Rise of Azshara Experiences So Far

Community General Discussion
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I’ve actually had a lot more fun in Mechagon than in Nazjatar. The rocket pack is the best thing that’s happened to the game in ages.

I would make two improvements to Mechagon though. First, put a portal out there. It’s a giant slog having to fly all the way from Boralus. Second, put a flight point on the western tip of the island. If you don’t have the rocket pack, it’s a really long haul back to Rustbolt.

In Nazjatar, I’d like the ability to dismiss the bodyguards, because they break my invis by remaining in combat. The sheer density of all the hostiles makes kiting impossible and sometimes you just need to get away. The bodyguard breaks that.

In both zones sharding/phasing has been a difficult issue, with enemy PVP materializing in massive numbers a few seconds after engaging a rare elite, for instance, or treasure chests disappearing the moment you target them.

The artwork is glorious.

The story is… a lot better in Mechagon than in Nazjatar.

The rewards are so far much less than exciting. Benthic gear suffers the same problem that has plagued WoW for ages. A 385 piece is not an upgrade to a 410 or 420 slotted item. Grinding time-gated mana pearls (which I will call them from now on, ‘time-gated’) to upgrade a 385 to a 400 is STILL not an upgrade. It makes Nazjatar feel like walking along the beach picking up seashells and sand dollars. Pretty, but not useful.

The bad guys in Nazjatar are just randomly… there. There’s no sense of structure in Queen Azshara’s court. No intrigue. Nobody working against her. Boring.

Unlike others, I enjoy the puzzle WQs. Only problem with them is that you can be kicked out by other players randomly dragging hostile mobs into the room. You phase me out for the Tortollan quests. Why isn’t that happening for these?

Curse you for bad design on the Tickles quest. Just… NO. Complete failure there.

Why did I have to save up 75 time-gated mana pearls in order to do that one quest for 23 gold? What was the point???

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Only working through Naga zone right now. (ally & horde)

I’ve explored all zones on Alliance side…and, well…is that it for now…or is that it for the patch?

(Never looked at PTR so I don’t know if there is more questlines coming later. But if this is all there is…it’s very weak when compared to Isle of Thunder opening and Argus opening. Both of those made you feel like you were struggling to gain a foothold in the zone. The naga zone - 'Hey! Come join the party! cause it’s always fun…where it’s wetter…under the sea!"

Terrain is an improvement over Broken Shore and Argus, however.

Thanks for adding in the idiot timer for us players who don’t like Bejeweled games. (Maybe you can ask the programmers to shorten the timer to like 30 minutes?)

P.S. Please do not make the alliance allies a playable race in the future. If you do, I’m seriously going to get on my horde main and kill every last one of them…in retaliation for the NON STOP VERBAL RAMBLINGS OF MY COMPANION!!! (real fun when you’re stuck trying to play the bejeweled game that does not give any info about how many in a row to connect to score. )

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More of the same really. Grind grind grind so I can earn something yet again that I earned years ago. I hate this expansion more and more with every passing day. If I didn’t have friends playing I’d have been gone a long time ago.

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Disappointed when I see the junker gnomes looking better than my regular gnome :frowning:

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I’m enjoying it for the most part. Pretty pleased. My only real frustration with the patch is essences I really want being locked behind PvP. I don’t like PvP and I dislike being forced to do that for a class function that should already be part of my kit.

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I can confirm no Alliance port, and I have finished the questline for Mechagon all the way up to getting the quest to run the dungeon. I went out to the docks where the party took off and they’re still there, you can even talk to one of them.

She does not port you.

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The problem with Vashj’ir was the fact the engine doesn’t handle full 3d movement very well. It never has. And barring an overhaul, it never will. So anything that relies on movement in three dimensions is going to have issues. Ground targeted spells were a pain and for some classes that was par and parcel for them. Charge attacks fare poorly when they have to consider elevation. Etc, etc, etc.

Vashjir’s other big issue is that water zones have a stigma attached to them. They are either very much love or hate, and they lean toward hate. Because they’re seldom done very well.

The thing is, even if they made Nazjatar purely underwater, the other issues with the zone wouldn’t be any better. The zone doesn’t feel like the home turf of the naga. It doesn’t even feel like the city outside of her palace, which is where we are. It feels like they squished a bunch of separate underwater hubs together and called it Nazjatar.

If the zone was say 20-30% larger and felt like the grounds surrounding the bloody palace, which would be mostly ruined city, it’d be a lot better.

