Zereth Mortis Feedback

The addition of the Anima deposit and the soul forge is a great help in Haven in Zereth Mortis but with all the stuff we have to carry and all the time it takes to go back to oribos id would be really nice to be able to earn a Bank and a Mission table at least through unlocks or something.

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Posting this for visibility but seems the last tree research is bugged for alot of people and causing people to lose literally hours (myself Included) because the game thinks we are research on an alt when we are not. (zeros alts in Zereth Mortis yet) Any chance we could get this looked at?

Seems it was reported on the PTR alot and never got fixed

11 hours later and it seems to have fixed it self

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I’ve had time to thoroughly soak in 9.2, and it’s been absolutely fantastic thus far.
The zone looks great, feels great, and I’m looking forward to having more to do as the cypher upgrades roll out and more story quests/flying get added to the mix.

That said, obviously there are some minor points that could use some elbow grease, most of the ones I’ve noticed have already been mentioned, like rares with HP pools that scale to ridiculous sizes, or Pocopoc’s enhanced perception option highlighting objects we’ve already discovered/Echoed Jizo we can’t interact with yet. Here’s some issues I’ve noticed in my time in Zereth Mortis:

  • 1H Swords with Agi dropping for Warriors/Paladins, 1H Swords with Str dropping for Rogues/Mages. Hotfix the swords to all have Agi/Str/Int so everyone that loots them can actually use them.
  • Otaris the Provoked’s Charged Barrage does splash damage that can easily chunk 60-70%+ HP off a non-tank character. Most times I’ve killed it in a group, half the group drops dead 2 seconds into the spell. Very punishing for a rare located inside a tiny cave with little room to move.
  • Shifting Stargorger’s Consume Vitality ability can’t be interrupted, so it’s effectively immortal unless you have a large raid group to spam it with stuns. Very annoying, and the necessity of large raid groups means waiting for long periods to recruit enough people.
  • The Engulfer’s Health Pool doesn’t seem to scale when engaged by multiple people, so it tends to die mere seconds after spawning.
  • It’s probably already common knowledge that Gluttonous Overgrowth is bugged and the roots aren’t available most of the time. Protector of the First Ones occasionally has a similar problem, where the runes on the locks aren’t there, making it impossible to open the door.
  • Tahkwitz and Gorkek are spawning, but can’t be engaged without Goblin Glider/Door of Shadows tomfoolery.
  • Sandworn Relic’s only use is to buy iLv246 armor sets. Why are these soulbound, and not Bind on Account?
  • Remove/increase the unique restriction on Sandworn Chest Key Fragments, and increase Sandworn Chest Key’s stack limit from 10 to 200.
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Personally, I am enjoying the new zone added this patch. However, I do wish the elites for the Dune Dominance achievement should have their respawn timers raised.

I’ve waited well over two hours tonight alone - Waiting for an elite for this achievement to spawn. As a result of this, I think the respawn should be only about every 15-30 minutes. This would make it easier for everyone to get their kills in for chances at loot.

Total times, I’ve seen the elites up for this since the patch dropped is only once.

I am wondering too why these 3 rars, that also share their respawn have such a long respawn timer. Furthermore one of them is also droping a mount. If there is a group in the tool, it is full in like 10 seconds.

Further Feedback, after 6 days:

  • Some of the bugs are annoying, was good to see the Cypher Research one fixed quickly, but the one affecting the gluttonous overgrowth is frustrating.
  • Being a DK feels bad sometimes. I play necrolord so unless I swap to venthyr I simply can’t access some of the chests easily (Edit: This is easier with the teleport gloves, but DoS goes much further) And I’m not a DH to just double jump.
  • Some of the abilities by the rares feel overtuned. I don’t hate the massive health pools, as it allows time to reach the rares (I saw Engulfer mentioned above, that would be a good fix) but some abilities like Otaris’ are way to hard to see, let alone dodge in a small cave with a lot of people.
  • I’ll agree it does feel weird to not have the dailies give rep as well, I suppose lore wise it makes a bit of sense given that these come from Firim, and he is not welcomed among The Enlightened, but it’s annoying from a player perspective.
  • I want to come back to this:

