The show is back! Why? We get into it. Plus, how the one-on-one with Metzen happened, why follower dungeons changed our attitudes completely about dungeons in general, thoughts on Remix and how they could do more of those and more. In news, we breakdown ALL the things you can expect from the War Within on launch and well into the first season of content. We breakdown all the pre-patch changes. Let's meat the Earthen! Hero Talents are a big thing too. Why we hate paying for early access or this or any other game out there. Delves and their potential. Especially how they work. Mythic and Raid talk as well, plus your calls and emails! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
listening to The End
Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Instance 2.0. This is technically a new episode, 667. We got to decide if we're going to keep the numbers. I don't know. I can't decide. But maybe my brand new co-host, Bobby Frankenberger, will help me decide that. Bobby, hello and welcome.
I'm just realizing, though, that that means that your last step was the final episode of the instance before it was 666. Yep.
Two years ago, the final episode was 666. We did that not on purpose, but we were happy to have that happen because it was funny.
We thought you were like everyone was like, OK, episode number 666 is coming. We got to do something special for it. Yeah, I know. Let's let's raise the dead. I mean, record a podcast, you know. I do have to say that I know I've been seeing a lot. Hello, everyone. My name's Bobby.
This is Bobby, by the way. He's the one that looks like Jesus, if you're looking at any pictures of him. Or I guess if you're watching this video right now, very Jesus-like in both look and tone. He's going to take us to task. He's going to judge us at the great judgment bar of Bobby, and it's going to be great.
I don't throw stones in this house of glass.
No. Turn your cheek or however it goes. How's that go?
But what I was going to say was that much like a lot of people, I've been seeing a lot of people really excited about this show coming back. And I have to say when I heard just now that intro music that you played right before... I got chills.
Did you get a little, did you get a little teary even maybe a little, um, a little misty because, and I know you probably hear this a lot, but this, um, the instance was the very first podcast I ever listened to.
Whoa. Um, I will actually say I didn't know this before our conversation, but I didn't know that's where you, where you came in, where you slipped in.
Yeah. I, I had never listened to a podcast before. I don't know how far back it was like 2009 or something is probably when I jumped in. Um, and, uh, it was, um, It was, it's so, so I am, I just would like to say to anybody listening, wondering like, who is this Bobby guy? I am just as much of a fan as, as everybody else who's listening.
And, and I'm just very honored to be able to be a part of the legacy of the show. And I can't wait to continue to take it. To familiar in new places. And let's all just love World of Warcraft. Because that's why I'm here.
That's why I'm here. Things are looking real good for that game. I'm excited in a way that I haven't been for a very long time. And I think a two year hiatus away from the show. Was the healthiest thing I could have done. In terms of putting it behind me. Thinking about it in a very different way over time. And finally got around to the last few months or so. And I went.
you know, it would be great right now. Like bringing that stuff back, getting back into the thick of Warcraft in a way that I haven't in years, both as a player and as someone who covers the stuff.
And I also feel like Blizzard's in a much better place in particular team too, in terms of the content they're making and building and them having Chris Metzen back and having that kind of leadership enter the, you know, this phase of the game. With his own much-needed break coming back from. He did a very similar thing.
He took off in 2016, 2017, whatever it was, and put it all behind him and then came back here recently. He had a much bigger break than I did. But in a lot of ways, I think those two stories cross. Having just spent some time with him, we talked a little bit about this. And sometimes you need some room between you and your whatever it is, your creation. Sometimes for...
You know, for a visual artist, it's their sketchbook. For an actor, it's just turning down some roles and taking some time off, you know, whatever it is, or doing directing or something else. And this felt like just a thing I needed to step away from for a while. And now I'm very energized about it. I'm very excited to have Bobby with us because here are the reasons I picked Bobby.
We may as well just lay these out. One, you have exceptional availability. Just kidding. That's not the number one one. But you have good availability. You're around, right? I can call you whenever and we do stuff. Um, that never hurts, but really the main reason is I really like Bobby's enthusiasm. I think he has a natural, um, he's, he's a natural for this sort of thing.
He's also kind of a big Warcraft nerd and we're going to hear more. I'm going to hear more about how mythics work than I ever did during my entire 16 run of the original instance. Yeah. Because I'm, I'll admit it. They, they, from day one, I was intimidated to the point that I was like, yeah, probably won't be doing a lot of that. And people are like, why?
And I go, because I don't want the pressure, you know? Um, But I'm changing. That sea is changing. That sea, that boat. That boat is on the sea, and it's moving. It's changing. What I'm trying to say is I've come to some realizations that I think I might enjoy this stuff. So to have you around talking about that stuff is going to be a big deal.
And for those that are like, oh, man, it would be great to have a hardcore voice on the show, yeah, Bobby, he's a hardcore player. He's not just dinking around. He's not just out there gathering beaver pelts for no reason. Right. There's got to be a reason. There needs to be a reason. Today we bring you that reason. Well, anyway, I'm glad to have you with me and it's going to be great.
There's a whole bunch of other things we could say about it. I've got some plans for some big interviews around the community. One particular very big YouTuber has agreed to come on and talk in a little side interview, that sort of thing. Uh, segments from the community. I'd love to see those make a little bit of a resurgence.
We've had, uh, you know, there was a time there where every episode we had five or six wonderful weekly segments that would show up at the end of the show. And, uh, people really liked those glommed onto those. It's how I met Patrick. He started out as a, as a segment producer or as a, as a, as a, you know, a little side extra producer.
And then in the case of Randy Jordan, AKA Randy deluxe, my, my old second original cohost, uh, He started out as somebody who called in with tips and stuff. So you never know what's going to come from those things. And I always liked that content a lot.
And at the end of the show today, we're going to actually play a throwback segment from a long time ago because the person who made it very sadly just passed away kind of suddenly. And I think we owe him a little honor there. So to bring all of that back, we're going to start with an old one and think about that guy a little bit. More on that later. But anyway, lots of cool stuff on the way.
We also started a new guild within the core guild, which is all part of my core podcast. You might say, wait, what happened to AIE? They're still there. So if you're in there, you're already good. You're with friends. You're among friends. We're just kind of spreading it around a little bit, having it sort of permeate other places.
And now that guilds are cross-faction, cross-realm, way less barriers to entry. Yeah. Just seems like a perfect time to kind of kick that part of the industry or the of the community together. So we're looking forward to all of that. And who knows, Bobby might be the guy that leads like the real hardcore, you know, weekly locked out freaking mythic runs. I don't know.
I do love mythics and reading.
Yeah. What do you, do you think there'll be like a line for this? I think there will be, people are going to be like, I want to, I want to do mythics with Bobby just from our conversation here. They don't even have proof that you're good at that yet. They don't even know. They're just going to show up and go, I have a keystone.
You guys want to go?
Wouldn't it be great if this was just like one big scam for me to get everybody to bring their keys? Because I can't be bothered to level up my own keys. So I'm just like, yeah, you bring the keys, I'll bring the... And I don't really bring anything.
Astounding levels of leadership. That's what you bring. So I'm not worried.
I bring the confident sounding voice.
That's right. You can also expect, I've been talking a lot to PR lately, you can expect a lot of conversations with more folks at Blizzard, some familiar people, some newer people that no one's really met in this way before.
like all this stuff is possible so it's all coming up speaking of which last week i went to um blizzard entertainment there in irvine california for roughly 36 hours it was very quick um but i got a message some days before from an old friend of blizzard chris metzen who said hey do you want to be the guy that does this interview that we need doing and i said 100 i would i'll come do that for you he's done so much for me why wouldn't i go that do that for him
And it turns out it's a good thing I did because I don't think anybody was going to do this if we didn't have some sort of mutual agreement on who was going to interview and that sort of thing. So I was honored to be asked, first of all. Second of all, it's just kind of a no-brainer. And I was like, all right, let's go. The only problem is it bumped this show a week.
We were supposed to record this last Tuesday. Yeah. That's kind of sucked, right? I was like, hey, Bobby, sorry.
I mean, it's all right. It's all right. Originally, Blizzard did ask me, but I was busy. So I said, there's this other guy that people know him, so he'd be pretty good for this, too. You might want to talk to Scott.
And they went, well, I guess we can settle for it. It's fine. But, yeah, I went out there and got to sit one-on-one with Chris. We did a very – those guys are very professional about their camera equipment and their audio stuff. It's kind of awesome to see them prioritize that. They have, like, full-time people that just do that.
They're at Blizzard whenever it's needed for their various games and whatnot. Of course, right now, a lot of WoW stuff happening there. But the interview happened. If you haven't seen it, go to the Warcraft YouTube channel. It's currently, I think, the most recent video.
Yeah. So WoWcast, you can search for WoWcast if you're looking for that.
Yeah, they basically made a part of that playlist, even though it was kind of outside of it, but it fits. I think you can hear it as well without the video on their RSS feeds, but I think it's worth listening to for a bunch of reasons. One, it was a really great look at 30 years of Warcraft, which is an insane thing to say, 20 years of World of Warcraft.
And what that time has yielded for both Chris personally and professionally, what the plans are moving forward, what it's like to come back after that amount of time and some of those challenges. It went places. And a lot of it got cut because we had done an hour and a half of content. They had to whittle it down to about 20 minutes or something. Yeah.
It was a fantastic interview. I definitely encourage people. It's not the kind of thing that you're going to go and get like, you know, like Ian has a Costas whenever he's on there. He's, you know, you're always going to get you're getting the like deets about the class changes and new system. It's nothing like that. It's very much.
I think I messaged you, Scott, and I said, I think this is perfect. This is what everybody needs because there are lots of people who are excited about Chris Metzen coming back. And so this is great for them because it feels good to hear Chris again. Listen to me talk like I've got a first name basis with Chris.
I think the entire community feels that way. So don't... Yeah, yeah.
It does feel like an old friend coming back. And that's what I think a lot of people who are big fans will like that. But I think it was really good also for people because there's part of the community who's a little concerned thinking...
maybe they they really liked the ever since chris metzen left they like the direction that the storytelling is taken because you know by no fault of his or anything it just happened to be that storytelling has matured quite a bit in the in the past several years and so i think a lot of people were concerned like what does it mean that he's coming back is are they going to take a step back in the storytelling direction what's going to but it very much feels like
from this video he he was saying like i'm i love what's happened with wow since i've been gone and i just want to figure out how to make that keep happening yeah um the best way that it can i loved hearing him talk about artists
and the art of storytelling and um and it just if it was it's great everybody should listen to it it's it's really really great yeah i think you should too so as far as like things that got cut um there's there were immediately in the youtube comments people who
I have followed my stuff for saying things like, Scott, how did you not say Khadgar the shit wizard when I brought up Khadgar and kind of paused awkwardly because I looked like I was maybe going to call him a shit wizard because we've been doing that for years on here. And there is a version of some footage somewhere that is cutting room floor for this where I did refer to him as the shit wizard.
And I can't remember exactly what the content was or why. It wasn't part of when I was talking about him in that context that did make it. But there was some other Khadgar comment that got yanked. Um, there are a few other things. Like he said something, everybody wants to know when he said, um, we're not prepared for something to do with the sword being extracted from Azeroth.
And I said something in the aftermath of that, that got cut. Um, And so I don't actually know the answer to this. I just know that my, the word, you might call it a proper name, a proper noun that I said got cut. I'm not saying that means it's anything or doesn't mean anything, but they left in the comment about you and are prepared. And if they're willing to do that.
I'm just saying put together your own thousand-piece puzzle, okay?
Yeah. Figure it out. Everyone, the writing is on the wall from a comment like that. Or at least if you're going to leave that in, you have to know that everyone is going to think about one particular character immediately, you know?
Okay. No getting around it. It was so much fun, though. And it really only represented about two hours of time for the trip. The rest of it, I got to go tour a bunch of stuff. We got to have lunch with Chris and hang out for a bit. Their curated internal museum, the Blizzard Museum, very cool. Like, you would love this thing. It's like literally a museum. Yeah. And they curate it like one.
So things come in and out. They rotate in and out. Sometimes these things end up at cons or other events. And then they come back. They go under glass again. They have all their awards in a special place. Ancient concept art from like the late 90s, mid 90s, this kind of stuff. Really, really cool stuff. And I love that part of the tour. We also got to see the bikes.
Remember the motorcycles they made? Do you remember that whole thing?
Yes, I do remember that.
Back in like 2013, 14. I think it was a Warlords thing. Speaking of which, the Warlord's gigantic axe, the Gorehowl. Yeah. That is the one that was in a taxi cab in New York for promoting that expansion.
Oh, yeah, that viral promotion.
Yeah. That thing's sitting in their main lobby now. And it is, I can't even, a photo doesn't know justice. You could hang 12 gorillas off this thing. It's so big. I don't know why I chose gorillas. Yeah. I like to compare things to how many gorillas could hang off of it. And in this case, a whole hell of a lot of gorillas could fit up there.
but it was really cool to just see all that stuff some things i'd only ever seen from afar and people are probably like well scott you've been going to blizzcon forever did you never do a tour during any of that no i mean i would fly into that santa ana airport that's near wow so this is your first time going to blizzard first time on the blizzard campus
Wow.
