On March 17th at 11:47 PM PDT, I reached a major goal I had set coming into this expansion. Roughly 20 pulls deep (logging didn’t work and DBM can no longer track pull counts with the addon API changes), I finished Nullaeus ??, the Delve Nemesis for Midnight’s first season, and with roughly 600 spots left in the North American region’s Hall of Fame for the boss, claimed the limited achievement (along with a treasure trove of prizes which Nullaeus drops as standard). Today, I wanted to take a moment to discuss the achievement, the reason I set it as a goal, the process of getting it done, and what Blizzard could do to make this a better-feeling thing for more of the community in future tiers. Ultimately, while I will be critical here, I want this to continue into future seasons, as I think that achievements like this fill an important gap in WoW’s rewards and player motivation profile (and not just because I like it and I got it).

The Basics

To do the complete but quick explainer, with the introduction of Delves in The War Within, Blizzard has added a boss to each Season of Delves. Dubbed the “Nemesis,” this boss is in their own Delve and you get a quest to defeat them during the season that rewards a toy. While Delves have 11 tiers of difficulty (because the game is for older people now and Blizzard loves old rock music jokes), Nemesis Delves have only two – a single question mark and the double question mark difficulty, which roughly correspond in numeric tuning to a Tier 8 and Tier 11 Delve respectively. While Delving can be done in any party size from solo to 5 player, the Nemesis rewards extra prizes for players who tackle the challenge alone, especially on ?? difficulty, where the (typically) coolest version of the seasonal Delve mount is rewarded for being able to defeat the double-question Nemesis all by yourself.

For Midnight, Blizzard decided to add the glory of a pseudo-Hall of Fame to the Delve Nemesis, giving the first 4,000 players over the finish line in each region a special title akin to the one given to the top Mythic raids for fully clearing Mythic quickly or to the seasonal Mythic Plus dungeon titles given to the top 0.1% of M+ players. With the launch of Midnight’s first season this week, the achievement became available for our first Nemesis this expansion, Nullaeus, and was claimed relatively quickly in both NA and EU (about 19 hours in NA and I believe the number I saw was 9 hours for EU). The Nemesis bosses, like end bosses, are generally not tested on PTR or Beta and so when the doors opened to Season 1 in NA on Tuesday the 17th, it was the first time players had seen the boss (save for a few overachievers that logged into the test servers during maintenance on the live game and could get test pulls on him since the season rollover happens on test realms too), so the time disparity between regions makes some sense through that lens.

My Preparation

There were three things you could do in preseason to prepare for the Nemesis ahead of time, if that was your desire – raise your item level as high as possible (mid-240 range was very doable with some luck), raise the level of your Delve companion Valeera as much as you could (she was hard-capped at level 45 prior to season start), and to prepare consumables and craftable helpers like enchants and gems. I did…a little bit of these, but admittedly, I didn’t try to grind too hard.

I went on my Demon Hunter, playing as Vengeance, and I reached a level of 240.25 to start. I took a mid-grind break the night of the challenge to send some upgrades and a craft and wound up downing the fight at 242.5 item level. I had gotten my Valeera to level 19 prior to season, and she dinged 20 and was just shy of 21 by the time I finished the challenge (she gets experience from the adds on the fight!), so she was quite far off of cap. Because I have been leveling professions like my life depends on it (I currently have cooking, tailoring, skinning, leatherworking, alchemy, herbalism, mining, jewelcrafting, and inscription at max skill and around 20% knowledge points), I had consumables well-covered, to the point I was even mostly enchanted (missing one weapon enchant) and fully gemmed when I got this done.

While I had been tempted to do some awful grinding for Valeera’s level, I chose mostly not to, and short of a couple of days where I did about 8 Grudge Pit runs on Tier 6 total to do a small bit of companion experience farming, I just leveled her naturally through leveling my first 5 characters through 80-90 (which was 8 delves per character for Delver’s Call quests) and then a few endgame Delves on my DH and Druid as my first two level 90s to farm some small pittance of gear for them. Likewise, while I had done a full 8 Mythic dungeon runs the first week of preseason on my DH, I only ran 3 dungeons in week 2, so outside of Prey and some world rewards like the rep gear, I wasn’t going in with as much as I could. On the day of launch, I made a conscious decision to live normally and not immediately push towards my goal – I spent an hour in the morning doing profession quests and made my normal gym trip, where I did watch a Survival Hunter POV of the fight during my cardio to get a sense of how the fight would go. I ate dinner logged out of the game while watching a YouTube video about the Shaq film vehicle Kazaam, and I wasn’t logged in to start working on this goal until after 7 PM PDT that night, where I still had to do Tier 8, 9, and 10 delves to unlock access to the ?? fight. I went straight for the hard mode, no attempts at all on single question mark.

