World of Warcraft: The War Within

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Just as I finished the last sidequest in The Ringing Deeps, I hit level 80. I hope I'm going to get something from questing besides just gold and rep.

The only standout sidequests in The Ringing Deeps were #1 the one where you worked with the Mistweaver Pandaren to track the fog beasts and the reveal of flying around the corner and finding the hidden alcove of gigantic fog beasts. #2 Magni's mace Fearbreaker (which predictably he gave to Moria...). and I guess #3 the group of Earthen who agreed to die striking a fighting pose was neat.

I am enjoying the dragonriding races. It's more visually stunning when you have cave walls all around you and a ceiling above you, rather than in Dragonflight where you only have land below you and nothing else to the left/right/above you. Just wish that the game could facilitate racing against other players.

Music: I'm really liking this Jake Lefkowitz guy. He did many of the tracks that I liked from Shadowlands and Dragonflight too. Need to check out what else besides WoW he has done.

@15:03




Part of the problem with WoW's music post WoD is that it changes too often, so you don't get to listen to the whole thing and become absorbed in it. The zones are subdivided into many small areas and the music changes whenever you cross one of these small area borders, and the nature of the gameplay (particularly once you finish the story) is that you are on your mount travelling across the continent across all of these different little area borders to reach these daily world quests spread out across the world. Or even while doing questing, you cross all of these borders to get to the next quest, which stops the current track before it has even started getting to the good part and begins playing a new track, which is then abrupbtly cut off before it reaches the good part, and so on. FF14 and GW2 don't have this problem as they just have a track that plays for the whole big zone and isn't constantly being cut off as you travel around in it.

As nice as the outdoor environments are to look at, it is a shame how neglected the interior houses are. Almost every Earthen building interior is the exact same layout, and you enter a lot of them.

I am overall fine with the Deathbringer hero talent tree (-10% damage taken is also nice), though it is a little finnicky to use. Basically, you get an ability to plant a DoT/bomb on an enemy (45 second cooldown). After a few seconds (or when the enemy reaches <30% HP and there are no other enemies around), the DoT/bomb will explode. This will then turn your Obliterate ability into two charges of a double scythe attack called Exterminate, which looks neat. Nowhere near as spectacular as Reaper's attacks in FF14, but still neat.

The finnickyness is:

• #1 Exterminate is not represented on your hotbar (you would think that the Obliterate icon would flip over into Exterminate and show the 2 charges), but is instead represented by two buffs up on the top right of your screen.
• #2 when you press Obliterate (with your two charges of Exterminate ready), the double scythe attack Exterminate will only activate if the Obliterate did not kill your enemy. So you can be running around with 2 charges of Exterminate ready and pressing Obliterate, but Exterminate may or may not go off.
• #3, if you apply the bomb to a mob but the mob dies immediately afterward (as in less than a second), then the bomb won't go off and you won't be able to use Exterminate.

Another odd thing about Deathbringer is that when you use Exterminate, the double scythes are actually staff weapons (Frostscythe of Lord Ahune) that your class cannot wield, and there are no polearm versions. Also interestingly, the visual size of the scythes scales to your target, so if you use Exterminate on a small enemy (as in smaller than you) than the scythes will be tiny, but if you use it on a big boss than they will be quite large and you can see them despite all of the other players and their effects.



Hallowfall

Gorgeous zone, good color palette with the azure blues and greens and bright golds and brownish reds.

The story catches your attention right away with you and Anduin immediately meeting Faerin and then fighting back an invasion.

Faerin has a nice voice, is very pleasant to listen to. Total mismatch with her character design. Should have looked like a cute girl. She is thus far the only expansion character I kinda like, besides maybe Baelgrim (rip).

This is the most engaging zone storyline thus far, with only a couple of parts making me facepalm. Anduin, we are at the bottom of this void cave. Our very souls are being erroded by void magic! We need to get up and out of this cave! Why are you slow walking and pouting for the Nth time about when you were mindcontrolled by the Jailer and shanked someone who survived? Why are you and Faerin stopping to have a discussion about hope and light and darkness? WE ARE TURNING INTO TENTACLE MONSTERS! I wish I could have slung these dumbasses over my should and hoofed it out of there.

