transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:13] You're listening to The Starting Zone, a podcast about World of Warcraft and the people who play it. And now, here are your hosts.

Speaker 2:
[00:29] Well, hello and welcome to The Starting Zone, the podcast about World of Warcraft and the people who play it today is April 17th, and it's another Friday record for us. And yeah, thank you so much for listening and subscribing to the podcast. My name is Spencer Downey, I'm joined today as always by my co-host, Jason Lucas. Jason, how are you doing on this fine Friday?

Speaker 3:
[00:49] Spencer, hello, I am here. I am technically, clinically awake. It is time for another TSE After Dark. It's been a long week for me. And if anybody hung out on stream this week, you know I was complaining about being very sleep deprived and insomniac this week. So hey, we got across the finish line. We're here. Our brains are working. And so what better time than to record an episode?

Speaker 2:
[01:16] Yes, I spent my day broadcasting all through the day. And so now I'm here in the evening, broadcasting something different in the evening. So yes, it is a very long day. I work early tomorrow morning too. And so we'll probably have another interesting release for this episode when it happens. But I am glad that we're getting the record in. And yeah, as Jason said, I got home. I ate a modest dinner. I took a shower and we started recording. So that is the day from work today. And I'm going to go to bed immediately after this. So it's a fun time here at TSZ. But yes.

Speaker 3:
[01:47] Big old party. The party never stops.

Speaker 2:
[01:49] This past week in World of Warcraft, we re-cleared, which was nice. Got up to Paladins, which was good. And we spent, man, I had guessed about 30 minutes on Sunday and then the whole night on Monday on Paladins and got really close to a kill, which was too bad, to be so close to a kill and not quite get it before raid time expired. And then see that they're nerfing Paladins immediately on Tuesday, which would have meant that we killed it on Monday, had they nerfed it just a little bit faster after those other teams had gotten through. You know, it's just one of those, hey guys, could you turn those dials a bit faster if that's what you're going to end up doing?

Speaker 3:
[02:33] Didn't really need the prestige of the pre-nerf kill at that point.

Speaker 2:
[02:39] Yeah, they're reducing all their health by 5% is what they're doing. And the Paladins fight after you kill one of the Paladins gets a lot easier because then you don't have all those abilities that you're trying to deal with. And the strat, we're using kills two of them at the same time, which would have happened had this had come through earlier. So it's just one of those unfortunate things where you're like, this is why I dislike the race to a certain degree, is you're like, this is the remnant stuff that they're still turning down after they turned it all up for that. So this is what we get. And anyways, we're into a new raid week. We'll go and face them this week and, you know, missed opportunities or missed opportunities, but it is what it is and should get it. I will say Paladins as a healer, because I'm playing Restoradruid on it, is a really fun fight. It is frenetic and crazy and the amount of damage boggles your mind at times. I definitely think it was in need of some tuning for, you know, a lot of situations. I still feel like it 100% requires either a bunch of priests with a bunch of Master Spells rotating or even that, I don't think that would be enough, or just revivals. So you just need to have at least one monk in your raid because the debuffs that go out on your group, yes, they cut down the frequent one that what happens every 30 seconds or so to four stacks from eight which meant that it wasn't as required to have multiple monks in those situations but you still get at two different points in the fight, it might be three different points in the fight, the whole raid blanketed with that debuff, that shield debuff where everyone gets hit by a shield. I don't know how they'd expect any raid team to be able to have that many dispells or to keep anyone alive. The ticking damage on that thing does 500,000 damage in 1.5 seconds to 2 seconds and it lasts 18 seconds. You just have to keep working to dispel people until you get all of them off of it. Being able to have someone just go boop and all of the dispells go away when those overlaps happen is like, hey, you're now just designed to fight where Mistweaver Monk is required and that feels strange to have done that. But we literally had our Resto Shaman said, I'm just going to level a Mistweaver and gear it. And so we leveled and geared a character specifically for this fight, which feels very weird to do. But it's what we did. So yeah.

Speaker 3:
[05:02] Yeah. It's unfortunate when you end up in a spot like that. And this one got some Mistweaver throughput nerfs coming through.

Speaker 2:
[05:09] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[05:10] You know, it's going to be it's, you know, we got a whole, obviously, I guess we should kind of mention at the top of show. Like we do have a patch coming up this week, first patch of Midnight. And so there are going to be, you know, many, many changes. We're going to talk about all the incoming stuff to play, but we're not going to get real deep in the weeds with class changes, tuning, redesigns, all that, because it's just too much to absorb. And it's probably not interesting to anybody that doesn't play that class. So, you know, just keep an eye out on your class discords and Icy Veins guides and whatever else about what you need to know, what change is coming in, because there are a lot, you know, there's a lot of stuff shifting around, in addition to all the new stuff coming out on Tuesday. So, yeah, a lot of stuff happening this week coming up.

Speaker 2:
[05:57] It's been very fluid on the PTR, too, which is why we haven't talked about it a ton. I know that RestorDruid, they've been, I mean, currently, the majority build that people use doesn't use their Apex talent at all. It's entirely unspect. And so they've been trying to figure out a way to make that not the case, because obviously, if you're going to put something into a talent tree, that's the big expansion feature that's called your Apex talents. Typically, you'd want to put at least a few points into that tree, because that should be valuable, and RestorDruid has been in a situation where it hasn't been valuable at all to really do that versus not do it. So, they had buffed it a fair amount, and now they've recently, just before this patch release, nerfed it again. And so I have no idea what state this is going to be coming in. I'm going to be having to watch a lot of, I guess, logs, and see how the meta kind of changes as all the druids go back to the kitchen to try and figure out what their specs and builds are going to be like for this week, once this patch comes out. Because there's going to be people who are testing things probably three or four days before something starts to even remotely settle into a meta of what makes sense to run on certain fights. So we'll see what happens. I'm very skeptical of whether or not they're going to get that right. But we'll see what happens, man. I don't know. It's a very weird thing to have a class go live into an expansion where within the first week of rating people are going, like, you just don't choose the Apex talent because you do more healing and you're better at your job without it. That just seemed very strange.

Speaker 3:
[07:32] Yeah, kind of goes against the design goals for the feature, I would think. I know they sort of alluded to when they announced it, like, well, the Apex talent is going to affect different specs in different ways or whatever. But I don't think they, from a design perspective, I don't think they wanted to be meta that you just don't take what is supposed to be your new toy. That's just weird. So yeah, that definitely needs to change.

Speaker 2:
[07:54] But outside of that, I mean, we worked on Paladins, we're looking forward to getting back there again on Sunday. At this point, we're only killing Chimeras on Heroic because everyone needs a Gaze Trinket. You just have to get one. I still don't have one. A bunch of people still don't have one. So we continue to, like, technically I should be killing them on Normal every week too, just because even a Normal one is a large upgrade over, which again makes me question, like, should this Trinket just get smacked a bit? Like, if literally it's so important that, like, you're wanting, like, at least 60 to 70 percent of people on your team want this one Trinket because it's that powerful, like, I don't know. Anyways, there's got to be a best Trinket. I get that. Like, there always will be. Yeah, it just seems a bit odd that we're in this circumstance where, you know, it was designed that way.

Speaker 3:
[08:42] Yeah, what is that good? There may be too wide of a gulf between, like, the best Trinket and the good Trinkets, or, you know, the next tier down.

Speaker 2:
[08:49] Could be.

Speaker 3:
[08:50] Yeah, it might be a little bit imbalanced.

Speaker 2:
[08:51] And then outside of that, it's just right back in to doing mythic stuff. I don't even think we're killing heroic Bellerin this week. We'd killed her last week. Cool fight to see. Tried to do the one-phase strat. Didn't have the damage the first time we saw it to do the one-phase strat, so we just killed it in the second phase, which was fine. We just sort of lived through it, which was okay, and that wasn't a big deal. Cool fight, though. Looking forward to seeing what that's like on mythic and what that fight feels like on mythic for us. That's not it. Yeah, it was just we're going to be re-clearing this week. I haven't done any mythic plus this week. I've literally had very little time to play World of Warcraft this week, so I just I am like behind the curve. I need to spend my one day off, which is Sunday, figuring out how to get the most keystones in and the most other stuff done that I need to do before raid, which is Sunday night. I also need to craft this week. This was a week where we got enough sparks to be able to craft, so I need to actually like earn enough mythic tokens. Actually, I think I probably already have enough because I haven't been getting mythic gear from raid to just craft another item before raid comes up, so that I can actually have the best eye level I can for doing that kind of content. So I have that going on this week. But yeah, literally it was like a few routine short stuff on Tuesday, and then it was just working. So I haven't had a ton of time to dig into WoW. So I'm looking forward to having a bit of time this weekend. And then again, I won't have another huge window for WoW time until probably Friday next week. So it will be a bit of a low, I think, is what I've moved into here just with my work schedule picking up. So we'll see where things go. How about you?

Speaker 3:
[10:27] Right. Yeah, I'm kind of on the complete opposite end of the spectrum because I got all my important stuff done in WoW by like Wednesday night. And I don't have too much else on the checklist before reset. So you know, that's kind of where I'm at. I missed Sunday. I was out and about. I had other stuff going on. So I didn't raid. I don't actually know what the team did. I think they were like trying to farm mythic BoE or something. And I don't know what else. So you know, whatever. They got together and did stuff. But I was not present for that. But so Tuesday, we came in and started with Heroic Chimeras for much of the reasons that you outlined. You know, just go in and do it. And I don't think we got any trinkets to drop anyway. After that, went to Normal March. Kind of what I'm doing now for the time being is like start with Dream Rift, do it on Heroic, go over to March and do the two bosses in March on Normal and then go to Void Spire. So we did that and we kind of cut Normal Void Spire out of the main schedule, I think at this point, it's just no real, I don't think there's that much of a benefit for it. Everybody's got four piece, you know what I mean? It's just that there's not a big enough return on that at this point. So I think Tuesday we ended up getting all the way back to Crown. And then we had time for like two pulls on Crown with a pretty big group, including some people who had never really seen it before. We were still getting to phase three. So I was feeling pretty good. They did nerf Crown a little bit on Heroic before we looked at it on Tuesday, I guess. So again, we didn't get the pre-nerf kill, but not really too broken up about it, to be honest. Wednesday, we went in with about, I think, 25, something like that. We did get Crown AOTC in about an hour. So that was pretty nice. It was not a clean kill. We had a Divine Shielded Paladin Tank alive, and I think one of our mages was alive when the boss died. But that's the hardest it's ever going to be. I think people were having a real hard time understanding the dance in phase three, like how to move back and forth with the grasp and try to keep the group safe and everything, but they started doing better. So I'm not concerned about reclears on that. I'm not saying we're going to go knock it over next week. It might take a couple more pulls, but it felt pretty good. The important thing is we were doing, especially phase two really well, pretty much consistently throughout Prague, so that was great. After that, we went to heroic Beloran and we had like a 6% wipe on it in just a few pulls. We just kind of had too many people dead on that second egg and there was no way to knock it over before it went back into main phase and then it was kind of just game over. But we'll look at it on Sunday. I think we'll probably end up with a slightly smaller group just because Sunday is not like a day people are as available. And so I think that will help a bit too. It's just really hard to direct traffic with 28, 30 players on some of these fights. There's a lot of visual noise just from players running around doing stuff. So I think we'll get it probably. And then it becomes the question of like, what's the priority now? Do we spend time on heroic Midnight Falls, which has been killed an absurdly low number of times last time I checked?

Speaker 2:
[14:01] I will, for the sake of your insanity, say I have not even killed that fight on normal. I just literally have not even gone in. It's not even, I have not even addressed what that content is. My focus right now is on us progressing our current mythic content. And if our raid team is not going in and even killing that thing on normal or heroic, it is just not on my agenda at all. I'm not plugging it. I'm not going to like, maybe if there's another raid team that happens to need a person on normal that's going in to do it, that's done it before, I might tag along if that lined up with schedule stuff. But that is a lot of ifs and things coming together to make that happen. It's just, honestly, it's just not there yet. I feel like they're going to do more tuning passes and it's going to be a very different fight by the time we get in there and kill it, which is fine.