In theory this was a great change. Allow players to reach revered by week 5 without killing a single rare. Do your world quests, do your weekly, do the campaign, you’ll get there “on time”
What I’m still seeing though is a “need” to farm as many rares as possible to stay ahead of the curve. I’m trying to hit Honored as fast as I can so I can capture my part of the legendary market on a small server. It feels bad camping a rare and running laps for 10 rep.

  • These things aside I would echo a lot of what is mentioned above about specific QoL changes, but I am enjoying the zone, although it would be nice to have a few more world quests / dailies to engage in.
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I’m glad you like how the zone looks. We definitely went for a bright and vibrant look for this zone, in both the vegetation, devices, and structures.

It was interesting designing props for this clean geometric aesthetic as we hadn’t really done something like this in WoW before.

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Its a really nice change from The Maw and Korthia. They had a really cool vibe and aesthetic, don’t get me wrong, but after a year the change is welcome :laughing:

And yeah the new designs are super cool too! I love all the new assets that were brought in!

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Thanks for your feedback on Rare tuning and feel. A couple things to talk about:

Generally, the Rares (especially group Rares) in Zereth Mortis have a bit more health than say Korthia or Mechagon. We wanted to try out making Rares that were a bit more dangerous than previously seen. Health is actually a great way of making something a bit scarier to fight without increasing damage done. If an enemy has a bit more health, that enemy will be able to attack more often – dealing more damage in the process. We do however see a few enemies that likely have too much health currently. We are taking an active look at some of the outliers in that regard.

On the tuning note, I am assuming you are referring to the damage done / frequency of abilities (please correct me if I am wrong). This is largely due to the same point above. There is an active want on the team to make more engaging, non-instanced combat. Rares, Elites, Quest Bosses, etc. are a great place for that, but there are some outliers for sure. The upper echelon of what we would consider appropriate for a Rare Elite would be something like Otaris with their rotating beams and missile attacks. We are okay with some Rares being more difficult than others - those peaks and valleys provide valuable texture to the game and can make for some memorable play experiences.

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I’m really enjoying the running around and killing rares portion of ZM. The rares are interesting and the mechanics are fun, although in the instance of Otaris in the small room it’s easy, especially for melee with no self heals to get into trouble and end up corpse walking 2-3 times.

I do want to make a note though for you all to consider as you begin this damage pass that there are far fewer players in ZM chasing rares this week compared to last week. It’s likely due to two things:

  1. People are working on the new PvP, M+ and Raid content. and;

  2. The rares don’t drop anything of particular use to people doing that content.

I see groups of 3-5 people standing around spawned rares without enough people to kill it. The rares in Korthia were often tanked by hunters which doesn’t work quite as well in ZM due to positioning and other more intelligent factors.

I know the idea is not to tie much in the way of player power onto anything in ZM; however if the player population is not high enough there the content will go stagnant quickly.

I suggest giving the Rare bosses a chance to drop a conduit upgrade token, renown, or something along those lines to give people something to chase unrelated to reputation and reputation rewards to give them a reason to keep killing the rares.

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I did get a small kick out of the Spider rare having more health than the world boss when each are attacked by a full 40 man raid group.

The ability I specifically referenced on Otaris feels harder than the others due to the damage done and the way it targets. In a melee heavy group it’s very hard to survive. Larger groups attacking Otaris also make this ability hit for over half of my max health, so two hits in quick succession kills me.
I agree that rares should have a challenge to them, but for me that particular doesn’t feel survivable.

I kinda like otaris as it makes it very easy to get the tag back in warmode but he should really be able to be pulled outside the room without bugging out

Some more feedback after week 1!

