Gracie Status Update

This weekend I dove down a rabbit hole of nostalgia and it was magical. Ever since even the hints of a new Karazhan started to surface, long before Legion was released, I started to get a bit hyped. Once Legion launched and I saw how good of a job they’d done with the Broken Isles, I got even more hyped about the new Kara. I dared to hope that it would do justice to the original. You see, I started playing World of Warcraft near the start of The Burning Crusade, its first expansion. Karazhan will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the very first raid I ever set foot in. I made some great friends, and got completely hooked on raiding. By the end of that expansion I had healed, dps’d, and yes, even tanked my way through Kara many times. The raid was oozing with character and charm, a fully realized haunted mage tower big enough to get lost in for hours.

The new Kara is the same, but different. I mean this in the best possible way. It certainly still is big enough to get lost in, as we proved immediately, getting lost on our way to the first boss. The first half of the instance is essentially the same old space we knew and loved. Even the bosses are all reprisals of the originals, and they are just as brutal to learn as the originals were. We one shot the first boss, the Opera event (it was “Westfall Story”), but most of the night was spent learning fights, picking ourselves off the floor and throwing ourselves at bosses until we won. The Moroes fight in particular was just completely brutal from a healing perspective. It was also really fun, because it was every bit as satisfying to kill that boss as any raid boss.

In fact the whole take home message of our first night in Karazhan was that this truly does feel like a 5-person raid rather than a mythic dungeon. The scale of the place is still epic, the fights are punishing, and it doesn’t just feel like a rehashed, slightly harder version of something we’ve already done. Even though that’s exactly what it is. Kudos to the devs for pulling this off spectacularly. The vague ingrained wisdom we all had from clearing the original Kara served us pretty well, but things were also different enough to offer some great surprises. It has been a very long time since I laughed as hard on the way back from a wipe as I did last night, and that alone was worth the price of admission.

After the first 5 bosses, the instance switches to some new sections. There were a lot of surprised and pleased reactions. I don’t want to completely describe the whole thing, because if you get a chance to experience it for yourself you absolutely should. We spent over 4 hours in there, and managed to kill 6/8 bosses and get some solid attempts in on the 7th. That’s definitely on par with a raid, rather than a dungeon.  I absolutely can’t wait to get back in and see the rest of it, and to do it again next week now that we vaguely know what we’re doing.

Blizz took a big chance re-working such a beloved instance, and it paid off hugely here. I’m also glad to hear the news from Blizzcon that they’ll eventually be releasing a non-mythic version of new Kara so even more people can experience it. I had an absolute blast, even if some of the fights made me cry a bit as the healer. It was a pitch-perfect nostalgia bomb and I hope it inspires even more people to fall in love with the magic that is Karazhan.

I’ve been one of the last folks in my raid group in WoW without a legendary item. We’ve been joking that of course I’ll get one of the worst possible ones for my spec if and when I ever get one, and the prophecy has been fulfilled. Last night, right before raid, I opened an emissary chest and got the worst possible legendary in the game. Not only is the effect mostly useless in raids, but it is a ring, which means no primary stat boost, and it doesn’t even have my best secondary stat on it either. I had been mentally preparing myself for this, because such is my luck, especially in a world where my pal Belghast steals all the good luck for himself. However I wasn’t prepared to have my shame broadcast to the whole guild at peak time when everyone was getting ready for raid. I tried to be good-natured about it, merely vowing eternal vengeance against and angrily shaking my fists at everyone who made fun of me for my bad luck.

I’m aware there are community members who think that everything is sunshine and roses, and that people who get a legendary item and then have the nerve to complain about it are entitled jerks. My honest opinion here is that those people can go eff right off. This particular item has multiple attributes that work against it, making it unattractive to almost everyone.

1. It’s a ring. However you feel about most legendaries, anything that gives you a huge ilvl bonus to your primary stat is likely to be more exciting than a ring with secondary stats only.
2. It drops for every class and spec. I’ve seen this item drop a lot, because it can drop for anyone. Even if it were more useful, this blandness makes it seem less fun than an item specially crafted to boost your chosen class.
3. Its special ability procs from applying a loss-of-control effect, which is something that most raid mobs and dungeon bosses are immune to. So most fights you won’t even get any special benefit from it.

Even Blizz acknowledged that there’s a few legendaries that aren’t as exciting as intended, and as far as I know there may be some changes to those items in the works. I prefer a system where I can work towards big ticket, game changing items like the legendaries represent. Or at least have some protection from horrible RNG, like with Kanai’s Cube in Diablo 3. There, if you just can’t get the item you need to drop you can keep trying to craft it in the cube. It is still RNG based, but there’s some protection there for people with terrible luck. It would also be different if there was anyone outside of a PvP setting that really prized this particular legendary turd. Instead, I’ve seen it drop over and over again, and never has the lucky recipient been excited. Always it is met by complaint and murmurs of apology from the rest of the guild. That’s bad design.

Item drops in dungeons can be good or bad, but there’s always another chance to run things again tomorrow and get something better. Bad legendaries feel extra painful because you’ve been waiting for months to get one, and know you’ll have a long wait for another chance. Meanwhile your friends get shiny new toys that change their playstyle or give them cool buffs. I feel a bit similarly about some of the incredibly hard-to-get hidden artifact appearances, but at least there it is all cosmetic. Nobody feels like they are letting their raid team down because they can’t get their artifact skin to drop, but I feel like I’m not healing as well as I could because I am missing a vital piece of gear.

I honestly attempted to vendor the stupid thing in protest when I got it, but sadly the game won’t let me. It is hard to even justify using it as a “stat stick” since the stats on it are pretty poor for me. All I can do is complain and joke about it and try to defuse some of the frustration of the whole thing. And pray to RNGesus that maybe next time I’ll get something useful.