The weather sucks. Let’s talk about video games.

World of Warcraft:

Naturally, with Midnight launching, WoW has been my main game this month. You can find my initial reactions over at Massively. At the time I’m writing this, I haven’t finished Voidspire or the ensuing story yet, so my feelings may have changed by the time you’re reading this, but right now that weak story (so far) and slower leveling have sapped a lot of my enthusiasm for WoW.

Still, I press on, for now, and it’s not all bad news. The endgame reward structure is largely the same as it was in The War Within, which is very good, and I’m having a lot of fun playing my paladin, who seems to have become my main for this season.

Partly it’s how well being a Blood Elf paladin fits into the current story arc, part of it is how much I’ve always loved the paladin archetype in general and the lore of Blood Knights in particular, and part of it is Holy spec being in maybe the most fun state ever. I’ve got a simple but satisfying damage rotation and a healing tool for every need in a compact set of spells with minimal button bloat. I’m the battle cleric I always longed to be.

Aside from the pally, my demon hunter is my other currently capped character, but while I’m still playing her, the class isn’t as fun as it was last expansion. Havoc just feels a bit clunky now.

I do like Devourer, and I’m playing it a fair bit, but it still feels a bit too difficult to maintain Void Meta for how long it takes to build up, and Devourer is absolutely terrible in the open world. It’s so squishy and takes way too long to ramp up. I’m also not pleased to know they’re removing the option to make Soul Immolation passive in the next patch. Avoiding maintenance cooldowns like that was a huge part of Devourer’s appeal to me.

So my paladin is overtaking her as the preferred character. I actually leveled the DH up first, taking her through the campaign. I’m pressing ahead with my plan to do each alt through the side quests of a different zone, though the slower leveling means I’m having to add a lot of dungeons, delves, and other grinding on top. Right now my Legion Remix death knight is around 85 after clearing out Zul’Aman, and my plan is to take Mai through Voidstorm and my monk through Harandar.

That leaves the warlock as the odd one out. I don’t really have any strong complaints about the current state of warlock, but there’s just other things I’d rather play more. I’d still like to get her to cap at some point for tradition’s sake.

Overwatch:

My other regular game these days is still Overwatch, where I spent many weeks fighting for Winston and the team in the Conquest event.

While I still play Brigitte a lot, I feel Juno may be slowly overtaking her as my main. I find her neurosis relatable. I think I’m starting to get the Juno mains brainrot, too. Wandering around my apartment muttering about chicken fried rice like a madman…

Mei also seems to be overtaking Pharah as my preferred damage character. Pharah is very fun, but also very stressful, and punishing of the slightest mistake. Mei feels more chill, no pun intended.

I do have weird luck with her. I’ve had some big win streaks and absolutely dominant games — I got my first four endorsement match the other day after rolling the enemy team — but then I’ll go like 0-7 and completely tank my win rate.

I tried Vendetta when she arrived, and I’m still making attempts with her here and there. After much struggling, I settled on a “spin to win” build using her whirlwind as my bread and butter. I do have a positive win rate with her right now, but I’m always at the bottom of the scoreboard, and it feels like I just keep getting carried. She’s incredibly satisfying when things go well — the sound design on her attacks is immaculate — but I just don’t seem very good with her.

One other event of note. A couple weeks back I accidentally queued for regular quick play instead of Stadium quick play and didn’t realize until I got into the match. Since I love her character and can’t play her in Stadium, I picked Illari, and I fully expected to be rolled, but we actually won.

Since then I’ve occasionally been spinning up mainline Overwatch just to get my Illari fix, and I’ve been doing okay-ish. More wins than losses so far, couple PotGs. I think I’ve had enough practice in Stadium that the first person camera doesn’t feel as bad as it once did.

I still prefer third person, though, and I’m hesitant to invest too much time into the main game. Aside from the camera issue, I miss Stadium’s customization, and more than anything I do not want to muck around with hero swapping. I can’t be bothered to learn who counters who out of a roster of ~50 characters, and I just want to play the character I like.

I’ll probably play a bit more here and there, but mostly I’m going to keep hoping my favourite characters make it to Stadium sooner rather than later. In the meantime I consoled myself with coming up with a fan concept for Illari’s potential items and powers.

