Covenants and the Asynchronicity of Rewards and Plot

 This morning, I got my Warlock caught up in his Necrolord covenant campaign. With what appears to be a 3-renown-per-week rate for those who are fully caught up, we're on week four.

The odd thing here is that the point in the plot where my Warlock is is behind where my Paladin is in the Kyrian campaign - there's an arc surrounding the Maldraxxi assault on the Temple of Courage (aka the Necrotic Wake dungeon,) which both the Kyrians and the Necrolords wish to retaliate against. But my Necrolord Warlock is still in the preparatory phases of that plot while my Kyrian Paladin has... well, landed a decisive blow in the fight to defeat the traitors of Maldraxxus.

My Warlock, who I don't think has run a dungeon since hitting 60, is actually by this point in decent enough gear to start heroics, thanks to the covenant armor set. Oddly, my Mage, who is also at 12 renown and thus just as caught up with his Night Fae campaign, has only like three pieces of that set to the Warlock's 5.

Meanwhile, my Death Knight cannot catch a break when it comes to weapon drops.

To recap, here's where the various plots for the different covenants are for week 4:

Spoilers ahead:

Renown, Catching Up, and Campaign Gear

While my Paladin and Death Knight are nearly always my #1 and #2 characters to level up in a new expansion (last time I had my Horde Shaman go second so I could see Zandalar) my other characters in the alt-priority list have been shuffled a little this time, to make sure that I can see each covenant story. That being said, yesterday I got my Demon Hunter to 60 and had him join the Death Knight in the Venthyr (I'm a little concerned that, at least in player-power levels, I might wind up going Venthyr with, like, the vast majority of my characters, as it seems favored for Enhancement, Arms, and Havoc, and while Night Fae is apparently the recommended one for Subtlety, there's no way in hell my Undead Rogue, who I've always conceived of as being obsessed with courtly intrigue, gothic opulence, and spooky places with big castles, ain't going to join the bitey boys.)

My Mage is with the Night Fae, and while he's not done this week's story chapter, he's done the previous ones. In fact, I think both the Warlock (Necrolords) and Demon Hunter (Venthyr, as stated above) are caught up to last week.

One thing I'm really interested to see is that the campaign gear set actually has 7 ranks. While the first rank is ilevel 155, which is basically only attractive to a freshly-60 character, by this point, the gear level is 171 (and you can upgrade the older pieces for a modest fee of anima in your covenant sanctum.) Given that three of my level 60 characters have done 0-1 max-level dungeons each, being able to get several pieces of 171 gear just by doing the campaign is very appealing.

It also suggests that the end-state for these campaign gear sets (which will cover every armor slot) should eventually be pretty decent gear - even if we only go up half-steps, that means that by rank 5, we'll have a bunch of mythic dungeon quality gear, and maybe by rank 7 we'll have Normal Nathria gear.

Now, sure, in the long run that'll seem like trash, but who knows? Maybe they'll even add more ranks to them over the course of the expansion? At the very least, it'll be a big leg up to get characters at least geared for LFR.

Sadly, I haven't done much of the Ember Court, and just a bit of the Path of Ascension (and I haven't unlocked the mini-game things for the other covenants yet.) But I think that's just a consequence of having too much to do for all the characters I want doing good stuff.

At the moment, the biggest hurdle I have is getting my Enchanter skilled up to 115 so I can pump out legendary base items. I was grateful to find that leveling leatherworking was not a terribly difficult task, and while my Blacksmith is sitting queued up to start leveling after my Shaman gets a little higher and my Rogue starts, I've been stockpiling ore for him to use when he gets to Oribos.

LFR Castle Nathria Wing One

 The first wing of LFR's Castle Nathria is pretty odd - as you actually go past the room with the real first boss of the raid (on Normal/Heroic/Mythic) and go through a side passage to fight what I believe would most likely be the second boss you face.

So, we have Huntsman Altimor, the Hungering Devourer, and Lady Inerva Darkvein (the latter being the one you faced in the Revendreth quests when you entered the Castle briefly.)

After watching some Fatboss.tv guides for the higher difficulties, I was relieved to find that LFR simplifies these fights significantly - only Altimor gave us any real trouble.

This was from a tank perspective, so my rundown might skew a bit that way.

Huntsman Altimor:

This boss has three gargons that come out to fight you sequentially - he gets a damage buff when the last is killed, so you'll want to try to make sure he's going down as you kill his dogs. Each gargon comes with its own mechanics, and these are actually the big ones to pay attention to.

The first gargon has a stacking bleed that will require, or at least encourage, a tank-swap. Kyrian tanks can, of course, clear this when the stacks get too high.

