With the Dragonflight pre-patch event in full swing and the expansion release in just a few days, I thought I’d talk about how Shadowlands season 4 went. I already blogged about Heroic: Fates of the Shadowlands Raids. Now let’s look at m+ and RBGs
Mythic+
I mainly played Sotiros, my resto shaman again. We didn’t go for Keystone Hero this season, so it was an easier season. I had a 2229 rating, which is mostly the +16 to +18 range.
I barely played Devee, my holy priest. Maybe I’ll play him more in Dragonflight! He had a 1481 rating and was missing a lot of scores.
Rated Battlegrounds
Mooglegem and I earned the Vicious Warstalker mount this season in rated battlegrounds. The win rate was fairly even, and I earned an extra Vicious Saddle too.
Back in mid-August I earned Fates of the Shadowlands Raids, and a couple weeks ago I earned the heroic variant. Once we earned our Jigglesworth Sr. slime cat mounts, we promptly jumped off Oribos!
While most people reading this likely understand the fated system, for those of you don’t, this was the first time Blizzard used something like this for a raid season. Rather than using new raids or even just updating an old raid (like Naxxramas and Onyxia’s Lair level 80 versions), this season involved scaled up versions of all three Shadowlands raids. Each week, one raid would be “fated,” scaled to current ilvls and with additional affixes to change things up a bit. Most of these affixes boiled down to being buffs, but some did cause issues on fights that were positionally difficult. The affix on each boss rotates each time the raid is fated as well.
Each boss could have one affix when the season started and later it was changed to two out of a possible four.
Chaotic Essence: Someone must interact with it to make it hostile. When it’s hostile, it keeps summoning little adds. Every little add that’s killed grants a stack of a damage, healing, and absorbs buff. The adds do damage, but it never felt like it mattered.
Protoform Barrier: This appears as a buff on the boss. When dispelled, it creates an add that’s attackable and shares a big absorb shield with other enemies. When it’s killed, it mirrors the damage done to it to the boss and gives a damage bonus to players. (There’s also a second add that healers can heal to reduce the absorb shield.) This was usually not a problem, but if the group is near a wipe, the boss is almost dead, and then a Protoform Barrier appears, it can cause a wipe.
Reconfiguration Emitter: An add casts raid-wide damage and gets a stacking damage buff over time. Once it casts or is interrupted, it’s attackable. When it dies, it increases player stats based on its power level. This never felt like an issue.
Creation Spark: Players get debuffs that will create circles on the ground when dispelled or expired. Standing in one gives players a mini lust. Every circle that doesn’t have a player standing in it will explode with raid-wide damage. This can be deadly on heavy movement fights.
Here’s Delillidan (Elias), me, and Mooglegem (gem) on our mounts!
This fated system certainly seems designed to extend the life of the content without heavy development. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and I enjoyed the season. However, the fated rotation adds difficulties. During the first three weeks of the season, my raid group spent the first raid night of the week doing normal and the second doing heroic. On the third week, I had to miss the second raid night. While I earned my normal achievement and the mount, it means I missed heroic fated Sepulcher. In the following weeks, my raid group decided to raid just once per week and stick to heroic. Three weeks after the previously missed Sepulcher, I had to miss raid night once again – which means I once again missed heroic fated Sepulcher. Yes, it’s on me for missing raids. But bad timing with a schedule plus the fated rotation can really hurt things.
I did manage to do some pugging to get my heroic fated Sepulcher of the First ones done. Now I’m Sotiros, Hero of Fate!
I earned Shadowlands Keystone Master: Season Four about three weeks ago and earned this purple beauty – the Restoration Deathwalker! (And I’m glad they recolored it, because this one is much better.) I enjoyed mixing in the old dungeons to keep things fresh, and I think it was a good test run of how mythic+ dungeon pools will work in Dragonflight. It’ll be a little weird not to be experiencing all the new dungeons in the first Dragonflight season, but I do think it’ll help keep the second season feeling new and exciting. From left to right in the screenshot is Delillidan (Elias), Carmela (Marc), Sotiros (me), Mushkin (Matt), and Mooglegem (gem)!
Now that we’re a couple days into Shadowlands season 4, I thought I’d talk about how the last season ended. I successfully reached my three goals – 3k m+ rating, Ahead of the Curve, and the Vicious PVP mount.
