First impressions is that this place is enormous!! The rooms are huge and there’s caverns to run through and winding twisting passageways. I can see a lot of getting lost for the first couple of weeks. I didn’t take anywhere near as many photos as I wanted to have but hopefully when we finish clearing the place out this week I can go back in and photograph to my heart’s content.
It’s certainly not as pretty as Nighthold, but there’s lots of little details that make me want to explore it so much more. We came across a really cool little room which had chairs and bookcases in it, I really wanted to stay in there and poke around but my guildies were rushing through, so I’ll come back!
The plan last night was to take all the main toons through normal together and then when it was done we’d break into our first heroic split run which is half alts, half mains and clear as far as we could with the alts, then everyone would swap – alts to mains and vice versa and restart.
The fights on normal were pretty quick but they did give help to give a look at the fights even if we didn’t get the best idea of what the mechanics were as we pushed a little too fast.The fights are different enough from NH that it feels like a real change and not just more of the same. I absolutely loved the fight that has a whale leap out of the water and had to keep an eye on the watery floor for bubbles to move out of it. Dec was chanting ‘bubbles bubbles’ throughout that whole fight and making me wonder what the heck he was talking about until I saw the water bubbling for myself. I never saw the whale though which doesn’t surprise me at all, I tend to miss a lot of things in raids when I’m staring at my healing bars.
We got up to the Maiden as the 7th boss right before scheduled maintenance so we only had a few attempts on her which was interesting. Her mechanic splits the raid randomly depending on a the colour you get assigned – light or fel and coming into contact with a person or ability that belongs to the other colour puts a bomb onto that person that explodes with raid wide damage. You can minimize this by jumping into the hole in the middle of the room and exploding down there and the bomb then throws you back up and out. Our raid was exploding with people everywhere.. it was hilarious to watch but it’s going to be a pain if that isn’t sorted out lol.
I was lucky with the legendary upgrade drops and could pop back to Dalaran mid way through the raid and upgrade my Velen’s to 970! That was a huge upgrade to it. Next one I’ll do will probably be Prydaz as I know I’ll be using those two legendaries a lot. I’m not sure what ones I’ll do next, if I get more Haste/Mast gear it’ll be shoulders but I don’t like how they feel with my current stat/gear set up so I’m sticking to Prydaz/Velens at the moment. I really want to get the new ring which grants me Soul of the Forest and luckily it’ll come at 970 when I eventually see it so I won’t have to upgrade.
After the shutdown, the door to the Maidens room was locked as if we hadn’t cleared through to her so we couldn’t finish the normal run. We decided to start the first split run on heroic and as my Shaman is rostered on the first run, she got to see heroic bosses before my Druid did! We ended up getting the first 3 done on heroic before raid was finished. My shaman was lucky enough to bonus roll (alts can’t roll on raid loot) a 920 trinket which was a big upgrade as well as completing the quest to make her first legendary to 970 so her ilvl jumped over 5 points in one run. She only has 2 legendaries so lucky I don’t have very many to have to upgrade. Maybe she’ll see more as I’m doing more content on her regularly. I’m starting to feel a bit more confident on her and more gear will definitely help her healing numbers.
I haven’t looked at what affixs are up this week but really hope I can manage to drag her through a mythic 15 this week for the 930 loot out of the cache. It might be a death march so hopefully I find some patient people in pugs. That’s the huge downside of being Alliance, there’s just not enough Ally on my friends list that are into mythic plus dgns to run with. I need more Alliance friends!
Tbh I actually am a little homesick for Horde and my Horde friends a lot. Alliance has some really great points but Horde still feels like home. Every time I put my teleport cloak on, I always think I’m heading to Orgrimmar and usually get a surprise when I see the Stormwind loading screen come up. After nearly 5 years Horde, how long is it going to take for me to get used to Alliance?
We don’t go back to ToS until Sunday night but hopefully I can sneak into Normal and poke around the parts we’ve already done and get some nice photos.
