Wrapping up another Tier

The current season of World of Warcraft is coming to a close within the next few weeks. Season 3 kicks off on August 13th, with the release of patch 11.2.0 a week prior to that.

This season was another season for me that saw me achieve another Cutting Edge (CE), or for readers less familiar with WoW, that means killing all of the bosses of the current raid tier on the hardest difficulty, Mythic.

It used to be just to kill the final boss, but some shenanigans and hacking from a specific guild early this tier saw them kill the final boss, Gallywix, in about 5 seconds flat, without even having to kill the previous bosses, so the requirements were changed after that (and many player bans).

In terms of my own personal performance, this appears to have been my best tier yet on my Hunter. As of the time of writing my overall parse score of 93.9%, and am currently around the top 200 BM hunters globally. It was 105th at the end of our raid night the previous week, but it's hard to get higher without regular PI's.

Apropos of nothing, I wish they'd remove PI from the game. At least an external PI that can be put on a player that isn't the Priest.

Overall the tier was a fun one. The first half of the raid fell over fairly quickly, with the only real challenge being Stix, where a missed bomb will still wipe the raid, even now.

After those 4, the next 3 bosses stepped up in difficulty until you get to the final boss, Gallywix. Easily the oddest boss in recent memory. The fight starts off as you'd expect, but once you get to 50%, it's like the developers forgot to put in any additional mechanics, because the boss just sits there, doing little of anything, and as long as you can dodge swirlies it falls over without much trouble.

But, a kill is a kill, and another CE under the belt. This is my 5th in a row now, and hopefully not my last.

And with that my tier comes to a close. We have one raid left next week before taking a mini-break, but I will be away in Manchester visiting the sprog, as she graduates for her degree and we'll be at the ceremony.

So that is my raid tier done and dusted, and a pretty good one overall.

Thoughts

It's just satisfying for me, as I turn 50 in a couple of months, that I'm still able to play to such a high level. Overall I'm our guild's 4th best DPS this tier, which, given we have some very good players, is a good place to finish up on.

I remember not long after I came back to WoW in 2009 we had a player in the guild I was in back then who turned 50 during early Wrath. Oddly he played a Hunter too (must just be the Old Man class 😂), but over voice comms he sounded like he was 100yrs old. I remember, as a spry 33 year old back then that 50 was OLD. Like, why was he even still playing at that age?

He wasn't the best player mind you, but everyone in the guild loved him to bits and we carried him through so many raids 😄

I remember making him a TON of arrows for a birthday present, enough to last him about 6 months IIRC.

Back then Hunters had to use ammo that needed to be crafted, otherwise they would not be able to shoot anything. One relic of a bygone era that I'm glad is just that.

I never thought back then that I'd still be playing at 50, never mind at the top-end of the game's difficulty ladder. But I imagine by the time that the World Soul Saga reaches its end in The Final Titan, I'll be looking at hanging up my Guns & Bows and either quitting raiding or dropping down to heroic. I'll be in my mid-50's at that stage, surely I'll not be playing when I'm that old? Right? Right? 😆

The future looks... different

The new raid, Manaforge Omega, looks good, and early PTR testing reveals a pretty strong raid in terms of fun bosses.

This is of course probably the final tier where a lot of addon such as Details, Plater, TellMeWhen, Hekili etc are mooted to be usable, at least in their current form. Blizzard will be making fundamental changes to how combat-related addons will work in Midnight, the expansion that will be launching early next year.

Whether that means they will not work at all, or will have the ability to do what they currently do limited or restricted remains to be seen. However I do know there's one addon that they'd love to lock down, and that's WeakAuras.

Blizzard will, they have claimed, make appropriate changes to mechanics and their relative difficulty, but again it remains to be seen how that will work in practice.

Personally I'm in favour of this move, because having to use so many addons to be effective at the high-end of end-game content is a pain, and has led to performance degradation at times. There was a period of a few weeks where Queen Ansurek at the start of The War Within became unplayable for a lot of people, as framerates during certain sections of the fight would dip into single-digits. The issue went away eventually, and I'm not sure if anyone ever confirmed what the cause was exactly, but the majority of people think it was add-on related.

Either way, less mandatory addons is always a good thing IMO. Addons should be there to provide customisation options, not be mandatory to decipher mechanics or perform well.

Blizzard have been doing better with clarity of mechanics in TWW as well, taking a lead from FFXIV where ground swirlies and beam effects have delineated lines and borders, making it very clear where an effect begins and ends. Much better than trying to work out if standing here will be safe, rather than 3 pixels further over there...

The full reveal for Midnight is coming next month in August's Gamescom, and it looks like the area around Silvermoon City and Queldanas is going to be reworked and made flyable, finally. I also have a suspicion that Silvermoon is about to get half-destroyed by the forces of the void, but we'll see. As a Blood Elf player for many years before switching permanently to Alliance I'm glad the zone is finally getting an update, 18yrs later, but I hope it isn't destroyed too much.

Anyway, enough word splurge from me this time, here's looking forward to the final tier of The War Within!