I feel these paladin people should be tilting their head at Anduin being escorted by a zombie panda who is dressed in skull armor, rides a skeleton dragon, and performs necromancy to raise corpses as minions.

Mereldar has nice music, looks good, and is very pleasant, and has a gorgeous backdrop. Should have been the capital city for the expansion. At least it has profession trainers. I just did a sidequest writing a letter of recommendation to the trading post NPCs to come set up shop down here, but I don't think there is a bank or an AH down here. If it did I would set my hearthstone here.

This book stand wheel inside the Mereldar Church is neat.

Once again, a lot of the sidequests that feel like they're part of the main story, such as the Faerin and Anduin quest. Sometimes it's difficult to tell whether or not a sidequest is just throwaway filler or something you really should be doing.

I should have done all of the Hallowfall sidequests once the party reached Mereldar. A little after that, the plot becomes urgent and seamlessly goes down to Azj-Kahet and it doesn't make sense to stop and turn around and finish up stuff in Hallowfall, which canonically takes place earlier in the story.

Anduin, if you really want to help these people, you could do a lot more than continuing to pretend that you are a lone grunt adventurer doing tasks for other people, trying to bail out the ocean with a bucket. You are a king. Grab a radio or a mage and call up Stormwind and bring in the armies and airships. If the Horde and Alliance were able to get their airships down into Deepholm then they can just as easily get down here.



Azj-Kahet

Hold up. Blizzard confiscates my MoP remix tinker gems so I can't use Heroic Leap as a Death Knight anymore, but Anduin gets to leap as a paladin? What?

I like this warm glowing plant that is used as a substitute for a burning campfire.

Orweyna (the dancing troll lady) is insufferable. The girlboss I thought Faerin was going to be.

 

[Just Locus]

Maybe I have abnormal self-control or something but I never particularly understand why so many find quitting WoW to be this difficult task, I don't see anything gripping besides the really enjoyable leveling experience. I guess it only magnified when TBC added daily quests and the difficulty was made easier...

 

[Late Bloomer]

Maybe I have abnormal self-control or something but I never particularly understand why so many find quitting WoW to be this difficult task, I don't see anything gripping besides the really enjoyable leveling experience. I guess it only magnified when TBC added daily quests and the difficulty was made easier...

1. The friends I played and still play with. We play other games together, but a couple of them still enjoy the various forms of WoW, and I enjoy playing with them.
2. The gameplay. WoW has tight, responsive controls, is fun to play and always has a few (or more) classes that have an enjoyable playstyle.
3. My characters. I have some characters from 2004/5. I like spending time playing them. I recreate them in other games, but on occasion, I like to play the game they were made in. This mindset applies to EQ & EQ2 as well.

 

[Sweeper]

Maybe I have abnormal self-control or something but I never particularly understand why so many find quitting WoW to be this difficult task, I don't see anything gripping besides the really enjoyable leveling experience. I guess it only magnified when TBC added daily quests and the difficulty was made easier...

Sunk cost fallacy.

 

[Thalstarion]

I quit successfully for years. Most of my friends did too. Some of us moved over to other MMO's. TESO sates my desire to be able to play around with and build houses for my characters but it's painfully dull when it comes to the combat. FFXIV drew me in by promising to be a love letter to the Ivalice games and the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole.

It collapsed on a level far beyond anything WoW did to drive me away. Seriously, it's almost impressive. I was stalked for years over saying I didn't like a specific character in FFXIV. The community is unhinged. Also posted a lot on the official forum there, met some good people through it who have all since quit due to how spectacularly the game blew up its own story and world.

So, yeah, I went back to WoW to get my MMO fix. The market isn't exactly swimming in options right now and though I'm cautiously optimistic about Ashes of Creation and Pantheon, they're not due to launch anytime soon.

 

[Late Bloomer]

I was stalked for years over saying I didn't like a specific character in FFXIV.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I was stalked for years over saying I didn't like a specific character in FFXIV.

