Let’s start off with the Stormrage Server population.

There are more monks on Stormrage than there entire populations on other servers

It is #3 in total population, and the largest pro-Alliance ratio in the game.  There are over 900,000 Alliance toons.  There are only 2 other servers with more than 900,000 total players.  So yeah, it’s big. And a launch server, so it’s also old.  The general rule of thumb is that if there’s a problem with WoW, Stormrage is the first to feel it.  Guess where I play?

BfA Start

I had done all of the lead up quests to allow entry to BfA.  A lot of people have talked about what comes next.  Magni has you click rocks and gives you an uber azurite amulet.  Takes about 2 minutes, then you go see Anduin and he sends you and Jaina to the isles.  This coming from Legion, where each weapon had a unique scenario that lasted 10-15 minutes.  I remember finishing this quest and going “that’s it?”

Anyhow, you end up in a boat, Jaina talks to her mom who disowns her, and you end up in jail.  There are plenty of videos of this, but gosh does it look good.  Kul Tirans have amazing models.  The world simply looks amazing.  There’s green and brown, but no neon and no demons.  The city (Boralus) is sprawling, and a look that reminds me more of Borean Tundra (if it wasn’t frozen).  The art/world builders deserve a lot of kudos for what they’ve done.

Stormsong Valley

This is a bit more like Mist of Pandaria, with large rolling hills, waterchannels, tunnels to explore, and tentacles everywhere.  Ok, maybe not so much MoP.  But I wasn’t 10 minutes into this zone before I saw tentacles.

Taken from r/wow

Those bad guys cover the entire east side of the map, with a dungeon on the NE.  I crossed what looked like the Bifrost to get there.  It looks great, and the story is cool.  It’s a bit on the nose though?

The middle of the map has the Horde coming in for a bombing run.  Not quite sure why, and that quest area is my least favorite.  There are animals to the south, bee area to the SE which is neat, awesome looking quillboars to the SW.  Then there are pirates.  Lots of pirates.  They look great.  I miss the BB days…

I did end up replacing my artifact weapon with a green weapon.  That hurt.  I’ll eventually transmog to something else, but after 2 years of the same general look, it is hard to let it go.

The questing is a lot different than Legion.  There are what seems like 20 or so questing nodes, and there are breadcrumbs between them, but no real order of preference to move forward.  It feels like the next logical step from Blizz after levels clearly don’t matter.  I am exploring at my own pace, and if I don’t like one part, I move to another.  It works.

The downside to this is that my questlog is overflowing.  I have targets all over my map. At least it looks like the quest cap has either been removed, or put to a much higher level.

Now What

I’m at 113 now, with about a quarter of the zone to go.  Then 2 more zones afterwards.  I have no interest in blasting through the content, I want to pay attention to the details and take in the sights.  Being a gatherer has a large boost to experience gain, which means I’ll hit 120 long before I’m done the questing content.

For now, I’m taking down a rare when they get in my way.  I’m leaving all the treasure chests for when I hit 120.  I know a lot of guides recommend putting your collected gear into the scrapper for material.  I am not all that convinced right now.  A weapon could get me ~75g.  So maybe I should scrap cheaper gloves.

At this rate, I guess I’ll hit 120 later next week and then try out some dungeons.  So far, so good in terms of minute to minute gameplay and world building.  Still wondering where this yellow brick road will lead…

Stormrage went down faster than… well it went down.  No surprise.  It goes down every major patch.

The advantages of an older server is that there is a large establishment of, well, everything.  It’s the highest % of Alliance as well.  Finding a guild means just logging in and taking one of the dozen invites you get within 2 minutes.  Auction House prices are usually pretty cheap.  The actual in-game world is part of a shared pool of servers.  I mean, I see Horde players, I just know they are not on Stormrage.

Still, my Stormrage roots are mostly gone.  The majority of folks I played with have long since left the game and a server transfer would not be out of the question.  CRZ would allow me to join another guild on a linked server… but those outside are off limits.