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Nazjatar is a slog. Due to the verticality, traversal is a chore despite the flight paths, not to mention there are areas where you are flat out dismounted. Mobs are far too densely packed, and the return of daily quests makes the chores here all the worse, especially the absolutely ridiculous kill 10 elite and 25 normal mob one given how long they take to dispatch. Nobody wants to be there.

Mechagon feels like it was designed by people who have and want to play this game. Hunting and killing just 3 rares? I’m down. Dynamic obectives? Friggin’ sweet. It’s a shame that the junkyard aesthetic isn’t too appealing, but the gameplay is strong.

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My god, you’re a brave one to make this post. I know you can see the forums, since you’re posting on them, but you still went ahead and made this post. You’ve got courage, I’ll give you that.

I liked what I’ve seen of the new content so far, but I haven’t seen very much of it because we’re going out of town for 3 weeks tomorrow, and I wanted to finish my mount farming for the week. Unfortunately, as I noted in a post I just made, I’ve wasted over an hour of my preciously dwindling time sitting at Oondasta’s spawn waiting for there to be 0 hunters here (there was 1, but another just came up while I was typing this sentence). I literally don’t have enough time in the day to not admit to myself that you’ve arbitrarily removed a mount that I’ve been farming for over a year and a half from the game. I’m going to have to give up if I don’t get this spawn, and spend the next 3 weeks of vacation in contemplative disappointment.

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I feel like I’ve done this before…
Oh, I have, Antorus.

Sure would have been amazing to see some class changes, or maybe a 110 or 120 talent slid in somewhere. Overall it’s ok but it’s recycled content with a different view.

I actually lost all care about flying at this point in the game, really don’t care if I get it one way or another. It’s been to long at this point. We get it Blizz we are playing the game how you want us to play it not how we want to play it, continue time-gating and dictating how we play, it’s super fun.

I am a person who loves having alts and feel basically forced to pick one out of the 12 I have and just stick with that because there is NO way I will be doing this on alts. It just makes me sad because I hate being restricted to one toon.

That new Shadowbringers coming is looking more and more tempting. A game that actually rewards players for sticking out the nonsense instead of rewarding people who quit, hmmm.

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haven’t done much but I will say 8.2 has caused a lot of bugs.

I’ve currently encounter 3 world quests that bug so baldy they at times are undoable.

my monk rolls seem to have extended an extreme amount

the lag/disconnects have been a pain

the “you have a new pvp talent” pop up is working my last nerve

so yeah not liking it so far

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Same, I have found the best way to play this expac is ignore the grind as much as you possibly can. I am an altoholic and Legion was nice with alts. However BFA I am getting burnt out with grind on top of grind… not to mention the lack of feeling my characters getting stronger after doing activities.

Upvotes this because I ran out of upvotes. Not much else to say aside from I wish for those vendors back.

Out of likes but your post has several things I want to give a thumbs up to more then once, especially the world scaling and alt friendly portions. Really at this rate I would trash the necklace in an instant if I could get my old Legion legendary weapons to function in current content.

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Just wanna add something purely positive i experienced in this patch, in Nazjatar to be specific:

As i described earlier, i was going to go around explore and enjoy the amazing work of the art, sound and music team. I was so taken away at how lively everything was… i found secret caves with such beautiful deep sea plants and super interesting looking creatures. I even think i found the spot where the waves crashed in on Azshara, which was a very cool spot to inspect closely.
I really enjoy running around there, so much so i don’t even wanna use my flight master whistle.
I’ve always had a thing for underwater type of areas, and wasn’t sure at first if Nazjatar was really gonna pull me in without being underwater, but i got totally immersed and fell for the zone so hard! Such a beautifully crafted place!

In terms of questing and adventure , i found one quest in particular very cool. Just by running around, i picked up a seed like item (i forgot the name, sorry), and it nudged me to go check out an area with a carnivorous plant. When i went there i figured, eh, okey i will just turn in the quest. But no!

Instead i had to catch the bugs around the plant to feed it to it, and make it grow. Only to then have it wanna devour me too, lol!
That was awesome. The whole lead up to the quest was great, because it needed me to explore the world out of curiousity in the first place, and then gave me a suprisingly immersive/RPG like experience in the world by encountering this flesh eating plant that i now fed out of curiosity to see what’s gonna happen.

