The Deaths of Chromie Scenario

It is a matter of fact that the Bronze Dragons are the coolest dragons. Their domain is over time, and that means they are dealing with the most potentially dangerous domain of any of the dragonflights. While Nozdormu is the Aspect, still alive at our point in time (or arguably alive, corrupted, and dead simultaneously at all points in time, because time travel is insane,) the one we tend to interact with the most is Chromie, also known as Chronormu (it's unclear whether Chromie is a male dragon, given the name, that just prefers to take the form of a female gnome, or a female dragon who has a masculine name, or maybe we don't have their naming conventions down, or that maybe Bronze Dragons don't get hung up on the whole gender issue.)

The Deaths of Chromie scenario is a new feature with 7.2.5 that players can repeat as often as they like, and appears to be an "evergreen" feature that scales the player to an appropriate level and item level (112 and 1000, respectively.)

Chromie realizes that at some point in her future, she's going to be killed, and so she enlists your aid to travel to that future and try to prevent her death. Shortly into your time-travel excursion, you discover that there are actually eight threats to her, all of which will be lethal. On top of that, the earliest she can get you to before her deaths is fifteen minutes, due to some mysterious interference (calling it now: Infinite Dragonflight.)

However,  you can repeat those fifteen minutes as often as you like, and in fact, you benefit a lot from knowing what's coming. For instance, there is a boss in each of the dragonshrines that requires a short series of quests to reveal, but in subsequent trips, you can simply go right to the boss and fight it. Each of these bosses drops an item that will unlock a different area: the Battle of Andorhal (circa Cataclysm,) the Culling of Stratholme, the Well of Eternity, and another era I don't remember right now.

These segments appear to be less fast-forward-able, though there do seem to be some benefits to having done them before. In the Culling of Stratholme, you need to get a key to town hall to get to its boss, and to do so you need to complete a series of quests where you buy a bunch of things from vendors. Once you've done those quests once, though, the quest items become available before you get the quests, so you can simply run to each shop and buy everything in one trip and then toss them to the two NPCs that request them right as they do.

Killing things in the scenario will upgrade your reputation with Chromie, and at each level you will be able to give her a new talent (which works a bit like class hall research.) The first two can be switched quickly at the start of each run of the scenario, but later ones require research time. However, you can continue earning reputation of the next level even if there's no talent selected, so it's not as bad as the class hall stuff.

I'm really just scratching the surface here, as there are plenty of items and buffs to get, as well as rewards including bronze-dragon-themed transmog (for successfully preventing all 8 attacks within the time limit,) as well as pets and the Time Lord title for filling one's reputation with Chromie (I must have it!)

Netherlord and Archmage Mount Quests

All right, two more classes!

Warlocks will get an up-to-date Dreadsteed of Xoroth-like mount (like the Paladin mount, this one flies without any visible wings, just glowing hoofprints.) You speak with the guy who collected materials for the original mount quest (that got 86'd in Cataclysm) and he sends you to do a number of things.

There's some auction house stuff - a potion, some metal, and some gems - and a pretty quick collection of Moonkin blood from a place in Val'sharah, and then the thing that will probably be frustrating to you if the stars have not aligned: an item off of the final boss of an invasion scenario.

With that stuff gathered, you get a quick quest to on the Broken Shore requiring the use of your Succubus and then you get to go into one little solo-scenario that has you slaying demonic minions (that go down easier with a Felhound) before taking out an eredar and enslaving its demonic horse, which you then get to claim.

The Mage mount has less set-up, requiring you to gather three pieces of a device Antonidas was working on before he died. These require a little bit of combat but mostly just ample use of teleportation and using Dalaran's central tower portals.

Once you get all three pieces, you go to the Eye of Eternity and have three somewhat challening fights against the elemental energy trapped in each fragment. Once all three are defeated, the three pieces are linked together and you get your cool flying disk.

Slayer, Farseer, and Shadowblade Mount Quests

Getting your class mount, in most cases, is primarily about just finishing the Broken Shore campaign, which is unfortunately gated behind champion missions, world quests, and rare spawns such that you might have to just log off and wait to complete them. The worst, however, is the hidden wyrmtongue cache quest. They did reduce this from having to find 10 to 5, but I really think it should be exactly one. Anyway, rant over.

Demon Hunters pretty quickly get a little scenario-like quest where they head to a remote fragment of Mardum and chase down the broodmother of the felbats on that world. You track it down and fight it while fending off its many offspring, but it mostly pretty simple.

Shamans simply get a summons from Thunderaan where you beat the three djinn bosses from Throne of the Four Winds (wait, if they're air elementals and you killed them in the raid, how the hell are they back? And if they can come back, why can't Al-Akir?) Anyway, these are just three tough but not too tough fights that I was able to do without much trouble. Once all three are defeated (not killed,) you get the mount.