Except…I have 7 max level characters and transfers cost $32 a pop.  I am not spending $210 on that effort.  Sure, the DH would be the least impacted since I could get one to 110 in about 2 days of effort.  That leaves 6 folks to go – the youngest of all being the Monk. I am not all the interested in re-leveling everyone again, certainly not after the 7.3.5 / 8.0 changes that pretty much tripled leveling time.

Which really makes you wonder why Blizz doesn’t offer mass character transfer services.  I’m sure there are other people like me that would be willing to pay for a large swap, at a reasonable rate.  Say $100.

Who knows, maybe I’ll level yet another character on another server and see what happens.  Worst thing would be getting the costs for flight speed unlocked… everything else is account wide, right?

1 week to go.  I still have yet to purchase BfA, so that gives you some context.  Seems more of an experiment and thing to do rather than hype at this point.  WoW has typically been about building, about growth.  Forward movement.  Everything since Sargeras was given the boot has been about loss. As much as the world loses 2 major capitals, players are losing every neat bit of Legion (gear/skills)… and I’m still having no idea what it is we’re getting back or building towards – other than more war.

Back on point, this week saw the release of the Battle for Lordaeron event.  Same concept as the starting event for Legion, you and 19 random people go through events related to the cinematic from last year.  Reminder, this video:

Neato!

Well… the actual scenario doesn’t play out that way.  There is no mass res from Anduin (he does cast a large bubble though).  Sylvanas doesn’t join the fight.  Feels like a movie trailer which incorporates the feel of the movie, without any actual scenes.  Fine.

In isolation, the event does work.  It has the major faction leaders… a best-of run of heroes.  It takes about 30 minutes to get through all the parts.  There are 3 main phases, all of which consist of filling a bar, then taking out a big-baddy.  That would be a tank, a druid, then Saurfang.  Tank is a patchwerk fight.  Druid has some neat wind effects and would be a fun dungeon boss.  Saurfang… I’ll get to that.  The event is a nice one to participate.  It rewards you (at the start no less) with a weapon that is worse than what the War of Thorns could provide… so that’s a bit odd.  Useful for fresh 110 I guess?

Recap

I like sci-fi fantasy.  I am fully aware that there are tropes that Blizzard depends on (the hero journey for one, and WoD was a trope-fest).  Blizz has come a long was from the BC days of story telling, with highs and lows along the way.  Legion was, ignoring the artifact questlines, a consistent tale.  The best part to me was seeing how Xe’ra was arguably a bad “thing”, trying to convert Illidan to the light against his will.

Sargeras is dead.  He plunged his super sword into the planet.  Magni/Khadgar convince the heros to sacrifice their uber weapons to stop the forward damage, and we agree.  That still causes Azerite (planet blood) to seep out.  Apparently it’s both powerful and valuable… and somehow after a couple thousand years we never knew it existed.  Fine.

Before the Storm (novel) is about the discovery of Azerite, the bonds between the Horde and Alliance, and the want of the Forsaken to either really die, or find peace.  Sylvanas wants none of this.  Novel ends with a new type of Forsaken joining the Alliance (Calia), that’s resurrected by a mixture of light/void.  Nice setup, right?

Battle for Azeroth

For reasons Sylvanas wants to conquer Teldrassil.  Ok, that’s actually a passable story for her character.  For poor reasons she gets offended and burns it down.  I won’t bother with the logistics of how this is not possible, but let’s just agree that she goes bonkers.  Blightcaller is good with it.

We learn from another video that Saurfang is not happy with this choice.  He knows what’s coming and it will wipe out the Horde.  He wants to quit/die.  Zappy boi somehow makes him change his mind.  This makes sense to this point.  When Saurfang decides to take on the entire Alliance force solo that seems a bit much, no?  Maybe this is a Loki ploy, in that he knows he’ll get captured?  But his lens is that he wants to die… so I don’t quite get what’s going on.

