One month in, and we are here to go deep! How is season 1? How's the story? How's the game doing on the whole? Let's do this! More on early access, Earthen missed opportunities, raiding as a tank for the first time, Delves after a month, zones a month in, the 20th year anniversary event, Race to World First check-in, Mythic+ talk, your calls and emails and more! Even a Mod of The Month Visit from Patrick! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
the world of warcraft podcast so you don't have to this is the instance so
Well, well, well. What a difference a month makes, people. Oh my gosh. I know, right? It's the instance. It's me, Scott Johnson, and Bobby Frankenberger. Bobby, welcome back. It's another month, man. How are you doing?
I'm doing really well. I have filled out my vault.
Mm-hmm.
All three rows and all nine slots, and I'm ready to talk about World of Warcraft.
Okay, good. Mine is almost full. I'm missing two dungeons. Two dungeon runs to fill it out. And then what? Monday's our... That's our next Vault Day, right?
Or no, tomorrow.
Sorry, Tuesday. What am I saying? Today is Monday. We're recording this on a Monday, everybody. And Tuesday, you get your vaults. You know, that's a thing that's relatively new in the game. And I feel like doesn't get enough praise as a fun system. It works differently in Dragonflight, though.
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
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.
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.
Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I also think it's less even if you consider yourself a casual player. It's still it still means, you know, you've got to play the game. And you've got to play various systems in the game. And of course, Delves are now part of it. So that automatically makes it easier if you're running Delves as a solo player to have your vault filled out.
But I think I just like the motif of there's a building. And in there, we've got banking dudes. We've got giant guild vaults. And then on this far wall, there's this huge dwarven forged gigantic freaking bank vault looking thing.
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?
In this case, yes. In this expansion, yes. Less so in Dragonflight, but part of that was... I mean, I think you mentioned it, but Dragonflight, didn't they require some PvP content or you had to play some PvP to get in?
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.
Yes. And that just bummed me out because I'm kind of a completionist and I would rather see that whole grid done. So now that they've sort of excised that from there, I'm sure someone out there is mad about this. It has zero effect on me. It's only positive for me. I don't want to speak for everybody. But and I've even run a battleground since this. Since this expansion. Yeah, just one. Just one.
And I did really poorly. One more than me. I was reminded, oh, yeah, I'm not very good at that in here. And I know it has its place, clearly. There's very, very hardcore players who love nothing but PvP in the game. I am the flip side of that. I don't care about it. I don't want it.
I don't put war mode on ever unless there's a really compelling reason to do it, like some kind of achievement or an amount I can only get because I had it on or something. but the, the concept as it is currently constituted of the vault, I think is a really strong addition to the game. I hope, you know, they'll probably still iterate on it, but I hope this is kind of the model moving forward.
And the fact that Delves are a part of it now and Delves appear to be by all accounts, uh,
um a permanent fixture now or this is intended to be one it's not you know like island expeditions or even torgast even though there's all there's bits and pieces of those things in this it still feels like this is the this is what the long road is meant to look like for delves and i like that because it gives some permanence to the way things like the vault work and other ways of unlocking stuff and when they're what do they call when they're when they're glowy but
Plentiful Delves? What are they called? Bountiful. Bountiful.
Thank you.
Why don't I remember that? There's a city north of me called Bountiful. I should remember that. Anyway, they have roller coasters there. The important thing is, though, to remember, folks, get your stuff done so you, on Tuesday, tomorrow, you can hop in there and get some pretty sweet gear.
I also really like the upgrade system throughout the week where even if you fill out all your slots or whatever you fill out, it'll tell you what you can expect. at the stage you're at, but you can see also that if you go do say a higher tier delve, that will bump your item level guarantee up to whatever six, 10 or whatever it is.
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,
delve and you'll get this much of an item level option in the in the vault it works really well so i i guess the best way to to dive into this episode today is we're gonna have to tackle a month's worth of content we're not here to you know fill you in on all the little nooks and crannies or what patch did this or that during that time or whatever but i can tell you right off the bat like as a big overall take here i have not played this much wow since 2008
and uh everything since around that time i played but i wasn't like hardcore like checking in all the time um doing my dailies the way i should this sort of stuff this this particular expansion drives me in those ways in uh well and above what it has in the past i'm not sure what the magic sauce is part of it might just be my renewed excitement and that's all it takes that's possible but
But I also think the way the game's structured from overall world level stuff all the way down to very specific things you need to do in the game, they're all so wired well together now that they feel like a cohesive whole instead of these disparate things scattered around.
so in other words i think i may have even said this during early access in another video or something it wasn't here because we didn't have the game yet when you and i did this it was right before your cruise which by the way i hope is a good time do you have a good time on your cruise we should it was i did have a good time i got sick on the cruise but uh oh no that's not good but but i made it through and and did have a good time you get uh like motion like a choppy day on the on the seas or something is that what happened
No, it was, I had a fever, like I got a cold or something. Oh, geez.
Um, yeah. Well, then you're, you're, uh, well, you're, you're, you were, what's, what's the word? Patient zero on a ship. If this was 2019 or 2020, they would have parked the boat and never let you off. So.
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.
What I like is, for example, so what I had said early on is how it seemed like chaos in that upper, I forgot the name now, lights, not lights reach, whatever it is, maybe it is lights reach.
but it's in Hallowfall and it's that zone with all of the farms and the light things you got to toss your bits into and, you know, put three and everybody's little thing and it pops out a dude and he gives you a daily and all that. At first I thought that was chaos incarnate and I never wanted to go there again. And now I love it there. I love it with alts. I love it with my main.
I love it as a place to grind out some sweet faction rep. It's a great place to just go and knock things out. And I like the vibe of it. And so for me, that stuff's more organic to the world than it's ever been. And while I'm out there, I'm running into other opportunities on the way. These disturbed earth things that appear like little purple rocks from the sky.
If you're using handy notes or something, they're even more specific than that. But those things... are often just full of like globs of wax. You can sell the, what's his name? Uh, you got, you know, sometimes it's just rep. Sometimes it's gold. Sometimes it's other stuff. That's how I ended up with, uh, with that mount. I got the, um, I forgot the name of the thing, the link, something links, uh,
Anyway, I love just finding those. And sometimes they're challenging because you've got to fight a thing. And sometimes you've got to catch wax as it flies out of the air. And then sometimes it's worse than wax. It's some kind of horrible, toxic thing, and you've got to avoid it. And there's really no reward at all. It was just a trap.
And something about those, I know it's a small thing, but scattering those around like that in the world as you're just getting things done, Add something to this experience. Adds a kind of random treasure thing that I haven't felt since maybe Pandaria and the patch that added that island. What was that called?
Yeah, yeah. The Timeless Isles.
Timeless Isles, yeah.
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.
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.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's easy to, well, I've said this a thousand times, so apologies to everybody who's hearing me say it again, but the strength of the game for me has always been the world's the most important bit.
And everything else from that feeds into other stuff, whether it's very specific things like I want to achieve this with mythics or I want to get real specific and down and dirty with these achievements or whatever. Like there's a vast amount of things to do, but really everything hinges on the world being as compelling as it can be. And this expansion in particular, there've been others.
Pandaria was one for me that really stuck out early Lich King. And I also think that, yeah, Legion sticks around. So does Dragonfly for that matter. I love the zones. But when the world is at its best and it's funneling me toward fun activities to do within said world, then World of Warcraft is at its best. That's when I am most engaged. And right now I'm feeling that engagement more than ever.
And it comes down to so many factors. It's music in the game is some of the best ever in this game. Incredible stuff. And that's all under the tutelage of a brand new music director who just moved up for this expansion and I think absolutely killed it on overall direction and specific tracks.
The music in Hallowfall alone is some of the best stuff ever, some of the best tavern music in the history of the game. All of that stuff, I just don't like to minimize them because those things make my cohesive world work. It's not discordant. I don't feel like I'm being taken out of the world like I have in maybe past expansions. I never felt that cohesion, for example, in Shadow.
What's it called? Shadowlands. Shadowlands. Yeah. And Shadowlands was a bummer in lots of ways, but the world wasn't... I didn't feel grounded to this place the way I do in this. And ironically, we're flying from the get-go and I still feel that way. Part of that is because these zones are massive and that helps, but...
Um, that's just kind of my big overall, we'll get into some of the specifics here in a second. Um, and I'd like to hear your overall as well. Uh, but real quick, I want to get this out before I forget about it. We gave away a bunch of stuff last, uh, uh, during the month, started a contest on the show last month. And we were able to give away a ton of cards, a whole bunch of codes for game time.
Big thanks to Doghouse Systems again for that. And we gave away a copy of the game, heroic edition of the game. Happy people all around. Everybody's gotten their stuff now, both physical and digital. And I just wanted to say thanks everybody for participating. We'll have more of that in the future. So keep an eye out for that. And... we tanked together the other night and a raid team.
