News and Opinion

General news and opinion about WoW.

Crests and Flightstones Need to be Alt Friendly

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With the upcoming The War Within expansion for World of Warcraft, we’re getting some cool new features like Warbands and reputation consolidation (at the cost of Human Diplomacy, sadly). But if we really want to make it easier and more fun to play with our alts, we need to take another look at how we gear them up. Right now, the system for Crests and Flightstones is a massive pain, especially if you’re trying to gear multiple characters.

The Current Problem

I’ve got a Priest and a Shaman both sitting at item level 527, which is pretty close to max (barring some vault upgrades). But when I think about levelling up my Paladin, Mage, and Evoker, it feels like an insurmountable grind. Running endless dungeons to collect Crests just isn’t appealing. To make things worse, Crests and Flightstones can’t be sent to your other characters, even though other in-game currencies can in TWW. This really slows down progress for alts.

Some Ideas to Fix This

Discounted Upgrade Crests and Stones

A great solution would be to offer discounted upgrades for Crests and Flightstones for alts. We already have something similar for gear upgrades. For example, if you get a new belt, you can upgrade the ilvl of it to match your current belt at a cheaper rate (no Crests, just Flightstones).

Why not extend this to our alts?

Imagine if once your main character fully upgrades their gear set to a certain level, like with the The Awakened Aspects achievement, your alts could then upgrade their gear more cheaply. This would reward your hard work and make gearing up alts a lot less painful.

Exchange Rates for Crests and Flightstones

Another idea is to let players buy Crests and Flightstones for their alts using an exchange system. Many of us have loads of Crests and Flightstones just sitting there unused on our main characters. I think my Priest has like 450 Aspect Crests just collecting dust. If we could trade them at, say, a 3:1 ratio, it would make those extra resources useful again. This way, we wouldn’t have to grind so much to gear up our alts.

Better Boss Drops and Incentives

On a completely different note, we also need to talk about raid rewards. Right now, the last two bosses in any raid drop the same level Crests as the earlier bosses in the instance. But bosses like Raszageth, Echo of Neltharion, and Sarkareth are a lot tougher. In Heroic raids, for example, it would make sense for these bosses to drop higher-level Crests like Aspect Crests instead of just Wyrm Crests.

This change could also keep players interested in completing entire raids. Right now, when I join pickup raids, I notice many players quit after getting their weekly vault rewards from the first six or so bosses. If the final bosses offered better rewards, more players might stick around to finish the raid or decide to give it a few pulls just to see.

Wrapping It Up

This expansion is a perfect chance for Blizzard to make the game more friendly for players with alts. By adding discounted upgrades and an exchange system for Crests and Flightstones, the game could become a lot more enjoyable for those of us who like to play multiple characters. Not only that, by tweaking raid rewards to match the difficulty of bosses, Blizzard could keep more players engaged throughout the whole raid. We can do it with the power of… uh, friendship!

In the meantime, I’m going back to chain-running dungeons to try to max out my Paladin before expansion launch.

Idea: Could LFR Boss Mechanics Reward Gameplay?

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LFR has a reputation for being a raid mode that’s already mindless and easy. LFR Raszageth was an exception, but we’ll chalk that to a one-off. With today’s release of the second wing of Aberrus, everyone’s queuing in for a shot at tier and trinkets. On a Tuesday morning, I see that many of the players are choosing to ignore some of the mechanics and I’m sure that’s okay to do if you’re already geared and can survive a few things. I do catch the odd player here and there who’s not sure what’s going on or struggling when they’re targeted with certain abilities. What if there was a way to teach and incentivize the players in LFR to do certain things correctly?

At the end of Shadowlands (Season 4), all expansion raids were back in circulation but with some new affixes. If you completed the mechanics, you’d gain a buff whether it’s to haste or throughput or movement speed. That was a neat way to add some extra challenge and reward. Why not take that concept and introduce it to a few bosses and abilities in LFR that are staple mechanics that can be commonly found on other bosses? What I’m suggested is if players execute a given mechanic properly, reward the raid with a positive buff.