Blightcaller is usually mob boss #2 and does whatever Sylvanas says.  Alrighty.  There’s a scene of hesitation when she orders the city blown up.  Curious.

Baine objects to letting Saurfang die alone, then swallows his pride knowing he can’t do anything – yet.  The other Horde heroes are inconsequential to the story line.

Jaina quit the Alliance council at the start of Legion.  Outside of the game (novel/comic) Jaina reflects on her rage after the Legion is defeated and vows to support Kul Tiras.  Fine, pull that story string of redemption.  Doesn’t explain at all why she chose that specific time to join Anduin with a magic flying boat.  It’s a bit too much on the nose for me, but hey, that’s how Blizzard write stories.

Anduin does what Anduin does.  As much as Sylvanas is the trigger for this expansion, Anduin is the one who makes the story progress.  The anti-hero days seem gone, and we’re in black/white mode.  Which is too bad.  Leadership is about making the best choice out of multiple bad options.

So where are we now?  Teldrassil is burned.  Lordaeron is blown up with the blight.  Sylvanas escaped, and sacrificed a significant part of the Horde to do so.  Her teammates don’t appear convinced, and Saurfang is captured.  Jaina is back in the Alliance fold, and Anduin has to be wondering what’s coming next from the Horde.

Looking at all the Warcraft media, it seems clear that there are larger plans at work, for a more unified planet.  Sylvanas is the outlier here.  A story that can only go one way, unless there’s a massive rug being pulled from under.  I am waiting for the shoe to drop.  And all sorts of other idioms. When are the void lords coming again?

Blizzard was in China and due to that timing, this launched late on Thursday.  I won’t even both saying spoilers anymore…everyone knows that a giant tree was burned, right?

First thing, holy crud the animators at Blizzard are good.  They should have worked on Superman’s mustache.  In isolation, this is is a tremendous technical achievement, not to mention the poignancy of the actual storyline.  This is the honorable orc I mentioned previously… who’s lost pretty much everything and everyone he knows (including his son).  You get a tremendous sense of that in this video.  Hats off.

Second, Zappy Boi!

Now the nuanced bits, in relation to how this video intersects with the actual War of Thorns.  If you recall, Sylvanas was pitied and she decided to burn down a city in spite.  It was such a self-serving act that made absolutely no sense in the larger scale of things.  The interwebs went nusto.  In succinct terms, it was dumb.

Saurfang clearly articulates this within the video.  There is no long game to be had here, and the Alliance is going to act in revenge.  Not like they have a choice, if Sylvanas is going to randomly burn down cities, then they need to take her out of the picture.  He knows what’s coming, he’s seen it before.  He’s tired of it.

I’m not sure if he wants to die so much as surrender in that walk across the field.   The Alliance would surely capture him.  Zappy Boi gives him a really weird talk about how the Horde is all he has, and Saurfang turns around, then gives a big roar.  This is where it goes off the rails for me.

Sylvanas’ actions will cause the death of numerous members of the Horde, for no sane reason.  She demonstrates worse qualities than Garrosh did.  He may have been mad, but he at least had a goal and took steps to get there.  The Horde is still healing it’s wounds from that time period, and now this crazy nut is in charge.  At no point has she shown any care for the Horde as a whole – it’s always about herself and the Forsaken.  I can appreciate that character trait, but the folks around her (in lore) certainly should take some issue to that.

Saurfang is put in a position where he has to support yet another leader that is acting irrational and putting the Horde in grave danger.  He almost decides he’s had enough and wants to quit, then through some weird twist decides to take up his axe and go to town.

Everyone has seen Braveheart?  You know that part of the war where Wallace looks back for support and the supporting armies desert him?  He still manages a win and then goes after them – ball on chain fun is to be had.

