Bobby Frankenberger
Appearances
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
Has attacked Dornagal, which they have been protecting that... What is that shaft called? I can't remember exactly what it is, but it's like a tunnel that goes directly into the heart of Azeroth, right? The Earthen have been tasked with protecting that, and so she's attacking that and trying to make it so that they can't get in there. Is she maybe... Oh, hold on. Good morning, please.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
Okay, I had to stop for just a minute because they were... I'm in like a makeshift sound booth I made here in the room on the cruise ship. And they were making an announcement because we just arrived at a port. Anyway, let me continue. So my thought is, since Zalatath has...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
attacked the place that has sort of a shaft down into the heart of Azeroth is she going to take all that energy that she's trying to absorb from Dalaran into the dark heart and she may be trying to because I think what it does is it converts all sorts of magical energies into void energies and maybe she's trying to inject that into Azeroth because you know one of my predictions it seems to be pointing to the fact that
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
She is preparing Azeroth to be maybe like a void entity, maybe a void lord, and to transform it into that because there's a lot of indications in the lore that this is speculation, but that Azeroth, even though we've been told for a long time, is... Is it a Titan soul is being born into a Titan that maybe it's not actually what a world soul is.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
Maybe a world soul actually is some sort of almost blank slate that can be transformed based on the type of energies that get get put into it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
um so that'll be really interesting to see the earthen at this at this uh at dornigal are fantastic i cannot wait to learn more about them they're just so interesting you've got the oath sworn um they talk a bunch about like directives that they've been given uh and and part of their directives are to to protect struck titan structures and maintain titan machines and
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
Now, what I want to know is why. I mean, I think it might be obvious why the Titans would set something up to make it so that there's a way for Titan energies or order magic to be sent directly into the heart of Azeroth, the world soul. And why not create these earthen as people who are there to maintain the machines that do it, but also to protect it and all that kind of stuff.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
And you've got the Stormrider people. Balegrim was really, really interesting. Oh, and Magni being a Thragar. That's pretty cool. I wonder what that's going to – like this diamond creature. I wonder what a Thragar is and if we're going to learn more about – Magni's relationship with Azeroth as we go on and everything.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
Oh, and the decision to not give these earthen Scottish accents like all the other dwarves was a really interesting choice. But it makes sense, right? They have been separated for thousands and thousands of years. Why would they all sound the same? But it's those little details that I really like about the world building and about how the world is just...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
Just this environmental storytelling that they're different people, you know. And you've got the machine speakers. Oh, that one machine speaker that you talk to who tells you all about the memory gems and how they do all that. Those are cool. They're like almost little like walking computers. Talk very like I am a machine speaker. I don't know. It's cool.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
And one thing, I don't know if you guys noticed this, go into Dornigal and look around some of the profession areas, like the herbalism area. There are these, they're called Fae Sworn Arborists. And you don't have to talk to them, but if you see one, talk to them and ask them about what they do. And it seems really interesting because they're very... Weird.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
So they talk – all the earthen talk about their edicts that they've been given, the directives that they've been given to maintain and protect everything around there. The face-worn arborists – They – the way that they talk about it is that they've got a different directive, right?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
And that their directive comes from someone else that they can't say and they say if any of the oaths sworn hear them talking about it, they'd be in trouble, right? Yeah. So that's really interesting to me. Why is that? Who is it that they're getting their directives from? They say if you meet one out in the wilds or something like that, that they can talk about it. I'm interested to see that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
Seems to me like it's probably Freya, because they're Frey-sworn, right? But Freya being... One of the early... Was she a titan or a keeper? I think she was a titan, but connected to earth magics, right? Nature magics. So it has to be Freya, right? And the reason I bet that that is some sort of secret and they're not supposed to talk about it is because, if you remember... is it Agamemnon?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
One of the, I don't know, some names are sometimes hard for me, but one of the leader of all the Titans got into a conflict with Freya early on because Freya had spread all these roots and world trees, planted a world tree into the surface of Azeroth to spread its roots around and sort of like protect with nature magic.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
And then he was mad about it because like, probably because nature magic was being pushed into the world soul and that's not what he wanted right he's they're looking for order magic to be put into the to the world soul to to make it into a titan all this kind of stuff it's it's a whole nother thing but maybe the fray that's why the fray sworn arbor is the fray sworn following freya would be a
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
So that's all my sort of hot takes. I have three main predictions, if I can remember all three of them. I've been thinking about them. Three main predictions about where this story is going. And we might not see it in this particular The War Within. We might see it unfold, these predictions, over the course of all three of these expansions. But one of them is that I think...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
I predict that the Titans are not who we think they are and that they're maybe sort of like claiming that they're benevolent and maybe they think that they are, but that they're just like everybody else, right? They have their own thing and they're forcing their order magic onto the world soul of Azeroth. And another prediction is, I think, Xalatath.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
While I'm sure she'll maintain her status as an enemy, I have a feeling we're going to end up in one of those situations where... we both have a common enemy. Once we realized that maybe all these people who are talking about how terrible the Titans are, maybe they were right. And the Titans aren't great. And we need to like fight back against the Titans.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
Um, and my final prediction has to do with Scott. Can't say this. I don't know what he knows. Um, based on that interview he had with, uh, Chris Metzen, but everybody's talking about the sword, like the sword being an Azeroth. And then he said, Oh, maybe you're not prepared for what's going to happen next. later in all of this stuff, in all three of these expansions.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
And everybody's like, oh, Illidan's coming back. I don't think Illidan is the one who's going to take that sword out. I think what's going to happen is Sargeras is going to come back and take that sword out himself because, again, Sargeras was going against the Titans.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
And so I think all these entities that were against the Titans who we thought were bad guys, we're going to realize maybe they weren't all great, but maybe they had something...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
going on there and that the titans really aren't all that great and the reason that has to do with you are not prepared is because obviously illidan last time we saw illidan he was devoting himself to making sure that sargeras stayed imprisoned so maybe he's gonna have to come back we're gonna see illidan again in order to see sargeras and sargeras couldn't come back
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
yank that sword out and maybe have a big titan battle i don't know um thanks everybody for being patrons and uh that's those are my hot takes my bobby's hot lore hot takes who knows maybe that's what i'll call this all right bye everyone this show is part of the frog pants network yes get more at frogpants.com
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
Hello everyone, Bobby here. If you listened to the first episode, you probably know that I am on a cruise right now and I happen to be able to play, I don't know, about an hour, hour and a half of the new expansion before we left while I was at the hotel before we got on the cruise ship.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
And I thought, man, I got so excited about some of this lore that I thought, why don't I do a little hot take because I keep thinking about it. I keep thinking about all the different things.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
um that happened and all of that and so i thought why don't i just throw out a little bit of a a little bit of a recording of some hot takes of what my thoughts were and everything and maybe i'll do this periodically throughout while i'm leveling up and through all the story and everything so well so first um
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
First thing I should say, I guess, is that if you're listening to this, I guess there will be spoilers for the first hour to hour and a half of the game. So if you haven't started playing it yet, you should go and do that. And I play it up until you get to the new... the main town with all the earth in the, what is it? Dornegal.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
And, um, I got the quest where I, you know, I just got there, flew in, landed and got the quest where I am being told to go around and introduce myself to different people. So like the vendors and stuff like that. So if you get to that, that point, that's how far I am. And, um, but let's start at the beginning. So the,
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
Already, at the very beginning, Dalaran, as soon as you get stuff, was... First of all, that opening quest sequence was intense. The story... They've started this whole story with serious stakes and have... Managed to say, hey, Zalatath is an absolutely scary villain. And has some serious things that you should be worrying about.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
And the way they did that was by... I can't believe they destroyed Dalaran. And they killed... Killed Khadgar. And that is... that just tells you that blizzard like it's sort of like your game of thrones moment right like you you're you're thinking now who else is on the chopping block who there's nobody is safe
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
Um, so I like that there are lots of stakes there and, and right from the beginning, they're going to tell you, tell you that you, you don't know what's going to happen. And, and, and it's great. Um, my, one of the things I thought was Zalatath is clearly there trying to, I mean, I think she says as much, tries to absorb magical energy from the magical city of Dalaran.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
What she's using is that, uh, that, um, That artifact that she has, the little round thing called the Dark Heart, and some of the prequests leading up to the expansion talked about the Dark Heart. The Dark Heart is sort of a prototype.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
If you remember the Dragon Soul, which was the little artifact that Neltharion used a long, long time ago, or Deathwing, I think, even at that point, used a long, long time ago to trick the dragon aspects
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
back in the early before all world of warcraft stuff tricked the dragon aspects into giving him part of their power so that um so that he could uh do some really terrible things but the dragon soul was was this thing that was able to absorb uh magical energies or different energies from the world and from the dragon aspects and absorb it and turn it into something else, something powerful.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
The Dark Heart is a similar prototype version of that and that's what Xalatath is using. And so she was there at Dalaran, I think, absorbing energy from that magical city. And she even employs you to help her, right? So you get, without knowing it, because you thought she was one of the council members who's masquerading as one. But the question I have is what...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: The War Within - First Impressions and Level 80!
What is she using that energy for, right? Is she going to try to inject that into Azeroth? Because then, ultimately, after the city explodes and then you end up going back, you see that the Nerubians, who she has recruited, remember in the cinematic, one of the videos before it launched, the expansion, saw that she has recruited those Nerubians there. And she...
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The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
He strikes me as that type. He's just always got something to do.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
Did you get a little, did you get a little teary even maybe a little, um, a little misty because, and I know you probably hear this a lot, but this, um, the instance was the very first podcast I ever listened to.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
What? Did he say that? That's mine.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
I know you've mentioned it in your teaser or preview kind of stuff, but yeah, I guess it's worth mentioning that this is, at least for now, it's going to be monthly. Yep. I think it's a good cadence.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
Yeah. I, I had never listened to a podcast before. I don't know how far back it was like 2009 or something is probably when I jumped in. Um, and, uh, it was, um, It was, it's so, so I am, I just would like to say to anybody listening, wondering like, who is this Bobby guy? I am just as much of a fan as, as everybody else who's listening.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
Certainly we'll have plenty of things to talk about once a month at the start. There's plenty of things that are happening, plenty of things to talk about. And then it feels like if, and you know it's if, if it's decided to go every other week, every three weeks, who knows? It should be because we feel like it's necessary. Right. Not because that's the way things are done or anything like that.
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I think it's the right thing. The last thing that people who are tuning in on this first episode of this revered podcast coming back.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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um that you did scott the last thing anybody listening wants to happen is is for is for you to put out you know a couple months worth of episodes and then you're like well i'm burned out or another two-year hiatus see you in the next two years right so in it's it's better for longevity to, to start this way. That's, that's my thoughts on it. And I, I'm all for it, you know?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah. Giving yourself built in times to assess.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And you can say, well, weekly podcast.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And, and I'm just very honored to be able to be a part of the legacy of the show. And I can't wait to continue to take it. To familiar in new places. And let's all just love World of Warcraft. Because that's why I'm here.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, it's in there somewhere. Yeah. It's hard to actually read it. Those are the good ones. I agree with that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And maybe real quick, we should just for anybody who's maybe not playing WoW right now or is coming back, just say that's what follower dungeons are, is that you can go into a dungeon by yourself and you have AI party members that are just filling out the roles that you need to be filled out.
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If you're not a tank, if you're a DPS, then there'll be two other AI DPSers and an AI tank and an AI healer.
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My joke that I always jokingly complain about whenever new patches come out and classes get all their changes and everything, I always jokingly complain that everybody gets to be excited about all their class changes and then old Bobby the Prot Pally just has to... The patch notes are like... You're good. You guys are good.
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Nothing to change here.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, the difficulty is definitely a lot lower.
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Oh yeah, we'll get to that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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There's a lot of story being told in dungeons as well that a lot of people miss out on because you go in there and if you're doing it on a lower difficulty then you still have to go in with other people and chances are other people who are doing the low difficulty dungeons, they're just doing it to farm something like you said. So their goals are different than yours.
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And so that's always a problem. Whenever you're in a group and your goals are different from other people's, you're not going to have a good time. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be the fault of the other people. They have their own agenda and they might need to be in there for a particular reason. Now, if they're being jerks about it, that's a different story.
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But the fact that they might want to rush through it isn't necessarily a fault of theirs. It's just they have different priorities, but they don't match up with yours. And so you're getting to do that. You're getting to slow down. You're getting to see the story that's being told, visual storytelling, environmental storytelling, which they spend so much time working on.
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So you should get to take it in.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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When your only experience in a dungeon is stress, you don't want to relive that ever. You're playing a game. You don't want to log in and think, Because before I was a live and die all the time tank person. Tank person. Before I did any tank person. Everybody calls it that, right? A live and die all the time tank person. I think that's on the website. If you look at the wiki, it's all on there.
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But before that, and I did DPS, I was afraid to tank. And it was a terrible feeling to be like, all right, well, I want to get into tanking. For my raid team because they need a tank. So I got to log on and I got to get into a dungeon. It was like a terrible feeling to be like, what am I putting myself through now? Right. And I had to force myself to do that. And I was playing a game.
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I think after a while, maybe they thought like, Like, okay, we're trying all these systems to make things nicer, but eventually you've got to realize sometimes people are just people. But hey, what if we take the people out? In your MMO, your massively online multiplayer game. So they took the people out, and that's follower dungeons, and they really are great. In this past...
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six months like you were talking about um i wanted to try healing out for just one part of the the last season of our of our rating and um so i was like oh i haven't healed in
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more than five years i don't know what i'm doing so i went into a follower dungeon i said i this will at least help me figure out what buttons to press you know like and it was great yeah it was great yeah it's great and you can walk away for a while if you need to pee that's another nice thing like if i have to pee oh my god that is nice yeah you'll get kicked if you do that with strangers forget it they don't they're not they should add that in to the ai the ai like votes to kick you out
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And then that little... Yeah, there's like a toggle where you can be the leader or they can lead you.
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I think it would be good to have some sort of difficulty slider. And the reason is because, again, with my healing experience, I did have a group of people that I could... Basically, all I was able to do in there was figure out the interface for healing and where the buttons were and everything like that. But I almost never had to heal anyone because the difficulty is so low.
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And that's not what Blizzard put it in the game for. I think originally the way they sort of packaged it is they said it was going to be an easy single-player way for you to get dungeon questing done if you needed to.
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And so that's, I think, what was on the front of their mind. But also, obviously, you can try out these different things like tanking and classes you've never done before. But increasing the... Because it's... What you shouldn't think is that doing the follower dungeon will properly train you for doing...
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actual grouped content because it will not no what it will do is it will introduce you to the environment and maybe the the interface and the set pieces and and just it'll make things look familiar when you start yeah doing maybe what trash you can skip stuff like that yeah yeah but but especially with healing and tanking and stuff as things get harder uh is when when you really have to learn it and so
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But understanding the environment is one thing in and of itself, right? Like, especially as a tank, Scott, now that you're tanking. Yeah, look at me. As a tank, you are expected to be the one in charge, like leading the group, right? So you need to know where to go. So if you were in a group and you couldn't find that tunnel. you would have gotten all, no end of crap.
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Well, actually, I'm going to walk that back a little bit because I kind of implied that that's the truth. But I have to say that my experience in the past couple of years has been much improved. People tend to be a lot nicer in dungeons, especially at the beginning of an expansion.
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It's not as bad as it used to be, but it's still not great. Follower dungeons are good for that.
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And some of them, they're like, they're like breaking mechanics. Like if you don't do them the right way, then you're done.
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Keep it at the end of an expansion. It's great because at the end of an expansion, everybody's always thinking about leveling up alts anyway. So making it an easy way to do that. And it was perfect timing with war bands coming, which I know we're about to talk about. But with war bands coming, I'm sure they're thinking, well, we want everybody to have alts now. Yeah.
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They made it way easy for that to happen.
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You know, I got to get this out and off my chest. It's not off my chest. It's a complaint. It's about me. It's not about anybody else. It's about the timing of my own vacations.
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Yeah. So the early access starts tomorrow. I have early access. I'm excited to get in there and try it out. But then the very next day, I leave for me and my wife. It's our 15 year anniversary this year. We are going on a seven day Alaskan cruise. I'm going to be gone until September 1st. Oh, my gosh, dude.
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40 bucks or something? Yeah, so I did buy it before I knew when the cruise was. I did pre-order the expansion before I knew when the cruise was going to be or before I realized. No, no, no, because when you pre-ordered it, you didn't know when the release date was going to be.
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Yeah, but I didn't get it for the early access. I was actually at the time a little bit annoyed by the fact that they added early access. And maybe this is a decent time to... to mention the fact that they've never done this before.
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I'm not trying to, um, the, uh, I, the reason I got it was because of the mountain, the, and the, and the pets, right? Yeah. And so that's and all the other extra little things like that. That's the reason I purchased that edition.
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And the fact that they added early access for some reason that I can't quite explain annoyed me a little bit because it felt like it felt like I was like I was buying into a privilege that I didn't think existed. it felt right for them to add to the game at all.
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Um, but now I'm going to have it and, but I'm, I'm not like out of principle, not going to play early. So it's like, I was put in this weird sort of like, like, uh, like position to have my, my, uh, my values or my ethics damaged in some way.
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Yeah. That being said, I'll see you guys in early access.
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All right? I'm not really trying to be hypocritical. It's just because it's not like I'm... I'm angry. I'm not like that. It's just it's a little irritating is all like, why did you do that?
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I think these are all local times to the places you're naming.
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No, it's all the Pacific.
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And that's what you mean is that in the past, just doing the main story quests, you could level all the way to max level just doing that and not have to do side stuff. But it seems the way that they're talking about it now is that you can finish, if you just mainline the main story quest, you're not going to get to max level, which that's fine. That's fine.
