The best thing

In my last post I talked about how the WOW expansion Shadowlands is good, and worth buying.  What I failed to mention was the best thing about the expansion so far - Torghast.  This is a zone you can run with between 1-5 players, and like many other roguelikes and dungeon crawlers of recent years, you do it by accumulating tons of interesting powers and upgrades and using them to defeat extremely powerful enemies.

Torghast has a bunch of different tilesets and the settings look fantastic.  There are dungeons full of furnaces and lava, gigantic towers rising from the mist, and twisted, metallic halls.  Torghast has different layouts and designs each time you zone in, enough of them that even if they aren't random they manage to keep on being fresh.  Each wing has different enemies and themes and they all come in a variety of difficulty levels.  Blizzard aimed for dark and scary and they hit the mark.

I LOVE running Torghast.  I would be doing it even if wasn't fun because it drops important stuff, but I just like doing it.  Many of the buffs you get are simple like +3% crit chance, but there are also lots of powerful and interesting things like "At the start and end of Avenging Wrath, cast Divine Toll."  I know most people won't have any idea what that means, but trust me, it is bonkers.  The best part though is the combos.  Casting Divine Toll for free regularly is great, but if you also get the power "Divine Toll stuns all nearby enemies for 3 seconds." it gets hilarious.

I think the way they have done the design of the powers is great.  Common powers are always useful but weak, rare ones are more powerful, but more narrow, and then there are ultra rare ones.  There are specific mobs that have unique abilities and they give you new powers that are linked to their abilities in theme.  You can even collect powers that let you blow up enemies and turn them into more powers, and this lets you get even more interesting and unique abilities.

There are definitely some dud powers.  A part of those are not great but they are thematically cool so I am on board with them, like "Maw Rats explode on death for 2000 damage."  Others are just totally worthless and have no interesting combo potential, so they are always a pass.  I don't mind some powers being worse, and I don't mind powers that are tricky to combo, but I want everything to be useful at some point.  There are a few things that are truly junk though, and I would fix that, if I were in charge.

However, the best thing about Torghast is the vast sums of money you get from running it.

Most people don't many vast sums.  In fact they lose money.  However, there are a lot of players who aren't that great but who still want the rewards.  Also it is undeniable that some classes and specs are better than others.  I play one of the best specs, Protection Paladin, so I can smash it easily.  In fact I can smash it while towing another person along with me.  A person who is paying for the privilege.  Paying an awful lot.

Previous to this I was running dungeons to earn cash, making about 5k/hour.

Now I am getting customers to pay me to run them through Torghast and I am making 50k/hour instead.  That is an incredible rate!  The real struggle isn't the dungeon - it is the logistics.  You can't trade money across servers, but you can group up across servers.  Finding people on my server who want to pay is tough, so I have been making alts on other servers, accepting payment there, and then doing the runs.  Now I just have to figure out ways to get that money to the server I am actually on!

I say 50k/hour is an incredible rate, but in terms of real dollars it is only 5$/hour.  That doesn't sound ideal, but it turns out to be an enormous amount of ingame currency to buy all the fun things I want.  And honestly... 5$/hour to run a fun dungeon with crazy powers and unexpected challenges?  Sounds pretty good!

One of the best things about Torghast is the way you can just run it over and over.  The previous expansion had something similar called Horrific Visions, and while that was fun, it had a cost to enter.  That meant a lot of mind numbing grinding in order to get to play, and that meant that people were reluctant to help others because helping meant grinding for your entry fee.  Torghast has no fee.  You just go, and you are either good enough, or you are not.  Also you aren't on a timer so if you need to afk to pee or answer the door you can do that.

I hope that they continue to support this new game mode.  Regular updates and changes to powers, new tilesets, and added difficulty will make this continual fun and I expect they can do that fairly easily.  Right now the balance isn't perfect, as tanks are particularly powerful, but since you can get a group together and do it and you aren't competing directly against other players I don't mind that so much.  There won't be a competitive Torghast scene, it is just a fun thing to do.

I like that.  I like it a lot.