Saurfang in this spot is provided three options.  One is to quit.  One is to follow.  One is to lead.  Quitting apparently is not in his blood – that’s been pretty evident over the years.  Following is something he does well, but it seems to be driving him off the deep end because he sees where it’s going to lead (worse than Garrosh).  He could also simply decide to abandon the Banshee Queen and take 80% of the Horde under his leadership.  He’d get all the Orcs, Trolls, Tauren for sure.  Probably a solid set of the various Elf races too.  That leaves Goblins to make a strategic choice (lore dictates they take the easy/life path).  There’s a risk that Sylvanas lives through this fight and goes more crazy.  It’s pretty easy to see how the Horde + Alliance vs Sylvanas ends.  We already did that raid.

All that to say that as beautiful and well-crafted a video as this is, and at how it presents the Horde as not being unified behind their leader, it just reinforces the difficult storyline predicament that Blizzard has put themselves into.  Any Horde player that does not support Sylvanas’ actions is going to instantly empathize with Saurfang.  And that splits the Horde up – again.  Vs. an Alliance that has never been more unified and focused.

I am so utterly confused as to what’s being attempted here that I am paying even more attention to the storyline than normal.  So I guess that’s a silver lining?

I finished part 2 of War of Thorns.  It is much too short.  3 quests, all done within 10 minutes (solely because the last one has a 3 minute timer).

New Warbringers video is part of that quest line.  Spoilers ahoy.

The lore nut in me sees no logic in this.  This feels a tad too much like a rehash of the Garrosh storyline, though that had some decent defense.  This… this has no justification whatsoever.  Of all the opportunities to show the Horde having growth, the lessons learned post-Garrosh, this just throws it all out the window.  Maybe this is a way to bring Thrall back into the picture?  Did we not just do this dance?

A bit more.  In this 2nd act, you can see that Saurfang is acting under the concept of honor and is torn with Sylvanas – there are many orcs that are in this line of thought.  The Tauren are not for this either.  Trolls under Vol’jin were trying a different path, one much different than this.  Goblins… no idea.  They only care about making money.  Blood Elves are a bit of a mystery… they were from here after all.  Finally the forsaken are clearly going to follow their queen.  I dunno, that seems to split the Horde pretty much in the middle, if not 80% against this.  Of course, that’s only if you care about lore at all.

Final bit, in this tiny set piece, there’s no logic in destroying one city when the faction captial still stands.  I will agree it hurt the Alliance, but it’s pretty clear that there’s at least one counterstrike (Lordaeron for starters).

From an in-game lens, this more or less splits both continents into Horde / Alliance.  Given that leveling is scaled throughout, it means that 1-60 you’ll only ever see your faction. BC/WotLK is the first time you’ll see another faction, which is odd.  It does line up with the BfA island being split.

Long-term, we all know this is an Old Gods expansion.  Dollars to donuts, Sylvanas just became a raid boss when that reveal is done.  Maybe there will be some justification of these actions at that point.  Until then, the Horde is painted as the instigators and the bad guys.  There’s no shades of grey here.  I’d like to say that there’s a larger storyline, some redemption arc for Sylvanas.  Time will tell.

I can’t say that I’m disappointed, as my expectations for this entire line were extremely low.  Seems the initial reactions are similar.

In contrast to the previous Warbringers vid (Jaina), this is extremely deflating.

On a tear now ain’t I?

Post brought to you buy a WoW Dev tweet.

We’ve just updated our hotfixes blog post with today’s hotfixes, including the reduction in experience required to level for levels 40-100:https://t.co/0t7nSI6Prh

— WarcraftDevs (@WarcraftDevs) July 31, 2018

Recall the internet furor that 8.0 brought in terms of leveling speed? No?  Internet furor is hard to measure.  Anyhow, the devs made a booboo when they crunched all the numbers for 8.0 and either monsters had too many hit points, or were hitting too hard.  I found a few of those within 10 minutes on my Warlock and just decided to wait it out.  That aside from the fact that from 60+ I gained no skills, and gear improvements are non-existent.  It’s the same gameplay from 60-100.

Previous to this, Legion made some leveling zone changes as well. The issue was covered in 2 main points.