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Well, now they've even sort of like... reframed the way that like in a renamed they don't call them side quests really anymore not that they ever did in the game I don't think but now they're explicitly calling them local stories if you go into the map this is another cool thing with the UI some of the UI changes if you go into the map you can filter
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all the different icons that are on the map and one of the filters is local stories and so they're explicitly calling it that you know you've got your main story quests and then you've got your local stories quote unquote and that is those are just like side quests that you know when you stop in some village somewhere and some dude has a quest for you and then you end up going on like a 12
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15 quest tear in that little village where they have like a story to tell and you get to learn all about this little fishing village or this or the you know some place you stumble on and it's on fire and you're like whoa what's going on over here this i didn't see this before and and so they're i think they're kind of leaning into the idea that this the world has a story to tell and these small areas they have their own little stories
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So by calling them local stories.
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It is fun, but one thing that I will say, and I didn't realize this until very recently when I loaded up World of Warcraft on an older laptop that isn't as beefy as my desktop computer. It's really hard to do dragon riding if your graphics aren't that great.
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uh if things are if if you get a little bit of stuttering because when you jump up and all the animations for the flying and everything happen and then and your view expands and all that then sometimes your graphics can stutter a little bit and if you're if when you're going fast like you're dragon riding you're just going to smack into things and it's a terrible experience so when i was doing that i did switch to the old flying mode because it just makes it easier because you don't
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You don't have to. So I think a lot of people are in that position sometimes and it helps them. By the way, if you don't know it because it took me a while to find the button, I didn't have it on my interface anymore. If you go into your spell book, there's a search bar now in your spell book. Open up your spell book and search for switch flight style. There it is.
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That's what it's called specifically. And just drag that onto your bar, even if you don't hardly ever use it. Drag it onto your bar somewhere so that if you ever do need it, it's there.
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Yeah, so you have to be on the ground.
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I know. You would have been afraid to talk about it because you would have started riots.
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I don't think it's, I try not to be too surprised about decisions that are made about something that I, that I don't get to have an input in. You know what I mean? Like it's the, um, they're going to make their decisions and, and, and I try not to be too surprised about it. It just, life is easier that way. But I, I was, um, happy about it.
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I think another reason I wasn't too, too surprised is because it felt like they were headed in that direction for a long time just Story reasons and other things that they were doing they were true.
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It's just one of those one of the one of the Paths and stories that you could tell about Blizzard's development of World of Warcraft is is over time They've just been trying to tear down barriers and and and if the game is better now than it's ever been in that regard the barrier to entry and the barriers and preventing people from playing together are as few and as low as they've ever been.
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I'm just realizing, though, that that means that your last step was the final episode of the instance before it was 666. Yep.
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And I'm probably going to, for the sake of this show at first, I'm going to jump in and check out Classic and see what's going on and, you know, give it its due. I've never had really a compelling reason to try it out because it, for me anyway, I mean, there's plenty of compelling reasons for people to try it out, but...
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I'm going to get in there and have some firsthand experience to try to talk about it.
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It's funny that you forgot about that because this is like one of the big selling features of this expansion.
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I don't think it's a small thing at all, Scott. I think it's a really big thing, and this war band's idea is, and just, I don't know, maybe you... have no idea what warbands are.
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Very simply and quickly, it's just that now all of your... It's sort of like the crystallization of something that they've been saying, Blizzard has been saying in World of Warcraft for many, many years, which is the whole ethos of bring the player, not the class. And so this is like them taking that and just really going hard on it. And so they've said, you know what? Now you're not your...
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your protection paladin you're not your beast master hunter you are your entire collection you are you you're your entire collection of characters and play and that you want to play at any given point in time and so to to enable that we're going to make it so that all all your characters share transmog they share achievements they share currencies they share reputations they share all kinds of stuff um and you can just pick whatever you feel like playing today
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And they want to make that as easy as possible. Now, how easy it's going to be in implementation, we're going to find out. So far, it's been pretty good. Uh, but, um, but that's what they're doing. And so I don't think it's a small thing at all. Remember we were just talking about how they have all these like tall global filters on your map.
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One of the filters is, uh, is something like, um, already completed by war band. You can, you can filter to, to, to, uh, if you're on your mage and you don't want any quests that you've already completed on other characters to show, you just want... Because you only want to do quests you've never done before on any of your characters.
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You click that button and it'll make all of them go away and it'll only show you quests that you've never done before on any character.
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And so... Yeah, it's great. It's awesome. I might actually have an alt this time.
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So it's going in the direction of, I mean, the elephant in the room when we're talking about this is Final Fantasy 14, right? Um, with their job system, you literally only have one character who has a bunch of different jobs.
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And so it's kind of like, it feels like the blizzards take on that, but also still maintaining their, um, their, their fantasy of having all these different classes and, and, and races that, that fill the world, you know?
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Well, there's a rich lore to the earthen, which I'm excited to learn more about. The dwarves literally kind of evolved from, if you can call it an evolution, they became the earthen. Some of them became dwarves. Right. Or we thought all of them became dwarves. And then it turns out that there are still some earthen left. Um, and, uh, and they just look awesome.
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Um, they've got like these memory crystals in their butt. Like they, they never, uh, there's, there's story to be told here and I don't know a lot about it, but from my understanding is they, they hold on to their memories in, they crystallize their memories into these crystals and literally jam them into their body in order to like,
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uh remember stuff that they learned in the past and other people have learned i don't i don't know i'm excited to learn what's going on with these crystals but they look awesome um i'm thinking about uh class changing once i unlock them my paladin to be because they're uh they're they're uh armor they're they're class armor their heritage armor yeah um it looks amazing
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and very paladin-y and so I'm thinking about doing that and if I do I for sure will be hiding in my transmog the chestplate because You've got to see those crystals.
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I'm a Zandalari troll like you, and it's going to be hard for me to switch if I switch because Zandalari trolls in plate armor look amazing.
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The beefcake humans. Yeah, what were they? They had a name though. Oh, you mean, are you talking about the, oh man, I'm so bad with names, but the ones that are like all the sailor people? Yeah, the sailor people, the beefcake sailor people.
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I do love mythics and reading.
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It was Blizzard's attempt to say, like, let's give each faction something special back in the naivete of their youth. Yeah. When they weren't as concerned and didn't realize they were going to have to think about things like balance. And so...
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Maybe it'll happen because, you know, with the Evoker in Dragonflight, the Evoker had that. They added that extra spec that was... that was basically buffing a buff class.
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Yeah, there's the healer. Is there a third one? there is a third one and I can never remember the, look at us. Wow. Podcasters. Um, I don't know.
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It's you've got the evoker class has, let's see, devastation, which is DPS. You've got preservation and then and then the other one augmentation. That's augmentation. You're right. And augmentation evokers are a buff class. Basically, they they are doing damage by increasing the the abilities or of everyone else around them. Other people, they don't. They buff people.
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Wouldn't it be great if this was just like one big scam for me to get everybody to bring their keys? Because I can't be bothered to level up my own keys. So I'm just like, yeah, you bring the keys, I'll bring the... And I don't really bring anything.
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This is the other big box feature, right?
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Yeah. I mean, that's the constant treadmill, right? Is in the back and forth is, is too many people doing this feeling like this is the only choice. So then they make some changes. I don't worry about that because that just works out in the end. What I, it's just some, it did feel like that there were obvious choices for some of these. So I,
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The hero talents are basically every class has different specs, right? We know that. That's how World of Warcraft works. These hero talents are like sub specs that sit somewhere between each of the specs. So I play a protection paladin or I play a paladin. You've got your retribution paladin, your protection paladin. and your Holy Paladin.
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Well, each of those, each one of the three hero talents can be chosen or basically each spec, each normal specialization can choose between one of two of these hero talents and there's three of them. So each one can be picked by two specs. That's a really confusing way to say that the Templar, for example, is a hero talent for the Paladin. Mm-hmm.
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I bring the confident sounding voice.
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You can have a, as a protection paladin, I can be a Templar or as a retribution paladin, I can be a Templar. Right. So, so it sits between, each of the specs has sort of like something that sits between two of them and, and you can pick it.
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Yeah, really should have done it in Remist, in Mists of Pandaria.
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A common misunderstanding is that your warband is those four characters that are in the start screen. That's not the case. Your warband is just every character you have.
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Well, I think all the Paladin ones, and of course I'm a bit biased, I think all of them actually sound really cool. The Templar, the Lightsmith, the Herald of the Sun. So I'm excited about trying out all of them, really. But I do think...
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that uh that i this is a way this is a cool way for for a lot of people to get certain classes or specs that they've always uh sort of fantasized about and thought these would be really cool and in particular like the dark ranger which is a hunter yeah um uh um hero talent spec yeah that's really cool there will be you'll get to be a dark ranger if you want to that's a it's amazing there's also um
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The other one I saw was Druid of the Claw. It's got a lot of support in the lore. So being a Druid of the Claw would be really, really cool. But some of them are like, I feel like they were like, oh, we got to come up with something.
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And you can switch between them. So it's cool. Like you can switch back and forth.
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Oh, yeah, the shadow pan buffet on the Lido deck.
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It's got really great soft serve there.
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Well, the first four you're about to mention are 70 to 80, which means that they're leveling dungeons.
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That would be on the cruise ship. That's where you buy your clothes.
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Love a good mother-in-law joke.
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So basically, Season 1 officially starts on September 10th. That's when the raids are going to open. Yeah. And if you're a mythic plus person like I am, I rate as well. But if you're a mythic plus person, basically sort of like the higher tiered stuff is going to open on September 17th. All of this sounds great to me because I get to miss the whole first week.
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So I still get some time when I get back to to get some leveling up done. But it's typical, right? It's basically we're going to have two weeks to get ourselves geared up and moving before all the endgame stuff kicks off and season one officially starts.
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Don't rush over it real fast, though. You kind of said it but left it behind a little bit, but raid story mode. This is a brand new thing in The War Within. It's a way for you to... There are a lot of people who are not into raiding because that's just not their jam. But there's a lot of story being told in raids. Again, environmental storytelling, lots of stuff.
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And this is just a raid mode that you can just go in on your own and experience the story of the raid without having to put up with LF, like the LFR wiping constantly and dying.
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We thought you were like everyone was like, OK, episode number 666 is coming. We got to do something special for it. Yeah, I know. Let's let's raise the dead. I mean, record a podcast, you know. I do have to say that I know I've been seeing a lot. Hello, everyone. My name's Bobby.
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I mean, it's all right. It's all right. Originally, Blizzard did ask me, but I was busy. So I said, there's this other guy that people know him, so he'd be pretty good for this, too. You might want to talk to Scott.
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Me too. I think it's amazing because even though I do raid, I don't pay attention to the story that's going on in the raid. I go to a raid to do the raid content. You know, to the team getting together and trying to down a boss. I actually often miss out on a lot of the story and the environment while I'm raiding.
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And so even though I go and do the raids, I expect that I will go in and check out these story modes raids just so that I can... soak in and sort of experience the story of the raid at a reasonable pace and not feeling rushed.
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I am very excited. When I first heard about this, it was more of like, hmm, that's interesting. So what Delves are is that they are a one to five player experience that is shorter form, about 10 to 20 minutes.
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minutes um you so you can go in there solo uh or you can go in there with five people or anywhere in between it flexes um and it's it's sort of like so for people who've played uh who who played um not shadowlands yeah shadowlands the what do you call it the roguelike tour gas tour gas yeah Yeah, it's very much feels like they're riffing on Torghast, the Tower of the Damned.
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And that whole experience was like you go in and you fight your way to the end of this thing. And depending on how quickly you do it or how many goals you accomplish along the way, you'll get different types of loot and different amounts of loot and everything. People had their problems with Torghast.
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Some people liked it and disliked it in different ways, and it seems like they're trying to improve on that experience. You'll get to take a companion with you, and the companion will change every season. The companion at first is Bran Bronzebeard, but the idea is like you're delving into the deeps and exploring and learning about stuff. And your companion can either DPS for you or heal for you.
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And it's supposed to flex and be able to be done regardless of what spec you are or what your team composition is if you take other people in there. Each delve has a story. So there's a compelling reason to do it. That's way better than Torghast. Torghast had... almost zero story.
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Yeah, you did. Like I said, they're riffing on that. There's a few less powers that you get, but you do get some fun powers and everything. Like I said, I was like, oh, that's interesting because I just seemed like, oh, more Torghast and I'll just get some transmog and whatever. I'll probably get bored of this like I did Torghast eventually.
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But they have... The fact that they're adding it to the Great Vault... is a big deal. They seem to really want this to actually be a gear progression path for people who are not as into big, even dungeons or raids or anything like that. And so from the, when you get into, so from the Great Vault, you should be able to get gear as high as mythic dungeon level gear. Yeah.
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Yeah. So WoWcast, you can search for WoWcast if you're looking for that.
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um in or mythic plus level gear from doing delves um and it's just what will happen is as you just like in torgas as you when you when you beat the delve um it has a tier level so the first time you go in it'll be tier one you beat that and it'll unlock tier two tier three all the way up to tier 11 and they'll get harder and harder, and then you'll get better and better rewards.
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sort of generated on the fly or procedural generation of levels i didn't feel like i was doing the exact like a dungeon you're doing the exact same thing every time so what i have seen is that there isn't doesn't seem to be as much um shuffling about like torgast was all the rooms were like shuffled around and everything it was um but the And there's less of that here.
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Each delve is sort of like static in its layout, just like a dungeon would be. But the enemies that are going to be in there maybe change up a little bit and the abilities that you can get change up a little bit. But the way that they're kind of freshening it up is, yes, Torghast, like the layout changed every time, but they basically all look the same. It was just some gray...
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tower that you were going through.
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But at least in the Delves, there are 12 different Delves. I know if you count up all the things that you just read off, there are 13, but one of them, Zekvir's Lair, is actually sort of like an end boss room that you will get to eventually.
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That's a different... I think it technically is, but it's not like a full Delve. It exists to house this big bad boss of the Delve story, I guess. Oh, got it. Okay. And he's just a challenge that you have to overcome.
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I'm going to correct you a little bit. That's if you want to get to tier four delves. Um, you can do delves from while you're leveling up, but you, the highest level delve you can do as you're leveling up is tier three. So you can only do one to three until you reach level 80. That's great though.
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Yeah, the things that you just mentioned are how you unlock Tier 4 Delves.
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Tier level 8 is the highest you'll need to do if you're doing it for gear. The gear level does not increase in tiers 9 to 11. Tier level 8 is supposed to be about the same level as Mythic plus 5 gear, so pretty good. And the 9 through 11, there are achievements associated with that. So there is a reason for people who like the challenge to do 9 through 11.
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Yeah, and you can do that, and the tier level you have access to is going to be limited by the lowest unlocked tier in your group. So, like, if you and I were to do it, and I've...
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gotten to tier level five but you've gotten all the way to tier six or seven we still will if we're together we would only be able to do tier five until i unlock higher ones right right so yeah there is some of that gating going on but no more it's not that different than what you're doing with your friends with dungeons and mythic levels yeah yeah
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You mean like from our garrison and stuff?
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Oh, yeah. They were even in Shadowlands. You're talking about when you send your followers out? Yeah. You think we're done there? I don't know. I think in Shadowlands, they tried really hard to do something with it, and it just still wasn't doing what they were trying to do. Yeah.
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And it just ended up being a thing that... It didn't feel like there was compelling choices you were making and you weren't doing anything. You were just like, you downloaded the add-on that told you the best configuration, you sent them out, and it was just not compelling. It was just a thing that you felt like you had to do.
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Exactly, yeah. You open up your mobile game and you send your people out and then you close it and then you wait for the notification to tell you that you could collect your, you know, coins.
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So I don't know. Maybe they'll try again. I never say never, but they've tried it a couple of times.
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It was a fantastic interview. I definitely encourage people. It's not the kind of thing that you're going to go and get like, you know, like Ian has a Costas whenever he's on there. He's, you know, you're always going to get you're getting the like deets about the class changes and new system. It's nothing like that. It's very much.
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One of my favorite things to do is what everybody hates, which is I actually level all the way up. I get all the highest achievements to where I get all the titles and the mounts and the maximum mythic plus achievements. I'm doing the plus 20s and all that kind of stuff, but I do it all in pugs. All pugs. You're a pug man. You're a pug. Yeah, I have a Mythic Plus team that I do go with.
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But when I'm pushing the highest cut, I'm doing it in a pug. And I know people are like, you are crazy. And maybe I am. But for some reason, I just love doing that because I'm a glutton for pain, I think. But anyway, that's a conversation I could talk about another time. But the two things I'm really excited about that they have changed in Mythic Plus is...
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is uh or so with mythic plus they have um these new affix affixes that they're doing affixes in mythic plus have been sort of the community has complained about them for a really really long time they've haven't for a while felt like uh a compelling feature the idea i think at the beginning was like okay we're gonna we're gonna make it so you can rerun these these
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five-man dungeons, we're going to put them, you know, you're going to want to do it quickly. We're going to put a timer on there. So it's challenging that way. Also, every time you do it, you can then get a keystone that increases its level that makes it so you can, it gets harder the next time. So that's going to be really compelling. You know, see how high you can get your keystone level.
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The gear gets better. You want to get it higher and higher and higher. The other thing we're going to do is we're going to change it up a little bit every time where there's going to be these different abilities that
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different challenges um every week that you have to put up with you know like maybe there's going to be these tornadoes that pop out all the time that you have to dodge or maybe the every once in a while um every time you kill an enemy a death pool will drop on the ground that you have to stay out of all this kind of stuff and it's in theory it seemed interesting but it just it just never it just always ended up feeling like towards the end it just felt like
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you were just annoyed by it all the time. You're like, oh, I got to deal with this one this time. And it was never like, it never changed your gameplay because I think that's what they were trying to do. They wanted to be like, oh, this week, you know, you have to worry about every time someone, every time a piece of trash dies, it explodes and does a bunch of damage.
