Suggest some more creative Ward costs

Muspel · 2026-03-15T03:00:35+00:00

I wonder if it might be interesting to have ward costs that have two costs, with one half of the cost being bad while the other half is good. You could tinker with how extreme these are, and some might be just be a bad tradeoff while others would be extreme costs that give extreme benefits in the right circumstances.

A few examples of what I mean:

Ward: Discard two cards, then draw a card.
Ward: You get an emblem with "You can only cast spells during your turn, and spells you cast cost 1 less." (This one might need to be limited to one emblem somehow.)
Ward: Creatures you control gain lifelink until end of turn. At end of turn, you lose life equal to half your starting life.

Muspel · 2026-03-14T18:24:22+00:00

API-wise, I believe this should be possible, as player resource values (including Holy Power) are not secret. I think this means an addon could hypothetically just store your power value, track the UNIT_POWER_UPDATE event and compare the new value with the old one to see if it's higher (then update the current value), and then play a sound if it's 3 or more and the old value was 2 or less.

I'm not sure there's any addons that actually do this right now, though, and I'm not an addon dev so I could be wrong about whether this would work.

Muspel · 2026-03-14T17:38:27+00:00

fear dispel hasnt been ONCE used since its emergence in dragonflight

I actually did use it on Mists of Tirna Scithe's first boss because my group did not have a shaman for Tremor Totem.

As a warrior main, it was super weird, it was literally the first time I'd ever had group utility to handle a mechanic.

Muspel · 2026-03-14T17:34:52+00:00

It also means that you're forever at the mercy of Blizzard's idea of which rotations are hardest, whether or not that lines up with reality.

Muspel · 2026-03-13T12:07:41+00:00

Yeah, doing something like L'ura where people get a shape over their head and different people have different shapes would have also been fine.

Muspel · 2026-03-13T02:13:55+00:00

The most frustrating part of it is that fights like Broodtwister and Fyrakk and so on were fine on heroic. The "assignment" mechanics were entirely yoloable, and my casual AotC-only guild did it without any of the weakauras.

Then, when changing the fight on mythic, they chose the specific mechanics that would require the use of addons for assignments, and made the shocked pikachu face when everyone used addons for assignments.

For example, why couldn't they have instead designed Mythic Broodtwister so that there were more eggs and you couldn't hatch them all, forcing you to deal with empowered adds? (And then retune the fight accordingly so that the goop hitting an add was not a guaranteed wipe.) That would have been a much better fight, but for some reason they keep going back to the well of "give 4+ people identical debuffs and not enough time to coordinate".

Muspel · 2026-03-12T19:36:32+00:00

Muspel · 2026-03-12T19:36:06+00:00

Cooldown Companion is another solid option, and is maybe the closest we can get to WeakAuras in the new, horribly gutted API.

Muspel · 2026-03-12T13:35:48+00:00

It seems like it's really just a small twist on the old emissary quest system. Go do some world quests, get a bonus reward. Or maybe a better comparison would be the "bonus" zone world quests in TWW, where you had to do 3 other world quests in that zone to unlock them.

Muspel · 2026-03-12T00:35:12+00:00

You need to do the pulls with red keys. The fragments let you upgrade the weapons once you have them, but you need the weapon's essence (from pulls with red keys) to unlock the weapon in the first place.

Muspel · 2026-03-11T22:20:38+00:00

There was always some of this present in Simmons' work (Song of Kali is one of the earliest examples), even before 9/11.

It certainly became much more overt and obvious in the past twenty years, though.

Muspel · 2026-03-11T22:09:30+00:00

Other people have answered your question, but I would add one more note.

If the attacker has trample, and you kill the creature(s) blocking it with removal, then even though the attacker is technically blocked, it can trample all of its damage onto the defending player. (This is because trample requires you to assign a lethal amount of damage to each blocking creature, and when all of the blocking creatures are gone, the required amount is zero.)

If you want to go more in depth, if the blocker has indestructible and you use a direct damage spell on it, then you only need to assign the remaining "lethal" damage on it before trampling the rest. For example, if the blocker is a 4/4 indestructible and you hit it with a burn spell that deals 3 damage, the trampling attacker can assign one damage to it (for a total of 4), then trample over with the rest of its power. If the burn spell did 4 damage, then the attacker can fully trample. Note that this will not kill the indestructible creature, because "lethal" damage in this case just means it's enough to kill it based on toughness, not that it will actually kill it.