For Valeera configuration, I took her as Healer (for the magic debuff dispels), with Mantle of Stars as a cheat death effect to smooth damage intake and Overflowing Voidspire to increase damage, both were rank 1/4 at the time I completed the fight successfully.

Nullaeus

The double-question mark fight is structured around 25% health marks on the boss, at which point he goes into intermissions where he becomes unattackable and adds are instead the challenge at those points. Each time he goes into an intermission, he gains a new or modified mechanic. He has a set of base mechanics and, in a first for Nemesis bosses, has a tank-specific mechanic to challenge the logic that tanks are generally sound at these fights. His major check is Emptiness of the Void, an interruptible cast that is a one-shot if allowed to go off. Aside from that, he has Devouring Essence, a magical debuff that ticks for heavy damage and can be dispelled by healers or healer Valeera, and Imploding Strike, which is tank-only and a melee attack that hits incredibly hard, requiring multiple mitigations to reduce down to a livable attack.

The first intermission at 75% health adds two Ravagers, which cast a leap attack and Jagged Rip, a bleed that is nasty damage, which you can force onto Valeera by outranging the adds. During this, the boss activates his first new mechanic, a void orb that covers a strip of the field in void goop that slowly dissipates and refills in new areas over time, leaving about 33% of the arena as damaging ground goo at a time. At 50%, the boss summons 7 tick adds that put a DoT that stacks onto you and activates a void orb that has a suction effect, which moves erratically around the arena and can pull you around as it gets close. The last intermission, at 25%, the boss summons a caster ogre that casts a Shadow Bolt onto you and also has the spell Shadow Crash, which marks an area for a decent-damage magical hit. He also puts a curse on you for 5 minutes that reduces movement speed, which he will reapply if it is dispelled, although once the add is dead you can dispel it if you have curse removal in your kit.

So this fight is interesting because…it’s not necessarily difficult. The overlap of mechanics is primarily down to the add phases, and so provided you can do the mechanics of the boss himself well enough while handling the adds, it isn’t terribly hard in a way that requires gear or big power on Valeera. What I found difficult, doing the fight as a tank spec, was that Imploding Strike hits incredibly hard and required me holding and rolling multiple mits through it when that isn’t normally how you’d play, especially on Vengeance (this expansion in particular, Metamorphosis is a damage cooldown that resets Spirit Bomb while also being defensively helpful, and the Apex Talents for Vengeance give extra charges of it that incentivize popping it a lot to use for burst damage output), so when coupled with the active mitigation changes (for most tanks in Midnight, the cooldown on your main mitigation is aligned such that you’ll have gaps in coverage) meant I had to hold mitigation until Imploding Strike and use 2-4 mitigations per Imploding Strike. I got into a decent flow of keeping Demon Spikes available for it, coupled with a free Metamorphosis, Fiery Brand, or Spirit Bomb shield, and I could stack Demon Spikes, one or two of that list of effects, and then small talent helpers like the tiny shield from Infernal Striking or the small armor boost from having Immolation Aura active, and the combination of those effects would often turn Imploding Strike into nothing.

Having said that, aside from Imploding Strike sometimes deleting my health bar, I did encounter a few other challenges with the fight. Add phases get hectic and one thing I noticed on several pulls is that DBM’s audio alerts for the built-in boss warnings are inconsistent when the boss is not your target, so I encountered multiple pulls where I was cleaning up the adds and didn’t have Nullaeus targeted while he was casting Emptiness, resulting in him getting the cast off and crushing up my layers of cheat deaths. That also applies to the “Defensive!” warning for Imploding Strike, so many of my nasty Imploding Strike hits (and deaths from it) came when I wasn’t actively monitoring his cast bar to prepare adequately. Another issue that I ran into and a learning I took away is that by watching a DPS player do it as my guide, I kind of had a bad idea about how to handle things in the fight. For DPS players, having strong burst on the adds is key because the bleeds, poison ticks, and casts from the ogre do substantially more damage on a DPS player compared to a tank. Early on, I was using my first potion around the first adds and then saving second potion and drums for bloodlust on the ogre, using them immediately on just the adds to try and kill them before Nullaeus came out of his invulnerability, but for a tank, this was a mistake, and my winning pull I used my first potion to stack the adds on an attackable Nullaeus and cleave, doing the same with second potion and drums for the ogre when I could maximize target count. The boost to agility also boosted my Demon Spikes, which meant the rough late-fight Imploding Strikes where it was easy to lose coverage due to tension and excitement were easier to cover and my baseline mitigation was stronger.

