells in WoW. The argument, then, was that if Kel'thuzad was any existing WoW class, he was a Mage.
Of course, the reality is that he was neither - he was a Necromancer, which is something that isn't exactly represented in-game. Even Necrolites of the Old Horde were really just Affliction Warlocks, still using Fel magic.
But given that Necromancy is inherently its own form of magic, it does raise some interesting questions about the most powerful necromancer in the Warcraft Universe - the Lich King.
I've thought (and written) about this before, but I was happy to see in a recent Blizzard Watch podcast that one of their commentators agreed that we could use a slight retcon on the origins of the Lich King.
As it stands, all we have for an origin of the Lich King is that Kil'jaeden captured the Orc Shaman (though if he was anything like his Draenor B equivalent, he was more of a Shadow Priest) Ner'zhul, stripped the orc's flesh away and then sealed his spirit within a suit of black armor.
This first Lich King was then sealed in an ice-like crystal that became the Frozen Throne, and later, Arthas Menethil (having already lost his soul to Frostmourne - also created by Kil'jaeden) would put on that set of armor to merge with the Lich King - when we face him in Wrath, Arthas is the dominant personality within the Lich King entity. When Arthas is killed, Bolvar Fordragon takes on the helmet (which seems to be the real active ingredient) and becomes the third Lich King, using his strength of will to draw back the Scourge and avoid that whole zombie apocalypse that was threatening all life.
The thing is:
Kil'jaeden is a demon, and a master of Fel magic. Now, that's not to say he can't dabble in other stuff - we see tons of Legion-affiliated demons using Shadow magic, even though in theory the whole point of the Burning Legion is to destroy anything that might be corrupted by the Void. So the current canon is simply that Kil'jaeden - a masterful warlock and one of the two most powerful demons in the universe (if we don't count Sargeras as a demon) - basically dabbled a bit in Necromancy to create the Lich King.
Or alternatively, Kil'jaeden simply knew about the forbidden Shadowmoon magics that the clan had learned from the darkened Naaru K'ara, which in Warlords of Draenor the alternate Ner'zhul used to raise the dead in service of the Iron Horde.
But again, Ner'zhul was using Void Magic. Kil'jaeden was using Fel magic. Neither of these guys were really true necromancers.
Again, you could explain this away as saying that these primordial forces aren't so distinct as they might first appear - perhaps Necromancy can even be accomplished simply by blending Fel and Shadow magic (it is right between them on the chart.)
But might it not then be more interesting if, instead, the Lich King pre-dates Ner'zhul?
In a previous post, I suggested that the Shadowlands might have originally belonged to Yogg-Saron, who styles himself the God of Death.
But Yogg-Saron, while ancient, is still an interloper on Azeroth. While there's not a lot of history known before the coming of the Old Gods (basically: Elementals fought all the time,) one wonders if perhaps the Emerald Dream and the Shadowlands existed prior to that time.
Chronicle is intentionally ambiguous about whether the Emerald Dream was created by Freya or if she merely found a way in, but if we go with the latter hypothesis and suggest that the Shadowlands, as the Dream's opposite number, also existed prior to Titanic or Old God interference, then perhaps there was some other entity, analogous to the Wild Gods, that ruled over that plane.
The retcon suggested is that Kil'jaeden did not create the Lich King, but rather bound the entity to a physical frame that could be manipulated and used.
The things is: the Lich King defeats the Legion. Not in a permanent way, but he wrests himself free. First he sends Arthas to help Illidan beat Tichondrius and then severs all ties with the Legion, successfully defeating the Illidari (who were coerced by the Legion to fight the Scourge.)
With the Legion likely to suffer a long-term if not permanent defeat in this expansion, it wouldn't hurt for Blizzard to start elaborating on potential future threats. We know that the Old Gods have bosses writing their checks, but given how iconic the Scourge are, it wouldn't hurt for them to come up with a new angle on the threat of the Undead.
A lot of the path has already been laid out, but it may require a little bit of lore tweaking in order to get it to work.