I still would love if daily quests provided reputation, especially with the third quest available. Just an added bonus and reward for completing them, although the cipher reward is great.

The zone feels like it could use more events, so it’s not just killing rares all the time, similar to the Uldum/Vale zones. I personally enjoy those a lot more - it’s just more variety, especially for completing the weekly quest. I love the puzzle chests of course and how the shape aesthetic was incorporated into them. Please keep adding the minigames into each expansion; they’re awesome!

One of my main gripes is the bag space management. With the forge tap reagents and the proto-synthesis reagents, I’m very quickly running out of inventory space. Mechagon had this same issue but this zone took it to another extreme. Since you need like 18k genesis motes to craft everything in addition to the lattices and glimmers, I’m going to be hoarding these for awhile.

I like the addition of the elite area of the zone. Just provides a stark contrast and challenge when navigating and doing things. Aesthetically I like the theme of shapes and how they’re integrated into the zone and quests. However the zone to me feels like it’s missing an area. There are the grass plains, garden and the desert and… that’s about all you see. I think sprinkling more visually distinct places like the garden across the zone would be neat!

One other gripe is that the sandworn relic acquisition feels super slow, and should be a currency or a boa item. My main character has extensively been in ZM killing all rares and opening all treasures and I’ve only ended up with 250-275.

Also wanted to give big props to the alt-friendly features especially with the research. Please continue these in other zones!!

There was one big change that I don’t see anyone mentioning yet. All the weapons/armor can be looted by any class/spec regardless of specialization, which can use the appearance (i.e. strength sword on a Mage). I think there are some remaining issues with this (hunters can’t loot the swords) but it’s been noticed! For transmog farming, this is amazing and a change collectors have wanted. Although not retroactive, I hope this can continue to future expansions and zones.

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Most of them feel fine. However, there are two in particular that I’ve noticed - Mother Phestis and Akkaris, that take far too long to die, and unlike usual, where more people make things die faster, more people actually make these two die slower due to how their health scales. A group of 5 can down Akkaris in 2-3 minutes. Whereas my raid group of 40 took 10 minutes.

Likewise, on the opposite end of the spectrum, there is one rare that dies WAY too fast - The Engulfer. I know you guys just hotfixed his health scaling, but it’s no where near enough.

I’d also like to point out that Helmix for some reason takes significantly longer to spawn than any other rare. We’ve worked out it’s based on killing the worms in the area, but I had a group of like 12 clearing out the worms for a good hour before it spawned. But I’ve also had him spawn almost immediately after he died because we killed a worm that aggroed with him.

And finally, a last comment on rares - Rhuv. Why is the Mawrat mount on Rhuv and not Iska? Rhuv dies literally within 10-15 seconds of spawning. It’s incredibly hard to find a group where it isn’t already dead.


I’d also like to see a way to tell if a rare is currently spawning. Like, for instance, we can see Xy’rath is up if there’s broker corpses in his spawn area. But for other rares on rotation like Chitali, Vexis, etc. I’ve seen no noticeable way to tell if they’re spawning.

A suggestion I had in general was simply make Shandris able to talk to in Haven, and have her say something like “The Sentinels have been tracking high profile targets in Zereth Mortis, but we recently lost track of a few of them.” then a dialogue you can press where she lists them. That way players aren’t stuck camping something for hours before realizing it isn’t on the rotation.


I would also like to talk about the swords that drop in Zereth Mortis. They were very obviously meant to be transmog. This is reinforced by the fact you made it so the agi swords can drop for str users and vice versa, as well as letting both the agi and str swords drop for warlocks/mages.

However, neither appear to be dropping for hunters (I’ve asked every hunter I know, communities, etc.), even though we are capable of using swords, so we could add them to our transmog wardrobe.