And then Rogues.

Holy. Crap.

Rogues have by far the toughest of the mount quests. I was lucky enough to encounter a couple of other rogues working on it, and teamwork definitely helped.

You receive word that the Legion has planted undead homunculi in all the major capital cities now that the Illidari are able to spot demonic infiltrators. To avoid putting the Uncrowned in a tough position, they send you to the opposite faction's cities so that your attacks can be passed off as standard Horde/Alliance aggression.

This is not phased or anything, so other players can make your life a living hell.

My rogue is Undead, so I went first to the Exodar, where you have to use Distract or Blind to keep the target's incredibly tough (basically he one-shots you) arcane golem from attacking.

Next is Darnassus, where the target is throwing a party in the entry area (from inner Teldrassil) and you have to sap her elite priest friend and then use Evasion and Cloak of Shadows while you target her and take her down (there's also a standard elite patroller who can detect through stealth that pats near the target.)

In Ironforge, there's a guy actually in the entryway to the throne room who takes almost no physical damage, so you'll definitely want to go either Assassination or Subtlety (and spec for Gloomblade for the latter) to max your non-physical damage.

Finally, the nastiest one that will never get easier: in Stormwind, you have to kill the guy in the Trade District auction house. So, where every Alliance player is in the city.

With those four killed, you're done, and you can be very, very proud of that mount.

The Joys of Nonviolent Encounters in D&D

So for my birthday (well, the night before, but going into the morning of) I had a really great session of D&D with my party. I came away with a smile on my face, and that's always great.

Partially it was because of a good fight - the party encountered a feature of the land in which they find themselves, called a Darkstorm, where undead and demons assail them. I decided to ditch my randomized list and instead pick an appropriately creepy creature from Volo's Guide to Monsters called a Spawn of Kyuss - a zombie-like thing filled with burrowing worms that can infect people (none of the players got hit, but a couple of NPCs they were guarding did - thankfully for them, the Paladin was ready with Lay on Hands to cure diseases.) Everyone got to do something cool during the fight.

The best part, however, was when I had them go into an Outer Plane of my own devising (I muck around a lot with D&D lore, though if I get into serious trouble I'll just make this a subsection of the Nine Hells) called the Oubliette, where they were trying to secure the release of a prisoner who had knowledge of the fortress they had just taken. As I had planned, a Bearded Devil appeared to try to stop them, but thankfully I trusted my instincts (and my battle fatigue after a protracted Darkstorm fight) I decided to play up the lawful, and thus bureaucratic nature of devils.

The Bearded Devil, who I named on the spot Kanameir, talked with the wizard in the party about securing a prisoner release form, which could only be done by proving the demise of the fortress' former commander and convincing him that the wizard was the new commander. The wizard rolled three natural 20s in a row - first to get the fiend to talk to him, second to know it would not be a good idea of ignore the devil's instruction to wait while he did hours worth of paperwork, and third to sign with a fake (ridiculous) name that, with a Deception check crit, he pulled off.

So now this party member not only has a friend in the infernal bureaucracy, but also secured the ability to house up to five prisoners within this horrific dimension. (He's True Neutral, so I don't think he'd have qualms.)

Anyway, as I said before, my quasi-new-years resolution was to allow for more non-combat encounters as the players saw fit, and this early example was a huge success.

Mounts for the Highlord and Deathlord

I've gotten two of the new class mount quests done. Both involve a short quest chain that can only be started after finishing the Broken Shore campaign (the last quest of which simply requires you to kill 100 demons in the zone - very easy if you go to the areas with lots of imps.)

The Paladin quest chain is highly reminiscent of the original Vanilla Charger quests (I never did the Blood Elf one added in BC, but I believe it had similar steps done in a different order.) Like that original chain, you are there to redeem a Death Knight's charger's spirit with the help of blessed barding. You need to pick up a few supplies (leystone and a Stonehide Barding from a leatherworker) and then you'll be able to go into Stratholme to face off against some necromancer who is doing some nefarious things.

The Death Knight chain is chapter two in the "uh... I'm not so sure we're the good guys anymore" series for the class. You get a message from the Lich King, who tells you of a vision he saw of a group of undead marching toward something on a glacier north of Icecrown. Yet when you go to investigate, there's only a tiny iceberg. The Lich King sends you to Wyrmrest to find out records of a fallen dragon in that area, and when the Red flight doesn't really cooperate, you go and take their records by force. You have an entire Ruby Sanctum's worth of red dragons and dragonkin to kill, and if you kill every last one of them (this might take a little patrolling to catch the flying drakes) you'll actually get a Feat of Strength achievement called Unholy Determination. Also, you'll be a pretty terrible person, as these guys' only reason to be hostile is that they don't want you raising one of their kind from the dead.