Speaker 3:
[14:52] Right. And that's the debate I'm having inside my own brain in terms of where do I dedicate the raid team's time. I know we're going to get, if we don't get Beloran on Sunday, we'll definitely get it next week. And so I don't have much more time to figure this out. I do, I mean, I agree with you. It doesn't feel like Midnight Falls is, even on Heroic, is a fight that is like very yet. It hasn't arrived yet. It's not in the form where players are engaging with it. And yeah, I am looking at WoW Progress. Yes, I still use WoW Progress. You know, now, okay, so Heroic Midnight Falls is up to like 1,033 kills on record. It was at like 500 to start this week. So it's been killed a lot more this week with some tuning changes, obviously people gearing up.

Speaker 2:
[15:40] Well, and the 1% damage increase that we all got.

Speaker 3:
[15:43] Yeah, the zone buff. But so that still puts it with a lower number of kills than everything until Light-Blinded Vanguard on Mythic. So it doesn't seem like a great use of the team's resources, but when I have 25, 30 people that show up and want to raid, well, you know, then that has to come into consideration too. So hopefully we'll see more substantial tuning on that fight. Heroic March landed in a very weird place. I mean, they nerfed Beloran significantly this week, and that's the only reason why we were able to get as close to a kill in two or three or four polls as we did. Because with the original tuning, I'm sure we would have been getting wiped out. So, you know, it's just it's weird the way they rolled these raids out. And it makes sense for the story, kind of like each each raid has like a reason to exist in the overarching story and staggering them and staggering the release and telling the story through the raid. I think it actually worked pretty well this time. But yeah, we got to get the tuning to a place where heroic raiders can actually approach the content and you know, enjoy it. So we'll see. You know, outside of raid, Keystone's like, I hit Keystone's hard early to begin the week once again. Actually up to 2961 rating. And I haven't done any 13s at all. But we've been plus twoing a bunch of 12s, which is a ton of ratings. So I'm knocking on the door of 3K, which is really my target. I don't care about going above 3K without doing any 13s so far. I unlocked Resilient 12. And I went into Wednesday needing four different dungeons to unlock Resilient 12. And I got all four keys to line up one after the other. I had like Pit of Saron, did that. It turned into a Magister's Terrace. We did that. It turned into an Algarthar Academy, but somebody else in my group had one. We did his. I re-rolled mine and it turned into whatever the last one I needed was. I can't think of it. It might have been Seat. I think it was Seat. So like when does that ever happen that the keys line up just one after the other right then the list? That felt really good. So this was the first week I didn't do any Keystones with affixes, which is pretty early in the season and certainly in the expansion. So that's cool. I don't think the affixes feel bad this time around, but I also am happy not to have to deal with them. So, you know, this week coming up, like I'll probably try to sneak some 13s in and get that 3k. I'll probably go to 13 resil just as a matter of course, but I'm only going higher if I get drag kicking and screaming by the people that I run with. I just don't think the benefits are really there for me to want to push above that. Like I have limited time to play, you know, or maybe I should say I want to limit the time that I spend to playing. I have my wow time and then I have my other time, right? Like I don't want wow time to creep into other things I want to do. So I don't want to have to put in, you know, substantial extra amounts of time on top of my weekly schedule to get what I want out of the game. And I think trying to push higher is not really conducive to that. So I mean, enjoying the process, I'm having a lot of fun in dungeons, but that's kind of that. And so, you know, a couple of other things. I'm up to 277 equipped. I got a myth helm from my vault, which I had to then catalyze, but I got some spare catalyst charges, so that was good. Some helms done, shoulders are done, you know, getting those myth set pieces the last couple of weeks. I got my crafted embellished cloak done, at, you know, max crafting item level, so that's good. I still weirdly have champ gloves. There just don't seem to be gloves in this expansion. They're just not anywhere. So I have like one, that piece sticks out like a sore thumb as I'm approaching 280, right? Like I just have these normal mode gloves. My stats are in a weird spot. Like I have some good items, but I don't, I just, I feel like I'm haste starved. I just don't have the haste that I want, but it's not really causing me a problem when it comes to doing the content that I'm doing. So I'm not too bothered about it, but it's just more fun to have more haste.

Speaker 2:
[19:49] It's just the feel of your class, I get that.

Speaker 3:
[19:51] Yeah, it's just the one thing that kind of sticks out about the gearing process right now. And then just to kind of bring it back around from last week, I did get the monk to max level by last Saturday. The monk is 254 item level, and all I do is pray and delves. And I've had pretty bad luck with drops too, because of course, what do I get out of my delve maps and all that stuff? Trinkets.

Speaker 2:
[20:14] Oh, I thought you were going to say heroic gloves.

Speaker 3:
[20:15] So I was going to be like, Ah, that would be, that would be welcome. Actually, I think my monk does have heroic gloves, because I think that was what I took out of vault for him this week. But my item level is massively boosted by my maxed out hero track trinkets from Delves, right? It's just that the scourge of the Delve trinkets continues. But the cool thing is I have now done enough Delves to unlock renowned nine on the journey. So now I'm getting that end of run stuff so that you can buy hero gear with the currency. Hero gear can drop, you get the warbound gear dropping. So now that I got a couple of characters hitting some Delves, now I'm almost done unlocking the renowned system. So that feels really good. I'm having fun with the Monk. I just would like it if I could get two piece, maybe if I could get a hero piece that I could turn into a set piece to complement my gloves, that would be quite welcome. But what's really cool is, it's very simple to just quote unquote like, finish my chores on the Monk for the week. Pick up my prey hunts, do those. You end up with your key fragments as a matter of course. Then you got your beacon already for free from doing your three prey hunts. Then you just do your bountifuls and you're in pretty good shape. I mean, for an alt that I'm not, nobody's counting on my Monk for anything. The raid team doesn't need my Monk to step in right now. Anything like that, it's just a different set of goals to pursue. I even had a moment this week, I'm like, maybe I just won't even bother. But then I felt like doing some dells the other day, so I did some. It's nice because you just don't have to commit to it like you did in War Within with managing so much the timing of the different events and making sure you hit all these specific things because it's like the most efficient way to get your keys. You just do stuff and then you can do other stuff and then you get stuff. So yeah, it's been pretty fun. I'm probably going to do some more bountifuls tonight, I think, is what I'm feeling like.

Speaker 2:
[22:17] Nice. Yeah, it gets even easier at 10 because those shard fragments are increased in drop chance as part of the level 10 renowned for delves. So certainly enjoyed that when that started happening. Like I said, delves are currently a really good way to gear up characters, and it's almost a way to target those pieces. So you're just talking about not being able to have heroic gloves, but once you start getting enough of that currency, you just buy heroic gloves at the vendor at the end, when they pop up in the rotation, which you'll see at some point just running delves. Then otherwise, obviously, we'll talk a bit about it this coming week. But the Void Forge system is coming in, and you'll be able to force roll on things that can get your gloves. So you'll be able to target that a little bit better, even inside other activities like Mythic Plus and Raid. So we'll see what happens with that. But with that news, let's get in to what's going on this week in World of Warcraft. Alright, this week is the Misa Pandaria Time Walking event, meaning the characters level 10 and above can do Gate of the Siding Sun, Temple of the Jade Serpent, Storm's Toe Brewery, Shadowpan Monastery, Moguishan Palace, and Skolomance to help either level up characters or to help gear up characters or just to farm those nice Time Walking tokens. The Sign of the Mist buff is up, increasing Misa Pandaria reputation gains from quests in combat by 50%. Dungeons have dropped in 220 eye level gear, vendors sell in 197 gear, and there's a quest to complete five of these to get a cache of Midnight Season 1 loot, which should be normal loot. It should be normal, it shouldn't be heroic because it's not specific to the current expansion we're in. Typically when it's the Midnight Dungeon event, we see those heroic pieces come out. So this should be a normal raid piece that we see. But it could be from any of the raids, and it could be a trinket that you really want. So you might as well pick up the quest and if you happen to get some time walking done this week, then that's another chance of gear for you. That was the situation.

Speaker 3:
[24:17] The big bummer with Mists of Pandaria, of course, is no raid. Still waiting on a Throne of Thunder time walking. So that means you don't have the opportunity at the hero piece from killing the raid end boss, and you can't streamline doing the weekly by killing the raid bosses instead of doing dungeons. But still a good opportunity to get some stuff. Hey, man, you could get a Chimeras Trinket from the box.

Speaker 2:
[24:46] I know people who did.

Speaker 3:
[24:48] Yeah, it happens. Dreams come true. These are good dungeons too. They're fast runs generally. I think there's some really cool dungeons in the pool for this.

Speaker 2:
[24:56] They're very fast. I like them a lot.

Speaker 3:
[24:58] Yeah, it's a good one. I'm really hoping that maybe in 1.7 or something, this expansion that we get a new time walking raid, and it should be Pandaria because Cataclysm got the last one. I feel like that just adds so much to the time walking rotation, especially, as we always say, when it's early on in the season because it's such a good extra shot at some loot and your whole team's getting a piece of hero gear. It's more efficient than killing a heroic boss because you're not getting four or five or six pieces of gear. You get up to 30, right? So maybe one of these days, it's been a really long time since we've seen a new time walking raid, but still crossing my fingers, we get like Throne of Thunder soon.

Speaker 2:
[25:49] Yeah, Throne of Thunder would be my choice as well only because the last boss of Throne of Thunder being very cool, but also being a shorter encounter than Garrosh. They gave us Garrosh time walking, people would be in there for like 10 to 12 minutes of fighting Garrosh potentially in some situations. So as you go to different phases and insores and outdoors and who takes the death wheel and who happens to hit people, all those things could factor. Whereas I feel like the OG Throne of Thunder fight when we're sort of cancelling out platforms and moving around would be a little bit less of that weird complexity involved in it.

Speaker 3:
[26:26] Yeah. And it's just like, man, Siege is such a huge raid. Like it takes so long to go through and everything. Not that Throne is small, but I think it would just be a better choice overall. Yeah. For a time walking event. Kind of why, you know, I think Firelands was the choice over Dragon Soul, right? Firelands is kind of that open layout, and it's pretty quick to run through on time walking. Like it's just not as big of a space to traverse. So, you know, I think maybe that's part of the consideration sometimes with this. But then again, the Black Temple and ICC are massive zones to run through. But hey, maybe that's where they learn the lesson. Like, hey, let's go with the smaller one. I don't know. Anyway, my point is give us an MOP time walking raid soon, please.

Speaker 2:
[27:13] Yeah, as long as it's not Moguishan Palace. Thank you. Alright, when we are looking at what else is happening this week, there's of course the things you don't want to miss. You want to be sure you're picking up those quests before your Apex cache just outside of the bank, inside of Silvermoon. That's your Choose One quest. That's going to be your Dungeon quest from Haldoran. It's going to be your Housing quest just slightly beside that over by the mailbox. It's going to be, you know, just the PvP quests that are there as well. So there's, and of course the event quest, the time walking quest. You want to be sure you pick all those up so that you have those right away. So you're automatically working on them. The Housing one I completed by, I think I like crafted something. And that technically earned me five tokens, which then completed the quest without me having to leave Silvermoon, which was very nice. So I was very pleased. So there's a lot of things like that that just, when you pick them up early, it just solves a lot of your problems by possibly resolving them along the way. As far as the Brawl goes, we have Packed House. This is arenas with 15 versus 15 players in them. So it's like, pick your choice of arena, and suddenly you're dumped in there with basically five times the amount of people on your team as you normally would have against five times the amount of people on the opponent's team if you normally do 3v3s, which is the highest you can do because they got rid of 5v5s back in Burning Crusade. So yeah, it is going to be a heavy duty slug-em-out, wild and crazy, very fast brawl this week, which I will say coming off of doing the classic Ashran last week, and of course we had the Soshuora vs. Terran mill the week before that, a fast brawl sounds really good because those were like hour-long brawls versus this, which is like four minutes.

Speaker 3:
[28:59] Ashran never really ends. It's just this tug of war that you just end up going in and out of. This is not that. Not in the least. It's about as different from that as you can possibly get. Packed House is hilarious. It's just an explosion of violence as soon as the countdown finishes. And then you're kind of just trying to assess what actually happened. It's fun. The games are super fast. So if you've never done it before, you should do it once just to see how silly it gets.