That was fun, man. A brand new raid team. What did you think about that experience? Especially cause you were being saddled with a pretty newbie tank and in the form of me, because I've never tanked 20 years of this game, never tanked before. Suddenly I'm like, all right, I'm going to do it. And we did it. So how do you feel?
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.
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.
Yeah.
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 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.
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.
Yeah. Here's what I think the magic is in this or the reason it worked out. I didn't go in as blind as I felt like I might be because I spent weeks even prior to the expansion launch getting my head around this paladin for the first time and then doing a ton of heroic dungeons. And that means tail end heroics for dragon flight.
And then as soon as the new, new thing got there and I got to level 80, it was like, all right, we're back to it. So I tanked a ton of normal and heroic content and it turns out that's good practice for even the big show, which when you've got your 25 friends there or whatever. And, uh, and it, and it just kind of clicked with me. It's weird.
Cause I've, this has been the most intimidating, uh, job in the game. Healer's not far behind it. I still don't know how those people can not lose their minds. I don't know how they do it.
Yeah.
So big, big ups to everybody out here. Their heels, their, their team. Well, but, um, I just thought, well, there's no better way to do this than to just go for it. Well, the good news is if you just play the tank, and I also mainlined the protection spec through most of the PBE content that I led to 80. And while you might say, well, you're going to kill stuff slower.
Sure, but I'll kill 20 mobs slower than the single target that some of you DPSers are doing. So that's how I would play. I'd gather a million mobs around me and kill them all at once. And often I'd rip through quests very quickly as a result. This is not new to people who maybe main spec tank. But for me, it was like this temptation of, should I just move over to Ret Pally for a little while?
And should I grind that way and then worry about this? But instead, I was like, nope, you're going to learn... what it means to taunt at the right time and pull this that way and kite this guy the way you need to. So when the time comes, there'll be in these innate instincts and you'll have to adjust. And there's some things you still don't know, but you'll get it. And it turned out really well.
I think a huge part of it is we have an excellent team overall. Like everybody was kicking butt for sure. For sure. But we one shot, what one through four, uh,
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...
that's a crazy fight those two can eat a turd i freaking hate them they're really it's really crazy it's fun but it's crazy in there and that's where we ended the night about a three-hour run but to get eight of you know two eight of nine in the first night albeit on normal is a is bodes really well for all of us because i think as soon as we hit you know we gear up to heroic we're gonna have a great time in there
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
chit-chatting while we're doing it and and then i love focusing and and repeatedly dying and trying to figure out what we're doing wrong like that's just that's i love that yeah i love it it's fun and um i had fun and and by the time we'd at least taken down maybe two of those bosses i felt like i could relax and not be so uptight about whether i was going to blow it or not
Yeah. On the first boss, you forgot or something was going wrong and you didn't ever taunt the boss.
I don't know what happened there. That was still janky, but I also reassigned it and it worked every time after that. So I don't know if I had that.
So once you figured out how to taunt, things went a lot smoother.
Yeah, it went fine. But I can't wait for our regular nights. We're going to
you know be doing these on the weekly um for those wondering if we are going to stream this stuff maybe not right away but that may happen we'll see um but grats to that whole team we had such such a good time in this week i guess very fun i guess friday what we reset and go again right start from the top every week it'll be different if if you can extend the lockout you can decide you want to start on the same boss again but that's a choice that you make and usually people don't make that until they're
trying to make a final push and people have, you want to go back and get gear from those first bosses. Right.
That's the thing. I got no gear, no meaningful gear from any of those encounters. Um, but lots of us did. So I'm really hoping Friday will be my, uh, happy gear day. We'll find out. Um, anyway, it went really well. Uh, and again, huge thanks to that team. We are called the core within.
Yeah.
It's pretty stupid, but I love it.
It was my idea, so don't call it stupid.
Oh, it's not stupid at all. It's wonderful and inspired.
Because it's the core guild, right? Yeah.
I do have, okay, so let's get into the overall on the month in bits and pieces. One thing I wanted to say early on is that the early access thing happened before, or excuse me, after the show had aired, I think a day later. I can't remember.
Yeah, we were recording the day before early access.
Yeah, and it was a bummer for you because you had to leave and couldn't really even take advantage of it.
Yeah, I got to play like an hour and a half of early access.
Yeah, that sucked. But I have an opinion about it now, and it may surprise people what... I have to say, because I thought I was going to be really glad they offered the option to play early access. Sure. I think that... I think it could be way better next time, but I think it was kind of bad this time. And the reason I think it was bad...
The full story, as would be presented campaign-wise to players on day one normal, not early access, was not fully in the game yet. So we all hit a bunch of artificial walls and went, oh, that's not here yet. Or I guess I'm done with Thrall for now. And you weren't even really sure of this.
unless you were really paying attention to news and stuff, but you didn't know what was even going to launch on the day one and how much, what's missing here and why is it missing? Is Blizzard like cramming? You know? I don't know. I couldn't, I couldn't really get my head around what the deal was there, but I don't, I think it was a vastly better experience than,
The day everyone played the game and the fullness of that campaign was ready to play. Yeah. And it felt less empty. It felt less. What's the word? I felt like I was in a PTR servers, how it felt for a few days. Yeah.
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
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.
Yeah, I think that's who gained advantage from it. I mean, I guess I suppose I got some of that because it got me there. I got to 80 pretty quick. And then, of course, they nerfed it. They didn't nerf it. They buffed it, buffed the game for launch day because they wanted to slow down progression. People are getting there too fast.
to be honest with the alts i've been playing i haven't really noticed that big a difference you know people were kind of freaking out about that i don't it wasn't that noticeable to me whatever they did it didn't seem to make a big deal but but then again i leveled this tank in a tank spec and then brought in dps alts and killed things quicker so maybe it was just my perception but
Anyway, I don't think they should do that. If they do it again, I think this game needs to be ready to go in all of its finished features for a normal day one launch for most people. That should be your early access state of the game. If not, then what am I paying? What? Forty bucks for whatever it was.
additional yeah to get it early i mean some of this some of the extras are nice the the sky rook mount thing what are they called whatever rooks the white the blue birds with the electrical business you have all the oh yeah whatever they're called Electro Birds. Electro Birds. That's an awesome mountain. I use it a ton.
But all that being said, I just think that the game felt... I felt like I was still beta testing and it didn't feel great. And there were just some broken stuff. Like I would talk to a...
you know no take candle kobold somewhere and he'd say yes treasure or whatever and do a thing and then i would accept its quest and the quest just straight up to never show up and i would reset it and it still wouldn't show up so there's a lot of that going on um also i had a bug where If I mounted, oh, I know what it was. The Diablo 4 mount, it's like the three-headed dog bonus mount.
I love that mount, especially on my Warlock. He's just awesome. But the problem is that when you mount him and then you start moving before he's fully done animating or before the bar fills, you fall off of it and now you're invisible. And it won't fix unless you re-log into the game. You can't do a reload slash reload. You have to re-log into the game or you have to zone in somewhere.
So I got to go find a load screen, which actually is harder and wow than you think, you know?
You couldn't do like a reload UI?
I tried that. Slash reload did not work. And I tried it over and over. And that never worked. And I tried disabling mods, re-enabling them, reloading the UI again. Nothing did it. And it was my shield and a hammer just floating out there. I don't know what other people... I'm guessing other people see the full model. It's not a problem. It's something on the client. Sure.
But now that seems to be gone. It seems to be worked fine. So there's just all this stuff was happening during early time where I just was like, I just spent 40 bucks to do what exactly? I guess get ahead on leveling. But then people like you who were even gone a week had no problem catching up. I don't think that was even an issue.
I think next time, unless they're explicit about fixing some of this, I don't think I'd do it again. Yeah.
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.
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.
It's more revenue stream for a game that hasn't changed their monthly price since launch.
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.
Yeah, I think early access on something like, you know, just pick any other game. The Elden Ring makes sense to me. It's primarily a single player experience and, you know, the game is just the game and there it is and it's done. There might be a patch, but it's not, you know, the functionally the game is there. MMOs are just too far, wide, deep and tall, like so much there.
There's no way that you're going to get in. You're going to get the core thing and you're going to be able to get started, which I did. And that felt fine. But it also just felt like all the gates were in place. No gates had been lifted. No time gates, no progression gates. All the gates are down. So you're in a mall with like three stores that are open. That's how it felt.
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.
Yeah, you're like, I really need to go down to Hobby Lobby. No, it's not even close to Hobby Lobby. What's the one where they get all the goth shirts? Oh, yeah, Hot Topic. Hot Topic. I got to go into Hot Topic. Nope, the fence is down. I'll wait until I roll. But I paid $40 to go to Hot Topic and it wasn't open. That's how it felt.
I don't know why I'm using Hot Topic or why Hobby Lobby even came up. I don't even like that place. Well, anyway, so that's my only thought on that. I otherwise have had nothing but positive experiences, and I have loved this expansion so far. I've loved the story. I've loved everything about it. I do think there is a missed opportunity I want to bring out on top here.