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So we're going to have to change our strategy. But you didn't change your strategy every time. You just were annoyed that this week, this terrible thing was happening. Right.
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right um so there was a lot of talk about like why are we doing this this is so this like let's stop doing that and blizzard said at one point we're getting rid of affixes and and the mythic plus community rejoiced they were like great we're just gonna because it was it's still fun to do when it as it gets harder and harder and harder right
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I think I messaged you, Scott, and I said, I think this is perfect. This is what everybody needs because there are lots of people who are excited about Chris Metzen coming back. And so this is great for them because it feels good to hear Chris again. Listen to me talk like I've got a first name basis with Chris.
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we love that just these affixes were just not and they also were restricted like just making life harder for specific classes sometimes um and that's not very fun either to feel like i'm a i'm a you know i'm a i don't know a druid a a cat druid and and i can't
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do anything like it's just i don't know like it's just harder for me because of what i do and then or on the other end of it oh i can't get into any groups as a as a monk healer because everybody wants shadow priests you know like or everybody wants uh discipline priests or or you know whatever um that didn't feel good so they they said they were getting rid of these affixes but then
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
They decided to add new affixes called Zalatatz Bargain. And these things, these are the new affixes that you have to deal with. And I won't go into the details about them because that's really nitty gritty kind of stuff. But the idea about these new affixes, Zalatatz Bargain, is that these are the only things you have to deal with now. And it changes every week and there are four different ones.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
And the idea is Zalatath has decided to add some benefit to all the enemies in the group. And it's some thing that's happening. Maybe there's these orbs that are slowly collapsing on the group of enemies every once in a while. And it's going to buff all the enemies if the enemies absorb these orbs.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
But the bargain is that they get they get a benefit, but you as a player, you can try to stop it and then instead you get the benefit. So it adds a little bit of interesting gameplay, like stand in the way of the orbs and you absorb them yourself. But if you don't absorb all of them, then whoops. Yeah. So that's interesting.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
But I am a little worried that it is going to still restrict certain classes and make things harder for specific people. Yeah. But yeah. And it also feels like, because that's going to be the very first affect, like you have to deal with it from Mythic plus two right at the very beginning. It feels like it's going to be a big...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
big thing that you have to deal with right away instead of easing you into it. I don't know. I'm interested and curious to see how it works, but I'm a little bit cautious about it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
That's when she wasn't a knife anymore and she got her body for the first time.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
This is back in, what, Legion, I think, that that happened? No, I think it was Shadowlands. Was it Shadowlands? Yeah.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
We were first introduced to Zalatath in Legion as the Shadow Priest weapon.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
It does feel like an old friend coming back. And that's what I think a lot of people who are big fans will like that. But I think it was really good also for people because there's part of the community who's a little concerned thinking...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
maybe they they really liked the ever since chris metzen left they like the direction that the storytelling is taken because you know by no fault of his or anything it just happened to be that storytelling has matured quite a bit in the in the past several years and so i think a lot of people were concerned like what does it mean that he's coming back is are they going to take a step back in the storytelling direction what's going to but it very much feels like
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
No, I think you nailed it. I never played EQ. So World of Warcraft was the first MMO I ever played. So I don't have a lot of experience to draw on for that. But I've heard people and I knew people who did play EQ and then started playing World of Warcraft. And that's all I ever hear is that it's just, you know...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
all the changes that World of Warcraft were making felt like it was just to make it more accessible to more people and make it easier to play and not so punishing, which wasn't for everybody. I mean, some people really liked how punishing EverQuest was. Whatever. More power to you. But, you know, if you wanted to stand the test of time, you got to make it for more people to join the party.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
Yeah, like hardcore mode in World of Warcraft.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
from this video he he was saying like i'm i love what's happened with wow since i've been gone and i just want to figure out how to make that keep happening yeah um the best way that it can i loved hearing him talk about artists
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
Here is one. I can never cut my hair.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
Lose all of his... It was a source of his strength, I think.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
No, you're confusing someone else. I don't know.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
The range. Oh, the like little.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
I don't know. I want to say pommel, but it's not.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
Whatever that is. Because the pommel is the thing at the end of a sword. Oh, right, right, right.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
The weirdness of the player character animation or lack thereof on mounts is very obvious when you're riding some mount that is tall. Yeah.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
taller than it is long you know um when you're farther from the ground like say the the big mammoth mounts or there's that one mount that is like a giant monster that is i don't know it's like on two legs and kind of like running like yeah that was the warlords one um yeah
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
oh i like that mount but i know what you're talking about it's a ground mount but you're far off the ground and so it whenever you're he's the mount is moving around your character it looks like someone is holding a cardboard cutout of your character on the ground and just waving it around back and forth yeah yeah especially when they move like the the creature will be uh idle animation will be sitting there and will suddenly just go move around like this and your guy's just like a little stick going whoo
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
Or if you're like at the top of like a pointy hill. Mm-hmm.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
In case you didn't know how contests work.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
It was beefy. There was a lot to talk about.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
Yeah. Figure it out. Everyone, the writing is on the wall from a comment like that. Or at least if you're going to leave that in, you have to know that everyone is going to think about one particular character immediately, you know?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
Yes, I do remember that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
Oh, yeah, that viral promotion.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
I don't throw stones in this house of glass.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance: Welcome back, Champion
But what I was going to say was that much like a lot of people, I've been seeing a lot of people really excited about this show coming back. And I have to say when I heard just now that intro music that you played right before... I got chills.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
Hey there, World of Warcraft fans. I wanted to get on here real quick and give a public service announcement, and that public service announcement is... Do not wait to upgrade your items in The War Within. Start upgrading them now. Go ahead and upgrade your gear with Valor Stones and Harbinger Crests. Don't wait. Don't hoard them. Upgrade them now.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
um anyway you can talk to kazalth to upgrade your items what that means is you're going to start to see that you're going to notice you're going to start noticing that you get items that have um have an upgrade track on them it'll say explorer one out of eight or adventurer two slash eight and those are because those pieces of gear belong to an upgrade track now
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
Anybody who played through Dragonflight and was upgrading gear, you're familiar with this system.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
It's the same system, but this is a public service announcement here for people who maybe didn't experience this in Dragonflight, maybe never understood how it worked in Dragonflight if they did see it, or who are coming back to World of Warcraft or playing for the first time and have no idea what this is.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
system is all about now you're going to know what it's about and now you're going to know how it works now what you do is you go to these vent these uh kazalth in dornigal and you say hey i want to upgrade some gear you got so he has a little window that pops up and you drop your piece of gear that that has a explorer or adventurer eventually veteran and champion and hero and myth all these high level higher level
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
Upgrade tracks. You'll drop one of those pieces of gear into the window where the little green plus sign is. And then there will be a drop-down window that says different amounts that you can upgrade. And the currency for upgrading that gear is some amount of valor stones if it's a lower level piece of gear.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
Or as it gets higher up in gear, you will also have to spend not just valor stones, but you will need to spend... um, you'll need to spend these harbinger crests as well.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
Um, an example is, I'm trying to find an example in front of me to, to read it to you as I'm talking, but, um, so if you have, so the first explorer gear, so if you're, if it says explorer, uh, and then, you know, some amount one through eight, that's only going to cost valor stones to upgrade. Um,
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
Adventure gear, if it's Adventure 1 through 4, it'll cost Valor Stones, but as you get to Adventure 5, 6, 7, 8, and you want to upgrade that higher, it's going to cost some amount of Valor Stones plus Harbinger Crests. And the higher the tier of gear it is, the higher the track that it's on, the higher quality or the higher level Harbinger Crests you're going to have to spend. All right.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
So, long story short, like, the long and the short of it is, because that part was a lot, just know that to upgrade the gear, you're going to need some amount of Valor Stones and some amount of Harbinger Crests. Okay? You might be tempted to think... well, why would I want to upgrade this gear? Aren't I going to replace this gear later?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
Okay, what am I talking about and how can I justify what I'm saying? Okay, so for those of you who do not know, as you do content in the War Within, as you do content in World of Warcraft at the end game, you will collect a currency called Valor Stones. And you will also, towards the end, collect an additional currency called Harbinger Crests.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
And you wouldn't be wrong to have that instinct because, yeah, you're earning these currencies by doing endgame content and things like running heroics. Next week you'll be running mythics, doing daily quests, and then also just quests. currencies, and then also there's a weekly cap to each of these currencies as well.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
Valor stones, you can only hold up to 2,000 of them, but the crests, every week you have a weekly cap of 90 that you can earn, and then that cap gets increased by 90 every week. So there's a limited, at least at the beginning here for the first few weeks, there's sort of like a limited number of crests that you can get, and you can't earn more.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
after you spend them after you earn that many it doesn't matter if you spend them all you're not going to get any more so you might you might not be you wouldn't be faulted in thinking well i need to carefully spend these maybe i need to save them for a couple of weeks until i get good gear from mythics or i get good gear from um doing doing the raids and gear that i'm going to hold on to for a while i want to upgrade that stuff but i'm here to tell you do not do that
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
Do not hoard your crests and wait. And the reason is this. Whenever you use these crests to upgrade your upgradable gear, once you have upgraded it, you get a discount the next time you try to upgrade that same slot. And in the case of Harbinger Crests, you will never have to spend those again to get to that same upgrade level. Now that's a little confusing. Let me try to explain it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
I like to think of the Valor Stones and the Harbinger Crests as different, as doing different things. The Valor Stones are like a currency that are upgrading the gear. The Valor Stones are the thing that are actually doing the change of changing that gear from one gear level to another. Think of it as a currency that increases the item level of your gear. That's what the Valor Stones do.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
The crests I like to think of as being a currency that upgrades the gear slot that you're slotting it into. So let's say you have a helmet, you have you have a headpiece, you have a helm and you want to upgrade that. It's adventurer level one gear and you want to upgrade it all the way to level eight.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
adventurer eight that's going to increase its item level from 571 all the way up to 593 and it's going to cost you a certain number of harbinger crests to do it so let's say you do that let's say you collect your harbinger crests you collect your valor stones and you get a helmet you're running heroics and a nice helmet with uh you know it's got some good secondary stats but it's you had a crappy helmet before so you just want any helmet you can get
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
You get a 571. You don't care. Secondary stats maybe aren't best, but it's got lots of good strength and stamina on it. So you're going to just take it and you're going to upgrade it to item level 593. That means you upgraded it from adventurer level one all the way up to adventurer level eight. All right. And so you can't upgrade that anymore because it's now adventurer eight out of eight.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
Yes, you've done it. You have this item level 593 piece of gear. Cool. Then let's say you're running Heroics again and another helmet drops. And it's item level, you know, it drops at item level 571 also. But oh my god, this helmet that just dropped has the perfect secondary stats. It's got haste and mastery and that's what you want. This other one that you had had versatility and crit.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
You don't really care about versatility and crit. This one has haste and mastery. That's exactly what you need. And but unfortunately, it dropped item level 571 again. It's adventure one out of eight. Again, you spent all these crests to upgrade your helmet all the way to adventure eight out of eight.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
And it's now it's not got the I wish I had waited for this helmet to drop so that I could upgrade this new helmet. Oh, so annoying. Fear not, my friend, because guess what? Those crests that you spent to get that Adventure 1 item all the way up to Adventure 8, you now don't have to spend those crests again.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
Now, they'll be named different things because there's four different types of Harbinger Crests. We've got gilded harbinger crests, runed harbinger crests, stuff like that. I think there are four different kinds. I just can't remember the names of all of them. What are they? Weathered, carved, runed, and gilded harbinger crests. Now, these items are used to upgrade your gear.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
If you were to go to the vendor, the upgrade guy, Kazalth, and you were to open up his window and you were to drop the new helmet in, the new 571 helmet that you didn't upgrade... you would go to the dropdown and say, I want to upgrade it all the way to eight.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
You would see that he now does not require you to use harbinger crests to get that gear up to item level adventurer, eight out of eight item level, five 93 amazing because you've already upgraded. You can think of it like the crests that you spent before have already upgraded your helmet gear slot to to item level 593.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
You now have permission to have item level 593 Adventure 8 out of 8 gear in your helmet slot. That's what you already paid for. Now, you will have to spend Valor Stones. to do it, but a couple of reasons why that's okay. First of all, Valor Stones don't have a weekly cap. They have a cap of how many you can carry, and so yes, you'll have to go back out and earn those.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
And that's a little difficult. That's a little challenging. A lot of people are limited by the Valor Stones. You'll have to maybe chain run some Heroics or Mythics or whatever it is that you're running. Do some daily quests. You'll have to earn the Valor Stones again. That's that. You just have to do that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
But because you've already equipped an Adventure 8 out of 8 gear, you already have that helmet that you've upgraded before. It wasn't the best helmet, but you did upgrade it before. Not only do you not have to spend the crests anymore, like I already explained, but you get a 60% discount on how much Valor Stones it costs. So maybe if it had originally cost... I'm just making these numbers up.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
But if it had originally cost a thousand Valor stones altogether to get from one to eight, now it will only take 400 Valor stones. So it's a lot easier. It's cheaper the second time around, the second go around. So there you go. That's why you should never wait to upgrade your items at the upgrade vendor. Because the crests you only ever have to spend once on that gear slot.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
And the Valor Stones, the next time you try to upgrade it, it will be much discounted. It'll be a lot cheaper and easier to upgrade the second piece of gear. And if you're running lots of content, at the beginning here, it's going to be challenging. You'll be spending a lot of Valor Stones.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
But as you move on, as you get higher up in level and you're doing lots of content or higher up in gear level, you're going to find eventually that you're going to stay Valor Stone capped. Um, at least if you're doing consistently doing lots of content, some people have a little bit more trouble because they're, they're not playing as often, which is a thing. Sure.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
And so maybe you want to be a little bit careful, but don't worry about those crests, those crests on each gear piece, each gear slot that you spend those harbinger crests on. You'll never have to spend those crests again to get gear to that same level. Um, There's more to be said about item upgrading and how it works and the different tracks.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
There's Explorer, Adventurer track, you get Veteran gear, Champion gear, Hero gear, Myth gear, all different levels. There's more to be said about that, but that's a little bit outside the scope of this public service announcement I wanted to do, telling people do not...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
try to save those crests do not worry about it just get your item level up right now that's really the focus right now don't even worry about it get your item level up and the reason because you want your item level to be up if you're trying to do higher level gear like mythic zeros next week or even to get into normal raids the reason is because um maybe There's a couple of reasons.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
First, the secondary stats are important to fine-tune your gear later. But at the beginning, every item level increase equates to your primary stat increasing and your stamina increasing, which means you'll have more health. So you'll be able to stay alive longer and you'll be able to get more of your primary stat, whether that's strength or agility or something like that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
All of that always increases with item level regardless. So that's why they say get your item level up. Item level is more important than anything else. Secondary stats can be tweaked later as you find better side upgrades. The other reason to go ahead and start upgrading your gear and getting your item level as high as you can...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
is because there are certain things like, like, like world crest, when you do world quests, and item gear drop, drop from world quests, the, the, the item level of the gear that drops from world quests for you is going to be determined by your current item level. So you'll eventually hit breakpoints, like you might be seeing item level 560 gear dropping from world quests.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
um, as you, there's a, there are, there are NPCs in the main city, um, Dornigal, and they upgrade your gear with their, it's called Kzalth and Vaskarn. They're, Kuzalth is in the crafting section near the auction house, and they do item upgrades. And next to Kuzalth is Vaskarn. They are Drakthir, and Vaskarn does Crest Exchanges.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
And then eventually you'll hit a certain average item level on your character that will unlock a breakpoint where now item level 568 items are going to start dropping from world quests. And the only way to hit those breakpoints and unlock, so to speak, the higher item level gear dropping... on world quests is by increasing your average item level.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
So in the beginning here, at least for the first few weeks, as you're trying to get into raid and dungeon content, mythics and raids, what you got to do is get your item level up and don't hesitate.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The War Within: Spend Those Valorstones!
upgrade it now stop hoarding your currency stop hoarding your crests and your valor stones just spend them because it's going to help you in the long run all right that's my public service announcement um thank you everybody uh for listening and i'll see you around
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
And they do it in like, what, three months or less than a week or whatever the hell it was.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
And what that represents, that represents, obviously, in the beginning, a massive time and cost sink. That they didn't necessarily expect. But again, their ambitions often were so lofty that the success that it brought in was equivalent. And then they would just go, ah! And so they got these guys living under their desks and doing, like you said, making these servers happen as fast as they could.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
there is a stage where wow hits a certain plateau after an expansion launches. And then from there on, it's a little bit like, okay, what do I want to do? I'm logging in. What am I doing? There's like four things I can do, but I'm really not in the mood to do that. And I've kind of had it with delves or whatever it is you're sick of. And, and you just kind of turn it off and go do something else.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
They got to a point where they couldn't keep up. And there was a thought to remember in the book, they said something about let's just halt sales for a while. And they may have in some markets just to slow the player on loading. And then this just got more expensive, more expensive, more exponential, more exponential. And eventually.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
well, we better sell ourselves to that big French conglomerate so we got the cash, and then let's let that sit there for a while. They never really... These guys all made... Don't get me wrong. They're founders of this company. Alan Anham, Mike Morhaime, and other principals early on, and certainly some that are still there today. They made a lot of money. A lot of money.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
They are rich men as a result. Rich men and women. Mostly men, but a few women. A lot of men, though. Uh... That's one thing about the book that really struck me. This is a this is a dude fest early on. Anyway, the they they've never truly to this day, Blizzard has never owned their own shit in this strange way to the point that now and the book sort of ends there.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
But Microsoft now owns this thing and is the back end of it cash wise. And here we are again, 20, 30 years later, Blizzard still somebody else has to, has to keep up with that success. It's crazy to me that that's how that went, you know?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
Yeah, Lost Vikings. The one and two, the three, Sven, Doofus, and Morabund, or whatever their names were.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
He died right away or something. And the kid walked away from the kiosk.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
And I've had that happen a couple of times this month. Mostly my month's been about not having enough time to play. Cause I've just been busy with other projects, but sure. Uh, How do you deal with that when you hit a little wall like that?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
By shallow, you're not saying shallow like we're not being pejorative here. This is a meaningful turning of the tide in gaming that continues to this day. And look, I remember when WoW came out, to jump ahead again, And people started playing it, and a lot of the quote-unquote hardcores that came from EverQuest and Ultima Online and all this sort of stuff, like, well, this is a baby MMO.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
It's too easy. When you die, you just go fly to your... You know, drive to your corpse. Drive. Ride to your corpse. And you don't lose anything. Wow, what a baby MMO.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
Yeah, it's a great idea. You've rested. And it's also kind of world consistent. There's something lore-ish about that. There's these little things that come out. But then they said, hey, 40 men, find 40 of your friends and go in here and have the hardest fight of your life. And then just pound yourself against that for months and months and months. Like they...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
They understood that donut thing by then really well. But it's I think it's revolutionary. And I also think it means lots of that for Blizzard.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
Yeah, before Vivendi, you had Davidson Associates.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
No, very early. You could argue that when they were three dudes in an office, I guess they owned that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
And then they realized, oh my gosh, we can't make payroll. We have to do something.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
No. Or the industry. This is not – not even just this industry and tech in general. Like, this is our version. This is gamers' version of Google. It's our version of Microsoft, of Apple, of – in-gaming lore, how companies come and go and start and whatever. This is one of those stories. And it is maybe the most significant of these stories given the meteoric rise.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
It's just insane how quickly things changed and how fast they grew. And at some point, you'd think up until 2003 or 3 or 4, you would think this is already exponential growth by any other measurable standard. World of Warcraft then cranked that up exponentially, like 10 times faster. And I don't know how they made it through that, to be honest.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Reading through this book, it just seems like it laid waste to human lives. And I don't mean this in like they're to blame. I mean, sometimes success is a, well, it is a double-edged sword. You have to keep up with this demand. You have to You have to always follow up and be better the next time. You felt a really strong urge to not falter after such great heights.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 670: Dino-Sour?