And finally, pocopoc:

I actually like pocopoc. I’ll be at Cypher level 5 tomorrow (I would be now but I’m saving Cyphers for the 4th row to make him a stronger fighter). Thoughts:

  1. The Jiro Buffs are borderline useless. They’re good to get once a day for Cyphers then never again. It feels like a genuine waste of cyphers to ever put points into those until we have no other option.
  2. The enhancements are fun, but some are very strong. For instance, the Healiac and the Toxicialic. The Toxicialic melts certain rares, as they aren’t elites. So their health goes down 6% every 5 seconds per person with the power. Perhaps make it so the strength of the power is reduced if more than one person has the power engaged with it, scaling with how many? Also, is it intended that this power is meant to aggro everything within 40 yards if you are in combat? IT also breaks CC when this happens. I’ve killed quite a few people on accident cause I ran by and my power broke their CC.
  3. The Pocopoc controlling: These are fun, and some are very strong.

However, the Tarachnid’s power doesn’t work 99% of the time. It uses an energy but nothing happens. The Scarabid’s power is so weak a melee attack does more, so why ever use it for 1 energy?

The Helicid, Geoelemental, and Vombata are great though. It’s just the first 2 that I fail to see much use for.

Can’t comment on the 4th row as I haven’t unlocked it yet.

  1. And finally, Perceptive Pocopoc. Can you please make it so Pocopoc stops pinging the minimap for lore concordances you’ve already added to your console, or lore concordances you can’t decipher yet? Also, you can only unlock one of each type of puzzle chest a day, but Pocopoc will continue to ping the area of a puzzle chest you can’t do - even though it won’t be visible for you. He also pings Jiro for me, even though I haven’t unlocked the ability for him to ping Jiro?

I think that’s all for now. I try to avoid critiquing things until I’ve fully experienced them. As such, can’t talk about the raid as I’m waiting for LFR, and I do not have interest in the solo queue PVP, because as a PvE player, I have zero chance against someone in PvP gear.

EDIT: On the topic of alt-friendliness - any chance you can make it so cyphers and protoform synthesis items can drop on alts who haven’t advanced that far in the campaign/pocopoc research? Feels bad looting treasures/killing rares and not getting cyphers cause I still haven’t unlocked pocopoc. Likewise, missing out on account-bound items my main can use sucks.

To add to this, even just adding a bank to Haven would make this significantly better. As well as double-checking all protoform synthesis items can be put in the reagent bank. Some can’t, according to a few communities I’m in.

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One other thing to mention - It really feels like the battle pet system wasn’t given much attention, especially for a later patch. Some thoughts:

  • No battle pet world quests or dailies (maybe these are unpopular due to rep rewards given in the past, but those could be removed)
  • No new legendary pet battles/trainers (i.e. Tanaan Jungle / Argus) or dungeons
  • No new battle pet achievements - usually there’s a Safari/Family achievement

Korthia also had this same treatment so I know it’s not specific to ZM, but I’m disappointed to not see any new battle pet content apart from just new wild pets. The proto-synthesis forge doesn’t feel like it’s a good replacement.

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This & Korthia is the first time since Pet Battles were added new daily quests of some sort weren’t added.

9.1 at least also added Anthea - so we got something new, daily wise. But 9.2 hasn’t added anything to my knowledge. Kinda disappointing. Especially with how cartoony and alive the Jiro are, I would have thought we’d get a few world quests fighting Jiro tamers.

At the very least, it would’ve been a good time for Raiding with Leashes 7, since I imagine those take minimal dev time, as it’s just re-sized existing art assets added as pets and attached to existing raid fights. As I mentioned in the battle pet thread I made, they even have a perfect candidate for the meta reward, being Rooby Roo. (I could be wrong about the dev time, but I struggle to imagine it taking longer than actual new content like unique trainers and such)


Anyway, something I wanted to add -

Can we get some vendor food buffs? In past expansions it honestly wasn’t that noticeable as you rarely took damage. But I’ve taken more damage and had to eat more in Shadowlands than any time in the past, even vanilla.