I haven't talked about this anywhere else. They missed an opportunity with the earthen. Every expansion, it's either like new race, new class, sometimes a combination of the two, pandarens and monks, for example. Most of the time, though, it's like, well, here's your demon hunter and good news, bad news, only night elves and blood elves can be that thing.
In the case of the last expansion, you got your dragon folks and they got to be a new class. That was a lot like pandaria. But it's usually every other, right? It's like new races, new class, new race, new class. But with sub races and everything else, I feel like they've gotten a little more fluid with it. Here's the missed opportunity. This game introduced the earthen.
So the horde finally have a version of dwarves. And for the most part, I think they're well received. I think Alliance people are just kind of like, oh, more dwarves, huh? Big deal. But for us, it's like, oh, no, man, freaking dwarf. This is great. We don't have these. But they missed an opportunity. The lore goes so deep and so awesome on how these are like, literally, they're called earthen.
They live mostly underground and they dig and mine and are constantly... Doing things that evoke earth and mud and stone and all that. Yeah, yeah. And you don't release this expansion with a Thurgis class, some kind of earth magic class. Now, I know all you shaman out there going... What about us? We have Earth things. I'm not saying you're one little aspect.
I'm saying something that is a focused Thurgist. It's like the earthquakes. And again, I know there's some of that with Shaman. But everything has to do with rock and stone. Yeah. What were they thinking? I mean, I know that you can only do so much for expansion. You got a lot of new systems this time. But I am literally bummed. that that wasn't a thing because I would be leveling one right now.
It would be amazing.
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.
Yeah, even just a secondary, like two classes. Do like you did with Demon Hunters. We don't need maybe three. So give me a tank spec, which makes sense for a big earthy dude.
yeah or uh that or maybe dps but maybe even some kind of healing thing maybe it's more utilitarian like providing instead of heels or providing stone shields that well like i said the rune carving right you're like you put you plop runes on the ground that people can stand in and and do stuff and great idea it's a great idea what would they think you know what i bet if we could ask the right people they'd say oh well this was on the whiteboard we just didn't get to it or something
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.
But for whatever reason, it's really hard.
Yeah. I agree. All right, well, let's get down into the dirt where these guys would go if there was such a class, and that is the newest system in the game, the Delves. Overall, I think Delves are really great, but I did not have that impression at first. My first impression was, oh, well, these are going to get boring quick because I don't see a lot of variation in here.
But here's where I was wrong. The variation, maybe if you ran only at Tier 3 for the rest of your life, you're going to limit your variations. But when you go up in the tiers... And by the time I got to 6, 7, and 8, it was like wildly different what you were doing in these same Dells, which may share similar layouts.
But they would throw new mechanics, new reasons to be there, new quests to do while you're in there. And also, it's very generous with giving you gear commensurate with the tier level you choose. And I have very quickly shifted from these are okay to this might be my favorite thing in years that the game has done.
And I've been curious the whole time, cause you and I haven't really talked about it in depth. What do you think of delves and how they've been executed?
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...
You have to be running a plus seven mythic to get the same vault rewards as tier eight delves that you can do solo.
Yeah. Even more so now because they've nerfed it for solo and buffed it for multiplayer in there.
Right. Which is what they should do.
I think these should be focused on single player, but anyway.
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,
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
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.
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?
Like he would get turned?
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.
I feel like it was about a week there of chaos in the month that just felt like they weren't sure what was going on. But I feel it feels pretty solid right now. I was also around for one of these runs where I did two people, and it took us longer to take that boss down together than it did with me on my own. And I think that's how it should be, right?
I don't want to go in there and just chip away, even if it's not really hurting me that much. I don't want to chip away in an eternal freaking damage sponge. That's not fun. I can think of plenty of other things I'd rather be doing than that. And I feel like they've balanced that out pretty well since.
And to my luck, most of these problems were happening when I was maybe running up to tier three and only doing it here and there. I was doing other stuff. So really, it's been post all those fixes that I've enjoyed it the most. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's really strong. I would like to see more, even more variety, maybe less spider shit. You know, there's things about it.
There's a lot of spider shit, Bobby. A lot in there. Spider webs, spiders themselves, big old orb weavers that are a pain in the ass. Like, I get it. This is an expansion where we're doing a lot of spider things. And for the most part, I'm happy with it. But I think the Delves, I wish the Delves were just a little less on theme for that. I wish they were maybe... Here's just a delve.
It's like a dungeon. You know, it's not meant to tie into Zalatath or any of her bull crap. This is just a room full of shit I got to do. So your experience may vary out there, everybody. But I think overall, though, I think Delves is a strong addition to this game, and I hope they keep tweaking it.
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.
Encourage me to go in there more often and also make it easier for me to grind coffer keys because I don't like the current way of doing that. It's not my favorite thing in the world. You get them from various activities, but the one you get them from the most is those memory deals. What are they called? They've been calling it since pre-patch. What the hell is the stupid blue memory
Oh, whatever it is. I know what you're talking about.
You find those bubbles on the overworld. You go out, you click it, you go in there, you kill a bunch of stuff. Those always drop a ton of those fragments, but you need a hundred fragments to get a single key. It's a little grindy. And I don't like doing delves unless there are, uh, the bigger coffers in there. Like I want to, I want the big ones and nothing feels worse.
By the way, I did this the other day. I hovered over some stuff on the map and it said, Oh, you've got like three keys. You're good. Then I forgot logged in as my hunter and I hover over the same things. I'm like, I'm gonna go do those as the hunter. And I forgot, I don't have the keys.
yeah my paladin has the keys so i so i go down there i do an entire run because i'm just being stupid tier eight the whole thing get to the end i'm like sweet gonna find that big fat chest in there sure enough there was i'm like all right here's my thing i run around pick up gold with my feet that's first thing i'm very methodical about this and then i go open the two stupid little candle boxes and they're fine i get some rep whatever and then i'm like all right
the big box. And I right click on it says, you don't have any coffer keys. And I'm like, shit. And there was nothing I could do.
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?
And I think when you're choosing your tier, there is some language there in red that says you'll do better if you have keys or something. Just so you know. But it's not... If you're used to just getting in, getting out, getting in, you're just not paying attention. And I felt like an idiot. But whatever. I got, you know... I cleared it.
I got a, what do you call it, a bump on the vault, you know, just for doing it. So there's other ways to get those rewards. And that's the other thing I really like about the expansion so far is everything seems to be contributing to a greater whole. And the war bands stuff is awesome. I want to play alts way more than I usually do, like way more.
I do think it's weird that if they haven't done the story quests, they're gated from a lot of things that come out of the story quests or unlock because of them. So, for example, they just launched, was it yesterday or the day before, the story mode raid thing, which is really just the last thing.
some lead up quests and then the last encounter of the raid the current raid yeah yeah but done in a kind of a story way almost like follow a dungeon way it's not hard it's just cool to see it mechanically and everything and there's some story there but um my my beef with all of that was well a i would like to see more of this and see the entire raid that way would be fun um
I think I understand why not, though. That's a massive ton of content. It will take people a long time. They'd probably rather have you LFR in there anyway for that. But what was my point? I had a point that I was heading to there. Boy, what a great point it was I had going. It must have been really important. I think I was making the point that I'm going through all that.
Oh, I can't do that on alts until they have also maxed out the main campaign story. Yeah. Yep. That's a little lame, especially it only feels lame because you're giving me all this other shared stuff through war bands.
Yeah.
And then this one thing you're like, no, I'm sorry. You got to go do, you know, got to go hang out with thrall and Anduin and everybody and do their crap.
Feels a little arbitrary sometimes. Yeah.
Yeah. But I mean, honestly, I have to say I'm impressed with how much, how many of the systems do jive now because wow, for its entire history has always felt disjointed in that way. It's just like, oh, I don't have enough rep on this character. So I got to go redo all these things. The fact that they're sharing so much of what they do share, I should really be grateful.
So trying to be more thoughtful about that stuff. Speaking of story, let's talk about it. A lot of stuff missing in early access. Again, not my favorite thing about it, but once things kicked off, I really like where everything went. One real strength at this time versus previous efforts.
Although I shouldn't say this has always been true, but it feels like when somebody's got a text bubble above their head and you talk to them and they do the stay a while and listen thing. It's usually fine, but it uses an ad much for me in the past. This expansion has so many amazing dialogue moments between characters. You just have to click them and listen.
And I am telling you out there, do not skip those. Even like the final one with Anduin and Thrall up on the hill. Maybe the best one. It's great. And what they do leading to that is pretty great. But when it's done and you do the optional thing, that it actually really gets great.