I don't think that's sustainable. And I think that we ran into that in the late teens, early aughts or early 2020s. That's where we finally started to see them kind of go, oh, shit, and start to... kind of lose it a little bit.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And I don't think that that was a healthy, long-term, perfectly sustainable model for those people to have. Despite all the rad shit we got out of it as players. It wasn't great for people on the ground necessarily, you know?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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As the kids say, they let them cook, right?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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It's a weird thing to be, right?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I guess the revenue or the revenue potential or the... I don't know. What you're reporting to your shareholders is on the backs of Blizzard. I mean, they would also pretty quickly... you know, harness the power of call of duty. And that would be a huge part of what they do. And ironically, the acquisition of King meant they were getting the actual, the actual biggest profit center was King.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Nobody talks about this. Nobody ever talks about this, but the big, the real acquisition, most of that many billions of dollars, Microsoft just spent in acquisition money was for King and you never hear about it and nobody gives a shit and whatever people are playing candy crush, but you don't think about it at all. That's where the real money is.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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The rest of this now starts to feel like... And I think Activision was in this weird... I'm not going to ever justify Activision or Bobby Kotick's methods. Yeah, that's not what I'm doing either. No, not at all. It's very cutthroat. It is corporate greed in all of its senses. Perpetual growth is not possible, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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But where the passion is has always been on Blizzard's back.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And they had to somehow figure out a way to make that even more money, but retain the passion. That's a shaky alliance. That's hard.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I actually hope more. I hope that's more true this time around as in terms of the ownership relationship, because the less significant it is for Microsoft, the more Microsoft will will let them again, let them cook. I hope. Right. You know, let them be amazing. Let them do what they do best.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Let them somehow hire back a lot of the amazing talent they've shed over the last few years because of all this and the other issues. You know, I don't want to diminish the harassment stuff and all that. That was a huge blow.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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But all of that stuff aside for just a moment, if Microsoft can just let them be what they were always meant to be and what they did previously, maybe it can't be done entirely the way it was. I don't know. But they can just let them do it. Then maybe just maybe... It's this happy little corner that Microsoft doesn't have to worry about that will produce, and it does produce.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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They don't need it to be... It doesn't need to be the next Office 365 or the next freaking Windows. It can just be what it is. That's what we all hope, right? But then things happen where you're like, is that... Should we get into the $90 mount?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, I agree. Let's get into the $90 mount. Play that one more time. So the other day, a couple of days ago, they announced or they released a mount. And it's weird. I heard about it before it happened, but didn't know I'd heard about it. I'll tell you how. Somebody had told me that there was a big kind of all hands on meeting. and didn't know what it was for. And I didn't either.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And I was like, Oh, I wonder what that's about. We're, you know, it's, is it the, is it the anniversary? Is it, you know, what's going on? Is it bad? Is it good? Is it, what are we doing over there? And it turns out, uh, from all accounts, this was a all hands on meeting just about where we're about ready to pull the trigger on the $90 amount.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And so everyone needs to be ready with this messaging, this thing to say this stuff to do. I don't know the details at all, but that's what that was about. And, uh, I think I get it now, given the turmoil of the last two days.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I guarantee that. In fact, okay. One other little note about that. I said this on core. I'll say it again. So if you've heard me say this, I apologize hearing it twice listeners, but, uh, When I was at Blizzard a couple of months ago, it was an awesome little trip. Had a great time over there. We did that interview. Got to hang out with Randy. It was great.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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One of the things we did was tour most of the campus. Not every corner, but a bunch of it. And there were parts of that campus I didn't even know existed. And in one place, they had these offices that looked kind of nonchalant, but they had these interesting titles on the door. And I cannot remember the exact titles. But essentially, these were offices full...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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of PhD statisticians, mathematicians, people whose job it is to take a ton of data and make predictions about outcomes, this sort of thing, right? I have no doubt in my mind that all of this went through them at some point, and they crunched the numbers and said, A, there'll be blowback, and we think it'll be about this much.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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B, we think we're going to make a ton of money, and it'll be about this much. And we think this many will buy, this many won't. It'll probably stay in the news cycle this long. I think they had all of that... That is all – that's why they're there. They exist at that company for this reason. Right. And they do it with everything across the board.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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It's not just, wow, but, you know, well, this expansion, we're launching for Diablo at this exact time. Is this the best time to do it or not? Well, what are the factors? Like, I think that's the thing they think about all the time now, and they have really smart people helping make those decisions.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Do you ever go for, either with earnestness or casualness, try for a lore master? Has that ever been a thing in your list of...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I am – so I guess what I'm saying is I am with you 100 and an additional 10% because there's no way they didn't know. Right. A, that there would be a bit blowback and B, that these would sell like crazy. Some are estimating at this stage two, three days in. And again, some of these sources may not have all the details.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And I don't even know if this includes the machinations of selling tokens and gold, moving it around and all this stuff that you can do to get one of these things. But these $90 amounts have made them somewhere in the $50 million range in a couple of days only, which if that book is correct about Titan costing 80 million and then being canned,
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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They've almost made Titan money back, although they already did it with Overwatch money. But the point is, like, that's a lot of cash. And I know that they know this. And all you have to do is go hang around Dornigal for a while. Loads of people have this thing.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I always say I'm going to do it. I always commit in my head that I'm going to do it. Or at the very least, I'm going to do it with an expansion in its entirety. And then I might go back and clean up old stuff. I always say I'm going to do it. And I never do it. Because that is one I'd like.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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It was like your neighbor showed up one day with a freaking Lamborghini and is now showing it off in town. That's basically what this thing was. It was a wow equivalent. And I think that the price at the time matched the passion of an auction house-focused player. There are people that just love the financial game. Right. So this seemed like a... To me, that particular amount made a ton of sense.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I remember at the time going, I wish I had 5 million gold here in the battle for Azeroth. That'd be nice. But I knew that it wasn't really for me because I didn't really play the market and other people didn't. It was fine. It was no big deal.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah. Yeah, cash, cash money. You got to buy it in the thing. It's got a bunch of gold on it, which makes it seem fancier than perhaps it is. Yeah, go ahead.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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begrudge anyone who spent money on this oh no not at all why we have we have we have really good friends who bought in fact we have somebody who runs our our raid team who got one and it's suddenly a really nice addition to the raid team because he's like oh shit we're out of uh potions what are you gonna do i'm gonna get some pots real quick here's the brontosaurus buy him off the auction house five seconds later he's got it in the mail
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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That's a shiny mark on anyone's report card to say that you've got Loremaster throughout the entirety of this 20-year experience. I know there are people like this. I don't know who they are, but they're insane. I keep thinking I'm going to do it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Like, we're going to benefit from him spending his $90. And he knows that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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sold in the first place i think is what what we're gonna yeah it's also a little bit contrary to previous blizzard statements about individual dev statements i've read here and there uh even some blue posts back in the day that said things like well here's our justification for doing the bfa one and later on people said yeah we don't we don't love what it did to the overall game exactly like a we we kind of liked that people needed to go to a capital city and do some some actual work to do some of this stuff so
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Not like they regretted it, but there was a feeling of like this was a controversial thing, even internally. I don't think there's any question about that. So to see this pop in there and suddenly be a thing, I can see why players immediately go, oh, cash grab, freaking... Is this Blizzard under Microsoft? Oh, no. And they start wanting to pick at everything. And I get the reaction.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Greetings, everybody. Welcome back to The Instance. This is The Instance for October 2024. I'm Scott Johnson, and I'm sitting right here with Bobby Frankenberger. Hi, Bobby.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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That's a bunch of money. So my personal stance is this. It's a very simple personal stance. I am tempted for two reasons. One, mostly, it's the limited availability. That works on people, and it works on me.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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You don't want to regret a thing, right? It's FOMO. Yes, it's a form of FOMO, something I pride myself in not having that often. Usually it's video game related when I do, but I don't get FOMO for parties or hangouts or anybody who's like, hey, you want to go to that concert? No. No, I don't. I'm good. I got their, I got their CD in my car or whatever. Right.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I'm just, I don't care that much, but something like this, they're playing on that FOMO. That's part of the reason it's selling well. And that's where my issue is. It isn't, I don't even think it's a, well, I just, I just made the argument for it being a calculated decision because it is, there's a calculation in this decision, but it feels a little for me again, it's,
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Just to reiterate what Bobby said, not speaking for anybody else and not judging anyone. You guys all do what you got to do. I really have no problem with other people buying this. I really don't. In fact, it's convenient to be in town and quickly run over to someone who's standing there for a long time. It's nice. Thanks for buying it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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But my biggest beef with it is that because of the calculated nature of it and because of the limited time of it, like if this is a permanent store amount, I wouldn't have so much problem with it. It's mostly about this limited time thing and the price. So you got a price point that's really high for an in-game item for your JPEG collection that you're buying and your... Actually, that's not fair.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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It's a functional JPEG collection that does a couple of good things for you in the game. But still, we're dealing in virtuals here. But anyway... My main beef with it is that is the definition. Maybe the word predatory is too harsh of a word, but it is predatory in the sense that they are playing on our human emotions to get us to do a thing. And I personally don't like that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Other people might go, no, that's what this is. If you go to a restaurant and you see a lobster and you got to have it, well, then you buy it. Well, I understand. This is the market. I'm not trying to pretend like this is any different than any other aspect of our lives. The fancy car you shouldn't spend money on versus this dumb mount, whatever.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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For me, though, personally, I just feel like it's an anniversary. Shouldn't this be a thing I could at least earn in-game? Or aren't they supposed to give more stuff to us for making the game so successful for 20 years? Or... Am I buying them a gift by buying this? Like who, who's actually celebrating what here? Like there's a lot of that in my head.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And so it just puts me off and sours me and I don't want to do it again. No, I just want to clear this, make this clear. No judgment. It sounds like we are because obviously I'm making my own kind of judgment, but I'm only making it for me. Okay. I promise you that it is possible to have two thoughts in your head at once that this is too expensive and I'm not going to buy it. And good for you.
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You got it. I can have those two things. Right. You know, we're complicated people.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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That's also a good excuse for people to talk about. I admit this is tempting. The game is at a really great place right now for the most part. As good as any time it's ever had this stage of an expansion, it feels like things are really solid. And so there's also that tendency to say, just when things were looking up, you go and do it. You know, there's that. It's a natural human thing.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, that sounds right to me. But also I think, I don't think it started tracking till, uh, until achievements went into the game, which I think was Wrath, right? So to do it... You had to go back. Yeah, I think you had to go back and then work your way up. But then you're only talking two and a half expansions or not even a full third expansion yet in terms of patches and stuff.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I get that we do it. It's a great way to pile on. You also on the other side of this have. Like somebody right now is mad because they bought it and they think we're giving them crap. And I know we keep trying to preempt that by saying that. But I've already had somebody tell me they'll never listen to anything I do again because I called them a whale. And I said, I didn't call you a whale.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I said that they're going after the whales. Meaning whales just means the people who will absolutely buy it no matter what. No matter what, there are people out there that do that. I don't care what it is. Magic the Gathering, there are people day one in line at the store buying 50 boxes. They're the whales. That's why they call him that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, I don't have a problem with it. Look, if I had money to burn, I'd probably just get it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, I mean, it's just – I have to – $90 is not nothing, all right? It just isn't. Like, we can all – I hear some of the exact same people complain that inflation is too high and then just bought this site unseen. Well, all right. Well, which is it? Do you have it or do you not have it? Like, you know, it's – That's the other thing.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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This thing has bled into like real life economic discussions and all that. And it's part of why there's so much. What makes wow great is the passion around it. And sometimes that passion manifests in some grumpiness and some willingness to cut each other down. And we're not here to do that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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So a co-sign on Bobby's thing that says that's the last time you're going to hear us try to make sure you understand where we stand. All that being said, it leaves me a little unhappy, and I don't love it. And I'll tell you what, if I cave, if on January 5th, the evening of January 5th, I go, I can't stand it anymore.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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It's been proven to me that I must cave. I'll let you know. I'll tell you, and I'll come sheepishly on the show and go... You guys, Scott did a real weird thing. 2025, baby. But I don't think that's going to happen at this point. But it's about, what do we figure? It's about a million gold equivalent, which is a lot less than the 5 million gold people spent then.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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So I think it was more doable. And I remember then going, well, here's my chance. This is what I should do. And then I would get started.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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That's just one coffee I don't get. It's the same thing. Same justification. Yeah, exactly. There's nothing wrong with it. I do it all the time with all sorts of things. I did it with that. I just changed to T-Mobile. It definitely makes sense to those people. I just switched to T-Mobile from AT&T on my mobile service, and I made a similar justification.
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We're just that's who we are. And I'm fine with it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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yeah wow so this is why i don't play the stock market by the way all this this entire discussion reminds me that i'm bad at uh market market knowledge market manipulation market any of that stuff bottom line for me is i'm happy for everyone who got one the art on it the art on it by the way the texturing all the stuff that these artists get tasked to do for these kinds of stuff killer looks amazing yeah yeah
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And I also understand why you'd have an all-hands-on meeting for this, because this affects, as we've already seen, this isn't just, all right, get ready to handle social media. That isn't it. It's get ready for the economy to be weird, and we're not sure where it's going to go and how long that will affect it. Yeah. it starts to make you realize what life is like at scale.
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Like it's a great little microcosm, a fun study kind of on how systems and economies and populations are affected by something introduced that sort of disrupts things. And, To me, that's the fascinating part of this. So enjoy your mount or not. Thumb up, thumb down. Don't care. Whatever. Whichever way you go, we still like you. Okay? Yeah. And we hope you like us. We like all of you. Yeah.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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You're all great. Time for some news. All right, let's get into the anniversary event so far thus far. And before we get into it and our opinions, I'm going to just tell you kind of what it was again so you understand what we got. So there's a new classic raid, Blackrock Depths.
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That's a 10 to 15 player eight boss raid, which is a big throwback with a bunch of changes, new mechanics, stuff like that. Some new time walking in classic dungeons. So those are now in the rotation like the previous ones were for season one. Deadmines, original classic version, Dire Maul, East and West Wings, Strathmore, Living and Undead Wings. There are new world bosses.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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They are all out there in Taranis near the sword. One of them annoys the hell out of me. I'll get to that in a minute. I've only killed one, by the way. Have you done all the three bosses yet?
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The emerald dream. Emerald dream.
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Whatever they were. But yeah, Shaw of Anger is my favorite of this group, voiced by our pal Liam O'Brien. So it's always nice to hear him say stuff that isn't an Illidan voice. But anyway, he's out there. I fought. I tried to fight that. Got killed many times because nobody knew what they were doing. And we were trying to do it to a few people. It was day one of the patch. And I don't know.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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It's just hard to get people lined up. And the sort of quest LFG stuff wasn't working for me very well that day. So I didn't get to do it. But I did beat the...
