Michael Blake 4/11/19 Michael Blake 4/11/19

Rise of 8.2

The WoW team dropped a big info dump about the 8.2 patch coming to the PTR. This patch is a mega patch that will not just add to the story of Battle for Azeroth but will even change one of its most hated systems. The Twitch stream they did was hosted by Senior Game Designer Jeremy Feasel. Now let’s try to squeeze all the information into a signal post.

In 8.2 we will be exploring the two new lands of Nazjatar and Mechagon Island. Nazjatar will be the focus of the patch. Like any new area we will be building up forces, and making new allies. They are adding a new system called Combat Allies. These allies will be powerful friends to have along side you and will gain experience. You will be exploring and questing threw the now risen city of Nazjatar the home of the Naga. You will be teaming up with one of two factions to make your way to the Eternal Palace. This will be the raid for 8.2 where we will confront Queen Azshara. This area will have new world quest, and rare spawns that act kind of like mini world bosses.

Mechagon is a long-lost island of the Mechagnomes. The gnomes here are half gnome half robot. They are led by King Mechagon. This area is a gnomish island where you will be helping to rebuild a mechagnome town. This area will have its own new world quests and have special rare spawns, like the old Timeless Island in Pandaria. The island will also have a new mega dungeon, much like return to Karazan in legion this will be an 8 boss mythic only dungeon. In the dungeon you will be making your way to King Mechagon to stop his plan to detonate a bomb that will turn everyone into robots.

One of the biggest changes coming to the game will be a change to the much hated Heart of Azeroth. You will be helping to rebuild the chamber of hearts. The Heart Forge will be the new focal point of the necklace. Like in legion where you had some kind of place to put your artifact when you added power to it. Now you will be doing this with your Heart of Azeroth. Once you place it there you can unlock traits with some passive abilities and some will have active abilities. From their description of this new system it seems like artifact system 2.0.

For PVP players you will be getting a new arena called the Robodome. PVPers will also be getting Ashran as epic battle ground, and mounts for season 3 of Battle for Azeroth. They will be adding new content for war mode as well.

We are not done yet because in 8.2 you will be able to unlock flying in both Kul’Tiras and Zandalar, when you complete path finder part II you will be rewarded with a new robot parrot mount. On the subject of mounts they are adding something new called mount equipment. These items can be equipped to your mount journal and can give your mounts special abilities. One of those abilities being water walking. Any mount can walk on water or many other things. If you are a fan of island expeditions, they will be adding two new islands.

They dumped a lot of information on us today. For those of you who want to see this content before released you can hop on to the PTR and try it out next week. An official launch date for the patch was not mentioned. You can watch todays stream in its entirety here. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/409517953?t=29m44s

Michael Blake 4/10/19 Michael Blake 4/10/19

Lightborn Undead

The other day was April fools and many places did joke posts. The wow team had there April Fools patch notes and even Wowhead got into the spirit with fake 8.2 PTR data mining. One of the things that were “found” in this data was a new allied race light bound undead.

Now as far as I know this is an April Fools joke and light bound undead is not coming to the game as an allied race in 8.2, but they might be coming to the game someday soon. For those of you who don’t know in the book Before the Storm Calia Menethil (whom you might remember from the priest order hall in Legion) was killed in the chaos of the undead and human get together in the Arathi Highlands. She was then taken to the priest order hall where Saa’ra rises Calia back to life as the first ever light bound undead.

The light born has been referenced recently in game. The 8.1 War campaign ends with you doing the quest fate of Jaina where you attend a meeting about the aftermath of the raid. At one point Anduin askes asks Jaina how she is doing and she says " So much transpired while I was away. Anduin... I've heard rumors about an old friend of mine-- Calia Menethil. What happened in Arathi?" All of this could only mean that the light bound undead will be a major faction going into the future of the game. My guess we will be introduced to the light bound undead by the end of Battle for Azeroth. Of course in the book, Caila Menethil was the only one but some time has passed and there could be more now.

