Nope! There’s a spot you have to use where a static ring has to line up with a pendulum-ing ring, and that alignment, coupled with orb cast time and latency, is really tricky! Overall, though, I had a lot of fun on achievement night, and our raid knocked them out in a single night of focus with no problems or major timewasters (short of my field goals and the precise timing of clicking needed for the Sylvanas one). However, the Remnant of Ner’zhul achievement was…field goal kicking, and I volunteered thinking it would be easy. However, after the Glory of the Shadowlands Hero runs I did months ago, I swore I would never play sportsball in WoW again. They’re pretty fun, lighthearted, and increase the difficulty of the fights a smidge. Some even force interesting exploration, like the Sylvanas achievement, which makes you scour the Phase 2 bridges for Covenant orbs to use in Phase 3. The boss designs allow for some interesting achievements, like using the right mix of Anima Powers on Tarragrue to complete a side-quest from Torghast, or the mechanic-focused options like Soulrender Dormazain’s achievement.

Not every raid can be Throne of Thunder, and this is a clear case where the team just didn’t pull it off. I don’t think more trash would be the answer, but rather less physical space. In short, the raid uses long paths of nothing with short bursts of trash, leading to a feeling of imbalance and listlessness as you go between being able to stack pulls for fun combat and just literally nothing but running. I appreciate that there are multiple forks in the road for bosses, however – giving you two points at which your raid can take a choice of two bosses that better suit the player strengths of your group. More than a lot of raids in WoW, Sanctum is irritating between bosses because so much of your time is fighting a densely-packed set of trash and then just running aimlessly for a minute or more at a stretch. Once you get used to it, the raid is easy enough to maneuver around, but for the amount of space present inside, there’s just not a matched capacity of meaningful gameplay. The raid has a single skip to Kel’Thuzad, which is fine enough, but the rest of the raid makes inconsistent use of teleports, skips, and respawn points, leading to frustrating runs back. There’s a repair vendor in an awkward spot that is out of the way for Demon Hunters specifically (who can jump and glide past him), but the run back on some wipes is godawful. It has long corridors with minimal skips in service of small, uninspired trash pulls with an increase in named trash for the sake of Stygian Ember farming. Sanctum of Domination is one of the worst raids to run through in WoW in a while. In fact, I actually want more explanation and details of what happened there, because it looks cool!

In terms of the technical artistry and work, it’s great, but there’s only one moment of the raid that actually appealed visually to me – the room for Guardian of the First Ones, which looks like bits of Korthia were being sucked in via a wormhole of some sort. It leans instead on the Torghast model, with different color grading across the board, so there’s some red-sky grey metal and some red-fire grey metal and also, some blue-chill grey metal before more red-sky grey metal (but with stone!). Visually, they did good work – there are unique flourishes, details, and small things that work to try and set apart the raid, but we’ve all done enough Torghast for the rest of our lives and that aesthetic has roots that are 11 years old now, in the Icecrown Citadel of Wrath of the Lich King, so it is a tired visual kit for longtime WoW players, regardless of the higher-fidelity geometry and increased texture resolution. Sanctum of Domination sees the WoW art team try their level-best to fight against the overwhelming sameness of the Maw and Torghast and fail.

So in writing about the raid and its gameplay, I have a mostly complete picture, barring Mythic.

Unique this time is that I’ve done pretty much everything short of Mythic – LFR, Normal, Heroic, pugged, multiple guild groups, and achievements up to the meta-achievement Glory of the Dominant Raider. But for me, effectively, I’m done with it, and so as is customary for me here, it’s time to discuss the raid as a whole. For a lot of people, the reality of World of Warcraft is pretty bleak right now – a likely 5 more months of this damned raid.

Sanctum of domination loot