Speaker 2:
[29:31] The world boss is Cragspine up in Zul'Avon, dropping a crit mastery neck and a shield, as well as of course the plate helm, mail helm, leather legs, cloth legs and primary stat trinket with a random secondary on it, which is what I got last week, which is probably your best option. The neck is not bad either to get because it's just applicable to like any character that you hit max level with. Just putting this on them as a war-bound piece of loot just makes that character stronger immediately, which is very nice. So hopefully people get at least something somewhat useful from their world boss kills this week, but certainly something that's worth doing for you. When it comes to Mythic+, we have Ascendant is what we believe is going to be happening. This is where 10 orbs appear every minute while in combat that must be interrupted, purged, knocked or crowd controlled. That is the best way to disrupt them in some way. We're talking about Rings of Peace, we're talking about Typhoons, talking about anything that disrupts and stuns. Master Spell works on these technically. You can just get rid of them with anything that's going to disrupt them or purge them in some way. And yeah, if the orbs all get popped, you get this big stacking buff for movement speed and haste. So that haste that Jason feels like he's missing, he'll have if he's running lower than 12s this week from Ascendant. So this could be a fun week for folks if they're trying to get in there and do this. This is the one Aphix I kind of dread the most at the moment, simply because it creates the most disruption in a group when these things spawn in, how they spawn in, like the timing of them spawning in, the amount of frames that pop up when they happen. Ascendant's the one to me that if I was like, oh, of all of these, I think one needs a bit of a rework, it's probably Ascendant.

Speaker 3:
[31:11] Yeah, I can't really disagree with that, especially like, so Pulsar was new with Season 2 of War Within, right? It replaced Oblivion or whatever that was called, that was so terrible, and then Pulsar was so much better.

Speaker 2:
[31:23] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[31:24] Voidbound got reworked, Devour got reworked, Ascendant is just the way that it was before. It's like, it's so noisy, that's one big problem with it. It's funny because it used to be like the easy one, right? Like before all the reworks, it was like, oh, good, it's Ascendant, it's so noisy with all the plates coming in and everything. And, you know, I have to be honest, I don't really want to use my interrupts and crowd controls on orbs that aren't literally damaging me or trying to kill my party members. I like to use my stops on the things I'm trying to kill. It's great if you got a monk in the group, which you probably do right now, because Ring of Peace is so good for it. If they could just drop it right in the center where all the orbs spawn, they kind of spawn in like a circular pattern. So a well-placed ring will just knock them all out. But yeah, like overall, it could use something. I don't know what. Maybe just cut it down to one orb per player or something. Make them all come down at the same time, maybe. Does that trivialize it too much? Maybe. But yeah, it's a little moldy compared to the rest of the pool. The buff is okay. The haste is pretty nice right now while we're in low gear. I'm not going to say no to more haste right now. If I end up at 48% haste on gear at the end of this expansion, I'm not going to care so much. Do you know anything about the movement speed? I feel like these tend to come in in between combats, and so you're moving and reacting to where they just dropped after you killed stuff. It's all random based on the timer and when you're fighting, but you end up moving to deal with them, and then you're just using that movement speed to run back to where you would have been if they didn't spawn behind you. 20% is not a lot of movement speed either, so if that got touched up a little bit, that could be cool. It would help you traverse to the next pack and just get into the next thing faster. Make it 50% or something.

Speaker 2:
[33:25] Yeah, a fun replacement for this, which would obviously take a little bit more work, would be to basically position orbs throughout a dungeon ahead of time. So when you started the run, there were orbs that were in the dungeon, and once someone disrupted them, interrupted them, dispelled them, whatever it was, you got a chunk of that buff. And so the objective becomes when you're doing keys at this keystone level is to try and move between orbs and maintain the buff for as long as possible through the dungeon. And obviously there's way more orbs than you need to only have it exactly this percentage kind of thing, right? So it's not a scarcity feeling. It's just more of one of those like, oh, we popped an orb, we're now moving. We got 5% movement speed and 5% haste. Let's run to this next area. We're fighting these mobs. Oh, there's another orb nearby. How about you duck over and just pop that one? Hey, now we have 10% if you refresh the buff. And we're back into like, that would be to me, a more fun kind of a-fix for this. Because then you're choosing when you're sort of getting that benefit and you're able to apply it a little bit more interestingly throughout a dungeon, which can help you do a faster route. Like, oh, well, we know that after, you know, we chose to go the route in Cydographer's Academy, where we chose to go to Croth, right? We killed Tree right away, went over to Croth, killed Croth, and then went over and did that person left. And now we have to backtrack. And we don't want to backtrack through a bunch of new fresh trash. Let's just pop these orbs as we go and get a bunch of movement speed to backtrack our way all the way to the front of the dungeon again to go up into the last boss. If that's what you're trying to do, that to me might be, you know, kind of interesting to see what they choose to do layout-wise and route-wise. But yeah, I don't know, it just needs a rework. I think a neat rework would be allowing players to kind of choose when they were getting that benefit based off of the affix existing in a dungeon, but not appearing on a timer, but more so just already existing in a dungeon. So anyways, we'll see. It's just an idea that I'd throw out there as far as that stuff goes. As far as hot fixes go, we got some dungeon and raid tuning. We did. We also got a little bit of a Delve fix here. So Reaching Midnight Season 1 Delver's Journey Rank 10 will now properly reward the Void Breacher title. I got the Void Breacher title before this came in, so I guess there was some people who weren't getting it. I'm glad that that got resolved for you because it's a cool title. I like Void Breacher as a title. I also like the Hearthstone you can buy. It's very cool. So I'm glad that that's a thing from the Delves that go around. I like it more than the Cosmic one, actually. So it's kind of cool. The Dungeon and Raids area, they address an issue where Kroft's defeating Screech debuff could persist after the raid encounter ended. Yeah, it's really unfortunate when people just kind of bleed out because you're all debuffed at the end of it. Let's not have that happen, please. Let's be sure that that goes away.

Speaker 3:
[36:10] That's just not fair. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[36:11] Thank you. They also address an issue where the trash before Kroft, the Alpha Eagle, could start casting gusts while still in the air. Yeah, and you can't see it at all when it's still in the air. They're talking about emphasizing spells and they've been emphasizing spells. This spell, gust, needs to be emphasized. It needs to have lightning in it or hard blue lines or something to make it clear where this is happening. The Alpha Eagle would fly in. It would start casting it when it was still eight yards off the ground. And you wouldn't see it doing it. And it would just one shot a bunch of people in a direction because you had no idea it was there as far as the frontal went. So thankfully, that's got resolved. You couldn't see the frontal at all when it was in the air. When it is on the ground, it is just like a sort of like a gray smoky kind of look on the ground. And it's on a gray platform. It is not easy to differentiate what's happening here. So I hope they emphasize that because it not only goes farther than you think it will go, but it's also hard to see visually. And it's on stairs. And stairs like to just eat anything that is attached to the ground. And you can't see it at all. So, yes, please. I would love an emphasis on what Gus does to make sure people are avoiding it, because it's a very easy way to die during this keystone, because it does so much damage.

Speaker 3:
[37:23] Just put the 11.1 hard lines on it. Everything should just have them now. It's 2026. But hey, at least they can't cast it in the air now. And then you can't tell whether or not you're actually in it or not, because it looks like it's over you, but it's not because it's higher than you think it is or whatever. Like the spell effect itself is just, you know, from the ground to infinity in the sky or something. Yeah, good change. But man, just I think we talked about it last week too, about the visuals in like Algarthar. We have the technology to have the hard edges on stuff. Just put the hard edges on everything.

Speaker 2:
[37:57] In Messiah Caverns, there was all an issue where Hollow Soul renders Frost Nova. It was apparently occasionally inflicting damage at incorrect locations. Well, that's just not fair. If it's going to be going off and people are like, I'm safe, and then you're not, that's not fair. So thank you for fixing that. They also reduce the health on Frenzy Berserker, Keen Headhunter, and when it comes to the Murogyn and Necrach's fight, there was all an issue where Carrion's Swoop could occasionally strike units behind Necrach's or strike players twice. The Swoop twice is a thing. I have witnessed that happen. That was weird. The other thing that happens on that boss occasionally in there is if someone else steps into a frost trap and gets charged, the person behind the frost trap could get hit and thrown into the air even though the bird impacted the first one and didn't affect that player, which was very weird too, so lots of little things needing fixing and they're getting in there and doing it. They made the the spectral residue duration it was increased up to 40 seconds on Rectool and additional applications of spectral residue no longer refresh the duration of it. So thank you for that as well because we don't need more damage with the damage on the damage. So thank you.

Speaker 3:
[39:13] Well, there was a there was a bizarre, I don't know if it was bizarre, that might be overselling it a bit, but there was an obnoxious technique that people were doing where, you know, the spectral residue thing is where you get like pushed into the spirit world and you have to run back to them. Well, when he cast that, you could have a brief moment to reposition him. So if you could put him like up against the barrier to the arena where you fight him, you could run up to him and get like five of the six things that you bonk in order to interrupt them and get the movement speed buff and leave the sixth one up. And then you would stay, you keep that buff, you keep him like stuck in the spectral residue thing. And then as it was about to run out, you'd have one person go and pop the last one and it would refresh the duration on it. So it would give you like a whole bunch of extra time to do damage with nothing else happening. But it was a super obnoxious technique to pull off. So I feel like once I saw that, I was like that is going to get changed. Like that's not going to live. They're not going to let that just be like that. I think this is actually a really good change to it because you just kind of do it as designed, right? Like you get pushed in the spirit world, you go to the back of the hallway, you run up and you CC the stuff and you get the buff and then you have bonus uptime on the boss when you get back. You just do it as it's presented and you get rewarded for doing it well. This is kind of the idea. So I like that a lot better than, hey, here's this weird little pocket strat that you have to be able to execute in order to realistically to kill this boss in time on a higher key or something. So yeah, it's good.

Speaker 2:
[40:59] I saw some very weird, there was a weird strat that came out on Wowhead in Algarthars about using the wind mob that you have to fight just before you go towards Kroth to launch an evoker specifically over to Cross Platform who could then pull the birds and they could be able to double jump and glide close enough that they could teleport to an ally and then teleport to an ally which would then pull the birds to the gust mob and you could fight the birds with the gust mob because that's more efficient. I was like, this is... I understand Mithstrats, man, but this is like way too specific for this stuff.

Speaker 3:
[41:36] I will not be doing that on my March 2, 3K and 13 Rizil. I'm all right. I'll just kill the wind guy and then I'll kill the birds later.

Speaker 2:
[41:45] Exactly, yup, exactly. All right. When it comes to Pityasara and apparently the Night Elf Vengeance Demon Hunters weren't able to hide behind Saronite Ore occasionally. It just wasn't a thing. Apparently, it was prevented from hiding. So now they can properly hide. I don't know what was happening here.

Speaker 3:
[42:01] Too tall, too tall and the horns are too big. So yeah, it would just go right over the top of the boulder.

Speaker 2:
[42:07] Just trim their hair and their horns back.

Speaker 3:
[42:10] Yeah, you got to just clip them.

Speaker 2:
[42:11] Exactly. The Seed of Triumvirate, they address an issue where some areas of the dungeon is unintentionally empowering creatures. Okay.

Speaker 3:
[42:19] That sounds really bad. I think I might have found a couple of those areas. Because I felt like sometimes, Seed is actually, for all the dread that I put out into the universe about Seed coming back as a key, I think it's actually like the easiest or at least the most forgiving keystone in the pool right now. Because the timer is just so long. But I've definitely had moments where like I pulled stuff that is challenging, but I felt like I could handle it, right? I have buttons, I'm ready to go, and it's six mobs, and I'm globaled.

Speaker 2:
[42:52] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[42:53] So maybe I discovered an area where they were unintentionally being empowered, I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[42:59] Could be, could be. They also made it so the Siphon Void in Lua's encounter is now marked as important, so people need to pay more attention to what that ability is. And Decimate in Zural, the Ascended Encounter, now has an encounter warning for players, so that's another good one. Apparently, Merciless Subjugator's Chains of Subjugation can now also be, sorry, they addressed an issue where it could be interrupted unintentionally. I'm curious as to how you unintentionally interrupt something, but yes, apparently that covers it.