What a treat, man. Oh, it was amazing. I can tell you why I never did though, because everybody was always in Anaheim. And so every time that I could have gone, everything important happening was happening in Anaheim and nobody was there. So it's kind of pointless to go up there on your own if you don't have somebody who can walk you through it or whatever.
So props to my old co-host and pal Randy Jordan, a.k.a. Randy Deluxe. He was my tour, my personal tour guide. And he showed me all kinds of stuff, knew a lot of inside stuff. Went and looked at... like every building has a lobby in this campus, but, but only one has like someone there. And then you got a NDA and sign and get a tag and all that.
That's just the one main one that you're, that you would think of behind the org statue over there. But all the other buildings have space for another one of those if they wanted it. So that was just weird, but it's just a big business park. Right. And so in theory, this is a hundred businesses, not just one taking over the entire, the entire thing. But, um, Anyway, I got to see a few people.
I haven't seen him forever. Some I wish I'd have seen that were either home because of some quarantine that somebody on the Diablo team got COVID. And so some people I wanted to talk to there were all stuck at home, so I didn't get to see him. But I did get to, I saw Ian Hazikosis in the hallway, whipped right past me. He looked busy. Just...
He strikes me as that type. He's just always got something to do.
Yeah, he's always busy. I do look forward to having him on here again because he's a great interviewer. But I didn't get to talk to him, though, which is kind of a bummer. But I got to see Bethany, who's awesome in their community outreach department, whatever you want to call it over there. I guess it's just community management, whatever the term is.
I got to see Thist, who's a podcaster in her own right. She does all their social media stuff now. She's awesome. Big thanks to Drew. Of course, Randy, as I mentioned. Steve, my old pal Steve, who sent me this. Should I even tell? I don't even know if I should. It was 2012. It was a long time ago. This guy's the one that sent me this Diablo 3 signed by the dev team skateboard deck. Oh, wow.
Look at that. That never went anywhere else. They were going to maybe make some of these and they didn't do it. And no wheels or anything because I'm never going to ride this. Are you kidding? But look at that. Isn't that awesome? Anyway, Steve, you're the man. You know it. And I got to meet Holly Longdale, which was a really nice treat because I didn't see that coming.
She's essentially in charge of all things Warcraft now, or WoW anyway. Right. And since John Hite left, I think all those responsibilities went to her. And she is the nicest freaking person. And as passionate as anyone I've ever met there, I can't wait to interview her. She was awesome. Awesome. I know people have seen her on stage.
She does BlizzCon stuff, worked mostly in the classic side of things before height left. And so you've seen her, but she's so great in person. Oh my gosh. I just love being around her. So that was awesome. That's my favorite thing about going was getting to see these people. Some I haven't seen forever. Some I've never met before. And knowing that we did something pretty cool.
We were both very sweaty when we did it. Um, maybe Chris was a little sweatier than me. I'm just saying. And that handshake thing at the end where we laugh and kind of crack up, that's like, we did like 10 of those. And that's why we were losing it because it's so awkward and weird. And, and, We wanted a good ending, right?
I'm so glad they put it in because I wanted Blizzard to have fun with this like we were having fun. That being said, there is a ton of stuff that I don't know if it'll ever make it out of there that was super funny, but maybe not good enough for primetime or whatever. Sure. I don't know if we'll ever see it. Maybe some TikToks or some Instagram reels or something.
I don't know what they'll do with it, but... Anyway, that's that. I got a quick question about that whole thing, though. Will wrote in and says, before I ask the question, I have to say how moving it was to see you and Chris back together on a stage. After watching that, I would have brought the three-year sub if one was available. Hey, Blizzard, I hope you're listening.
Anyway, my question is this. Was there anything cut from the interview that you can share or that you found interesting, informative, or important? And follow up any chance for director's cut of the interview. Anyway, amazing to see you guys together again, says Will.
Well, funny you should ask because there were a couple of things that came up that didn't make it, but I think it was mostly for time. These weren't like super secret-y things or anything, but... We had a big, long discussion about class fantasy and why he thinks the Protection Paladin is the coolest class in the game.
What? Did he say that? That's mine.
It's also mine now. I've been playing a prop pally for a while now, mostly because he told me forever ago about this via text or something. But to hear him say it out loud was super fun. And he just loves righteous, mighty hero stuff. And freaking, you know, the Captain America tie-ins and throwing hammers around and, you know, for justice and all this. That's super his jam.
But he talked about other stuff, which really surprised me. He rolled a Hunter Volpaire and made him look like Robin Hood. Right. And that's weird. That's a little weird. In fact, I have it right here for those watching at home. There it is. There's a there's a scene where it fades out and he's Chris is up here and the Volpair is down here and it's actually or Volpair. I keep saying Volpair.
Volpair. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, things like that. There is there was a lot more of that sort of stuff and a lot more like. you know, 20 years ago, who were you then versus now? And, you know, we dug, we just dug deeper. It wasn't like it was all bombshell stuff, but they had a 20, 25 minute limit and they had to tighten it up. So mad respect for them even doing that.
I don't know how they did it to be honest, but it was super fun. So thank you for that. Well, we'll talk more about emails and how to contact us a little bit later. A couple other quick things before we get into the big news of the month. Have we mentioned this as a monthly? Have we done that?
I know you've mentioned it in your teaser or preview kind of stuff, but yeah, I guess it's worth mentioning that this is, at least for now, it's going to be monthly. Yep. I think it's a good cadence.
Good starting cadence in it at any rate, right? Yeah.
Yeah.
I tend to agree. Here was my thinking or reasoning, because in the past it was always weekly. Yeah. There's a little part of me that knows that a monthly show will always have content no matter what. There's always going to be stuff for us to talk about, changes that happen that we're interested in, all of that. That's going to be a thing. Weekly, it was hard even –
halfway through the original run of the show sometimes to produce enough content to justify a weekly podcast and uh i hated that feeling of we're having to pad this out or talk about too many other games to pad it out or that sort of thing so we figure i think bob you'll agree with this that's weird my mouth made a weird noise then i apologize to everybody at home
Made a lot of weird noises over the years. It's fine. I think you'll agree with me when I say it's better for us to start at this cadence and give more down the road than it would be the other way, where we start cramming one weekly or however often we do it, and then we go, well, we think it needs to be bimonthly because it's not enough. Well, we're going to go back to a monthly or whatever.
I suppose anything's possible in the future, but this feels like the right place to start up again.
Certainly we'll have plenty of things to talk about once a month at the start. There's plenty of things that are happening, plenty of things to talk about. And then it feels like if, and you know it's if, if it's decided to go every other week, every three weeks, who knows? It should be because we feel like it's necessary. Right. Not because that's the way things are done or anything like that.
I think it's the right thing. The last thing that people who are tuning in on this first episode of this revered podcast coming back.
um that you did scott the last thing anybody listening wants to happen is is for is for you to put out you know a couple months worth of episodes and then you're like well i'm burned out or another two-year hiatus see you in the next two years right so in it's it's better for longevity to, to start this way. That's, that's my thoughts on it. And I, I'm all for it, you know?
Yeah. We'll do basically we, we've, this is more internal. I don't know why I'm sharing this, but we're going to do six episodes seasons. That's that for this cadence is six months. Yeah. And at the end of that six months, we look at it and go, all right, let's evaluate it. What do we like? What do we not like? What do we think about the next season? And is that next season more often?
Is it the same? Like that's when those decisions will be made.
Yeah. Giving yourself built in times to assess.
Yeah. I think that's smart. Something I didn't do enough of in the first run. I didn't know what I was doing in the first run. I mean, let's look, let's think about this. The show started in 2006. It ran till 2021 to two. It was 22. Yeah. And that's a long time to do anything. Yeah. Without a major tweak.
And you can say, well, weekly podcast.
Yeah. Let alone that. And you could say, well, Scott, you had all kinds of tweaks. You had a different co-host at various different times. And that's true. We did. Um, And lots of ups and downs, including the Blizzard ups and downs, which were pretty massive at the time. Controversial stuff, layoffs, the buying by Microsoft, and Bobby Kotick finally getting his hand out of the cookie jar.
All of these things represent a very... chaotic kind of run that did real well. People were real happy with it and whatever, but it wore me out. So the goal this time is to retain all the passion and love, but yes, keep the fun out front. Fun is front. Fun front.
wait they called me that in high school fun old fun front they called me funny front yeah they were they were into it anyway so that's the plan um i have a quick thought on before we get to the news i wanted to talk about follower dungeons for a second and these were these were put in i don't know months ago as part of the tail end of dragon flight um an expansion i don't know if i've said this anywhere else i probably said it on core a few times but i think dragon flight was awesome i loved that expansion yep fantastic
yeah i think it was a real big return to form after shadowlands i felt like not since maybe legion have i enjoyed it as much as i did and i would put it up there with my top three expansions i think go and in no particular order because that that'll get me in trouble but i think it's lich king it's legion and it's and it's dragonflight those are my three favorites oh you know what i
You got to squeak it in there. I do love Pandaria.
Yeah, it's in there somewhere. Yeah. It's hard to actually read it. Those are the good ones. I agree with that.
Yeah, they were great times. So anyway, but I didn't play a ton in the last six months or so of this expansion. I knew that the follower dungeons were coming and I didn't know much about it other than, oh, that sounds interesting. And then I got kind of sidetracked in Final Fantasy for a while. And they were doing a thing and they're just like it. You could run dungeon content with AI companions.
And maybe real quick, we should just for anybody who's maybe not playing WoW right now or is coming back, just say that's what follower dungeons are, is that you can go into a dungeon by yourself and you have AI party members that are just filling out the roles that you need to be filled out.
If you're not a tank, if you're a DPS, then there'll be two other AI DPSers and an AI tank and an AI healer.
Yep. right? All doing their job. And every single one of at least the current dungeons, there is some talk of retrofitting old dungeons. I hope they do. Um, I don't know if they will or not, but, but I, I remember hearing about that going, well, that seems cool. I will definitely try that out. And then I kind of lost track of it.
So here recently working on alts and just getting ready for the expansion, I also have been playing that prot pally and enjoying the hell out of him. Yeah. Uh, it's kind of Chris's fault. And, um,
man those things that shield it's really great partly because i can just round up like 50 i can round up like 10 elite mobs and 50 regular mobs all in one pile and they're done like it's op you throw your shield you consecrate maybe maybe maybe heal yourself maybe maybe if you have to i hold on to that blinker for a while you know it's like i barely ever need it and i take down world bosses that you're not supposed to solo so it's like
It's like very, it's a power fantasy that's a little out of control if I'm honest. But see that my secret thinking is because Chris has one and because he was there at the very beginning and probably had a lot to do with that class. They're not going to change it. They're not going to nerf it because, you know, they can't do that.
My joke that I always jokingly complain about whenever new patches come out and classes get all their changes and everything, I always jokingly complain that everybody gets to be excited about all their class changes and then old Bobby the Prot Pally just has to... The patch notes are like... You're good. You guys are good.
Yeah. Don't worry about it.
Nothing to change here.
Yeah. I love that about that class. And I'm just having fun with it. I rolled a Zandalari troll because I think they're cool and tall and they're not all hunched over.
i get a little purple skin you know just looking like a badass um and i'm having and so did you use follower dungeons to teach yourself how to tank then well so here's so here's what happened i'm like i am in the world doing world quests and all this stuff with a tank spec which is usually slower for most other classes it's a it's the slower choice you're not gonna tear through them i tried that a little bit with a demon hunter years ago and
Everything took longer, even though I kind of enjoyed the rotation of a tank. But I was always like tank tanking in this game, healing in this game, for that matter. Those two things intimidate the hell out of me, partly because I've been playing this game since early access friends and family beta in 03. All right. A long time. During that entire run, DPS only. Never tanked. Not once.
I had some tank, you know, like a warrior, but Fury or something. So this time, finally, after all these freaking years... I thought, well, there's no harm in me going into a follower dungeon in tank spec to just, let's see what this is. Let's just try it. I'm going to have to have some of these mechanics figured out.
It's not that hard, I'm sure, anyway, but I can do it without the pressure is the point. I don't have to be with some randos with higher expectations than I can deliver or some DPS who thinks every time he dies, it's my fault and everyone mass leaves the group or whatever. All of these things that sometimes are just... Old stories of toxicity and it carry through the wow time, right?
These are just, they're stereotypes of wow and they stuck. And this was one of them for me is like, you don't want to tank. You're going to be miserable in there. But here's the part. Okay, so that part, I get in there, and guess what? No problem. I can tank. I can do it. It's not a big deal. It's a video game, it turns out. You can wrap your head around it.
But here's the big takeaway that I didn't expect. I may have mentioned this somewhere else. I hope this isn't redundant for somebody. But I came out of that first dungeon experience kind of elated because it wasn't just that, oh, I can tank. And yes, it's easier, right? The follower dungeons aren't meant to be super hard.
You're supposed to feel like you're having a decent time in there and you're not dying all the time.
Yeah, the difficulty is definitely a lot lower.
Yeah, way lower. And that's fine. That's good. I don't think their goal here is to make that some sort of hardcore part of the game. Although I have questions about Delves, but we'll get into that in a minute.
Oh yeah, we'll get to that.