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the what are they called the the big angry robot from uh the doom walker doom walker thank you and uh it's always fun to fight that because i'm reminded of some very old times and wow walking around hellfire peninsula and hearing that sound and like i gotta get the f out of here and yeah that's where you really learn how to feign death as a hunter and you know stuff like that
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And, you know, they're a lot more story based, which is good because if they do tweak something, change something, remove something or add something, it doesn't diminish your achievement. If you got it. Um, I remember when cataclysm hit, I went, well, this is bad because they've, they've gone through some zones and completely done. It's all new.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And anyway, we beat him. I do like you get a little trophy for that so you can like pop it out like a toy. Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. I look forward to getting them all. I'm sure I will get them before the event's over. But other stuff included here, new mounts, pets, classic transmog sets.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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They're going to be available to earn through the new currency, the bronze celebration tokens, which right now are trickling in. And I mean trickle. Additionally, there are updated modern versions of the tier two armor sets to be purchasable with the celebration tokens. And we all knew about that from previous reveals. If you haven't seen those, you should go check those out.
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The tier twos are considered some of the best the game ever saw. And these are all redone versions of those. We talked about those a bit last time we were on. All right. One other part we didn't mention is there's this area by Caverns of Time that you go to. And when you portal there, it's just there.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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So if you go to the portal near the major city, you'll pop right there and you'll see the celebration. It basically looks like a little fair is set up. There's some booths and there's stuff going on. There's some repeatable quests in there, dailies, and there are some events in there that you have to do. And at first, I was like, dude, this feels like the Northrend stuff.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Was it called the jousting tournament stuff? Oh, yeah. I can't think of it all of a sudden. The Argent tournament. Argent tournament. And I love the Argent tournament. There was something about the vibe and the atmosphere and the music and everything was just like... wow, this is like I'm really at a big fair.
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I'm at a big event and I'm hanging here and I got to do stuff here every day and everything. I thought that's what I was getting into here. It has no music. It has these events that at first seemed neat, like, ooh, Laura Walker Cho is going to come out and talk on stage and tell me an old tale of Arthas or some kind of weird druid dream or whatever. He's going to retell these stories.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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That seems neat. And then there's the pull out your mounts and let's see how many you have. And if one of you wins, good job. And And these various things, right? The transmog thing. They all sound amazing on paper. And also first time through, it's fine. Yeah, fun even. Fun even, you might even say. It's a slog now. I don't even want to go there. I don't want to do anything there.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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The only thing I would recommend is make sure you hop on one of the balloons, which just slowly floats you around the grounds and then lands you and gives you an achievement. So if you're an achievement head, you get an achievement for that. The rest of that place can F out of here. I don't like it. I think it's boring. I think it's grindy.
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I mean, I'm not saying... It's just, it's a 30-year anniversary of... I don't know what I expected. I know there's a lot going on, and the team is spread everywhere, and they're all doing different things. But if they were trying to impress me with this fair part of it, it's not working, Bobby. I really don't like it there.
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Like this is, these aren't even quests that were available in the original lore master, uh, And in my head, I was like, well, I'm not even going to bother. But what I should have realized is, of course, logically, they're going to make a path for that to work for people.
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Please do, because I need something positive about this place. I freaking hate it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Each person gets five and they can spread them out however they want, I think.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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win and that's it was kind of neat um again caveat i only did that one time so that kind of does go into your uh like uh the first time it was fun well i would do it more often if it wasn't 400 million years between each one like honestly that's the other thing there's no timer anywhere so you don't get to see you you know what's up next but you don't really know when and a lot of times i come out and go that's one way they could fix it
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, this guy's always says, step right up and be a part of the mount thing. It's going to be great on the first day. You hear a voice say that. And you're like, sweet. You get down there and you wait and you wait. You could go take three dumps and walk your dog four times before this thing freaking starts. Then it finally starts.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And then it's God knows how long until the next time they start the damn thing. So my biggest problem is frequency. I think I would do that. Like the transmog contest is fun. You're right. It's fun. And it's community driven. And you're voting.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I think something like that. I can't remember. I remember that was around the time you started hearing about feats, though, right? It was like Cataclysm came along and like, yeah, we're kind of dicking with the old world. So we'll call that a feat of strength or this other thing you thought was rad. It's no longer rad. It's kind of dumb and deprecated. Yeah.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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That's my whole beef here is that this is a company or this is a team that prides itself on for 20 years finding repeatable content and making it compelling to repeat it. This is all do it once and never look back for me.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Oh, maybe it's not. The momentum is just weird. It's not a good momentum. I fully expected to go in there and just spend... For a couple of months, this would be a great hub to go and do stuff and then go back and do other things. But this would be where you would go while it's live. And instead, it feels like Halloween or the beer fest event. It's just like, okay, it's another thing.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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In fact, those things are more well thought out. They have more... Again, you're right, though. They're going to add stuff. So I don't want to be too critical either because I don't know what they're going to add. If that lady goes, hey, come here, champion. Three goblins barfed over there behind the stage. You need to take care of it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And then I get over there and it's like, oh, not only do I have to clean up this barf, but I also found a clue. And then the clue says, go. They barfed up a clue. Yeah. They barfed up something strange. What is this? I better take it back and show the lady.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And I remember people being mad about it. I remember there was a lot of anger in the community about that kind of stuff. That was kind of a moment for me where I realized that you can't lock any of this into permanence. It's a feeble thing to try because eventually... it's just too, it's too much. It's an MMO. It's a game that's, that's meant to be expansive and change and tweak and do all this.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And you know, if you're telling me that, well then maybe we're getting somewhere, but it just feels a really, if this was it, if this was all that was coming, I would probably be harsher. Cause I think it's really lame. I think that, so all that being said, I think the addition of the braid content, the unlocks, I think all that stuff's really strong. I think even the world bosses are cool.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Like that stuff's great. It's just this celebration part. Yeah. Just kind of a bummer.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Not an LFR yet, but I will be queuing for that sometime before the weekend is up, so...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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This is like built in, built in coordination between the two tanks is almost always that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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So it's not just tank and spank. You guys had to learn without 20 YouTube videos and something on Wowhead. That is unique at this stage of the game, isn't it?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And hell, this is long before, this is when classic was just regular. It was long before we were going to have classic. Now we've got a whole new slate of, uh, you know, its own separate kinds of achievements. And I don't even know how they handled when they put wrath in classic, did they add achievements to classic? Like, I don't even know how that went. Cause I didn't play classic.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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with the heroic narrow bar palace raid right because we basically up till where we got stuck we have that part on farm i suspect that within the next couple of weeks that will be true all the way up through silken court i hope like we don't we don't know but wherever we're going to be uh yeah like i i look forward to that and also by then obviously there's going to be some guides and people are going to understand the fights better and probably have some patches but
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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That's where the balancing is off, I think, because there was no PTR, therefore no feedback. You're getting live feedback, and that's it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, I do too. I look forward to going in there for sure. Plus it's just nice to have some alt content during a time that you may not normally have it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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You know? Uh, so anyway, those, those are all good things. I just hope that before this event is over, there's more on the, I don't want to put this. I want to feel something.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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No, it's not. And for all those people yelling, play classic. I'm not talking about that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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That's a whole other thing we should probably talk about at some point. But my biggest beef is that I don't... There's nothing happening yet. We're on like 30 years, man. You know where I thought it would happen is with Laura Walker Cho's little stage show. I thought I was going to get some real meat off that bone because I loved listening to him in Mists.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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You'd be in a quest line and he'd go, listen, there's a thing I'm going to say. And I'd go, oh shit, he's going to tell me another story. And I'd get a little faded out translucent image of some thing going on. And I used to love that. And they'll fall so flat for me on that stage. They just aren't working. Yeah. I don't know why. There's no music as part of it. It's just him talking.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Like all the usual heft, like the full package just doesn't feel like it's happening. I feel like I'm playing some beta stuff.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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anyway point is someone'll someone's yelling at their portable device right now about what they did but anyway the point is go for what you want don't do what you don't want and i will probably never get lore master even though it is a thing i think about every single expansion for some reason oh yeah well speaking of you asked me how how do i you know do i have trouble with
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, like Level 80 Torrin Chieftain or whatever they were. They could even be doing metal covers of Wild Me. Like something to bring me back, to make me feel those feelings.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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um in the same way that i i have these feelings in other parts of the expansion just about the current expansion right so it shouldn't be hard to go 30 years we have we have so much 20 of this game 30 of the ip we have so much to draw from and instead i got a i got a old version of the orc model phasing in and out in front of me driving me crazy it's like i don't want to talk to that guy
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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It is what it is. Let's move on. Oh, we did want to talk about... So there was a big class patch as well that came with all this.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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No, you used to be able to just listen, enjoy it, yell at your thing about the things we'd get wrong, and then write in to correct them or whatever. I don't know if you ever did that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Balances and also some tweaks to the heroic talents and some people not feeling like they had enough flourish to things like the... What's it called? The Hunter one? Yeah. Not Black Arrow, whatever it is. It's the use of the Black Arrow, but I forgot the name of it. Anyway, that thing was just kind of boring. Now it's got a bunch of flourishes, looks really cool.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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You and I are both playing Paladins pretty exclusively this expansion. And on paper, I thought we were looking down the barrel of one of the biggest, most massive sweeping changes to Paladins ever.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah. And it turns out, It's fine. I mean, there are changes. There's some stuff, and it's definitely gotten tweaked, especially with the Paladin spec, but even a little stuff with the Rett. It's fine. It's just it doesn't feel massive to me, and if anything, it seems like we're underperforming on the protection standpoint.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, we literally called it Hunter Talk and had a whole thing for it. But what's our – I almost forget the name of the damn talent – not talent, but the ability to throw your hammer and you get three of them and they swing around you and they build –
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I'm just glad to have that back. That has always been badass. It looks cool. I know that prior builds, maybe it wasn't the best thing, but to be able to just start popping those and having those hammers fly everywhere, it makes me feel like Johanna in Diablo 3 again.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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So I spent, I spent a lot of time, uh, just making sure dailies were done. Um, you know, rep working on the, working on renown. Yeah. The usual rep grind is, is obviously a thing. Um, but also, uh, those three quests you get in town in Dornegal that are essentially like your big weekly area activity things.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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We were raiding last night and Bobby would pop them and I'd go, oh yeah, right, right, right.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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You see that Chinese Olympian during the Olympics when the two Italian, I think, I think gold and bronze that were both biting on their, their metal. Like that's the traditional picture. And she kind of looks at them and looks at her metal and looks back at them and then bites it super cute and very wholesome and awesome. I love that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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It's my favorite thing, favorite chunk of video from the entire Olympics, but that's what it was like.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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So the rest of the night I was always whacking that thing, but it has such a great low cool down. And also if you're a jittery player, that's like wait for everybody to do pots and eat their freaking feast and everything. And you're just sitting around instead of like a fidget. Yeah.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Instead of jumping around, just that thing's always on like zero cool downs, constantly throwing hammers and driving everyone else crazy. It's great.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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uh balanced druid got a lot as well dude your brother's so your brother played with us last night he played he's a shaman he was i haven't seen such a cool uh transmog in a long time
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Beautiful shaman, though. I usually think shamans are kind of dumb looking. Sorry, shaman. But he looked cool. So tell him that. Let him know that we approve. I will. Well, folks, one quick other note before we move on to some hardcore talk about Mythic Plus and Bobby's specific journey there. I want to mention that there is a 30 Years of Warcraft Direct coming.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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They're using the parlance of Nintendo, I guess, now.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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uh we don't know exactly what this is going to be uh because i mean they've told us mark the date here's where it's streaming they've got twitch and youtube links uh essentially but on november 13th at 10 a.m pacific time they're doing a special presentation celebrating 30 years of warcraft and a look ahead of what's next um and then there's some stuff but not a lot of details we don't exactly know uh but there's an orchestra involved um my guess is there'll be people talking there'll probably be some retrospective video
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Normally, I would have heard by now if a certain couple of friends of mine at Blizzard are involved or not, but I haven't heard. So maybe we'll get to see some familiar faces. This could be exciting or it could be not. But you know what? Don't temper. I guess I'm just giving everybody a nice equal expectation level here. Show up. Don't expect the world, but maybe it'll be cool.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I like those. You get the crests and you get other stuff from it. I did some... What did I queue? Oh, I queued for some LFR just to get some of those achievements and also some transmog. I don't need the gear. Sure. Because we're geared up better than that. And last night, I think I walked out with that new sword and a trinket, and I think that put me at 615? Yeah. Nice. I forget.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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The official website on the thing has all the links. You just go to the official accounts on YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok, and you'll be able to watch the thing live. You can earn rewards for watching it. It looks like you get Hearthstone, Warcraft Rumble, and World of Warcraft items possibly, but they don't have any details on that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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No. And you know what? I hate to say it, but they never really figured out a way to monetize those in a way that would make him happy. And that's really it. That's all it was. StarCraft II was outperformed. StarCraft II, what was the first one called? Wings of Liberty. Yeah. Was the most successful launch of an RTS in history.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Despite that, World of Warcraft's first premium on-store sparkly horse made more money than the entire game did. So I'm not saying I side with Bobby. I just get why he did it. And by Bobby, I mean Kodak, not Bobby Frankenberger. Very different Bobby.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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That was such a mess. Oh my God. That's still the word. I still think it's the biggest fumble I've ever done.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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We didn't really say this earlier. I do want to make this clear. I think Bobby agrees, and everyone I've talked to has read it. I think this book is, if you are a Blizzard fan or a WoW fan or any just sort of interested in games and the back end of all this...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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um which has always been fascinating to me this is a must read i think it's amazing and i have it on some pretty good authority that factually speaking this thing is dead on like they didn't miss any of that they may not always cat the book doesn't always capture the passion behind some of what looks like just lunacy yeah it's hard to do that because there's magic involved and how do you describe that in a book and it's hard and you don't have every voice but
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Well, you think you do, but you don't. Bobby, let's talk about power. Let's talk about Mythic Plus power. You've acquired it all. You are now lord of your domain.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, the diamond one. It's kind of... I don't always like these when they're just all... alternate skins. It's not that I don't, I don't, I really do love and respect the work that skins provide or that, you know, those artists are doing amazing work. Like, like we talked about with the expensive mount, uh, that's one point I didn't bring up. I kind of wish it was just more, uh,
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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A respectable number, even though I know there are people that are higher now. But a couple of weeks ago, I would have been way ahead of the game at about 615. But anyway, it felt good to do that. But I have not had time for extra raids with any other teams. I know you have kind of an alt team that you run with. We're more like your alt team. You have a regular team. Sort of, yeah.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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about this expansion we're in or more overall wow and not just another one of those dinosaur models with the new skin sure anyway yeah but but in this case too i kind of just wish for special achievements like where they really hit you with the uniqueness and it's hard to get or whatever i wish they were just more than this is that one you got accidentally by questing but it's prettier because it looks like diamond you know what i mean
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Difficulty reasons or some other factor, do you think?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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There's always going to be knock-on effects by something this new and drastic in the game, so I'm not surprised.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah. I get out for that. I hate that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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See ya. Yeah. There are consequences to your bad behavior. Like I do this and I think it is a little bit of fatherhood kicking in. I do.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, it's a scale problem once again. But it is one aspect to WoW that has been here since the beginning. And one of the problems of trying to satisfy the inner side of that donut, that's one thing about the donut we don't talk enough about, is the inside of that donut is a little bit, sometimes can be a little nasty in there, a little caustic.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah. Kicking ass, taking names. We played last night and, uh, cleared one shot heroic, everything up till, uh, freaking worm, worm lady.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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part of that reason is the inside of the donut doesn't necessarily like the outside i'm like you know i'm the real donut here but the truth is without that outside you don't have a donut right there is no donut you know what you have if you just do the inside of the donut you have everquest and guess what that capped out at about 400 000 people max that's what you get mic drop yeah mic drop boom
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Oh my gosh, we've taken a full... You know, if Adham was listening, and he's not, but if he was, because apparently, according to that book, there's never been a more burned out human in the history of the planet. Holy cow. But if he's listening, donuts for everybody. You had it right the first time.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Adham, underrated, I would say, Adham is.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Thank you. I can never remember their names. She's the one shitting all the eggs out and making our lives hard, covering the floor in blue goo. That's a hard fight, but we also made a lot of progress on it, so I feel pretty good about next week, assuming everyone's ready and able. I didn't expect that. I don't know why. I didn't expect that one to be such a pain in the rump, that fight.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Oh, I'd love that. Here's the thing too. Remember the Patreon stuff. Sometimes we're going to do Patreon only content and sometimes we're going to do stuff that will be in both. Well, it'll always be in both places, public and Patreon. But there might be times where we do something that is a timed exclusive in Patreon. So you may get it for a week or two before anyone else does.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And this is actually a great time to say this. One of the things when we started this up again and I approached Bobby, we decided – And agreed mutually that a monthly cadence made the most sense to get started. Like, let's see where this goes, what this is. And I think it was the right decision. It feels right to me just from an overall standpoint.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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But what it has introduced is this feeling that I want to make other things in between. I've been doing it on YouTube. which is less podcasty and it's not showing up in audio feeds or anything. But just when I've got a thought about a thing, just hop in, let's talk about it real quick. Those are really fun to do. More focused stuff like you're talking about, fun to do.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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So I think what you can expect is more on the audio feeds as well as sometimes video. But
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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patreon or otherwise we'll fill in more of those gaps because yes a month is a long time to wait if you're super passionate about the game i get it but i've also heard back from people that say you know what's great about the monthly cadence is it's no longer just this thing i expect every week it's now a thing i look forward to and then when it drops it's like yeah dude a new one in my player today i can't wait like that's that's great feedback to hear too so anyway i'm glad you brought that up because yeah yeah
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Sounds great. More on the way. And of course, every month we'll talk in depth about some sort of hardcore aspect of the game. So look forward to that. It's now time for your feedback.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yes, that's right. That music can mean only one thing, and that is that we have some Town Crier stuff to read in the form of texts, emails, phone calls, all that stuff. If you'd like to email the show, you can do it at theinstanceofgmail.com, or you can send us a text at 801-471-0462. Or you can voicemail that same line. Use it to your heart's content.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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It's tough. It's tough. Yeah. We banged our head against that a lot last night. But we one-shot everything else from top to bottom right up till her. And then she spit on three eggs and made our lives hard. So that's fine. Anyway, so when I'm not playing with you guys, and of course last week I had family stuff, so did you, so we couldn't even raid that night.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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There's also a form on the website at frogpants.com slash instance. And that'll send it straight to our email account as well. So no excuses. There's a million ways to contact us and no reason not to. Let's start with this text from... Uh, did we not get a name? We didn't get a name on this one. I thought we did.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Uh, it says the subject was we are so back and I just thought this was a nice way to start out our messages today. I can hardly express how thrilled I am to hear the instances back. The show is my nostalgic kick. Uh, my first ever podcast I listened to. We hear that a lot. It's always blows my mind. And my original immersion into World of Warcraft.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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As much as I've loved playing WoW these past years, this show has been missing from my being home. Welcome back, old friends. And then a little bit of a PS. On that note, I want to splurge all things instance. Where can I listen to the show from episode one? Seems to only find episodes 436 and forward. Well, I'm glad you asked. So a little bit of utility to this question.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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There was... The show's been almost around since... Well, it's been around since 2006. So we are pushing 20 years. Wow. Which is an insane thing to even say, right? So when RSS began, which is essentially when the show began, very different how you made the files, where you kept them, how you stored them, how web services worked. This has all evolved very...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Quickly or slowly, depending on your point of view over the years. And as a result, multiple hosts, multiple formats, people like iTunes changing RSS feeds to need something. So we had to change it. And then you host it in a new place. And then that place goes away. And now where's the old file? And you got to do what you got to do.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I have every single file from episode one to current here locally and all sorts of backups and stuff. But the feed stuff's kind of all over the place. So on the site, you'll find an archive feed, but that's not all of them either. So what I did have was a link to an archive.org page where all the other episodes were.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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That technically exists, but archive.org, as you know, got hacked and is all over the effing place right now. It's a mess. It really pisses me off. It's a horrible hack. Assuming that all resolves itself, then that will all be back there. But I am working on some other redundancies so that these early episodes can be available and hopefully –
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Maybe I can parlay it into another RSS feed or something so you can get it more conveniently. I realize that's all kind of screwy, but trust me, 20 years of this, we're lucky there's a feed at all. Right. Like it's so jacked. And this is true of a lot of my shows. Film Sack has the same problem. It came out in 09, you know, again, very early in those days.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah. Yeah. Just yell at me when I get something wrong. And I promise you those are coming. All right. They're coming.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And so a lot of these things have that issue. But there are plenty of shows that I do now where we've got the entire thing. If I had started the instance five years ago. You wouldn't even be asking us this question.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And then that's actually a missed opportunity. What was I thinking? I know what I was thinking when Classic came out. I was pissed at Blizzard for all their internal bullshit and the harassment and everything else. And then the layoffs and then the pandemic and then more allegations and then those turning out to be true. And then all of that mess. I was so incensed by it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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It just feels like I've had stuff get in the way and say, sorry, Scott, you're not going to go out and do your dailies tonight. You have to do this or whatever. It was almost like just nonstop, not distractions, but just other stuff I had to do. And so when I have gotten in, it's mostly been short little stuff like that, a couple of delves here and there, especially if there's a quest tied to it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And this is right about the time Classic is even starting.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, I was kind of at the point where I was like, I wasn't even sure what I wanted this show to be. It was a hard time. So what ended up happening is what needed to happen, which was kind of a death, some mourning, some rebirth, and a return. Being able to control that in a way that I get to kind of, I don't know, not start over, but keep what was great, but also enter a new phase.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I needed that for this to work at all. I'm saying this in retrospect because while I'm doing it, I'm not thinking that. I don't know. I didn't have a plan.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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You were done. Yeah, I had no plan. I just knew that that needed to happen and that that space had to be created. And I needed a good couple plus years of... not having it. And I needed to see what Blizzard was doing during that. And that helped. And I'm not going to lie here. A huge part of this was Chris coming back to the company. That was a big part of it for me.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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He and I are very close friends, but that's not just the reason. It's the spirit he brings to things that matters to me. And what it means that he came back. And what it means.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah. What it means for him to go from a very comfortable retirement to, yes, I'll go back That meant more than just a job. That's not it. He didn't need it. That's why it mattered to me. That was a big deal for me. But anyway, long story short, I would like to get all these back in a place where people can more easily.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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It's kind of on garage bullshit or whatever we did early on. That'll be fun.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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uh here's another text this is about consoles and controllers hello instance love the show is back listening to y'all talk about console port this week meaning the um uh the mod that patrick talked about uh and i love it i bought a asus rog ally and it runs windows beautifully i play any uh anywhere and everywhere in raid and in mythic plus even the only issue i've run into is pvp because of targeting and uh sorry because of targeting and keybinding not being very easy um
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I only play this way now. It's great. Let's see. Y'all keep doing awesome things. Love it. Again, anonymous. That might be the dude that's at our raid team. He didn't put a name here, but that guy's also crazy. Yeah, maybe. He was leading DPS as a survival hunter with a freaking controller the whole time. It's blowing my mind.