While each primal force and its opposite make sense in contrast with each other, some neighbors can be a little odd. Going counter-clockwise on the Chronicle chart, you have the Light, with its affiliated Holy magic, then Nature, with its affiliated Life magic. Following that is Order, with Arcane magic.
These three seem to embody the "good" forces, but what's interesting is that they aren't the top three on the chart, but rather the top one and then the upper left and lower left.
Circling around, the bottom is Shadow/Void, with its affiliated magic of the same name. The next is Death, with Necromancy as its affiliated form of magic. Finally, in the upper right, there is Chaos, with the affiliated Fel magic.
It isn't exactly clear what meaning there is behind certain forces being next to each other on the chart - one could imagine popping it out into three dimensions and thus having each force equidistant from all the other forces other than its opposite. But if we assume that this is truly a cycle and not just a flattened cube-like shape, there are some surprising implications - like the notion that Holy Magic is more closely related to Fel magic than to Arcane, and vice versa for Shadow.
But it also introduces an interesting new wrinkle - that Necromancy is just as primal a form of magic as Fel, Shadow, or Arcane.
Oddly enough, when Trial of the Crusader came out, players were surprised that the Alliance version of the Warlock tier 9 set was called "Kel'thuzad's Raiment." The Horde version was named after Gul'dan, who of course embodies the classic Warlock archetype. But Kel'thuzad? He wasn't using Fel magic. If anything, he was using Arcane, and in fact a lot of his WCIII spells became Mage spells in WoW. The argument, then, was that if Kel'thuzad was any existing WoW class, he was a Mage.
Of course, the reality is that he was neither - he was a Necromancer, which is something that isn't exactly represented in-game. Even Necrolites of the Old Horde were really just Affliction Warlocks, still using Fel magic.
But given that Necromancy is inherently its own form of magic, it does raise some interesting questions about the most powerful necromancer in the Warcraft Universe - the Lich King.
I've thought (and written) about this before, but I was happy to see in a recent Blizzard Watch podcast that one of their commentators agreed that we could use a slight retcon on the origins of the Lich King.
As it stands, all we have for an origin of the Lich King is that Kil'jaeden captured the Orc Shaman (though if he was anything like his Draenor B equivalent, he was more of a Shadow Priest) Ner'zhul, stripped the orc's flesh away and then sealed his spirit within a suit of black armor.
This first Lich King was then sealed in an ice-like crystal that became the Frozen Throne, and later, Arthas Menethil (having already lost his soul to Frostmourne - also created by Kil'jaeden) would put on that set of armor to merge with the Lich King - when we face him in Wrath, Arthas is the dominant personality within the Lich King entity. When Arthas is killed, Bolvar Fordragon takes on the helmet (which seems to be the real active ingredient) and becomes the third Lich King, using his strength of will to draw back the Scourge and avoid that whole zombie apocalypse that was threatening all life.
The thing is:
Kil'jaeden is a demon, and a master of Fel magic. Now, that's not to say he can't dabble in other stuff - we see tons of Legion-affiliated demons using Shadow magic, even though in theory the whole point of the Burning Legion is to destroy anything that might be corrupted by the Void. So the current canon is simply that Kil'jaeden - a masterful warlock and one of the two most powerful demons in the universe (if we don't count Sargeras as a demon) - basically dabbled a bit in Necromancy to create the Lich King.
Or alternatively, Kil'jaeden simply knew about the forbidden Shadowmoon magics that the clan had learned from the darkened Naaru K'ara, which in Warlords of Draenor the alternate Ner'zhul used to raise the dead in service of the Iron Horde.
But again, Ner'zhul was using Void Magic. Kil'jaeden was using Fel magic. Neither of these guys were really true necromancers.
Again, you could explain this away as saying that these primordial forces aren't so distinct as they might first appear - perhaps Necromancy can even be accomplished simply by blending Fel and Shadow magic (it is right between them on the chart.)
But might it not then be more interesting if, instead, the Lich King pre-dates Ner'zhul?
In a previous post, I suggested that the Shadowlands might have originally belonged to Yogg-Saron, who styles himself the God of Death.