But in Zereth Mortis, this is a horrible feeling, because I have almost 50k health in LFR Sanctum Gear, but the best food we have restores 30k over 20 seconds. That’s a lot of time spent eating. And it’s just going to get even more noticeable and worse as I gain more health.

Same with Bandages.

It’s gotten so bad I queue for Seething Shore and Ashran just to talk to the mage NPC (For those curious - the mage on the airship will conjure you some in SS and in Ashran, just go to the top of your tower) to have her conjure me food then leave the bg. Which isn’t fair to the PvPers, but I don’t have any other options, as I rarely find a mage nice enough to conjure me food outside of a party. (And yes, I know I can stay and do the battleground, but leveling 7 toons from 10-50 JUST through PvP in 9.0, I have developed a seething hatred for seething shore, and in my experience, Alliance rarely win Ashran, so I don’t like to waste my time.)

If the worry is PvP, then why not have food have a reduced effect in PvP, so as to not punish PvE players?

This would be great, although it would definitely feel bad to not have had it in place for the first week of the patch, it would be great to have some other incentive to kill the rares. I hit honored on Tuesday, after spending a week doing everything I could. I’ve killed all the rares and collected most of the cosmetics from them - silly mawrat didn’t drop yet though - so I’m not likely going to spend my time farming them for revered, when thanks to our other thread we know we don’t have to to hit it “on time”

But it would also be great for my alts who I plan to bring through the zone before long to have a conduit upgrade item drop.

Also, I’ll bring this up again, from another thread, I wish there was an item to mass upgrade conduits to a higher level.

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Without echoing most of the feedback everyone else has given (which I think is great and I agree with almost all of it), a couple of thoughts that have marinated for a while:

  • I really like the zone for its artistic merits, its ambience and the feelings these things invoke as you play. On launch day someone said “breath of the wild vibes!” in general chat, and I totally agree with that. ZM feels so peaceful, untouched and relaxing most of the time, and suddenly you’re in a desert filled with mawsworn and it’s putting the war in Warcraft again! It’s really well designed.
  • I initially thought the travel time between hubs, rares and treasures was too much, but I have since changed my opinion on that and I think it is pretty decently designed as a whole. Traveling on foot means you can usually pick up some treasures or a rare or two on the way to somewhere else, so taking the flight paths almost feels bad because you can see everything you’re missing out on. Once flying is unlocked, rushing over to rares is going to be much less of a pain, which I’ve seen is one of the biggest issues with the travel time. As always, it feels bad to see a rare spawn you want, and not be able to hurry over there to grab it because someone else pulled it.
  • The story feels a little… empty. I’ve enjoyed the quests so far, but I’m surprised at how few there are. When all the non-daily/weekly quests are completable in 30-60 minutes every week, you’re often left wanting for more. I would have loved a couple of extra quest chains that delved deeper into the origins of ZM, some more personal storylines, and to see some of the ramifications of discovering the place. (Not gonna talk about the Anduin cinematic right now.)
  • I really like the pacing of the zone. The quests are well-paced (I wish there were more!), and the daily/weekly to-do list is very well-shaped. Prior to this week’s change, I was going to write that I did not like the 3-day Patterns within Patterns quest, but so did everyone else it seems, and now that it is weekly I’m very happy with it. I know exactly what I’m getting when I log in every day now, and it feels great to not be forced to spend hours in Zereth Mortis to do something because of a lockout. I know some players still feel forced to kill as many rares as possible to ‘stay ahead of the curve’ with rep, but I’ve never really felt that is much of a problem now that you can easily get to revered when you need to be, without grinding anything. Thank you for listening to feedback on this point :>
  • Cosmic flux!.. I have more than 10 000 of it, and I don’t know if I’ll ever use any of it. As far as I know, it is only used to upgrade a legendary to its highest form, or change any season 3 item into a tier set. I’m unlikely to get either of them, as I don’t participate in raids, pvp or m+ to get tier-eligible items, and the legendaries are so expensive that I can’t justify spending so much gold on an item I know that I won’t need to do the content that I’m doing. Yet, I keep getting more and more cosmic flux, and a cool reminder that I’ve just looted it every time I open a treasure chest, kill a rare, or complete a quest. My question is, can we get to change Cypher equipment into tier sets, and could we get another way to spend our cosmic flux? (the latter also kind of applies to soul ash/cinders).

