I am a glorious delver! If you play The War Within, you probably already know that in order to complete this meta achievement, you must kill Zekvir all on your lonesome.
I’m a Beast Mastery Hunter using the Open World / Delves Pack Leader build from Wowhead, my ilvl at the moment of the kill was 605. Brann was level 32, he was specced as healer with Unbreakable Iron Idol and Relic of Sentience. It took me between around 20 attempts to complete it.
I used Deadly Boss Mods to warn me of the different phases, a Weak Aura alert to interrupt Enfible Spittle and a macro to counter shot the target of my focus, so I don’t have to swap targets:
Interrupt Enfeebling Spittle. Its cast time is 1.5 seconds, so you must practice to use your Counter Shot macro really fast;
You must, in absolute priority, destroy the cocoon that Zekvir creates when he casts Call Web Terror. If you let it hatch, you’ll be incapacitated and probably die from Zekvir’s other spells;
Don’t stand in the shit! Whether it’s Zekvir’s frontal attack or its AOE Fear, run away!
So the whole fight consists in DPSing Zekvir while interrupting its DOT and switching to the cocoons when he summons them. Don’t forget to heal your pets, stay out of his attacks and use your CDs on the cocoons, because they need to be destroyed in priority.
I start the fight by applying Hunter’s Mark, marking Zekvir as target of my /focus, using Misdirect on my pets and already using Mend Pet before pulling.
My greatest advice is to do it again and again until you get comfortable with the mechanics. The amount of attempt isn’t limited and, beside the repair bill, it’s free. Oh, and don’t do like me during my first 10 pulls, make sure that Growl is on!
A few days ago, it felt like Christmas… We’ve received our 20th anniversary collector’s edition of The War Within and, oh boy, we haven’t been disappointed!
The Collector’s edition in itself is the same as any other expansion, a beautiful big box with a few goodies inside, including the art book of The War Within. However, the 20th anniversary statue is absolutely gorgeous (and huge). The whole thing was very well wrapped and protected, you can see the details in the gallery below.
We’ve just been playing the entire week-end and we continue to enjoy the expansion very much. We’ve unlocked the world quests and we’ve both completed the Pathfinder achievement to unlock Steady Flight in Khaz Algar. All the zones are fantastic to explore, even if we both have a little preference for Hallowfall which is one of the most gorgeous place in the entire World of Warcraft.
That’s what hundreds of players look like when they’re all gathered in the same room, minutes away from accessing a brand new expansion. There’s just nothing like that moment, believe me.
We played the entire starting scenario during the night of Thursday to Friday and we went on to game on Friday evening and the entire week-end. This launch was the smoothest that we’ve ever seen, there was no lag, no crash and no bug. Big kudos to Blizzard for making it happen.
It is now Sunday evening and we’ve both reached max level a few minutes ago. We’ve completed most quests (if not all) of the two first zones and all I can say is that The War Within is shaping to become one of my favourite expansions. The zones are gorgeous and there’s a great variety in the quests. The main quest line is absolutely Magni-ficent (pun intended) and I can’t wait to see more, Xal’athat is already a better protagonist than Fyrakk ever was. Delving is very well done and we had a lot of fun running each of them (some more than once).
Below is a small screenshot gallery of this week-end.
Fantastic landscapesDornogal is beautifulKobolds are awesome!The Kaja Cola vending machine
If you purchase drinks in the right order at the Kaja Cola vending machine located in The Ringing Deeps, you’ll be rewarded a 34 slots bag 😉
How can a 20 years old video game still manage to have people countdown until the next time they can log in? I don’t know, but I can’t wait to be tomorrow to continue my adventures.
We’re only a few hours from The War Within‘s early access and we’re still discovering great stuff from Dragonflight. Last Monday evening, we’ve completed what we’ll remember as our favourite quest chain in the expansion. Learning the Furbolgs’ language to be able to quest and gain their trust was awesome! Also, SNOW! It felt so good to play in the snowy landscapes during this hell season.