It made so much sense, and it felt really fun and engaging. It made me care more about the whole zone, because the quest sold me that it was it’s own living thing.
On top of that i found other items that even cursed my character as i had them in my bags… Blizzard, more of this! This makes me feel so much that I’m playing an RPG, an element that i felt has gone missing in WoW in later expansions. But this is so cool, because when i entered a raid with my guild today, the items were still debuffing me as they should regardless of where i am or what i’m doing!
Makes it so much more believable that this world and what i do with it matters! Great job :two_hearts:

Another quest that left an impression on me was an escort of a Murloc i found out there in a dangerous area. I took the little guy with me back to the camp, and now he became a vendor just like that, with cute Murloc items! That was so cool. So small, but again, it’s a creature of the zone i now befriended after i helped him, so he sticks around to sell his little fish wares he gathered from the place. Very immersive, and adds so much to the world feeling!

And last but not least, because you guys really earned this praise, there’s one additional super small but still awesome experience that stood out to me:

When i ran back to the camp, there was a giant sitting on top of a bridge on the path back, and underneath him was another giant. First of all i found it cool to see they weren’t enemies, and was wondering why actually! Still need to investigate that one.

What made these guys special was when the giant who sat on the bridge was so unaware of the giant beneath him, that when he heard him talk, he thought the bridge was starting to speak lol! That was so charming and again, immersive, giving this land so much character that made me wanna spend more time in it and explore everything! I didn’t even have a quest for these guys, yet they still interacted with eachother like they didn’t require me to be there to do it. Awesome!!

It’s really obvious in a lovely way that so much work, love infused work, has gone into this area. You can tell by traveling through it that the people who worked on this really have a charme about them that translates into this zone they breathed life into. It also feels much more RPG like than for example Argus.
Big thumbs up for this! I haven’t explored the gnome zone yet because Nazjatar has grabbed me, but i will check it out soon as well :+1:
Keep it up :heart:

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I care for none of this, it is to little to late. I would of preferred class design changes and the 2 dungeons

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A bit about my experience with WoW. While I did play a bit in Vanilla, I primarily played WoW throughout Burning Crusade and Wrath. This was my key time playing and my most enjoyable time with the game. I did play a bit in Cata, but lost interest as I hated the questing and just found it really difficult to stay focused when all my friends quit. I unsubbed and grew up a bit, got a real job and didn’t have time to play over the next few years. I left out Mists and Draenor. However visting these zones, Mist was great and Draenor was cat vomit. I came back halfway through Legion, which I did enjoy a lot (probably cause BC 2.0 story) and bought BFA upon release date (meh). In Legion, I enjoyed about 75% of the game (artifact weapon, order hall, nightborne ar), more-so at the end of the expansion. The biggest thing for me and my close group of friends was Mythic Keys. It’s all I cared about, still do care about and will continue to care about. I love keys, I love how you get gear through keys and it is the only thing I enjoy doing in WoW. In Wrath, it was totally different. I enjoyed almost everything that expansion had to offer from PVP to Raiding, and grinding dungeons to get badges to get gear. It just made sense, it worked and I loved it. A lot has changed since then and my feelings are perhaps a tad bit biased. I do enjoy World Of Warcraft and I don’t want to see Blizzard fail. This is my honest to god personal feeling of this expansion and patch.

Pros Of Nazjatar:

  • It’s prettyish.
  • The voice acting is good (I don’t play with sound though because Ariana Grande> WoW Sounds).
  • There is a portal to it.
  • PVP Events. As a member of the horde, are all ive been doing while im there. Gank, camp, gank. Fight for a point. Intimidate ally to not get point. Win.

Cons Of Nazjatar:

  • Navigation: It’s terrible to navigate. I can bet with flying it’d be 10000% times better. However I won’t know what that’s like for at least a month or so. Due to really heavy time gating.

  • The feel: It feels mostly like the Walmart version of High Mountain, mixed with a touch of Aszuna and Argus. This isn’t a good thing. High Mountain was a terrible zone. I read a post that said Vashj’ir feels more like Nazjatar then Nazjatar feels like Nazjtar and I couldn’t agree more.

  • Time gating: I get it, you don’t want people rushing through content. I truly believe this isn’t something you should decided as a company. You should just release it and let people do things at their will. If someone wants to spend 20 hours straight going from revered to exalted. Let them. If someone wants to do it over six months, that’s fine too. Locking us behind dailies, and rep, and questing that you can only do about an hour a day over the course of ten days is really sad and stale.