The second tank is the raid-wiper - the gargon will sever the soul of the tank tanking it and that soul will start to walk toward the boss. If it reaches the boss, the raid takes massive damage. The soul is friendly, though, so the way you deal with it is that healers need to top it off, which will cause it to disappear. For this phase, make sure to tank the boss away from the add (well, and the add away from the boss) to give healers time to do so.

The third will gain a stacking buff to its damage with each hit. However, by moving it, you can cause it to lose these stacks. But also however, each time it moves, it does damage to the raid. So you'll want to move it every few stacks but then generally let it sit still. This is made harder by all the aoe crap on the ground.

The boss himself will shoot at three random players, hitting anyone in his shots' paths. It's easier for people to move out of the way of it, which is indicated by an arrow over the target's head. Fatboss recommends having ranged on one side and melee on the other so that melee never has to look behind them to see if they're in the path of the projectile.

Hungering Devourer:

A bit closer to tank-and-spank on LFR, the main things to look out for are a big AOE that everyone including tanks needs to run away from. Random raid members will get debuffed, losing all healing, but also leeching health from nearby raid members, so for this, you'll want to stacks up. However, there's also a burst damage ability that causes everyone to do damage to people near them - the lower their health percentage, the bigger the aoe splash zone is, so you'll want to spread for that.

The boss will also sometimes do a big burst to anyone nearby, so everyone needs to run away (including tanks.)

There are also some line-attacks that radiate from the boss, hitting I believe one targeted raid member, so other should get out of the way for that.

Lady Inerva Darkvein:

This fight is way simpler on LFR than it seems to be on higher difficulties. Basically, there's a taunt-swap, and I believe you want to drop your debuff off far from the raid. Then, there are adds that you need to run up to to tank (even with threat, they'll spam a raid-wide aoe unless you get in melee with them).

There's also an ability that non-tanks will need to look out for, where you have these lines form between you and other raid members, and you want to make sure that the lines cross the red anima orbs to dispel them.

As usual, the first week of LFR for a new raid in a new expansion is pretty simple and easy, given that most people are running their mains through it. I'm hoping my guild can get back into gear so I can see this place on Normal, because so far, it's had some very cool boss mechanics. (Though, man, I've gotta say, WoW raid boss fights have gotten insanely complicated.)

Catching Up in Shadowlands

 While I got my Paladin to 60 asap and my Death Knight followed shortly after - and both of them are rocking at the point probably over half mythic dungeon gear, eager to hit Castle Nathria when LFR starts next week - I've been taking longer on my other alts. Normally, I'd make sure my Demon Hunter, then my Horde Shaman and Rogue, would be the next up, but I wanted to take characters who I was confident would go into the covenants I haven't done yet, so I took the Mage and the Warlock next - Paladin going Kyrian, Death Knight Venthyr, Mage Night Fae, and Warlock Necrolords.

The Warlock is one or two quest chains into Ardenweald, sitting at 57 (likely to hit 58 well before the point where you have to be to progress in the main campaign) while the Mage is at 60, and I've thus had my first experiences of the catch-up mechanics for Renown.

Running in to do the world boss Mortanis (funny story, my Warlock's name is Morcanis) I got a Renown, and then another from a Calling, another from the intro "save 5 souls from the Maw" and then the weekly version of it. I'm at 6 renown now, still needing to do the 1000 anima weekly quest, and I think (if my math isn't off - it feels like there might be a missing one in there) I could be caught up if I dedicated myself to doing so by next Tuesday.

This is pretty heartening. Granted, there's not a ton of stuff to catch up on, Renown-wise, but I imagine that if you hit 60 on a new character several months into the expansion, you're going to be getting bombarded with Renown so that you can get up to speed without too much pain.

Also, as the first character who can actually make rune vessel pieces (the Mage is a Jewelcrafter) I finally got the quest where such recipes are unlocked - it's just the normal "unlock legendaries" quest chain, but with a special addition for, I assume, jewelcrafters, leatherworkers, tailors, and blacksmiths (guess my awesome goggles aren't good enough for your runes, Runecarver?) You still need 100 in your given profession to unlock them, so while the Warlock will be ready to make cloth pieces as soon as he gets that quest, the Jewelcrafter is just 8 skill points away (though I think I have the Solenium he'd need on my main.)

This does make me a little more eager to level my Warrior, as he's my Blacksmith, though I suppose I could spend some of the massive amounts of gold that my callings are earning me. (Also, I sold some Missives made by the Death Knight and got an obscene amount for them.)