Mythic+
I definitely spent more time on mythic+ than anything else in Shadowlands season 3. I ended the season at 3017 rating on my shaman.
Here’s the breakdown from raider.io. As we were unlocking portals, I had timed a couple +20 fortified keys but no tyrannical, so I really thought tyrannical was going to be the harder one. Somehow I ended up with a lot more rating from tyrannical than fortified, which I didn’t realize until working on this blog post.
Not the most exciting screenshot, but this is when Shadowlands Keystone Hero: Season Three popped! Like last season two, I main’d restoration shaman. I also earned the rest of the dungeon portals this season that I didn’t get last season, and we made sure everyone in our m+ group got all the portals.
I also played holy priest a little. My goal was just 2500 rating, and I got that done without much stress!
Raiding
I finished Sepulcher of the First Ones heroic on my resto shaman, although the Jailer did give me some trouble. We ended up splitting the raid team into multiple small groups after determining that the fight was easier with smaller groups. I didn’t end up getting my kill until week 19 of the season – 56 days after defeating the previous boss, Rygelon!
This is Carcinized Zerethsteed, the Ahead of the Curve mount! It’s pretty cool.
The Shimmering Aurelid mount was the reward for Glory of the Sepulcher Raider; it’s another awesome mount!
RBGs
My goal in PVP was to get the Vicious War Croaker, which is the cool frog mount that you can see I earned above. I love the frog animation in which the frog shoots its tongue out to eat the glowing fly! I PVP’d on my priest in discipline.
I ended the season at Challenger II – 1691 RBG rating (also my best) with 45 games won out of 95 played. We also tried 2v2 arena a little, although I like battlegrounds significantly more. In 2s, I ended Challenger I with a rating of 1481 and best rating of 1490 with 20 wins out of 37 matches. Mooglegem and I were expecting to do much worse to be honest, so we were happy with how we did. However, you get much less credit toward the mount while doing 2s, and it caused way more stress. We mostly did RBGs, but it was nice trying 2s.
It was a good season! Now it’s time for season four, which will definitely feel a little different for PVE. I hope everyone has a great season!
Recently I went back to get my DK class mount from Legion. I had finished the order hall campaign and figured it couldn’t be too much work to get the mount. At one time you had to finish the Legionfall campaign, but it seems that’s no longer the case. I doubt it took me longer than an hour or two to get the mount. Spoilers for the quest series follow.
The quests involve finding the remains for a powerful red dragon and raising it in undeath. One quest has you enter the Ruby Sanctum. Originally, there was a feat of strength you could earn for slaying all the red dragons in the sanctum, but Blizzard removed it because they decided it wasn’t fair to give a reward like that for something you could miss. Since it was removed by the time I tried to do the quest, I took the opposite approach; I got in and out without killing anything.
Here’s a video I edited together of the lore parts of the quest series. Starting at 9:26 you can see the three forms of the mount. I mostly play unholy, but I think it’s the worst variation. I like the frost one!
Last week I earned Keystone Master, and this week the last of my 5-man group earned it too! (He would have had it earlier but he fills multiple roles and splits his time between multiple characters.) As is tradition, we took this screenshot on our mounts on the edge of Oribos. From left to right, we are Mushkin (Matt), Delarm (Elias), Sotiros (me, Peter), Todesfall (Marc), Max (Todesfall’s pet), and Mooglegem (gem).
Korthia and the covenant assaults in the Maw brought a lot of new mounts to hung back in 9.1. With 9.2 here, I’ve been looking back at my 9.1 goals. I got most of the 9.1 Korthia/Maw mounts except the Hand of Nilganihmaht (putting the rings together), the Fierce Razorwing (Death’s Advance paragon reward), Tamed Mauler (Archivists’ Codex paragon), and Hand of Salaranga (Breaking the Chains, Korthia meta achievement).
This is my favorite mount from the patch and one of my favorite all time mounts – the Fallen Charger! The gold looks awesome!
The Rampaging Mauler from Konthrogz the Obliterator is also pretty.
I don’t use the Mastercraft Gravewing from Stygian Stonecrusher a ton because it’s so big, but I do think it’s really cool.