Speaker 3:
[43:30] I don't know. Well, if you just missed the hotkey, like, oh no, I unintentionally interrupted this thing, but I would like to be able to interrupt the Chains of Subjugation, but I guess you're not allowed to, so you won't be doing that anymore.

Speaker 2:
[43:48] Yeah. In Skyreach, the target of Cast Down now has a debuff on their Uniframe. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 3:
[43:53] Yeah, that's nice.

Speaker 2:
[43:55] It is always one of those interesting things where like, Cast Down and you're looking around as to, okay, which one is it going to be, or trying to watch what the boss is targeting when it's past to be able to figure out what's going on. Now, just a debuff shows up on the frame. Everyone knows who it is and who to go and help. If it's that friend you don't like, then you just don't help them and it is what it is.

Speaker 3:
[44:13] You just laugh when tunnel on the boss. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[44:16] In Windrunner Spire, Commander Krulik, they fixed an issue where Krulik could fail his jump based on his target location within his chamber. Oh, okay. Well, I've never seen that one, but they fixed it.

Speaker 3:
[44:29] I wonder if it was like a vertical issue or if it was like a max distance issue or something. He's like, you have to go to, I don't know, you can't bonk into the ceiling or he couldn't go that far away. But I never saw it happen either, so I'm not sure, but he's going to be jumping at you now.

Speaker 2:
[44:46] He is. All right. In general, I will state that we finally saw the very predicted first wave initial nerfs to Midnight Falls Mythic encounter. They went in, nerfed the health by 5 percent. They increased some ability cast times in all difficulties to make certain things happen less often. They made it so that the blades are actually reduced to five on Heroic and Mythic difficulty down from six. There's fewer blades for you to dodge and things happen with that. The max duration of those blades reduced to two minutes, as opposed to three minutes, so they don't last as long and aren't around as long as their max duration. In the Grim Symphony part, they now did another couple of nerfs on all difficulties. For Melody can no longer repeat the same Dark Rune twice. The second cast now spins clockwise, was counterclockwise, so you now know exactly the directions the casts are happening, and it's going to be consistent. The Eclipse Heal on Mythic was reduced by 10 percent, so there's obviously less of that coming back. Overkill current damage reduced by 20 percent Heroic difficulty, the final cast of Criticality now triggers two Tears of Lura down from three on all difficulties, and Dark Constellation precast increased to 2.5 seconds on Mythic from two. So this is the initial first pass. I expect to see more, because there will be more. This is just...

Speaker 3:
[46:17] Yeah, I don't think a one percent per week zone buff is quite enough to overcome the current tuning state, so I agree. I mean, actually, we do know that, and we'll talk about it in the... There are nerfs to this fight in the.5 patch notes.

Speaker 2:
[46:34] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[46:34] So, like, we know there's more coming this week, and I'll bet you they're not done.

Speaker 2:
[46:38] Yeah. Yeah. In Void Spire, right? Man, they went through the whole batch of bosses here that needed to be looked at. The fiction issue where Void Infusion on Fallen King Saladar could override the boss's ability to enter the Berserk phase. I think that's very interesting. People were finding ways to prolong this fight without, you know, essentially entering Berserk. In Velgor and Ezrak, there resolved an issue where Ezrak could continue to fight the Lightbound Vanguard after Velgor and all players had perished. In other words, you just get trapped in combat and cannot release. That's a big problem. You know what's also a big problem? They addressed an issue where the bosses could spawn atop the Devouring Stronghold instead of in the arena, which I experienced. I queued into an LFR. I queued into an LFR and literally we walk up to the arena and there's just nothing in it. You're like, that's weird. And I turn around and I look back down the stairs and the dragons are just perched on top of the structure behind me. And I'm like, wait a minute, what are you doing up there? You're supposed to fly down here. And so everyone waited around for a while with people leaving and going in and out of the LFR and the group emptying and filling again as people realized what's happening. And I walked down the stairs and I could jump and tag one of them. At which point they started teleporting people on top of the building and killing them on top of the building. And I was like, well, this also didn't work. So, yes.

Speaker 3:
[48:03] And then everybody was like, kick the druid.

Speaker 2:
[48:06] I was on priest, thankfully, so everyone didn't know it was me. But no one suspects the priest. But yes, that was the thing that happened with the dragon. So I'm glad that they fixed that because I had firsthand experience with all of this. When it comes to...

Speaker 3:
[48:21] Yeah, it's weird stuff. Maybe it's because of the scale of the Void Spire raid zone. But just weird stuff this week getting fixed with encounters spawning or triggering at all, like in the way they're supposed to. And maybe it's because of how big the space is and everything. But yeah, I want the bosses to be where they belong when I go into the raid.

Speaker 2:
[48:45] Yep, in the Light-Blooded Vanguard, we obviously got that health reduced by 5% on Mythic Difficulty. Yeah, they say our goal in this change is to encourage a greater diversity of raid compositions to succeed in this encounter. Okay, to be honest, this is going to help people who don't have a lot of hunters. We had to bring two hunters to this fight because hunters are just so essential in this cleave damage that they can do. But at the same time, like, monk is still a required thing. We need to look at this boss's ability that literally blankets the entire raid in a debuff that's only able to be removed with the spells that have eight second cooldowns. Because you're like, okay, if you bring...

Speaker 3:
[49:26] There's like one tool for that job, basically, right? I mean, essentially.

Speaker 2:
[49:30] Yeah, I just don't know what you're expecting here. So anyways, you're going to see a misweaver monk in the raid groups that kill this. You just are. That is just going to be a thing. The War Chaplain sends Aura of Peace. Silence effect no longer triggers on Halo, Ice Lance or Galactic Guardian's Moonfire. This needs to be expanded. There's a lot of other druid abilities I can speak of that hit random targets or targets that already have existing dots on them. I don't like when Fallen Star chooses to do damage on my target that has Moonfire on them, or just randomly chooses another target to hit, and it chooses this one, and I get silenced for 6 seconds. That's not very nice.

Speaker 3:
[50:13] Yeah, the thing with this, right, this is where when San is channeling her aura, if you hit a target in the aura, then you get silenced. And so, yeah, like smart damage abilities or whatever, yeah, we got to get those off the list. I mean, these are some good choices, but there's definitely other stuff too.

Speaker 2:
[50:33] Yeah, and I can speak for my druid friend who is currently playing Boomkin inside of our raid that we're working on Lifeblade Vanguard for, who was silenced consistently by just random proc spells, smart targeting into targets that were inside of the circle. And it was like, this is really silly and should not be happening. So please resolve, that would be great. They address an issue where the raid skip, and using that raid skip, could fail to spawn all three paladins. And this was something that happened initially earlier in the week. And then it apparently had to get fixed a second time today.

Speaker 3:
[51:12] So yeah, maybe it's actually fixed now because it was in the hotfix notes for the 13th. My team did it on what, the 14th. We went in there and we weren't intending to do the skip. We were just clearing back through, but somebody didn't understand what they were doing and they like click teleporter. Yeah, and they went up there. And so after we killed Bimmy and Jimmy, then we go up to Paladins and just the Paladins aren't on the way up there. And we get up to the platform and just nothing happens. So we all had to run out so I could reset the instance so we could go back in and just do it again. So hopefully it's actually fixed this time because I feel like this is a frequent thing with raid skips. They just have some weird unintended effect where using them becomes actually detrimental, like kind of a time waster if you're planning on clearing anyway or clearing backwards or whatever. So you initiate the skip, but then you have other hoops, you end up having to jump through it. I missed the days where the raid skip was just like, hey, that door in the middle hallway unlocks, you could just open it instead of having to kill the bosses on the side hallways to unlock it. Instead, we're always in outer space somewhere teleporting through all these giant spaces.

Speaker 2:
[52:31] I can't really speak to why things like this happen and get bugged, but I'm glad that it's fixed because that's foolish. They also apparently buffed the lights preservation potion. It now provides more healing. Preservation potion from what I remember from when I read it, just gives you a big shield that then absorbs damage when it gets hit. I will say the damage that absorbs currently, I believe, is less than half of what a healing potion, the Silvermoon healing potions provide. So I don't know who would use this over using a healing potion in that circumstance because whatever hit you're going to take is going to do more than this can absorb and chew into your health. There shouldn't be hits in the game that one shot you at the moment. They've outlined that as a strategy. So I don't see the purpose of this. If this potion was, hey, you use this and the next, basically you get a shield for five seconds if that's what this did. But that shield was like 450,000 health. People would be using this over using a healing potion because then there'd be times where they want to click this because they know incoming damage is about to happen. Like just before divine toll or something happens, or executioner's sentence, something like that on vanguard fight, people could use one of these potions and it would absorb the bulk of that damage, if not all of that damage from that window as opposed to going, no, I think it's better we just take the damage than I just hit a healing potion or hit a healing potion just before the damage comes in. So I'm at max health before the damage comes in. It's I don't know. I yeah, it's a weird motion. It's just weird.

Speaker 3:
[54:05] I wonder if maybe at some point there will be some like encounter based use case for it, right? Like some reason why an absorb would be particularly strong, in which case that would be cool. But at the moment, yeah, I'm not sure why you want to use this over just a traditional healing potion.

Speaker 2:
[54:21] Well, you'd see all of the disc priests celebrate joyously if you put an encounter in that meant absorbs were required.

Speaker 3:
[54:27] That's true.

Speaker 2:
[54:28] Yeah. I hope that doesn't happen.

Speaker 3:
[54:30] It's been a while. They could have one if we're doing one boss race now, they could have one boss.

Speaker 2:
[54:34] I mean, Miss Weaver has a boss. I'll say that Miss Weaver does have a boss. As far as the 12.0.5 content update notes go, they have released many, many blogs this week. We've been chatting about them for a while, so a lot of these announcements aren't going to be like really big new news to you guys. But just to start it all off, we have the Stave Off Void Assaults that we know is coming in. These Void Assaults are going to be happening. There's going to be quests associated with them, and there's going to be essentially this feeling of assaults taking place in different zones. So Reaper Rewards is the final part of this, which says, when the dust settles and you've collected your rewards, head back to the second level of the Bazaar in Silvermoon City to purchase a variety of field accolades like Voidlight Marl. That's something you will, and Voidlight Marl. You can purchase new housing decor, armor pieces, heroic and champion item level loot, mounts and more. So they're trying to make this very worthwhile for you. So it might be something you want to check out if you're talking about, a heroic and champion gear. We're talking about armor piece decor. We're talking about house decor. We're talking about mounts. This is hitting everyone's wheelhouse for collectors and people who want to power up their character. What are these? Well, forces of the Void are vying for position and control amongst themselves in a grasp for more power. They seek every opportunity. Attacks begin in the Eversong Woods and Zulamon zones. You succeed in putting a stop to them and reap your new rewards. The Void strikes take place in Eversong and Zulamon on a weekly rotation. Once completed, a new one will begin in another part of the zone and will continue to rotate through the zone as they are completed. Completing Void strikes provide a field pouch with each completion containing field accolades, gold, void life, marl and more, acknowledging your acumen in the field. Void incursions occur when enough void strikes have been completed in the zone in which they are active. So a progress bar will show up on your map, allowing you to track when it begins, gather your allies and head to the gates of Silvermoon in Eversong or the Speaker's Rest in Zulamun to take part as it will take the might of many of Azeroth's champions to defeat them. So there's also a quest associated with it. I don't want to spoil the quest stuff, but yes, it is all there and you'll get a bunch of rewards and it's cool. So if you're someone who wants to participate in events, there will be more active constant events. It doesn't sound like they're going to be on any kind of timer. Basically, they just are occurring until you trigger the big event and then the big event happens and then they occur again. So you're just able to work on it whenever you want to work on it, it sounds like.

