Zereth Mortis Feedback

Community WoW Community Council
41

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.

7 Likes
42

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.

3 Likes
43

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.

3 Likes
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

6 Likes
45

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

1 Like
46

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.

7 Likes
47

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.

5 Likes
48

Thank you!!

2 Likes
49

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

50

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.

1 Like
51

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

3 Likes
52

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.

2 Likes
53

The problem with doing this (just to play devil’s advocate for a minute) - while I do agree the system is not a good one - is leveling up the crafting of legendaries. That system just wouldn’t work anymore (as much as I would love to see it go)

54

Someone in general chat brought up a good option as well - reduce the crafting cost of legendary base items by 90%.

Not the 5/6/7 items that upgrade the recipe. Just the base recipe. This would create more crafters as well as drive down the prices to somewhat reasonable.

So the current crafters aren’t screwed over, give a month warning of it happening so they can offload their stock to those who aren’t willing to wait.

4 Likes
55

This is a great idea IMO. Right now it’s much too cost prohibitive to level up legendary crafting if you didn’t already do it a long time ago.

For some personal context here, I’m currently bringing 5 chars to Enlightened Honored specifically for crafting purposes. I’m not a big player in the crafting scene but used to have a small glyph business going in WotLK (1k g/day) and now craft armor, enchanting and jewel crafting for enough gold to not have to worry about gold.

2 Likes
56

Yeah, the legendary crafting system is my least favorite thing about Shadowlands–and I’m a crafter who has ranked up quite a few of them to max. It’s a system that is punishing to almost everyone involved.

Crafters have to make a huge initial investment (200-500k gold) to rank up the craft, and then they have to sell the max-rank item at a hugely inflated price to recover the initial investment. Sales are slow, and in order to get the sales you have to cancel scan all day, which is extremely not fun gameplay that consists of hitting the same button over and over again, all day, on a second account. I flat-out refuse to do it, so all my legendary crafts have been money losers for me. I rank them up to help my guild get their legendaries, and I just eat the loss. I finance it through a small army of mission table alts.

The system is also super not fun for buyers, who have to pay exorbitant prices for the base items. This makes it hard for them to craft multiple legendaries for different specs and situations, or to move a legendary to a new slot.

The only people who might be having fun are a small number of power goblins who make crafting these things and cancel scanning the focus of their gameplay. For all the rest of us who like doing raids and dungeons and arenas and such, it’s punishing and not fun.

10 Likes
57

I mostly agree with Mornnah here, especially after having a chance to play around with it a bit. There’s still incentives to kill rares besides the things listed, such as rep and the 236 gear with transmog appearances - although, I do think that cypher gear should also drop from rares, cypher gear still feels to rare even after the latest hotfixes.

I also like that I don’t feel like I have to do the rares to get cyphers and anima, because it softens the blow a lot when you’re trying to run to a rare and find it dead already. You probably didn’t miss out on much, unless it was one of the rares that actually dropped something cool, and if you got the rare, the rewards are more than sufficient imo.

On another note; cypher gear upgrading is not particularly intuitive, for example, when you’re at cypher level 3 you don’t always seem to get the correct ilevel from drops. And I don’t like that it only applies to new drops, as cypher gear is quite hard to get. I’d love to have the ability to upgrade cypher gear by using cyphers, so I can at least stockpile a few pieces for the future.

58

That’s because for some reason I can’t fathom, Cypher gear is secondarily gated by enlightened reputation.

A lot of us hit the rep threshold already to get 252s at 6/6 but not everyone has.

1 Like
59

I don’t really understand why. I guess it’s put in place to delay letting everyone get the highest ilevel cypher gear so that endgame players don’t feel forced to farm it… but isn’t that why it was gated by the cypher system in the first place? Seems weird to have two gates, and only show one of them in-game. (Unless it’s written somewhere and I’ve just not seen it!)

4 Likes
60

I find myself just annoyed with the research times for the cipher system. Actually, I don’t understand the appeal of research times at all. What is gained by the player waiting for days to actually gain the benefit?

4 Likes