The Forsworn Aquilon from Wild Worldcracker is really cool. I know Kyrians already had other tints of this, but I like this one!
While not from this expansion at all, my group has been occasionally going back to Mechagon to get Aerial Unit R-21/X from the hard mode. Only one party member can get it per run, and I came in last! But I did get it last patch. Sweet!
When we started doing rated battlegrounds, Moogle and I were aiming to get the Vicious War Gorm. As you can see, we got our wish.
Here’s a closer look because I think it’s so cool!
I also wanted to collect the gladiator set, which I thought looked great. I know I usually like my priest in blues and whites, but this just looked awesome, at least for PVP, and appropriate for the expansion.
I wasn’t expecting to collect the elite set! We pushed hard the final week of the season. On 2/10, I was at 32.5% and Moogle was at 25% progress toward our seasonal mounts. We had to win at least 30 games over a week and a half, and luckily we made it. However, I wish we pushed earlier so that we could have pushed higher. We both hit 1954 rating without really hitting a wall. If we had more time, I’d love to see how high we could go!
Tuesday night was achievement night for my raid group. This was my last Tuesday raid for a while because the group is moving on to mythic, and I’m not on their server. We still have a couple Saturday raid nights left though, which is good because I wasn’t there for the Sylvanas kill to get Ahead of the Curve.
The Glory of the Dominant Raider meta achievement was easier than I expected. I didn’t really think they were easy enough to finish in one night, but my raid group didn’t question it so maybe they always do it like this. Some achievements made me nervous; Tormentor’s Tango requires you to /taunt Garrosh, which gives you a slow debuff, and then not get hit by any Torments. And if anyone messes it up in the raid, no one gets the achievement. I thought for sure it would be hard, but we did it in one attempt.
The Kel’thuzad fight has one of the cutest achievements – Together Forever. As a reminder, Kel’thuzad had a pet cat back in Naxxramas, Mr. Bigglesworth. If you killed it, he would yell and curse you. I think it’s cute that he had a pet he loved even as a lich. Well, it turns out Mr. Bigglesworth also ended up in the Shadowlands. For this achievement, someone in the raid has to find and pet Mr. Bigglesworth, now a slime-ghost-cat, near the Tarragrue’s platform and then again near Painsmith. This will cause him to spawn in Kel’thuzad,s room, where a player can click him once more. Mr. Bigglesworth will hop on that player’s head. During the Kel’thuzad fight, that player must enter Kel’thuzad’s phylactery and deliver the cat, thawing Kel’thuzad’s head (and causing him to take increased damage). How cute is that?
Here I had some nice tea with Keridwen and Mooglegem while we waited for others to find Mr. Bigglesworth. It was our Finer Things Club.
Look, there he is riding on someone’s head!
I Used to Bullseye Deeprun Rats Back Home was an interesting achievement. There’s a vertical hoop on a stick next to Remnant of Ner’zhul’s platform (like a quidditch goal) with a second hoop swinging. Three “goals” must be scored by throwing the bomb off the platform and through the hoops. None of us had ever noticed the goal posts before.
Whack-A-Soul seemed like one of the most appropriate achievements. On top of everything else Painsmith throws at you, there are Burning Gibbets that appear on the sides. More continue to spawn throughout the fight, and they case a raid-wide four second fear. Basically, you just have to keep killing and interrupting them. This would have likely been very hard earlier when we were less geared.
This World is a Prism, on Sylvanas, was another neat achievement. One prism from each covenant spawns in phase two. Four players must each pick up a prism. In the last phase, each platform has a sigil corresponding to a covenant. The players with the prisms must stand on the sigils to channel on to Anduin. Lore-wise that does… something? But every good WoW fight needs to beams or magic lasers.
And after a little over two hours of raiding, we finished Glory of the Dominant Raider. Now we can all ride our Hand of Hrestimorak mounts! I’m not in love with the hand recolor, but it is a cool model. I have the Hand of Bahmethra from Tormentors of Torghast already. I still need the Hand of Salaranga from Breaking the Chains as well as Hand of Nilganihmaht, the gold hand and one I want the most!