So I get in there and I realize for the first time in my WoW history, which is deep and distant... I actually noticed where I was and what was going on. And so I realized even before I was tanking or before I wanted to learn how to tank, I had a problem in dungeons no matter what. If I rolled in there with the hunter or the lock or anyone else, I always was like, okay, everybody doing their stuff.
Okay. Oh, we're running. Are we moving this quickly? I got to hurry and get loot. Okay. Grab loot. Okay. Go to the next wing. Okay. Where's the boss? Shoot. I didn't look at it. You know, like you're always doing that and it's, and you're not on your own timetable. You're on somebody else's. These things made me slow down and literally smell the roses. Maybe not literally.
I couldn't smell anything. But I saw things I'd never seen before. I paid attention to voiceover and story. I walk into a cave, and I'm suddenly like, oh, my gosh, look at the work they did on the stuff hanging from the ceiling. Yeah. that's amazing. Like this environmental art is incredible. And I can't believe they got these textures to work. And this boss design is crazy stuff.
I never got to do because I wasn't able to take that kind of time. either like the first time you see a dungeon and you run it, let's say back in BFA, you're just trying not to get killed and you're trying to understand what the mechanics are and you're whipping through there fast.
Maybe you saw a YouTube thing, but once you have it on farm, you're also not really paying attention because now it's just a thing you got to hurry up and get in there and do and get the F out. This was this moment of like, let's dip my feet back into the fantasy of this experience. It's a dungeon. It's as old as the fantasy trope itself. You want to go in there.
It's mysterious and dark and weird and you don't have all the answers and you're not quite sure what to expect.
There's a lot of story being told in dungeons as well that a lot of people miss out on because you go in there and if you're doing it on a lower difficulty then you still have to go in with other people and chances are other people who are doing the low difficulty dungeons, they're just doing it to farm something like you said. So their goals are different than yours.
And so that's always a problem. Whenever you're in a group and your goals are different from other people's, you're not going to have a good time. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be the fault of the other people. They have their own agenda and they might need to be in there for a particular reason. Now, if they're being jerks about it, that's a different story.
But the fact that they might want to rush through it isn't necessarily a fault of theirs. It's just they have different priorities, but they don't match up with yours. And so you're getting to do that. You're getting to slow down. You're getting to see the story that's being told, visual storytelling, environmental storytelling, which they spend so much time working on.
So you should get to take it in.
It's also my favorite thing about World of Warcraft. I think I may have said this in the interview with Chris and it got cut, but my favorite thing is the world. The world's the character. The world is the place. The world is the game. So when I go in there,
i love i think the reason i leaned so much into solo play and i think a lot of players are like this is that you get the thing to yourself and you get to pay attention and really soak it in if you're constantly being forced to play a role within a group especially with strangers you don't always get that experience and so i know there are some players who look at follower dungeons and go that's for weenies who are afraid to have a group
I don't suppose I can change their minds, but I would at least address that by saying, I understand the sentiment, but this is one more way they're letting me get in there. And it turns out that exact same dungeon that I breezed through on follower mode, saw, loved, was like blown away by. Now I'm excited to get back in there with friends. Now I want to do that. And then I want to go higher.
I want to go normal. I want to go heroic. And then guess what? Let's get some keystones going. Let's start farming that shit. And let's freaking go mythic. I've never even gave a crap before, right? And suddenly I give a crap.
When your only experience in a dungeon is stress, you don't want to relive that ever. You're playing a game. You don't want to log in and think, Because before I was a live and die all the time tank person. Tank person. Before I did any tank person. Everybody calls it that, right? A live and die all the time tank person. I think that's on the website. If you look at the wiki, it's all on there.
But before that, and I did DPS, I was afraid to tank. And it was a terrible feeling to be like, all right, well, I want to get into tanking. For my raid team because they need a tank. So I got to log on and I got to get into a dungeon. It was like a terrible feeling to be like, what am I putting myself through now? Right. And I had to force myself to do that. And I was playing a game.
Yeah. Where you're supposed to be having fun regardless. I mean, say what you want about Blizzard. Say what you want about WoW. They have always had... This is a toxic problem they have always had. I don't know why the player base is like this sometimes. I'm not trying to say everyone is. Obviously, they aren't. There's a ton of people who aren't. But why has it got this reputation?
It has a reputation for a reason. And I don't think it's Blizzard encouraging it. They don't do that. In fact, if anything, they're just like... what if we LFG? You guys don't have to freak out so much in there. How about you don't have to wait by some stone and hope another dude shows up? How about, you know, they try to make these things simpler.
You can still do it all the hard way you want, but they're like, what if you had some AI followers that would help you just get this experience that we spent all this time making?
I think after a while, maybe they thought like, Like, okay, we're trying all these systems to make things nicer, but eventually you've got to realize sometimes people are just people. But hey, what if we take the people out? In your MMO, your massively online multiplayer game. So they took the people out, and that's follower dungeons, and they really are great. In this past...
six months like you were talking about um i wanted to try healing out for just one part of the the last season of our of our rating and um so i was like oh i haven't healed in
more than five years i don't know what i'm doing so i went into a follower dungeon i said i this will at least help me figure out what buttons to press you know like and it was great yeah it was great yeah it's great and you can walk away for a while if you need to pee that's another nice thing like if i have to pee oh my god that is nice yeah you'll get kicked if you do that with strangers forget it they don't they're not they should add that in to the ai the ai like votes to kick you out
Yeah, just... That'd be really realistic. I mean, there is that button you can hit that'll say, I need directions, essentially.
And then that little... Yeah, there's like a toggle where you can be the leader or they can lead you.
Yeah. And that worked great in one particular situation. I got lost and I was like, I don't know where the next tunnel is. Like, this is just really, it's really obtuse where this is located, or at least it felt like it. So I hit that toggle and the character says something like, you want me to lead? No problem.
And this mage goes running out and then starts walking toward a hole in the wall and went, oh, that's the hole. Okay, nevermind. And then I untoggled it immediately and kept leading. So just giving me the tools. I really appreciate that. I do think there's room, though, I'll say this, for follower dungeons to also scale some difficulty. The base level is very, very simple.
They give you some good gear in there for your first time in there. It's definitely going to be an eye-level improvement over what you walked in there with. But it's not amazing. And it'd be nice if I went through there a couple of times on regular and then went, all right, I'm ready for a heroic follower dungeon or even some sort of mythic adjacent difficulty.
I think it would be good to have some sort of difficulty slider. And the reason is because, again, with my healing experience, I did have a group of people that I could... Basically, all I was able to do in there was figure out the interface for healing and where the buttons were and everything like that. But I almost never had to heal anyone because the difficulty is so low.
And that's not what Blizzard put it in the game for. I think originally the way they sort of packaged it is they said it was going to be an easy single-player way for you to get dungeon questing done if you needed to.
Yeah.
And so that's, I think, what was on the front of their mind. But also, obviously, you can try out these different things like tanking and classes you've never done before. But increasing the... Because it's... What you shouldn't think is that doing the follower dungeon will properly train you for doing...
actual grouped content because it will not no what it will do is it will introduce you to the environment and maybe the the interface and the set pieces and and just it'll make things look familiar when you start yeah doing maybe what trash you can skip stuff like that yeah yeah but but especially with healing and tanking and stuff as things get harder uh is when when you really have to learn it and so
But understanding the environment is one thing in and of itself, right? Like, especially as a tank, Scott, now that you're tanking. Yeah, look at me. As a tank, you are expected to be the one in charge, like leading the group, right? So you need to know where to go. So if you were in a group and you couldn't find that tunnel. you would have gotten all, no end of crap.
I mean, I still think people should be nicer and go, oh, no worries. The first time in here, check it out. It's over here. Like, but no one does that anymore. They should. They don't.
Well, actually, I'm going to walk that back a little bit because I kind of implied that that's the truth. But I have to say that my experience in the past couple of years has been much improved. People tend to be a lot nicer in dungeons, especially at the beginning of an expansion.
Yeah, because they're all kind of in it together trying to figure it out.
It's not as bad as it used to be, but it's still not great. Follower dungeons are good for that.
Yeah, it's very cool. So we'll see what they end up doing with it. you know, I walked out of there going, this is cool. It's just cool that it exists. I may never use it more than the first times I go through each new dungeon and see them. I may never touch it again after that for, for that entire expansion. I don't know why I would. Right. But, but now I know them. Now I can go in there.
I can properly lead a run through there. I can do it with friends and strangers. I ran some her. Oh, the one, the one thing that does throw you is immediately almost after I finished the last dungeon of this expansion, um,
on follower mode, I immediately queued up for a heroic version of the same thing and got in right away because I was a tank and I was a little nervous, but I knew this place now, right? I was like, okay, I can do this. The bosses throw, you know, starting with heroic and moving forward, especially in a mythic, they start throwing new mechanics at you. Yeah.
And I was like, oh, these weren't on the floor when I was here last time. Shit.
And some of them, they're like, they're like breaking mechanics. Like if you don't do them the right way, then you're done.
Yeah. You're a dead hunk of paladin meat on the ground and nobody wants that.
uh speaking of which remix is ending or has ended it's done yeah um they even took down the ui that was saying how many days to count down for a while said zero which i thought was weird they finally get rid of it um i don't know if you played much of that but i thought that was really cool and i came to it late so i didn't get all the stuff i wanted to do done but a lot of people were leveling characters zero to 70 in like an hour and a half two hours oh my god like everybody's got like eight billion alts now yeah and they basically created like an arcade game oh my gosh
And it's fun. It's really fun. And it made me realize it's not just because it's set in Pandaria. That helps because everybody loves going there. But it also just really captured the essence of what would be fun to tweak this. It's not that different than what classic players have liked about the Season of Discovery stuff.
New ideas, new concepts, new abilities, this cloak that just gets exponentially more powerful the more you play and the faster you level and all of that. And I think that was a brilliant little test of maybe what's to come. So if they're going to do more of that, that's great. I don't know where else you'd take it.
Maybe Legion would be a good backdrop for this because there's so many places to go.
uh even just to start your journey you can pick the you know that whole continent's just got tons of content um but and then maybe even bring this one back again make a rotation but but doing this with the retail game and not just weird stuff with classic i think is very good for the health of the overall wow thing and i say more of that please i loved it
Keep it at the end of an expansion. It's great because at the end of an expansion, everybody's always thinking about leveling up alts anyway. So making it an easy way to do that. And it was perfect timing with war bands coming, which I know we're about to talk about. But with war bands coming, I'm sure they're thinking, well, we want everybody to have alts now. Yeah.
They made it way easy for that to happen.
It's a great way to have alts. We now have alts. Use them, everyone. Oh, and that is one thing that came out of the interview with Chris that I liked. They didn't do all of it, but most of it about how the allied races systems that they started putting in the game around Legion. Yeah. One of my favorite things they've done in the game because it.
Instead of just waiting every other expansion for, oh, there's one, maybe two new races. Or usually it's like, I don't know, what was it? Morgans for the Alliance and goblins for the Horde. And then, you know, Death Knights, whole different thing. And like, they always try to do this.
with either class or, or races, but to have races kind of pop and, and get, and you can get them with an expansion has made the game so much more interesting to live in just diversity of character types. Um, you know, upright, upright trolls walking around with hunched over ones. Like, yeah, just all of that vibe is so great for the game. And I hope they keep that up.
I guess with this one, we're getting, what, the earthen, the trolls that live down under the ground? Yeah, and I am excited about the earthen. I'm pretty excited about their whole story. Right now, the main earthen guy looks like his job sucks. He's just pulling that giant freaking lava hammer.
pulls the chain over and over again yeah that would that's not a fun job i don't want that i mean does he get breaks does he have like a decent dental plan like what's it like it's like sisyphus rolling the rock up a hill except he just yanking the chain yeah it's a bad time all right we're gonna get into uh what's going on this month and i have this for you i have a bunch of look i've did some things that are reminiscent of old
Like, you know, transitions and some stingers and stuff. And some that are new. I would call this one new. And big thanks to a very specific friend who pulled out his thrall voice to help me with this one. So here you go.
Big news of the month.
Yeah, that was Chris Metzen with his thing. Here's the thing, though. Yeah, he did it with his phone, which was a challenge because I was like, is this going to sound okay? And I think I got it to where I wanted it. So very happy with it. Thank you, Chris, for that. Let's talk about what's going on. Obviously, new expansion tomorrow for early access, folks. Yeah. My whole day is going to be shot.
Yeah.
You know, I got to get this out and off my chest. It's not off my chest. It's a complaint. It's about me. It's not about anybody else. It's about the timing of my own vacations.
Oh, right. Bobby's leaving town. I forgot.
Yeah. So the early access starts tomorrow. I have early access. I'm excited to get in there and try it out. But then the very next day, I leave for me and my wife. It's our 15 year anniversary this year. We are going on a seven day Alaskan cruise. I'm going to be gone until September 1st. Oh, my gosh, dude.
That's a long time. Without you playing WoW. And I can tell you as a veteran of said cruise, I didn't even think you're on the same boat we were on. Yeah. The internet is so bad. You can even pay for it. It doesn't matter. It's so bad. It's terrible. So there's no, there is no playing remote WoW while you're on that boat. I promise you that. No. But grats on the 15 years and also too bad for you.