Speaker 3:
[57:14] Yeah, it almost seems more like what they usually do for a pre-expansion event. It's like the zone is being attacked and there's this stuff and you fill up this bar by doing stuff and then it creates this bigger event that everybody converges on and then it resets. That's kind of the way that they're describing it from what it sounds like. So it's got that kind of the rotating zone flavor like we've seen in some other expansions. It really reminds me the most of BFA where at the end you'd have the N'Zoth zones would rotate between the two spots. So yeah, I mean, I assume it'll start in Eversong Woods this week, but I'm sure there'll be a bunch of big call outs on the map and everything. Yeah, it seems cool. Just spice up the outdoor gameplay a little bit and just add some new channels to get some rewards out. This is going to be like a part of the way to get the new power, but it's not the main way. It's a complimentary thing with the next thing on the list. But I'll definitely be checking these out. I don't know what the big draw is here. I got to be honest, as far as the collecting goes, I'm just not... None of the aesthetics are really speaking to me with any of the stuff, the stuff that's in Midnight already. And this kind of like... Yeah, it's all very Quell Thalass, or then there's like Void Elf stuff. It's cool, but it's not really something that I feel like I need to... I got to catch them all if you know what I'm saying. I'm just not that into it. I'm not spending my moral. I'm like almost done with Renown Reps for the initial Midnight Release. I'm at 20 on one, I think, and 19 on two. And I'm just... I don't even go to the vendors because it's like I don't want this stuff. So for me, this might just be more about the experience of having done it. Check out what it's about. Do this and ritual sites and try to save up enough field accolades to get some heroic gloves since they don't come from any other content. Although, then again, I don't think you can pick what rewards you buy. But yeah, I mean, I think it's always good to have this kind of more dynamic stuff in the outdoor world, but not sure I have a real big pull to make this a big part of my diet for the week.

Speaker 2:
[59:29] We'll see whether or not Zulamon has some really cool troll transmog that you're like, I have to have some Zulamon transmog.

Speaker 3:
[59:36] If they do the etched bone armor that we had from Bowling Crusade, ZA, if we do that in a new higher poly style, yeah, I'd be way into that for sure.

Speaker 2:
[59:45] I figured, yep. Now, just ritual sites is another thing that's going to be taking place here. These are what they say are similar to Delves, where they have these flexible group sizes up to five players. Each offers an escalating challenge and a bid for heroes of the Alliance and Horde to disrupt these ritual sites of the Naga in Eversong Woods and Twilight's Blade Rituals in Zul'Aman. So you can either go to Daggerpoint or Broken Throne in either zone to be able to participate in these. And these sites alternate between the two zones. To enter the ritual site, players will interact with a curious obelisk, which allows you to choose the difficulty tier and challenges you will face. As you progress through ritual sites, you can choose your level of challenge. From tiers 1 to 5, players must complete each tier before unlocking the next. Tiers 3 through 5 will require you to select 1, 2, or 4 challenges respectively in order to enter. As far as what challenges are, well, there's tendrils, which is grasping tendrils have found rooting and damaging distracted adventurers, increases spoils by 10% when you activate it, and it's found in the ritual spoils place. Manifestations. The magic of the site occasionally manifests powerful spirits interrupting these manifestations or face their withering magic. This increases your spoils by 15%, and it's currently a tier 3 ritual site ability for you to interact with Ranger Captain Lyathra in Silvermoon to turn on. The Magical Alarm Bells disrupts disruptions at the site trigger forces to be summoned to the location of the incident. The more disruptive incident, the greater the force that's summoned. This gets you 13% more spoils. We got Malevolent Boons, where enemy forces at the dark site where the site are using dark obelisks to empower their forces. We have Tainted Corpses, where volatile magic in the site has tainted the enemies. When killed, this taint manifests into a pool of deadly magic. We have Reinforced, which is security is heightened. Many additional forces were brought in to protect the site, as in there's just more trash inside of that run. Patrols, where powerful patrols have been seen at the site due to suspected looting. It's best to try and avoid them if possible. And Embers, where the overwhelming power of the ritual is felt throughout the site. Embers of power can be found empowering nearby enemies and their leaders. So you basically are like, hey, I want to turn on these challenges. And on top of that, you can go, I want to actually do higher ranks of this. It looks like you can obviously choose up to rank five of difficulty. And you'll complete these runs through these adventures and basically get yourself some rewards at the end. So the rewards themselves, they say, a new currency called Field Accolades is earned in the ritual sites along with ritual spoils, which contain crests, currency and rare cosmetic items. Field Accolades and Voidlight Marl can be spent at several new vendors in the second level of Bazaar. So same places you'd spend for the last event that's also taking place. So I guess it's another way to earn that similar currency of Field Accolades. And you'll be able to spend those where you think you normally spend them. There's also apparently a renown associated with this. There are eight ranks of renown you can earn providing greater benefits as you progress. These benefits seem to be already all listed, which is pretty great. So rank one, we have Regenerating Orbs, while in combat Regenerating Orbs will manifest healing you for 15% of your health. So these are targeting to make these rituals a bit easier for you as you go through these eight ranks. We also have like Revered Treasures can now have a chance to spawn in ritual sites. There's the ability to find additional treasures and spoils in ritual sites. You can have Elite Rares now spawn inside of them as well. So there's a lot of interesting things that sort of get unlocked through renown as well, similar to Delve, so people will be getting in there. They have a list of rewards as well in this post, which obviously I won't go through, but it's going to be something that you can certainly check out inside of the blog post, which will be linked in the show notes. They have the Unbound Mana Worm, which I believe WoW had data mined the look of recently, which is a flying mount that you can get on, as well as a Void-Touched Hawk Strider. So some pretty cool stuff as far as that goes. They have a Void-Touched Dragon Egg as well, or Dragonhawk Egg as well, and Cappy the Pet in case you want Cappy. So there's a lot of neat things there, and then just a bunch of transformers.

Speaker 3:
[64:13] We'll take a Cappy any day of the week. Yeah, it's so dense, right? We didn't even get the Abyss Anglers blog yet at press time. I got a feeling we had it on Monday or something. That's a whole other mode with a new system that has a ton of cosmetics from it. We talked quite a bit towards the end of War Within about the quantity versus quality thing. One thing I'm a little concerned about is are these things going to have a long enough tail where they feel like they're valuable to players, right? There's a ton of stuff just in ritual sites in this mode. If we just move on from this in four months or whatever into.1, is that enough time? We'll see. It seems cool. It seems like we're seeing the return of old school Mythic Plus affixes are the challenges in these. There are some parallels to some old school Keystone affixes. I definitely get the horrific visions comparison that Blizzard was making about it to some degree, because it's take on substantial risk and gain substantial reward. I have a concern about the gearing piece of it because from what I can tell, from the way that they've outlined this, okay, so you can buy a heroic item from the vendor once you have enough field accolades, 500 field accolades to buy a heroic item for your loot specialization. You don't get to pick what it is. There's nothing on here that says it's something you don't have. The cosmetics, it all says you get a void touch belt you don't have in your collection, for example. Now, the cosmetics are all, I believe the cosmetics are the purple, voidy recolors of the high poly tier 2s that came out in War Within, which is kind of cool. But you don't know exactly what you're going to get other than the slot that it's on from the cosmetics. For the champ and hero items, it could be anything that your spec can equip. I don't know how long it's going to take to save up 500 field accolades if you're playing with like the highest possible risk for the highest possible reward. But like if you're doing that, then do you need the heroic items to begin with? Or you know, maybe you need hands. So I don't know. I'm interested to check this out. It seems like a cool system. I want to play it. I'm a little concerned that because of the pace at which the game moves these days, that it might not have enough room to breathe to be something that ends up being really valuable for your characters. So we'll see.

Speaker 2:
[66:57] That's kind of where my conversation about the earn rate of stuff towards these rewards comes in. It was... I was looking specifically at the hide or seek decor duels. We were chatting with that because it's one of the ones where they really outline and lay out, hey, this is how much you can earn. Where they specifically go ahead and say when illusions are all lifted, players will receive their rewards depending on how well they did in a match. They can earn approximately 30 to 35 illusionary coins per game. Then they're like, okay, the first mount you could buy cost 600. Then pretty much everything else costs 150, 200, 300 of these coins. And then specifically just the Decor, the Disguised Decor Dual Vendor sells like cook pot lids and some garden equipment and some wooden toolboxes and stuff for like 15 or 30 or 120 coins in some cases. But by the time you add all these up, you're like, okay, just to actually get all the rewards possible from Decor Duals, if that's something what your objective is, you have to do like 120 Decor Duals. Then you're like, okay, how many, if I'm trying to actually earn enough currency to be able to buy all the rewards that I might want from, or just all the rewards period in some cases where people are really collecting all of it from ritual sites, right? It's like, oh, how many of these accolades do I need to earn? You're like, oh, well, okay, how often do I acquire them? How reasonable is that for me to do? And will I be able to complete this within this patch? Because you then also have, as you said, our void assaults, we have the abyssal diving. There's a lot of things that are coming in. I'm never going to complain about there being too many things to do, but it is one of those things where you hope it has the legs under it to continue into future patches, because it's got to be an activity people enjoy if you're going to do it over a hundred times to be able to get rewards from it, right? And that's where I lean into, like with the corduwa looking like this already, if you're talking about this being even five minute matches that you're getting into, ignore queue times even being a thing, it takes instant queue, let's say, as five minutes to complete a match, you're still talking about like seven or eight hours of time of playing the game, just doing that over and over and over again in order to actually buy the rewards you want to buy. Now, is that unreasonable? I think that probably fits in with some of the other stuff they've already done as far as their timeline goes, but you have to factor in these matches are probably longer than five minutes, there's going to be a queue time to get into them, that time for every minute added extends a lot. So like let's be sure that this is not, you know, asking a lot of players as far as time commitment wise to get the rewards because some of this stuff does feel limited time. I don't know if the core duels are just going to stick around permanently, like they might, they might not. We have lots to see what they choose to do with it. It could end up like Brawler's Guild, where it just shuts down every now and then, and they bring it back again later on. Who knows? Right.

Speaker 3:
[70:02] That's definitely a good point. I think, you know, the core duels, we could probably assume it'll be at least live through the end of the expansion. And so even if you really hate the mode, but you just want to collect everything from it because you have to have everything you can possibly collect. First of all, I would say you might want to evaluate your approach to the game. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm saying you're setting yourself up for a lot of stress and potentially disappointment.

Speaker 2:
[70:24] Some people can't help it, Jason. Some people can't help it.

Speaker 3:
[70:26] There's just so much stuff in the game anymore. Like I feel like they're really just going now with decor and everything. It's, I mean, it was getting out of control in War Within, and now it's just, it's beyond that, you know? But I mean, for me, I think that when I'm looking at these features coming in, it's like, how hard do I have to work to get that hero gear out of Ritual Sites?

Speaker 2:
[70:47] Right.

Speaker 3:
[70:48] And then how long is it really going to be good for until we roll over? You know, the cosmetics, obviously they're good forever. It's the only true end game, which is why people like collecting stuff because you carry it with you forever. Your power fluctuates, it comes and goes. But you know, that's what I'm, I'm hoping that it will be in line with kind of the other, the other avenues we have for the stuff, right? Like, I can do an 11 bountiful in, I don't know, 20 minutes or something. And then I can get my hero piece for the week out of it, and you know, whatever else. So maybe if we frontload some of the currency for this, the accolades into like the week, there's a weekly quest wrapper for doing the void assaults. And you know, maybe you get some kind of big bonus for like the first completion for the week of, you know, a particularly dangerous combo for the ritual site. And then, okay, so I do this and I could get my heroic item for the week. I think that would be nice, you know, I don't want to be like, I'm going to get a spreadsheet and figure out how many of them I got to do and how many different levels to get a full set of hero gear from this vendor. I hope the other factories, you don't know what you're getting when you buy the cash from the vendor. So I don't know, I have some mixed feelings about that in advance. Like, how's that going to really turn out? I do like the fact that the ritual sites hook into your outdoor row for Great Vault. So you can add that into the mix with Delves and with Prey. So if you're getting sick of doing X amount of bountifuls or whatever to fill out that row, you get a little bit more variety with the system. I love the idea of new stuff coming in in patches that has that level of relevance. The Vault is kind of really the... I hate to say it, but it is sort of the main hook of the game in general for the last several years. You're doing stuff because you're waiting for that moment at the Great Vault on reset. It's not as much about the moment-to-moment rewards as it used to be. So when new stuff comes in and it's like, oh, this gives me Vault progress, that's awesome because then it immediately slots it into a level of relevancy with that other stuff, and then it gives you more variety of how you approach your playtime. So that is very good. So we'll see. We'll have a chance to play with it this week and we'll see how it feels to start climbing the ranks in the ritual sites and what the currency income is looking like. I'm not expecting to just do some solo content and have a full set of hero gear in a week or two. But we know the pace that they're publishing stuff at and we see how fast stuff becomes irrelevant. So there is a balance there between like, literally is this worth my time to do? Or is it just going to get swept away by the next thing in a few weeks? So that's what I'm looking at.

