Reset has happened, and we're now into week 6(!) of World of Warcraft Dragonflight. My Great Vault this week wasn't... great. I took the heroic track tier legs (upgrading the same I had on champion track).
The rewards for >8 M+ dungeons at 18+ were really sad. Feels bad.
This week in The Mana Regen:
A review of the week that was
Previewing this week
The War Within release date predictions
World of Warcraft Dragonflight 10.2 Week 5: The Week that Was
Amidrassil, the Dream's Hope
Doomforge Brewing is now 8/9 on Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope heroic raid. We spent most of Monday night progging on Tindral Sageswift after we managed to down Smolderon last Wednesday.
With the holidays upon us, we've had some issues with availability for a few of our healers, and so we decided to hold off on Fyrakk progging when one had to leave raid. I feel like that fight is manageable, and I think we have a good chance of achieving AOTC before the next reset.
Mythic raiding is next, but there are still some restrictions for mythic raiding that I find problematic if Blizzard is really looking to make this game as accessible to folks as possible.
We have over 20 people in our raid team currently. We have at least 24 and sometimes closer to 30 folks on a given night.
However, some of these folks are on different servers, which means of our raiding crew, 17 are on Proudmoore. That's not enough for mythic raiding.
This leaves our raid team in a weird spot for a tier that has at least some mythic raiding progression at a more than achievable level for us. Unless folks server transfer to Proudmoore, we're locked out of mythic raiding.
I know that Blizzard are addressing this issue in 11.0 with The War Within, but that's cold comfort for the here and now of Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope. I would hope that the devs might find a way to get this feature to work before 11.0, particularly given the amount of time we'll be waiting for 11.0.
M+, or Wracking Pain
All things considered, it was a productive week of M+ in World of Warcraft Dragonflight. The affixes were generally non-issues.
Except for tyrannical - especially tyrannical on the final boss of Atal'Dazar, Yazma.
You might recall the devs changed how her spell, Wracking Pain, worked a few weeks ago.
On tyrannical, this is just absolute torture in addition to a lack of space, too many spiders, and maybe too much health for Yazma.
I think Yazma could benefit from some tuning. Yes, I know there are people out there timing +25 keys even with her present settings, but just some tuning would be nice to make this less of a dead key on tyrannical weeks moving forward.
World of Warcraft Dragonflight 10.2, Week 6: The Coming Week
Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope
The final wing of World of Warcraft Dragonflight's Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope raid is available in Raid Finder beginning today! Now T. Swift and Fyrakk are open to players raiding at any level.
Enjoy the fiery pain of those last two bosses - and I for one cannot imagine how the dragonriding is going to look on LFR.
In other news, Tindral Sageswift is receiving some nerfs. See above for details.
This fight was really spicy when we progged through it, so I think these changes are warranted. I imagine we'll see similar nerfs to Fyrakk before the new year.
M+, Fortified and Bolstering
Last week, we had the OK combination of raging and tyrannical. This week, though, we have fortified (non-boss enemies have more health) AND bolstering (as enemies die, they bolster remaining enemies' damage) at keys 14+.
I think most folks would call this a tank affix. It likely is. And I suppose we healers need to be worried about bolstered enemies just trucking tanks in our groups.
The 7+ affix is entangling. Just move or use one of the many spells that break entangling to avoid being stunned. As a priest, Fade works. For monks, Tiger's Lust. Your class likely has something.
At time of writing, I was attempting to list my Galakrond's Fall +20 to provide some feedback on how this week feels, but I'm getting an error: "One or more dungeons was not valid."
It seems to be an issue with the auto-generated listing. Going in and manually listing the key worked. Weird.
Anyway. Fall on a +20 this week is very doable. The worst trash is the platform you have to clear before the second boss.
I don't know that I'd call it a push week per se, but I can't see too many dungeons that will be terrible. Maybe Darkheart Thicket or the hallway in Throne of Tides before the last boss.
The Super... yawns... bloom and Weeklies
I think every WoW podcast I listen to has called for this event to be shortened. And it really needs to be shortened. 20 minutes for this event is just too long.
The weekly quest is The World Awaits. Complete 10 world quests, and you'll get to choose 2.5K reputation with any of the factions from Dragonflight. Yes, you read that right - any.
I will be taking the Loamm Niffen rep because I have no desire to go back to actually grind rep there in Zaralek Caverns.
The Aiding the Accord quest allows a choice of Emerald Bounty or Zskera Vaults. If you're choosing the latter, I salute you.
Otherwise, it's the same Emerald Dream quests we've been at for 5 weeks. Go out, earn rep, plant seeds, and get all of the pets, transmog, and mounts.
Sadly, you won't be getting tabards for days. That bug has been fixed, so you won't receive a Dream Wardens Tabard for, well, everything.
If you haven't already filled out your traveler's log for the month, keep on doing that. You, too can be a Trading Post Fanboi.
Kaelcas is above, wearing this month's mog, including the lovely anal beads; riding the Crimson Glimmerfur; and chilling with Buttercup. Buttercup is just the best.
World of Warcaft The War Within on Internal Testing Servers
Wowhead announced today that Blizzard has a build of 11.0 on its internal servers.
This doesn't necessarily tell us anything, but if we average the days from internal server posting to game release from Shadowlands and Dragonflight, that's 235 days. That would place The War Within coming in August 2024, which is earlier than most folks have predicted.
Specifically, we'd be seeing 11.0 at some point in the first or second week of August 2024. This date would set up a similar patch cadence to what we've seen in Dragonflight.
If 11.0 drops on August 12, 2024 for example, we can imagine Blizzcon 2024 might be announcing 11.1 or at least celebrating what's to come in 11.1.
I know some folks are predicting 11.0 will not come until after Blizzcon, but I don't know that that's the way to continue the good will and hype momentum coming off of The Worldsoul Saga announcement.
A whole year of 10.2, or a long 10.2 and an abbreviated 10.3 fated feels really bad. If Chris Metzen is true to his word of quicker releases, that needs to start with shortening the lull of the end of Dragonflight.
I'm guessing August 26, 2024 will be the release date for The War Within - approximately marking the 8th anniversary of the release of World of Warcraft Legion.
The future is bright, friends. I'm looking forward to it.
With that, I'm OOM. Thanks for reading. For Azeroth!