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uh go down and do my packed crap with the freaking spider people um all that and then as many as many dailies as i could do and then here's my favorite thing about wow during the month of october because of how busy i was i took many meetings i don't know what happened in october but it was a month of meetings lots of calls i'm working on a book for one guy doing illustration thing for another guy an ad possibility for another thing for shows like all this stuff have to meet with these people individually on phones and zoom calls and all of that
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, because there's a way to do it, obviously. There's a little more hoops to jump through because you're running SteamOS and not Windows directly. But that's okay. It can be worked around. What I'd really like to have happen is for Blizzard... to put World of Warcraft on Steam. I'll rebuy the current expansion. I don't care. I would too, yeah.
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Because our accounts are linked, so all my progress is there. But I did this with Diablo. I'll do it again. Having it on there natively would be insanely awesome. But they're going to have to have native support for controllers. That mod is the perfect example of...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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somebody getting it exactly right it's very good blizzard should just lift it i want i say that but maybe hire that guy you need a new controller guy at the company bring him in get that done i would i would be in bed every night going i'd be play oh this would be bad for me this would be really bad yeah but good but in such a good way in a good way bad but good you know as they say yeah
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Uh, let's see. That's a great one. Thank you for that. Here's another one. Uh, this is a very short one. It says, do y'all think that we'll get a blizzcon 2025? I want to have dinner with y'all and Dan, the board game man. Again, I'm not sure who sent this, but I'm sure I've had dinner with them now that they've said it this way. Okay, Bob, we haven't talked about this really on this show.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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It used to be a very common discussion on The Instance every year. Where will it be at BlizzCon this year? And often there was. A couple times there weren't. 2012, they didn't. 2020, they didn't. 2021, they did virtual. Let's see. And then they haven't had a new one since last year. So 2022 also didn't have one. So this last time that they had one, they didn't sell out of tickets.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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That's never been the case. They've always sold out. And they even had less tickets up and they still didn't sell out of tickets. I don't think BlizzCon. Well, all right. Prior to the Microsoft acquisition, I would have been surprised there would ever be a BlizzCon again. when that happened or was at least confirmed.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, because it really wasn't a profit center. They'd make money, but they don't make barrels of money, which is what Activision always wanted.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, where they weren't charging enough. And then even when prices would go up, we were offering too much for too little. And he missed the point.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, under Microsoft, maybe. Because again, I think they want to let them cook. And also hearing the origins of BlizzCon is pretty crazy. In that book again, there's a whole thing where it was just two community managers, which is a very different job back in 05 than it is today. But those two just had this wild hair like...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Oh, the fries up the street. Yeah. In Orange County. Yeah.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And boy, were they right. They were absolutely right. And it was only 8,000 that first year, but tickets were gone immediately. And it would eventually go to as high as 30 or whatever it is. And it's high at around 2018. But they... Yeah, that... I mean, obviously, it's a huge deal. It's a bunch of work. It means a whole lot of money and planning and all the things that it does.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I was just convinced before the Microsoft acquisition that the appetite from players wasn't where it used to be. And I think that proved out with not selling all your tickets for the very last one that they had. It was also a smaller event. They kept it a little more tight. Sure. Esports kind of took a... A side thing, a bunch of games didn't get any attention anymore.
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There's all of these other issues around it. I think if they... Okay, here's my prediction, Bobby. I'm basing this on nothing, but here's my prediction. Okay. They rebrand and launch BlizzCon as a more... because that's where the most of the people are coming from. They make it a more wow focused event and they don't aim for 30 to 50,000. They aim for 10 to 12 or something.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And they just, they bring that aspect of it back and don't make it a profit center. They just make it a thing. That's a passionate subsection, a place to really show stuff off, lean hard into simulcasting it. Um, Remember when they were charged for that? They didn't the last time. Partly because of the same problem. People aren't paying. But I don't know what the future holds for this.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Let me tell you, while still the reigning champion of have a call going and just casually gathering herbs and checking out mining nodes and run to the auction house and spend a little gold doing this and that and then earn a little gold doing this and that and just kind of bouncing around the place and not really having to be very mindful about it. It's still no better.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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That's my prediction, though. They figured out a way to make it more WoW-centric. Because what didn't work, I will give Activision this if I'm giving them anything. It was a place to show off your new games, show a new cinematic, announce things like Heroes of the Storm, even though they kind of blew it at the end.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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uh announced things like overwatch those are big moments but you'd still could make the argument that people weren't going to blizzcon for that stuff they were going there because of world of warcraft and yeah i i think you know buckling down and saying well that's the focus again probably wouldn't probably would help and i think it would probably hype people up and make them want to go yeah and i think um for my part of it i think
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Oh, yeah. It is a longstanding tradition here at The Instance. So, yeah, we've had a month. It's been a hell of a month for me. Really fast month and a lot going on. A lot of wow, but a lot of other stuff, too. It's just been one of those... One of those falls, but I'm glad to be back and tons of great feedback over the month. You guys have been amazing.
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I agree. For Blizzard. Obviously, there's some dark BlizzCon moments that have come to light that really challenge that reputation, but I think you could bring that back. I really do. And I hope they do because I really – I love that every year. I love going. I love being on stage that time.
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It was one of the – that was one of the most revelatory moments of my entire life, not just career, my life. When I got up on that stage and realized – I was nervous as hell going up there. But when I got up there, I realized 30,000 people in a live room may as well be no one. And I don't mean this in a bad way. You're all human beings. But it –
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I got so relaxed immediately because it was like, well, this is just everybody. So it's nobody. So it's fine. If there's a room of 10 people, I'd be terrified. You know what I mean? Like I would lose my freaking mind. If I knew when I'd live stream shows that it was one or two people, that's so much more stressful. But when it's like 500, 600 people, it's like, eh, it's fine.
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So they taught me, that thing taught me a lesson. I'm grateful for that lesson. I was grateful for the opportunity, of course, but I would love to do it again. Or just, I just want to be part of the community again. I want to do a live instance on a little stage at the Hilton because me and Bobby would be there and we're going to do it. You know, like I miss that shit. Yeah. So much fun.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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All right. Let's get to a phone call. We got one voicemail from a familiar voice. Check it out.
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There's no better game for this. I have a lot of games where I kind of think, is this a good meeting game? This is not bad. Loop Hero, excellent. It's a very different game than WoW, but excellent meeting game, by the way, if anyone's interested. It's super cheap, so you can get it really cheap on Steam. But it runs on Mac. It's great. Just have it back here running while I'm doing work.
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All right. Thank you, Tanner. Thanks. That's awesome. I didn't know that when I first got this. He said this a little while ago. It's been a while since the last episode, but I had no idea.
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and i still haven't done it i meant to i was gonna go take the alts through there because i was for a hot minute with this expansion for about two and a half weeks i was very alt freaky like i was going nuts i got four of them up to 80 pretty quickly sharing all that experience doing delves and like having an advantage because i was getting more xp because of you know war war party stuff and all that or war wait war party war band war band thank you still not used to the name
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And yeah, I just hadn't done it yet. But just so everybody knows, you don't have to go find the spider every time because that's kind of a pain in the ass. First guy, yes.
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Yeah, well, good luck. I don't even know. I don't know what NPCs I need to talk to. Where are they? Are they all over the place? Yeah, good question.
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It's almost as bad as saying you need to log into Hearthstone, you need to have this card, and then go over to Diablo 3, start a Necromancer, kill three mobs, and then you'll be told to go open up Heroes of the Storm. It feels that vague. And so I'm like, okay.
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And besides, I already got enough gear from our rating that I was like, well, these tokens I dropped aren't going to give me jack at this point anyway. So it's fine. Yeah. All right. Well, that's going to do it for our feedback today. Again, you can find all the details about how to contact us on the website, frogpants.com slash instance.
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I would like to thank some brand new folks who joined us on our Patreon. And boy, we love these people. Why do we love them? Well, because they're helping the show happen. And a bunch of people signed up since we last talked. I'm just going to name them all. Will Matheson, Dustin Remy, Dr. Samurai. Yeah. I don't know why I like that one, but I do. Me too. Billy and Paducah. Eagle Scout.
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Brett Boatwright. It's way better than Boatwrong. Andrew Diamond. Pasta Matt. I love that. That's either a thing I want to buy to make pasta or that's a guy who likes pasta. I'm not sure what.
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And WoW is still king of the hill when it comes to that. And you can even have the sound off. You don't need audio. Just flying around. Ooh, a glowy thing. Oh, it's one of those. I guess I have some webs on me for a second. Anyway, so yeah, we're thinking that'll be done by June next year. Sounds great. Thanks for the meeting. Like I'm having that experience with WoW right now.
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Hey, Pasta Matt. Come over here. Burger Bernie and... Shake Sally. Let's go. Let's get lunch. Xavier Bertoli. Sorry, Bertolino is what I meant to say. David Hootie42Andreas. Hey, it's Hootie42. Hey. I like that guy. Matt Dodson-Handleton. Battlehammer Callahan. Another amazing name. That's a great name. Hoojohn. Steve Holler. Steve Holler, rather. And finally, Omega9, a regular in our chat room.
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A big thank you to all of them for going to patreon.com slash theinstance. And signing up, we really appreciate it. We hope to be bringing you more and more content there as time goes on. And having your support means a lot. It's a monthly, which means it's really not bad. A little slow amount per month and bam, you're in. And your support means everything. So thank you guys so much.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Everything else is at frogpants.com slash instance. Bobby, anything else you want to fire off before we hose down the huge dinosaur with the nice gold trimming and send it to the garage?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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It's a great show. If you guys are into science topics of any kind, really, there's a good chance Bobby and his co-host have talked about it at All Around Science. So check that out. You can also find more shows like this one at frogpants.com. There's Core. We mentioned we're part of the Core Guild, which is another show we do about games in general. If you haven't heard that show, you're insane.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Go check it out, frogpants.com slash core. It's going to do it for us, for me, for Bobby, and for giant $90 dinosaurs everywhere. We'll see you next time.
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I love it. I love it. And Intel, this is the thing Blizzard does better than anybody or has at least traditionally. And this is true of most of their games. This is that example of the wide range of easy to get into, hard to master.
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Because on the one hand, I'm having a meeting and earning money and just screwing around and also leveling my professions, my gathering professions, because screw the rest of them. Anyway, that's just a me thing. But I'm doing that while I'm getting work done. In the same exact moment of any given day, you're out there mythic plussing your heart out, right?
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in some of the most difficult content the game's ever had. That's a wild thing to consider, and I love that about it. I guess most MMOs are like that now, but WoW kind of set the standard for it, I think.
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uh a goal of theirs to to appeal to to all of the the whole donut yeah right and it and it that's an amazing part of this book actually because what i wanted out of the book i guess we're talking about the book a little let's do it
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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What I wanted out of that book or what I thought maybe I wanted out of that book was a bunch of insidery stuff like, ooh, deal between what happened with Titan and had Bobby Kotick run through the building naked with his wiener out or, you know, what salacious stories am I going to hear? And instead, that book isn't really about that.
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The book is about, it's about some other struggles in that regard, but it's mostly, and I made up that Kotick thing for anyone who's, don't write that down. I made that up. Yeah. Although, whatever. Anyway, the thing about the book is what it gave me is what I actually really wanted, which was some of that fundamental sauce that we've all wondered about for so many years.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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We'll be reading some of that today and playing some of that today. You guys have been just, I don't know, just super active, and we love seeing that, which is good because the game is at a pretty good place right now, and people are playing and having a good time. Although, Bobby, don't you feel like, before we get into some of the stuff that are on our minds here,
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Like, what is it that put Blizzard here when everybody else was here? Why? And why was it from the very beginning? And that donut story is a great example. It's such a simple one, but this concept of...
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donut outside everybody the closer you get in you're less casual and when you get to the center there's your hard cores and you must have an entire donut that that may sound obvious to all of us now especially in the current you know games are a lot of games are this way now it's like you'll have an easy mode so you can just enjoy the story or play it on really hard because you're a freak show and that's how you want to play dragon age or whatever um
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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But back then, this isn't a thought. This isn't even a thing like other games come out and they are either, you know, take the first XCOM on PC. Right. Nails hard on purpose. There is no there's only a donut hole. That's all there is to that original game. Right. That's who they aim for. That's who they tackle. That's what the game they want to make. And nothing wrong with that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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But then on the other hand, you may have a more arcadey experience on a console or something that is the outside of that donut only. And they never really appeal to anybody who are looking for a deeper challenge.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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So to come along in the early 90s, late 80s, early 90s and say, we think we can do the entire donut turned out to be a revolutionary concept that would propel them to disgusting levels of stardom. Yeah. And in some ways almost hurt them in the in the in this long haul, because I don't know if you notice this, Bobby. These guys never owned anything for a long time.