And I'm torn as to whether that's good or not, that people aren't, not forced, but they're not going to get that unless they make a choice to do that. And some people choose not to do it based on previous experience. Like, no, these aren't ever that good. I don't want to sit and listen to them talk. Or often it's not voiced in the past, right? It's usually just text bubbles.
but these are voiced and they're incredibly well done. And they add so much context to the story. Like that's how I did the story this time. I listened to everything, read everything like super, super into it. And I think they're killing it. I think this is the best it's been in a long while. You know, you still have a lot of questions and loose ends.
You know, there's still some, I got questions about why everyone's feeder bare feet in this movie. There's constant movie, this game and this game, everyone's got bare feet. What's that about?
Yeah. There are so many, so many cut scene shots of Zalatath's feet all the time.
Yeah. Oh, and I'm sorry. I mentioned earlier the spider queen lady is Zalatath. I mix their names up all the time. That's not what I meant. I meant the other one. What is it?
answer x she's the one that killed her mom and the one uh yeah thing she's kind of she's pretty rude um but anyway yeah zalatath uh big time foot stuff i'm watching this going does is tarantino like a wow fan and like what's going on here new new wow cinematic director yeah yeah you never know um you're overall on the on the story as a whole
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.
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.
You mentioned story mode reading.
Oh yeah. Can we talk about that for a second? What do you, what you, I did it last night. So I'm curious what you think before I say anything, cause I'll bet we're on the same page.
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.
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...
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.
It's not that the culmination of the story and the faction leaders in the Spider-Town coming together and talking after... All that stuff's great. You'll get that same shit at the end of when we beat it for real. When we do our normal completion, we're going to see the same story. So it's not like that changes because of the way you watched it. It's also just that encounter.
There's some lead up like... Outside, you're like, oh, we hear rumors of an uprising. Go do all these things. You do like these four or five quests. And by the way, finding about this is something you either read online or your friend told you because the starting of the quest at a spider on the whole other side of Dornagal.
who's just hanging out over there, and it's not even like the shielded quest symbol. It's just a little good old-fashioned thing. And so I walked right past him at first going, I don't want to take another spider quest. What are you doing here? Get out of here. And then I realized, oh, no, that's where this thing starts. So I'm with you. It's a little bit of a letdown.
It basically felt like an experiment to say, the follower dungeon system, I wonder if we could do that with raids. Here's our first stab at that. It's the final encounter. And it plays out fine in that regard. If they want the entire raid to... have a follower version of the raid at some point, even if it's time delayed so that, you know, all the hardcores get to do what they want first. Yeah.
Thumbs up. Go that. Do it. Give people a chance.
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.
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.
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?
Yeah. There was no, and there was never a chance, no matter what role you were playing. D DBM is still yelling at me during this fight.
Right.
So I'm like, you know, getting up close and I'll say, run away or get away or the, you know, uh, D uh, debuff this or whatever. He was yelling stuff at me.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I realized, and I'm reacting to it. I'm going, well, yeah, let's get the hell out of that. That looks bad. Whatever it is. And then I started to realize it's not doing anything to me. I'm not dying. I'm not even coming close to like losing health. I don't think. So I just stayed and ignored DBM and took her down. And the stuff she does in that fight is pretty epic and cool.
I've seen the video of Heroic. It's insane. Like, awesome encounter.
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.
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.
Right.
You know, you know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah. Like.
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
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.
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.
Yeah. Sell it to me that way. It was sold in a very different way. Instead, just tell me. I think you're exactly right. If you are somebody who's either comes just for the story and the PV aspect of the games and you just don't care about the farming and the getting there and the beating the challenge doesn't matter to you.
The game's always been pretty nice to you that way, but you never get really good closure or it hamstrings the writers. So the writers are like, all right, well, we got to finish this quest line for those who don't see this raid. And but for people to see the raid. OK, how are we going to write that?
Because that is the same story, you know, different conclusion or it has to be lighter here or whatever. Now they're basically finding ways to say. No, we want the impact across the board. You're in here running some sort of Mythic World first attempt. We want that for you, and we want you to get out of those things also. But also, hey, Larry, you only have an hour to play once a week.
You should get to see this too because you worked pretty hard on the rest of these quests, and now you're at the end and you have no closure. So from that viewpoint, that's a really cool way to do this. But you're right. It's not that I don't think they were. It's not like conniving, but they weren't like the way this was presented to us was not what I ended up getting. You know what I mean?
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.
Yeah, beef it up. It shouldn't be just a little side thing. And also, it's a spider who can't even really talk to me. Like, what are we doing? That was just a weird way to do the whole thing. And I kept questioning myself. Am I doing the right thing? Because then it would split off into... Go into the middle of town and disrupt it and destroy all these things.
And then do this other thing in the middle of town. All right, well done. Now go talk to the vizier. And I'm like, am I just on a quest chain I missed the first time through here? That's how it felt.
Yeah, yeah.
And then when he finally says, all right, we've got movement in the castle. Get up there. And I went and talked to the dude in the front who... Literally, his prompt is, let me in the thing on story mode, and then you go do it. And I was like, oh, okay, I see what's going on. So it's a little bit unbaked, underbaked, this entire thing.
But I think that, like Torgas before it, like Island Expeditions, like other ideas that are a little half-baked, maybe this one, a little more time in the oven, we might get something special out of either future patches for this expansion or whatever 12.0 brings. Maybe this will be more fleshed out. Yeah.
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.
They're also trying to
to knock stuff out at a faster cadence now so I hope it's not a consequence of that and then that gets worse so yeah those are all questions that have to be answered with time but on the one hand everybody's like ooh an expansion almost every year you know right around That's amazing. They've been trying to do that forever. Well, why do you think it's been hard for them in the past 18 years?
Because it's hard. If you want to hit quality levels, standards, and provide tons of content quickly, they're kind of at odds with each other. Stuff doesn't just happen. But they've also streamlined a lot of pipeline technically and otherwise over there. So maybe now is the time where all this can happen. But yeah, I worry about that a little.
But hopefully it's something, I mean, I'm sure they're worried about it too, so hopefully they're on top of it.
Yeah, we'll have to see. What else? Oh, you mentioned something here about the Arathi. I love everything that's happening with the Arathi, with that zone. With the crystal sun that turns on and off every three hours. Everything about that place. Everything about Hallowfall is amazing. It is number one zone in the history of the game for me.
And that says a lot because I put up a video in the last couple of weeks or something describing my favorites. But this thing leapfrogged over my previous favorites. And it's not just how it looks, although it is amazing how it looks.
But the way that zone is constructed, the things you can do in there, the diversity of content available in that zone alone, and then add on top of that the music, the stoic people with some really great cultural stuff being sprinkled in with different quests and stuff. There's the quest with the girl who's an orphan. Yeah. I don't remember the name of the quest.
She runs around with a helmet with you to get some stuff done. One of the most meaningful quests I've ever played in my life. It was fantastic.
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
and you know like heartfelt genuine yeah didn't feel like just a throwaway story idea in fact the side questing which we haven't really talked about a huge leap up in my opinion in terms of what you do how long they are some of them are longer main quest stuff and in particular the one with the the old earthen who's i forgot what his job was even but basically he's got alzheimer's
Oh, yeah. Oh, man. That was a rough quest to do.
Yeah. And they handled it so well. You could tell they're people on team that are dealing with some of this with their families. And you could just tell they were doing it with care. And I just really appreciated that. And I don't feel that way about most WoW questing, period. Yeah. I've been doing this for a long time. It's all fine. And I don't want to be – I'm not trying to be –
you know, what's the word? I'm not trying to minimize the fact that it's not, you know, we like to joke and say, well, it's go get five beaver pelts and kill 10 rats. And that's the extent of it. Well, that's not exactly true.
There's sometimes those are in there, but most of the time they, they try to make some meaning out of it, but it's usually a little surface level, this stuff a few times in this game and even some things in spider town, which I didn't expect. Um, are a little gut-wrenching. Like, whoa, are we going here? Really improved on that end, in my opinion. Agreed. I enjoy that stuff a lot.
So we'll see what happens with the Arathi. The Arathi are very interesting and untapped in some ways.
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.
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.
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...
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.
What happened to Kael'thas? Whatever happened to him? I can't remember.
We, we, we quote unquote killed him, even though it was before that we killed him multiple times. There was always a setback though.
Yeah, but that's what I was thinking is didn't the last time we kill him, I thought he, I thought there was another one of those where he kind of broke out or got free or changed his mind or some shit like that happened. I do not remember what ended up happening with him. Part of the problem is he became one of my favorite characters to play in Heroes of the Storm back in its heyday.
And I remember thinking, oh, he's fine. And it just stuck with me. And I just like, for all I know, oh, wait, no, we killed him in a raid.
But I'm playing him every week.
Yeah, he's doing good work out there. Let's see. The other thing I wanted to bring up is a thing that we probably disagree on a little bit still. Oh, okay. I went in really dis... I don't like this spider stuff. And not because I'm afraid of spiders. That's not it. I'm not afraid of spiders. I don't want one crawling on my toast in the morning or anything.