My apologies for the small post and the eventual typos, but I’m typing this while watching the one on one interview with Chris Metzen and I just love that dude! I’m so glad he came back to work on WoW.
I can’t believe that WoW is already turning 20 in November. I’m so incredibly proud that we’ve both been part of it for so many years (decades). Long live Azeroth!
We’ve been spared! The weather cooled down for a few days, very conveniently during the first week-end of the Pre-Patch Event of The War Within. I honestly thought that Augustus would be too warm to spend hours on our PCs and that we wouldn’t have the time to complete the event.
I hate it when Blizzard releases temporary content around summer. I don’t care not being in the few firsts to reach max level in a new expansion, these people always end up burned out of the game anyway. However, I do care about temporary content and I would hate to miss on something that will never come back.
Fortunately, Blizzard had tuned the event so people could farm the Residual Memories non stop and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing on Saturday. By the end of day, we had enough resource to purchase all mounts, pets and craft the new heirloom ring. By doing so, we’ve also completed enough objectives for the Trading Outpost to get the monthly reward. On Sunday, we’ve continued to farm the echoes a bit further so we could purchase the remaining pieces of the mail set appearance (which is ugly, but completitionism and all…).
The event was fun and everything went smoothly, except for Dragonblight which was laggy as hell. Soforah ended a few times without getting her reward after killing the Lich King, which can easily get frustrating.
All in all, we had fun and we’re super happy to know that we won’t miss on anything, even if summer would return with a vengeance.
Oh, and cherry on the cake, Wakyn dropped from Warden Entrix exactly one minute before I had to log out. A welcome pat on my back during this God forsaken season!
I’m getting dangerously close to turn 50. I remember when I was 17, people of that age looked boring and lame. I only hope to never become an old fart who only talks about football and adult stuff.
However, realising that nowadays 17 years-old kids were babies when The Burning Crusade was released makes me feel ancient.
And now, I’m going to rest a bit before the dinner…
With Dragonflight, we’ve entered what Executive Producer Holly Longdale would call the Third Era of Warcraft.
For more than 15 years, we were used to play a certain way, we would gather all the daily quests from an area, complete them to increase our reputations. Upon reaching exalted, we would then visit the quartermasters and buy the pets and mounts with our gold.
Now, the world quests are scattered across the maps and they reset twice per week (instead of daily). There are hourly events happening across the entire expansion, each on a different timer and rewarding renown with different factions.
It doesn’t seem like much but, trust me, it has completely changed our way to play WoW. Before, we would just log in the game, fly to a zone and let the dailies tell us what to do.
The new system is more chaotic and requires planning. Starting my gaming session by first deciding which zone to visit and which event to attend keeps me from wondering what to do next.
On top of that, there’s a ton of pets, mounts and appearances to collect, each one purchasable with a different currency, you got to keep track!
I’m not gonna lie, the launch of Dragonflight was pretty brutal for us. We’ve stopped playing after two weeks and only came back recently.
However, we’ve managed to change our habits and we’re much more organised than before. We use Obsidian to keep track of objectives, currencies and event timers. We make notes about pretty much everything and it has greatly helped us bringing order to chaos and enjoy the game again.
I still don’t like Dragonflight and I don’t think that I ever will. It’s a patchwork of new systems, stitched up together by a mediocre story (which was so sliced up and gated behind renown that I completely lost track of): “There is an Island with Dragons, some are good and some are bad. Let’s unite so we can defeat Fyrak, the evil one.” I’m also shared about Dragonriding, which feels more like riding a glorified kite than a dragon. I can’t believe that people criticise Shadowlands when everything was better then, even the protagonist. The story of the jailer was much deeper than “I’m a bad dragon” Fyrak. Korthia was much more enjoyable than Zalarek Caverns and Zereth Mortis was definitely better than the Dream Grove with that horrible Superbloom event (whoever green lit that thing obviously didn’t try it himself). I still think that the zones were very well designed, they were just not that fun.