Z is for Zeirah 
If our schedules weren’t so different I’d gladly run stuff with you. I’ve never run a +15 on my main much less an alt. What iLvl is your shaman up to? Is the new ring really good for Resto? I switched my loot spec to balance last night for turning in legionfall bags (only spec I hadn’t used up my higher chance of first legendary for) and managed to snag the ring. It’s good for feral, so if it’s good for resto too then that’s even better. I think I have one last higher chance legendary (2nd balance), hopefully I can get it soon and it’s something fun.
I know, you seem to be coming on when I’m logging off 🙂 These timezones 😦
My Shammy is sitting at 907 now. The highest I’ve done on her has been an 11 and it was horrible but she was 7 ilvls lower and it was horrible affix’s so we’ll see :p
The ring will be good when I have a high lvl 4pc tier 20. Tthe druid discord is full of comments saying it’s not worth wearing the 4pc until you have high heroic/mythic pieces and not to wear the ring with the 4pc t19 but I’d still like to see it early just to try out a bit and then I can turn z’s loot spec back to balance.
I’ve decided I don’t know how the leggo chances works, I have all the resto ones and still got a new one exactly 2 weeks after my last one, it seems to be like clockwork so how can it be based on chance? When I turned my balance spec loot on, I didn’t get one in a shorter space of time and I have much less balance ones than resto so isn’t the bad luck protection thing supposed to kick in?
Your alt is higher than my main lol. I think I hit 906 with the new ring. Hell my alt was higher than my main too though before the new raid released, but that was mostly because he never got 4pc t19.
After the first two per spec the chance is the same. Where you had all of them for resto you had more than two that count for Balance (sephuz, prydaz, etc) even though they didn’t drop as balance spec. If you look at all possible leggos for a spec and you have none then your first one is a really high chance and your second is slightly higher than normal. From then on it’s supposedly the same base chance.
I had gotten Feral boots, Velen’s, Luffas (feral and guardian), and the energy ring (Feral). So technically I had a slightly higher chance at a resto or guardian legendary because I only had 1 for each of those specs. I didn’t have any that counted against balance so that was what I set my loot spec to for opening legionfall bags. I got the ring that is shared across specs so now I effectively have 2 for resto, 2 guardian, 4 feral, and 1 balance. That means balance is the only spec I still have a slightly higher chance at a legendary for. If my next leggo counts against balance I will have used up all of my increased chances. If you are unlucky like my warlock you get two leggos that are both bad and they count for all three specs so you are screwed out of any increased chance on future ones.
It is very good to see you excited about the raid! I hope to feel the same very soon.
Good luck!
And to you 🙂
Thank you for sharing, Zeirah 🙂 So nice for me to see and hear a little bit about the raid, it will still be a while before I see it in game.
Nice to be able to upgrade such a juicy trinket, congrats!
As for the homesick feeling, I am not sure. I cannot imagine changing faction, ever. I will always belong with the Alliance.
Maybe it would help if you went and did some “lower level content” with Z? I cant say for sure, of course, but I imagine you might spend a lot of time at the end game atm? Sometimes doing a few Alliance quest chains on lower levels might help with the more “grounded” feeling of belonging to the Alliance? Just an idea.
I hope you will settle down soon. More Alliance friends for sure will help you too, indeed.
Most of the content i’m doing on Z is completely factionless. In fact doing the faction change has just reinforced even more how completely irrelevant faction is in the world now days. Literally the only change I see at End Content is that as Ally doing the wardens tower daily quests has me fighting a complete misrepresentation of what the horde is (undead monstrosities like patchwork- that’s not what horde is ffs) whereas Horde fight against worgen – an acutal Alliance playable race.
I like Alliance for the pretty races and pretty architecture but horde lore perspective and faction leaders and pretty much everything appeals to me more. I’ll settle down in time 🙂 I want to have a wider variety of raiding guilds to be able to draw from when needed and for oceanic, that’s found on Frostmourne and Frostmourne is predominately alliance. So for now, I’ll stay here and I am loving being a night elf so much so if I can combine raiding with Nelf, it will be good 😀
Ah I see, that makes sense. (Never given it much thought, about the Wardens Tower, that is actually quite odd, the display of horde)
I hope so, have faith 🙂