But I'm not freaked out by spiders the way some people are. It's not that. It's... And it's just, I don't know. I just wasn't in the mood for kind of Halloween spider town. And at first I was like, let's go take me back to hollow fall. I can go to ringing deeps, anything but this. But now something's something switched for me.
And I don't know if it's because I'm also leveling an undead warlock and he just fits there. but I have grown to really, really like that entire place and everything going on there, the politics of it, wearing pheromones to sneak around and do shit. I can't explain it, but I don't think you're with me on this one.
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.
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.
I know. Well, I mean, the reason I like the Vizier is because I remember that he's called the Vizier. You know what I mean? Right. So if I had to call him by his real name, I'd be like, okay, this is going to be trouble. But you're right. There's some fiddly stuff like that.
I also think always having, well, it depends on where, how far you are in that city or what you've done and unlocked what, but, you know, sneaking around, trying not to get caught by guards. It's, it's a very Suramar memory. And I didn't like Suramar for the same reasons early on. It was just like, oh my gosh, even working, just walking around.
And you know what?
Yeah.
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.
Yeah, there's something about that place that goes against, especially the Paladin vibe. Yeah. Right? Right. Whereas, you know, when you're in Halifal, they're all Paladins. Everybody in that whole town. Like, I don't even see Paladins wearing gear that isn't dropped from quest gear in that zone.
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
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
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.
I just, I wish they were less involved in Delves. I said it earlier, but if Bran tells me one more time that don't step on the webs, the Nerubians will come out of them. Like I know, dude. I know. Give me the torch thing and I'll burn them. But all that being said, I think that that place surprisingly grew on me and I'm not even really sure why. It might mostly be – you know what I really like?
I like shutting down all the propaganda stuff. That's fun. That is – yeah. Because they're basically – it's like – I don't know what to compare it to. Hey, depending on who's listening, it's like Fox TV or like Fox News and CNN. There I did it. So everybody got there. Everyone got insulted.
There you go.
But it's like that. They're just telling you what you want to hear in this place. And you getting to help shut that down for some reason resonated with me. And I was like, all right, I'm cool with that. Otherwise, the subterfuge stuff, yeah, I could maybe take or leave. But you're right. I think they're done. Not done. But the Nerubian angle on this is important and very much part of 11.0.
And the next expansion, or even maybe subsequent patches for this one, you'll see way more Earthen slash way more Arathi involved in it all. So... Right. There you have it. The only other problem I have with the spider people is they're kind of everywhere. So you don't see an Arathi campground in the middle of Ajkahet, right?
But you see lots of spider shit in Hallowfall just because you went down the weird corner. It's like, oh, this is all webby and weird. And, oh, there's some spiders in here. They've infiltrated. Like, they've really tried hard to make them the kind of consistent thing throughout. And I could see if you don't like that stuff, it would get old. Right. Right now, I like it. I'm okay with it.
It grew on me.
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.
As far as other basic stuff about the zones, I really like, as we mentioned, Hallowfall is amazing. I could live there. If they ever put housing in this game, that's where I'm putting it, if that's even an option. I would love that.
yeah um the uh what's the other one oh uh bringing deeps is i also like it had to grow on me and me helping a bunch of freaking kobolds do anything had to grow on me because this game set them up to be the most irritating meme worthy little pieces of shit with candles on their heads all these years right and now suddenly they have meaningful lives they have needs and wants just like anyone else.
And I'm, I'm kind of invested in them. So I really, I quite like going around there and doing stuff. Um, and it enjoyed my time in that zone. The only other one that I wouldn't call it boring, but the, the most standard of the zones is, is, uh, outside. Isle of Dorne. Isle of Dorne. Yeah.
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?
Yeah. Like their plate there, you know, I can't even compare it favorably to like, What was Dragonflight's main city? Draken Vale. Draken Vine. Valdraken. Valdraken. Jeez. Dracula Town. Valdraken puts this new outdoor zone to shame. I just don't think it's that interesting. What I'm doing there is fine. Everything's great. I like the city. Everything's popping there. It's great.
All that stuff's fine. But
riding around in the outskirts doing stuff i've spent a lot of time farming bees right now because i want that beam out pretty bad um and i'm only i think i'm 50 of the little uh honey currency that i need to to buy it and i need like 999 or something like that i don't know holy cow it's a lot i'm gonna be doing that the whole expansion i think and i only go in there for like 20 minutes at a time kill a bunch of stuff leave all my dps characters get wrecked in there
Because it's all elites and it's like big globs of honey and there's no telling who's going to aggro who. So forget it. I'll just keep taking the paladin in there and do it that way. Let's talk about... We talked a little bit about the raid. I still have kind of an issue. Let's talk about dungeons for a second. My biggest issue with dungeons is that they feel a little deprecated because of delves.
Just the kind of static nature of a dungeon. Yeah. Which we've always had. And they're cool dungeons. I'm not going to be wrong. These aren't bad dungeons or anything. It's just they're static. They're always going to be the same. And that dynamic change of things in Delves has made me wish dungeons had some of that.
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
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.
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.
Right.
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,
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.
Yeah, I agree. I think if they'd have kept Delves purely solo, that would have solved it.
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.
But now that that genie's out, how do you shove that back in? You know, players will lose their mind.
You can't, you can't.
You really can't, can you? Unless you completely redesign it next. You got to wait a whole expansion and and say we've redone Dell or something. You know, you can't just do it in the middle of season two of this expansion or something.
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.
I just think it's such a great alternative way for me to be off raid schedule and do something meaningful toward gear progression in between when I saw you last. You know what I mean? It used to be more like, well, get your dungeons in and do your things and get your dailies. There's all those things and they still exist.
But I have a meaningful chance at a really good piece of replacement gear if I just go do that tier nine delve. Yeah.
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
It wasn't. It's just for bragging rights. Ah, shit. Well, I did it. I can brag. I did nine. There you go. See, you have the right to brag now. It took forever. It was the one with the... Actually, I think it's up in the aisles. It's up out in the open air. It's the one where the final boss is the bug lady... who's shoots webs to pull a train through as part of her rotation or part of her phase.
And she's very, she does the same stuff. So it's not like she's hard in terms of pattern or anything, but she's she never, she just took forever to die. So I will not being doing, I will not be doing tier nine again until there's a reason to do tier nine. Forget it. Yeah.
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.
And then they start over again with the new expansion.
I would love new locations. That'd be great.
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.
And that's awesome. That's really great. Very cool.
What's the thing with the Illidan raid where you can walk out with a heroic dungeon level piece? Do you know what that's about? I didn't check into it.
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.
Okay. I was thinking about maybe... I don't know. Let's do it.
I've been thinking about it too. Have you? Let's do it.
If we co-queued as grouped up tanks, we'd get in like... Yeah. It would take no time to get in there.
Yeah. Get some people from the raid team, the core within. Yeah.
Let's do it. By the way, if you want to join our core guild, it's super easy to do. And it's part of the core podcast, but it extends over here to the instance. If you're like, man, I can really use a new fresh, get into a new guild experience. Now would be your time. Head on over to frogpants.com slash discord. And it's our discord. Hop in there. Apply. And you may just get in.
We really don't turn anyone away unless you're a dick. So don't be a dick.
Just don't be a dick.
Just don't be a dick. Let's talk about professions real quick before we get to some of the news we're talking about for the month. Yeah. Professions. Here's my professions for the thing. If you see my video, you already know the answer to this. But I fly to a mining node. Chop, chop, chop. Put up my pants. Fly over to the... Oh, look. It's some kind of weird weed. Chop, chop, chop. Put up my pants.
Chop, chop, chop. Go to the auction house, which is now in Dornigal, and stick all that stuff in the auction house at whatever defaults they are. And then tomorrow, I'll check my mail, and I made 1,000, 2,000 gold.
You've made a lot of money.
That's professions right now. Now, I know it's early, and this is what happens with gathering early on. Is everybody, nobody wants to go gather themselves. They just want to do their mail. They want to make their leather. They want to do whatever they're doing. Engineers, whoever. So I'm feeding their rush and this will even out over time. I understand that.
But for right now, that is professions for me. What are you doing in there? Yeah.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Oh, yeah, for sure. I think I've got like, I don't know, the paladin, which I started in Dragonflight toward the end. is up to about 250,000 gold, which doesn't seem like a lot, but you can do it. You can earn gold. Inflation's real in this game. Inflation is a thing. And they don't have enough play. Most of my gold throwaway comes from Transmog. It's very few other places I just toss gold.
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.
And I'll have way better, I'll have a way better look at how gathering is working then versus now too, as, as a sole thing to do. So yeah, for sure. I think maybe next month we have a little bit of focus on that and maybe also a better, for some people who just don't understand the changes that happened in dragon flight. There are, I mean, it was fundamentally changed, uh,
uh the way that all that were including gathering it's all weird now and if you don't have your head around it it seems kind of impenetrable impenetrable i don't think it's the most that's a good idea it's not the easiest thing to talk about professions next month for sure if you got thoughts on it keep those coming into us to the instance at gmail.com we'd love to hear from you uh all right it's time for us to talk about a couple of big news items and we'll start with this one
Thank you, Chris. So just a quick check in. We're not like hardcore race to world first watchers here. Or maybe you are more than me. Are you keeping track of that much?
