Zereth Mortis Feedback

Community WoW Community Council
33

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?

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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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39

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.

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

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Something minor I’d like to add real quick:

We never learn her name. Why does it appear after she activates Pocopoc? Seems weird. Shouldn’t it just be generic “Oracle” until we learn about her? (If we do, I didn’t play the PTR)

And one more thing: Hirukon.

On the PTR, once you crafted the bait once, you could get one each week by talking to Vashj.

However, on live, this only lasts until you get the mount. However, the mount is a 100% drop for people who use the lure, which means you would have to purposely not loot the mount to get more lures.

Hirukon is the only source for a unique recolor of the “Lightsaber” sword, as well as the only known source for the Aurelid Lattice, something used in Protoform Synthesis.

Having this locked behind a horribly low drop rate of Strange Goop is going to be very bad once more people get the mount and less people fish up the Strange Goop.

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I noticed this too, it is even hard enough to find a Hirukon group now and get into it if you are a little bit slow. And the goop seems to be total rng. Some got it after a few fishes others fished for hours and got nothing. With which i would be fine, if you could use the lure once a week or daily to call Hirukon after u got it. But as this is not the case it seems a bit weird to me to catch the goop over and over again.

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ZM is a beautiful evolution of the Timeless Isle playground. There are rares and treasures in every corner. There are vistas and spectacles around each turn. The big question in my mind is what is the story behind this realm.
I do think that what would really draw players more into the game would be a further expansion of Al’Firim’s journal. The main entries told the tale of his arrival in the zone and his exile from his people. Supplimentary entries might talk of the flora and fauna. These would be totally optional to hunt down and explore; but, for those interested it would and context and texture to this world.
That context could inturn be used to guide players. An entry could point a player in the direction of a rare that holds the lattice needed for a mount or pet. I think such content creates a way to guide players without tiring exposition or breaking the fourth wall.
In the context of the larger story, have the Enlightened ever witnessed a realm of the afterlives being forged? It would seem they arrived before the current events of the shadowlands. What was the reaction when the chains from the Maw tore the realm assunder? Did the Atoma behave differently at that time? The current events are pressing to us; but, that is not all that has happened in this place. Yet there is no record of it.

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44

New raid entrance seems to be timegated to alts as you cant enter the raid without doing it on each character seems silly to punish people for having multiple toons should really only have to do it once to unlock it on all alts

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EDIT: Nevermind, you seem to have fixed the overabundance of chests, or people finally stopped avoiding chests.

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The treasures don’t really offer any substantial player power though. They offer Cypher and comparable anima gains to other content. I don’t see the harm in a player having the opportunity to hard-core farm treasure chests since it doesn’t really provide them with any actual advantage to other players. Nerfing the treasure gains does not really have an impact on us.

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A bit more feedback:

I’m doing the Finding Tahli quest chain, I finished it on my main but doing it on some other alts also.

This is the quest chain you get after Sopranian Understanding is completed that unlocks the mount crafting.

It is a quest chain recommended for a group of 3. You’re killing a bunch of Elites and there’s two or three Elite quest bosses.

The fact of the matter is that due to all of the time gating there aren’t groups of people in a position to do this all at once and you either solo it (and hope someone else drops in where you are to help kill the Elite quest bosses) or it doesn’t get done.

I have 5 chars I want to open this up on. I’ve done it on a druid and a pally so far in tank spec and had some people drop in by chance to add some DPS.

My understanding is that ZM is mostly meant as a solo play content zone. The rares are pretty easy obviously for people to just all gang up on since there is no gating to access them.

In any case I’ll be doing this three more times today on a mage, shaman and war and I’m sure I’ll get it done. It’s an aggravating pain in the butt for me but likely a real issue for a lot of other solo players (people who for whatever reason are not necessarily in guilds or playing with friends). Not sure why this needs to be set up as a group quest chain for content that is from my understanding solo content.

On a side note: Why is there not a shadowlands option under the drop down in “h” → “Dungeons & Raids” → “Premade Groups” - > “Questing” → “Start Group” ?

Side note #2: The quest “Mysterious Greenery” also opens up upon completion of Sopranian Understanding. The quest giver isn’t at the location indicated on the map. It doesn’t exist at all. This is by my count the 4th major bug associated with the cypher system that has been discovered by the player base on live after almost two weeks of waiting for these items to unlock from behind the time gating. A lot of this couldn’t easily be tested on the PTR because it was constantly changing (albeit for the better!) and was also double gated (currency and time) on the PTR which meant you had to do what we have all done for the first two weeks of live on the PTR to test it. This is not what I would call a “fun” roll out of the cypher system.

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Thank you!!

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EDIT: Treasures seem fine now, as mentioned in later post.

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Well as you noted the rares provide some other incentives which differ from the chests, and considering there is no detriment or advantage to the player base from farming either content, I don’t believe Blizzard should waste time and resources into evaluating and/or alternating the chests.

To be more blunt, it doesn’t “feed bad” to kill a rare or to loot a chest. You can easily do both. Therefore, I don’t believe a change is required.

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This is some pretty good 9.2 feedback that I think is worth a read.

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It’s not specifically Zereth Mortis, but it is 9.2, and indirectly is affected by Zereth Mortis:

Legendaries. I get that you have to keep increasing the ilvl for legendaries, but why is the system that was used in Legion not used here?

In Legion, things were tuned around people having legendaries of a certain ilvl, like they are now. Unlike in Legion however, there’s no quick or cheap way to upgrade your legendaries. In Legion, if you started with an ilvl895 legendary, at one point in the expansion, those legendaries automatically upgraded to ilvl 910. You didn’t have to do anything. They just automatically upgraded, because you guys understood that being that far behind was detrimental. Then when you added new updates to the ilvls, you made a quick and easy way to upgrade legendaries, so people who had old legendaries were not immediately weaker than those who crafted new ones.

In Shadowlands, this is a bigger problem. The legendary base items cost gold. A lot of it. A LOT of it. Rank 7s aren’t out yet, but just based on the AH prices, on most realms, it’s easily going to be 600k per item. Most people will not pay that much, and will stick with a lower ilvl legendary. However, therein lies the problem.

The lowest ilvl legendary is 190. Rank 7s are 291. That’s over a 100 ilvl difference. That’s a LOT of player power.

So even if I were to want 2 patch outdated ilvl235 legendaries right now? That’s still about 100k a pop. And in most servers, they’re actually more expensive than rank 6 legendaries, because no one buys rank 4s anymore. Even rank 1 legendaries are still 10-20k on my server for most slots. But that’s acceptable and I’ll buy them normally.

So I ask: Why not have it so any ilvl190, 210, and 225 legendary upgrade automatically to 235? This will let us choose the cheapest legendary base item of the 4 ranks at the time and craft a somewhat useable 235 legendary. Simply make it so 190/210/225 legendaries no longer exist. If you use a 190 base item? When it becomes a legendary, it becomes 235.

Even if you can’t retroactively apply this to existing 190 legendaries, I imagine the majority would just be happy they could break down their 190, buy a relatively cheap base item, and get a 235 in exchange.

Otherwise, a lot of people, myself included, are going to go legendary-less on their non-mains (and there’s been people on the forums saying they will on their mains) because their 190 legendaries just can’t compete with the stats of a 252, even with the effect.

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