With all that being said, what would light bound undead be like in WoW? Well, I would think they would be like the light forged Draenei, where they look just like Draenei but they have cool looking light tattoos. But what if the WoW team wanted to do something different and made light bound undead a neutral allied race. Much like the Pandaren, you would get to choose to side with the Horde or the Alliance.

This would make sense for the narrative they explored in legion where light and void are not necessarily good or evil. Thus the light bound undead not be Horde or Alliance and would choose. Before you say “but horde already has undead why would they have light undead too” well the Alliance already had Draenei but we still got Light Forged Draenei as an allied race.

Now I’m going to go one step further, what if light forged undead became a normal race attached to a new hero class. They could be some kind of super priest or light mage. They could say being risen as an undead by the light caused their powers to become stronger. They would still be neutral. Now I know this is unlikely but since we just got Deamon Hunters in Legion so getting another Hero Class is unlikely plus it would just add to the growing problem of class balance. I just really want a range Hero Class.

8.2 could hit the PTR anytime now and I'm sure we will not see light born undead. I truly think we will see them soon in the game and then further in the future we will be able to play them. They might even be the key to saving Azeroth herself.

Michael Blake 2/19/19 Michael Blake 2/19/19

Uldir a Review

Oh boy, the first of Battle for Azeroth is in the books now. We are well into the Battle of Dezarlor. Now is a good time to look back and talk about how was the first tire of the expansion.

I have to start off and say this was not my favorite raid ever. I've never cared much for the Uld type raids like Ulduar. They have always seemed like busy work to me and this time it was a little more relevant to the story. They could have started the expiation by doing two different raids. Like have Uldir as horde centered raid and have Crucible of Storms for the Alliance. But that is not what they did.

If you like Old Gods and bugs then this might have been the raid for you. Being the first raid tier we had plenty of game bugs to go with the creepy crawly kind. We had useful ones. Like as a mage being able to use frost orb to reset MOTHER to skip the trash you have to do to open the door to get to her. Some halted progression for some. a big problem they had, was a design problem. Some bosses were designed with certain classes in mind or in some cause required. This is fine when you are doing mythic raiding and have at least one of every class.

I know with the team I raid with, we got to Zul on heroic and we ran into the issue. We felt we needed a Death Knight to pull adds in during the fight. From all the kill videos we saw most of those groups had a Death Night but we didn't and we were hindered by that. I then finally had to team up with another raid team to get past him. Until that point, we had to get more geared and learned other fights. The other bosses went down as they should Zul was the one that had us and others were in our same boat.

This was also the first raid tier where we didn't have tier gear sets. Instead, we had Azerite gear, which had its issues. For most people, the problem was grinding out Azerite. Other people have the issue with the traits on the gear. The fact that some of the best in slots came from doing mythic plus dungeons and not from the raid itself.

The mythic world first race took only a week and a day for Method to beat. I mean the where other guilds but come on we all knew Method was going to get it. Though the race in this expansion docent end with world first it's the first 100 this time around. The hall of fame is a new thing the WoW team is trying. Once 100 Horde and 100 Alliance guilds have cleared mythic then cross realm mythic raiding is turned on. It only took the Horde until 10/14/18 to get their 100 but allianced lagged behind not getting their 100 until 11/5/18. So it was 2 months before cross-realm mythic raiding could happen. As a non-mythic raider it docent effect me. But I do feel like this is a bad system. Nowadays with cross-realm normal and heroic raiding, and sharding. Why does it matter if everyone is on the same realm for the hardest raid content. Mythic raiding should be cross realm from the get-go. Though I do like the hall of fame and they should keep it as a bragging rights thing. But lose that as a rule for cross-realm raiding.

Uldir was a mixed bag of problems. But once things had been hot fixed and people got the hang of it, Uldir was an average raid. I doubt anyone will look back at this raid with fond memories of the bosses. It will be the first raid where we got to see the changes from legion to BFA take effect. We are currently in the next raid and I think this one might be the most beloved. But we will have wait and see.