For healer Valeera, she has a similar setup to Brann as a baseline to her healing – she drops blood orbs that give a healing-over-time effect, so while you are tempted to vacuum them all up immediately, staggering them is wiser and results in higher net healing and smoother damage profile. She also drops a green healing circle which is nice, and if you get low, she drops a shadowy circle that is a damage reduction effect, so being able to get the circles to overlap, pickup bloods in a staggered but orderly manner, and then using your own self-healing as a smoothing and spike recovery measure works exceptionally well. Of course, Valeera will get a mind of her own and place circles in bad spots a lot, but because the goop in this fight is relatively temporary, it isn’t as bad as how Brann could be. Her circles of benefit can be a challenge to see, especially because they can sometimes clip the floor or blend in with the goop (especially the damage reduction one, which also only spawns when you are in higher danger so….oof), and sometimes her placement logic gets wonky and she’ll put both circles down in completely different spots, rendering the effect of one basically useless. Overall, however, I like Valeera on this fight, she has no real snags here, unlike Brann on Ky’veza where he could go into mega DPS burst mode when he has to move for the suction mechanic and ends up being a real burden.

Basically here, if you can manage the adds intelligently, correctly handle and mitigate incoming damage, and hit your interrupts on target for Emptiness, you can win the fight. While there is some talk of a stacking damage increase on the boss, I didn’t see evidence of that and so it doesn’t seem like there is a hard DPS check, if any. For a tank player, the challenge is proper mitigation allocation to survive the Imploding Strike and the first two add phases, while for DPS it seems the main challenge is smoothing the incoming auto-attacks through whatever means you have – pet tanks, self-healing, leech, etc.

What Blizzard Got Right

WoW has become, in some ways, a very soloable game. It’s got ways to experience dungeons with NPCs, most content in the world is very doable without a party, world events are better and easier with people but made to scale so that you can do them alone most of the time, and queueable content allows for group activities without the old school chat pressures and extrovert behavior. However, the game doesn’t have that many ways in which solo players can test themselves and receive a reward in the same vein as those who push boundaries in group instanced PvE and PvP content. Delves have given solo players a powerful content and reward loop that didn’t exist before, one that is expanding further with Prey, but there still just wasn’t that way to set yourself apart. This idea, the Hall of Fame for the Delve Nemesis, does that. While WoW has had a lot of fun soloable challenges in recent years that can test skills (Mage Tower, Horrific Visions, Torghast (yes really)) it hasn’t offered those things with the same level of pomp and circumstance that comes with top-end Mythic raiding, high key dungeon running, or top attainment in the arenas. And I don’t think that solo challenge players like myself necessarily want the exact same things, so I think that this idea was a good compromise – it’s limited, but not too limited, the title is neat but also not a thing that many would be sad to not have, and it asked for commitment at a point in the season where a lot of different things pulled in different directions – I personally had to make an active choice between living my life normally for the day or going hard, and even after choosing to have a normal day capped off with grinding to this achievement, I had to make smart trade-offs – not choosing to get lost in gear farming, not chasing every easy upgrade option like Prey into Nightmare, Bountiful Delves, or even running a few M0s prior to starting – I went with what I had and that made it feel more rewarding.

Nullaeus is a decent Nemesis that tries to correct some of the issues of the past – giving him a hard tank mechanic makes up for the times where going on tank could make the actual mechanics trivial without making DPS and healer players suffer for it and the layers of mechanics all have different answers you can engage depending on your spec and how you have your Valeera setup. If I was more confident in my self healing not being used on Imploding Strike, I could have taken DPS Valeera instead and just dealt with the DoT, or I could have gone as one of my DPS specs and attempted to blast the fight that way instead. It actually felt like an interesting choice, and while I perhaps made a suboptimal choice (not switching to DPS when the tank mechanic was my primary source of grief), I committed to the grind and stuck it out and that felt rewarding. The fight did, given the relative difficulty, feel rewarding – if it were even a bit easier, it wouldn’t have felt rewarding and I probably wouldn’t have as much to say about it, and if it were harder, I might have enjoyed that but also felt like it compelled more grinding and prep than I did. I feel like the overall tuning and setup was a sweet spot – only 12,000 (maybe 16k? I dunno how many regions have this achievement) people in the world have the title and I am one of them, and it felt like about the right level of challenge and struggle given my gear and Valeera level. If I had ground out more, it would have been easier but also I feel like doing it at a lower item level and companion level made it feel more like an earned victory.

