World of Warcraft Dragonflight 10.2 Week 4 Rundown
In now the third week of the raid and fourth week of World of Warcraft Dragonflight 10.2, there are a lot of goings on to keep up/catch up with.
Tier pieces are coming together! As a holy priest, 4-set is a great quality of life improvement - particularly for M+. Renew can reset Holy Word: Serenity or Holy Word: Sanctify.
Yes. Please and thank you.
And, don't worry - if you've not been lucky with tier yet, another Catalyst charge came Tuesday with reset. And we learned today they'll be coming each week with 10.2.5.
In talking with guildies and other friends, it seems the consensus is that the weekly quests, e.g. Aiding the Accord: Emerald Bounty, are taking much less time than similar quests did in 10.1. These are expedited no doubt by the 19th Anniversary buff that's still ongoing, but even without this buff, it seems like we're getting more reputation more easily and for doing more things. This is a win in the respecting player time category to be sure.
If you're still doing Dreamsurge events for gear, transmog, or pets, this week the Dreamsurge is active in The Waking Shores. I find dragonriding around the zone and collecting the green blobs of dreamsurge in the air to be relaxing in its way. This event is rapidly losing its relevance with the patch, but there might still be some useful gear there for alts.
There is a weekly quest this week, too, for a piece of normal Amirdrassil gear upon the completion of 5 Legion timewalking dungeons. Initially, the gear awarded was at the LFR level, but this was corrected, according to Wowhead.
Legion dungeons are relatively fast, and so this is a good way to get a shot at some of the gear available in the raid without setting a toe inside.
I would, however, recommend trying out the raid at least in LFR. It's a lot of fun.
The Mythic + affixes this week include fortified, volcanic, and spiteful. The worst here, by far, is spiteful. I think this might be my new least favorite affix. Although there are some dungeons in which volcanic can prove a bit tricky during certain stacking mechanics. I'm thinking especially of the soaks in Dawn of the Infinite Fall and Rise, for example.
The Darkmoon Faire is back starting this Sunday, 3 December. If you, like me, have never grinded your reputation with them, the 19% anniversary buff + 10% Darkmoon Faire buff might help that.
Reader, let's be honest. I still won't. But I most certainly will ride that carousel a few times.
Also, Prime Gaming folks, there's a new December drop: Tabard of Fury Transmog.
Doomforge Brewing Continues Progression in Amirdrassil, the Dreams' Hope Heroic
Monday night, DFB successfully downed 5/9 bosses with a last-pull kill of the Council of Dreams. We'll reclear and continue progression tonight!
These fights on heroic have been a pretty well tuned so far. Last week, Volcoross was hitting some tanks like a truck, but we managed to work through that. He seemed to be less of a headache this week, and so I'm assuming gear upgrades have improved our quality of life in the raid.
I am looking forward to seeing Fyrakk on heroic difficulty eventually. Having watched Race to World First and seeing that fight on mythic difficulty makes me glad that I don't raid at that level. I wouldn't know where to begin with everything going on. Kudos to Echo and Liquid for the most entertaining and competitive RWF in a long time. (I'm still not especially high on the event as an esport, but you can read more on that in my previous post.)
Another Chapter in Tyr's Storyline
I won't offer too many spoilers here beyond the obvious: Tyr is back. We've resurrected him by finding some old floppy discs backup lying about to boot up his spare body.
The Tyr's Guard questline has been fun. There's the usual timey-wimey element, which means we get to travel to some alternate timelines to see some popular characters from the WoW universe. I love that.
During one part of the quest line, we end up in gnoll territory in The Azure Span. I happened to have a tailoring recipe for the Forlorn Funeral Pall drop.
I'm not a tailor, but a guildie, Xyclon, is, so i sent the recipe to him. He made it for me. I've been having fun with it during raid. 😆
Many folks have been speculating what it means, now, to have Tyr back in this brave new world, post Amirdrassil. Even Tyr seems to be asking this same question.
There's nothing quite like a giant titan-forged watcher have an existential crisis. I feel like we ought to send Tyr to Pandaria for a bit. Lorewalker Cho is the pandaren for the job.
Seriously, though, I think it's likely that this Tyr is somehow untethered from his titan handlers. That's the only logical way he fits back into this story now. What that means for The War Within and beyond remains to be seen.
I will make the early prediction that Tyr will play a large role in whatever we get up to in The Last Titan when we return to Northrend. I honestly get chills just writing "return to Northrend." The hype for that expansion is going to be great, but we still have two (hopefully excellent) expansions between now and then.
Bits and Bobs
The rare hunting/farming/spawning in World of Warcraft seems to be on everyone's mind this week with changes that have come to Zaralek Caverns last week and the new explanation this week.
I'll admit that Zaralek Caverns rare spawning did seem to be particularly egregious, and as the blue post mentioned in the Wowhead link above, there seems to be a sharding issue going on here, too, causing low player populations in Zaralek Caverns in particular.
The conversation that has spun off of this issue, though, has concerned drop rates for transmog, pets, and such from these rares. Make the drop rate greater so we can farm rares less is the rallying cry.
Or just have rares have a chance to drop these items and drop currency that can be used to buy these items like we saw in 10.1.7 with dreamsurges and 10.1.5 with time rifts. I think this solution makes more sense for a few reasons:
Equity: The percent chance for drops remains the same for folks whether it's day 1 of a new patch or random transmog farming years after said content was relevant.
Player choice: If a player wants to pursue particular transmog, pets, or mounts, they can choose how to spend the currency as they earn it for these rewards.
Developer time: I really don't like the idea of needing developers to return to old content to tune it for something as trivial as collecting. I KNOW. I. Know. Some people play WoW just for collecting, and that's great. Play how you like. But the easier solution is the currency solution rather than having devs tweaking drop rates on Pandaria rares that have been patrolling Valley of the Four Winds for over ten years at this point.
World of Warcraft December Trading Post Rewards were just announced, too. You can see the whole list here.
The real winner, obviously, is the bonus reward, Buttercup the baby moose.
I also want to offer a quick shout out to the Girls Gone WoW podcast for their WoW's 19th Anniversary episode this week. The stories E-J and Raven shared along with the stories from their listeners were a nice reminder of why we all still play and love this game. It was a good hit right in the feels.
And I think I'm now OOM.
Thanks for reading. For Azeroth!