Hydaelyn/Venat fanatics. FF14 starts with Hydaelyn being the good goddess (also sometimes called "the Will of the Star") and you're her Chosen One (she also chooses a couple other heroes), and she is the mission control directing your actions in the fight against the evil rebel being satan stand-in, Zodiark. Then come the Shadowbringers expansion and completely upends the narrative, revealing that Hydaelyn is a fraud. She's not the goddess at all (actually there is no actual god in the FF14 setting). She's just some wizard named Venat who was controlling a puppet made out of a lot of magic, and was stringing our characters along the entire time. ShB reveals that Zodiark saved the world and was the most popular and was the actual Will of the Star (not only figuratively in that he had majority vote of the population, but also in that he became the literal embodiment of the laws of physics of the planet), only for Hydaelyn an unpopular rebel with only 12 backers comes along to beat him up and literally breaks the world. In the beginning, there was no war or strife or death. Everyone lived forever, was beautiful, could wield powerful magicks, held authority over creatures, etc. But when Hydaelyn sundered the world, everyone then grew old and decayed and died, and there was now war between people, and animals devouring people, etc. She caused the Fall of Man. The Endwalker expansion is further incriminating because we find out that she is responsible for the very apocalypse that required Zodiark's creation in the first place. She knew it was going to happen but made zero attempt to stop it. The FF14 game tries to present her as the hero, but it is impossible to reconcile that with the actual content of the game. Unfortunately the FF14 fanbase for whatever reason has a lot of people who just take what the cutscenes and the happy/menacing music says at face value (Hydaelyn is good and you should feel happy for her, Zodiark is evil and you should hate him) rather than stopping to think about what just actually happened (Hydaelyn is an usurper who caused all of the suffering in the game, Zodiark was doing the best he could to make as many people happy as possible before he got ganked). And some of these people are very, very fanatical.

 

[Thalstarion]

Yeah, it's usually either Venat/Hydaelyn or any of the Scions. A 'fun' experiment would be to search any FFXIV character's name on Twitter and it won't take long before you find all sorts of weird art or obsessive players building their entire identify around even the most obscure characters.

It's really strange. WoW has Goldshire, sure, but Goldshire usually stays in Goldshire. Plus you can openly bash pretty much any character in WoW and not face the same level of extreme scrutiny and venom. There's still some crazies to be sure, just not anywhere near as many in FFXIV.

 

[J1M]

I did not consent to a thread title change.

Our tradition is new expansion = new thread. Not the very very clever thread title's fault that nobody cared enough to make a new one this time.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I did not consent to a thread title change.

Our tradition is new expansion = new thread. Not the very very clever thread title's fault that nobody cared enough to make a new one this time.

The funny thing to me is that WoW's zombified corpse has become such a wet fart of a game that I haven't really even registered that they've made any expacks since Shadowlands.

My interest in the game had been waning over the years, but I kept coming back to at least check out new expansions though for less time each time. Shadowlands took my remaining interest and nostalgia for the game and staked it through the heart. It's sort of like what Disney's been doing with Star Wars. Just rape a thing until all the fans give up in disgust.

Was there actually anything of interest in the Dragon thing or this new one? What's the point of this War Within or whatever anyway?

Are they still doing the Old God of the year expansion thing where they keep uncovering another eldritch/cosmic horror that is totally the most craziest world shattering threat evar! That shit just wore me out and is why I think they really need to finally kill this game and try to launch something else. Or find a way to re-ground it into Azeroth politics and battles and inter-faction conflicts, not let's be frenz and find a reason to fight together albeit temporarily... yet again.

 

[Caim]

I'll just watch the lore video after the final patch and be updated that way, no game time needed.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Was there actually anything of interest in the Dragon thing

It's fundamentally a retail expansion which means it's fun to play for a month and tour through the content, and then once you've seen everything you unsub because otherwise you just speedrun the same current raid/half dozen dungeons/same instanced 10 vs 10 RBGs over and over again until you get bored.

For Dragonflight, I liked the solo adventure puzzle gameplay in the Zskera Vault and the Niffen Seeking. The capital city looked really nice, being a central tower with good sight lines and lush colorful vegetation and waterfalls around it. Some of the boss fights were fun. I liked the Ice Spider that you fought while ascending a spiral staircase and she tries to yank you off of the staircase with webs, the Zskarn fight in Abberus where you have the traps going off that have to be disarmed or avoided, Echo of Neltharion where he is raising earth walls trying to separate the raid and knocking people back, and the Tindral fight where you mount up to chase him. The dragonriding races were fun. Some of the music was good.