Here's the funny thing about it, though. You ended up having to pay, what, an extra 40 bucks for this privilege and you still have to leave town early? Because that's about what the epic version is, right?
40 bucks or something? Yeah, so I did buy it before I knew when the cruise was. I did pre-order the expansion before I knew when the cruise was going to be or before I realized. No, no, no, because when you pre-ordered it, you didn't know when the release date was going to be.
Oh, right, good point, yeah. We knew, but you knew you'd get early access. She just didn't know when that would be.
Yeah, but I didn't get it for the early access. I was actually at the time a little bit annoyed by the fact that they added early access. And maybe this is a decent time to... to mention the fact that they've never done this before.
Yeah. Let's air out those panties right here, right now. Cause this is not, sorry, not panties, whatever, whatever you want to air out. Okay.
I'm not trying to, um, the, uh, I, the reason I got it was because of the mountain, the, and the, and the pets, right? Yeah. And so that's and all the other extra little things like that. That's the reason I purchased that edition.
And the fact that they added early access for some reason that I can't quite explain annoyed me a little bit because it felt like it felt like I was like I was buying into a privilege that I didn't think existed. it felt right for them to add to the game at all.
Yeah.
Um, but now I'm going to have it and, but I'm, I'm not like out of principle, not going to play early. So it's like, I was put in this weird sort of like, like, uh, like position to have my, my, uh, my values or my ethics damaged in some way.
Yeah. I get it, dude. I don't like, uh, For those who are afraid that the instance reboot is nothing but shiny talk about Blizzard, I actually think this was a big mistake of theirs. And it's a mistake that is not without precedent across the industry. Sure. And in a lot of ways, they're just sort of following suit. Yeah. I still don't like it. I think it's a little predatory.
I think that giving people early access... I think giving items like a bunch of cosmetics, mounts, and maybe some currency and that sort of thing, I think those are reasonable reasons to do an upgrade. I get those. Those make perfect sense to me, especially amount on the store is 20 bucks alone or 25 or whatever it is. So this is actually a pretty good deal for everything you're getting. However...
Holding when you can play over your head with money, I'm not a fan of that at all. And if I had to guess, there were probably some internal naysayers on that that just were like, do we really have to do this? This is not a good idea. And who knows when this was all solidified? It was certainly before the acquisition. So who knows who's in charge then? I don't even know.
But I don't love this part of it. And I think we'll have to just obviously live with it. But I think it's important we give them heat for this, and I hope players do, so that maybe they rethink this next time. I agree. If there's one thing I know about the marketing teams, PR teams, community, and even devs over there is that they...
They want you to have a great time in this game they work hard on. I know that for sure. And if you could really talk to those guys without a PR nightmare, I think a lot of them would say, yeah, we don't love this business decision that was made to squeeze a little more money out of players so they could have the privilege of playing the game early. Right, right. I think it's a little devious.
That being said... Of course, I paid up and I'm going to do it because I'm going to get in there.
Yeah. That being said, I'll see you guys in early access.
Yeah. There goes my principled stance ends there because, I mean, maybe that's why this... What am I saying? I know this is why they do it because there will be enough people to do it. What's the harm in doing it almost? It's like, well, either everyone will be happy waiting until the day they can and they don't want to pay or they'll pay and do it.
Either way, it's extra money for them, for whoever, even if it was five people who did it. Right. It was extra money that they wouldn't have had otherwise. So, of course, from a business perspective, you do stuff like this. These kinds of things aren't crazy. And for me to sit here and complain about it and still pay up to that amount is a little jarring even in my own head.
All right? I'm not really trying to be hypocritical. It's just because it's not like I'm... I'm angry. I'm not like that. It's just it's a little irritating is all like, why did you do that?
Yeah. Come on, you guys. You didn't have to do it. You guys make a lot of money over there. Anyway, the the collector's edition looks nice to get some good stuff going on with that. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. They always do. But I don't think it comes with a copy of the game anymore. We're past that now. No more copies of games, no USB drive, no DD ROMs or none of that. We're done. It's all digital.
Get the code, go online, download it. It's the year 2024. Get used to it. Speaking of the launch, let's look at the dates real quick. Here's what we have to expect. For early access times in LA, 3 p.m. Pacific data. Data? Daylight. That's what I meant to say. There's no Pacific data. That will be, let's see, August 22nd, so tomorrow. New York, 6 p.m. Makes sense. Three hours later, right?
Or three hours difference. Right. Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1900. London, 2300 BST. Paris, zero CEST. What does that mean? Like midnight or whatever. The turning of the tide there. I don't know what that is. Taipei, 6 CST. I don't know what the CST stands for. These foreign regions, I'm not going to be able to give you much info on. Seoul gets it at 7. Is that AM or PM? I don't know.
It just says KEST, which I assume is Korean Standard Time. And then Sydney's getting it at 8 AM or PM. Again, they don't give the PMs or AM.
I think these are all local times to the places you're naming.
Yeah, I think you're probably right. If you are living in those places and you look there... you'll know. For global launch, that is all happening on the 26th and roughly the same exact timeframe for that day. So 22nd for early access, you will have access to the game until the 26th where you'll have it to yourself and you're a little exclusive club of people who bought Epic or higher.
And then on the 26th, everybody else jumps in the pool. And that'd be good for you because you're not even going to be you're going to be out in the middle of the Atlantic doing or Pacific doing stuff. Yeah. Or the Arctic, wherever the hell you go. How high up do you go? Are you in a different ocean by then?
No, it's all the Pacific.
But at some point, doesn't it change to something like you get high enough? It's like, you know, you know what I mean? Like at some point, it's the Northern Pacific maybe. Okay. All right. You're going to love that stuff. I'd love that. All those weird little village type places and strange fishing towns and stuff. Awesome.
Yeah.
Maybe I'll see some of those walrus people there. Yeah. It was all cool. But already in the game, we have the following. UI and quest changes. That's already in. All right. So that means all kinds of new icons on your map. Yeah. Some of it takes a little bit to get your head around, but for the most part, it's pretty straightforward.
The game is in the last couple of expansions have been very heavy on if it's the exclamation point with the shield, that's your main story campaign quest. And anytime you see those run those, because that's going to be your main story. Yeah. That's still true. However, It's not so easy now to just do those and do nothing but those. They want you to do more than that.
So just know that going in that some of these other regular exclamation points from the old days might be required. You're not going to over level like you did in the previous expansions. They haven't given us too many big details on that, but it sounds like it's just a broader distribution of XP.
And that's what you mean is that in the past, just doing the main story quests, you could level all the way to max level just doing that and not have to do side stuff. But it seems the way that they're talking about it now is that you can finish, if you just mainline the main story quest, you're not going to get to max level, which that's fine. That's fine.
I want to see all of it, so I'm fine with it too. That's my favorite part of open world questing. But also I hope it means improved side quests because they were so deprecated in the last couple of expansions, I don't think the side quests were awesome. They were okay. Sure. But they weren't like, whoa, I can't believe this side quest exists outside of the main story.
It's almost better than, you know, you hear that in games all the time, like The Witcher.
Well, now they've even sort of like... reframed the way that like in a renamed they don't call them side quests really anymore not that they ever did in the game I don't think but now they're explicitly calling them local stories if you go into the map this is another cool thing with the UI some of the UI changes if you go into the map you can filter
all the different icons that are on the map and one of the filters is local stories and so they're explicitly calling it that you know you've got your main story quests and then you've got your local stories quote unquote and that is those are just like side quests that you know when you stop in some village somewhere and some dude has a quest for you and then you end up going on like a 12
15 quest tear in that little village where they have like a story to tell and you get to learn all about this little fishing village or this or the you know some place you stumble on and it's on fire and you're like whoa what's going on over here this i didn't see this before and and so they're i think they're kind of leaning into the idea that this the world has a story to tell and these small areas they have their own little stories
So by calling them local stories.
Yeah, I think people like a good MSQ, but I think that I think they may be maybe overcorrected a little bit. And this is a chance for them to pull it back some. So I'm actually looking forward to that. Also, Skyflight worldwide and is a toggleable thing. So even in the current content, if you're even still leveling in Dragonflight. You can turn your mounts.
What was called dragon writing is now just called sky flight. You can turn that off or on. And what that does is it turns your flying mounts into the old school sort of hover and move style that existed prior to this expansion. And between that and sky flight, which lets you do the full dragon writing kind of mechanics, uh, I love this, that they put this in.
But maybe some people always didn't like, you know, they just don't like change. So they'd never like dragon flight or dragon flying and they would rather just float and do their way. I think that's great because now they have their thing. Good job, guys. You got it. I think that those of us who've embraced the mechanics of dragon flight, it's so much freaking fun to get around.
It is fun, but one thing that I will say, and I didn't realize this until very recently when I loaded up World of Warcraft on an older laptop that isn't as beefy as my desktop computer. It's really hard to do dragon riding if your graphics aren't that great.
uh if things are if if you get a little bit of stuttering because when you jump up and all the animations for the flying and everything happen and then and your view expands and all that then sometimes your graphics can stutter a little bit and if you're if when you're going fast like you're dragon riding you're just going to smack into things and it's a terrible experience so when i was doing that i did switch to the old flying mode because it just makes it easier because you don't
You don't have to. So I think a lot of people are in that position sometimes and it helps them. By the way, if you don't know it because it took me a while to find the button, I didn't have it on my interface anymore. If you go into your spell book, there's a search bar now in your spell book. Open up your spell book and search for switch flight style. There it is.
That's what it's called specifically. And just drag that onto your bar, even if you don't hardly ever use it. Drag it onto your bar somewhere so that if you ever do need it, it's there.
Yeah, or click the other one is if you click on your collection, like the little horseshoe. And up top of the horseshoe, there's a little tiny dropdown up there of a few things like this, like random mount, something, something. And then the flight switching is also there. So they tried to put it in a couple of places to make it convenient.
But once you have that, just stick it on a bar somewhere, have it off to the side. And I find myself toggling all the time. It takes a little bit of time, like you cast a spell to do it.
Yeah, so you have to be on the ground.
Yeah, you have to be on the ground to do it. And when you do it, it immediately changes it as soon as the spell's over. And then you can mount up again and you're to the other way.
So where I find this most useful is world quests in particular, where it would be a lot easier for me to see things from a bird's eye view where I'm not soaring all the time, where I just need to kind of helicopter hover. And so I'll toggle it on for those kind of quests. And when I'm done, I toggle it back and then soar across the continent and do it somewhere else.
The actual freedom of choice there is excellent. And I'm really glad they're doing that. Because it's one of my favorite new features of the game for a very long time. But I also think there is some value in giving people a choice, especially if they're used to doing a certain thing. So watch for that. You also have cross-realm guilds. We've been filling ours up pretty quick.
In fact, I think we kind of hit... Maximum already. I need Blizzard to take away, like back in 2010, the rumors at the time were that our guild was partly responsible for this, but they made guilds smaller. They put a cap of a thousand per guild. And it was because ours was like nine or 10,000. It was unwieldy and it was kind of hard to deal with for them.
I don't know why it was for them, but, but then how we handle data has maybe changed or whatever. My guess is this isn't a problem now. So I think they should drop the limit and we should be able to make a gigantic guild again without any problems.
instead of getting on it yeah all these separate guilds it's hard but cross realm guilds are happening that means that you are no longer limited to one server it also means you are no longer limited to one faction so if you've got some folks yeah on the alliance you want to bring into your guild you can do it this would have been dude this would have been like swearing in church about 10 years ago
I know. You would have been afraid to talk about it because you would have started riots.
Did that surprise you when they changed it? Because it shocked me. I was like, whoa.
I don't think it's, I try not to be too surprised about decisions that are made about something that I, that I don't get to have an input in. You know what I mean? Like it's the, um, they're going to make their decisions and, and, and I try not to be too surprised about it. It just, life is easier that way. But I, I was, um, happy about it.
I think another reason I wasn't too, too surprised is because it felt like they were headed in that direction for a long time just Story reasons and other things that they were doing they were true.
It's just one of those one of the one of the Paths and stories that you could tell about Blizzard's development of World of Warcraft is is over time They've just been trying to tear down barriers and and and if the game is better now than it's ever been in that regard the barrier to entry and the barriers and preventing people from playing together are as few and as low as they've ever been.
And it's great.
I should mention, this is a great time to mention this, because I also agree the retail game's in the best shape it's been in a very long time. Some of you at home are going, wait, what about Classic? You guys going to talk about Classic on this show? Yes, the answer is yes. It's just that there's nothing huge happening right this second in Classic. And you know what?
Someone's going to write in and go, are you kidding me? This thing they just did was huge. I get it. There's stuff happening in Classic. I'm not playing Classic. I'm not that interested in Classic. It doesn't mean we won't cover Classic stuff. We will.
And I'm probably going to, for the sake of this show at first, I'm going to jump in and check out Classic and see what's going on and, you know, give it its due. I've never had really a compelling reason to try it out because it, for me anyway, I mean, there's plenty of compelling reasons for people to try it out, but...
I'm going to get in there and have some firsthand experience to try to talk about it.
That's good for the show. I mean, just from the baseline, why I don't care to play classic is because I've played all of this a lot. I've played since 2003. It's a long time to play a game. And I'm more interested in what's new and less in what's old. And I love... Trust me, I'm a nostalgic guy. I have a whole other podcast about classic gaming.
