Picture this: you’re healing a dungeon in World of Warcraft, and things are going well, when the boss stops to cast a huge party-wide damage hit. You’ve got people near topped off, everything seems okay, and then the party-wide blows up. BAM! Everyone except the tank, including yourself, is dead. What happened? The tank wipes, you go again. You top everyone off going into that same ability, you know the horror that awaits if not. BAM! Everyone except the tank is dead, again. How am I supposed to deal with this? You aren’t – and that’s a problem. Healing in Dragonflight has hit a wall that has ..read more

The dungeon difficulty changes made to World of Warcraft have been interesting, to say the least. For the uninitiated, the basic rundown is this – in Season 4 of Dragonflight, Blizzard took what used to be Mythic 0 level difficulty and applied it, minus the Mythic mechanics, to make a new replacement version of Heroic difficulty. They then took what would have been a +10 Mythic Plus key, and made that the rough level at which Mythic 0 dungeons now sit (scaled to fit the season, mind you), and then keys start at a +2, with the rough equivalence to a former +11 in terms of scaling, and have kept ..read more

Blizzard almost, dare I say it, made Season 4 a player-friendly one for the raid audience. The Season 4 concept that started with Shadowlands (not BfA, which had a legitimate 4th season of new content!) is an interesting one. In an attempt to mitigate the effects of content draught on the playerbase of World of Warcraft, Blizzard made what is, effectively, a greatest-hits season for the expansion. In Shadowlands, this meant a weekly raid rotation of the 3 Shadowlands raids, with one per week being upgraded to have boss affixes (not quite M+ level, just one new mechanic from a generic seasonal ..read more

Blizzard’s recent experimental streak on World of Warcraft has brought about two huge shifts in content through unique modes of play – Plunderstorm and the upcoming Mists of Pandaria Remix mode. Both of these take interesting and different approaches to World of Warcraft – in the case of Plunderstorm, by not being very WoW at all short of asset usage, and in the case of MoP Remix, by being a twist substantial enough that it is far more than what it appears at first glance. This week, I accomplished two things related to these modes – I finished the Renown track in Plunderstorm for all my rewar ..read more

Blizzard’s recent experimental streak on World of Warcraft has brought about two huge shifts in content through unique modes of play – Plunderstorm and the upcoming Mists of Pandaria Remix mode. Both of these take interesting and different approaches to World of Warcraft – in the case of Plunderstorm, by not being very WoW at all short of asset usage, and in the case of MoP Remix, by being a twist substantial enough that it is far more than what it appears at first glance. This week, I accomplished two things related to these modes – I finished the Renown track in Plunderstorm for all my rewar ..read more

We are getting, by most estimates and the timetable provided by Blizzard in the WoW roadmap for 2024, close to The War Within launching in alpha. If this alpha test ends up like most modern tests, once it escapes Blizzard’s hands and gets to content creators and Wowhead, we’re going to see a truckload of design details, actual content, and get a general sense of where the expansion is going to end up going. To their credit, Blizzard has been releasing big details of the major gameplay feature for everyone, the Hero Talents, but there are still a handful waiting to be shown and I expect that al ..read more

PAX East is this weekend, and the Final Fantasy XIV team is going to have a global livestream from the show that will, in all likelihood, include the start of pre-orders and the availability of the Collector’s Edition boxes. The patch 6.58 data from this week includes the pre-order incentives, other pending news items like the full release of the Xbox version of the game have been resolved, and we stand likely 3 months and change out from the actual launch of the expansion. Dawntrail is going to be in an interesting spot, as it will demonstrate what the vision of the FFXIV team is for the futu ..read more

10.2.6’s big surprise is live as of this week, and…uh, it’s interesting. The lynchpin feature of this new patch is an addition to retail WoW playable by anyone with a WoW subscription – a 60-player battle royale called “Plunderstorm.” You roll in as your Battletag, can customize any of WoW’s playable races to suit your needs as an avatar, and play matches either solo or queued with a friend and try to be the last ones standing among the 60 players entered. Battle Royales are hardly new, and as a genre they’ve been a bit down as of late, with juggernaut Fortnite not being quite as compelling, e ..read more

When Blizzard mentions that they want something to both have flavor and also be a source of player power, it is usually a sign of trouble. Hero talents for The War Within are starting to kind of fall into this trap, where they are a mixed bag with some bags having flavor, some having good player power (in theory), and some having or even lacking both. Today, now that one of my most-played specs in Dragonflight has both of its trees published and I’ve started debating what spec I intend to play next expansion. The Tug of War Between Flavor and Power Blizzard’s core issue with this, which crops ..read more

The War Within marks Blizzard’s first time trying something new with the release of a World of Warcraft expansion since they moved to simultaneous global release – an Early Access window. This has, predictably, been a bit of a mixed bag as an announcement. While early access as a thing is not new to games or even MMOs, it is, in this case, somewhat conspicuous because WoW doing it marks an interesting change. WoW is, also, quite a time-sensitive game, and thus a 3-day headstart on expansion content seems like it could create a state of relative imbalance, where the people who start early get a ..read more