Regardless of what I am about to say in the next section, I do not want Blizzard to feel discouraged away from doing this again in the future – this is a vital thing for solo players to have and something that sweetens the pot to encourage that push, and I feel like some iterations in the future will stick the landing all the way, but it should continue to be a thing that we get.

What Blizzard Got Wrong

Nullaeus’ mechanical tuning was way off to begin the day, because the Emptiness interrupt mechanic was not tuned to account for different interrupt timings, which meant doing it with a ranged interrupt or, even worse, no interrupt, could be a real pain in the ass. Valeera can help on non-healer specs with the interrupt at least so that means that healer players should be covered, but if you were a ranged Hunter or caster DPS (aside from Devourer DH haha), the fight was literally impossible until they hotfixed it mid-day. Blizzard doesn’t test these fights in public, and while I like that to an extent, they need to be more thorough with their own internal testing of these things now, especially with a limited achievement tied to it.

I think that, similar argument to Mythic raid racing incoming, there needs to be some way to maintain parity between NA and EU. EU is generally more skillful as players and in the case of a fight like this, they get to see the early struggle on NA through streams and guides before engaging, which means that the EU HoF filled substantially faster than NA in spite of being a smaller overall audience. If I was an EU player, I would not have gotten the achievement, full stop – and that’s personally okay for me because I accepted that I was pushing to get it in the first place, but I still think more can be done to help level-set across regions and keep it relatively interesting. As with RWF Mythic though, I don’t fully know how you actually create that level playing field – and at least it’s not NA versus EU, so it maybe matters less, but the delay in rollout means those that could no-life it in EU on reset day were the only people able to get it at all, and maybe a soloable thing shouldn’t require calling out of work and grinding fast to get. Even on NA, if you didn’t push on reset day for it, you didn’t get it, and that feels kind of bad.

I think there could be some adjustments made to make it a little easier to do while also holding a certain intangible prestige value. 4,000 players per region isn’t tiny, but the idea of 10,000 that was floating in beta might be too much – maybe there’s a middle ground at like 8,000? I won’t pretend to have the correct answer, but I think a little adjustment is in order. I also don’t think that delaying the reward of it is satisfying, so holding it like the M+ or PvP titles would be a bad move in my opinion, so I think adjusting the player count that can receive it is probably the right play. Perhaps setting it to a value based on total number of hard mode Nemesis solos, like whatever number would represent 1-5% of total clears of the boss on average?

I still, however, have to come back to the notion of the tuning – getting something simple that wrong on launch means that caster players in NA got particularly screwed out of the title, which sucks. I think the way you equalize the knowledge gap between regions and address tuning gaps like that is to perhaps do limited public testing of the fight on PTR, so you open it up like raid testing on a schedule, let players get a peek and report problems early, but maybe hold some double-question mark mechanics back or adjust in a way that keeps some mystique and discovery to the fight.

As a general note on tuning of these fights more broadly, I have yet to be super impressed by the tuning of any of them. There always seems to be a “correct” answer as far a role that is just flat-out easier to play on them, and while that has changed between tank and DPS, the correct answer has never really been healer, which feels very bad. It’s clear with Nullaeus that they made an effort to try and make tank tuning a bit more aggressive with an actual tank mechanic instead of just making auto-attacks smack everyone on the head for a kajillion damage, but the tuning levers they use on the fights themselves are just undercooked and feel bad. Tanks get a lower-health boss and adds, and healers even more so, but I’d like to see a multi-faceted fight where I can even seriously think about bringing my Druid as Resto instead of Guardian or Feral, or where my Priest feels like he would even be capable of it between long cooldown DPS interrupt and atrocious DPS throughput as healing specs. The tankbuster here did make it feel engaging as a tank more than prior Nemeses, but more can be done to make these feel like fair fights and for the Hall of Fame to feel like a level playing field for all.

My Motivation

A lot of my journey since Legion can be defined by the desire to prove my ability as a player and to be perceived outwardly as a good player. I did the Mage Tower in Legion because I wanted the weapon skins, but it grew into an expression of player growth and ability, showing that I could even take a spec I virtually never played like Subtlety Rogue and still play it well enough to win a hard solo challenge. Horrific Visions, Torghast solo runs, all of it feeds the same need – the desire to be seen as a good player. My entire journey socially within the game has been an outgrowth of that too, as while I have friends in game that exist in a normal social framework, a lot of the social value I receive from playing WoW with people is that perception of skill, the trust that I know what I am doing and can adjust and learn well enough for them to continue to trust me, and the ability to convert people into seeing me as a skillful player. Hell, one of the cornerstone founding members of my current guild was also someone who made one of the comments about my skill that irritated me in our old guild and led me down the path of founding my own, and now he very often asks me for guidance with the game!