And hell, Warcraft about to hit 20 puts it in that category. Sure. But... I find it just, I find it jarring and hard to be in and I've tried. So it doesn't mean that I'm representative of some of a whole bunch of people. I'm sure some people agree with me, but we will make sure that we have, especially the big, you know, the big strokes that are happening in classic.
We're going to definitely talk about on the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's talk about warbands for a second. That was a thing that I forgot they were doing entirely until I got back in and went, oh, right, they're doing warbands. This is a big deal.
It's funny that you forgot about that because this is like one of the big selling features of this expansion.
I think maybe what surprised me is that it was in so early. And I shouldn't be surprised because they always do feature stuff in final patches before expansions hit. So it shouldn't be that shocking to me. But when warbands happened... And I logged in and the first four or five characters in my character list were all hanging out in some sort of campfire circle.
I just went, what the hell is going on? It's like Diablo. Am I picking the freaking barbarian to go do Diablo 2 or something? It felt very weird. And I went, oh, right. This is just them saying we also have a little bit of a visual picker. for your war band, but really everything in that whole column of characters, they're all part of your war band.
And I already love it because here's my favorite feature. I go out into the world on an alt. I wanted to get a lock to 70 and I did yesterday. And so that makes, I think I have four seventies, maybe five going into this expansion. Not that I'll use them all, probably only use one or two. But I'm running around with this war lock and
And I'm leveling and I'm doing my thing and I hit 70 and then I'm out to do some quests and I see under the quest, I noticed that the exclamation point above some of these people's heads is a little bit faded out. I'm like, that's weird. I hadn't seen this before. So I would walk up to it and ask the person what the quest was. And sure enough, they're ready to give me the quest.
But down below it says your war band has already done this one.
Yes.
And the idea is, well, wait, if I was only doing it for Transmog, that's already done. If I'm doing it for rep reasons, that's done. Like, I don't need to do it. And so I won't, or I will because it's fun, or some other reason that you wanted to do it or whatever. But giving me that choice, I mean, that's a small thing, but I really like that. Like, I should be way more excited about it.
I don't think it's a small thing at all, Scott. I think it's a really big thing, and this war band's idea is, and just, I don't know, maybe you... have no idea what warbands are.
Very simply and quickly, it's just that now all of your... It's sort of like the crystallization of something that they've been saying, Blizzard has been saying in World of Warcraft for many, many years, which is the whole ethos of bring the player, not the class. And so this is like them taking that and just really going hard on it. And so they've said, you know what? Now you're not your...
your protection paladin you're not your beast master hunter you are your entire collection you are you you're your entire collection of characters and play and that you want to play at any given point in time and so to to enable that we're going to make it so that all all your characters share transmog they share achievements they share currencies they share reputations they share all kinds of stuff um and you can just pick whatever you feel like playing today
And they want to make that as easy as possible. Now, how easy it's going to be in implementation, we're going to find out. So far, it's been pretty good. Uh, but, um, but that's what they're doing. And so I don't think it's a small thing at all. Remember we were just talking about how they have all these like tall global filters on your map.
One of the filters is, uh, is something like, um, already completed by war band. You can, you can filter to, to, to, uh, if you're on your mage and you don't want any quests that you've already completed on other characters to show, you just want... Because you only want to do quests you've never done before on any of your characters.
You click that button and it'll make all of them go away and it'll only show you quests that you've never done before on any character.
Yeah, that's awesome.
And so... Yeah, it's great. It's awesome. I might actually have an alt this time.
Yeah, that's the thing. People who don't do alts, this is a huge gesture. This is saying to you, hey, try some new stuff. And that's really what pushed me to get the lock ready to hurry up and get some of these other characters because I think I am going to be more involved that way.
Not just in like, well, one has professions and he's making bags for everybody or this guy's cooking for everybody or whatever. Those are all still key and important and whatever, but having it feel more like these characters who I inhabit when I'm playing them are all on the same goal sheet. that's meaningful, right?
And then we're sharing stuff like bank stuff and we're sharing rep grind doesn't feel as grindy when all your dudes have it, you know? And then Transmog alone is a massive thing for me. I love the Transmog system in this game. And now everybody gets everything.
I mean, not necessarily, can't necessarily wear everything from everyone, but I've got, if I find a piece of mail out somewhere and I wear plate, If I get it, it gets thrown into the bucket. And anytime I have a male wearing character that wants to go out there and change and have that look that I unlocked with a whole different character, they can. It's all in there. I love that.
Absolutely freaking love that.
So it's going in the direction of, I mean, the elephant in the room when we're talking about this is Final Fantasy 14, right? Um, with their job system, you literally only have one character who has a bunch of different jobs.
And so it's kind of like, it feels like the blizzards take on that, but also still maintaining their, um, their, their fantasy of having all these different classes and, and, and races that, that fill the world, you know?
Right. Yeah, I think it's a really smart thing to do. I think it's a long time coming. A lot of these features, I just sort of go, could have really used this one about 12 years back. Yeah, no kidding. But I can't get wound up in that or else there's a million things Blizzard should do and maybe they will eventually do. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if one day...
Stuff they've been asking for since vanilla suddenly shows up. That's just the way these projects go. If it's the right time, you do it. If it makes sense, you do it. You throw the resources behind it and you do it. And I'm excited for them to do it. What else is there to mention about that? Let's talk about the Earthen, the new race.
Yeah, there's so many things.
There's so many things. We're just going to touch on a few of these. But this is the new playable race with the War Within, the Earthen. You unlock the Earthen characters after completing their quests in the overall level-up campaign. You enlist this Titanforged race made of living stone by aiding them in their endeavors. I mean, let's be honest.
They're basically underground doors made out of dirt. That's pretty much it. And that's okay. I'm not saying it's bad. Yeah. But that's what they are. You can go Horde or Alliance. And they have, let's see, starting at level 10 in their capital city of Domagol or Domagol. Dornagol? Dornagol. Yeah. I always get that R-M-N mixed up as an M, especially in italics. But anyway, yeah, that's exciting.
Why are you so excited about them? Because I see them and I go, oh, cool. Another one to add to the list. Great. I'll make an alt. This will be fun. But you seem a little more enamored than I am.
Well, there's a rich lore to the earthen, which I'm excited to learn more about. The dwarves literally kind of evolved from, if you can call it an evolution, they became the earthen. Some of them became dwarves. Right. Or we thought all of them became dwarves. And then it turns out that there are still some earthen left. Um, and, uh, and they just look awesome.
Um, they've got like these memory crystals in their butt. Like they, they never, uh, there's, there's story to be told here and I don't know a lot about it, but from my understanding is they, they hold on to their memories in, they crystallize their memories into these crystals and literally jam them into their body in order to like,
uh remember stuff that they learned in the past and other people have learned i don't i don't know i'm excited to learn what's going on with these crystals but they look awesome um i'm thinking about uh class changing once i unlock them my paladin to be because they're uh they're they're uh armor they're they're class armor their heritage armor yeah um it looks amazing
and very paladin-y and so I'm thinking about doing that and if I do I for sure will be hiding in my transmog the chestplate because You've got to see those crystals.
They're just amazing. What's your current race for your paladin right now?
I'm a Zandalari troll like you, and it's going to be hard for me to switch if I switch because Zandalari trolls in plate armor look amazing.
They look so good, you guys. I mean, I don't know. I wasn't much of a troll guy before this, but after that expansion, which was already a controversial expansion, my favorite thing that came out of it were those Zandalari trolls. They are awesome. And it's fine, you Alliance, you got your like beer drinking humanoids. It's fine. Whatever those were.
The beefcake humans. Yeah, what were they? They had a name though. Oh, you mean, are you talking about the, oh man, I'm so bad with names, but the ones that are like all the sailor people? Yeah, the sailor people, the beefcake sailor people.
Yeah. They're fine. I'm not complaining. You guys got a thing, but I'm telling you, those Zandalari trolls. Woo. Such badasses. Anyway, we'll see. The Earthen look cool, though. I'm excited about it. Me too. And also anytime... We're old enough to remember a game where paladins were strictly an alliance choice, right? Yeah. And what was the equivalent on Horde? It was... The shaman. Shaman, right.
And they're not... Really not equivalent at all. They never were, but... You know, it just never felt right.
It was Blizzard's attempt to say, like, let's give each faction something special back in the naivete of their youth. Yeah. When they weren't as concerned and didn't realize they were going to have to think about things like balance. And so...
I saw YouTube short or on TikTok or something that was showing off some early concept work for an initial class. They were going to do something along the lines of a bard that did a lot of buffing and kind of had a guitar and, you know, this sort of thing. And they ended up scrapping the whole thing. But I always wonder what that would have been like, you know, a mostly buff class.
There's other buff classes, but... That's a little hard. I'm not really a bard guy like in any kind of game, even D&D, even though John, for example, is always telling me that bards are the greatest characters or the greatest classes in D&D ever made. And therefore are great in everything. But I'm just not big on the whole. I played a guitar for a second and you guys all have more hit points.
I don't know why. I don't know why. It just annoys me. So I'm not into it. But anyway.
Maybe it'll happen because, you know, with the Evoker in Dragonflight, the Evoker had that. They added that extra spec that was... that was basically buffing a buff class.
Oh, that's right. So wait, there's the Voker that does the direct damage caster stuff. And then what's the other one? The other one's a healer.
Yeah, there's the healer. Is there a third one? there is a third one and I can never remember the, look at us. Wow. Podcasters. Um, I don't know.
Trust me. 16 years of me forgetting stuff when I needed it the most. It's just fine. This is, this wouldn't be the instance without that. Um,
It's you've got the evoker class has, let's see, devastation, which is DPS. You've got preservation and then and then the other one augmentation. That's augmentation. You're right. And augmentation evokers are a buff class. Basically, they they are doing damage by increasing the the abilities or of everyone else around them. Other people, they don't. They buff people.
That is very bard-like. Yeah. I like that fantasy a little better than bards. Bards and the music and stuff. It's just silly to me. I'm going to get hate for this. It's just never been my favorite thing. And also, if you're going to call them the – what did you call them? What's the spec? Augmentation. Augmentation. They should give you like Botox treatments and stuff like that.
High cheek – like cheekbone lifts and boob reductions in my case. Yeah. Let's move on to some hero talents. This is exciting.
This is the other big box feature, right?
Yeah, because I mean, look, I'll admit this. The game is old enough, long enough in the tooth that the old days of when you get a new expansion, it meant a whole new leveling path of brand new abilities. That's gone. We don't do that anymore. If anything, it's just talent unlocks. I think the talent system is really in a good place right now, so I'm not complaining. But I do miss that.
Like every other level, bing, I got something awesome to try out. And you don't have that with your old characters. So I feel like this is an olive leaf in that direction. It includes hero talents for all the World of Warcraft classes. Don't know why I had to say that. I could have said, wow.
And they are an evergreen form of character progression for each class specialization that introduces new powers and class fantasies. There are 11 nodes in a hero talent tree. First of these unlocks with the system at level 71, and you earn one talent point per level from level 71 to 80. So you get every talent in the tree by 80. So you fill it out. It's not A or B. It's everything.
You may do it in a different order because you want to, you know, I don't know, have stuff early. Not downside of this, but I hear a lot of people arguing about which class they're going to play because some of them seem epic for some of these classes. And some seem fine. You know, like the ice spec stuff for a frost mage seems awesome compared to that of a arcane mage.
And I guess to each their own, you're going to find something you're going to like. But I always worry about that a little like... are we going to see too many of a certain thing because they just go OP and then they'll balance it and they'll patch it and then they'll piss someone off because it got nerfed and it's fine.
Yeah. I mean, that's the constant treadmill, right? Is in the back and forth is, is too many people doing this feeling like this is the only choice. So then they make some changes. I don't worry about that because that just works out in the end. What I, it's just some, it did feel like that there were obvious choices for some of these. So I,
The hero talents are basically every class has different specs, right? We know that. That's how World of Warcraft works. These hero talents are like sub specs that sit somewhere between each of the specs. So I play a protection paladin or I play a paladin. You've got your retribution paladin, your protection paladin. and your Holy Paladin.
Well, each of those, each one of the three hero talents can be chosen or basically each spec, each normal specialization can choose between one of two of these hero talents and there's three of them. So each one can be picked by two specs. That's a really confusing way to say that the Templar, for example, is a hero talent for the Paladin. Mm-hmm.
You can have a, as a protection paladin, I can be a Templar or as a retribution paladin, I can be a Templar. Right. So, so it sits between, each of the specs has sort of like something that sits between two of them and, and you can pick it.
Yeah. Like Frostfire spec as opposed to Sunfury spec, it's kind of like in between those two if you're a mage. I'm talking about mages a lot because I think I'm going to use my 70 boost for a mage. I think I've decided. Mages are very fun. I mean, I got a lot of like level 50 mages and I don't want to do them manually. So I think I'm going to boost one.
Yeah, really should have done it in Remist, in Mists of Pandaria.
I know, I'm an idiot. Remix. I even had like a, what's the, who's the dark elf from on the Horde side? What's the name of those elves? They're void elves.
Void elves, yeah.