Look at that glorious Mimiron’s Head! My mage, Mooglepete, was the character that finally got the mount to drop. Coincidentally, he was also the one that got Mollie, the alpaca, to drop! I guess he has good luck at mount farming. Bulleto, gem’s hunter, has been holding an Ulduar lockout cleared up to Yogg-Saron for months now. I think he’s happy to end his post in the icy wastes of Northrend.
I wasn’t sure what I was seeing was real for a second. I started nervously laughing when I noticed what dropped. I know I ran this a few times over the years, but likely only 10 or so maybe before I started farming it regularly. Since I started farming, I’ve run it 282 times. At first, I was running it with all 12 of my characters that were over level 50, but it became annoying to move characters I’m actively playing to Ulduar. For the past couple months, I’ve been running it 8 times per week; those 8 characters have just stayed parked in front of Ulduar. It’s nice to be finished!
We decided to clear normal Sanctum of Domination before heading into heroic. We defeated normal Sylvanas on our fourth raid night, which was in the second week of the raid. In heroic, we’re now three bosses into the raid with The Nine falling this week. As mentioned in the title, there will be some spoilers in this post.
I got the Sanctum Gloomcharger’s Reins on my second defeat of The Nine, which was actually in LFR. I’m not sure of the drop rate, but it doesn’t seem too high. It’s a pretty cool mount!
We’re struggling against Soulrender Dormazain in heroic for now, but at least we’re making progress and getting better. This is a pretty cool fight, and I really enjoy seeing Garrosh again.
Here’s the cutscene at the end of the fight courtesy of wowhead. I think this is a pretty good end to Garrosh’s arc. No redemption. He is who he is, and he does feel remorse for his actions. He goes out fighting and even screaming “for the Horde!”
And then I guess he becomes a pile of ash. Oh well.
And this is how I feel after wiping repeatedly to Soulrender Dormazain in heroic! Okay, actually things have been going well, but I thought I’d end the post there. Happy raiding!
We earned our Glory of the Shadowlands Hero achievement this weekend! It’s been a long time since I’ve gone for a Glory achievement to be honest. This was pretty fun and not very fun honestly, although you definitely wouldn’t stumble into all of them without trying. For example, there’s Kaal-ed Shot, requiring you to pick up a Filled Anima Container in Sanguine Depths to get the Shadow Ball buff, carry it through the gauntlet, get knocked off the boss platform toward a lantern, click the lantern to dunk the ball, and then kill General Kaal. What a weird achievement.
The Voracious Gorger is a pretty cool mount. I like the devourers and the little bit of lore about them originating from the in-between. This isn’t one of my favorite mounts necessarily, but I like it. In the screenshot above from left to right is Mooglegem, Delillidan, me, Mushkin, and Kanora – with two of them naked because that’s how they earned the final achievement!
The last achievement we earned for the meta was I Can See My House From Here – another that you’d be unlikely to do without really going for it. The biggest things we learned are 1) perspective can mess with you and 2) trust your friends and don’t tell them what to do haha. We kept correcting each other, which just caused more problems.
Just because I haven’t posted recently doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy in WoW. Lately Mooglegem and I have been joining PUG rated battleground groups in an effort to earn the Vicious War Spider. Those groups come in two flavors – YOLO groups that fill quickly and are not very good and organized groups that fill slowly, use voice chat, and actually coordinate. Sometimes I might have “played” for over an hour just searching for a decent group, and once I joined one, I’d hope to stay for a couple hours.
Eventually I found steady group that welcomed Mooglegem and me to join them consistently. In addition to their RBG groups, we began to raid with them. Thanks to that group, I earned Ahead of the Curve: Sire Denathrius and Heroic: Castle Nathria! I was way over-geared for heroic already thanks to m+ and had a done a few of the bosses, but trying to find PUGs was always such a hassle that I never got around to finishing before this. It’s been fun raiding again, seeing how the fights are supposed to be done, and getting to know new friends.
The PVP grind took longer, but with a good group, I was at least making consistent progress. And about a week ago, I earned by Vicious War Spider! I’m continuing to do RBGs though because I’m having just too much fun. I used to PVP much more before it took a backseat to raiding and then m+, and it’s been so much fun focusing on it again. Playing with a coordinated group certainly helps! Now I’m looking forward to gaining rating (hopefully) and maybe earning another mount! In the screenshot at the top, I’m enjoying my mount while Moogle is on her IMPOSTER Vicious War Spider! Actually she’s about 10% off, and the rest of the group isn’t too far behind. Soon!