But Yogg-Saron, while ancient, is still an interloper on Azeroth. While there's not a lot of history known before the coming of the Old Gods (basically: Elementals fought all the time,) one wonders if perhaps the Emerald Dream and the Shadowlands existed prior to that time.
Chronicle is intentionally ambiguous about whether the Emerald Dream was created by Freya or if she merely found a way in, but if we go with the latter hypothesis and suggest that the Shadowlands, as the Dream's opposite number, also existed prior to Titanic or Old God interference, then perhaps there was some other entity, analogous to the Wild Gods, that ruled over that plane.
The retcon suggested is that Kil'jaeden did not create the Lich King, but rather bound the entity to a physical frame that could be manipulated and used.
The things is: the Lich King defeats the Legion. Not in a permanent way, but he wrests himself free. First he sends Arthas to help Illidan beat Tichondrius and then severs all ties with the Legion, successfully defeating the Illidari (who were coerced by the Legion to fight the Scourge.)
With the Legion likely to suffer a long-term if not permanent defeat in this expansion, it wouldn't hurt for Blizzard to start elaborating on potential future threats. We know that the Old Gods have bosses writing their checks, but given how iconic the Scourge are, it wouldn't hurt for them to come up with a new angle on the threat of the Undead.
A lot of the path has already been laid out, but it may require a little bit of lore tweaking in order to get it to work.
Friday, November 11, 2016
The Patch Layout of Legion
In an interview today, Ion Hazzikostas (WoW's new game director - though he's been a pretty high-profile guy on the team for years now) talked about the future of the Legion expansion, and it looks like we've got a fairly clear path for what we'll be getting as the expansion unfolds.
7.1 is obviously already out, with Trial of Valor filling out a kind of "tier 18 and a half" with Emerald Nightmare, and with Nighthold coming out as the true tier 19 raid (meaning that by the end of the first official raid tier, Legion will have 20 raid encounters.)
Nighthold isn't going to need its own patch - theoretically it was considered a 7.0 raid, but that's a little absurd as we've clearly passed 7.0 and have not yet stepped inside. But the point is that at the end of the extended Suramar City campaign quests, the raid itself will open up, and that's going to happen some time in January.
I suspect that they're going to take their time releasing 7.2. They're letting Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor breathe for a bit, and with Nighthold comprising just as many bosses in a single raid, I imagine that we'll have that as the main content until the middle of 2017.
Blizzard will, I'm sure, be looking closely at how people are doing, but I for one would far rather wait a month or two longer for 7.2 than have another 14-month stretch of zilch at the end of the expansion.
With no clear release date, but definitely a significant amount of work already done on it, 7.2: The Tomb of Sargeras will put a lot of content on the Broken Shore zone (which is currently accessible but beyond the Kosumoth quests, doesn't have a lot of stuff for you to do.)
The patch will add a new faction - a kind of united front between all the Class Orders - and will contain a new class campaign that rewards flying class mounts for each class.
The headliner will be the Tomb of Sargeras, which will be the official Tier 20 raid. This raid will have Kil'jaeden as its final boss, and also contain a fight against the Avatar of Sargeras that was buried here way back when. The raid will have 9 bosses, taking the expansion's raid boss count (not counting world bosses) to 29, meaning that it will have already beaten Cataclysm.
7.2 will also add a new dungeon called the Cathedral of Eternal Night, which is linked to the Tomb of Sargeras raid (similar to how the Frozen Halls dungeons were linked to Icecrown Citadel.) This will have four bosses and have you climb to the top of the ancient temple, while the raid has you descend into its depths. We don't have any details on the fights or characters within, but we do know that there will be normal (I think normal,) heroic, and mythic/mythic+ modes for this dungeon.
7.2 (unless they do this earlier) will also bring about heroic versions of the Arcway, Court of Stars, and will create two heroic wings of the Return to Karazhan dungeon that can be queued for separately.