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Like they they went from, oh, shit, we got to pay payroll and we're going to do it with a credit card because we just can't keep up with what we've done. Even though they're having wild success and they're like, well, don't worry about the next game. It'll all work out. Oh, well, let's see.
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The next game is going to have this ambitious online component called Battle.net that no one's ever done before. We'll acquire all kinds of archaic behind the scenes stuff going on that we can have cloud and all this like distributed computing back then. So we have to do that at the back end. Gosh, what's that going to do?
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Well, if it sells well, we're going to be in debt again because we have to support this back end. And then they got to get investors. They got to sell themselves again. And then eventually this happens again. And World of Warcraft, the greatest example of this, right?
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It was introduced there and it was a chest then. They didn't call it a vault. I can't even remember what they called it. It might have just been the mythic chest or something like that. And it was really just meant for high-end players. And it was a little bit complicated because they were tweaking it constantly and they finally found a version that worked really well.
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Yeah, I think we only died once on the fifth boss and then I think once on the sixth. Yeah, and then we got... And then we hit the freaking wall on that seventh boss. So the silken court is...
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Yeah, it's going to be really fun. I'm really looking forward to it. And now we're on that second to last boss and we get to... This is what I love about raiding, Scott, is the progression. I am the opposite of John on core, your co-host on core. I love wiping over and over again. I love going through the trash and
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Yeah. On the first boss, you forgot or something was going wrong and you didn't ever taunt the boss.
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So once you figured out how to taunt, things went a lot smoother.
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It made a couple of slight adjustments during Shadowlands. And then by Dragonflight, they really settled on a really good solid format where if you're listening and you don't know what the vault is, it's basically, it's kind of like, you know everybody used to talk about bad luck protection.
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trying to make a final push and people have, you want to go back and get gear from those first bosses. Right.
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It was my idea, so don't call it stupid.
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Because it's the core guild, right? Yeah.
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Yeah, we were recording the day before early access.
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Yeah, I got to play like an hour and a half of early access.
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It bummed me out. This is probably almost certainly me doing the sweet lemons thing, but I'm kind of glad that I missed all that experience of feeling weird about hitting those walls. It felt to me from hearing about it like that it just ended up being that a bunch of
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people who don't care about the story and just wanted to level to max level as fast as possible so that they could get to the end game faster and start doing all that stuff faster. It felt like it was just an advantage to those people.
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um, in the roles when you would go into raids and everybody was like, they need to fix all this stuff and have bad luck protection where if you go so many boss kills or so many dungeon runs without getting any gear, there's somehow some value in the code changes to where you're more likely to get something on subsequent runs.
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You couldn't do like a reload UI?
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And they did mess with things like that, but this, the vault really kind of is an, it was a different approach to bad luck protection. It made it. So the more stuff you every week, you will get something. As long as you're playing the game in certain ways, you will get something.
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Yeah, I don't know. If they're offering a mount and a pet, I'll probably end up doing it again because that's why I did it in the first place. And not to belabor the point, I know we got a lot we want to talk about, but I'd love to see the numbers of who got early access compared to previous expansions because... My gut tells me that people weren't doing it for the early access.
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And the only reason I can think that you would add early access is just because you're trying to get money out of people. Oh, yeah.
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And it doesn't feel like they've ever needed it before. Right. And then they put all these things into place that made it so that they wouldn't have an advantage if they did have early access, you know, making it so that you couldn't access Mythics until week two, you couldn't get Mythic Plus until week three, stuff like that.
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That's a really good analogy because I've been in a mall before where pretty much the food court is open and that's it.
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And that was the big change this time was they made it so much easier to fill out your vault because they said, screw you PvP players. Yeah. We're going to give we're going to give casual people, which is which really was a good decision. I think we're going to give casual players an easier way to fill out.
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Yeah, they could have differentiated it from Shaman as well by giving it a Titan magic flavor instead because they're obviously connected to the Titans and stuff. There's a lot of rune magic with Titan stuff, so they could have been like, You could have had rune casters and earth shapers and all that kind of stuff. I agree. That would be an awesome class.
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I'm sure that they have, you know, there are no new ideas, right? Like, I'm sure they have thought about this. They have rune spells in the game already that other like NPCs cast stuff you have to either stay out of or get into. So I'm sure they thought of this and I'm sure that there are lots of conversations happening. And I'm sure there's a whole contingent of people who want to make it happen.
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But for whatever reason, it's really hard.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I've enjoyed them so far, but I am still worried that it's gonna, that my excitement is going to Peter out very quickly. Um, after a certain point right now, um, Right now, delves are the best place to get gear with an asterisk. I know that people who are running really high level, like plus seven keys and higher, the delves are not great for you. But in terms of the vault...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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You have to be running a plus seven mythic to get the same vault rewards as tier eight delves that you can do solo.
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Right. Which is what they should do.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Yeah, there's been a lot of back and forth balancing on the content with delves, right? For a while it was... uh, it was super hard to do solo then and really easy to, um,
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doing it with a group there's there was one i didn't experience this myself but i heard somewhere that there was briefly a bug where you know you know how scaling works when you increase when you go in with more people they they change the the health and damage numbers right it's basically it's like diablo running with a friend in diablo or not it's like that kind of everything right they they make it a little bit harder because you have more people there yeah
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Um, so there was a bug apparently for very briefly where if you went in, I'm going to make up some numbers, but, uh, if you went in solo, uh, bosses might have like, like, like 30 million health or something. But then if you went in with two people, they'd have like 20 million health and do even and do less damage. And like they made it even easier than the solo one. It was weird.
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And so there was all this like and then Bran Bronzebeard apparently would sometimes attack you. Really? Wait, is there a mechanic tied to that?
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No, it was just the AI was weird. And so they were they were acknowledging it on, you know, on social media and on the forums and everything saying, OK, we're fixing this. We're tweaking this. It just felt like For a time there that it was like, maybe this could have used just a little bit more testing before. But it feels really good now.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Me too. It's good stuff. I think it needs to lean into a more single player and they need to keep balancing it. I agree.
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Oh, whatever it is. I know what you're talking about.
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So have you ever interacted with the vault at all? Like, have you ever gone and looked for it and anything? I mean, I know you've probably clicked on it before, but have you ever been excited about it and wanted to jump in and get it?
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What kind of kill them? Yeah. Yeah. Would it kill them to give just a pop a little, if you go into a bountiful delve, just a little like warning box that pops up. Hey, just so you know, you don't have any keys. Yeah. Do you still want to do that?
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Feels a little arbitrary sometimes. Yeah.
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If you wanted all the slots, you had to do PvP because the bottom row was all PvP stuff. So I never had the bottom row filled out because I don't PvP.
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Yeah. There are so many, so many cut scene shots of Zalatath's feet all the time.
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I'm absolutely loving the story. I think they're doing a lot more showing, not telling. It's like you said. I think it's great that they're actually getting the story out of the way in a way because they're just people who don't care, who just want to go through. And I don't want the fact that I enjoy the story to get in the way of other people's enjoyment of the game.
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So all they've done is pushed it over to the side a little bit and said, if you are interested in it, all you got to do is click this person and you get to experience it. Like you said, it's fully voice acted. Right. There's books all over the place. And I always like to read those. There's lots of really interesting information there. Yeah. it's all really, really good.
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You mentioned story mode reading.
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I was interested in doing this cause this is brand new. So the idea behind story mode rating was you're going to get to experience, this is how they pitched it, right? You're going to get to experience the raids in a new way. Um, the story that was in the raids, you know, and, um, And a lot of the story historically has been in the raids. Like a lot of the storylines conclude inside a raid.
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You build it up in a quest line. You're doing all the footwork. You're doing everything, boots on the ground, doing all the work for all these NPCs. And then it always ends up concluding inside a raid. And it just happens to be that not everybody's a raider. Not everybody even wants to go into LFR. I know LFR...
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makes it easy to experience but some people just don't want to do that either and also it's kind of chaotic and everything's moving fast and you can't really experience it right yeah so they were like let's do story mode reading we go in and experience the story so i went in and did it and uh my my first thoughts got after i finished the story mode raid was That was dumb.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Well, I disagree with you actually on that. All right, go. Because that's kind of what I thought in a way at first. You know, like you said, you pop into the last boss, you just beat the last boss. It's a super trimmed down version, which has the whatever mechanics still remain after they've gutted all the mechanics out of the encounter for the story mode. Yeah.
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They're very inconsequential and you don't, you could just stand there probably. And it would, the boss would die. Um, it's, you're really just there to experience the last boss and then get that cut scene. And when I came out of it, I thought, wait a minute. We were able to get the cutscene before.
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Like, even in the game, there was always an NPC you could go talk to and they'd say, let me tell you what happened in the raid. And you'd get the cutscene. Like, why do we need to go in and watch nine other NPC follower people shoot their spells at the boss and then get... Like, it just seemed like... why am I doing this?
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It's just that this little... You're not getting that. No, it's weird. So I had some bad feelings about it, right? But then I thought about it some more. And I thought because I was I was literally in my notes typing up my complaints to talk about on the show. Yeah. And and as I was thinking how best to to criticize everything, I literally typed out the sentence. It just feels so inconsequential.
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Like when you have to fight so-called powerful enemies at the end of a quest chain. But really, they're no danger at all.
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You know, you know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah. Like.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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even if at the end of a short story side quest there's they're like go kill warthog mcgee because he's been killing and he's like an epic skull he's got the skull thing next to him and he's like a plus question mark character and but and in in in name plate only though right because like there's no way that this guy's gonna kill you because they don't want you to die blizzard doesn't want you to die they want you to experience the end of the quest but that's when i realized oh that's what this is
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This is really just, you've spent all this time questing and manipulating and spreading secrets with the Nerubians and setting up this whole plan to take down the Spider Queen that everyone now is rallied against. Yeah. It would be such a letdown not to get to do the last part of the quest, which would be take her out.
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So they're just giving you a way, just like every other quest chain, to just do the end of the quest. Yeah, that's it. And when I thought about it that way, I thought, oh. Well, that's kind of cool. So I wish they had just pitched it that way.
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And so I thought I was going to go in and get to experience the story of like it just felt like it was different than what it is. And it's it's what it what it actually is is pretty cool. Although I totally agree with you. The the quest you get to go do the story mode thing. Yeah. It's just a regular yellow exclamation point. Put a shield behind it. It's part of the main story.
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Now, what does worry me as we're talking about it is that we've already mentioned several things that feel half-baked. I hope this doesn't foretell something. I hope this isn't an omen. I hope it's something that is not going to be a big deal and they're just going to continue to iterate and fix things. And they have in the past. We have some evidence of that, but I hope it's not.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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But hopefully it's something, I mean, I'm sure they're worried about it too, so hopefully they're on top of it.
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yeah so yeah it had a lot of that echoed a lot of my feelings do you remember back in vanilla there was the out in the plague lands there was that quest where there was that like i think it was like a ghost girl who wanted you to get her teddy bear oh right i remember that um it felt a little bit like that like it was it was cute and sad and um
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Oh, yeah. Oh, man. That was a rough quest to do.
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I think we're going to see a lot of them going forward. My prediction is they have a very big role to play even in the next expansion, Midnight. Yeah. There's a lot... I have a lot of thoughts about that and maybe I'll, I'll flesh all those thoughts out in like one of those little like Bobby's lore take videos that I've been doing. Um, but, uh, I think, I think we're going places.
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I think, I think that the, the, the blood elves and the Arathi, um, have a lot in common and that they're going to, they're going to find themselves fast friends and they're going to be helping each other out and there's stuff going to be happening. We know that things are going to be happening at the Sunwell in mid, in the next expansion, midnight.
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Um, and so there's a lot of, if you, if you listen to a lot of these characters talk, you get, you hear that the Arathis, they talk about the sacred flame and, And they describe it as a mixture between arcane and light energies. And that, for those of you who are really into the lore, you'll remember that's exactly what the Sunwell is now. It is arcane...
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magic and arcane magic font that was purified by, by the Holy light Velen purified it. And so I think there's, there's stuff going to be happening in the next expansion a lot with the Arathi.
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We, we, we quote unquote killed him, even though it was before that we killed him multiple times. There was always a setback though.
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But I'm playing him every week.
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No, I chuckled because I'm almost the polar opposite of what everything you're saying. I went in there thinking, oh, this is kind of a cool place. It reminds me of Nex Ramis and things we've done before, a little bit of echoes of... just other places we've been, right? And I like it, and it's cool. And so I went in with all the spider stuff.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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And then they started giving us quests, and then they started talking about each other. And I've said this in one of the videos I've done, but... Between the episodes, I cannot remember who the F any of these people are because all of their names sound exactly the same to me. It's like Zizik this and Kixifith that and Checkthar this. And I'm like, I don't know who you are. And that's a me problem.
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I'm doing really well. I have filled out my vault.
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Even more, now that you're a tank, you're leveling and questing as a prot paladin, maybe you'll get this. I hated even more the stealth stuff because I just want to drop right in the middle of everything and consecrate and wipe everyone out. Yeah.
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That's my transmog is I'm... i'm hello fall arathi all the way same i got a big i got a big old torch for a for a hammer i got a a flaming shield like you you and i were using the same shield the other day or the same look so it's it's fine i get it um i know it's just my taste i don't like the politics stuff it just is hard for me to follow i like big epic stories that that have big you know
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characters and and big personalities and everything and the the the the ashkahet stuff the nerubian stuff is not that and but some people love that and and i don't begrudge them for that like i'm glad it's in there for those people but
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I also don't think that... I really think that the raid and this first season, we're probably getting a lot of the Nerubians, and it feels like we're going to tie up their story anyway. So I'm not too upset about it. But I'm just not feeling it. And the more I get in there, the more I'm like... Let me just get this weekly thing done with and get out of here. Yeah.
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Right. Yeah. If you hover over, if you mouse over it, it'll say, Oh, complete, complete a bountiful seven tier or complete a set tier seven, uh,
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Well, good. I'm glad you like it. And there are a lot of people, I'm sure, who like it. And I'm glad they're getting it.
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It's fine, but there's nothing about it where you're just like, Whoa, it's a pretty zone, but it's, it's kind of more of the same, right?
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um yeah i realize that you'll see that in dungeons yeah um and that's because of the people like me who still love dungeons because we do mythic plus dungeons you need it to be the same yeah um for mythic plus you have to plan out what your route is you have to think about the best way to move through what you know is going to be there and then you let other things like
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like the weekly effects impact how things are going to change. There has to be some level of planning when it comes to that. And maybe I'm just thinking about it that way because that's how it's always been and that's how I've enjoyed it.
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And maybe it could still be fun if every week, you know, like with the Delves, you go into one of the Delves and there's like one of three versions of it that you'll see. It's still the same place, but, you know, whereas this corridor was locked last time, maybe the other quarter is going to be locked in. This one will be open.
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And so maybe there's something you could do with that in, in mythic plus and stuff like that. And in the regular dungeons, five man dungeons. But, um, I, I, I like the idea that they have different ways of doing things in different parts of the game. Right. And so make the mythic, make the dungeons be something that,
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you progress through and the end game and five-man content is Mythic Plus the way it's been, and it's working really well. Sure. And the Delves be for what you're talking about.
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I still think they should just lean into that. I will get a lot of emails from people who disagree with me maybe, but I think they should stop. I think they should just do away with group content and delves. Yeah, I kind of do to make them single player.
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What you do is you incentivize single player content, which they have done. And I'm looking forward to doing that. You know, there are lots of achievements that you can only get if you defeat the Delves on max level as a single player.
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tier eight but um the uh nine's unlocked for me do you have nine unlocked because mine's unlocked yeah you just won't get better gear from tier nine oh i didn't realize that they cap it there yeah i didn't know so so you you'll get achievements from doing higher tiers but if you want all you need to do is go up to tier eight and you'll get oh you'll get the best rewards well then i don't know why i tried to i tried to do a nine thinking it was going to be better
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All three rows and all nine slots, and I'm ready to talk about World of Warcraft.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I assume they'll add, you know, they'll buff that or that'll be, there'll be a reason. I bet you they'll increase the, well, they might do a whole new season with just new places to go, or they could just make more tiers. I kind of, I kind of worry that if they just add more tiers, then when does that end? But maybe it just ends at the end of the expansion. I don't know.
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And then they start over again with the new expansion.
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Yeah, I hope that they do that. But yeah, to your point and to put a cap on the Delves thing, yes, if you do Tier 8 Delves and you enjoy it, you will get, in your vault, you will get heroic raid level gear. And so that's where we're eventually going on our raid team, for example. We'll eventually get into heroic. And you can keep up, Scott, with being geared for that by doing Delves.
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And that's awesome. That's really great. Very cool.
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It's the time walking event, I believe. It's a black temple? Yeah, black temple raid. You can go back and do the black temple raid.
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I've been thinking about it too. Have you? Let's do it.
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Yeah. Get some people from the raid team, the core within. Yeah.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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I'm not going to talk too much about this because I could rant about professions forever and we do have news to talk about. But let me just say, I don't do that. I like to do crafting professions. I typically do enchanting and alchemy. And I like to craft and sell things.
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And for the past something like four or five expansions, they keep saying that they're making improvements to professions to make it so that... you'll be able to, the marketplace will be better and you'll be able to more easily make money or something like that. But for the past four or five expansions, every expansion, it's harder and harder and harder for me to make any gold.