Last week I got Shadowlands Keystone Master: Season One! Here’s the five of us on our Sintouched Deathwalkers in Oribos. From left to right: gem (Mooglegem), me (Devee), Matt (Mushkin), Marc (Kanora) and his minions, and Elias (Delillidan). Was the other character in the screenshot the guy who made fun of us? Possibly.
This season felt a lot faster to me. We have one dungeon left, Mists of Tirna Scithe, for a sixth guildmate!
It’s a good thing I have 12 characters and do the boss that drops Mollie, because my 12th run this week gave me the mount! This is probably only the 3rd time I ran all my characters through the boss this expansion (plus whatever I did last expansion when it was current), so not bad really. Look at Mollie! She’s so cute!
I’ve collected a few new mounts and a lot of new pets recently and thought I’d share some highlights. This is the Spirit of Eche’ro, who was Huln’s moose! Who doesn’t love a good spectral moose?
Here’s the beautiful Shimmermist Runner that can be obtained by solving the maze in Ardenweald.
There seems to be just a ton of little things treasures and surprises hidden in nooks and crannies throughout the Shadowlands. I’ve been focusing on Ardenweald when not working on progression. Here are just a couple of pets.
Mollie, the last alpaca that I need, was a mount that I not get. But at least I saw it drop for my friend gem here.
And lastly, the Prestigious Ivory Courser for reaching honor level 40 – a great indication of how little I PVP now!
I might be emotionally scarred from the amount of Horrific Visions and accompanying assaults I did in 8.3. They were neat content, and I really enjoyed the challenge of pushing myself to play better on multiple classes, but I also felt completely burned out by the end of the patch.
By completing both the Horrific Vision of Orgrimmar and Horrific Vision of Stormwind solo while all five masks are activated (the hardest version), you earn the Mad World feat of strength, which rewards the title, The Faceless One. I found that it was significantly harder to do this on cloth characters than any others. I really pushed myself to master my mage and warlock, while it felt like the other classes came easier. In the end, I earned Mad World as a discipline priest, demonology warlock, retribution paladin, elemental shaman, and balance druid. Five classes down!
I also managed to save up the 100,000 corrupted mementos from Horrific Visions to purchase the Wicked Swarmer, shown at the top. It’s a really great mount I think. The color looks good, it’s a cool model, and it’s small enough that it isn’t annoying when using it. I decided to save up for it on my warlock so that my priest, my main, could spend the corrupted mementos on sockets.
The Glacial Tidestorm is guaranteed to drop twice off mythic Jaina in Battle for Dazar’alor, which is fairly easy to do with people who follow some simple directions. Mooglegem got the drop on her first try when I showed her the strat. Here she is with her Glacial Tidestorm, Squishy (her water elemental), and Aborius, the elemental fury in Nagrand!
It took me a lot more runs, but I got mine too! I got on my frost mage for the screenshot so we could have maximum water elementals!
We had to visit alternate Draenor as well of course!
Two Sides to Every Tale (the achievement for doing all the 8.1 quests on both sides basically) gives a horse to the Horde and a wolf to the Alliance, which seemed strange at first until I paid attention. The reward for the achievement is, in lore, a stolen mount.
Alliance get the Ironclad Frostclaw: “Captured in the snows of Alterac Valley, this bloodthirsty hunter now roars for the Alliance.”
Horde get the Bloodflank Charger: “Stolen from the Arathi Basin stables, this fire-hearted charger now steeds for the Horde.”
This is an achievement for completing Zandalar Forever!, A Nation United, and both Tides of Vengeance achievements. So basically, do the Horde zones and their culminating storyline, do the Alliance zones and their culminating storyline, and finish both sides of the 8.1 war campaign. I did one Alliance zone before completing the A Nation United part, so I’m not sure if they changed in a later patch or just made it easier to for alts. (I’m still working on Drustvar and will do Stormsong Valley last.)
While I liked the wolf, I thought the horse was a bit of letdown until I realized it was stolen. Now I like it!