  • The quests: I feel like everyone complaining about the “mobile phone game” world quests are being a little silly. I actually don’t mind them personally. Bejewled is fun, I just don’t think the RNG aspect of the quest is. Wanting people to get five of one color could be done instantly or it could be done after twenty minutes depending on RNG. Bad idea. The jumping jellies quest, was actually really easy. I think people over looked it, however it is a terrible quest and time and time again, i’ve read on the forums that the: Kirin Tor, Tortollan and “game” quests are just the worst thing you’ve done to the game. I hated the leytiger quest in legion. I hate gimmicky stuff, but hey, that’s just me. I’d make these more as a “bonus” type quest, and less of a requirement. As far as the other quests in the zone. It’s copy pasta stuff over and over again. Stale, boring, repeat quests. I skipped every cutscene cause I don’t care about the story. I just couldn’t wait to be done with the area and what it had to offer.

  • Story: I don’t care about the story at all. Like literally at this point i’ve lost so much interest. In Wrath, watching Jaina just loose Arthas to the power of revenge and frostmourne. That was captivating. I haven’t cared about the story since then. I don’t care about the horde or the alliance. I think Jaina is cute, and that’s about it. So I enjoy seeing her character. I also main her in HOTS for what it’s worth. Perhaps go back to the roots, bring in old writers and make a story like in wrath or crusade.

  • Aggro/Mobs: My god the density is terrible. Literally Argus 2.0. You pull like ten things in a fifteen-foot range. As a tank, it’s not that big of a deal to me, cause I don’t get dismounted. However, my friends hate it. Which brings me to alts.

  • Anti-Alt Friendly: I’m literally only doing this zone on my main. I can’t even fathom how anyone can do this more than once. As mentioned I primarily only do mythic dungeons and keys. That’s it. I don’t enjoy raiding anymore. I just spam keys for gear. I think I got my paladin to 400 in a day or two. Then 410 just two weeks later. It started slowing down after that. I plan on doing this with my alts to get them geared. Mythic keys is the only aspect of wow that hasn’t really been ruined for me.

Pros Of Mechagon:

  • Jet Packs: Holy cow these things are fun. I wish you’d make this a stand-alone mount. I love being able to just soar through the zone. The most fun I’ve had in BFA to be totally honest. I was role-playing with my friend in the sky like Dragon Ball Z characters and it was the first time all expac I really was like wow, something sick.

  • Crafting: I like the idea of a vendor for crafting stuff. It gives me something to do when there is literally nothing else to do. It’d be cool if there were a lot more mounts to craft like 10-15 of them. Perhaps there are more mounts in the future, but I just have the one now. Lots of rare toys and transmog would also be sick to craft. Something that makes someone else go: “oh snap, you spent six months trying to get that, wow sick” would be neat, “I only have the three month one”. This would be acceptable time gating for “fun, optional, toy” type things.

  • Rares: Rare killing is cool, it also entices a bit of pvp, however, the zone was mostly dead when I was there and there wasn’t too much of that.

Cons Of Mechagon:

  • Crafting/Bag Space: Just as it is a pro, it’s also a con. The amount of junk that you pick up, and how it fills your bag. That’s rather frustrating. I’d really like it if you can make these mats “at least most of them” a currency.

  • Timeless Isle 2.0: It’s more of a Timeless Isle 1.5, than a 2.0. It’s just an island with some stuff on it. There’s no real reward for doing anything there, at least not yet.

Overall Pros:

  • Transmog: Finally you can hide stuff. People have been asking for this since transmog came out. Better late than never, I guess?

  • Changes To Old Content: Making the first boss basically soloable now in Hellfire was cool. This is just a general thing I think should be done every so often. Once a raid is one expansion old, you really should be able to go and there and solo it for yourself. When expansion nine comes out. I want to be able to walk into Tomb or Nighthold and just farm transmog and mounts. It’s old dead content. Just make it be this way.

Overall Cons:

  • Boring/Stale/Repeat Content: Really as mentioned it’s just the same stuff over and over again. If you want to do something that’s been done. Do something that’s been done, that everyone loved at least. Perhaps you don’t want to go back to wrath type stuff because you’re making the wrath legacy servers and you don’t want to have that compete, I don’t know? I’m just saying, retail needs it.

  • Class Design: I know Ion addressed this, but it’s still an issue until it actually gets fixed.