I had a void elf in there, in the Mist remix thing. And he's looking like just like the most magic badass you ever met in your life. And then I ran out of time. So he's going to be like level 45. And I'm like, I could just boost him, I suppose, now that he's in the pool, right? The other thing about that, real quick, I almost forgot to mention this earlier. I did forget.
Your warband, which is like the top five characters, you swap those in and out, whatever order you want. You can take an old character and shove them way up top if you want. It doesn't matter. But what I didn't know they did, I was like, why is this list so long? Can't figure it out. And I'm like, Roy, you're not on this server. Roy, what are you doing? Because I have this character named Roy.
Right. And I still think it's amazing I have that name. And they haven't taken it away from me. But anyway, it's because they're now giving me one single list. It's no longer a server or realm list. Character list where you jump realms and check characters. And so it's one gigantic thing. You hover over it. It'll say, oh, that character is on Suramar. That character is on whatever.
And you can just launch it from there. And they're part of your war band. Like, yeah, it's that's nuts to me.
A common misunderstanding is that your warband is those four characters that are in the start screen. That's not the case. Your warband is just every character you have.
That you've ever had. I got a guy named Wetblade. I talked about this on TMS today. His name is Wetblade. He's a level, I think maybe even nothing more than a 10 or 11 level warrior that I made back in 2008. Yeah. I think, or seven even. And he just sits at the auction house in Orgrimmar as a bank alt back when those mattered. And I haven't seen him in years. And suddenly he's in my list.
I'm like, what the F are you doing here, dude? And he's wearing blurry, shitty armor. He looks like a clown costume. It's awful. Yeah. But, you know, it's a good time. Anyway, back to the hero talents. Are there anything in this or anything as part of that that you're the most excited about?
I mean, obviously it's a big box feature, but, you know, anything here that's like, whoa, I can't wait to do that.
Well, I think all the Paladin ones, and of course I'm a bit biased, I think all of them actually sound really cool. The Templar, the Lightsmith, the Herald of the Sun. So I'm excited about trying out all of them, really. But I do think...
that uh that i this is a way this is a cool way for for a lot of people to get certain classes or specs that they've always uh sort of fantasized about and thought these would be really cool and in particular like the dark ranger which is a hunter yeah um uh um hero talent spec yeah that's really cool there will be you'll get to be a dark ranger if you want to that's a it's amazing there's also um
The other one I saw was Druid of the Claw. It's got a lot of support in the lore. So being a Druid of the Claw would be really, really cool. But some of them are like, I feel like they were like, oh, we got to come up with something.
Yeah. I do like this. I like this crossover, though, because I can either be pack leader. I'm a beast master hunter, like, through and through. I don't want to play anything else. The whole point of that class, in my opinion, is to have tons of animals. I just love it. Give me two bears. Give me a couple of cats that come out once in a while. There's a dinosaur on a certain proc, like...
Just dump all the animals on everything. And so I'm going to stick with that. But being able to choose between Pack Leader and Dark Ranger, you know, as paths to take, I think is really smart. So that the player doesn't feel like they're locked into one little thing or another. You know what I mean?
And you can switch between them. So it's cool. Like you can switch back and forth.
I like the monk ones sound like places I'd want to eat their buffet. You got the Conduit of Celestials, Master of Harmony, and the Shadow Pan Buffet. Mm. Mm-mm-mm.
Oh, yeah, the shadow pan buffet on the Lido deck.
Oh, you just keep going back, dude.
It's got really great soft serve there.
Let me tell you something real quick. Sorry, offshoot. Again, a staple of the instance. A little tangent. That cruise to Alaska, the food, right? It's awesome. I love the food on that ship. It was really good. But I at first hated the pastries and the desserts because they seemed to have –
just a monocle of sugar compared to what they used to have or compared to what I would get somewhere else, just really low sugar. And I realized that's the devious part of it. I'll eat five of these now because they have less sugar than one back home. And that's how the, that's how the French get you, by the way, all of their stuff's like that. It's like low sugar, but you eat more of it.
We, we poo poo the whole thing's over. Right. You don't even know what that means.
uh what else we got here let's talk about season one schedule schedule oh my gosh yeah as the kids call it um they've laid this out for us pretty well you've got uh early access like i mentioned on the 22nd normal difficulty dungeons will become available on that start so ericara the city of echoes level 70 through 80 well these are dungeons sorry let me get to that first yeah
Priory of the Sacred Flame, 70 to 80. The Rookery, these are all 70 to 80, so I don't know why I'm saying it. Well, not all of them. Some are 80.
Well, the first four you're about to mention are 70 to 80, which means that they're leveling dungeons.
Right. Stone Vault, another leveling dungeon. Cinderbrew Meadery is level 80 only. City of Threads. Why does that remind me of something? City of Threads. What is that? Anyway.
That would be on the cruise ship. That's where you buy your clothes.
Oh, in the City of Threads. I see. Let's see. Darkflame Cleft. I mean, look. That was my other wrestling name in high school back in the day. Darkflame Cleft. And Dawnbreaker, also at level 80. See, with the launch of the expansion on the 26th, heroic difficulties become available then. So these are all norms until the official launch.
On September 10th, The War Within Season 1 begins with heroic and raiding Wingfinder 1. uh, which is the new, uh, new narrow bar, narrow bar. If I'm saying it right, palace that opens up mythic zero dungeons also become available along with heroic seasonal dungeons and the new world bosses that are going to be all over the place. Uh, so that's, that's exciting.
Um, and then here are the world bosses, Kordak, the dormant protector. Well, he doesn't seem scary. He's dormant. It gives, it gives a crap, you know what he's doing. Um, Aggregation of horrors. Now that sounds a little scary. That sounds a bit more scary. That's my mother-in-law's house. Sure. She doesn't listen, so everything will be fine.
Love a good mother-in-law joke.
Sure. A atrocity of the undersea. And then Orta, the Broken Mountain. That's a whole mountain. Beware. All right? Watch out for that. September 17th, you get Mythic Raids, Raid Finder Wing 2, Mythic Plus Dungeons, and Story Mode will open, or Raid Story Mode will open. And then on September 24th, Raid Finder Wing 3, if I can say this right, will open as well. So that's your plan.
That's your big initial blowout of content.
So basically, Season 1 officially starts on September 10th. That's when the raids are going to open. Yeah. And if you're a mythic plus person like I am, I rate as well. But if you're a mythic plus person, basically sort of like the higher tiered stuff is going to open on September 17th. All of this sounds great to me because I get to miss the whole first week.
So I still get some time when I get back to to get some leveling up done. But it's typical, right? It's basically we're going to have two weeks to get ourselves geared up and moving before all the endgame stuff kicks off and season one officially starts.
Yeah, and it's roughly what we're used to. This isn't that crazy of a schedule. It's not that different than, say, the last expansion.
Don't rush over it real fast, though. You kind of said it but left it behind a little bit, but raid story mode. This is a brand new thing in The War Within. It's a way for you to... There are a lot of people who are not into raiding because that's just not their jam. But there's a lot of story being told in raids. Again, environmental storytelling, lots of stuff.
And this is just a raid mode that you can just go in on your own and experience the story of the raid without having to put up with LF, like the LFR wiping constantly and dying.
Yeah. It's a little, honestly, it's a little bit like follower dungeons, but it is, it's the raid version of that. It feels like, yeah. And I think, I think they're being very specific about not calling it follower raids to set expectations for this. Cause this really is a chance to, This is a further effort, all right? Because you can see what goes on here.
Raiding in the beginning, 40-man raids, 25-man raids, all that early crazy stuff in the game. Those all made sense, but it was very obvious early on that a very small percentage of the player base was actually seeing this stuff that took so much work to create. It was a huge part of the development. Right. And that was annoying. So what do they do? They bring people like Greg Street and others on.
uh, right around cataclysm and they start working on, uh, and releasing content that is LFG, the LFG or LFR rather stuff made it possible for you to play on a much simpler mode or, or less difficult mode. It meant more people could see the stuff, but I'll bet you that even then that's still a larger subset, but still smaller overall than what maybe Blizzard would like everyone to see.
This is a chance for them to say, well, We made this big, complicated, multi-tiered thing that's got tons of story and all this stuff that is also tied to all your outside questing. Hey, all you filthy casuals. They don't say that, but if they did, get in here and see this. In a way that you can see it. And I think this is a great idea. Again, way long coming.
This feels like something they should have had forever ago, but I'm excited about this. I think it'll be great.
Me too. I think it's amazing because even though I do raid, I don't pay attention to the story that's going on in the raid. I go to a raid to do the raid content. You know, to the team getting together and trying to down a boss. I actually often miss out on a lot of the story and the environment while I'm raiding.
And so even though I go and do the raids, I expect that I will go in and check out these story modes raids just so that I can... soak in and sort of experience the story of the raid at a reasonable pace and not feeling rushed.
Yeah. You're not there for all the fat loots. I mean, there's some loot, but you're not there for all your grindy reasons, so save the grinding for a different... That's a different night. That's a different thing. That's a thing you schedule with a bunch of people, and it's almost like work, but it's fun. You like it, but now you have...
Right.
You know what I mean? So I think it's going to be great. I'm really looking forward to that as a feature. I did skip over it. Kind of. Didn't I just ran right past that thing? Yeah. All right. Now we got to talk about some hardcore stuff.
Yeah.
A gaze of a God. Do you know who that is? That's, um,
i forgot which elder god i chose for that i forgot who it is that's a bad oh no no no no i can't remember who it is anyway i'll think of it before the show's over anyway let's talk about delves and the potential for hardcore games among the delves um it is replacing pvp in the great vault which makes me happy because i never used it in this last expansion i don't play pvp in this game
I'm sorry, okay? They've made great strides over time to make a great PvP experience, but I just don't like it in MMOs of any kind. It's not just a WoW thing. I just don't like it in any of them. Your mileage may vary. I've definitely got some memories from doing some PvP things, but I just don't care about it that much.
So for me, that Great Vault thing just ended up being a feature I never touched in this last expansion. That's all switching over to Delves and it being its, you know, connective tissue. Real quick from the Delves themselves, we have a bunch of stuff in the Isle of Dorne. We have Earthcrawl Mines, Creevel's Rest, Fungal Folly. That sounds terrible. I don't want to go in there.
In Hollowfall, another zone, you have Skittering Breach, Nightfall Sanctum, and the Sinkhole. You also have something called Micromancer Cavern. Cavern. Micromancer.
Myco.
That's in fungus. Another fungus thing. Micromancer. Is my co-man. Oh, my co. Like mycology. Mycology. Now I get it. It's like, oh, it's mine. Look at me and my co-mancer. And then they mixed it with necromancer. The Ringing Deeps. We got the Waterworks and the Dread Pit. Both things. Also with my mother-in-law. And then we have...
Azkahet, the Spiral Weave, the Tak-Rathan Abyss, and the Underkeep, as well as Zekvir's Lair. Yeah. And Azkahet is that big bug city, cavernous bug city, which I'm stoked about in there. You watched the new cinematic for that, right?
Yes.
The mom and the daughter and all that. I don't want to spoil anything, but it was good. It was real good. It was gooey, too. I don't even like... Look, I don't like any of the Blizzard bug stuff. Don't like it. Not a fan. Don't like big bugs coming at me. Don't like beetles. I don't like carapaces.
Fighting all that stuff's not my jam, but I really like what they're showing with the story in there, so I'll deal with it. It'll be okay. But let's talk about the Delves in general. This is an idea pulled a little bit from a lot of stuff in different MMOs. They come from neighboring MMOs, and they kind of do their own tweak on it.
Follower dungeons are definitely a tweak on the AI-assisted dungeons in Final Fantasy. And I would say these Delves are a lot like the self-same Delves in Elder Scrolls Online. They have a very similar system in there. How excited are you for Delves, and why?
I am very excited. When I first heard about this, it was more of like, hmm, that's interesting. So what Delves are is that they are a one to five player experience that is shorter form, about 10 to 20 minutes.
minutes um you so you can go in there solo uh or you can go in there with five people or anywhere in between it flexes um and it's it's sort of like so for people who've played uh who who played um not shadowlands yeah shadowlands the what do you call it the roguelike tour gas tour gas yeah Yeah, it's very much feels like they're riffing on Torghast, the Tower of the Damned.
And that whole experience was like you go in and you fight your way to the end of this thing. And depending on how quickly you do it or how many goals you accomplish along the way, you'll get different types of loot and different amounts of loot and everything. People had their problems with Torghast.
Some people liked it and disliked it in different ways, and it seems like they're trying to improve on that experience. You'll get to take a companion with you, and the companion will change every season. The companion at first is Bran Bronzebeard, but the idea is like you're delving into the deeps and exploring and learning about stuff. And your companion can either DPS for you or heal for you.
And it's supposed to flex and be able to be done regardless of what spec you are or what your team composition is if you take other people in there. Each delve has a story. So there's a compelling reason to do it. That's way better than Torghast. Torghast had... almost zero story.
No, the story of Torghast was outside of Torghast. There were things I liked about Torghast. I liked the concept. I liked the augmentation of your abilities, the deeper you went in. The roguelike elements were fun, but man, you got tired of that place. Oh my
Yeah, you did. Like I said, they're riffing on that. There's a few less powers that you get, but you do get some fun powers and everything. Like I said, I was like, oh, that's interesting because I just seemed like, oh, more Torghast and I'll just get some transmog and whatever. I'll probably get bored of this like I did Torghast eventually.