We're also going to be seeing some tuning done with Heroic and regular Mythic dungeons, raising the difficulty and rewards, while level-cap normal dungeons will probably be rewarding higher-quality gear (I believe the current plan is 825, which is what heroics currently reward.) Expect numbers to shift a lot while this happens, but the presumed goal is to make sure that these remain relevant content and provide a more effective stepping-stone for characters who are fresh to 110.
7.3 will have us journeying to Argus. The planet will be represented by a single zone, and will presumably have a lot of outdoor content to play through. Argus will represent the capstone on the Legion experience, and will thus presumably contain its final raid and, hopefully, new dungeons as well.
That said, given that we are several months away from even 7.2, I don't expect we're going to see much of 7.3 for a long while.
Still, the content that they have announced looks highly satisfying. I'm certainly not eager to set aside Legion anytime soon for whatever comes next, and I'm glad to see that Blizzard has a lot of stuff planned.
There hasn't been any word on a "small patch" like 7.1 coming in there, but to be fair, for all we know the 7.3 patch will be the first half of a two-parter, perhaps with 7.4 actually introducing the final raid. We know very little about the final patch other than its location, except that our purpose there is to have a much more definitive victory against the Legion than simply closing the portal at the Tomb of Sargeras.
7.1 is obviously already out, with Trial of Valor filling out a kind of "tier 18 and a half" with Emerald Nightmare, and with Nighthold coming out as the true tier 19 raid (meaning that by the end of the first official raid tier, Legion will have 20 raid encounters.)
Nighthold isn't going to need its own patch - theoretically it was considered a 7.0 raid, but that's a little absurd as we've clearly passed 7.0 and have not yet stepped inside. But the point is that at the end of the extended Suramar City campaign quests, the raid itself will open up, and that's going to happen some time in January.
I suspect that they're going to take their time releasing 7.2. They're letting Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor breathe for a bit, and with Nighthold comprising just as many bosses in a single raid, I imagine that we'll have that as the main content until the middle of 2017.
Blizzard will, I'm sure, be looking closely at how people are doing, but I for one would far rather wait a month or two longer for 7.2 than have another 14-month stretch of zilch at the end of the expansion.
With no clear release date, but definitely a significant amount of work already done on it, 7.2: The Tomb of Sargeras will put a lot of content on the Broken Shore zone (which is currently accessible but beyond the Kosumoth quests, doesn't have a lot of stuff for you to do.)
The patch will add a new faction - a kind of united front between all the Class Orders - and will contain a new class campaign that rewards flying class mounts for each class.
The headliner will be the Tomb of Sargeras, which will be the official Tier 20 raid. This raid will have Kil'jaeden as its final boss, and also contain a fight against the Avatar of Sargeras that was buried here way back when. The raid will have 9 bosses, taking the expansion's raid boss count (not counting world bosses) to 29, meaning that it will have already beaten Cataclysm.
7.2 will also add a new dungeon called the Cathedral of Eternal Night, which is linked to the Tomb of Sargeras raid (similar to how the Frozen Halls dungeons were linked to Icecrown Citadel.) This will have four bosses and have you climb to the top of the ancient temple, while the raid has you descend into its depths. We don't have any details on the fights or characters within, but we do know that there will be normal (I think normal,) heroic, and mythic/mythic+ modes for this dungeon.
7.2 (unless they do this earlier) will also bring about heroic versions of the Arcway, Court of Stars, and will create two heroic wings of the Return to Karazhan dungeon that can be queued for separately.
We're also going to be seeing some tuning done with Heroic and regular Mythic dungeons, raising the difficulty and rewards, while level-cap normal dungeons will probably be rewarding higher-quality gear (I believe the current plan is 825, which is what heroics currently reward.) Expect numbers to shift a lot while this happens, but the presumed goal is to make sure that these remain relevant content and provide a more effective stepping-stone for characters who are fresh to 110.
7.3 will have us journeying to Argus. The planet will be represented by a single zone, and will presumably have a lot of outdoor content to play through. Argus will represent the capstone on the Legion experience, and will thus presumably contain its final raid and, hopefully, new dungeons as well.
That said, given that we are several months away from even 7.2, I don't expect we're going to see much of 7.3 for a long while.