  • Time Gating: This really needs to end. Go back to when you could just do things the way you wanted to do them. I don’t mind “soft” time gates. I don’t think anyone does. But this whole, you can only do “x” amount of content in “x” amount of time, because we don’t want players to progress to fast is quite frankly the dumbest thing i’ve ever. It’s an mmo, so there should be grinding, but if someone wants to grind six months of content in ten days. Let them be a neckbeard and grind!! Locking things being a rep gate is totally fine, if you can spam quest and spam dungeon to get exalted with them as soon as possible. Blizzard shoudn’t be able to decide on what you do with your time, or how you spend it. They shouldn’t force you to do things a certain way. If you want to power level through dungeons rather than quest, that’s your choice. It shouldn’t be a punishment to not have to do the story. Telling your player base, we want you to see the world and experience the story, is understandable, it’s just not for everyone. So don’t force everyone to do it. Myself speaking, I hate questing, and will dread to do it. Dungeon spam is my prefered method.

  • Flying: In 9.0, once you hit the level cap, and finish the zones/story. Just be allowed to buy flying. Don’t make people wait and have to do all this stuff for it. Flyings been fine. If someone doesn’t want to fly, they don’t have to. If they want to explore and be “immersed” let them walk or ground mount. I loved the ability to jet pack in Mechagon and it was the most fun i’ve had since BFA came out a year ago. That’s sad.

General Suggestions for BFA and fixing the game in terms of content:

I like the idea of progressing your character and getting strong and feeling better than everyone else. At 440 iLvL. I want to be able to literally two shot an add, in Zuldazar. I want to be able to solo a normal dungeon with ease and be able to handle high keys with no problem. 1v4 in pvp. I want it to feel like the end of legion. I want to be able to work for gear and get really excited when something neat drops. I loved vendors and I think the titan residuum was a great addition. However, it needs to be Wrath Again. Base Mythics award tokens. Weekly quest for a boss in raid gives tokens. Mechagon has a boss that spawns or a really tough quest that requires people and communication that drops tokens. Perhaps you can craft a token or two with the new crafting stuff. Stop time gating. Stop forcing people to play the game a certain way. Stop letting the idea of exporing and forcing interaction to happen.

If you build a great game, with a great story. Give balance and equality through all classes and design. Make great fun and exciting content, soloable stuff too, with gear that rules, and requires effort to get. You will be 10000% successful. I know you’re under a million subs, and just to think at peak you had ten times that playing. You can have that again and more if you bring the perfect balance between the game, enviroment and mmo roots. I don’t want this to get to winded but imagine, if it worked in a sense where each class countered another. In order to basically shut down a paladin, you needed a mage and a rouge. It’d make those two classes feel incredible. Then in order to shut down the mage and rouge, you need a warrior and a demon hunter. It’d make this chain of having importance in a class. Do the same thing for raiding. Build bosses off of classes. Build spells around encounters. Make all of it fit together and compeling and the game will sell itself.

I wish I could just brainstorm with Ion and everyone. I can easily speak for about twenty people, all who have been die hard since day one and most of which have switched to other games for what they offer.

No one cares if you mess up. Admit it, fix it and you’ll be fine. Everyone cares if you continue to mess up. When you have a community, especially powerful youtubers and twitch streamers who constantly talk about “what it could be” and “what it’s not”, it’s basically one person speaking for hundreds and persuading them. So do something right to make them persuade them right back into Azeroth.

*EDIT!!! I found out today that the jetpacks are only available on some days. So that really sucks and made me feel kinda sad. The one thing you had good and made available, is of course time restricted.

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Nazjatar is fine. Haven’t gone to Mechagon, its probably fine. If BFA started this way, the whole experience would have been better.

My quarrel with the dev team is the seasonal nature of WoW these days. I hate that I can’t “finish” a character to my satisfaction. I can “finish” the character for a patch and that progress is entirely wiped away 6-8months later. It feels futile and like I am not in control of my character and that character’s choices.

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When will the dungeon mechagon be available?

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so water has been moved out the way from the zone. But I got to run around the full zone to fine 10 fish to kick into pools of water?

add more fish!

my bags filling up with items I cant use until next week? will get to use all them that week? or wait weeks to use each one?

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Lol I see you guys had enough time to make a new store mount though.

You people are unbelievable

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I like it so far. Don’t care much for the new armour designs, but the weapons are definitely pretty well done.