But they have... The fact that they're adding it to the Great Vault... is a big deal. They seem to really want this to actually be a gear progression path for people who are not as into big, even dungeons or raids or anything like that. And so from the, when you get into, so from the Great Vault, you should be able to get gear as high as mythic dungeon level gear. Yeah.
um in or mythic plus level gear from doing delves um and it's just what will happen is as you just like in torgas as you when you when you beat the delve um it has a tier level so the first time you go in it'll be tier one you beat that and it'll unlock tier two tier three all the way up to tier 11 and they'll get harder and harder, and then you'll get better and better rewards.
Yeah. Big question for me is how much variety will there be with runs? I want it to be... The one thing I liked about Torghast, at least initially, it felt like things were...
sort of generated on the fly or procedural generation of levels i didn't feel like i was doing the exact like a dungeon you're doing the exact same thing every time so what i have seen is that there isn't doesn't seem to be as much um shuffling about like torgast was all the rooms were like shuffled around and everything it was um but the And there's less of that here.
Each delve is sort of like static in its layout, just like a dungeon would be. But the enemies that are going to be in there maybe change up a little bit and the abilities that you can get change up a little bit. But the way that they're kind of freshening it up is, yes, Torghast, like the layout changed every time, but they basically all look the same. It was just some gray...
tower that you were going through.
The concepts did not, it wasn't full Diablo levels of randomization. And that bummed me out. That's part of why it fell off as I just like, this is so samey and so boring. And the, and the look of it, like environmental art was kind of bad. No offense to anyone working on that, but.
But at least in the Delves, there are 12 different Delves. I know if you count up all the things that you just read off, there are 13, but one of them, Zekvir's Lair, is actually sort of like an end boss room that you will get to eventually.
Oh, I thought it was his own separate thing.
That's a different... I think it technically is, but it's not like a full Delve. It exists to house this big bad boss of the Delve story, I guess. Oh, got it. Okay. And he's just a challenge that you have to overcome.
548.
So one would assume once you finish the campaign, you'll have it.
I'm going to correct you a little bit. That's if you want to get to tier four delves. Um, you can do delves from while you're leveling up, but you, the highest level delve you can do as you're leveling up is tier three. So you can only do one to three until you reach level 80. That's great though.
Especially for alts. I didn't realize that. I thought this was a, well, yeah, you're right. So 548 or five, yeah, excuse me. 548 will get you into tier four immediately.
Yeah, the things that you just mentioned are how you unlock Tier 4 Delves.
Got it. Let's see. There was another thing about this I wanted to mention, if I can find it. Similar to Torghast, recommended levels. You can do tiers. Here we go. Tier 1, 561+. If you want to do Tier 8 through 11 at your max, 603+. And it will drop, obviously, loot appropriate to that gear level.
Tier level 8 is the highest you'll need to do if you're doing it for gear. The gear level does not increase in tiers 9 to 11. Tier level 8 is supposed to be about the same level as Mythic plus 5 gear, so pretty good. And the 9 through 11, there are achievements associated with that. So there is a reason for people who like the challenge to do 9 through 11.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to these. This is going to be stuff that you can very quickly in a guild situation to say, hey, is anybody around who's going to go run tier two on two of these? And three people in the group can go, yeah, I'm available. And you just go, you know.
Yeah, and you can do that, and the tier level you have access to is going to be limited by the lowest unlocked tier in your group. So, like, if you and I were to do it, and I've...
gotten to tier level five but you've gotten all the way to tier six or seven we still will if we're together we would only be able to do tier five until i unlock higher ones right right so yeah there is some of that gating going on but no more it's not that different than what you're doing with your friends with dungeons and mythic levels yeah yeah
um real quick here is for those at home going well scott it's nothing like eso delves what i mean by that is this is blizzard is putting their own spin on it kind of like they did with dragon flight and mounts it is definitely lifting from uh what's the name of the other game guild wars 2 and their mount system is very similar like there's no way they didn't get inspiration from it but they put their own spin on it this is what blizzard does and they do it pretty well
So the delves are going to be different. There's a whole different kind of focus with these delves. The ones in ESO are kind of random and you're just out in the middle of nowhere and you're like, I think I'll go down that hole. And there are other players in there and you have goals to do and stuff like that. And you can clear a delve, but it's not this structure.
They've clearly tightened this up a little bit. Do you think we'll ever see quest tables again? Are we done with those forever? No more of those.
You mean like from our garrison and stuff?
Yeah, and they used them in BFA at the ship, and you'd talk to Vampire George, whatever his name was, and you'd...
Oh, yeah. They were even in Shadowlands. You're talking about when you send your followers out? Yeah. You think we're done there? I don't know. I think in Shadowlands, they tried really hard to do something with it, and it just still wasn't doing what they were trying to do. Yeah.
And it just ended up being a thing that... It didn't feel like there was compelling choices you were making and you weren't doing anything. You were just like, you downloaded the add-on that told you the best configuration, you sent them out, and it was just not compelling. It was just a thing that you felt like you had to do.
Yeah, it was like checking for currencies in a free-to-play mobile game a little bit. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly, yeah. You open up your mobile game and you send your people out and then you close it and then you wait for the notification to tell you that you could collect your, you know, coins.
Yeah. I mean, I think there's something to that in general, but I just think it's a hard fit for an MMO. It's just not that interesting, you know? Yeah, it's just, it's not.
So I don't know. Maybe they'll try again. I never say never, but they've tried it a couple of times.
I liked earning gold that way. It wasn't much, but I liked just saying, oh, this guy's going to go off and I'll take this 300 gold mission. And he'll come back with a bunch of gold that I didn't have before. And then I'll exploit that and have him go every day. And then I'll definitely check it. Like if it's the right motivation, I'm in. But that just never felt like it to me.
yeah uh all right well that's about that for that let's talk about mythics for a little bit more or raids anything about these any changes to mythics i should say this time around for somebody who loves them like you do are you excited about yeah mythic plus dungeons are my jam i really love that um i'm so crazy about mythic pluses that i actually um
One of my favorite things to do is what everybody hates, which is I actually level all the way up. I get all the highest achievements to where I get all the titles and the mounts and the maximum mythic plus achievements. I'm doing the plus 20s and all that kind of stuff, but I do it all in pugs. All pugs. You're a pug man. You're a pug. Yeah, I have a Mythic Plus team that I do go with.
But when I'm pushing the highest cut, I'm doing it in a pug. And I know people are like, you are crazy. And maybe I am. But for some reason, I just love doing that because I'm a glutton for pain, I think. But anyway, that's a conversation I could talk about another time. But the two things I'm really excited about that they have changed in Mythic Plus is...
is uh or so with mythic plus they have um these new affix affixes that they're doing affixes in mythic plus have been sort of the community has complained about them for a really really long time they've haven't for a while felt like uh a compelling feature the idea i think at the beginning was like okay we're gonna we're gonna make it so you can rerun these these
five-man dungeons, we're going to put them, you know, you're going to want to do it quickly. We're going to put a timer on there. So it's challenging that way. Also, every time you do it, you can then get a keystone that increases its level that makes it so you can, it gets harder the next time. So that's going to be really compelling. You know, see how high you can get your keystone level.
The gear gets better. You want to get it higher and higher and higher. The other thing we're going to do is we're going to change it up a little bit every time where there's going to be these different abilities that
different challenges um every week that you have to put up with you know like maybe there's going to be these tornadoes that pop out all the time that you have to dodge or maybe the every once in a while um every time you kill an enemy a death pool will drop on the ground that you have to stay out of all this kind of stuff and it's in theory it seemed interesting but it just it just never it just always ended up feeling like towards the end it just felt like
you were just annoyed by it all the time. You're like, oh, I got to deal with this one this time. And it was never like, it never changed your gameplay because I think that's what they were trying to do. They wanted to be like, oh, this week, you know, you have to worry about every time someone, every time a piece of trash dies, it explodes and does a bunch of damage.
So we're going to have to change our strategy. But you didn't change your strategy every time. You just were annoyed that this week, this terrible thing was happening. Right.
right um so there was a lot of talk about like why are we doing this this is so this like let's stop doing that and blizzard said at one point we're getting rid of affixes and and the mythic plus community rejoiced they were like great we're just gonna because it was it's still fun to do when it as it gets harder and harder and harder right
we love that just these affixes were just not and they also were restricted like just making life harder for specific classes sometimes um and that's not very fun either to feel like i'm a i'm a you know i'm a i don't know a druid a a cat druid and and i can't
do anything like it's just i don't know like it's just harder for me because of what i do and then or on the other end of it oh i can't get into any groups as a as a monk healer because everybody wants shadow priests you know like or everybody wants uh discipline priests or or you know whatever um that didn't feel good so they they said they were getting rid of these affixes but then
They decided to add new affixes called Zalatatz Bargain. And these things, these are the new affixes that you have to deal with. And I won't go into the details about them because that's really nitty gritty kind of stuff. But the idea about these new affixes, Zalatatz Bargain, is that these are the only things you have to deal with now. And it changes every week and there are four different ones.
And the idea is Zalatath has decided to add some benefit to all the enemies in the group. And it's some thing that's happening. Maybe there's these orbs that are slowly collapsing on the group of enemies every once in a while. And it's going to buff all the enemies if the enemies absorb these orbs.
But the bargain is that they get they get a benefit, but you as a player, you can try to stop it and then instead you get the benefit. So it adds a little bit of interesting gameplay, like stand in the way of the orbs and you absorb them yourself. But if you don't absorb all of them, then whoops. Yeah. So that's interesting.
But I am a little worried that it is going to still restrict certain classes and make things harder for specific people. Yeah. But yeah. And it also feels like, because that's going to be the very first affect, like you have to deal with it from Mythic plus two right at the very beginning. It feels like it's going to be a big...
big thing that you have to deal with right away instead of easing you into it. I don't know. I'm interested and curious to see how it works, but I'm a little bit cautious about it.
Zalatath, by the way, for those who don't know, she's your floating balls in front of her face cinematic lady. She's our big bad to this thing. And the thing that Metzen said in the interview was going to show up throughout the saga, not necessarily just like, oh, she's the raid boss and we're within the It's much more than that.
I'm putting up an image of her right now that she originally appeared as. She looks like she'd be no trouble, you know? Look at this image. I'll put it in Discord. You see that and you just say, oh, yeah, just look at her. It's like an NPC. Big deal. She's not even wearing shoes. Lame, right?
That's when she wasn't a knife anymore and she got her body for the first time.
That's right.
This is back in, what, Legion, I think, that that happened? No, I think it was Shadowlands. Was it Shadowlands? Yeah.
I don't remember now.
We were first introduced to Zalatath in Legion as the Shadow Priest weapon.
Oh, that's why I was thinking of Legion. Because she was actually a weapon. Oh, there it is. Yeah, the sentient blade. Yeah, her story is a weird one. But anyway, yeah, I like that. I mean, it will be like all this stuff, proof's in the playing, right? All your mythic friends are going to play it, and then they'll decide whether these new affixes are stupid or not. So watch for it.
Come into a town near you. All right. Okay, I'm really excited to play this. So I'll just play it. Here you go.
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!
All right, what you got there is a multi-generational take on the town crier. We got the OG Nicholas when he was five, then his nephew who is now five, and then Nick, or then me doing the, it's the town crier, and then you got Nick who's now 24 doing his little bit, and then you got Van again doing his thing, and then the two cries are Van and then Nick when he was five again.
All in one glorious bumper file. Anyway, I had fun putting that together. So, uh, yeah, it's nostalgia. It is that it's in its purest form. Uh, let's get to this, uh, here message that we got here. Uh, this is sorry, tabbing around here. Uh, this is a quick message from Bay Lell in our chat room and, uh, discord and all that stuff.
How does it feel, he says, with all the hype coming to The War Within? Do you think that any XEQ devs wonder when it went Blizzard's way or why it went Blizzard's way rather than theirs? So referring, obviously, to EverQuest 2, which launched the same time as WoW. I remember at the time, there were a lot of people, including my very into MMOs brother-in-law, who were convinced that
All the money should be on EverQuest. They were the ones that were going to do it. And that WoW was going to be a also-ran. It wouldn't last very long. You can still play EverQuest 2, EQ2, and it's fine. It's community and everything. But why did it run away as the clear frontrunner and has been since?
I don't have a good answer for this, except to say I think the game began as a more, even in classic days, people want to act like it was more hardcore than it was. But I remember when this game came out and everyone said, when you die, you just float around for a minute as a ghost, and then you get all your stuff back. This is a baby.
I remember people saying stuff like that, even about WoW's initial days, which people act like now. Oh, your hardcore days, man. Those were the days. You don't remember then.
um it was already that right they were already getting accused of care bearing but i think that their instincts were correct make this game as as as available to as many players as possible and that will carry you longer i also think choosing to do a art style that was uh significantly less at least aiming for realism and more stylization did them enormous favors
Because it lasts the test of time. The technology and what we see today is vastly improved, but it's still consistent with what the game was in its early days. So you can keep that consistency throughout the years. They were trying for like the hottest looking mannequin level freaking quote unquote realism at the time with EQ.