So, the Warlock is working on Ardenweald (the Warlock Night Fae ability once again feels tailored for Affliction, like the Kyrian one, though I'm sure it's good - just not as tied into the rest of the spec as the Necrolord one, which makes me feel I'll be happy going with that.) Meanwhile, my Demon Hunter has made it through Bastion, and boy had I forgotten how fun Havoc is. Indeed, the Kyrian Demon Hunter ability is actually pretty potent (and devastating in AoE) even if it's a tad non-interactive - it feels much better for Vengeance, given its massive generation of Soul Shards. Given what I've read in Icy-Veins and such, I believe I'll be going Venthyr on him, which also fits RP-wise (to be honest, I think as a relentless demon-fighter, he might fit more personality-wise with the Necrolords, but unless there's a totally different ability from the Beta, I don't think the Demon Hunter ability is one I'll want to take, and Fleshcrafting is my least favorite signature ability of all the covenants - especially for a melee class.)

I'm glad to see that most profession seem simple enough to level. I managed to get my Warlock's tailoring to 100 purely on the cloth he'd gotten from my other characters. While I don't necessarily want every profession to need to do a million rep grinds to be able to make anything useful, I also think that a skill grind isn't too fun either. Being able to get most of the way to the skill cap while leveling seems fair. I'm hoping Blacksmithing is comparable to the other professions in this regard - it's always seemed like they've made it harder than other professions to skill up. But the Warrior is on the back burner - probably in line behind the Warlock, Demon Hunter, Shaman, and Rogue in my leveling plan.

Anyway, the expansion is still fun! I'm eager to check out Castle Nathria next week, and I'm very happy to know that I've got a new computer coming in January - my current one was new in the first weeks of Warlords of Draenor, and is starting to show its age - Ardenweald in particular forces me to set my graphics to low settings.

Why I'm Avoiding Threads of Fate

 For the first time since Warlords of Draenor, the leveling process in Shadowlands is a linear one - taking you from Bastion to Maldraxxus to Ardenweald to Revendreth, with a couple of side-trips to the Maw sprinkled in. To experience the story of the expansion's first chapters, you do these in order, and there's really not much in the way of branching (in Maldraxxus you can choose the order in which you do its three "Act Two" quest chains, but for the most part it's a strictly linear experience).

There are benefits to this: the narrative ties the zones together. For example, the attack on the Temple of Courage and the resultant Necrotic Wake dungeon lead directly into the events of Maldraxxus - and then the message left by the Primus sends you to Ardenweald and then Revendreth.

In the past two expansions, instead we've typically arrived at a hub and then been told about the various crisis locations (aka leveling zones) to pick from.

However, once you get through the experience once, all your alts then get an option - after you get through the Maw intro (which is not insignificant - it takes you nearly all the way to 51) - to choose the "Threads of Fate" option instead of replaying the campaign. Doing this allows you to choose your covenant immediately and then start working on it while you level through side quests, world quests, and any content that isn't just the main storyline.

Indeed, the quests for that main storyline are unavailable if you choose this option.

I have not chosen this option on any characters. You can do so any time you're still working on the main campaign, but you can't go back.

I'm also given to understand that leveling is slower - while it makes sense that the vast number of quests you do over the course of the main story campaign would be a huge chunk of experience all in all, I suppose that the alternate sources of XP, such as world quests, don't make up for it.

The real problem that I'd have with the system is that leveling through the campaign gives you plenty of time to try out the various covenant abilities. While Soulbinds and their features are sure to be an important factor to consider moving forward, getting a feel for those abilities seems really important. I've now taken my Warlock through Maldraxxus, and was happy to find that the Necrolord ability for them (Decimating Bolt) is easy enough to work into a rotation and decently fun to use.

(Sidenote: it's freaky to me how many of the classes I play have Venthyr as their recommended covenant. I've leveled up the Mage and the Warlock so that I can check out the Night Fae and Necrolords, respectively - though even that required a little bit of creative reading of Icy-Veins; they actually recommend Night Fae for Demonology; actually, there's a whole post to be written about the trickiness of reconciling character vibe with covenant. Point is, I want to get my Warlock leveled in part so that I can get my Demon Hunter next, who will share Venthyr with my Death Knight.)

You can change covenants - something I wonder if I'll feel compelled to do later in the expansion on any of my characters - but I'd prefer to make the right choice now. While you do get a chance to try out all of the abilities in the Enclave in Oribos before making your decision, getting a full (or at least most of a) zone to try them out first seems preferable.

Alts in Shadowlands

 We're now over two weeks into the expansion, and I only have two max-level characters.