Still, the content that they have announced looks highly satisfying. I'm certainly not eager to set aside Legion anytime soon for whatever comes next, and I'm glad to see that Blizzard has a lot of stuff planned.
There hasn't been any word on a "small patch" like 7.1 coming in there, but to be fair, for all we know the 7.3 patch will be the first half of a two-parter, perhaps with 7.4 actually introducing the final raid. We know very little about the final patch other than its location, except that our purpose there is to have a much more definitive victory against the Legion than simply closing the portal at the Tomb of Sargeras.
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Saving Something for Later versus Getting to the Fireworks Factory
As I get older, one of the most disturbing things I've come to realize is that there has been about one and a half times more Simpsons episodes than there were after the show "stopped being as good." Generally, to those of us who were born in the 80s and grew up in the 90s watching America's favorite jaundiced family, the Simpsons "stopped being good" after about ten seasons. That's not to say that there haven't been great episodes or even great stretches since then, but through the 90s, the Simpsons was so cleverly tapped into the zeitgeist and had such incredibly sharp writing that the show was pretty much undisputed as the best on the air (and possibly of all time.)
Anyway, the point of all this is to define a term I'm using: "Getting to the fireworks factory." There's an episode of the Simpsons where corporate executives, who don't understand what makes the show-within-a-show Itchy and Scratchy so popular, decide to "improve" it by adding a new character who is an amalgamation of buzzwords and trends that don't actually add up to anything interesting. In I believe his only cartoon, this new character, Poochie (voiced by Homer,) spends the entire duration rapping (because making a character rap was how adults who didn't understand kids tried to make things cool for kids back in the 90s) about himself. Rather than getting to a fireworks factory where Itchy and Scratchy would certainly have gotten up to all the horrifically violent mayhem that their show was beloved for, they spend the whole time introducing this awful character. While watching, one kid (I think Milhouse) asks "When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?"
Ok: the point:
I like to use the term "Getting to the Fireworks Factory" to mean having a story move forward to the point that we've all been waiting for, rather than dragging it out so that the writers can keep the audience hooked.
What does this have to do with World of Warcraft? Well, Legion has been an expansion full of "Getting to the Fireworks Factory."
Ranging from small things, like finally seeing the island home of Deathwing (a few expansions later than we thought we would) to things that we expected to have their own expansions - like the Emerald Nightmare and Argus.
After two expansions that either came up with totally new territory for us to explore or had us revisiting old characters and places we had already seen, Legion is inundating us with things that we've been waiting to see for years (The Emerald Dream was rumored to be the first expansion, way back when.)
For the most part, I'm very happy about this. Basically ever since Death Knights were introduced, it seemed like you'd have to also bring along Demon Hunters, and now we have those.
But I also wonder if we're using it up too fast. The Emerald Nightmare is a single raid (well, it also plays a big part in its zone and one dungeon.) What they have is, I think, really cool. But I also wonder if perhaps they could have mined more out of the Emerald Nightmare concept. It seems unlikely that we'll see it again.
As much as I would love to see more of the Scourge, I can't exactly say that we were shortchanged on our dealings with the Lich King. Wrath was a very satisfying expansion. They did leave the hook that the Scourge continued to exist, but they haven't done a ton with that (yet.)
We really don't know what it will mean for us to go to Argus in 7.3 or 7.4 or whenever we wind up actually going. But it's highly unlikely that we'll have the multi-zone leveling experience and "continent" with different stories going on and different kinds of environments. I've joked with myself that while most of my characters are blown away by the magical city of Suramar, my Draenei Death Knight, who was born in Mac'aree, thinks of it much as he thinks of all the other cities on Azeroth - as a quaint little primitive village. If we're going to Argus, that means that we're almost certain to see Mac'aree (which has probably become a dystopian nightmare under the Legion.)
All of this stuff was made up at one point, and so there's nothing preventing Blizzard from just coming up with new stuff for us to see as we move forward in WoW. And I imagine most people far prefer this sort of expansion compared to the extremely convoluted time-travel-but-not-time-travel excuse to have us fight a bunch of WC I and II villains in Warlords of Draenor.