1. People were outleveling zones in a half dozen quests and unable to complete the story lines.
2. Time to Kill (TTK) was too low.  Anyone with a cast time could barely hit anything before it died, and no one really knew how their class played until level 100+

To address the first item, the applied scaling to all the zones, just like in Legion proper.  I would say that was a successful change.  Similar issues to 8.0, but generally pretty small.  You could level pretty much wherever you wanted.  Neat!

To address the second item, they boosted all enemy HP so that the TTK went from something near 3 seconds to closer to 10.  That in itself is not a bad change, but it was isolated and, in my opinion, short sighted.

Leveling has 1 main goal, and that’s to get to the top.  Measuring that goal is done through two facets – the time it takes to get there (objective) and the fun had along the route (subjective).  Since pretty much Cataclysm, the time to level from 1-X was fairly stable.  Sure, heirlooms had an impact, but general time to level was pretty stable.  The tripling of TTK increases the amount of time to level.  It wasn’t massive, since the majority of experience is from quest completion, but it was certainly noticeable.

The fun along the way measure split a few players.  Some had fun rounding up 10-20 enemies and then AEing them to the ground.  Others wanted to explore more of the zone.  Others wanted to see more of their favorite quest chains.  It is impossible to please everyone under subjective measure.  Still, it’s somewhat fair to say that most people were pleased with the world-scaling changes.

Progress

The above noted XP change reduces the amount required to level by ~14% for 60-80, and a bit less for the other levels.  That covers the BC/WoTLK era (10-13 year old quest design) and is (subjectively) my least favorite part of the leveling experience.  With so many people re-rolling allied races, those who have clearly demonstrated they know how to level, it makes sense to have a leveling normalcy applied.

Maybe I will end up leveling my warlock.

That time of the year again, where we appreciate flying with the understanding that it’s going away in 2 weeks. For at least a year.

I think there’s no better example of what flying does to WoW than leveling a Druid.  The benefits of instant travel, and the fact that you can interact with most world objects while in flight form make it feel like there’s a cheat code active.  Druids without flight form feel like molasses.

I’ve leveled my fair share to 110.  Usually I get a half dozen to max level by the end of an expansion.  Monk, DH, DK, Rogue, Paladin are there now.  Figure Druid can catch up pretty quick.  Aside from the Monk/DH runs, I’ve used ConsLegion to speed up the process.  Basically TomTom + auto-accept quests for super speed.

With the exception of Stormheim and Highmountain, most zones are decent enough on the ground.  Stormheim at least has the hookshot… so I’ve always left Highmountain for last.  Leveling was usually decent enough.  Maybe a level a session or so.  Most of the time is spent travelling between NPCs.  When I unlocked flying a while back, the DK and Paladin shot through levels – nearly twice the speed of before.

Druid though.  That’s another ballgame.  I made 3 levels in 2 hours. I cleared most of Valsharah in 30 minutes.  An I’m not in bear-mode, AEing everything.  This is cat-mode, where it’s stun/bleed/swap, arguably a slower process.

And that my friends, is exactly why Blizzard removes flying on a consistent basis.  Flying negates a supremely large amount of content.  Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy the vertical aspects of zones.  Zones that are designed thoughtfully.  Stormheim is a whole lot of fun to move around (minus the large gorge in the middle).  It’s honestly fun to explore the nooks and crannies, and doing it 2 or 3 times isn’t too bad.  It’s when you realize that the content is really just padded with travel… and that you’ve already explored it to the end that it’s time to turn off that mode.

There is a good argument against flying when it comes to hunting rares/gathering.  It is easy as pie to jump from one target to the next without consequence.  Most rares have minimal value for a max level character after a couple weeks.  Nodes… that becomes a farmer’s dream and a money making machine.  I made a shredder to harvest herbs just for that reason alone.  A quick fix for this is to have a counting debuff while flying.  After it caps, nodes only appear while walking until it wears off.  I’m sure there are better ideas.

