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Soul cinders 9.112/29/2023 ![]() Empowerment offers a decent power boost with a strong survivability component via high Leech, and having Empowerment active adds to your score. Each floor has a par time, and meeting or beating it is how you reach full points. The scoring system encourages exploration over completion, with full points on a floor only possible if you explore everything, with exploration being a mix of enemy kills, urn breaks, treasures and souls, and quests. Deaths do, however, count against your score. ![]() No death counter means that you cannot fully fail a Torghast run unless you just cannot complete it – pushing to the end, however brutal, rewards you with the full allotment of Soul Ash and, from layer 8 up, the new Soul Cinders currency. The most impactful change thus far to the core gameplay is that the floor structure does make bosses easier than they otherwise would have been, since there is one floor less scaling in the way, and that also means that you no longer have the difficult 5th floor run in each push through Torghast, which was where scaling reared it’s ugly head, particularly on classes and specs with bad Anima Powers.Įach other change does make a small impact, however. ![]() Each run still has the same basic flavor – zone in, get to clearing, kill floor boss, ascend, and repeat. ![]() The core flow of a Torghast run is not drastically different for any of these changes. Lastly, the structure of a Torghast run changed – going from an even 3-floor pattern to a skewed pattern, removing the old fifth floor to bring the boss forward, and then adding two additional layers as an incentive for high scores in Torghast on layer 9 or higher.Īll these changes sound like a lot, and they are, but at the same time…they kind of aren’t. With the scoring system comes Empowerment, a buff you can activate when you’ve completed a sufficient amount of Torghastery, increasing your Haste and Leech and offering a sustainable buff that you can keep from depleting by going faster and chaining kills, smashing urns, freeing souls, and completing quests inside the instance. You can fight back against this with The Box of Many Things – stockpiling a new currency, Tower Knowledge, and then using that to buy what are effectively Torghast talents, adding Blessings, removing Torments, reducing damage taken, increasing your damage dealt, etc. Gone are the instance-specific Torments 1.0, instead replaced with a rotating selection of torments that scale up as you tackle higher layers, and these offer more broadly applicable and interesting twists to high runs – with the old Torments being used up as an element of the Heroic and up Tarragrue fight. Replacing the limited deaths mechanic as a limiter is a scoring system, encouraging you to run through Torghast quickly, completely, and with flair like hoarding Phantasma, not taking Epic Anima Powers, or not taking trap damage. Instead of a simple system of trying to live to the end and win, Blizzard has retooled everything. You also get to kill him in an easy-enough raid fight, so that’s a fun bit of retributive justice. For flavor, lore, and the actual gameplay, the Tarragrue was removed to be the first boss of the new raid, meaning he no longer sniffs you out when you die too much and thus removing the death counter. In practice, it was sort of a dull chore at its best and an atrocious timewaster at worst, due to inconsistent scaling impacted by game balance, classes and specs with underwhelming or flat-out awful Anima Powers, and, like all the worst things in WoW, it has the dreaded label of “required content” – as Torghast is your sole gateway to Legendary crafting by offering the currency used for it and also offering a handful of the memories per class.ĩ.1 promised to change all of that, by introducing a drastic set of changes. In theory, it sounds great – a roguelike built on WoW’s foundation, fun random layouts, strong powers that shape a run – awesome. Torghast was probably one of, if not the most, contentious issues with the launch of Shadowlands. I’ve been teasing this post for what, two weeks now? Obviously…some things got in the way, and then I went to live in Mythic Plus until I emerged with my Keystone Master achievement for Shadowlands Season 2, but Torghast remains, looming ever larger in the distance.
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