Guess what's back. Back again. The Mana Regen's back. Tell a friend...
Ehem. ANYway...
It's week 2 of Seeds of Renewal. There's renewing still going on. And seeds. Apparently.
This week in The Mana Regen:
M+ re/preview and Glory of the Dream Raider
"Stay a [Long] While and Listen"
Follower Dungeons
M+ Re/preview and Glory of the Dream Raider
M+ last week wasn't great. Tyrannical, afflicted, and bolstering have some really bad interplay at times.
And Yazma is still a right pain in the ass on tyrannical unless you have a class to clear the spiders.
This week of M+ has us facing fortified, incorporeal, and sanguine. I haven't run a dungeon yet to see how it feels, but I can't imagine it will feel much worse than the week that was.
Doomforge Brewing achieved Glory of the Dream Raider this week. These achievements are very doable on normal difficulty, and so it was a nice way to break the monotony of heroic reclearing.
We're still trying to figure out what we're doing with mythic raiding with a roster that suffers from the lack of cross-server mythic raiding being available earlier than it is currently.
I'll use this opportunity to, once again, call for some mini-raid during .5 patches or at least along with season 4 to temper the purgatory that will be awakened raiding or whatever this version of fated raiding will be called.
World bosses =/= raid bosses. No guild actually goes out into the world to down those bosses together because the rewards are so absolutely minimal.
"Stay a [Long] While and Listen"
Tess Greymane summons us to Stormwind to talk to her. She's arguing for infecting herself with the worgen curse if she is indeed to be a good leader of Gilneas.
Her literalism is frankly a bit alarming. "How can I lead a people whose suffering I myself have not experienced?!"
Maybe I'm being a bit disingenuous calling this small quest line we get in Stormwind from The Greymanes a "Stay a while and listen" narrative, but it very much feels like that sort of narrative.
There are quests that take us to Duskwood and then into the Dream, by way of Goldrinn, to see an alternate reality in which Tess, too, has the worgen curse.
Goldrinn is pretty great, and well played, Blizzard, using one of the many assets just slowly rotting into digital dust in the old world.
Spoiler alert: Tess realizes infecting herself with the curse wouldn't change things for the better. /clutches pearls Color. Me. SHOCKED!
After all is said and done, you return to Stormwind and get the armor ensemble promised in the original quest line.
The other Stay a while and listen worth checking out is between Genn Greymane and Mathias Shaw.
Anduin Wrynn has been spotted! I'm sure we all know where he is going.
But Genn doesn't want Turalyon to know. Hm... I wonder why that might be.
Follower Dungeons
Caelcas went into a follower dungeon to see how it all worked.
Overall, this seems like a great addition for folks who don't want to group with the (many) toxic humans they'll encounter in the usual LFG apparatus.
When you enter the dungeon, you have the option to make one of the NPCs the leader who will direct the rest of the party through the dungeon. As a mage, I deferred to Captain Garrick.
This Ruby Life Pools went relatively smoothly. We didn't have any deaths! Overall, the NPCs pathed OK - there were a few moments where they glitched and got stuck in a bush or tried to go over a wall to their deaths. (I mean, we've all been there.)
The only BUT I have for this new technology is mythics and higher. I suppose you could talk me into single-player plus AI for base mythics, but I don't like the idea of this being used for keystones in any way, shape, or form.
World of Warcraft is an MMORPG, and despite the fact that, yes, some players want to experience the game solo, there are elements that need to be true to the first two Ms of that acronym.
Being able to experience all of the content solo is totally fine. M+, however, is not content as much as it's a style of gameplay - a challenge mode for experiencing the same content new ways.
With that hot (lukewarm?) take, I'm OOM.
Thanks for reading. For Azeroth!