So here we are, 2 weeks from BFA and 2 weeks until I say goodbye to the skies.  I know it will come back, just not when.  I’ll certainly miss it for the first few weeks, then grow accustomed.  It’s that 2 month marker where I’ll be itching.  So fingers crossed it comes sooner rather than later.

I certainly recall having quests that required 3-5 players to complete way back when.  Nearly everything in EQ required way more people.  WoW was smaller groups.  SWTOR did it for a while too.  The latter 2 never really worked out, while EQ had so few quests and a mandatory grouping requirement, that it sort of did (after hours of waiting).

The quick and dirty answer to that was solved by Rift – quick grouping.  With a single button press you would join nearby players, all attempting the same event.  Was great for group quests, and even better for Rifts.  The system only started to breakdown when there was a lack of players around you (say mid-game when most were top level).  Still, the model made sense.

I loved that system for 3 main reasons.  First, there are practical ones.  Group content isn’t about throwing meat at the problem.  I like healing.  It’s useless to heal solo.  It works wonders in a group, so auto-grouping made it so that I could heal effectively.  I had targets, HP bars, focus, etc…  Second, it allowed for an easy way to meet new people.  I met my guild in Rift with that.  I’ve swapped guilds in WoW with that.  Sure, there are the silent, let’s-get-this-done-and-drop people, but you will find other folks.  Third, it’s stupid easy.  This meant that you could effectively auto-group while leveling, and doing the daily quests.

The LFG tool for custom groups does have use.  Sentinax farming.  Fishing rep building.  Things that are not quest related are done through this, and generally it works.  World bosses was better with an add-on, but it did also have LFG as a backup.  I get that part. The downside to LFG is the overheard of using the tool.  Compared to “press a single button”, LFG seems like a slow lead-eating cousin.  In effect, it meant that LFG was used once a week.

(Side note:  Fishing rep building should only ever be done in a group/raid setting. You go from 12 hours of effort, to 2.  And get to have fishing conversations with the raid.  Win-win.)

For some reason, Blizz decided to block the auto-group feature from addons in BfA and push people to use LFG.  Without actually changing LFG.  I am honestly a bit confused why.  For 95% of the uses the addon provided, that has just been removed.  We’ll go back into the solo-mode for world content, and then LFG for weekly bosses.  This is quite strange.

Aside from Argus quests to defeat champions (that only tanks can really solo effectively) there is no difficulty in daily quests.  Just time sinks due to combat for spawns.  Redoing Tanaan Jungle recently proves how crappy an experience that is to the openness of Legion.  It’s deafening silence as compared to dynamic grouping.

I think that’s my largest gripe with 8.0.  Sure, there are always going to be tweaks to gameplay, but it feels like the fun parts, the dynamic parts, have been removed for a month, if not forever.

At least I still have my fishin’.

It isn’t often that a gaming video has some resonance with me.  This is quite well done, mainly due to the way that the art (image and sound) work so well together.

Not much of a secret that I have been a Blizzard fan for ages.  I am quite familiar with the story lines that pre-date WoW, and the particular tone that Chris Metzen applied for so many years.

Jaina has been part of Warcraft since W3.  She was a well-crafted character up until the start of MoP.  Then she went off the deep-end and became a caricature of the crazy villain.  The focus went to the Wrynn family for 3 expansions.  Or Khadgar for 2.

Recall that everything Jaina has loved or fought for has been destroyed – her family, her lovers, her friends, parts of her nation, even Theramore.  I am struggling to think of another major character that has lost more.  (Sylvanas is a different topic, as most of it is self-inflicted.)

Looks like they are pushing her to be vengeance / remorse driven, which puts her in the anti-hero archetype.  People do not make good decisions when they are emotionally driven.  WoW has a penchant for redemption story-lines, and it will be curious as to how Jaina comes to terms with her past in order to move forward.

At the end though, if this is the first of three shorts… I am really looking forward to the next two.