Last week my mythic+ group finished our last +15. This was for the Battle for Azeroth Keystone Master: Season Four achievement, which awards the Awakened Mindborer mount.
Here’s our mythic group! It makes me feel gross! Matt had already finished the achievement before the rest of us but was still helping the group push. It seemed like last week was our best shot because the affixes got harder this week, and we were running out of time.
The hardest part was getting the key we needed. Our final key was Siege of Boralus. We actually had a 16 of it. Besides little issues here and there with our run, our tank disconnected for a bit. We were fairly confident though, because even if we fail on +16, we’d be able to try again on +15. We were just about done with the boss, and the timer was close. We pushed hard and accidentally went just a couple seconds over – and that’s when we realized that by finishing it overtime, our key would change. We meant to walk out and reset. There goes our SoB key.
From that point, our group split up into PUGs. Sometimes a few of us went together, but usually we were pugging alone. Matt continued to try to run his own keys in an attempt to generate the SoB key, which was unlikely. It took forever trying to get into good PUGs, but eventually we all did it! While the end was stressful, m+ was a blast and felt very rewarding!
Trolling aside, I got Invincible last week! It took 68 attempts according to Rarity, which means like a few more than that but not many. Pretty lucky honestly. While trying for the mount, I’ve also been collecting tier sets from ICC. I almost have all of them, so I’ll likely finish them up. It’ll be easier now that I don’t have to even bother finishing the raid during my transmog runs!
Time for an update on horrific visions! Last week I did a full clear of the Horrific Vision of Orgrimmar for the first time. I’ve been sitting on a lot of Coalescing Visions recently but just hadn’t had the time to keep running Horrific Visions. Also, I took Matt’s advice and switched to shadow when running these with gem (frost mage). It went much, much faster as shadow!
We also earned Mail Muncher mounts from the mailboxes in horrific visions!
I’m disappointed that there isn’t mail stuck to him or something, but oh well – still cool!
I befriended the Friendly Alpaca in January but never posted this video! I’ve been very excited about alpacas being in WoW, and I now have two of the three.
For this alpaca, you have find the Friendly Alpaca in Uldum and feed it Gersahl Greens for the Alpaca It Up quest. This can be done once per day, and once it’s done 7 times, you get the quest Alpaca It In. This one rewards the Reins of the Springfur Alpaca so you can bring this friendly alpaca with you on your adventures!
Memories of Azeroth, the special raid celebrating the 15th anniversary of WoW, was quite different than the LFR version of Molten Core that was part of the 10th anniversary celebration. Having three wings instead of one long instance is huge in opening it up to more players, and I think that’s a good thing. Molten Core LFR was tuned too difficult in my opinion: casual players should be able to experience an anniversary celebration. The tuning on Memories of Azeroth felt very much in line with LFR. There were wipes, but groups could consistently finish it.
The idea behind the raid was pretty fantastic. Three wings, each featuring one of the first three expansions in World of Warcraft. As far as I know, this is the first time WoW has had a sort of boss rush too. In each wing, all three bosses had to be downed without wiping. However, you only see certain phases of the bosses and not all. Between bosses, all CDs are reset, and anyone who died is rezzed.
What seemed off to me was that some fights were so boring and easy that I never saw a wipe on them.
Memories of Fel / The Burning Crusade: Lady Vashj, Kael’thas, Archimonde. This was the easiest wing. I’m not sure I saw a wipe on Lady Vashj or Kael’thas. If so, I didn’t see many.
Memories of Frost / Wrath of the Lich King: Heigan, Anub’arak, The Lich King. This was the weirdest difficulty. Heigan should be incredibly simple. The “dance” of the fight is to simply stand in the one safe quadrant, moving with the group. The safe quadrant shifts in order. But there were wipes. Then there’s Anub’arak. Not only were there definitely no wipes, but there was no challenge at all. That fight is incredibly boring. And then we get to The Lich King, with many, many wipes to defile. Aw, the memories. Wiping is frustrating, but adding some challenge made it fun, and calling out defiles and teaching people was satisfying. Anub’arak was the worst part of this wing. It felt like a waste of time.
