It's Week 9 of World of Warcraft Dragonflight 10.2, and, friends, we've officially entered the doldrums. In this week's The Mana Regen, I'll discuss the weekly quests, M+ affixes, the no man's land between heroic and mythic raiding, and finally dance on Bobby Kotick's Activision Blizzard grave.
Week 9 and M+
This week's affixes include tyrannical, volcanic, and sanguine. One would think this wouldn't be too bad as a push week.
In the first few keys I've run this week so far, one would be very, very wrong.
Now, this is something I've noticed especially over the holiday break. It seems like there are a lot of folks engaging the M+ aspect of the game. That's good.
It also turns out that a lot of people are playing > +20 keys who might not be especially familiar with mechanics, affixes, etc. That's bad.
I'm also probably likely to blame for some issues in the keys I've run as I'm playing on WiFi, which doesn't tend to be an issue for most of the content I'm playing. But I can see a few stutters and hiccoughs caused by WiFi to be deadly at +22 and higher. (I'll write at length later about the ongoing ordeal of attempting to get ethernet run to my desktop in my office in this old house.)
Beyond my technical issues, I've found myself logging in a lot less post-AOTC, Keystone Hero, etc. I had been trying to push my score to 3K, but I'm beginning to think that will be less and less likely if tyrannical keys are mostly impossible for the groups I find myself in on these weeks.
It's not fun when you get 3/4 bosses and someone in the group drops when a wipe on the last boss means the key will be depleted. It's a waste of everyone's time. This issue is one that WoW devs still have yet to address in this M+ system that is otherwise pretty good overall.
The Aiding the Accord quest this week is The Superbloom event. Go and grow twenty minutes older if you really want to complete this community event again. It's just... too... long.
The Weekend Event is completing 4 mythic dungeons. You could easily do 4 Mythic 0s to knock this out, but I think I'll just try to two birds/one stone this week by knocking out 4 18s for mythic track gear in the vault and completing the quest at the same time.
No Man's Land of Post-AOTC and Pre-Cross-Realm Mythic Raiding
I don't have a lot to say here other than I'm happy his will not be an issue anymore with The War Within.
Reclearing heroic Amirdrassil seems to be especially unrewarding. I know there is the legendary weapon that some folks in my raid obviously want, but I think the group's time overall could be better (and more enjoyably) spent in mythic progression given that the bar for entry seems to be lower than ever before.
But the cross-realm restrictions remain. Uff.
Folks have begun the alt parade, and I can't tell if I'm annoyed that I, too, don't have an alt to bring or I'm just already tired of this raid. It was quite fun, really, at the beginning. Now it just seems a bit tedious to plow through 6 bosses before any sense of challenge begins.
My concern becomes that folks will get enamored with alts, and then attempting mythic progression will just fall by the wayside because they won't want to return to their mains. C'est la vie, I suppose.
I anticipate a lot of time in Diablo IV and/or WoW Season of Discovery until 10.2.5 releases on January 16th.
Bobby Kotick Has Golden Parachuted Away
That troglodyte is finally gone. It's a shame he took so much money with him on the way out - money that would have been better spent for literally almost anything else you can think of.
May his name be forgotten by history. May there always be a fly in his drink. May his underwear chafe his privileged ass. May his coffee be cold. May he receive even a portion of the evil he inflicted on those who worked under him.
In short, go fuck yourself, Bobby Kotick.
With that, I'm OOM.
Thanks for reading. For Azeroth!