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And I feel like it's like a one percenter problem or a situation we have going here. I feel like every time they make a change, it just makes the rich WoW player's
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richer and me i spend so much money trying this time whatever my new scheme is i think i'm gonna do to make money and it just fails every time yeah and uh i think next expansion i'm just going to do what you did just do gathering from yeah Yeah, because I would be, I'd probably have, if I'd focus on that, I'd probably be approaching like a million gold by now. And you know what?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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Saying a million gold, that's the other thing. Saying a million gold five expansions ago was a really big deal. There's like there's like half the people I know that play WoW are like have multi or multimillionaires. Oh, yeah.
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But professions are frustrating at the beginning of an expansion. It's very expensive. So here's what I'll do. I'm going to stick it out. I always do stick it out. So why don't we just... Table, the professions talk. Got it. And then next month, I'll let you know how things are going after hopefully things have settled down and we'll have, I'll have more of a thing, more things to say.
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No, I typically don't. I check in on it every once in a while. I actually thought, okay, we're going to be doing the instance and maybe I should check in more than I normally do. And I'll go in... This morning I was thinking, I'm going to go check in. I'm going to watch the stream. They cast it and everything. I'm going to go watch.
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Yeah, they're still in there. And I did, like I said, I did get to watch it. I saw that they were, they're not, right now they're not at least Liquid. Some of the other guilds are, but at least Liquid is not pushing They're not hitting the raid bosses right now.
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They've decided to take the end of this week to go and do some Mythic Plus stuff and fill out their vaults and everything to kind of get them positioned to have some better gear at the beginning after the reset tomorrow. And I think I would have watched more of this and some of the... But after about 30 minutes of watching it, and then of those 30 minutes, 10 minutes...
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or 20 minutes were watching them casting, playing, and talking about about rating and stuff. And the other 10 minutes were ads. Yeah. Um, it was, I was done. I was like, I can't do this. I'm not gonna like, it was like they, they'd talk for like three, four minutes and then it'd be like three minutes of commercials.
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So e-sports, which was, it's on their Twitch. It's the Twitch thing, right? Like it's not, it's, it's just because all Bobby, all you gotta do is sub to their channel.
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Lots of really cool planning. The big guilds that are running this, like Liquid and Echo and stuff like that, are... just playing constantly. They're rotating people in and out. They do a thing called a heroic splits, um, where, where some of them will be running heroic, the heroic version of the raid gearing up, um, where they'll, they'll split it up to, to try to be running that often.
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And then they'll have a new raid leader who didn't go in there starting the raid so they can kill the bosses again and, and try it. And they split up their, their teams in such a way where they can, they, they can provide maximum opportunity for the, the people, the right people to get, to get gear drops. Right.
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Um, and so they do that and then they go in and do mythic as of right now while we're recording, um, All the big top guilds like Echo, Method, and Liquid are all six out of eight bosses. They're now on the same one that we were on.
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Yeah, but it was surprising. They were also one-shotting a lot of these bosses. All these guilds one-shot the mythic versions of the first boss, second boss, stuff like that.
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No, no, no, no. You need to come over here. What are you doing? Come back over here.
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Yeah, these hard fights are interesting to watch and how they approach it.
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No, it was, I had a fever, like I got a cold or something. Oh, geez.
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Oh my gosh, yeah. If there's one thing that I think World of Warcraft could use more of, it's currencies.
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Wouldn't it be great if like the more currency that you had, there were like giant bags and you got encumbered and had to, you know, like, oh, I've got 60,000 resonant crystals and you had to like drag them around. Yeah.
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maybe but i was i was complaining about that a little bit to to one of the raid teams that i'm on i was talking to them saying i'm gonna uh everyone's gonna be wearing it and i was saying even me of course i'm gonna wear it but uh everyone's gonna be wearing it and they reminded me they were like it's kind of on brand for a paladin for like all of them to kind of look the same yeah you're not wrong right you'll be we'll just be like arathes everybody kind of looks the same in there
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Oh, Judgment. You're talking about the Judgment set for Paladins. Judgment set. There are a lot of iconic ones. The Hunter Tier 2 set was really cool. Oh, that's so ugly, I think. I hate the Hunter one.
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Yeah, I know. Thank goodness. Thank goodness it's 2024. Thank goodness I could fly under the radar. Exactly. But anyway. And get lots of people sick.
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No, it's fine. There are lots of really cool iconic Tier 2 sets that they're remastering completely. They're not replacing the old ones. They're making new versions of it that you'll have to earn through this event. The other cool thing they're doing is there were...
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there were classes that were not around during tier two death nights, monks, um, you know, uh, and, this monk, this monk set is beautiful, dude. The monk set looks amazing.
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So what they're doing is they decided not just to make cool looking sets, but they actually went back and said, how can we reimagine what this set would have looked like during tier two and sort of get ourselves inspired by, uh, characters in the game and stuff like that. So for example, evokers, you know, evokers were as a, as a race and everything were, uh,
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were invented, were created by Neltharion, who later became Deathwing. So the tier set for Evokers is going to be based on Neltharion, another famous black dragon from the tier two time. That's awesome. During that time. So they're reimagining some of these sets and stuff. So I think they all look really cool.
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They've told us what it is. I honestly can't remember. There's so much, you know. But they do have... Oh, it's a bird. It's another bird. It's kind of like so many birds. You're not wrong about that, Scott. They're always giving us birds. So many birds.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
They're going to have this whole celebration zone. It's sort of like a party area where you're going to a celebration party. And there's just going to be like... People you can talk to, and some of them are guest relations people that'll give you little things to do, and you can go play here and do this fun thing over here. Great.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
I'm anti this. You'd do it and you'd complain about it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
It's monthly. It's the beginning of every month. Yeah.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
It's a little weird right now. So I should let people know how I interact with Mythics. I do have a Mythic Plus team that we play once a week and we get in there and do stuff. We progress and we try to get rating and stuff like that. But my...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
primary way that I interact with mythic plus is entirely in a masochistic way because I I do I climb through the rankings and get all my gear and and higher and higher keys by doing pugs and so it's something that for some reason I really really enjoy I have this value of mine also that that I think
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
pugging dungeons in general has always made me a, has in over the years made me a better tank, for example. Um, and so it's just something that I like to, I've learned to really like to do is, uh, is, is pug through stuff and mythics in general feel really good right now. Um, in, in their variety, there are a couple of them that, that, uh,
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
that feel like they still need a little tweaking and tuning, and that's normal. So I don't try to focus too much on that early on because they're going to make tweaks. They're going to do stuff like that. Some of the dungeon bosses are doing... too many things at once or overlapping abilities in ways that are really difficult to avoid, which cause lots and lots of wipes.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
But that's all stuff that gets tweaked, so whatever. But they feel like there's a really good variety between all the different mythics. All the environments feel different. All the challenges that you have to go through in the bosses feel different. And it feels really, really good right now. I hate Siege of Boralus. Why? What's the problem there? There's just, it's chaotic.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
So the whole thing with Siege of Boralus is you're going through this town that is under attack by like, it's being sieged, right? Yeah. So it's under attack and you're trying to move through it and do all this stuff. And so you're going through the city of Boralus and there's a bunch of different paths that you don't actually take. But it looks like you can take them, so it's confusing.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
And then there's a bunch of trash mobs that you don't actually need to fight, but you can see their bars there and they light up and you can attack them, but you didn't need to because if you had just walked past them, they would have ignored you because they're already fighting another NPC. And then... It feels stressful and chaotic, and maybe that's what they were going for, but whatever.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
Maybe a little. There's a ton of trash in that place, too, and there's no amount of tweaking that'll change that. But there are a lot of dungeons in the past. The way mythics work is... The game launched with eight, the Mythic Plus season anyway, the game launched with eight new dungeons. New dungeons, yep. But during a Mythic Plus season, you only play four of them.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
Four of them are in the rotation. And the other four, because you still have eight dungeons in the Mythic Plus season, the other four come from past expansions. Oh, okay. So in this one, we're going back to Mists of Tirnascythe from Shadowlands. We're going back to the Necrotic Wake from Shadowlands, Siege of Boralus from Battle for Azeroth. And then what's the other one?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
I can't remember off the top of my head. Oh, Grim Batol. Grim Batol, yeah. I think that was Cataclysm. Yeah. And so they... You sometimes encounter some of the old issues and ways that they designed dungeons at certain times. And at the time, during Battle for Azeroth, a lot of the dungeons had a ton of trash.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
There might have been worse times back in Vanilla and Burning Crusade and stuff like that. Sure. But in what you might call the modern age, like the second half of all of that stuff, definitely Battle for Azeroth had a lot of trash. But it's okay. They increased the timer. So the other thing about Mythic+, for anybody who'd never played before, you go in and there's a timer.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
You want to beat the whole thing in a certain amount of time. If you do, then you get more rewards at the end. And the key that you use to increase the difficulty gets leveled up. And then you can go back in. and increase the difficulty a little bit higher. And the higher the difficulty, the better rewards you get. So you keep going back over and over and doing it. And that's what I love about
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
And they tweak the challenge of the experience a little bit from week to week as well. So for the first week, the boss... So they'll alternate back and forth. First week, the boss's health and damage are really, really high. And then the next week... the boss's health and damage are back to normal levels, but all the trash health and damage will be high. And so it's a different challenge.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
In the first version, when the bosses are dangerous, you can blow through all the trash really, really fast, and then you have to be really careful, and the mechanics of the bosses are super important to follow, right? And there's not a lot of wiggle room.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
um but when the trash is really really high you have to go a little bit more slowly carefully you can't pull as big a pools to get to the to the bosses but when you get to the bosses it's almost like it's almost like the boss is not even the boss the trash is the boss on those weeks you know yeah um and so it's and then on top of that you have this this uh this new feature called zalatatz bargain which adds a new whole new feature to the thing so this week what it is is
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
10 of these little orbs pop out and they all start casting an ability that if the orb finishes the cast, then it will buff the enemies that you're fighting. Bosses, trash, whatever. And when you interrupt the orb, the orb explodes and gives your team a buff. Oh, wow. So you have to kind of figure out, how am I going to build my...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
talent load out to best be able to have plenty of interrupts to hand so that our whole team can handle all 10 of these are we gonna are we gonna be able to cover all those how we're gonna coordinate that and it's just more and so next week that will
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
challenge won't be there it'll be a new zal's hats bargain and there are four different ones that they'll rotate between yeah and so um that just adds a whole nother layer of interesting challenge sure um so it seems like it seems like pugs would be that'd be a challenge to pug that kind of thing though It is. It is. And that's part of what I like about it is having to deal with that frustration.
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The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
To me, it's kind of like, yeah, a lot of these people get to the plus 10 keys, plus 11, and they did a great job. And they coordinated really well with their teams. And I do also like to have a team. I said that. And we do like to try to get there. But being able to say that I got like 2,500 rating...
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
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or or even 3000 rating and i got all of the the keys up to plus 10 and i did it all in pugs it's just kind of like yeah next level like another feather in my cap that i really like to be able to say yeah no i get it i think that's great um is i got a question does dawnbreaker uh in mythic mode of any sort or mythic plus mode
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
So what, one of the challenges is, One of the what it's not like an explicit challenge that they bake into the game, but one of the challenges that is sort of an emergent challenge as a result of how mythic pluses work is figuring out the route that you have to take.
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The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
through the dungeon yeah you go here you move here you skip this trash you take this trash you don't need to worry about those they're not worth the effort because the other thing you have to do is before the dungeon is complete not just you not only do you have to kill all the bosses but you have a percentage bar that you have to fill up called the forces in other words a certain number of a certain amount of the trash has to be killed you can't skip everything
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
But you want to maximize your efficiency for speed. You don't want to kill more than you need to. So ideally, you get exactly 100% forces filled up. So you have to figure out that route. Dawnbreaker is... a crazy challenge. Because during the first week or two, part of what you're doing, especially as a tank, Scott, is learning the route.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
Because everyone, I heard you talking about this on Core, on the Core show, not too long ago, about how Everyone is looking to you as the tank to know where to go. Yep. And so you have to learn the routes. Yeah. And Dawnbreaker is nuts because you could, there's the whole city underneath you and you can land anywhere. Yeah.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
It's a different challenge. It's really interesting. I kind of like it. I've been trying to learn where the best places to land are. Now, Encore, John, I know mentioned that he saw arrows telling him where to go. That was not something that was patched in like he thought it might have been. When you're doing the follower dungeon, they just tell you where to go.
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The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
Yeah, but when you're doing heroic, and especially Mythic+, not only do they not tell you, and it's not just to be like Dix and say, like, yeah, you got to figure this out on your own. That's not the reason, really. It's because... different groups can go different places. It's really kind of part of the challenge is to figure out what works best for you.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
Do you want to land here and take out this trash and then go to this boss? Or do you want to land over here because it's just easier because you have polymorph that you can use as a mage? So they can't tell you where to go next, right?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
So the last thing I'll say about Mythics, because I'm really enjoying it. So I guess two things. First of all, I'm going to start this coming week. I'm going to try to stream some of my Mythic plus pug journey. Nice.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
You know what? I was going to ask you, which one do you think is better nowadays, Twitch or YouTube? Well, for me, my... For games. Let's say for gaming.
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The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
Yeah, yeah. The Timeless Isles.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
Because that was really cool and exciting there too. You'd run around and there'd be random treasures. That's when the treasures really started in the world because now they're a permanent fixture. They're all over the place all the time. But you're right. Those types of things make the world feel more dynamic. You're flying through it and it makes you want to pay attention.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
Well, so I'm probably going to make an attempt to switch over to YouTube. I've been doing it on Twitch, so I might start on Twitch. It's Bobby Franks, twitch.tv slash Bobby Franks. Cool. But I've been thinking about switching over to YouTube anyway, so I probably will eventually do that. But for now, check out that if you want to do that.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
But the last thing I had to say was I've got a beef with Delves, and that is that... I've noticed at the beginning of it, normally at the beginning of an expansion, the Mythic Plus world of Pugs is actually pretty good. Groups are more tolerant. Everybody knows you're learning.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
You need to get in there and do the stuff so they're willing to tolerate people learning things because you want to fill out your vault and all that kind of stuff. I've noticed a lot more... impatience and people just dropping after one or two wipes um in in mythic plus and i think it's because of delves you can just go into a delve And get what you want.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
So people are just way less patient with Mythic+.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
So once you get up to the high keys, like 7, 8, 9, that probably will go away because you still need to do it. Or at least it'll be less. But climbing the keys, getting your keys leveled up and everything is a little bit more of a slog now. And I think it's because of Delves.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
It makes you want to look around and at least observe your mini-map and then be like, ooh, there's something there and dive down and check it out and and, and find things, you know, it, it feels, it feels more, it makes the world feel a little bit more alive. Like, like you're, you're in it and you're not just passing through it.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
Like the day of or the day before or something.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
If you were to come to them and propose this, they might die laughing.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
Which I'm not making fun of this person because all they're doing is saying like... Because in a way, from one perspective, you can think about this as that, right? Like maybe we all felt like we had to pay for the early access. Obviously not all of us, but a lot of us felt like we kind of had to. Sure. So for many of us, the early access price was the price of the game, right?
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
And then all of you other... Probably smarter people really were paying less to start later. And so that's one perspective of what happened, right?
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The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
You know, it's going to take some extra money for us to hire some people to come and turn the switches to turn the thing on. So we got to pay for that. We got to pay them money. So if you just give us a little bit more, we might be able to... That's not what's happening. No, that's not what they're doing. That's not it. They're saying,
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
They're saying, oh, they have some extra money in their wallet. I wonder how we can get that out.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
make making world of one if there's one way to bring the cost talk speaking of professions bringing the cost of maths down yeah is if everyone can just play in bed that's right dude how much do i like i'm not going to use this probably in a raid situation or maybe i would i don't know but i would definitely use it when i'm just flying around looking for nodes
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
Yeah, and then you pop, everybody's putting more stuff on the auction house, and then Bobby can make our potion cauldrons for a much lower price. That's right.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
Look forward to, I might be talking some Arathi and predictions for lore stuff for patrons.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
It's a lot. It's been an exciting month. And I think we did our best to talk about... Talk about the things we were excited about. That's right.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
and yeah it was slightly yeah slightly and i thought it was just more complicated and i was less engaged in it um this time at the beginning at the beginning of all the vault stuff it was a little bit more complicated i think it was introduced in the uh in the that that when the troll the zandalari people got introduced what was that that one was called a battle for battle for azeroth that's the one
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
I was going into it. I was I was a little worried. All right. I've I've been I've been tanking for a long time. I've been raiding with a team for a long time and we go through heroic and do all that kind of stuff. And I've had brand new tanks before that I've helped. And so going into it, I was like, well.
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The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
well scott's never done this before he's never even touched a tank before i really haven't no it's a completely different mindset yeah and um it's scott hasn't been raiding in a while like has he does he even remember how to raid the last time i raided was battle for no did i even raid in battle for azeroth did i no i the last time i like really raided was legion Yeah. Yeah.
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The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
Wow. Yeah. It's been a bit, you know, so we went in there and, um, and I was ready. I, I, I'm not there to like, to like, you know, destroy things and come back, you know, like I'm not a hardcore raider, uh, or anything, but I do enjoy progression and all that. So I was, but I was ready to, you know, we're going to take it slow and, uh, you know, people are going to be learning.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
The team was getting together for the first time. None of us had rated together before. or at least not as a team. And so I was ready for it to be nice and slow. And I was talking to Tanner. Tanner was raid leading. We know Tanner. And him and I were talking and thinking, well, we'll probably get stuck on the second boss.
The Instance: World of Warcraft Podcast
The Instance 669: Bug Hunters
We might get through it towards the end of the night and get to the third boss. But we've made it. We downed six of eight of those bosses on the first night. Some of those are challenging tank fights, Scott. You did a great job.