Shadowlands' Odd Timeline and In-Game Spoilers

 The ultimate timeline of Shadowlands is a little odd. While it happened relatively early in the campaign, there was a good period in the Kyrian campaign in which Devos is chilling out at Elysian Hold, and everyone's wondering who is leading the Forsworn, despite the fact that we players had been clearing Spires of Ascension for weeks at that point.

Oddly, there's also a world quest in Maldraxxus whose intro speech by Draka spoils not only some major developments of the story in that zone, but also the reveal of a secret villain who's been pulling strings all this time.

Because this is literally a post about spoilers, obviously, here's a cut:

The Runecarver, the Jailer, and the Burning Legion

 The Jailer is new lore for the Warcraft cosmos, but so far, the whole deal of Shadowlands is the awesome kind of new lore that opens doors to interesting possibilities for the future.

I'd always hoped that there was something more than just Kil'jaeden wielding demonic magic to make the Lich King, and this expansion has revealed that there is - that the Helm of Domination as well as Frostmourne (possibly the rest of the Lich King armor, but I think mainly those two) were created by the Runecarver, who has been imprisoned by the Jailer, all his memories drained from him.

Who the Runecarver is remains something of a mystery, though a popular theory (which I think is mostly based on narrative efficiency) is that he might be the Primus, the eternal one who is the rightful ruler of Maldraxxus.

Upon giving the Runecarver a certain number of memories (which we use to allow him to make us legendary items) we get a cutscene - one that, sadly, for me had a checkered box where I think the Helm of Domination was supposed to be. (And given that these memories are account-wide, I don't know that I'll be able to see it again, at least in-game.)

In it, the Jailer mentions that he has made a crown fit for the King of the Damned, as well as the finest of his "Mourneblades." Surely, then, that implies that Frostmourne is of a certain type of weapon (what does this mean for Shadowmourne, then, the legendary two-handed axe that Warriors, Paladins, and Death Knights could get in Icecrown Citadel, made as a sort of safer-to-use equivalent to Frostmourne?)

The massive lore-expansion coming with this game expansion is very cool. But I'm always curious to see how this stuff gets tied back into the existing lore.

After all, we do know that the Lich King's artifacts were taken by the Burning Legion and bent to their use.

Kil'jaeden was the one to put Ner'zhul's soul into the armor and make him the first Lich King. But I believe more recent lore suggests that it was the Nathrezim (aka Dreadlords) who retrieved them for him.

Now, the Nathrezim are complicated.

Following the BC-era ret-con, in which it was the Dreadlords rather than the Eredar whose depravity drove Sargeras to madness (thus allowing the Eredar to exist in their uncorrupted form as Draenei, rather than just being demons from the get-go) we later got in Chronicle that the Nathrezim had particularly perturbed Sargeras by channeling the power of the Void and seeming to work with the Old Gods on a different planet with a World Soul. Sargeras destroyed that world (that I'll refer to as Telogrus, as it's more or less stated that the broken world where the Void Elves were transformed was the one that Sargeras destroyed) and then embarked on his Burning Crusade.

Found in-game somewhere in Revendreth, there's a series of missives that seem to link Sire Denathrius with the Dreadlords - as if the Dreadlords, far from being loyal to the Legion, or the Old Gods, or even the Light (specifically Lothraxion) that instead, they are all actually working for the Sire, and the force of Death (and thus probably the Jailer.)

That the Nathrezim could be connected to Sire Denathrius seems quite possible - they look a bit like Venthyr and Stoneborn, and of course their names share some distinctive syllables. The missives that were found (I don't know exactly where in-game) I believe was found in both the beta and the live game. We also have what counts for subtle lines in WoW like the Accuser telling Denathrius that he "was once the lord of dread," which cannot have been phrased that way accidentally.

But at this point, people have completed the Castle Nathria raid, and while the Sire is not entirely gone at the end of it, there haven't been any huge reveals regarding the Nathrezim.

Given that the past few expansions have hinted at major themes and powers coming next, I think the only thing I've really noticed in Shadowlands is the incursions of Light and Void into the Shadowlands - the Void attacked Bastion, which you can witness in a little side quest chain, and the Light, of course, scours the Ember Ward of Revendreth - we even rescue one of the Naaru who took part in the attack from the Sanguine Depths dungeon.

I think Legion was too recent an expansion for us to jump right back in to them as major foes, but I do really wonder when, exactly, we're going to learn more about the connection between the Burning Legion and the forces of the Maw.

Those Really Out-There Covenant Class Abilities

 I've now taken my Rogue over to the Shadowlands, which should be the last of the "alts I really play" to do so. The Bastion leg of the main story campaign (my Warrior alt is going Threads of Fate, but I think everyone else is going to stick to the story - I realized too late that if you just don't pick a covenant to start, you can try out all the abilities if you just go to their zones, so my Warrior perhaps prematurely chose Night Fae, in large part because, well, wooden armor seems cool. Also, I like the ability even if tanks aren't always so cooperative about making use of it.)