I'll be doing the Demon Hunter one relatively soon - I just need to get a Broken Shore champion mission completed - but the other classes will probably take a bit more time, as I haven't gotten them as far through the Broken Shore campaign (some haven't even gone there yet.)

Evaluating a Supposed, Poorly Sourced WoW Leak

It's pretty crazy to think that it is now June and this year is nearly halfway through. For WoW fans, assuming a release schedule consistent with history, it also means that we're looking at an expansion announcement in only a couple months.

One of the really big questions is how exactly, story-wise, they're going to follow up Legion. Given that Kil'jaeden is probably going to die at the end of only the second raid tier, it's hard to imagine us fighting anyone but Sargeras as the expansion's final boss. Even if we don't kill Sargeras, the fact that we will have defeated him marks the sort of logical extreme of our power.

Still, for a long time, level has not really been an indication of lore-wise power - I'm pretty sure they don't mean for us to take literally that some bear in Stormheim is truly harder to kill than the Lich King.

The other day a friend told me he had seen a rumor about the next expansion - a supposed leak. Now, I think it's wise to take any leaks with a grain of salt, but there have been several leaks in the past that proved accurate. I remember seeing some poorly-translated leak of Legion that suggested Demon Hunters and Warchief Sylvanas. The latter I thought disqualified the leak, as it seemed absurd that they would replace Vol'jin so quickly, yet here we are.

So just in case this does prove correct, let's put it out there so we can feel cool about ourselves. We'll break it down element-by-element.

Setting/Villain:

The "leak" suggests that the next expansion would be a nautical/Naga-themed expansion, presumably with Queen Azshara as its final boss or at least an important antagonist. Azshara has seemed like an obvious expansion-carrying bad guy for ages, and every time there's a new expansion announced, people tend to assume that it'll be hers. While it has never been the case, the reasoning is still sound.

Allies on the Sea:

In this rumor, it appears that both Kul Tiras and Kezan would play a role. Again, I think these are pretty reasonable for the setting. Kezan we've been to, but its volcanic activity forced the playable goblins to leave. Still, assuming that things have cooled down there since the end of the Cataclysm, it might be an opportunity to finally see Undermine. And Kul Tiras, being the most navally-oriented of the human kingdoms, is an obvious Alliance location for a sea-based expansion.

New Race: Naga:

Supposedly playable Naga are something Blizzard's wanted to do for a long time. The Naga would be a new neutral race, like the Pandaren. Clearly, there are some anatomical issues to work out with Naga. While simply hiding pants and boots would probably work out (you often don't see shoes on Tauren, Trolls, Draenei, and Worgen) there's also the question of mounts and, if there were to be Naga Rogues or Monks, figuring out how kicking moves would work. One really interesting opportunity here, though, is that Naga would be a perfectly appropriate third race for Demon Hunters, as the Naga have been part of the Illidari longer than even the Blood Elves, and Demon Hunters just got a Naga class champion.

New Class: Tinker:

Ok, here's where I get a lot more skeptical. So far, we've gotten a new class every other expansion, so getting one right after we got Demon Hunters is a little far-fetched. The other question is how any new class is going to work with the class systems introduced in Legion. Obviously any hero classes that come about can just skip Legion content, but if we get a new start-at-1 class, what are they going to do in the Broken Isles? Do they get their own artifact weapons and class hall? To be fair, that's going to be an issue regardless of when they come out with a new class. I'm always excited to see more player options, and a gadget-based class could be a ton of fun. But this aspect of the rumor also seems very player-wishlist-y. Not to say that Blizzard isn't concerned with players' wishes.

Tomb of Annihilation and Xanathar's Guide to Everything Announced for D&D

Wizards of the Coast has announced new D&D products coming this year during their "Stream of Annihilation" that they've been hyping for a good while now.

Two books are coming out this year.

The first is Tomb of Annihilation, an adventure that takes players to an area called Chult (not part of the until-now standard 5e setting of the Sword Coast, though it is still in Faerûn) where the demilich from the infamous Tomb of Horrors is performing all sorts of nasty deeds, eating away at resurrection magic to fuel his undead. The adventure is going to be filled with dinosaurs, zombies, and zombie dinosaurs, and presumably the eponymous tomb, which we can expect to be a real death-trap.

The other book actually excites me a lot more, which is Xanathar's Guide to Everything. Just as Volo's Guide to Monsters was theoretically written from the perspective of a character in the Forgotten Realms, Xanathar is a beholder crime lord in Waterdeep. This book will be an expansion of rules, worked out in the Unearthed Arcana articles but now pinned down in official forms.

I've gotten way more use out of Volo's than any of the adventure books I've bought, and so I think Xanathar's will be a definite purchase. This includes new and expanded rules systems, but also new subclasses for every class (possibly with the exception of the Wizard, but they've got to have the most already, right?)

Anyway, I'll be following these releases.