On this Rashok screenshot above, you can see Doom Flames is in the progress of being launched. Some of them are soaked, but others aren’t. Normally, any missile that doesn’t hit a player results in the whole raid taking damage per missed attack. If all of the pools are soaked, let’s provide the whole raid with 10 seconds of haste.

In Assault of the Zaqali, players can hurl these boulders over the edge at designated spots with the red column of light indicating there’s a wall climber ascending. One idea could be that if the raid successfully eliminates five wall climbers with boulders, everyone’s attacks has a chance to be duplicated onto one nearby target for 6 seconds.

When raid mechanics get missed, the healers are often punished because it’s on them to heal through what (admittedly little) damage goes out. At least this way, it provides extra onus to the DPS players. Experiments last stage involves Rionthus’ Temporal Anomaly where he gets a shield if the orb doesn’t get booted away and I guess that sort of punishes DPS players a bit as they have to punch through a shield. Anyway, the point here is the idea that proper execution can lead to a small, minor performance boost and players can feel good about themselves in the process. Hopefully, this will encourage better play that could translate to normal raid difficulty and above.

Mythic Dungeon Season 1 Isn’t Fun

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I want to take a moment and just discuss the state of keys and dungeons for this first season of Dragonflight. There’s some definite negativity going around with the dungeons, the affixes, and the season in general. I’m not immune to it and I understand it. But I’ve never participated in a season where I’ve witnessed players just bailing on keys mid-run.

This just happened to me the other day. I mean, yeah it’s Tyrannical this week, but I don’t think it was impossible. It would’ve been very close.

Anyway, I find the atmosphere around keys have been quite gloomy and not as optimistic. Some of my friends in previous seasons who aimed to push and test their ability to climb as high as possible aren’t going for it this season. They’re content to just get their +20s done and unlock their portals then call it until the next season.

Why Is That?

Because it’s not fun!

Thundering is just not enjoyable at all. You get a buff that’s difficult to discern in what is often a visual cornucopia of ground effects, spell effects, and other bullshit on your screen. In order to handle it effectively, you need to have some Thundering Weak aura installed that gives you and your team the best chance of clearing it at the right time so you can track who has what debuff and where they are. It can be hard to tell the differences between two shades of gray when you’re on other sides of the room or a mob pack without it.

Seriously, I would’ve made the positive a bright purple and the negative a Lucio green or something to make it pop that much more.

Furthermore, if you fail to clear it, you get stunned and you take damage that normally isn’t bad by itself and is survivable, but when combined with other incoming attacks is often lethal to one person. It’s at the point where I’ll clear it within 5 seconds right away to not have to deal with it. The 30% buff to performance just isn’t worth the risk.

Let’s look back.

Shadowlands Season 1

  • Prideful: It was okay, but if you didn’t utilize the Prideful buff, you risked completely bricking your key. You sure did feel amazing though when you had the Prideful buff.
  • Tormented: Better. You got to pick a buff. Your character got stronger and stayed that way for the course of the dungeon. Depending on your role, there were certain must-have picks. It may have been boring, but it wasn’t actively punishing.
  • Encrypted: Easily one of my favourites. The relics were great and it spawned a mob that you had to deal with which buffed your party temporarily. Priest Boon of Ascendance with near-unlimited cooldown recovery was just fun even if it was for a few seconds. You could tailor your routes accordingly by targeting Wo and using invisibility to get around.
  • Shrouded: Alas, this one was also kind of boring since it was just a flat stat buff as you progressed. But if you defeated the Infiltrators, you still gained a buff and you could feel your character get that much stronger over time within the dungeon.

None of the ones here felt overly punishing. Even if the affixes themselves seemed dull, that’s okay. Let the dungeon itself provide that fun factor.

I won’t touch too much on the BfA affixes. Those ones were just extra things that made the dungeon more challenging and didn’t offer much of a benefit except for Awakened which was neat and allowed for creative pathing with the Obelisks and the alternate universe.

In any event, Thundering doesn’t provide an impactful performance when playing. I’m not sure how I would really fix it. One thing I would do is make it less punishing — Remove the stun if two people don’t clear and just leave a DoT on the affected. At least it gives the players some chance of recovery. If they do it, great. If not, well they’re dead anyway. A DoT plus a stun is excessive. It’s so punishing that it leads average players (like myself) to not even risk a long duration of the buff. If it was just a few DoT ticks, I can make that tradeoff calculation in my head and decide whether it was worth that extra party damage and healing through it.