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.
Yeah, Team Liquid has like eight casters they've hired. They partnered with Wowhead. It feels a little cheaty. Not cheaty. I don't want to throw that word around. I'm just saying this seems a little... Well, whatever. Liquid's huge, right? Big, successful gaming conglomerate now. They're no longer just a raid team.
But Team Liquid still looks like the North American favorite as of day six, which I think was yesterday, day seven today, I think.
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.
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...
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.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah, I'm sure that's all it is. That's all it'll take. No, I'm with you. My attention span is limited when it comes to that kind of stuff, but I do think it's interesting. It just takes a long time, so I'm more interested toward the end.
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.
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.
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.
Even the normals are having trouble with, yeah. That's a tough one.
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.
Wow, they're professional players for a reason, I suppose. Yeah.
i like i like it i like learning that they have a coach basically it's not like a raid leader like we would get where yeah a tank or somebody is sort of calling all the shots or whatever it's like a dude who's untethered from the fight he's just out walking around telling everybody what to do that'd be nice you know yeah he's he's just watching everybody and it's it really is like you're you're at like your kid's soccer game and the coach is on the side and they're like hey oh
No, no, no, no. You need to come over here. What are you doing? Come back over here.
Yeah. You just have some angry parents yelling at him, I suppose. The only difference. But I guess some people are going to say, well, Scott, they've been doing that for years. No, I know. I just didn't know it.
Yeah.
I didn't know they had a second guy or that's how they would. It makes perfect sense to me, especially when there's, you know, they got big money on the line. They make those are those are companies now. Like liquid's not 20 guys in a basement. Like they're a big deal. Not that the rest of us are in basements. You guys know what I mean? Right. Anyway, so there's that. I watch it like baseball.
I could care less about the 75% of the season before I start to care. And that's what will happen here. I'll start to get really interested as they get down to the wire and how close it is.
Yeah, these hard fights are interesting to watch and how they approach it.
For sure. Let's talk about the 20th anniversary stuff real quick. Yeah. Just a quick breakdown. We're not going to go into everything in super big detail, but they did announce this a couple of weeks or a week or two into the expansion, what their plans are for the November 20th anniversary of World of Warcraft.
And according to Blizzard, there are a few things coming that you're going to want to know about. This is all going to happen through November and December. So a big swath of time to earn things, get things, unlock things, all that sort of stuff. You can earn and spend a new currency called Bronze Celebration Tokens. Everyone loves a new currency to keep track of.
Oh my gosh, yeah. If there's one thing that I think World of Warcraft could use more of, it's currencies.
It's currencies, right? And a bigger... Actually, there should be a better way of displaying them because right now it's just a tab on your character and it's not great.
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.
Take them everywhere you go. It's just required to do it. Let's see. So these will be able to, you'll spend this on new items for your collection. Engage in the Blackrock Deaths Raid Dungeon. So another, basically another time, what do they call them? Time shit.
Time walking.
Time walking. You know what? COVID brain's real. I'm telling you right now. I had COVID last week and I can't remember names. I mean, I always, I always kind of struggle with names, but in this case, it's really, it's really bad. Anyway, you can also collect iconic tier two transmog appearance sets and Now, this is the one everyone's talking about because some very famous, very all-time banger.
Transmog, these sets, these tier two sets from back in the day are renowned in the game. And in particular, yeah, you and I are going to be wearing that. And here's the problem. So is everyone else. There's going to be a million of these guys, these paladins running around with that stuff on.
You're going to, it's more a realistic little scripture crap on your arm and the little knives that slot in. I mean, it's going to look better than ever, but we are all going to be twins and it's going to be annoying for a hot minute.
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
Yeah.
That is basically Paladin Town. Pal-a-town. They should call it that. Yeah. Anyway, so what is that one called? It is called... It doesn't have a name, does it?
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.
Do you like that? I think it's so bad. It's all right. I mean, it's fine. Woof. I don't know why. Maybe it's the feet. It's those clawed feet. Not a fan. Maybe. Or maybe it's because they always put them in humans. Humans are always wearing this stuff for the previews. That's what ruins it. Give me a big old orc or something. I don't want these stupid humans. Anyway, sorry. Go ahead.
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...
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.
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,
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.
I think, yeah, the Death Knight in particular is maybe my favorite of the new imaginings. Right. The Demon Hunter would also be in that category. He looks pretty cool. As far as the old ones go, it's hard not to see the Judgment set and not get stoked, right? It's just hard. You have to. Yeah. But the Druid, little hats off to the Druid because that's pretty badass. Druid looks good. Yeah.
Anyway, that's coming with the 20 years, of course. You're also going to get the... Did I mention Blackrock Depths? I did. Yes. That's awesome. Very excited about that. We're going to go time walking through classic World of Warcraft dungeons. We are going to get a new mount. It's a Blizzard Employee Service Awards cosmetic. Or no, that's not what that is. That's a separate thing.
But I don't know what the mount is. Do we know what the mount is? They show us?
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.
This bird is called Cold Flame Tempest Mount.
yeah i mean it does look cool it's just kind of a chicken but it's fine yeah yeah i don't hate it all right it's also a 20-year balloon toy it's like basically a treasure chest that pops out bunch of balloons and one of them is those metallic balloons that make letters or numbers and it says 20 yeah so that's pretty cool and uh little kaz and little doomy are your uh your your pets uh that are coming
Some new world bosses to fight, including stuff in really old zones. Let's see. I'm trying to find one of these here. Caverns of Time expanded event, they say. Chromie. She's got a new time-bending adventure with the Codex of Chromie. So that'll be fun. I guess. Discover new secrets and solve them with guest relations. Okay. I don't know what that means.
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.
Probably earn some currency while you're in there, so that's good. You can defeat party-crashing world bosses, including the Shaw of Anger and Archavon of Stonewatcher. Am I saying that right? Archavon? Archavon. Archavon. It's been a long time since I've seen that name. Shaw of Anger, though, I think is our pal Liam O'Brien does the voice of the Shaw of Anger, I think.
Illidan and that, I believe. Anyway, let's see what else. Oh, we go back for some PvP revenge during Korax Revenge in Alterac Valley. No thanks, but I'm glad it's there for those who want it. And also they are celebrating 30 years of Warcraft with Warcraft 3 themed back appearances in the Trading Post. It's another thing I wanted to mention.
Trading Post is one of my favorite new additions to the game. Because I love transmog, like collecting everything. I feel like I never have enough currency. And I'm not asking Blizzard to sell me currency. I'm not saying that. But I might do it if they did. That's all I'm saying. Like that's terrible to say.
I'm anti this. You'd do it and you'd complain about it.
And I would complain that I have to do it, but I'd never have enough of it. So I want to buy this crocodile. It's on there now and I'm just shy like a hundred and I don't want to wait. Also, I think it's about to refresh soon, right? Is it monthly? How often does it refresh?
It's monthly. It's the beginning of every month. Yeah.
So we got to wait a few more days. We'll see what happens. Um, all right. One other thing I wanted to mention before we move on to, I want to talk to talk mythics with Bobby and kind of what he's doing right now, because, you know, we promised you guys a little more of a hardcore look at some of that stuff and boy, howdy, are you into that?
But before we do a small change that has big effects at 11.0.5 as currently constituted on the, uh, beta or the, um, what do you call it? The test server. Yeah. The PTR. Jeez. Uh, uh, Content now, time walking content in particular, will now scale up to you instead of you scaling down to it, which is how it's been since the inception of time walking.
This is the most right and good thing I've heard all week. This is how it always should have been. I hate that feeling of... Well, you're level 70, like previous expansion. You're level 70, but now basically you're effectively a level 10. That just feels stupid. I don't like it. So it's the other way around now. This content, which I love that they do this. Give me the old stuff.
Let's not have that just waste on the vine. Give us a reason to play it. Scales up to me. And I say, good job, guys. I like that. Bobby, let's get into some hardcore talk.
goodness yog saran or whoever that was i don't even know bobby uh let's talk about mythics you are in the middle of your usual like go crazy on mythics and i i just think people should know what that means and whether that's whether or not they should feel more comfortable this expansion or even this season poking their head in there as opposed to previous attempts
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...
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
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a lot.
They could use some tweaking, maybe.
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.
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?
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.
Oh, yeah. That was... How do we put this? I'm trying to think like the biggest trash era in dungeons and in raids even. It's probably that expansion.
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.
