Dragonflight Season 3 content is…interesting. Blizzard aimed at changing up some of the things that made last season feel heavily frontloaded by new changes – better integration of the crest and flightstone upgrade systems, a larger item level jump that saw the peak item level jump 39 item levels instead of the usual 26, and a far more robust system of catchup gear that rewards three pretty decently high-level pieces of gear per week for weekly zone quests in the Emerald Dream. These, coupled with other reward philosophy changes including Heroic, Mythic 0, and Timewalking dungeons counting for ..read more

One of the expected bits of news out of Blizzcon, after confirmation that 10.2 would be the last major content patch of Dragonflight, was that we would get a Season 4 of content. In Shadowlands, we got our first taste of a season 4 of WoW content that wasn’t defined by a new raid or dungeon (as was the case previously in Battle for Azeroth), but instead a way to smartly reuse the raids that had come out that expansion, alongside a new Mythic Plus dungeon pool largely composed of older dungeons, a move that paved the way for the seasonal model we’ve had for M+ in Dragonflight ever since. When I ..read more

At Blizzcon this last weekend, Blizzard announced not one, not two, but three new WoW expansions, the next three in sequence to follow Dragonflight. That’s pretty cool, even if it is also an overstatement of what one means when we consider a Blizzard announcement. Lost in the shuffle and left sort of ambiguous, however, is the timeline. We know that The War Within, the next expansion, is coming in the fall of 2024, in the spot most of us would assume it would rightfully launch and in time to commemorate WoW’s 20th anniversary. Why is this even a question? Well, for literal ages at the start of ..read more

The announcements for the future of the modern version of World of Warcraft made at Blizzcon 2023 are…interesting. Let me first say this – I’m going to do small cynicsm up top here and then attempt to meet the news in good faith and with the assumption that Blizzard moves as they say they will, because, cynicsm and doubt aside, I think the news this weekend was good for the WoW fans and I think there’s a lot to like in what has been shown so far. There’s some weird plays and some reasons to doubt as well, but overall – I came away from the Blizzcon virtual feed impressed with what I saw. So w ..read more

Blizzcon’s opening ceremony was interesting for WoW, in that it set forward something of a bold new path. I plan to talk more about the modern game info after panels and discussion have taken place, but I think I can reasonably sum up the Classic news and discuss my experience with Classic and how my opinion of it has shifted in a way that plays directly into what Blizzard is doing. So Why Play Classic, Anyways? Something I’ve grappled with quite publicly here is this – why would I play the old eras of the game I was around for? To me, I liked those old eras, but for me, they’re best left in t ..read more

So FFXIV’s EU Fan Fest was held last weekend, introducing a fair bit of new content for Dawntrail and setting up the hype cycle that will continue with JP Fan Fest in January, media tour in the spring of 2024, and finally the release of the expansion next summer. My predictions were…well, shattered is probably the right word, and so I’m here today to admit as much out loud and then take a look at the things we did see at EU Fan Fest and how they’ll maybe shape JP Fan Fest and the expansion to come! Viper – The New Melee DPS Job Corsair, it turns out, was a mix of wishful thinking and masterful ..read more

Final Fantasy XIV’s European Fan Fest event for the 2023-2024 cycle is this upcoming weekend, and with patch 6.5 story on the table, we can now start to speculate just a bit more accurately about what is likely to be unveiled to us this upcoming weekend, with another 90 minute Yoshi P keynote dedicated to unveiling a revised Dawntrail trailer with more content and giving us some likely first actual glimpses into the expansion to come. There are some trends we can use to analyze this on top of wild speculation and theorycrafting, and so I’m going to spend my post today looking at what I think i ..read more

Over the past couple of years, but especially in Endwalker, the Final Fantasy XIV team has made a lot of effort to adjust the onramp for new players into FFXIV. They’ve added Duty Support as an extension of the Trust system, allowing players to do every story-required dungeon alone with an NPC party, adjusted the questlines that are a part of the MSQ to remove and consolidate some of the fluff quests that were there for flavor and condense those story beats into other quests to avoid some of the perception of running around headlessly as you reach the end of the A Realm Reborn experience, stri ..read more

Shadowlands had a story whose best moments were few and far between, and the rest of the expansion was defined by a mix of awful bad moments that repurposed existing Warcraft lore in service of half-baked stories, with what remains after those two categories being in a category I call “aggressively mid.” It wasn’t all bad (or good), but it was kind of like eating plain oatmeal – no one really wanted it but if you’re a WoW fiend, a meal’s a meal. You might have noticed that I haven’t talked about lore much in Dragonflight, and there’s a reason for that – most of the expansion, so far, has been ..read more

I’ve been raiding in Savage in Final Fantasy XIV for nearly 2 years now. It’s not a long time, and it correlates with Endwalker’s raid scene exclusively, but it has been an interesting two years of learning and developing skills. I’ve played all of the game’s roles in Savage, with at least one boss kill on each of the roles – but I’ve spent the most time in Endwalker healing, in Asphodelos Savage through Party Finder as Sage (and a mix of White Mage and Astrologian helping my now-main static), with Abyssos being me primarily as Sage and Anabaseios seeing me get all my kills as Sage (with some ..read more