I don't recall precisely when I got various characters up in previous expansions, but it's pretty clear to me that there's so much to do on each character that I've got my hands mostly full with just the Paladin and Death Knight. In a break with tradition (largely based on which covenants I'm intending for them to join - trying to cover all four before I do repeats) my Mage is next in line, to be followed by my Warlock - after which I'll get my Demon Hunter, Shaman, and Rogue.

The massive amount of content is welcome, though - WoW thrives when there's a lot to do. The real question, though, is what, of this content, will feel particularly important.

My daily routine on my main, the Paladin, is this:

Make sure I do my Anima Conduit.

Go to the Maw and do my dailies for Ve'nari.

Try to run a Mythic Dungeon or two (I'm not really in a place guild-wise where we're anywhere close to hitting Castle Nathria, so I'll be seeing it for the first time in LFR.)

Do the Calling for the day.

Weekly, add in:

Torghast (clearing both wings at the highest layer I can - I've actually found layer 4, the current max, to be perfectly doable in a tank spec with a healthy selection of Mythic dungeon gear).

Any Renown-based stuff (anima collection and souls in the Maw)

The two weekly dungeon quests.

And if I have time, doing some of my Covenant mini-game (though that's been very back-burner.)

And the World Boss now.

So doing that on two characters is quite a lot.

I think over time we'll start to get a sense of which of these are really important to do if you want a character to be "caught up" and which you can let slide. I'm also really curious to see what kind of catch-up mechanics they'll have.

I know that Renown can drop in Calling boxes and from dungeons if you're behind the curve, but when it comes to stuff like anima, especially looking at how much the higher-level version of your various covenant sanctum bonuses cost, I do wonder if we'll see some sort of inflation of anima rewards (I might imagine that world quests and such start dropping more of the anima-items.)

Anyway, it's only two weeks into an expansion that should last us two years, but there is my usual altoholic (see name of blog) impulse to feel like some of my characters are missing out.

Once I get my Mage to 60 (he's a little into Ardenweald and is at 56) I'll start to get a sense of what sort of catch-up mechanics there are. For now, he's gotten to that point in leveling where the deprecation of secondary stats has really started to hit him - his Ice Lances are far from guaranteed to crit even with Fingers of Frost.

One other thing I've been thinking about is upgrading legendary items. I actually did craft a legendary belt for my Paladin (the effect that makes Avenger's Shield sometimes not have a cooldown, which seems to often chain several times in a row, which is excellent) but it seems as if, should I drop a few tens of thousands of gold on the AH (not as much as that used to seem, given that I'm making about 2k a day from Callings) I could, in theory, push that belt from 190 to 225 item level. I have not yet made one for my Death Knight, especially because I don't really know if he's going to be maining Blood or 2H Frost this go around (while I'm overjoyed to see that 2HF is back, it's also about 1000% easier to get a mythic dungeon group if you're a tank, and I do enjoy Blood as a spec, even if it was a little scary the first few mythics, as Blood needs a bit of ramp up time to get its defensive stuff going and that made those first pulls pretty nerve-wracking.)

Still, I sometimes feel as if my Demon Hunter is looking very sad to be waiting in Stormwind while alts he was ahead of in the priority in most situations get to start earlier, all because he wants to go Venthyr and the DK got there first (my Rogue is also probably going that way). My Mage is likely going Night Fae (I just got the ability, which is... weirder than I expected, but could be good) and my Warlock is probably going Necrolords (I actually don't know what the ability is, but if it's fun to use, I'll feel very good having the 'Lock go with the jock-bros of the Shadowlands.)

Still, that seems far on the horizon. I don't think my Mage or Warlock will be prioritized quite as much as the Paladin and DK were (I've always thought of them as kind of Main and Vice Main) which might make it a bit easier to spare some time to work on the other alts. Still, I want to keep up with renown so that I can see the stories in each of the covenants. I just hope that I'll also be able to keep them geared enough to do the content the covenant stories entail.

Crafter's Marks, Callings, and a Need for Deterministic Rewards

 By this point, it's actually been a long time since we had such a system, but back in the day, there was something called Badge gear.

In Burning Crusade, vendors were introduced who would sell high-quality gear for a currency called Badges of Justice. You could get these badges by beating Heroic Dungeon bosses (Heroics in BC were considered quite difficult, at least by those days' standards.) New gear was introduced to these vendors with the release of new raids like Zul'Aman and Sunwell Plateau, and so players were incentivized to keep running heroic dungeons in order to earn the badges to purchase that gear. Later, they made it so that raid bosses would drop these badges (2 at a time for every raid beyond Karazhan, the intro raid).