Changing WoW as much as the devs did for Dragonflight requires guts. When other companies try to provide the same experience with each iteration of their franchises, Blizzard didn’t hesitate to rock the boat and have us adapt to their vision. In the end, the community followed but it was a risky move to change so many things, all at once.
We’re now days away from The War Within’s pre-patch and weeks from the official release. I love World of Warcraft, and I play it first and foremost to be part of that fantastic universe and goof around with my wife and the other players. I’ve been waiting for over a decade to see more sharing between my characters and it seems to happen with the Warbands (don’t screw this up, Blizz!). I’ve also been waiting a long time for a solo end-game content that would reward us with real end-game rewards and it’s finally happening with the Delves (don’t screw this up either, Blizz!). So, despite a disappointing last expansion, I’m eagerly waiting for The War Within. I’m sure that the return of Chris Metzen will help with the quality of the story.
To conclude, I’d say that we’re far from our days running around Dark Shore, levelling our first characters and Dragonflight brought this to the next level. However, WoW remains, to me, the best game ever made and I know that by trying to content the many different kind of players that constitute its community, Blizzard is fated to create expansions that can’t satisfy 100% of the player base but it doesn’t matter because, as Ion Hazzikostas wisely said, you can do anything in WoW, you just can’t do everything.
There’s probably a short answer. However, this question is a trigger to my complicated self.
The last 15 years have been a complicated labyrinth created by a back and forth between solo games and World of Warcraft. Would I have known what I know now, it would have been much easier but, most of the time, us humans have to learn by trial.
I’ve been collecting games since I was 11 years old. From my C64 and my Amigas (500 & 1200) to my PCs, I must have owned several hundred (if not thousand) games. However, I only hooked on a few of them: Maniac Mansion, Zelda – Link’s Awakening, Quake 2, Diablo 1&2, Animal Crossing and Life is Strange.
However, it’s in April 2006 that I discovered World of Warcraft. It was as if I had found the game that I had been looking for my entire life. Little did I know that it would change my life forever.
From a hobby, gaming became a passion. I wasn’t just filling my free time anymore, I was creating time to be in Azeroth. I was reading everything about the game, watching every video I could find (Athene still makes me laugh), it was perfect!
I first played a resto druid and I will never forget the day that my guild was the first guild of the server to kill Ragnaros. Then Burning Crusade came out and I rolled a combat rogue. There too, I had my moment of glory when I killed 3 times in row Achrono one-on-one in the middle of Alterac Valley. Wrath of the Lich King was an absolute blast, mainly because Soforah joined me in the game and we’ve been playing together since then.
However, the following years have been quite different. I’ve been jumping out of World of Warcraft only to be disappointed by solo games and jumping back in… Since we didn’t really hook on the last expansion (Dragonflight), we’ve been trying as many games as we could: Diablo 4, Grim Dawn, Hogwarts Legacy, Starfield, The Division 2, Enshrouded, Stardew Valley, Elden Ring, AC: Valhalla,… However, I felt exactly the same as I felt before discovering WoW: alone.
To me, the greatest revolution in video games isn’t how big the open worlds have become or how incredible the graphics are (not that incredible, even on ultra with an RTX 4090). What baffled me during my first week in WoW is still what I find amazing nowadays: playing with people and I don’t think that I’ll ever come back from that.
People say that WoW‘s community is toxic. Honestly, they’re the best people I know! They can be rude and even sometimes nerve wrecking but I’ll take any Goldshire creep over of a fake romanced character from Stardew Valley or Cyberpunk!
So, sorry for the entire history of my gaming life but my answer to the question “What game do I play?” is the same as it’s been during the last 18 years: World of Warcraft!
Some years are just perfect copies of each other, fast-forwarding you through time with a feeling that not much is happening. Then, some years are so different, you feel like you’ve just been spat out of a washing machine, and you can barely recognize the world around you. Well, 2023 feels like the latter. It’s not as if we’re powerless and the things that are happening are out of our control. I think that we both needed a change, and we created voluntary chaos around ourselves. Maybe we feel like this because this year marks our 20th wedding anniversary, or maybe we’ve spent too long sliding down the same quiet river… Maybe both. Time works in mysterious ways…
So, what’s changed? Well, not that much. However, it has only begun.