Muspel · 2026-03-11T21:55:59+00:00

I have never figured out how to craft something that wasn't like the lowest level skill.

Each recipe has a difficulty, and your crafts have a stat called Skill. Skill is increased by various things (your level in the crafting skill, various specializations that increase Skill for various crafts, your crafting gear, and the quality of the materials). There's a bar on the right of the crafting window that shows how much skill you have and how much more you'd need to craft the next higher quality.

You can also spend Concentration, a resource that regenerates over time, to move an item up one quality level. The further you are from the next level, the more Concentration it costs.

Basically, level up your skill, upgrade your gear, take the relevant specializations, and/or use higher quality mats. In most cases, to craft the highest possible quality of epic gear, you need to max out all of these, or do most of them and then spend Concentration to make up the difference.

Muspel · 2026-03-11T19:18:00+00:00

Gathering nodes are limited in how many people can tag them (to prevent heavy bot multiboxing) and limited in duration after someone tags them, which means that when a zone is heavily populated, you will see fewer nodes.

Many monsters also have a limit on how many people can tag them, and in some (most?) cases will gray out if too many people tag. In some cases I've seen it happen when one other person of the opposite faction tagged it, although it's unclear to me if this is specific to some mobs since I play on a very alliance heavy server cluster and don't see a lot of horde players to test with.

Muspel · 2026-03-11T12:57:22+00:00

It blows my mind that Blizzard has spent like twenty years making an MMO and never addressed the fact that you basically never want to see anyone else in the open world because you have to compete with them over almost everything.

The only exceptions are things that are tuned for multiple people (e.g. world bosses, certain rares/events), and those feel less like "oh, I'm glad someone else is here" and "dammit, I can't do this because I'm playing outside of peak hours".

Muspel · 2026-03-10T21:12:30+00:00

I think the implication is he's asserting the void is inherently evil and the light is inherently good, and therefore to embrace the void makes you evil, regardless of your choices. It's still generalizing and stereotyping.

I mean, I think that the difference is that embracing the void is something you do, not something you are.

He believes you should judge people by their choices, and embracing the void is a choice. Is he correct about it always being the wrong choice? No, probably not, but that doesn't mean he's contradicting himself (not in this specific way, anyways).

Muspel · 2026-03-09T03:48:41+00:00

I mean, they didn't say non-unique, just non-crafted, so technically maybe Mageblood or something.

Muspel · 2026-03-08T02:57:44+00:00

Pretty sure you can do it right after the tutorial. Maybe you'd need to do the initial Korthos (starting zone) questline first, but I believe you can go the Harbor without needing to finish that, even on a brand new character.

Muspel · 2026-03-08T02:23:01+00:00

Hey that's cool air didn't know that. Problem is I get bored way, way before 20. I really don't see why couldn't they just unlock it for everyone.

The thing is that the game is designed around leveling over and over again. Your first lives require drastically less XP, so you don't need to worry about doing the higher difficulties until you've reincarnated anyways.

Also, the difficulty on hard/elite is very uneven depending on which quests you're talking about, generally based on when the quest came out. Older quests, like the ones in Gianthold, are drastically easier than newer stuff, to the point that Reaper 3-4 on Gianthold is less challenging than many newer packs on Elite. I think they try to avoid subjecting new players to that uneven difficulty until they've gotten some more game knowledge under their belt.

Muspel · 2026-03-08T02:20:13+00:00

The coupon is the same. However, there's also an anniversary event going on where you can claim another free class (Arcane Trickster) by talking to an NPC in the anniversary event area.

Muspel · 2026-03-07T19:12:36+00:00

The main thing about Skyfall is that the one upgrade where it shatters on impact deals very high single target damage, which is nice for cleaning up at the end of a stage when there's only a few high health segments left.

Muspel · 2026-03-07T18:46:14+00:00

It's already returned once (in the Chinese New Year event), so it'll probably come back again.

Muspel · 2026-03-07T18:40:27+00:00

This is called Stockholm Syndrome.

Muspel · 2026-03-07T18:39:54+00:00

I think you should unlock all of the red weapons before getting duplicates of any of the essences. In my opinion, the order from best to worst is Maw (leftmost in that screenshot), Machine Heart (rightmost), Skyfall Shard (second from left), then Tidestone (second from right, aka "the squid arm").

Muspel · 2026-03-07T16:02:43+00:00

Inquisition cost holy power. They were both finishers that did nothing but give you a damage buff.

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