Are they still doing the Old God of the year expansion thing where they keep uncovering another eldritch/cosmic horror that is totally the most craziest world shattering threat evar!

Yup

 

[Reever]

Was there actually anything of interest in the Dragon thing or this new one? What's the point of this War Within or whatever anyway?

For dragonflight no. In fact, probably one of the most boring expansions in terms of storytelling. No stakes whatsoever until the last patch and that's only if you're a treehugger.
For the war within I didn't find it that bad until now. Some of the writing is very predictable but at least there's some semblance of a story moving forward and character progression. And yes, it's once again centered around Eldritch stuff since I think at this point it's the last thing warcraft has to a villain.

 

[Dr1f7]

of the modern wow xpacs:

shadowlands>=legion>bfa>>>>>>>cata>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>mop>>>>>>>dragonslop

haven't played war within no time (busy getting laid) but it looks like it's somewhere between cata and mop. maybe worse than mop but that would be pretty bad

not surprising that the art direction took a nosedive after the tit-milk drinking scandal happened just after shadowlands release that caused them to fire all of the people responsible for cool design between legion and shadowlands and replaced them with dei hires and consulting firms (EHRRMM yeah that whole expansion theme is spiders? spiders are problematic ehhhrmmm how about making them crabs)
it's funny that people thought Cuckold Chris "i'm sorry" Metzen was going to fix course
it's sad because they had nice long stretch of good xpacs then that happens
oh well

 

[Reever]

shadowlands>=legion>bfa>>>>>>>cata>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>mop>>>>>>>dragonslop

 

[Dr1f7]

shadowlands>=legion>bfa>>>>>>>cata>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>mop>>>>>>>dragonslop

well one day you'll realize that the entire shadowlands backlash was a dei psy-op takeover and you fell for it
shadowlands:

dragonflight:

 

[Axel_am]

My main issue is that by adding so much new shit like races and whatnot the game is starting to look more and more streamlined. When WoW was just starting it had to compete with Lineage, Guild Wars and other stuff like that no matter how you slice it had some Asian appeal to them. There was a stark contrast between those games and the fantasy art style and direction of WoW. Even when compared to Everquest and the other MMO's WoW was able to retain a strong sense of identity simply by its visual style.

Right now I don't see any of that. When I look at it it just look like a grindy MMO game. With all the flashy spells and sparkly mounts that I can see in any other MMO. Mediocrepoet hit it out of the park when he called the game a wet fart.

​

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Shadowlands looked gorgeous. Visually imaginative high fantasy environments. Night and day difference between the expansions that came before and after.

 

[Dr1f7]

well the creative/art directors for legion->SL were clearly inspired by cool things like dark souls and LOTR
then they were all fired and replaced by women who were inspired by disney movies and we got dragonflight

then they were like 'oh shit this isn't working' and brought white apologist metzen back who is inspired by his wife's boyfriend's 8 year old daughter and we get a spider-themed expansion that features arachnophobia mode and strange femdom power fantasies

 

[Thalstarion]

I don't trust Metzen. He tends to self insert way too much and from what I recall he put Thrall together with Aggra. He'll probably agree to have Anduin to be married to Faerin. I already see forced celebrations of how good they supposedly work together on the official forum and Twitter.

She looks less disgusting in-game than the cinematics but she still looks revolting. Do I feel bad for heavily scarred and mutilated soldiers? Sure.

Would I lie and say they look great if they're missing an eye and an arm whilst also being heavily scarred? No.

The logical trajectory would be to have Anduin marry Tess given how strong a part Genn played in Anduin's life in recent years.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Shadowlands looked gorgeous. Visually imaginative high fantasy environments. Night and day difference between the expansions that came before and after.

Yeah, I could see some of that. It's the entire reason I bothered going back for that at all. The gameplay is just so awful though. MMOs used to offer something for me that other games weren't, whether novelty, or community, or whatever. Now that all of that's gone, all that's left is the gameplay and most MMOs are total shit for that.