In Wrath of the Lich King, they introduced new Emblems which served a similar purpose. However, Emblems came in various varieties. Emblems of Heroism would drop in Heroic dungeons and the easier 10-player version of Naxxramas, Eye of Eternity, and Obsidian Sanctum, while Emblems of Valor would drop in the 25-player versions.

When Ulduar was introduced in 3.1, the 10-player version gave Emblems of Valor while the 25-player one gave Emblems of Conquest. Then, in 3.2, with the introduction of Trial of the Crusade, the system got streamlined - now, every bit of old content that could drop Emblems would give Emblems of Conquest, and the new Heroic mode of raiding for Trial of the Crusader gave Emblems of Triumph (I'll be honest, I might have some of this wrong - effectively there were three raid difficulties at that point, because 10-player heroic was seen as equivalent to 25-player normal.) Finally, when 3.3 brought Icecrown Citadel, the final Emblem was introduced - Emblem of Frost - which was used to purchase, among other things, the tier 10 raid set (Triumph had also been the way you got tier 9.)

In Cataclysm, they came up with a much more elegant system for this - "Old Content" would give a currency called Justice Points, which could be spent on any of the older gear (there was also some initial Justice Point gear you could get when you were starting heroics) while Valor Points were introduced as the always-cutting-edge currency - something you could acquire a limited amount of per week, but which you could get from doing both raids and random heroic dungeons.

And while Cataclysm was sort of the first disappointment of an expansion (other than heroics or raiding, there was practically nothing to do at the level cap - though I still think the old-world revamp was a great change, even though what had been an update after 6 years is now 10 years old) I think this system was really great.

But Blizzard has moved farther and farther away from deterministic gearing. To define the term: deterministic gearing is the idea that if you complete the content you intend to, kill the raid bosses or clear the dungeons that you need to, you will be guaranteed after a certain number of successes to get the piece you're aiming for. Random drops are not deterministic - you can run a dungeon over and over and just get unlucky and never get the thing you want.

I think there's an argument for random drops - it makes it more exciting when you kill something to see if this time you'll get the thing. And I think that's been Blizzard's argument in favor of it. (The cynical view could be that they figure this will make content last longer and thus get people to stay subscribed longer, but I'll be honest, I don't really believe that - I think Blizzard understands that what gets people to keep playing is that the game is fun, and if I ever find myself with everything I want on a main character while I'm still enjoying myself, I'll just play one of my million alts.)

But we never lost those random drops when we had a currency-based deterministic system. And given that these systems generally require well over a single dungeon run to get loot equivalent to what might drop in it, the big benefit to a currency system is that no run feels wasted. These days, if I take a character through a mythic dungeon and I don't get a single piece of gear, it feels like my time was wasted and in fact, I've lost opportunity given the weekly lockout. But if I were also getting a Badge of Justice off of each of those bosses, and that for 15 of those I could get a decent trinket, helmet, or even a weapon to fill in that last bit of questing gear I still have, I'd feel much better about having succeeded in that dungeon run.

So, I do think that we need to bring back a system like we had in Wrath and Cataclysm (Mists of Pandaria also had Valor gear, but it was locked behind reputations that could only be attained after months of daily quests, which was a major pain.) This is especially true given that Callings are not nearly as useful for gearing as Emissaries were in Legion and BFA. Indeed, even world quests themselves seem to be far less gear-oriented in terms of rewards.

Furthermore, I've talked before about Crafter's Marks. In theory, these are a fantastic system that allows any professional recipe to continue to be relevant as long as new Crafter's Marks are made available. The problem right now is that the absolute pinnacle of Crafter's Marks are A: only enough to raise the piece's item level to 161 - which is 10 points below heroic dungeon gear - and B: locked behind a reputation that will likely take a few more weeks for anyone to get to the level needed to attain it. (Don't get me wrong, I love Ve'nari and think that making that rep grind a slow one is fine.)

Crafting gear is supposed to be the original deterministic gear acquisition method. But it's always been hamstrung I think a bit by Blizzard worrying that it'll be too pay-to-win (especially given that they resorted in Warlords to selling gold - kind of the video game economy version of parents letting their kids smoke pot as long as they only do so safe at home.) And I think that's fair - WoW would be in terrible shape if they had to balance around people just buying player power, and I think they've been very wise in avoiding some of the pitfalls of F2P MMOs.

The ecstasy and the agony of random loot drops is something we've always had in WoW, and I don't think we'll ever lose it entirely. But I do feel that giving players a sense that their time isn't totally wasted if they don't get the loot they want out of an instance is a really great way to make the game feel better.