Speaker 2:
[73:51] Yeah. Now we can't talk about this patch without talking about the thing that I am most excited for, which is the Void Forge. So the Void Forge is coming in. We've mentioned this numerous times, but this will allow players to get a currency called Nebulous Void Cores. And these Nebulous Void Cores are used almost like a bonus roll coin at the end of a dungeon for Mythic Plus or at the end of a raid, where you can shoot, well not at the end of a raid, at the end of a, defeating a raid boss, a single raid boss, where you will be able to choose to use one. And if you choose to use one, it will then, for Mythic Plus it will only cost one currency for a roll. For raids it costs two currency. They based this off of the amount of size of loot pool. There's much larger loot pool inside Mythic Plus dungeons, and they're off of a specific raid boss. So using one token only to try and get a chance at the thing you want out of a dungeon makes more sense, versus the two you have to use off of a raid boss, because there's fewer items on a raid boss. So that's how they chose to make up that number. But you can use one, and it will pull an item from that boss's loot pool, from something that it can drop. Inside a raid boss, obviously, that's like from four or five items in some cases. From a Mythic Plus dungeon, it's like 13 to 16 items sometimes, depending on where you are and what size of dungeon you're doing. And once that item has been looted by you, which will come in at vault item level. So if you did a plus seven, and you rolled inside a plus seven for a bonus piece of loot and you got it, you would get a heroic of that equivalent vault slot for a plus seven. If you did a ten, you'd get a myth track. You'd get a one of six myth track item from using a roll out of doing a ten or above inside a Mythic Plus. Once you've received that item, it is no longer receivable through that system, which means that it has been eliminated from that boss's loot pool from you, or that dungeon loot pool from you, so you're guaranteed to get something different the next time you roll. In other words, a great example of this is, hey, you're trying to get your trinket off of Chimeras. Guess what? You go and kill Chimeras. You use two Void Cores to roll. You don't get the trinket, you get a different piece. The next time, your chance is now increased to get the trinket because that piece you just got is no longer in the pool of items that you can roll Void Cores for. So, congrats. That is the big advantage to that. It's a way for people to target loot and target loot out of the system. You might ask, cool, how do you acquire these Void Cores and what happens? Well, we've been working at this point on the Void Forge, which does have a catch-up mechanic. If you're someone who has not been working on this, you can go and do Mythic Plus and Battlefield Elves and raid bosses to try and get this currency. You basically have to keep turning it in over and over again to progress the quest to catch up on your Void Forge to get your Void Forge unlocked. And it is account-wide as far as this unlock goes, so you don't have to worry about it. I know for me, once I completed one character, it progressed on my whole Warband, so I didn't have to worry about that, which was great. But once you've completed the Void Forge, you're then able to start earning this currency from doing Mythic Plus, doing Bountiful Delves, doing praise on Nightmare difficulty. Those are all ways for you to be able to get Void Cores from things, which is pretty exciting. Another added way that they threw in is the actual Nebulous Void Cores from Vault Keeper Alyssa. You can basically spend your six Tokens of Merit, if you got nothing out of your Vault, and you chose to take the Tokens of Merit instead, to get Nebulous Void Cores. And the Nebulous Void Cores that are acquired this way don't count against your weekly cap. Similar to Crest, Void Cores are going to have a weekly cap. You're only going to be able to earn so many each week. My guess is probably two, based off of what they're talking about in this. And basically, you'll be able to earn two in your first week. And then you could potentially purchase a third, and be able to have three of them, if you wanted to, if you're choosing to do that out of your Vault, and start targeting to try and get some mythic gear that you're wanting, or specific pieces of loot that you're wanting from this. It's a really cool system. I'm super excited about it. This is just phase one, because once we finish the Forge, we start working on the Nihlhammer, and the Nihlhammer is a whole other phase of this. So Jason, what do you think about the Forge coming out?

Speaker 3:
[78:17] Yeah, I mean, well, when they first announced this, and we talked about it on the show, like, I can't believe that this is going live, because it's just too good of an item distribution system. Like, WoW has never done anything like this before. It allows you to, you know, I mean, you have to be patient, but it allows you to deterministically get a myth-track item from a keystone dungeon.

Speaker 2:
[78:42] Yep.

Speaker 3:
[78:43] As long as you can run that key at 10 and higher enough times, and you have enough nebulous void cores, then you will get the item. I know some people are still a bit confused as to how this works, and so, you know, just to make it really clear, when you decide to use one of your nebulous void cores, it's not a chance to get loot like it used to be when we had bonus rolls in the Ms. Pandaria. Yeah, you're never going to get heroic gold off of this. You get an item that's on the table, and you can never get that specific item again from using your nebulous void core. The one thing also I want to just clarify about obtaining your nebulous void cores for the week, in order to build the void forge, that's what you have to complete Decimus' repeatable quest six times for killing raid bosses or doing Delves or Keystone Dungeons. Once you have it unlocked, then you can purchase two nebulous void cores a week, and you get to pick all kinds of relatively low-impact stuff to trade Decimus for your cores. You can buy them with gold, you can buy them with Voidlight Morrow, and you can buy them with veteran Dawncrests, which you probably do not need too many of. So a very flexible system, you just got to remember to go do it before you step into whatever you're going to do. You got to go see Decimus, add that to your list for the beginning of the week, because you do not want to get stuck in like, I did the key, but I forgot to go get my void cores first. So just make that a habit, go out and buy them. The new information this week was about, if you decide to go with tokens of merit out of your great vault, now you can exchange them for an additional nebulous void core, and it doesn't count against the cap. That is huge because, you know, how many times have you sort of been in a spot? Yeah, by like mid, you know, by like mid season, it's like, okay, if I don't roll this one or two specific items, then I don't care what's in here, none of it's going to be an upgrade, none of it's going to be even interesting. Now you don't really have that problem, as long as you have some loot that you still want, right? As long as there's still one thing out there that it would be cool to have. Being able to cut that weight down by an extra half of a week, right? If you do this every week, you get an extra couple of void cores a month compared to the schedule, which then for Mythic Plus especially, I feel like this is a lot better. As always, since Mythic Plus was introduced, it just continues to put this downward pressure rating, because if you want the item from your Heroic or Mythic Raid boss, you got one shot a week, right? That's it. You got to use two of your void cores on it. Even if you have saved up 12 tokens of merit and then you bought two extra cores, then you could roll multiple times because you got yourself an extra week's worth essentially. You can't kill the boss again because you got a weekly lockout. As long as you can keep finding those keystones, you can go do that and spend them. You can go spend three nebulous void cores on the same dungeon's loot pool in a week. That is way better than rolling it against raid bosses, but it is what it is. That's the state of the game. It doesn't diminish how good the system is, but it is a quirk of it where I feel like it's just so much better for Mythic Plus than for Raid, that especially if you're not killing Mythic Raid bosses, if you do plus 10s but you're doing heroic raid, then jeez, you get so much more power out of it from Keystones. But I mean, it's a way that is really going to reward you for the time you spend in the game, right? You don't have to jump through a million hoops to get your weekly rolls, and you're not going to slap a roll down and walk away with some golden consumables or something. You're not going to get some garbage like that. You're not going to just miss out on whatever. You might have bad luck, and you might have to roll against a dungeon seven or eight times. You might have to roll against a raid boss three or four or five times. But you're going to get the stuff you want as long as you keep doing it. So I love that. It does make me... The one thing I just want to throw in here is this also ties into my point of how long does this have to live this season? Right? We're getting it a third of the way through the season. It's not really that... You got about, what, 16 weeks of the season, maybe? So, you know, is it going to be enough time to get more than two items that you really want? You know, if you have really bad luck, it might take eight weeks, right, to get one item. So it's... You know, that just makes me think, hopefully this comes in at the beginning of season two, so that we're just kind of... We're not losing that first third of the season, but maybe this is like a turbo boost replacement, essentially, so it's always for the back two-thirds. It's just, man, I don't know, the amount of time pressure around the game, everything just feels like it's too fast, seasons are too short. This would be... Because if this had an extra couple months to breathe, it's like sweet, you can just get totally decked out, get everything you want. Maybe they don't want you to get to that point, right? Because if they roll over a new thing right as you're getting close, then they reset the table and then there's more stuff you want to go chase. Maybe that's the goal.

Speaker 2:
[84:18] Here's where I'm at with it. It is coming in to me at a point where I would consider if my vault came up and like my choice was Mythic Boots or Bracers as my choice, I would take the extra roll. Because the extra roll that I'd get from the Nebula's Void Core is guaranteed Mythic Loot as well, right? So like I'm not turning down a Mythic Piece to get six tokens to put a socket into my gear. I'm turning down these Mythic Pieces because I'm not interested in them. But there's other pieces that I might be from these particular dungeons. And so that to me is actually pretty dynamic right now. Because if we are talking about a system where this week, let's say I get garbage out of my vault, there's nothing I really want. I choose to take a Nebula's Void Core. So I take a Nebula's Void Core out of my vault. And let's say the cap is 2 that we can earn per week, that goes up per week. So I'm then buying 2, so now I have 3 of them. It means I could go into a Mythic Plus dungeon, in Mythic Plus dungeons, and roll 3 times, which is 3 Mythic pieces of gear. So right now, I have a lot of slots on my character that are not Mythic. Like my rings aren't, my trinkets aren't. I've got at least 3 or 4 pieces of armor that aren't. If I could actually hit even 2 of those rolls on just slots that weren't currently Mythic, the amount of crests I would save potentially as a player who hasn't maxed out all the heroic stuff yet would be huge. And then also, if it's actually just a decent piece of gear or something I can catalyze, you've just gained twice as much Mythic gear from your vault as you essentially would have initially, right? Like from your week, as you would have. If you're a character who doesn't even raid Mythic raid, I currently raid Mythic raid as a healer, which means I don't get loot because they prioritize DPS over healers for getting loot, because Blizzard design fights with DPS checks and less about healing checks. So people don't need to gear the healers as much. So I have a lot of slots as someone who's currently doing Mythic content. I think you're technically a higher item level than my character is now because I haven't crafted yet this week. Once I craft, I think we'll be really close. But as someone who's been working in Mythic, right? I just don't get that loot. This is something that's coming in at a time where I could get a lot of eye level very quickly through this system when it comes out. I'm kind of excited about where it's coming in. Because this to me feels like something that could have been a.7. And then it's really tail end turbo boost kind of range, right?

Speaker 3:
[86:44] Oh, yeah. That would be so tight against the new season.

Speaker 2:
[86:47] It'd be brutal. Which is what I'm assuming the Ascendant Void Cores are. So for those who are curious, there's a second part. Once we finish constructing Decimus' Void Forge, we then have to craft the hammer for the Void Forge, called the Ascendant Nil Hammer, which lets us make Ascendant Void Cores. Well, what does that do? Well, you can consume Ascendant Void Cores to infuse eligible weapons or trinkets with additional power to increase their item level. Only a fully upgraded Hero Piece, Myth Track Piece and a maximum quality Radiance Crafted Weapon and Trinkets are eligible to become Ascendant Void Forge, which means you essentially are like, hey, I've gotten this Mythic Piece or I've crafted my Mythic Weapon. It is at its maximum item level that it can be at. I have sunk enough crests into it that it's the maximum item level. You can then use the Ascendant Void Cores to push it beyond that limit to another ascended level where it's an even higher item level. I think it's like 13 more item levels, something like that. It jumps like a whole big jump. And yeah, so that I assume is probably going to be the.7 thing. We're probably going to finish the Void Forge. We're going to get a weekly quest that pops up for creating the Nilhammer. And that Nilhammer is probably going to be six weeks out or whatever it is, right? And that'll be the time it takes for them to get to doing the.7 patch. And we'll see that happen. So yeah, this is the second tier of it. And to me, honestly, this, in combined with the announcements about Mythic+, which we'll get to here in a moment, are really exciting to see, because I feel like they are giving people a longer tail to sort of chase with some of this stuff for a lot of their gear. Not only chasing the right items, but then also ascending those items and using those items to achieve things and earn things that weren't existing in the game before. Because, like I said, we'll start chatting about the Mythic Plus stuff here in a sec, but looking forward to the Nilhammer quest.