It also doesn't help that WoW went from having a somewhat unique look in looking like WC3 realized in 3D which was pretty cool to looking like every mobile cash grab thing released in the past 10 years.

I think other than that, their focus killed it for me. I really enjoyed vanilla WoW up to the release of AQ where I started to check out again since rise of the bugs didn't do it for me. I thought the BC space battle crap was lame. I got really into LK for the thematic closure of it all, though the game changes started to go to the shitter and then even though I kept coming back for awhile, for all intents and purposes, WoW died for me. They didn't know where to go with it and it was pretty obvious.

 

[Just Locus]

Most MMOs are victims of feature creep, where they're just constantly adding, changing, and reworking, which wouldn't be a problem if they weren't continually stripping the game of its most recognizable elements. Private servers are a must-have for most online games because I just can't be bothered to engage with whatever the developers have in store to keep the content flowing. I'm still playing WoW Vanilla and I'm having fun, the environments look gorgeous, the combat is enjoyable for what it is, and have been playing with others.

One time a player invited me to their group to take on a Frostmane dungeon, we both died countless times but I honestly couldn't care less that we didn't get through it, because I had fun and I bet he did too, I had dozens of similar interactions of just engaging with the community and having fun with other players. I'm wary of going to the later expansions and seeing everyone be mindless meta slaves being constantly toxic that you didn't remember to do one spell at one specific time or whatever the hell they do now. I'll just continue swapping between Vanilla and DnD Online for now.

 

[Thalstarion]

Yeah, the base game is something genuinely special. I think where a lot of MMO's struggle is the inevitable shift from being a random adventurer to being the best hero ever.

You start out killing wolves and kobolds in the human starting area and culling beasts and slaying imps in the night elf starting area. The idea that some very dangerous entities existed in the backgrounds was built up fairly well - the Defias Brotherhood serve as a major threat but when the curtain is pulled back there's something even more dangerous manipulating them. It was a nice, slow burn eventually paying off with a major battle against a dragon.

Now even the most supposedly powerful threats serve as fodder to slay in generic kill quests. At least the raids still give a sense of scale and danger.

It was also nice back when the Horde and Alliance had completely different experiences to go through. Now the factions might as well not exist and the single campaign everybody goes through is very much catered to Alliance aesthetics and sensibilities.

 

[Axel_am]

Now even the most supposedly powerful threats serve as fodder to slay in generic kill quests. At least the raids still give a sense of scale and danger.

A lot of franchises that continue for years upon years suffer from this. The big baddy of the game feels more like a cog in the machine than something of significance and importance. The only baddies in WoW that were able to stand out were characters that were already build upon in WarCraft prior to WoW.

The thing is that WoW would benefit if it followed the adventure of a specific character and not just throw in random world ending bad guys every chance they get. I feel like after Thrall got removed as chieftain, as well as Varian as king, WoW has struggled with setting up a main character for both the factions and that hinders the stories they try to tell greatly. There still isn't a single character that can fill their shoes in any way shape or form. Obviously, I haven't played WoW in so long but speaking as outsider the role of Chieftain and King are missing in the whole scenario and it leaves the whole setting of WarCraft floating in the air, or planets, or different dimensions or whatever the fuck they are doing this year.

The same could be said about Assassin's Creed as even though there were some awesome protagonists after Altair and Ezio just because the franchise got so big they aren't given enough time (or games) to develop and stick to the pop culture of Assassin's Creed. Like I said it just feels like they are cogs that are part of the machine and not really something of importance. The show must go on.

Maybe with this 3 part expansion-story-thing this might change but with the story of WoW being so convoluted I kinda doubt they would be able to pull of something of considerable value.

 

[Hoodoo]

Zone design for WoW is consistently great in my opinion, at least from an aesthetic standpoint. Couple that with the good memories I have of playing vanilla WoW and its a pretty comfy game. Story I don't even hate because it's batshit insane at this point. Saying all that Blizzard is full of evil losers and the small things really irk. Havnt played since WoTLK but whenever I see screenshots of zones I can't help but get nostalgiac.