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
content i like challenging content that requires me to try harder do better and think more and just and get stuff done your attitude about that stuff has changed the way i think about farming or repetitive content and mmos before talking to you about that and kind of getting that take that you just now re-expressed on the show yeah um i just always thought well
I wish these games relied less on giving me the same things over and over and over, just making it a little harder or whatever. It's a very myopic view of the whole thing, right? But that's kind of where my head was at. The way you describe it, That's the point of these, right? That's the whole idea. It isn't that, oh, I've seen this boss 15 times. That's not the point. Yep. That's exactly right.
The point is, the 14th time I was here, we did this. This 15th time, we're going to up our game. You know, whatever. Like, you're looking at it as a whole different enterprise than just, hey, I'm fighting a dude. Right.
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.
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.
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
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...
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
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.
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...
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
Uh, just get, is it just more confusing after knowing where to go after the ship part or is it, how do they make it work? Cause that freaking, I'm, I'm not gonna, okay, how do I put this? This is my favorite dungeon in the new, in the new expansion. I love it conceptually. I love the way it mechanically works. All that stuff is awesome.
It is super weird how to find where the hell you're supposed to be in the map is not much help. So I've a couple of times now, just either get lost or, and I've like seen this thing multiple times. I should know what the hell's going on. And I get lost every time half the team gets lost. Most of them die on the ship because it wasn't great about indicating when you had to fly.
Now it does, but you know, knowing where to go after, it seems like that's a difficulty tier of its own. Right. And I kind of get, I get mad.
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.
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
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.
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.
You're also moving. You're on a ship that's moving. So when you do go land, you're not, it's not like some stationary thing where it's like, all right, I go up into the left now. It's like, well, no, you could be on the opposite side of things and now you got to go all the way across the freaking battlefield again. It's really, I'm not saying it's bad.
In fact, like I said, it's my favorite dungeon, but it's complicated.
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.
Oh, that's why he saw it, because he did follower. Okay.
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.
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?
Right. But that's what makes that a much more interesting thing, even though we don't know what we're doing. Players just don't like change. So when you're not handheld to the next area you know you all everyone panics and people were yelling like Where the hell is everybody? I'm like, I'm coming. If I just knew where you guys are at, freaking somebody mark yourselves or something.
It's a weird thing.
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.
Here, Wayne, let's tell people right now where you're going to stream it. YouTube, Twitch, or where? Where are you putting it?
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.
If you would have asked me this six years ago, I might have said Twitch without even hesitation. But I actually think YouTube might be better. These days, it's the aces for me monetization-wise. But actual tech reasons... I have a better experience on YouTube. I have better looking video when things are done with the same bit rates than I do when I – or that I would use on Twitch.
I just overall have a better experience and also less ads. And I just think it's a better – If I had one beef, it's the chat rooms, aka basically comment rooms in live YouTube channels don't even hold a candle to live Twitch streams because they don't have all the functionality in there. There's so much crazy stuff you can do in your chat that you can't do on YouTube necessarily.
That would be my only beef. But the actual like... how's the stream going out? How good does it look? Is it more consistent and not dropping a lot? Is it a better bit rate later and not all artifacty, all those sorts of things way better over on YouTube.
And the other advantage is if you're also putting other supplementary content up like followups, short versions of this, a chunk of your stream moved out and put into a smaller thing, you're already doing that on YouTube anyway. So it kind of keeps it all under one roof. And I also like scheduling the way the scheduling system works in YouTube.
So I'm kind of all over the place there, but I, my overall has been over the last couple of years trying to really test things out, including multi-streaming, which I've now dropped because it just wasn't doing it. It was, if anything, it was splitting people up even more. And that's really not the point with a community.
I ended up coming back to YouTube as kind of the mainstay for those reasons I just gave you. I don't know if that'll help or not, but.
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.
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.
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.
So people are just way less patient with Mythic+.
That is one of the downsides, right? Or potential downsides.
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.
Yeah. I can see that. I mean, that's the balance I've got to figure out is how much to reward people for just whipping through a Dell versus making them work with pugs or do all the other jump through hoops you have to do for a mythic. Plus that's going to be a weird balance as they move along. Um, but I like when you have beef, so bring the beef anytime you want.
Yeah.
Always bring beef. Lots of beef. All right. Uh, let's get into some town criers, uh, this week.
Hear ye, hear ye. Hear ye, hear ye.
Why, it's the town crier. It's the town crier.
The town crier. Woo-hoo-hoo! Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!
i swear that gets longer every time i play it um hey everybody welcome to the part of the show where we read your feedback and we got it in the form of a couple of calls to start with and i'm going to start with this one uh it's just a nice call and i just thought it'd be nice to play it so here it is hey senor johnson this is uh for the instance just wanted to say watch
the recent WoWcast that came down from Blizzard itself. You did an epic job interviewing Mr. Metzen and talking about the War Within and the history of World of Warcraft. Just keep being awesome, dude. You are epic and amazing, and I love all of your content that you create. Keep going and have fun doing it. Hope you are having a great week. Bye-bye.
Well, that was very nice of you to say. I have to say, so we haven't really had a chance to talk because I don't think the interview even landed before you left or before our last episode. Maybe it did.
It had. Had it?
Okay, but just barely.
Like the day of or the day before or something.
Yeah, it may have been the day before. That was really a great experience for me. And I just wanted to say how thankful I am to everybody and their nice feedback about it. Obviously, a two-hour conversation got chopped down to about 25 minutes. There's a ton of stuff that we probably never hear from that thing. But huge thanks to Chris for even thinking of me in the first place.
And what's nice about Metzen is when we were rating the other night, Or whenever I do anything big and wow, he and I have been friends forever. So I'll send him a quick text and go, hey, we're about to raid. First night raiding. I'm going to tank. And he'll write back weird things like, you go, girl. Or, you know, stuff like that. Anyway, he has expressed also to everybody's kind words.
Because he was really nervous about that. That was like a big target. Like...
big expectations things about to launch all the everybody's sweating bullets over here and he was you know he just wanted all everything to go well and i think it went really well so big thanks to to him the team of blizzard that helped to make that happen and all that stuff and you guys have been very nice in your comments very much appreciate it here's another one about early access hey this is jay calling from minnesota listening to the instance glad it's back uh i like bobby was
Also, that was my first podcast experience was the instance years and years ago. Listening to the episode, you were talking about the ability to pay more in order to get early access to the game. And to be honest with you, it annoyed me too. But in hearing you discuss it, it made me think of something else. What if they did one step further and allowed you to pay less?
and get a discount on the game in order to say, well, I'll wait 10 days and I'll start 10 days in. I would be interested to hear your comments on that.
It's a very interesting idea. It's never going to happen, but imagine this, like, I don't know how they'd even do the math. Let's say Early Access bought you an early, what was it, a week? I guess you got seven days or six days, whatever it was. Four days, I don't know. But let's say you figure out what the math on that is. That's 40 bucks. Let's say four days.
40 bucks for four days, that's 10 bucks a day. If you expect Blizzard for 10 days of coming to the game late to deduct $10 a day for 10 days, they're not going to do it. Literally, the game is free at that point.
If you were to come to them and propose this, they might die laughing.
Yeah, they might actually die laughing, and then the game ends and no one gets to play it.
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?
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?
Sure. He's also playing with the logic of why you would charge for early access anyway and why we just accept that. It does seem weird. It's not them doing some altruistic thing of saying, we really want those who want in early. I mean, it's going to cost you a little something, but we're here for you to get in.
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,
They're saying, oh, they have some extra money in their wallet. I wonder how we can get that out.
Yeah, no, that's exactly it. They're not thinking logically about it so that when you propose the idea, well, I'm not coming early. I'm coming late. What are you going to pay me? That was never in the cards. But I appreciate the concept. And also, of course, the phone call 801-471-0462 is where those voicemails came. That's 801-471-0462.
You can also use it as a text line if you prefer, like this person did. Although I think this person used the web. Yeah, they did. This is about Patreon rewards. It's from Gary Yelland, I think is how you say it. The subject was wallpaper Patreon. I am thinking of joining the basic tier of the instance Patreon and would love some of your artwork for my phone and laptop wallpaper.
Warcraft or TWW related, meaning the war within, is something that is in the basic package. I have listened for years. Yeah, I think that that may end up coming to fruition. Digital, certainly at first, right? Like adding another tier of, well, we got to print a whole bunch of things and ship them out the door.
Like we may not do that right away, but the whole point of this particular Patreon and also this iteration of the show was not to say, bam, here it is as exactly as it will always be. That is not what we're doing here. And that includes what the show might evolve into. The reason we started monthly instead of weekly, because we felt like, well, that gives us some wiggle room.
If we introduce more content, that's better than taking away. So it fits there too, right? With what we do on the Patreon. So I would keep my eyes on that though, because I would like to do some digital rewards of various kinds.
uh some might be audio some might be strictly artwork uh you know wallpapers is a great idea or avatars that kind of thing um we'll keep you informed is basically what i can say there uh all right now i have something very special to share with everybody and i can't wait to do this so i'm just gonna do it here we go
Put on your nostalgic instance glasses that an engineer in the game made for you and charged you too much gold for, okay? Put those glasses on, look back in the past, and let's listen to what Patrick has to say for his mod of the month. This would be episode 107 of the mod of what used to be of the week. 107 of these now.