Memories of Fire / Cataclysm: Cho’gall, Nefarian, Ragnaros. This wing mirrored the last one pretty closely, except Cho’gall is much easier than Heigan. I’m not sure if we had wipes on him or not. But Nefarian… I don’t even think I saw any mechanics because it was so simple. However, the room filling with lava and later draining made a fun sort of timer so we could be in a DPS race with out past selves in an effort to do better than last time. Ragnaros was challenging for some people, and I don’t mind some wipes as people learn an encounter.
It was a nice stroll through past memories and it makes me long to see full versions of some of those fights. Complex, multi-phase fights felt gutted. I miss the rest of Arthas! Memories of Azeroth makes me with we had more timewalking raids – but broken into wings so I don’t have to do them in one go like Black Temple or Ulduar.
And for my trouble – an Obsidian Worldbreaker! Who wouldn’t love a Deathwing mount of their own? It’s pretty cool!
The best part of patch 8.3 releasing last week is the availability of three alpaca mounts! I obtained my first last night, the Elusive Quickhoof alpaca. Look how cute it is when it does its /mountspecial animation, bouncing in a little a circle. I’m pretty happy with it! Now I’m still farming the second one :)
I’ve been wanting one for a while, and I finally purchased a Spectral Tiger on the Auction House. I’m pretty broke now with a total of 8873 gold across all my characters, but the only thing for which I really needed gold was this, and it’s mine now!
My druid was actually the first to mount it. Looking good there, little feral druid.
The Spectral Tiger is still significantly cheaper than the Swift Spectral Tiger. I wonder if there’s some ingrained sense that epic versions are better even though they’re the same speed now. I actually prefer the Spectral Tiger because it has less armor, so yay for me.
Last night I finally finished collecting Fragments of Val’anyr and completed Val’anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings. It looks pretty cool, and I like the effect it puts on people. It’s obviously not as cool now, but back in Wrath, it was really cool to see a healer with one. Even in a battleground, when I saw enemies with that electric-looking shield, I instantly knew one of them was wielding Val’anyr. Mooglegem was nice enough to do runs with me. I don’t know how easy it is now, but at level 90, I could solo the raid with exception of Yogg-saron +0. With her, the whole raid is much more enjoyable.
Luckily for Mooglegem, she got something out of it as well. A couple weeks ago, Yogg-saron dropped Mimiron’s Head. I think it’s one of the coolest mounts in the game, and she looks great with it!
A few weeks ago, Zaghar, my guildmate, suggested we run Challenge Mode dungeons to get silvers for the mount before the first season of CMs ended with the completion of Mists of Pandaria. I’d been wanting to do CMs mostly for the, well, challenge of it. We’ve been running them when we had the chance. I wish we had started earlier because they’re a lot of fun.
Is that a second Devee in the picture? No, it’s just Mooglegem.
I really enjoy how Challenge Mode dungeons greatly reduce the role of gear and tests group skill. In Warlords of Draenor, I think I’d like to try Challenge Mode dungeons earlier so I could aim for golds. However, I have to be honest that I’m not sure how much time I can truly devote to the game. I doubt I can seriously focus on CMs and raiding.
gem and I both chose Violet Pandaren Phoenixes as our rewards! Of course, soon we’ll have all of them when the patch lands.
MMO-Champion user Mojo Risin posted a pretty neat idea that I had to mention here. He proposes a Mount 2.0 system with three things:
mount names
mount traits
new riding skills
I’m sure you can guess what mount names are. Mount traits are special abilities that each mount has such as providing a temporary crit bonus when the player dismounts or healing the player while riding. Each mount has one specific major trait and two empty minor trait slots. Once you have a mount, you’ve unlocked that trait. You can use unlocked traits in a lesser form in minor trait slots. In other words, you can’t change a mount’s major trait, but you can equip a mount with two minor traits, which are lesser forms of other traits you’ve unlocked. It’s an interesting idea, but there’d be balance issues. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, but it would be a decent chunk of work.
How about new riding skills? His proposed Mount 2.0 system would allow you to train a new riding skill that increases land mount bonus speed to 125% as well as giving your mounts an additional 25% movement speed bonus when riding on roads and 10% on paths. I think these are fantastic ideas!
The system offers a number of interesting improvements. The traits sound fun, but there could be ramifications. The road and path system, however, should be implemented immediately!
Kor'kron 501st 