Speaker 3:
[88:43] Yeah, I mean, the post doesn't give any kind of idea of a timeline on it. I assume it's going to be similar, where it's like, hey, do these repeating quests for me, and then we'll unlock the hammer. But it doesn't really say. But then it's like, you'll get the Ascended Void cores from kind of the same way that we unlocked the Void Force to begin with, from doing endgame stuff. I really like the fact that crafted weapons are in the pool here to ascend.

Speaker 2:
[89:14] And I hope they ascend to the same item level. I want them to ascend to the same item level.

Speaker 3:
[89:19] Right, yeah, I'm not sure if they'll carry the penalty or not. I hope not, obviously. If they do, it's still going to be a huge bonus. I mean, I'm using crafted sword and shield, and I'll probably stick with crafted shield regardless, because there's no stat splits on shields I like in this entire loot pool. If I want haste on a shield, then I got to craft one. So it would be awesome if there was no penalty on that. But yeah, it's really cool. I also with trinkets, too. I mean, you know, these are some of your highest impact items that you carry around. So it just it feels cool. You know, it feels like very RPG. You're going on these quests and defeating these powerful foes, you're powering up your equipment and carrying it with you. You know, your ascendant items are going to be still really powerful heading into season two. You know, you'll hang on to that stuff if you if you choose to upgrade it, you know, into farther into season two than everything else that you that you bring in. So that's really cool. I mean, I feel like they've done a lot of interesting stuff with loot distribution and minimization in this expansion so far. And these systems seem like the best additions that we've had in a really long time. I mean, we can meme about the Great Vault, but the Great Vault has been a really important addition to the game. And it does provide opportunities, even if your vault stinks most of the time, like you're still getting power from it, even if it's not the thing that you want. And eventually you do get cool stuff out of the vault. But that came in, you know, about five and a half years ago. I think this is the biggest addition to it since then. And I think this is just straight up better. I mean, the scenario that you outlined where it's like, okay, well, I don't really, I don't want to take this item from my vault. There's nothing in here I really want. So I'll take a roll that I know that I'm going to use to get an equivalent item level piece. And I can semi-target it a bit more at something. And maybe a high roll and I get the exact thing that I wanted anyway. And if I don't, then I just increase my chances for next week, or next time if I got more cores, anything like that. So what I'm waiting for is for this to come out and be so good that they kind of claw parts of it back when we see the Season 2 version, right? Like just make it stingier or something. And maybe that's just because I'm conditioned to be suspicious of anytime the wow devs let us have too many toys or too much power or too much fun that they go, we overshot it a bit. I feel like this seems like a good balance for, okay, I put this effort in, I have these resources available, I go do this content, it's active, I don't just get it, right? I have to go do the stuff that drops what I want. And then I get a reward for doing that, for putting the effort in and actually playing the game. I think it's well structured. So we'll see, I mean, I'm sure players are going to love it. We'll see if it ends up becoming kind of a staple of end game gearing or what.

Speaker 2:
[92:24] Yeah, we'll have to see where that ends up going. As far as still talking 12.0.5, as far as class balancing goes, we did see some class tuning come in for Restor Druid. The biggest change, I guess, is that they're buffing our damage, because apparently our damage, particularly our caster damage is very low, which I've noticed. I noticed that the majority of people are running a melee build where they switch into cat form to do damage. I think that's unfortunate, so I'm glad they're buffing. They're basically they're buffing Wrath, Starfire, Starsurge all by 40% for Restor Druids. Sunfire, Moonfire getting 25% increases for Restor Druids. Sunfire you don't even spec into currently in the tree, so it doesn't even exist as a spell that people run as a Restor Druid. So good to see them fixing that. I'm really disappointed with their Apex talent stuff, because it was something they initially came out to go, hey, we're going to fix Apex talents, so we're going to make it so that Everbloom, when Lifebloom's final bloom occurs, heals all allies within 40 yards. And it was for, I think, 50% of its healing, at like first rank and then 100% at second or something. It was very powerful initially, and it went through a couple of iterations. It's now going to go live as Everbloom, that when Lifebloom's final bloom occurs, it heals six allies within 40 yards, up from 30. For 25% at first level and 50% at second level. Now this is still an upgrade over what we currently have. Because what we currently have is it heals two allies within 30 yards for 15% and 30%, based off the amount of talent points in it. Which, people, is just garbage. It's just, you know, it's unnoticeable healing when it comes down to it. So this will be more healing, but it is not as much healing as they initially designed it and spec'd it out for. But it gets worse, because they then nerfed the talent point after that. Because the talent point after that is Everbloom, the rank 3, the Blooming Frenzy, now triggers three times, down from five. So it used to be that when we spec'd into this, your Blooming Frenzy would bloom whenever you used your Soul of the Forest was consumed, five times in rapid succession, and they're nerfing that to three times. They're buffing the amount of healing it can do from 15% to 25% and 30% to 50%, and they're buffing the amount of allies it hits by four, but then they're nerfing it so it doesn't actually trigger two additional times. I don't think this fixes it. I honestly am curious as to whether or not this is going to go live and everyone's just going to stick with what they're currently doing, because this is enough. Like, I genuinely am curious about it. And if it isn't, it's like, dude, you guys messed it up at launch, so no one used it. And now the.5 patch has arrived with your big rework, and no one's using it. Like, you need to address what this thing is. Like, I don't know if it's enough.

Speaker 3:
[95:16] Well, I guess it's one of those, you know, those tuning passes where they go, okay, we know that this is not right. We need to start somewhere. So that's where they're going. I mean, I, yeah, you know, I play a lot with a very strong Resto Druid player, and she does obviously does not run the Apex talent and she is just blasting away in keys and in rage. She sort of has to more direct traffic and contribute in other ways because the specs is kind of not there. I think it's really weird. Just, I mean, we kind of mentioned it earlier, but like, you know, this is the, this is the thing that class has got. This is the new thing we got, this expansion, and to come in so off the mark with this and then not really have, you know, a strong idea to pivot in the dot five when it's obviously not working, that's a little weird. Like they had plenty of time. I can't, well, I mean, I don't know. I shouldn't say that.

Speaker 2:
[96:19] Well, they've, it seems like they had, they knew it was coming, right?

Speaker 3:
[96:23] They knew midnight, they had this production schedule for midnight. They knew everybody needed Apex talents. That was the big feature and for it to land like that and then just, you know, I mean, I guess we'll see if people start messing around with it and it's better. But yeah, I mean, I will defer to you. Like if it's underwhelming, then that's not a great sign for, you know, this next, this next phase.

Speaker 2:
[96:47] What's underwhelming is they're like, okay, it's going to do slightly, it's going to do more healing. It might do, I don't know, maybe twice as much healing as it's currently doing, but it's going to trigger fewer times. As soon as you nerf the final part of this point, it's almost like saying, okay, guys, we're going to help you out a little bit. You might want to put two or three points in your apex, but that third point, we've now nerfed as opposed to a triggering five times and now only triggers three times. And you're like, why is it an apex talent that literally people are putting no points into? Are you nerfing the final point in? Seems very strange to be doing that. So it's a weird one. I will just say, I hope we don't have to wait till.7 for them to do the next fix. Because they did class tuning on all these other classes as they sort of lined up through mythic week, heroic weeks in a mythic week and we've had class tuning every week. And they're like, almost, I think it was three weeks ago or four weeks ago. I think it was three weeks ago, they put out this stuff on the.5. They went, here's our fix for Everblue. Three weeks ago, and haven't done it, haven't pushed it live, they kept it for the.5 patch. So I hope it's not a similar thing where they're like, hey, we're going to fix Everbloom again, and we're going to do it in the.7 patch. So here's the.7 patch PTR two weeks from now, or three weeks from now. It goes live, and they have another fix for Everbloom to try and make it better. And you're like, great, how many more weeks do we have to wait before this goes live, that you're just leaving Restor to the state that it's in?

Speaker 3:
[98:13] Well, I think what it seems to be, their approach is when there's a redesign that comes in in a patch, and then that design gets tuned via Hotfix until the next patch, where there's a potential for a redesign. So I wouldn't expect a Hotfix redesign, but I'm not saying they can't do that, but it doesn't seem to be their pattern with abilities in general, with talents and stuff like that. So I think this is what they're going to go with until.7.

Speaker 2:
[98:42] Yeah, I also find it odd that they call it a redesign, because it's not redesigned. They changed it from, it heals two people to heal six, and they changed it from 30 yards to 40 yards, and they changed it from 15% to 25%. That's what they changed.

Speaker 3:
[98:57] Yeah, it's the same effect. They changed the numbers, which in parlance, we consider tuning, right?

Speaker 2:
[99:02] Yes, that is tuning to me. And even the rank 3 Blooming Frenzy, they changed from five blooms to three. So they literally tuned it. I don't know why they say it's been redesigned. It really has not been redesigned. So I don't know. It's a weird thing to look at. It is frustrating for me as I play this class actively. But it's one of those cases where you're just like, I don't like seeing this from the current team. Because the current team has been really good at pivoting and doing this stuff. So seeing them not pivot and not push stuff out and not do this stuff earlier, it seems really weird that we're just like, yeah, we're going to wait till the.5 patch to do this. We're going to call it a redesign even though it's the same thing. We've just turned the numbers up a bit and turned the numbers down a bit in other areas. That's not really a redesign. You're not making it do something new. It's not like summoning 8 treads or something. It's not doing something wild.

Speaker 3:
[99:50] It's some new concept, right? Conceptually, it's the exact same thing. It just behaves slightly differently.

Speaker 2:
[99:56] Yeah. Anyways, that's the rest of Druid stuff. I don't know if you want to mention any warrior stuff for it, but go for it.

Speaker 3:
[100:01] Sure, a couple warrior changes. Not a lot of stuff, but one thing I like is they're changes from UI stuff. So wrecking throw highlights when you target a unit with an active absorb shield and shattering throw highlights when you target a unit with an active immunity. I've been having a lot of fun with wrecking throw in this expansion. There's a bunch of stuff that has shields, and I like dealing 500% increased damage with my wrecking throw to something that's shielded. And also when you throw in the talent that gives you extended range on your throws and adds an interrupt and silence to wrecking throw, it's become like a staple ability. It's so fun. And it's great in raid too, like Crown of the Cosmos, man. That Simulacrum add, it puts up that barrier, wrecking throw, it takes off a big chunk. So I think that might be functionality that is not obvious to players who maybe just grab a build off the internet or something, or I don't know if it's in the starter builds or whatever. So I think highlighting like, hey, this button is a good idea to push this button right now. I like that either. You know, if you're just looking at the spec from a high level, they're not, it might not occur to you that this is the tool for the situation, right? On the pro side, specifically, they're buffing Colossus kind of quite a bit. The Practice Strikes talent is increasing Shield Slam and Revenge and Thunderclap damage. Those are all of your buttons that do damage, basically. Increasing the area of effect radius of Demolish, which is your big signature button that you get for going Colossus. A really cool change is dominance of the Colossus is going to reduce the cooldown of Demolish by five seconds instead of two seconds when you gain a stack of Colossal Might and you're already at max stacks. That means a lot more demolishing, which is good. And that means that the more throughput you have, then it's really going to pay off because you'll be able to get more shield slams down and then more demolishes down. The thing is, though, I don't really like playing Colossus and I don't want to. So I don't know if I'm going to even bother with this. We'll see. I might try it out for Raid because it's kind of fun to hit those big demolishes sometimes. I just like Mountain Thane so much better. It's just kind of set and forget and it's just more in tune with how I want to play, especially in Dungeons and stuff. I think these are good changes and Mountain Thane has kind of just been the defacto choice for Prot for this expansion so far. You can't just have one hero talent, right? You can't let the other one fall off. So I think they do have to do things to make Colossus more appealing. I love the cooldown reduction change. Cooldown reduction is kind of a, it's a staple of Prot Warrior's kit, right? And being able to get more stuff out is just always fun to me. So I might mess with it for single target situations like big raid bosses and stuff. We'll see. Probably not. I'll probably make a build and try it out and go, I'm going back to Fane.