Anyway, as I see it, the class covenant abilities come in a few varieties. A lot of them are dull, but useful, like Sinful Brand, the Venthyr Demon Hunter ability, which is certainly good but not exactly revolutionary, or Divine Toll, the Kyrian Paladin ability that is an absolute lifesaver for a tank (especially when some DPS pulls another trash mob in your mythic dungeon) but is also not exactly mind-blowing.

But then there are the out-there, and kind of garbage abilities. But, like ambitious garbage.

Fodder for the Flame is the Necrolord Demon Hunter ability. It is bananas, and also borderline unusable. You summon a demon from the Theater of Pain that is hostile to you - if you kill it, its soul shard is extra powerful, increasing your damage done and reducing your damage taken by a big chunk for the next 20 seconds. Also, your Throw Glaive does extra damage to the demon.

But, like, if you don't get to the soul shard in time, it's wasted. And you've just added another monster to the fight (granted, one you can take down fairly easily.)

I also want to talk about Echoing Reprimand, the Rogue Kyrian ability.

So, on a 45 second cooldown and for 10 energy, you strike the target for a good chunk of arcane damage. Then, one of your combo points is animacharged - meaning that if you use a finishing move while you have precisely that many combo points, it treats it as if you had 7 combo points (it might be only 6 if you don't have Deeper Stratagem, though I could be wrong.)

While cool in theory, I can tell you that at least as a subtlety rogue, it's nearly impossible to actually hit that combo point, because so many of our CPs come from Honor Among Thieves, which means we're generating them constantly without control.

Anyway, clearly not all of these can be winners, but I do have to hand it to Blizzard - they came up with some interesting and outside-the-box ideas here.

New Alts and Qualifying for LFR

 My Demon Hunter took a back seat to some other alts who he'd normally level up ahead of, due to the fact that my Death Knight was already in the Venthyr covenant, and that's where I wanted the DH to go. So, a few weeks after the release of the expansion, I got him to 60 and started working on the gear treadmill.

The good news is that it's way easier to get into heroic dungeons now. By working through the covenant campaign, you can get 171 pieces for your covenant set - which then allows you to upgrade all your previous pieces.

This isn't actually a widely publicized system, but it's a crucial one given that you'll be able to, eventually, have a full set of Epic gear for the price of going through the quests and spending increasing amounts of anima.

There is a pair of NPCs in each covenant sanctum, one of whom can sell you any pieces you might have vendored back for anima, and the other can upgrade your older pieces to keep them in line with whatever your most recent pieces are, item-level wise. As such, a Venthyr by this week can have I believe 5 item level 171 pieces through this system, which takes them a long way toward getting them geared for heroics, and even mythics.

At the moment, my Demon Hunter is stuck at 168, two points too low to queue for LFR - I think I might just chain-run Sanguine Depths for two shots per run at a weapon upgrade, given that his off-hand is currently his lowest level piece of gear.

Without bonus rolls, there's basically zero agency players have over getting drops they want, which is something I find very frustrating. The days of Need or Greed were problematic, to be sure, and so I understand why they went with personal loot. But I think there needs to be some interactivity to make the system feel slightly less like a slot machine.

The truth is, I miss Badge gear. I don't know why they got rid of it. Indeed, once Wrath introduced and Cataclysm formalized the distinction between current-content versus old-content currencies, there was an easy way to keep people from feeling that they had to run content they were done with. Today, if you run a dungeon and don't get loot - or worse, you get loot that is useless to you and anyone in your group - the entire exercise feels like a waste - you got nothing out of it (other than the fun of running a dungeon, which, you know, is fun, after all).

Additionally, I took my first character into the Threads of Fate leveling system. Unfortunately, I did not realize that if you went to the various zones before picking your covenant, you'd get a chance to try out all the abilities - I had thought you'd just talk to the representatives and be able to use the ability until you came back, but when you leave the Enclave, you lose it. So after I'd committed my Warrior to the Night Fae (gotta get that wooden armor!) my friend explained how one could try out the various abilities. Oh well.

I wonder if this version of leveling is truly slower than the main story, or if it's just that the story provides a sense of momentum and propulsion - leveling this way (and I've only done a little - I mainly wanted to get the Warrior up there to work on his Blacksmithing so he can make legendary pieces for my Paladin and Death Knight) I've done a couple bonus objectives and some side quests in Ardenweald. Each zone, you get a slowly-filling bar that tracks your progress through the zone. I think the general idea of it is that once you fill it up, you can feel free to move onto another zone, so I assume you'll get roughly 2.25 levels doing each of these quests, given that you finish the Maw intro at more or less level 51.

Oh, and by the way: at least for the intro, Worgen can use Running Wild in the Maw, which is a game-changer.

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.)