Eldegarde:

New World’s Catacombs left me with a hunger for more PvE extraction play, and Eldegarde was much praised by my fellow Massively writer Sam Kash, so I decided to pick it up.

Unfortunately, I didn’t end up liking it that much. The idea had potential, and the graphics were pretty, but despite supposedly being finished, it still felt like an early access title. Very limited content, no tutorial, lots of jank, no way to mute voice chat or report people…

And then they announced they were sunsetting it. Thankfully I was able to get a refund.

Diablo IV:

Speaking of paladins, I checked out Diablo IV’s free trial of the new class. For all of my griping about D4, I had been thinking the arrival of the paladin and Skovos might finally be enough to get me to pull the trigger on buying the game.

I haven’t necessarily been put off that idea, but I gotta say having tried the paladin, I’m once again disappointed by D4. It’s not bad, but it felt pretty underwhelming all things considered. Very slow animations and pretty resource starved, and no real creative abilities or builds, either. Every D3 class felt like a fantasy archetype elevate to its most bombastic platonic ideal, but every D4 class feels like it was built to have the bare minimum tools for its archetype and nothing more.

I did have some fun with the Avenger’s Shield equivalent, and I might still play a pally if/when I buy D4, but it’s not the absolute guaranteed main material I thought it’d be.

I also decided to revisit some older classes briefly. I still mostly like the druid, though the resource mechanic isn’t ideal. I found a pretty fun necromancer build using the Sever upgrade that makes it drop a corpse comboed with Corpse Explosion.

I appreciate that sorcerers have an elementalist capstone passive now. Of course I didn’t level anywhere near far enough to unlock it, but I tried pretending I had it to see how the playstyle would feel. Conceptually it’s very similar to the Tal Rasha’s Elements build I used for my wizard in D3 — you get buffs for cycling different elements — but the execution is actually fairly different.

Tal Rasha’s only cared about how many elements you used in quick succession. The order didn’t matter. The D4 passive only cares about the order. You could only ever use two spells and just alternate and get max benefit. I think I liked the smoothness of Tal Rasha’s better, but you could argue the D4 version is better design because it does require you to think about the order of your spells. It’s basically like playing a Windwalker monk in WoW, and I do like that playstyle.

If and when I buy D4, my main will definitely be one of those four classes. I’d say necro and sorcerer lead the pack right now.

Demos:

I’ve rounded out the month by checking out a bunch of demos on Steam. Not all merit discussion, but there’s a few I’d like to touch on briefly.

Pragmata was the most interesting overall. It’s a good old-fashioned “gruff dude protects surrogate daughter figure” game like it’s 2013 all over again. Its main gimmick is that enemies are heavily armoured, and you need to hack them to make them vulnerable. This isn’t just an extra key press; you need to do a whole-ass hacking mini-game mid-battle.

If that sounds overwhelming, it certainly was at first, but the enemies do tend to be a bit slow and dumb, and by the end of the demo I was beginning to see the vision. Like Alan Wake’s “fight with light” mechanic but more fleshed out. Pragmata’s not a game I’d buy at full price, but it’s intriguing enough to keep an eye on. That little girl’s character model is damn creepy, though.

1348 Ex Voto (terrible name) had some promise. “Classic save the princess story but make it sapphic”* is a fun enough concept, and the voice acting was strong, but the character animations were horrendous, and the combat felt a bit rough (that might be a skill issue, admittedly).

*(Nothing in the demo explicitly labels the relationship between the two heroines as romantic, but the subtext is very strong.)

I came away thinking it was a promising alpha build and that it might be worth playing after another year or two of development, but then I saw the release date was this month and was like, “Oh… Oh no.”

John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando had pretty graphics and fantastic music, but the dialogue was horrendous, and the gameplay didn’t really feel distinct compared to any other zombie shooter you’d care to name. If it was free to play I might play more, but it’s not worth the asking price.

Finally, Space Tales seemed like it could be a charming enough low budget StarCraft clone, but the demo was too lacking in content to get a good feel for it. Will keep an eye on it, if only because the options for new RTS games are fairly limited these days, but probably another “buy on sale if at all” game.