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I've been looking forwards to a full on WoW Underdark-themed expansion since the Azjol-Nerub regions in Wrath. I'm excited to get down there.
Here's how I'd rate them. (My opinion here...)
1) Brackenhide Hollow
2) Algeth'ar Academy
3) Azure Vault
4) Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr
5) Neltharus
6) Halls of Infusion
7) Ruby Life Pools
8) Nokhud Offensive
I freakin' love Brackenhide, and I think that's just because I enjoy fighting gnolls. It's got a very old school vibe to it. The dungeon has a lot of route variety, and yes, most groups have fallen into a meta route for M+, but there's plenty of other interesting ways to play the dungeon, and I appreciate that. Brackenhide has become one of my favorite dungeons ever. I would put it up there with the likes of Taza'vesh and Freehold.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I really do not enjoy Nokhud. I can't fault them for trying something new. They wanted a dragonriding dungeon, and so they did one. But the idea unfortunately didn't work. The whole "fly to an area, kill 4 packs and a boss, and then fly to the next area and rinse and repeat" is not a fun dungeon experience for me. I also find most of the trash packs in there to be highly annoying; it spawns way too much ground shit, and the overall length of the dungeon is also way too high.
In the middle, Neltharus is a very challenging dungeon. One of the hardest. It has some brutal bosses with a ton of unavoidable AoE damage. But I also think they're a lot of fun. I'd probably rate this one higher, except for the annoying trash at the end. Those birds with their knockback are annoying. Also, we're 2 years into this expansion and on the precipice of the next expansion, and people still don't know how the chains work on the 2nd boss.
I think I broadly agree with this list. I rate Brackenhide lower but I also played a lot more of S1 than S2, so I think Brackenhide is suffering from vibes more than its actual quality. It was by far my favorite of the S2 dungeons. Algeth'ar and Azure Vault I think are unimpeachable -- Vault in particular moved way up my list as the season went on. Nokhud I think was a great idea, but they designed a dungeon where you could fly between everything and then forced you to kill 12 specific packs to clear it... come on.
RLP I wish I could rate higher but the difficulty spikes in that dungeon -- in particular the last boss -- are brutal.
RLP is a fun enough dungeon that was just too highly tuned in season 1; once they nerfed it a bit it was fine
don't get the hate for nokuud tbh; it's long but it was pretty easy and gave you some routing choice (even though the 'best' route got sussed out pretty quickly)
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Edit: Ugh, and they jacked the cost of Moonfire way up too.
Edit 2: Oof, and Travel Form uses dynamic flight now too? This login has been painful.
Edit 3: And Adaptive Swarm is gone?
Im pretty sure you can toggle dynamic flight in the mount menu, which i assume works with flight form. Im personally not sad to see adaptive swarm gone. it was just a button you pushed on cooldown, and just contributed to druid's hotkey bloat.
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Getting rid of Swarm didn't really alleviate my hotkey bloat, since with the new trees, I actually ended up with a net gain in abilities to hotkey.
i also tried out new ww and ran out of energy and basically just stood there doing nothing. with secondaries super bloated due to end game gear, i cannot imagine it will be fun to play when stats start falling while leveling. elemental seemed pretty fun, but was definitely a little slower to play.
i think ill end up maining my hordies this expansion though. its been a while for that. and who knows, maybe papa thrall will be back in charge at some point.
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On Bear, I tried both Bear and Pala so far, and siding with Bear, like that I can just chill and focus more on what's happening instead of having to worry about Consecration, even with the new 4 seconds leeway. Elune's Chosen goes all in on the Laser Bear theme and that's dope. Also race changed to Worgen, do like the Werewolf look:
Looking at Runebear most of the time anyways, but is nice. Worgen Heritage Questline actually managed to surprise me, it was decent.
Regarding Monk energy, they made a massive change to how it scales with haste. In the past, monks just ignored haste on stat priority because all of their abilities line up perfectly for combo strikes and it was a dead stat. Blizz decided they didn’t like the fact that monks ignored that stat, so they made energy regen scale off of haste so we basically have to take it now.
I am curious if they do it again what would it be
HAHA oh come on it is fun watching your demon hunters outrunning ground mounts.
My main motivating factor for doing that was the free Hero track item token. I was wearing Veteran shoulders that I have never been able to replace all season long, so a free token was a nice way to replace that slot. I actually ended up running a ton of keys this week on my monk, even though it wasn't really a push week. The Afflicted affix is kind of a pain in the ass. And one of the keys I ran, nobody was doing the mechanic, so I ended up basically soloing it as a DPS player. But it was okay. Overall a good week of keys.
I'm really loving New Monk. Having Strike of the Wind Lord really helps the rotation. Plus, having SotWL proc Rushing Jade Wind is a really good reduction of button bloat. It makes everything more smooth. Having a beefed up Whirling Dragon Punch feels great too. That spell has always looked super cool and I generally always took it and used it, even though it hasn't always been a good button to push. I took it because of how iconic it is. But now it's good and it still looks great. It's a Win-Win.