But as I have also recounted before, a journey for external validation is often one that is empty and unsatisfying, so over the years I have also come to desire that advancement for my own satisfaction, to prove to myself that I am capable of achieving difficult things and growing as a person and player. For me, the idea of pushing to a “title” achievement tier in my preferred content was undesirable – I will not ever really want to invest the hours and social effort into finding a Mythic raiding guild that can do HoF level play (or being at that level of play myself), and while I think perhaps a Mythic Plus title could be in question, I always tap out at the top rating achievement, even as that has grown – I rarely feel a strong desire to invest much beyond that, so while I perhaps could reach an M+ title for a season, it’s not a desirable thing to me.

WoW’s solo challenges have always been a thing I want to do and seek out, however, so when the news of this achievement came up in beta, I knew I was going to chase it. I was prepared to not get it – it’s a new level of play for me and it was likely to require a substantial effort that I might not have been able to meet. But I knew that I wanted to chase it, that it was the closest I would be in my current player growth and investment to being able to obtain something that could be seen as prestigious and skillful in that way. And sure, okay, it’s the delve boss, it isn’t the highest bar of attainment in the game nor is completing it a new thing to me, but I know tons of players who think they are great at the game who cannot get these down reliably and many more that don’t even try or only try in maximum item level gear near the end of the season. I feel like this challenge presented a lot of interesting constraints to work within that I really liked – early expansion meaning I could only have a few characters leveled, mostly preseason prep gear so no huge power spikes, still learning the changed rotation and priorities, no rotation assistance from addons, and limits on consumable quality and enhancements to gear because of cost constraints due to lack of supply of epic-level enchanting materials and delve reagents that were in short supply early on. In a way, it gave me a field where there were limited excuses I could make to dismiss my achievement – and I sort-of self-sabotaged by choosing not to invest excess time towards big grinds in preseason that would have made the fight easier, so I almost actively made it more challenging to myself.

No matter my confidence level in my gameplay, I always want to do better and always ask what I can improve upon as a player, in the role I play in a given mode of content, as a raid leader, guild leader, communicator and more – I always try to focus inwardly at this point. In fact, I think the one thing that makes a majority of the players that I would deem “bad” at the game that I have dealt with over the years is a lack of that introspection – when they fail at content, it is always someone else’s fault, the tank pulled too much, the DPS didn’t know what they were doing, the healer was slow, we all have heard a million stories from friends in-game that amount to “I was the only skillful and good player in a sea of shitty ones” when the truth is often that everyone was kinda shit including the person scapegoating everyone but themselves. Or it’s someone who is “trying” in spite of having nothing they can point at as specific actions being taken to improve and no results to show for it. While a big part of my personal growth has come in group content – pugging Mythic raid bosses, pushing Keystone Legend at the point when 0.5% of players have it early in a season compared to late season when it’s like 20% of players – the reason I gravitate to solo challenges is that they put the focus on my play solely. There are no scapegoats, maybe short of blaming a game bug, and so the only thing I can focus in on and improve is my play and responses to things. Every Imploding Strike death was something I did wrong and could learn and do better – an adjustment to my gameplay that would see tangible results, every failed interrupt was a sign to adjust focus and attention to better observe cast bars and step in with the interrupt when the time was right, and every death to adds was an encouragement to smartly regulate resources to manage survival during those phases while saving necessary tools for the main boss.

The fact that I got it as a buzzer-beater with maybe an hour or two before the NA HoF filled completely was immensely satisfying. When I prepared this week to tackle the challenge, I checked to see if I had been top 4,000 on any prior Nemesis, and according to DataForAzeroth, I had only managed it once – on Underpin ?? during Season 2 of TWW, where I was NA #280. For both Zekvir and Ky’veza, I was just outside the top 4,000, not by a lot but it’s neither horseshoes nor nuclear war and so close doesn’t matter. But knowing I had reached that level of play at least once meant I could do it again with focus, and I made the choice to pursue it, locking in on not just doing the Delve boss but specifically pushing for HoF.

In the end, the fight was challenging enough to feel rewarding, the title was a big enough prize to feel worth chasing, and the satisfaction I feel for accomplishing it is immense. While there are opportunities on Blizzard’s part to ensure that a player like me doesn’t feel a need to append asterisks and footnotes to their achievements, I think that this model is something I am delighted to see Blizzard trying and one I hope to see them iterate on into the future.