Edit: Forgot to say that I’ve been really happy with the bugfixing of ZM! Every time I’ve encountered a bug, it’s already been noticed by the community at large and it’s usually been fixed the day after.

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A few more thoughts as I’ve experienced a bit more playing ZM:

  • Rares - The rares are fun, the mechanics are great! I think some focus on how they scale down rather than up so that they are more doable early in the morning or late at night when there are much less people on. I often do WoW stuff before I start work around 6AM, it’s just not possible to do a rare with 3 people like it was in Korthia
  • Rep - The rep gain rate is slow, I’m farming up to honored on 5 toons for the crafting items. I have to say that it is definately getting to be a chore to do all of that every day across 5 toons and I’m really looking forward to scaling back once that is done. With that said I can’t imagine intentionally grinding out to Exalted, doing what I’ve already done 4 more times … bleh. There certainly doesn’t seem to be much in the way of reward for all the effort it would take unless I just happened to get there in the course of doing other things. Not exactly sure what that would be …
  • Cyphers - I’ve almost got all of the cypher cooldowns done, very glad that gets done once across all characters, thanks for that! It was disappointing to realize that cypher gear does not scale iLvL with cypher gear level automatically. It often will take a lot of time to get the individual pieces with the effect and stats I want. I’m supposed to gather all new pieces for each of the 6 levels? Nope, not gonna do it. The levels are already ground out with the cypher currency, now its double gated behind RNG ??? FFS Gah …
  • Treasures are sometimes very interesting, like the submerged ones and ones that require interaction with the environment to get. Some parkour is fun to a point but some of them I just haven’t figured out or can’t do
  • Terrain is both not too flat and boring and not to mountainous and inaccessible. There are a couple of spots where aerial mobs die and slide onto a slope that is inaccessible (near the FP to the WB for instance) and a few places where I’ve died that I cant actually get back to but not very many. I’m not finding myself cursing at the terrain while trying to get to a rare so that’s good!
  • Fishing I’m enjoying entirely because of the goop mount :slight_smile: Leveled up fishing for the first time in SL as a result, still don’t have any goop but will probably keep going for it a little at a time, easy spot to fish from, nice environment to look at! Also lots of fun to go to some old content to get the lure and to share the boss with friends when it gets fished up etc. More fishing stuff would be fun too.
  • Puzzles I like and they do tend to take a while to solve. I solved each of them manually once and then was like there has to be a faster way to do this, and yup there was, there’s an addon for that! So the puzzles are a fun way to open a chest. Getting 2-4 cyphers for my effort is pretty ridiculous though! That’s it?!?! Nothing else? No rep? No goodies? 2 cyphers? Bleh, ok, I still open them anyway lol
  • World quests are great and fun and reward rep! Yay!
  • Daily quests are great and fun but dont reward rep Booo! I hear people in chat complain all the time that there is no rep for them. I tell them that they can mix their chocolate, strawberry and vanilla into whatever proportions they want but they are still getting one box of ice-cream a week and to shut up and eat it! e.g. weekly rep is capped (more or less unless you want 10 more per rare) and you’re not getting more. Although it sure doesn’t FEEL good not to get rep for dailies even though you do indirectly since it counts towards patterns within patterns; but no one cares to think that deeply on the subject. Where’s mah rep !?!!?! is what they all complain about.

I’ll add some more feedback later as I think of things and maybe add to the topics above in some more detail as thoughts come to mind.

Id love to see a PvP ffa quest come back in this zone tbh

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