Two more things on the topic of haste and energy regen:
1) Be sure to cast Fists of Fury on cooldown, and be sure to always let it channel for its full duration. The channeling time of FoF is a natural point in the rotation for energy to regen.
2) Don't forget that the new talent trees we're using in Pre-Patch are designed for The War Within, and they are "incomplete" without hero talents. When you hit level 71 and gain access to Conduit of the Celestials, that is another channeled ability that you can use to help with energy recovery time.
Things are going to feel a bit "off" for the next month or so, until TWW launches for that reason. Some classes are hit harder than others by this. I'm not a big shaman player, but my understanding is that the shaman talent trees that they delivered in the pre-patch are not the final trees that will be delivered on launch day. And that's because the TWW trees just don't really work without the hero talents, so they had to deliver an interim tree to hold over for a month.
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I think void elves are dumb conceptually, but that didn't stop me from making a void elf shadow priest, with the intent of putting them through Legion, then the BFA Crucible of Storms story (which I'd already done on my main). I eventually did that earlier in Dragonflight, then removed the Gift of N'Zoth, with the intent of using the toy to keep it permanently on my head, then took the character to 70.
But after using the toy, I realized a couple things. One, the toy looked a little goofy. And two, looking it up, the toy was purely cosmetic, not having any of the other effects of the Gift (understanding Shath'Yar, getting whispers or odd sounds or strange sights, e.g.). Plus Blizzard had said it could be important to keep it in the future, and War Within or the trilogy to follow might finally be the time. I was annoyed.
Then I had an idea: I could make the same priest...as a blood elf, and have them keep the Gift.
Just finished that. Now I'm ready for anything.
My biggest issue with nokuud is some people are just really bad with dragon flying and trying to get everybody to land in a safe spot with all the roaming add packs is a bit of a pain. Fine if you have a stable group and you do things consistently but in a pug stuff gets weird. I like the attempt it was an interesting way to do a dungeon but I will be glad to not go back to it for a while.
Made weirder by you have to know where the landing spot to get to the final boss because nobody uses the clearly intended pathways and I have seen people get booted for not knowing. It was an interesting idea that led to some weird toxic issues I will be glad to see this one take a long rest.
Do you have to buy WWT to do it? as I was trying to remember what exp I really bought after the effect [I think shadowlands?}
yay all I need to do is SoG in remix and I am done with everything I wanted to do expect for buy some armor sets
It feels like they put the bare minimum into this one. There's less here than even the last prepatch from pre-Dragonflight. And it feels like they either forgot to test it, or tested it and then ignored the findings of the QA and pushed it live with known issues. How do you release a story cutscene with no audio? Surely somebody played it or watched it and reported that that it was bugged.
They ask if anyone wants to switch [I don't have a healer class other than my shaman I am relearning enhance on} The shaman in the run says they will switch but they don't have the gems? the paladin will switch to holy
It was kind of rough as the wheels on Garrosh did wipe the raid twice
But I finally got it done! just to do a few more things before it ends
I'm bemused by the slow roll of killing the spec at this point, honestly. Anyone that understood the mechanics of it was telling Blizzard that the spec would be BIS for top-end content if it was merely 'good' for the majority of players, just because of the execution ceiling in raid and how much utility they have in dungeons. A support spec was always going to have to be balanced on a razor's edge, assuming you gave a shit about balance in the first place. It's why games that I think of when I think of Supports - City of Heroes and Warframe as examples - don't give a fucking shit about competitiveness.
If Blizzard wants to keep Aug as a Support spec, then tbh the safest thing they could do is the direction they're going now, and just make sure it's subpar, maybe rising to the level of 'not the worst thing in the game' if you play optimally. Maybe then people will stop reflexively hating it for existing.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
I think they are betting on Delves as this way to release pressure from organized content by giving people outside that fully flexible content on both number of players and the roles of said players.
Also Morgan Day literally said "yes we are going to balance Aug as a DPS and nerf it hard on M+" on the interview he and Ion had with Wowhead, but nobody noticed until there was another interview and this time got added to the Wowhead summary, which firmly convinced that most people, even a lot of content creators, do not read the actual interviews and only read Wowhead summaries. Which does explain a lot.
Or they need to add at least a couple other support specs. You can't just have one spec doing its own niche thing and not expect that not to be seen as necessary unless it is just flat terrible. if you have 3 or 4 other specs that can fill that niche then maybe the group is 1 tank 1 healer 2 dps and a support and that's not terrible but you can't do that if only one spec of one class can fill it or people are going to RAAAGGEE.
1T, 1H, 2D, 1S would be an okay group comp, but they would have to fully commit to that and start designing encounters for it. And you're right, Kaid, they would need to add more than just the one. Shaman totem support would be an easy win. Paladin support, where they bring back Blessings as support skills would be a pretty easy win as well.
Yup if they really want a support roll they need to go all in. Could have a bard rogue spec, disc priests could go full support, A shaman spec would be low hanging fruit maybe a chronomage option for mages.