The seasonal affixes have the opportunity to make even the most dreadful dungeons appealing.

King’s Rest?

Shrine of the Storm?

Sanguine Depths?

De Other Side?

Cathedral?

I absolutely hated healing through all of these, but give me Encrypted or Tormented and even the most hated dungeons go from “hell no!” to “okay, fine!”. As for the other dungeon affixes, I don’t have a strong opinion about them one way or the other. The Bolstering change has been incredible. This week with Tyrannical, Bolstering, and Volcanic is a great push week. Managed to get to +2400 on my alts to the point now where both my Mage and my Evoker have more portals than my Priest. But for the designers, I implore you. Incentivize the players with the benefit of doing the seasonal affix. Don’t punish them. If you want to make dungeons difficult, the rotating weekly affixes already do that. If you want a challenge, then let the dungeon trash or boss do that. But adding another pain point in the form of a seasonal affix that operates under “If you don’t do this, bad things will happen” is backbreaking. Make the seasonal affix something that players look forward to and are eager for.

Flash Concentration and How to Use It

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Going into Shadowlands, it seemed universally agreed upon that the Harmonius Apparatus was going to be the top throughput legendary for Holy Priests. Who doesn’t want Holy Word spells getting further cooldown reduction and indirectly feeding Holy Word: Salvation, right?

It wasn’t when I started trying to heal in mythic dungeons that I felt I was struggling more than most compared to Shamans and Druids (as usual). I considered Flash Concentration (or FC), though I was skeptical about it at first until I received a few recommendations about it. After a few dungeons and select raid bosses, I am now a believer.

Flash Concentration is a great pick among Holy Priest legendaries. It slots in either your wrist or neck slot. I selected the wrist slot for mine so I could apply a +15 Intellect enchant to it.

Each time you cast Flash Heal, Has its casting time reduced by 0.2 sec and healing increased by 3%, stacking up to 5 times.

For some reason, when I read that, I interpreted that it would apply only to your next Heal. That’s not what happens though. The FC buff lasts for 15 seconds. For that window, your Heal cast time is 1 second less which puts it as the same cast time as a Flash Heal and increases the healing throughput of it. You can squeeze off about 9 consecutive casts of Heal before having to hit Flash Heal to refresh it. Last week’s Fortified affixes included Grievous which was a struggle to heal through but having FC completely trivialized it.

Usage in dungeons

My talent setup

There is wiggle room. Shining Force gets the nod over Censure during a week like Necrotic where the slow and knockback can help your tanks shake off their stacks. I personally like Censure in most cases (largely because I’m not great in my Shining Force usage).

Depending on your dungeon layouts, Benediction is often the better move because you don’t need to fret about accidentally pulling an unintentional mob pack with Divine Star or Halo.

With the last row, you can make a case for Light of the Naaru or Apotheosis. I prefer Apotheosis just because of the on-demand reset for Holy Words in case something accidentally happens. This is my pug dungeon insurance. If I’m running with my guild or other players that I know consistently, I’ll convert over to Light of the Naaru instead.

Tip: Keep Mind Soothe handy. I’ve found it to be great when trying to get around certain packs.

Usage in raids

My talent setup

This is a slightly different setup for FC in raids. Enlightenment is now a necessity due to the increased time spent on the encounter. Cosmic Ripple gets you some increased passive healing. Censure or Shining Force is dependent on the encounter. Surge of Light continues to be valuable here to help maintain your FC stacks (otherwise I would just have Prayer Circle active). Halo is the main selection but there is merit to Benediction for certain encounters (like Huntsman and not breaking crowd control).

By default, I’ll keep Harmonius Apparatus equipped. For progression, I’ve got my awesome X’anshi, Return of Archbishop Benedictus pants! We’ll talk about that later though.

There are a few bosses in Castle Nathria where FC shines. If you’re working on progressing through Huntsman Altimor, I recommend using it. During Bargast, if your tank isn’t at full, a fully empowered Heal can help restore the Rip Soul spirits to full health quite quickly. It can top up your 3 players that have been hit with a Sinseeker.