Living in Brussels
Nine years ago, we moved to Brussels to live closer to work. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to enjoy this town. We’ve really tried, but it didn’t happen. So, for several months, we’ve been searching for a house around Liège, my hometown. Despite our best efforts, we didn’t find the right place… The apartment we purchased when we moved here is gorgeous, which made it even harder to find a house – we don’t want a downgrade! Also, searching for a house made us realize how convenient living in Brussels really is. Mobility is fantastic, and there’s always a grocery store within walking distance. Not depending on a car is amazing, especially for our budget. This may sound like our brains trying to rationalize the fact that we’ll have to stay in Brussels, and perhaps it is, but having searched for a house made us realize that we’re actually pretty good.
Dragonflight
Our end-of-the-year 2022 holidays were kinda underwhelming. The launch of Dragonflight was a flop, and we didn’t find a way to replace it. So we started the year not knowing which gaming direction to take.
We’ve tried several times to get back hooked to WoW, but the direction they took with the game is horrible. It’s almost as if they took all we disliked in the game and packed it into an expansion.
I could talk for hours about all I dislike in retail WoW. Forbidden Reach feels so dead, Dragonflying being mandatory, world quests that don’t reset fast enough, the lack of quest hubs, crappy events like the community feast or the great hunts, the professions that I don’t even feel like leveling anymore… Each expansion always had a thing or two that we disliked; it’s hard to please everyone. However, this is pure garbage.
The problem is not only that we hate the expansion, we hate the general direction of WoW’s development. If this is indeed the third phase of WoW, then the game is dead to us.
We’ve been playing that game for 17 years, so it takes some effort to get out of our routines, get used to new games and change our habits. That alone kept us very busy, finding new games isn’t as simple as it sounds. Luckily, Diablo 4 got released, but that will be part of a dedicated post.
20th wedding anniversary
On the 7th of June, we were married for 20 years. Soforah is the best partner that I could ever dream to have. She’s always there when I need her, she brightens each of my days, and I only wish that I had met her sooner because it feels as if I only started to live from the day I met her. So, Hon’, if you read this: thank you for everything. I hope to be the man you deserve!
We’ve been back and forth between a few ideas for our celebrations: a short trip to the Belgian Ardennes, a trip to the US, two new huge PCs. We finally decided to do it all; we’ll be celebrating the whole year. So far, we already traveled to the Ardennes, and it was great. Rochehaut is very beautiful, even if a bit difficult to reach by public transportation.
We ate really well, and it was great to be together, far from everything for a few days.
We almost drowned in the Jacuzzi. Believe it or not, but it was our first time enjoying a bubble bath together… Jeez, that thing made us sleepy. However, we survived. Only to be drowned once more by the most overwhelming shower I’ve ever had. I’m not sure if we’re really good candidates for spas.
We’re planning our trip to New York, which will be followed by building the most badass PCs we’ve ever owned.
Voilà , this post was long, but it covers pretty much the last 6 months of our lives.
TLDR: We spent a lot of time searching for a house, but we’ll stay in Brussels. WoW sucks, and we’ll be celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary for a full year.
Last week-end, following the huge trend, we both tried Hardcore Classic WoW. While we had fun in the starting zones, our nostalgia trip was brutally interrupted by death. I understand the excitement around Hardcore but I personally don’t enjoy to delete a character that I’ve been levelling for hours. I can’t imagine the feeling when your character dies after level 50, I would be devastated.
However, this little adventure made us realise how great vanilla WoW was and how bad retail has become when you play the game the way it was meant to be played. It was a game made by roleplayers for roleplayers while retail feels like a phone game ported on PC.
So, thank you Nostalrius for having made Blizzard consider creating Classic servers. And fuck you, J. Allen Brack, You were dead wrong!