Again, I present Patrick Beja, everyone's favorite Frenchman, really, really, with his edition of this month's Mod of the Week.
Hey, everyone. This is Patrick with your Mod of the Month. Today's mod is called Console Port, and it's pretty incredible. What it does is that it allows you to play WoW with your controller. It works with any controller, PS5, Xbox, anything, and it takes advantage of all the functionalities of each controller.
But beyond that, the way it remaps the UI and makes very clever use of every modifier and every functionality of the controller is really amazing. It allows you to comfortably play the game after a little bit of fiddling, of course, but it does allow you to comfortably play the game from your couch or just if you prefer to use a controller to your mouse and keyboard. Blasphemy, I know.
But honestly, after having used it for a few hours, I'm pretty confident that some of you will actually prefer this to the normal way of playing. What the developers of this mod are doing is amazing, both UI and functionality-wise, again. The mod is called ConsolePort, and I think you should give it a try.
I did, Patrick. Thank you, Patrick, by the way. That was amazing. He's right. It 100% works the way you would want it to work. It feels like Blizzard made it. That's how good it is. It's an incredibly good way to interface with a controller. Here's my only beef, and truly my only and one beef with this. I want it to be Blizzard officially sanctioned controller support. Let them copy this.
That's fine. Work with these guys. Pay the money. I don't care how. But integrate it into the game directly and put WoW, a client version of WoW, in Steam so that I can more easily, natively, run WoW on my Steam Deck. Then I'll never not be playing World of Warcraft. I'll have it with me all the time. I would love this. I did that with Final Fantasy XIV for a long time.
Beautiful use case for the Steam Deck. Worked wonderfully. And... This is a lot like that control scheme. A lot of this stuff is kind of lifted from it, to be honest, how the triggers work and all that. They're basically like shift keys in a lot of ways. But the experience is very good. Patrick is right. I tried it after he first mentioned it. You guys should give it a shot as well.
See what you think. I know I can hack my Steam Deck to do this, hack it by putting Windows on there. I know there's ways to do this. I don't want to do all that. I just want to fire it up and play it.
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
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.
I keep hoping WoW's the next big Steam. I mean, what do we have on there? We have Overwatch was first, we're Overwatch 2, and Diablo 4 are all on Steam. There's a lot of questions about what will be next. I hope it's WoW. You know they want to. They're just trying to figure it out. Yeah, and if they do that... Then I'll just use the mod in the Steam version.
Oh, I wonder if I have to rebuy everything again. That would suck all hell and back, wouldn't it? They wouldn't do that to me. They didn't do it. You know what? They didn't do it with me with Diablo, and I re-bought the game, the base game. I'm happy to do that.
Yeah.
But I don't want to, like, Final Fantasy, they don't even let Mac and PC users share the same account. To them, those are two different platforms, even though, wow, I can play on my Mac or PC anytime. Yeah. Uh, shout out by the way, to my Mac players who, uh, just a quick note here. If you have the, one of the Mac studios, even the M the early M one Mac studios. Wow. Is glorious on that device.
It's so good. They made it native and it's really good. So don't feel like your PC friends are, you know, have some huge advantage over you. It runs at a, you know, beautiful full 60 frame plus depending on what your monitor supports clip and looks amazing. Thank you, Patrick. Can't wait to hear from him again. He's awesome. We love him. That is going to do it for today's show. However.
We got a lot of new patrons and I got to read them. All right. So a couple of things for that. A guild reminder. If you want to be a part of our guild, hop into patreon.com slash frog pants. Look for the core guild. You'll find it pretty easily. There's a ton of stuff on the frog pants discord, but that whole area is popping right now. And you'd be welcome. Tanner's who you're looking for.
Straving in there. If you're looking for an invite, don't overwhelm the poor guy. He's already doing a lot and I'll feel bad if you overwhelm him. Anyway, now to our Patreon at patreon.com slash the instance. I don't even know where to start, so I'll just start at the top. Mick Smith, Muhammad Sharif, Sheriff, Spencer Cole, William Warnicke, too hip for hair. There's probably a bald guy, right?
I'd love that one. Michael Marin. Let's see. Joseph Champagne. Kyle Velote. I mean, if you got a weird name, you're running the risk of me having to say it. This is what people are paying for, Scott, is to hear you say their name. I swear, sometimes people use fake hard-to-say last names so that I'll screw it up. Fuzzy Pockets. Thomas Chambers. Zach. Abdullah. Justin Salisbury.
I knew a guy named Scott Salisbury. Anyway, Daniel Dupree, David Hearthstone Power Helms. I'll bet he's got a show called Hearthstone Power. And if he does, then you should go listen to it. Bradley Wills, Ian Makes, Bill Capella, Robbie Hill, Jay Steen, E. Johnson 7973. E. Johnson. There's something there. Anyway, Chippalip is a great name. Swordfish, McMilton, Fowey, Dingus, Texas.
That is not a real town. That's just this guy's name. The man with the plan. Rogue Pogue, Wahooga.
uh jeffrey chris peretti uh james pierce kyle holder dave schultz uh what's this one uh macroholic oh he likes the macros yeah yeah actually do you use any you got any good pally macros you can tell me about because i don't of course i do i'll hook you up because i got stuff i may go to you know some website and look it up but i i need i bet macroholic has some too he that'd be a great site macroholic.com oh man
Anyway, Kristen, William Aiken, Alex Mader, Jerry Tolbert. Oh, we already knew about him. I mean, no, he didn't. That was a different show. Anyway, Jerry supports everything. He's the best. Wayne Raylene and old Peter Storbaten. I'm pretty sure I got it all right.
Old Peter's in here.
Thank you all. You'll be getting all kinds of great benefits, especially the no ads thing. Just no commercials anytime. You're basically just in there for good. And it's only a monthly. So it's a pretty inexpensive way to support your favorite show about WoW. Go check it out. That again is patreon.com slash the instance.
Look forward to, I might be talking some Arathi and predictions for lore stuff for patrons.
Yeah, we're going to put, that's the other thing to expect during the month. So one of the things that we kind of learned through the first month, lots of supplemental content on YouTube, on the podcast feed, wherever it fits, but also Patreon exclusive stuff that you're just going to get. No one else will ever see it. Your lore video that you put up is a good example of that.
No one else even knows it exists except these patrons. And if you're a brand new patron and you join today, you get that stuff already. It's just there for you on the feed. So anyway, all of that hopefully makes sense. And we will have more of that kind of content in the next month as well. And we'll let you know when our next episode is toward the end of October for this full chat.
Bobby, is there anything I've forgotten? I feel like this was a lot today. It was a lot.
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.
And that's what we're here to do. And I'll leave you with one story. If you're like me and you enjoy going out and finding mining nodes and you like going out and finding herbs to farm and whatever, just be careful of that one herb that explodes and then flings you 400 feet from your position. Now, sometimes you hit a wall and it's no problem. You take a little damage.
Sometimes you take a little fall damage. Not a big deal usually. But if you're doing this in Hallowfall where there's lots of cliffs and waterfalls, Just be careful where you're aiming yourself, because if that thing knocks you off, you will go halfway across that damn map, and if you don't hit a body of water, you're dead. All right? First death I had as a paladin in this game came from that.
Ouch. Yeah. In the entirety of World of Warcraft, first death as a paladin. How embarrassing. Anyway, that's your advice. Go do what you will with it. Get ready for raid night, everybody, and we'll see you next time. Have a great month.
This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Yes. Get more at frogpants.com. Think about it.
Hey, Scott and Bobby. This is John in Providence, Rhode Island. Long-time listener of The Instance. Maybe first-time caller. I can't remember. Maybe I called before. I don't remember. But it feels like it's 2007 again because... I'm playing WoW heavily again for the first time in years, and I'm listening to The Instance, and I just finished The Office again. That's unrelated.
I literally only play WoW because of The Instance. I wasn't a gamer in 2007. I tried World of Warcraft. I found so many toxic people, and I hated it, and I just quit. But at the time, I followed pretty much everything Veronica Belmont did at the time, and she was on an episode of The Instance and mentioned the AIE Guild. And I figured, well, let me try joining that guild and playing.
And many years later, I had so much fun. For many years later, I had so much fun just playing WoW and questing with guildies and having them take me along on raids because I still kind of sucked at them. And I just built my love for WoW for so many years and then for gaming in general. And even when I fell off the WoW train, I still listen to The Instance up until the last episode.
And I'm just so overjoyed that the game that I love is back, and with this expansion particularly, I think, and that the podcast I love is also back along with it. So I just want to say thanks so much for bringing it back and for all the other great podcasts you do as well, but really have a quick mark against me. So thanks so much from Providence, Rhode Island, and hope you all have a great week.