The Queue: This is the real Chromie Time

Friday? Already?! Again and for the first time! Chromie was right; this time thing gets very confusing… so I guess we’d best get to work on the Queue.

Forbidden Reach lives up to its name: you can’t get there. But fatigue is not the problem. You get two or three ticks of fatigue, but nowhere near enough to kill you.

However, as you approach the island, the weather worsens. The sky becomes the dark purple of a thunderstorm, with glowing purple streaks cutting through it. Lightning flashes through the sky and rain pelts down.

When you get out of fatigue water, you’re forcibly dismounted and start to take heavy ticking damage from an ability called Stormwall — about 40k per second.

Basically there’s no escaping this storm. You’re now dead. And when you release, you are automatically razzed back in the Waking Shores, so you can’t explore as a ghost.

In short, Blizzard doesn’t want you to poke around with what we might see when we can go back to the Forbidden Reach in patch 10.0.7.

Healer here! And from my perspective, Conductive Mark is actually a very good reason for tanks to keep some distance from each other. On normal, this debuff does 26k nature damage upfront and nearly 9k nature damage per second after that… on top of increasing your nature damage taken by 10%. The effect lasts ten seconds and spreads to anyone you’re within 4 yards of, refreshing its duration on anyone. It’s conceivable that tanks could endlessly pass this back and forth for ever-increasing damage if they were too close to each other.

Conductive Mark is a raid killer. It does about 104k damage in total, and it’s very easy to get within 4 yards of another player to spread it, adding another 104k damage to the group. And even if you try to get away from the group when you see you have it, you could spread it. (The best thing to do is be mindful of positioning throughout so you’re away from other players, and if you get the debuff stand still so others can avoid you.) It’s not something that your tanks necessarily need to be on opposite sides of the boss for, but it could be something they’re doing out of an abundance of caution.

Knockbacks are another problem tanks need to be aware of on this fight. When Dathea doesn’t have a tank in range, she starts firing off Aerial Buffet, which deals 70k nature damage. This can become an issue with the number of knockbacks in this fight, including the tank swap mechanic, Zephyr Slam.  So it could also be that the tanks are keeping some extra distance to be sure one of them stays in range to fire off a taunt if the other is hit by a tornado or any other knockbacks.

It strikes me that this is something you might do if you do not really know or trust your co-tank to stay in the right spot and not position the boss to run a tornado through you both — which is to say something you might find frequently in PUG groups. It doesn’t seem to be strictly necessary, but it could give you a wider margin of error if one tank is positioning themselves poorly.

I think the new system is pretty great… though it has quite a few rough edges. Let’s talk about the good stuff first, though:

You can craft real gear you will really use. My Jewelcrafter could immediately craft rings and necks that amazing leveling gear, and right now I can craft rings and necks that are very excellent end-game gear. In the past, crafting has really fallen behind here, and you’d be lucky to have anything you could make that would be useful end game… and if there was something great for end-game, it would probably require a huge rep grind or a lot of luck to get a pattern drop. In this case, I got the first patterns baseline and the last by advancing through the jewelry-making tree. (Of course there’s the Elemental Lariat neck everyone wants which is a super rare drop pattern… but I can already make the Torc of Passed Time, a 382 neck with a socket, without farming anything.)

Similarly, my alchemist alt, who has yet to even hit 50 Alchemy, is making flasks phials that my main uses on raid night. I’m immediately able to make things that are useful throughout the game, without farming for recipes, grinding rep, or anything else. The good stuff has previously always been locked behind various methods of recipe acquisition… but now I’m getting useful stuff immediately, and I’ll get better stuff when I start really working at it.

I feel like I’m getting a ton of use out of professions, maybe more than I ever have in the past 18 years. And I’m not grinding rep or farming for recipes or collecting rare reagents: I’m just playing the game, gathering as I go, and crafting what I can with what I’ve got.

That’s amazing!

But the second most amazing thing is work orders, which are also really amazing. (I have not been paid to say any of this, I just think it’s all great.) With a work order, I can get a crafter to make anything I want, even if it’s usually BOP. And because professions have really great patterns available well before you fully unlock every tree, a lot of people can make end-game ready gear… which I can order from them and immediately equip. My gear was looking rough for our first raid night, so I went and made work orders to replace a couple of 340 leveling greens with 385 epics with my desired stats. It’s amazing that I can do this and get raid-quality gear just by handing a pile of ore to the nearest Blacksmith. Okay, yes, there was some work put in to getting a few specific reagents, but for the most part I had what I needed because I was gathering as I went.

The new crafting system has given crafting a lot more useful items to make, and the new work order system makes those items easily accessible to all players. Even if you don’t do any crafting, you can benefit from the system because of work orders. Everything about that is good.

But no system is perfect, and I feel like the new crafting system has two major flaws: the system is poorly explained with confusing ability descriptions and new stats (which also aren’t explained anywhere in game), and the interface to use these poorly explained systems is clunky and confusing. That’s a recipe for disaster.

In the professions trees, everything needs better, clearer explanations so people know what each point gives them, and what they’re progressing towards without spending an hour on Wowhead researching what all of this means. There should also be a list of your stats for each profession somewhere, as well as mouseover tooltips for what those mean. Even if you know nothing about the game, you can open your character panel and mouseover stats to figure out what intellect or mastery does for you — crafting should have a similar system so it’s easy for everyone to access that information.

I don’t personally have an issue with the speed of leveling professions, or with the fact that applying points is permanent — it’s meant to be an expansion-long progression track, and I kind of enjoy that there’s that much depth to work through. However a one time “oops, I had no idea how this worked and put all of my profession knowledge in weird places” reset would be greatly appreciated — particularly since the game never really explains what any of this means. (What does Finesse do? Do I want more of it? Should I spend points on this tree to increase my Finesse? Even now, I’d have to google it to find out.)

Then there are work orders, which are just as convoluted. How do I tell who has something I can order? How do I tell what the reagents are to include in my work order? While work orders do incorporate a decent system for browsing crafted gear, if you want to know how to get all of the required components, you’ll need to have a Wowhead tab open. If you want to know who can fill your crafting order, and whether they’re skilled enough to use missives to set specific stats, you’re going to have to start shouting in trade. If you want to do a guild order and need to find out who can make something, you better enjoy opening the guild menu, tabbing to the rooster, selecting professions, and then going through every guild member’s professions individually looking to see if anyone can craft the thing you want.

The system is pretty good, but it’s still really clunky, and I spent an hour last night trying to figure out if anyone could make a mining helmet for me and where to get the reagents for the mining helmet which I would need to do additional work orders for…. and, well, it just gets complicated. (Answer: I don’t think anyone can make the mining helmet, but I haven’t checked everyone, and I think it’s probably best to do work orders for the crafted components, but I’ll need to gather materials, work order the components, and then work order the final mining helmet… when I find someone who can make it.)

I still think work orders are 100% amazing, but the system hard to navigate and extremely un-intuitive. I’m constantly swapping between the work order menu, the guild professions menu, and the auction house to figure out what I want, who can make it, and if it’s more efficient to buy things off the AH or craft them.

There are a lot of good things here.

I am now one of those people who seriously thinks about the benefits of when to use bloodlust and which specific tasks in a raid need clear assignments, but I’m still trying not to be that guy. I don’t want to be a back seat raid leader because being a raid leader is a lot of work and I’m just not that interested in doing any of it. But now that I’ve spent several weeks learning as much as I can about these fights and also watching the best players in the world tear through these fights, I find I have opinions. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

That’s all for this week… and, apparently, this year! May 2023 find us all in a better place.

Have a good weekend, everyone.