Still, while I expect Blizzard will try to produce a new expansion regularly for as long as they possibly can (and if Everquest is still going, WoW will go a lot longer,) I'm kind of shocked to see the makings of three potential expansions (Emerald Nightmare, Tomb of Sargeras, and going to Argus) all rolled into one.
We probably won't hear anything about expansion seven for at least a year (meaning next Blizzcon) and if they're really taking their time on Legion, possibly even longer than that. But I really do wonder what's in store, because we've been bouncing around in the fireworks factory quite a bit this round.
Anyway, the point of all this is to define a term I'm using: "Getting to the fireworks factory." There's an episode of the Simpsons where corporate executives, who don't understand what makes the show-within-a-show Itchy and Scratchy so popular, decide to "improve" it by adding a new character who is an amalgamation of buzzwords and trends that don't actually add up to anything interesting. In I believe his only cartoon, this new character, Poochie (voiced by Homer,) spends the entire duration rapping (because making a character rap was how adults who didn't understand kids tried to make things cool for kids back in the 90s) about himself. Rather than getting to a fireworks factory where Itchy and Scratchy would certainly have gotten up to all the horrifically violent mayhem that their show was beloved for, they spend the whole time introducing this awful character. While watching, one kid (I think Milhouse) asks "When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?"
Ok: the point:
I like to use the term "Getting to the Fireworks Factory" to mean having a story move forward to the point that we've all been waiting for, rather than dragging it out so that the writers can keep the audience hooked.
What does this have to do with World of Warcraft? Well, Legion has been an expansion full of "Getting to the Fireworks Factory."
Ranging from small things, like finally seeing the island home of Deathwing (a few expansions later than we thought we would) to things that we expected to have their own expansions - like the Emerald Nightmare and Argus.
After two expansions that either came up with totally new territory for us to explore or had us revisiting old characters and places we had already seen, Legion is inundating us with things that we've been waiting to see for years (The Emerald Dream was rumored to be the first expansion, way back when.)
For the most part, I'm very happy about this. Basically ever since Death Knights were introduced, it seemed like you'd have to also bring along Demon Hunters, and now we have those.
But I also wonder if we're using it up too fast. The Emerald Nightmare is a single raid (well, it also plays a big part in its zone and one dungeon.) What they have is, I think, really cool. But I also wonder if perhaps they could have mined more out of the Emerald Nightmare concept. It seems unlikely that we'll see it again.
As much as I would love to see more of the Scourge, I can't exactly say that we were shortchanged on our dealings with the Lich King. Wrath was a very satisfying expansion. They did leave the hook that the Scourge continued to exist, but they haven't done a ton with that (yet.)
We really don't know what it will mean for us to go to Argus in 7.3 or 7.4 or whenever we wind up actually going. But it's highly unlikely that we'll have the multi-zone leveling experience and "continent" with different stories going on and different kinds of environments. I've joked with myself that while most of my characters are blown away by the magical city of Suramar, my Draenei Death Knight, who was born in Mac'aree, thinks of it much as he thinks of all the other cities on Azeroth - as a quaint little primitive village. If we're going to Argus, that means that we're almost certain to see Mac'aree (which has probably become a dystopian nightmare under the Legion.)
All of this stuff was made up at one point, and so there's nothing preventing Blizzard from just coming up with new stuff for us to see as we move forward in WoW. And I imagine most people far prefer this sort of expansion compared to the extremely convoluted time-travel-but-not-time-travel excuse to have us fight a bunch of WC I and II villains in Warlords of Draenor.
Still, while I expect Blizzard will try to produce a new expansion regularly for as long as they possibly can (and if Everquest is still going, WoW will go a lot longer,) I'm kind of shocked to see the makings of three potential expansions (Emerald Nightmare, Tomb of Sargeras, and going to Argus) all rolled into one.
We probably won't hear anything about expansion seven for at least a year (meaning next Blizzcon) and if they're really taking their time on Legion, possibly even longer than that. But I really do wonder what's in store, because we've been bouncing around in the fireworks factory quite a bit this round.
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