Mechagon!

With two weeks until Mechagon (the dungeon) opens and we're allowed to face down Mechagon (the boss), I have plenty of time to explore Mechagon (the island). Seriously, they could've put some effort in naming things. It's like smurf village up in this place.

My GOD, the difference in tone between the Nazjatar and here are night and day. For general "feel", the zone is very much like an extension of Stormsong Valley, with rolling green hills and the occasional scrapyard thrown in for flavor. The island itself is littered with densely packed heavy hitting robotic monstrosities, which provide the primary resource you need: "scrap parts". That's right, this island is all about the tinkering… tinkering and FISHING!

The tinkering aspects come in a few flavors:
- there are landscape "projects" that require completion. You feed them resources like spare parts and charged power cells (you can find depleted ones and there's a time gating mechanism that lets you charge one every now and then for scrap) just like wood and steel for the Warfront buildings. Once done, you get access to nifty things like flamethrowers and jump packs.
- There's a robot that assembles things once you've collected the blueprints and parts. All in all, there's several dozen things you can make including "The Mechanocat Laser Pointer", which yields a paintable cat mount (apparently you can spray paint it one of eight colors)
- Statless rings and trinkets can be acquired and customized using a socket system. The "gems" in this case are "punchcards", obtainable by reputation, boss drops, or from the mythic dungeon opening Soon™.

Fishing is generally its own reward, but I was delighted to catch new rares as part of a fishing achievement in various pools and sections of the coastline. There's also a questline that ends with you fishing up a 3-man boss fight. Collecting all the fish will be a thing for me to do over the weekend when I have more time, just like hunting down rare spawns. As it was, I spent less than 2 hours getting to and screwing around in Mechagon, which was more than enough time to do everything that was currently available I could find and explore the island fully.

Afterwards it was time to hit Fishland. The short version is "I did most of the dailies and all the WQ, which got my fishboi to level 3 and unlocked the next part of the campaign and then did all of that." I think my next step is either rep-gated or I have to do more of the War Campaign proper. The only thing of real note is that they managed to make a daily worse than Beachhead. "Jumping Jellies"…it's a "jumping puzzle" using an engine that wasn't designed with jumping puzzles in mind. In this case, you leap onto floating jellyfish which bounce you high into the air and you have to Tokyo drift yourself onto a slightly higher jelly a number of times before you can reach an octopus named "Tickles" floating in a magic bubble well above the area. This. is. hell. If you fail to stick the landing, you fall into an area swarming with naga, because OF COURSE YOU DO. All in all, it took somewhere around a couple dozen tries to get it and I will seriously reconsider it when it comes up next in my daily rotation.

For all my efforts, I'm now "friendly" with both the friendly mechagnomes ("The Rustbolt Resistance") and fishbois ("some unspellable name with too many vowels").