On Mythic, it becomes even more crucial as there are more Rip Soul spirits that spawn off the Sinseeker targets. Whatever Holy Word: Sanctuary doesn’t catch, Flash Heal and Heal will finish off.

If you really want to have some fun, put this on when you’re about to start Sun King’s Salvation. Grab a healing orb, hit Kael with a Guardian Spirit, and start bombing away with Flash Heal and Heal. You will phase him into the Shade in no time.

WeakAuras

I recommend using this Weak Aura to track FC. It doesn’t take up a lot of space and it comes with audio cues for time remaining on FC before it needs a Flash Heal refresh. Mine is positioned above my frames. You can see a Surge of Light weak aura right next to it (Thanks, Kyu!).

If you’re Holy, I can’t recommend using Flash Concentration enough for dungeons and pushing keys. I doubt it’ll make us crazy competitive at the high level but it’ll be more than enough to help get us through some of the affixes coming out. The cast sequencing does take a bit of time to get used to. I admit, I’ve let my fair share of FC stacks drop and really unfortunate times.

Don’t Ask your Guild about Shadowlands

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(No story spoilers)

I missed writing. But between raiding, orchestra practice, and the esports job, something had to give and it was blogging. Though with the current states of affairs going on in the world right now, I find myself with a little more time than usual. Dusted off the site and applied some paint to give it some more life. I’m going to need to dive deeper into the rest of the archives though to see if anything broke.

How about you? How’ve you all been? Take care of yourselves (and each other) out there.

Shadowlands

If you’re like any other guild and you ask them their thoughts on Shadowlands, I guarantee you the consensus you’re going to receive is that it is literally going to be the worst WoW expansion ever. Some of the reasons include:

  • Covenants are going to make everything so imbalanced.
  • Literally every class is going to be overpowered.
  • There is clearly no testing going on.
  • There is a mission table (still).
  • Rogues exist (still).

I’m telling you, Shadowlands is going to be the best expansion (for Holy Priests)! As I was huffing around beta, I jumped into a dungeon queue. Bless that 2 minute healing queue which is both a blessing and a curse. If you ever want to feel pressure, it’s setting up your keybinds via the default system UI, dragging spells out of your spellbook, and configuring talents whilst keeping your party alive.

Everyone’s been all over Discipline in this expansion and Holy Priests are like that forgotten lip balm you have tucked in your drawer somewhere. Prayer of Mending is instant cast. Casting Circle of Healing can reduce the cast time of your next Prayer of Healing (via talent Prayer Circle). The resurrect cloak from Legion has returned in some fashion. Power Word: Shield can be spammed again across the party. I can access Power Infusion (take a number, stand in line)! I am quite delighted with where the class is at right now. Are we going to be throughput monsters in Shadowlands? That’ll most likely be a hard no. Holy was always designed to be above average to good at everything but I know we’ll never excel at one thing.

There is no way I can contain my giddyness. There is going to be a boss somewhere that involves some kind of soak mechanic or else the raid is going to wipe. Obviously, it’s going to go to some Ice Blocking Mage or a Bubbling Paladin first. But there will come a time when the raid leader will say, “Matticus, we’re out of options. You know what to do.” and I will gladly take a dive in the name of progression!

Seriously though, it does seem like my guild has a giant, dark cloud looming over them. I wish I could snap them out of it but I don’t know how. My worry is that they’ll be so demoralized to the point where they want to quit the game. Then what am I going to do? I’d have to go look for another guild to raid with again :(. I understand how seemingly inflexible covenants can be but to Blizzard’s credit, they’ve actually come out and said they’re prepared to allow for ease of use for switching if the system is deemed unsalvageable. I can’t remember the last time the dev team openly saying something like that about a new system they’re shipping with an expansion. So in a way, the acknowledgement is a step in some direction.

Other news

  • We cleared Mythic N’zoth (316 pulls).
  • Reached Platinum 1 in Valorant.
  • My vibrato technique continues to be non-existent.
  • I haven’t cut my hair since January.