The War Within

Manaforge Omega Raid Preview: First Look at the First 7 Bosses (PTR Testing)

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Spoilers ahead on the new raid.

Patch 11.2 is almost here, and I got a chance to jump into the Manaforge raid on Normal difficulty during PTR testing this weekend with my new guild, Death Testers. We previewed 7 of the 8 bosses (Dimensius was not available for testing), and I’ve compiled my thoughts, early impressions, and videos for each. Use this as a scouting report as you prepare your raid team or just want a peek at what’s ahead.

1. Plexus Sentinel

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • Introductory level boss. We start off in a confined room without a lot of space to work with, and the raid will need to progress from chamber to chamber.
  • There are circles (with red player arrows above) that need to be taken to the outside. These drop a puddle that seemingly eventually despawns. I expect these to stay longer or even permanently in harder difficulties. Important: Don’t drop them by the entry wall.
  • Big group soak mechanic: Eradicating Salvo, we just grouped under the boss for it.
  • About 60 seconds in, Protocol: Purge starts with a knockback. Dodge giant bubbles and rotating lines before reaching a slowly moving wall that you’ll need to use your Reshii Wraps through using the Extra Action Button (seems to be an 8-yard blink, 8s cooldown).
  • Phase ends after blowing up the shield, then rinse and repeat.

2. Loom’ithar

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • Big fuzzy spider vibes.
  • Kill an add to break through a shrinking wall early in the fight. Place a marker or designate a spider right away.
  • Lots of dodging with circles and movement-heavy mechanics.
  • Frontal cone needs to be soaked, and you may need to split players into two groups.
  • At 30%, Loom’ithar becomes mobile. Movement and positioning become critical from here on based on how much of the room has been covered.

3. Soulbinder Naazindhri

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • Adds are locked in prisons, and you’ll need to aim beams to break them out. If the prisoners are not broken out in time, then the ads will eventually break out on their own. Encounter seems to be about ad management and deciding which ones to break out to defeat over the course of the fight.
  • Edge-of-platform fight: easy to get knocked off. No guard rails
  • Remember Kyveza lines? They’re back, but these orbs move slower.
  • You cannot use the prisons as cover, so plan knockbacks accordingly.

4. Forgeweaver Araz

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • More adds! You’ll be splitting your raid for soak mechanics that spawn enemies.
  • Collector Pylons emit orbs, and dodging becomes important here.
  • Random players spawn adds that should be spawned under the boss to cleave.
  • At 50%, we switch to a new phase focused on the pylons, before reverting again.
  • At 25%, a giant black hole pulls the raid while damage ramps up heavily. Use a Warlock gate near the back of the room to help stabilize movement or as an emergency to port back to the front and buy time.

5. The Soul Hunters (Optional Boss)

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • Fight against 3 Demon Hunters (cool design twist!)
  • You can skip this one, oddly enough.
  • DPS them evenly, or you’ll fall behind.
  • Each has its own toolkit and expect lots of individual responsibility.
  • Magic debuffs remove puddles, and dispelling the debuff jumps the effect to a nearby player. The afflicted player just needs to walk into a puddle to remove it.

6. Fractillus

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • Tetris-meets-WoW. Favorite fight of the test.
  • Arena is split into six zones. Players spawn walls by running to their zone.
  • Shortly after, another group breaks those walls by standing in front of them. We gave tanks their own zone.
  • The challenge is managing space. Poor wall coordination means it’s game over.
  • Fast, punchy encounter with lots of movement and communication required.

7. Nexus-King Salhadaar

Thoughts & Impressions:

  • Multi-phase fight, includes mounted phase with a dragon.
  • Reminiscent of Sarkareth—players start with debuffs and must cleanse them through mechanics.
  • Wraps are critical for jumping to side platforms to kill adds, then porting back.
  • Once the mount gets low, Salhadaar sacrifices it and gains HP back based on the mount’s remaining health.
  • Final phase: Meteor mechanics pull the raid toward them (again, Kyveza-style). You’ll need equal positioning to survive.

All in all, this looks like a fun raid to close out The War Within. Did end up playing Shadow and changed up specs a few times (you’ll notice I completely forgot about Void Form somewhere and I had to scramble to find it in my spellbook to rebind it — oops!)

Thoughts on the Upcoming Raid Renown

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With the next raid, Blizzard is building upon the finery buff that was added in the first season. Raiders would receive a gradually increasing buff over time as they worked their way through the raid, and this week is the final amount where it will cap at an 18% bonus. The Gallagio Loyalty Rewards club aims to build upon this with additional rewards and features while raid teams progress their way through the raid. There are 20 Renown tracks which means there will be at least 20 weeks of raid because you can only progress one Renown level per week. We can easily acquire Renown just by participating in the raid by defeating bosses or knocking out various Lieutenants throughout the raid. If you happen to fall behind, there are catchup mechanics where more reputation will be earned on kills until you get closer to parity.

The big prize that stands out is the return of the bullion currency (Puzzling Cartel Chip) which can be used for a player to redeem to a vendor for any weapon, trinket, or special item from the Undermine raid. Like what we had back in Season 4 of Dragonflight, these are items on their own upgrade track (a maximum of rank 14).

Unfortunately, the two Puzzling Cartel Chips drop at Renown 17 and Renown 19.

I would much rather see the Cartel Chip moved up earlier. For it to be released at week 17 and week 19 is fairly useless because it equates to being at a similar point to where we are right now in Nerub-ar Palace. Seriously, we would get new toys 4 months after the raid releases. I’d prefer to see one come out at week 12 (after 3 months) and the next one at week 16 (after 4 months). It gives us time to enjoy where it might impact progression, especially for any mid to late mythic progression teams.

In terms of other rewards, I would also advocate for another catalyst charge or two in some of the earlier Renown tracks just to help with gear flexibility and bad luck protection, especially for teams who are just unfortunate or who have a slightly imbalanced roster for tier sets.

It’s also odd to me that Enchanted Crests aren’t anywhere to be found in the reward track here, as they were offered in the other Renown reputation tracks outside of the raid. I would add consider adding an Enchanted Heroic Crest somewhere around Renown 10 and then an Enchanted Gilded Crest around Renown 14 just to further help players (and their alts) with crafting pieces as those will continue to maintain relevancy for alts and help out players who are behind on their gear (whether it’s due to playtime or as bad luck protection).

After testing the PTR the previous weekend when it was available for normal bosses, I appreciate the lobby area, which has all of the profession tables, vendors, and craft orders. I can see them coming in handy in the future and it’ll save raid groups time if they need to grab something.

Renown 18 comes with increased movement speed and an Auctioneer, but since we can mount around inside anyway, I feel like this particular reward isn’t as necessary. I suspect many raid teams will have at least one character with some kind of Brutosaur.

The Augment Rune vendor is a great touch, even if it comes in at Renown 14. It might be a potential money machine for those with an army of alts to simply pop in the raid, grab the rune from the dispenser, then resell it (assuming they’re tradeable, to begin with).

I like the innovation going on here with the Renown feature and can’t wait for it to go live in the next patch! But please consider changing the order of that Cartel Chip reward!

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.