And it flopped on its face with that particular aspect because it looks like ass now. It looks terrible now. So never go for the cutting edge. I think that was a hugely smart decision for them and to go stylized and to make the game more playable by more people. I think that's really it. Do you have any thoughts on that, whether I'm insane or not?
No, I think you nailed it. I never played EQ. So World of Warcraft was the first MMO I ever played. So I don't have a lot of experience to draw on for that. But I've heard people and I knew people who did play EQ and then started playing World of Warcraft. And that's all I ever hear is that it's just, you know...
all the changes that World of Warcraft were making felt like it was just to make it more accessible to more people and make it easier to play and not so punishing, which wasn't for everybody. I mean, some people really liked how punishing EverQuest was. Whatever. More power to you. But, you know, if you wanted to stand the test of time, you got to make it for more people to join the party.
Yeah, I agree. What was the game I was playing right before while I was playing a lot of... Oh, geez. What was the one that introduced Realm versus Realm? My brain just went crazy. I can't think of the thing. Anyway, the one that had Merlin in it, it was... I can't remember the name. Anyway, that game I played a ton of and it had this very punishing death problem where you would die.
First of all, they didn't have like questing, proper questing. It was just like grinding. So you'd find a place where a bunch of creatures were and just kill them until you couldn't stand it. And the name almost came to me and then it left again. Shit. Some people at home are yelling at their stuff because they know. But anyway, when you would die, you would lose some percentage.
I want to say it was 20% of your XP. Regardless, that was gone. No matter what, that was gone. But also your stuff, your gold, your items, your equipables were all left there in a pile, kind of Diablo 2 style. And you had to run, you had to corpse run, not in some ethereal realm where you're dead and you're a ghost and nothing can hurt you, but in the real world. And so you're very vulnerable.
And then when you get out there, I just almost had it again. Dark Age of Camelot, that's it. Hey. You ever have a thought just go, oh, shit, I didn't catch its face. And then it runs by again. It was like that. Anyway, then you'd have to run up to your thing. You'd get a little bit of your XP back. I don't think it was all of it. And you get your stuff back.
But now you had to go grind out the XP you lost. Yeah. Now, I understand the value that some may place on that kind of punishment. I think there's a place for it, and I'm glad that there is.
Yeah, like hardcore mode in World of Warcraft.
There you go. Exactly. Or something like, I don't know, Souls likes today. They're punishing on purpose. It's part of the experience. I think that's wonderful that those exist. But if you want to capture a very large part of a subscribing game model market, you've got to be more approachable than that.
So it's a small example with the death thing, but there are a lot of things in WoW that I really appreciate that others did not do. Here is a quick email. No, this is a voicemail. This came to us at 801-471-0462. This is about when things started way back in the day.
Hey, this is Andrew. After seeing your two videos, I can't believe it's almost 20 years since the incense became a thing. And it's nuts. And it makes me feel old because I remember when the town crier was a damn kid. And now he's got kids. So it's crazy. I miss all you guys, Randy, Patrick, the Guild. I haven't played WoW since Panda Land expansion came out.
Although I still periodically log in to see if all my guys are still there. And they're all still there, which is kind of nuts. Well, I just wanted to call you guys and congratulate you on Instance 2.0. And I hope you guys have a blast. I'm actually looking forward to listening to the show, even though I don't really play WoW anymore. See you guys.
All right. So if you don't recognize the voice, that is Andrew Konietzky, the original co-host of The Instance back in 2006. And he was there for about a year. Also did a little ELR with me. And it was just great to hear from him. So I wanted to make sure I played that. Brings us full circle. That was a long-ass time ago. A long time. It seriously was. Yeah. And we started the guild together.
I think I probably first complained about wow bugs then because we were doing the Gates of Encarage back then. It's just a wild. And then I saw Randy last week, so I got a little bit of that. And, you know... There's been a lot of people, a lot of stuff in between, but here we are now today doing a thing with this guy that looks like Jesus, and it's great. I love it.
Here is one. I can never cut my hair.
No, you can't. You're like Samson. Don't do it. I don't even know how that story goes, but Samson couldn't cut his hair for some reason. What was the deal?
Lose all of his... It was a source of his strength, I think.
Oh, was that it? All right. Yeah. I thought it was something more like all his money went away or something like that.
No, you're confusing someone else. I don't know.
That shows what I know. All right. Returning player after a long time away. He has a question about writing animation. Here you go.
Hey, this is a call for the return of the instance. I've been listening since, you know, the days of you and Randy in a hot tub. I was probably around like 14 then. I'm 30 now. And I'm a returning player that kind of fell off in Warlord the Drainer and haven't seriously played since then. But, you know, my son is back and so am I and all that good stuff.
Anyway, I've been having a lot of fun in this game, leveling a few different classes. All of them have a good feel to them. The game looks great. Dragon riding is great. However, I do have a complaint. How are we still using the same riding animation for the player character as we did in Vanilluxe? And by animation, I mean there isn't one.
Every mount, it's the same look of just, like, holding a horse's reins and your character does not move whatsoever. It's just, it's jarring because Dragon Knight writing not only is, like, really fun, it also looks really great. But just that look of your character not moving whatsoever, it's real weird. Anyway, that's my gripe. Love the show, though.
All right, so... I was thinking about this the other day because my, um, one of these mounts I was trying to remember what it was. Oh, I know what it is. The Diablo, the Diablo death something mount. It's the one you got for Diablo fours pre-order. It's awesome. By the way, one of the best like tie-in mounts they've ever done.
And it's got this amazing wingspan, super demonics got like three headed dog in the front. It's very cool. But I noticed that when my orc is sitting there, he's holding like, he's supposed to be holding like a, like a, what are those called on horses? Hilt or whatever it is. Uh,
The range. Oh, the like little.
Yeah. What's that called?
I don't know. I want to say pommel, but it's not.
Is it pommel? No. It's not. It's not.
Whatever that is. Because the pommel is the thing at the end of a sword. Oh, right, right, right.
So this is like whatever that little handle is. And he's holding it with his two hands, but there's nothing there. He's just in the midair holding nothing because the reins of this thing are all in a different place. And so he's just very stiffly sort of stuck there. I mean, clearly it's not a priority.
But you'd think for a company that really prides itself on smooth transitions and animation and all that stuff, maybe would have had a look at that. I don't know. Maybe there's some old code that just prevents this from ever looking right. But he's right. If it isn't a horse, you all look funny.
The weirdness of the player character animation or lack thereof on mounts is very obvious when you're riding some mount that is tall. Yeah.
taller than it is long you know um when you're farther from the ground like say the the big mammoth mounts or there's that one mount that is like a giant monster that is i don't know it's like on two legs and kind of like running like yeah that was the warlords one um yeah
oh i like that mount but i know what you're talking about it's a ground mount but you're far off the ground and so it whenever you're he's the mount is moving around your character it looks like someone is holding a cardboard cutout of your character on the ground and just waving it around back and forth yeah yeah especially when they move like the the creature will be uh idle animation will be sitting there and will suddenly just go move around like this and your guy's just like a little stick going whoo
There's no momentum.
Or if you're like at the top of like a pointy hill. Mm-hmm.
and like so you step forward a little bit so the mount like tilts you forward but like really fast yeah and so it's like you're waving around like like a stick like yeah like paper you really you should launch off the front of that thing nobody's asking for like hyper realistic physics here but i do think they i think they could go right like revisit this you know yeah tweak it a
If you want to have your voicemail played on the show, 801-471-0462. You can also email us theinstance at gmail.com. And if you prefer to use the website, there's a link on there as well over at frogpants.com slash instance. Sign for the drop of the month. Now, this is exciting because we're about to give away some stuff. This week's drop is a contest.
And I want everybody to go right now to frogpants.com slash contest. I'm going to bring it up here for folks to view it. As you can see in the video version anyway, there's a picture of Thrall and Anduin checking out the sword. And it's a contest that will give you a bunch of possibilities. So here's what you're entering to win. One of you will win a copy of the War Within Epic Edition. Okay. Wow.
Just one of you. We only have one. By the way, thanks to Eric for that. Dude in our community. Very generous to offer that up. Six people, and these will never be the same. There will only be one per thing. So there won't be one guy gets six months of free WoW time or something.
In case you didn't know how contests work.
Yeah, just in case. Six people will win free 60-day WoW cards. This is thanks to our friends at Doghouse Systems who have been with us since 2008. One of my favorite people I've ever partnered with. John and crew over there are amazing human beings. You should buy your systems from them. They're amazing people. And, uh, he sent these over to me and says, Hey, let's give these away.
Yeah.
Why wouldn't you want it? Six of you will win that, and then six people will win 2008 BlizzCon mount cards that are very rare. You can't get these anymore. It was the mount cards you had to scratch off and then enter into your account in 2008, and they've never made them since. Wow. And I can't even tell you who gave me these, but somebody at Blizzard, I'll say that. They were very nice to do it.
So a little piece of history there, six of these unscratched. I already have them. They're like literally in my possession. I have to admit I've been, you know, I had a couple of eBay temptations, but I didn't do it there for you guys. Uh, all of that is possible. If you just go to frog pants.com slash contest, that's frog pants.com slash contest. All it asks for is your name, your email.
And if you want to leave a message, you can, it's not required, but we just need to be able to get in contact with you. If you win, um, All of the winners will be announced sometime early next week. What is today? Wednesday? Maybe even this weekend. I just want to give people a few days.
So let's say Saturday we'll make an announcement across the channels and stuff and let everybody know who has won what. And we hope to do more contests on the show as well. But right now this is a big one.
So again, hop in there now for your chance to win 60-day WoW cards, BlizzCon mount cards, or the War Within Epic Edition of the game, all courtesy of wonderful people like Eric, Doghouse Systems, and a secret friend in Irvine. I think that's it on that. Oh, and I mentioned earlier, just as a little memorial of sorts, it's not much of one, but it feels right to do this.
For an old friend of the program, way, way, way back in the day, if you guys remember, one of our post-show segments was created almost every single week by James. He went by the name Akuzod. He has been a very active player in our guild and was
always showing up with these awesome files every week i loved playing them and he would play this overly dramatic news segment and i decided to go find one to play at the end of the show today which i will do in post uh so if you're listening to the audio version of the podcast you'll hear it uh you won't hear it on the video one but the audio version will have it
And, uh, we just want to wish him and his family the best. Um, he passed away suddenly. I feel so bad for his wife, just awful stuff. We lose people in this community sometimes and it's never easy. Um, so shout out to Accusat and his family for, uh, you know, for being such a rad dude. He was awesome. Yeah. I think it's going to do it. That is going to do it.
Oh, we got a Patreon should mention that. Oh, do I have Patriot? Let's see if I have a bumper for that. What do you mean there's lore in this game? Oh, that's an old Thrall thing. That's not going to work. Uh, but anyway, we got to this Patreon, patreon.com slash the instance. And, uh, we got some people who signed up already.
I mean, I didn't even really get the word out that much, but we already have a bunch of new signups. Lee Adams, Quag Spire, Will Porta, Carrie, Ram Volter, Spaghetti Syntax. Love that guy. Leveled up, sorry, leveled up noob. Uh, Andy Tashita, Shatterproof, know him. Jesse Raposa, Gabe Geisendorfer, amazing name. I want to know him. Michael Hennessy and Tanner Goodman. We know Tanner.
You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for your early support of The Instance. You're going to get commercial-free versions of the show. You're going to get other benefits. Just go read about them. And we'll be adding more as time goes on. We just wanted to get something up for launch, and so it's ready to roll.
You can sign up today at frogpants.com slash instance, or go straight to patreon.com slash the instance. Okay? Super easy. Piece of cake. No problem. I think that's it. Frogpants.com slash instance for everything else. You can find all our links and stuff over there. And of course, the instance at gmail.com if you'd like to send us your feedback. And don't forget, we also do voicemails.
We also do texts at 801-471-0462. Bobby, super fun having you on for the first one, man. Wow, and this was a beefy one.
It was beefy. There was a lot to talk about.
There was a lot of catching up with what's going on. I suspect our monthly visits will be slightly less lengthy, but no less tasty. You know? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I'm getting Thai food later, so I'm kind of hungry. You can tell. Anyway, that's all happening next month right here on The Instance. Thank you guys for being here. Thanks for letting us relaunch this directly into your face.
And we hope you enjoyed it. That'll do it for me and for Bobby. We'll see you next time.
This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Yes. Get more at frogpants.com.
A mage saves the day. It's the overly dramatic news. This is Accusod. Blood elf frost mage Rockerchick proved herself to be a hero today when she saved a children's party at the local Chuck E. Cheese from total disaster after a fuse blew, rendering the establishment's snow cone machine completely inoperable. Rockerchick explains what happened next.
Well, I took one look at those sad little faces. And I knew I had to act. I summoned my frost pick, grabbed an ice pick, and in 15 minutes, everyone had more snow cones than they could eat.
This follows a week after Rockerchick saved a Westfall farmstead from an attack of ravenous crows by freezing a passing night elf and placing him on a pole in the middle of the field. For the Overly Dramatic News, this is AccuZod.