Speaker 2:
[103:07] Cool. I'm glad you're going to give it a shot and it's at least interesting enough to do that. So we'll see what happens with it.

Speaker 3:
[103:14] I'll try it. I like the noise that Demolish makes. It's a cool sound effect. It looks cool. I'll try it.

Speaker 2:
[103:22] Cool. As far as Mythic Plus goes, there's two announcements here. The first is people really like Lindormi's Glow. It's super helpful for a lot of tank classes out there for how to move your way through a dungeon and be able to have a guided route, if you will. Currently, Lindormi's Aphix is while you're doing through keystones, there's highlighted mobs that will take increased damage as you progress through. If you kill all those mobs, you'll get your percentage of trash needed for that dungeon by the time you finish the dungeon. Now, they're saying, hey, that still currently exists. But people were like, I missed my Lindormi's Glow in higher keystones once this Aphix goes away. So they're saying, we'll bring the Glow back. If your tank, rural person, goes and talks to Lindormi, they can ask for Lindormi's Glow to be turned on. This is by speaking with Lindormi near the timeways portal or at the end of a keystone dungeon. You can ask for that to be turned on. And it means that while the tank is working their way through, there will still be highlighted mobs. They just won't take the increased damage. So you can choose to disable it again if you don't like it anymore and you want to try new different routes. But for those who are working their way up, at a certain point, obviously, that Glow went away and people missed it. So this is a way to turn it on. You don't get the benefit of those mobs taking increased damage, but you do still have the benefit of seeing the route that you were familiar taking as you worked your way up in keystones. So great change, very happy, good to see.

Speaker 3:
[104:56] Yeah, I mean, this is my first thought, right? Like when I, the first time I did a keystone in this expansion and it had Lindormi's guidance on it and it was like, oh, that's how that works? Okay, they just kind of glow and I can see them all and they have this little buff on them or debuff, whatever you want to call it. Like, okay, awesome. And then my next thought was, oh, wait, this goes away, like rank six, like I wish I had this all the time. And so, yeah, this was new this week. I think it's great. I mean, I might just throw it on just to maybe, you know, check my own routes and make sure I'm doing stuff that makes sense or whatever. Even though I'm very close to hitting all my goals for the season, really that I care about with Keystones, like already. I think it's great. I mean, you know, when we knew that Lindormi's Guidance was coming in as the low rank ethics, I was like, this is something we've needed for a long time, right? One of the big problems with the Mythic Plus system is encouraging people to tank them. And you know, tanks have a lot of responsibility in group settings and especially in Keystone Dungeons and knowing a route is an important one. And it can be really, you know, it could be anxiety inducing, be nerve wracking, right? You don't want to make a mistake if you're not very experienced or confident tank like, oh, did I go the right way? Did I pull the right packs or whatever? A more experienced tank knows what they want to do, right? So even if it's not meta or whatever, it's not the thing on Keystone Guru or what have you. You know, a tank with that experience and confidence is going to make a decision because that is going to be the best for their approach or because their cooldowns need another 15 seconds or, you know, whatever the case may be, you kind of have that. But it takes a while and you need an environment in which you can develop that confidence and develop those skills. And not everybody is going to have that. And you shouldn't need that just to go in and do a simple Keystone, you know. So I think this is it's cool. It's the implementation is a tad awkward, I guess. Like I think a lot of people aren't going to know that it's there, right? That you can just go talk to Lindormi out in the Keystone area of Silvermoon and toggle this on. So hopefully, if you if you missed this with this week's news, if you're hearing it from us first, then good, you know, use it if if it seems interesting to you. And hopefully, they call it out in some way in the game, right? There should be like a little breadcrumb quest as you go talk to Lindormi this week just to point it out that something like that would probably be good.

Speaker 2:
[107:26] Yeah, it'd be it'd be neat to see them do that because yeah, my players might not catch that immediately. At least it sort of spreads the community and more people will tell other people if they aren't aware of it. It's kind of a cool thing for sure. There's a new achievement and a new kind of stretch goal for folks are doing mythic plus. This kind of goes along the lines of what I was talking about targeting gear and then pushing that gear to an even more ascended level because the new objective is 3400 rating. If you achieve 3400 rating, you receive a time lost saddle that can be exchanged with Lindormi for a mount of your choice. The mounts include a variety of new mounts and Keystone Master and Keystone Legend mounts from previous seasons. For those who aren't familiar with the PvP stuff, this is very similar to what they do in PvP. You can earn saddles, the same sort of saddle concept in PvP, to be able to go and buy from a pool of mounts that exist inside of PvP, when you achieve certain ranks inside PvP or, you know, certain high-end stretch goals inside PvP. So this is the Mythic Plus version of that. If you're someone who wants to push and do resilient 16s, which is what this is probably going to take, then you will be able to get this saddle and go and choose a mount of your own from that pool of mounts. So that's pretty cool. I think overall it's a very neat kind of idea that they put into the game. I think it's a great objective for people who like to push really high keys to have something special just for them. It is equivalent of like that gladiators achievement kind of thing for PvP. So it's kind of neat to see a very high-end key reward for that, especially with people pushing up into higher keys than they have before, sooner than they have before, right? So this is a season where I hit 3K last week and was like, hey, I'm actually almost 31 something. So I could probably push for 3,400 if I wanted to by just continuing to play as actively as I'm playing and keep trying and trying and trying higher and higher keys to try and get there. So that's something that some people might push for. I'm just glad that they did that. I know there's people in my team that are doing 15s and 16s already who will be all prepped and ready for this to go live on Tuesday as much as they can. So they also snuck in, I just want to mention this, they also snuck in the, hey, the Umbral Champion is going to be the title for folks that end Season 1 in the top 1% of Mythic Plus stuff. So if you get that Umbral Champion achievement, you'll get the exclusive mount reward with that as well for being in the top 1%. Pretty cool.

Speaker 3:
[110:01] Yeah, I mean, this is the first time they've done a new mount for title, before it was just title. Now it's, you know, title and mount.

Speaker 2:
[110:10] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[110:10] Yeah, I think this is cool. When I saw it come in, I went, well, have fun. I'm not doing that. I have not like 3400 is just higher than I want to go. And like, yes, the season is easier. And yes, like as time goes on, these milestones get more and more attainable all the time. So I remember the first time I pushed to 3K, it was like, whoo, OK, we got to really lock in here and make sure that we get this done. And then it's subsequently gotten easier. And like this season, I'm about to hit it without even really trying. So, you know, 3400 this season is doable, but I don't want to. And next season, 3400 will probably be easy. Like there'll be a point in time where 3400 is like this milestone. You sort of accidentally approach when you play like I do, I guess. Could be. I mean, that's kind of the trend over over time. Since we've had the in-game rating system, I feel like. But you know, I'm not that motivated by mounts. I have pretty I think I have all the seasonal mounts. Like I think I got Keystone Master every season since I started attaching mounts to it. So I know there's new ones, but how new are they going to be where it's like, yes, I want to do additional hours and hours and hours of like white knuckling keystones in order to hit this thing to get like, I'll have to see what the mounts look like, but this is not on my radar. This has been controversial. People are upset about this because they don't feel like they should have to express the skill necessary to get 3400 Mythic Plus rating in order to get that saddle and then be able to get the mounts. And I just totally disagree with that viewpoint. I feel like you need to have prestige rewards in this game. You always have. You've always had them. You need to find ways to reward players who are the most dedicated and playing at high levels because that aspirational thing is how players get into the end game. And yes, it fills out the pools. It increases people's skill levels because they want to learn how to do it. They want to get better. They want to follow an example. And then they bring people along with them. It's always been there. It's just that your prestige rewards used to be things like completing your tier set. Right? Like that was the thing you aspired to do all patch or all expansion maybe.

Speaker 2:
[112:40] And where were these complaints during PVP when gladiator mounts were a thing forever?

Speaker 3:
[112:44] Well, I think that's different because people see PVP as sort of this totally other game almost. It's like, well, I don't PVP, so like I'll never do that. But this is PVE, so I should be able to just do it or like I should be able to get it from, you know, whatever. So I pay my subscription. This is just a it's a PVE mount and I should be able to collect it. I don't see a distinction between this and a PVP saddle. Like it's the same thing. It's rewarded for the same reason. It's for demonstrating this, you know, real mastery over over the mode. So yeah, I mean, I feel like there has sort of been, I'm not saying it's wrong, but there is there are a portion of the player base that collection is their main focus. That's what they do. They installed all the things, right? And they want they need to fill up every single bar and collect literally everything there is to collect. I mean, I love to fill up bars in this game too. But I am no where near the level of wanting to install all the things and then try to collect literally every collectible thing in the entire game. I go hard after the stuff that I like, and that's good enough. Yeah, in this case, I don't like, I guess what would be the reward that would be acceptable then? I feel like mounts have been missing from the top to be top end of Mythic Plus for a long time. We've had Keystone Master mounts. We have Keystone Hero, or Keystone Legend mounts, excuse me. But those are relatively attainable. Title not having a mount has been weird since they put title in, I feel like. I feel like they should go hand in hand. It does stink if you can't have everything you want in the game, but I don't think that that can be a design concern. You can't design the Mythic Plus reward system around, well, what if everybody can't do this? When people have mounts, they can't get. I don't think it's the point. I think the point is to reward the skill expression of getting this far up the ladder.

Speaker 2:
[114:48] The argument for me that comes in of people should be able to earn all the things before they go away kind of idea, is what falls under like decor duels. When we had the alternate game modes that came in, like that to me is where you're like, okay, I generally express the concern of how much time is required to be able to achieve earning this stuff from... Even like Legion Remix, how much time is required to be able to earn the rewards from Legion Remix before they go away permanently. For a player who only has so much time to play in a week, when you're giving completely alternate game modes and those things, but like that's where I understand that argument happening. I don't understand a skill expression point. A skill expression point, it's like if you really want this thing, then you should have the motivation to chase this thing. Chasing this thing means playing the game at a higher level. Playing the game at a higher level means putting more effort into playing the game, whether that's talking with more people, so you have a little more advice or coaching that's happening by learning from people who are performing better than you or going online and finding other resources outside of the game that help you find ways to improve your play to be able to achieve the things you want to achieve. In some cases, it's leveling a class that's able to achieve the thing you're wanting to do. There are certain classes just in any meta that happens where it's really hard to get invited to keys. Maybe you need, if you're one of those classes, to put together a group of a consistent five-player group that's doing Mythic Plus on a regular basis. So you as a group get better and are able to learn and get better and do these things. You're not plugging into keys trying to get to 3,400. There's a path to this and you should be, if you want it, wanting to chase it, putting in the effort towards going down that path. I think right now, Mythic Plus is in its most accessible point and I feel like that's by design. And I hope players who want to chase this, chase it. Like they put in the work and they chase it. I think that's great.

Speaker 3:
[116:42] Yeah, I mean, I feel the same way. Like it's not undoable, but it's a pinnacle reward for achieving, you know, a pinnacle of gameplay in this mode. And we've always had stuff like that, or at least for a very, very long time. So I think again, like for me, I think it's it's cool, but it's not motivating to me. I'm not like, OK, all right, guys, we got to get in there. We need some 15s and 16s going. I'm not I'm just not about that. And no matter how cool the new mounts are, it's not going to be enough for me to change my mind. Which is fine. You know, I don't not everything has to has to be like that. I don't I don't need to. You know, feel that pull to get into every single thing that they offer. Again, the PVP thing is a perfect example. I've never PVP in any kind of consistent or remotely competitive way. And I've never gotten a saddle from PVP or anything. You know, there's just there's piles of PVP cosmetics, you know, set recolors and various mogs and appearances mounts that I've never gotten and never will have and never thought twice about. So I think probably Keystone Myth and the saddle from that will probably fall into a similar category for me.

Speaker 2:
[118:05] Yeah, as far as hotfixes go, they're coming in with this because we already mentioned this earlier. Midnight Falls Fight is getting more nerfs on Mythic Difficulty. The health of the dust crystals reduced by 10 percent, glimmering damage reduced by 10 percent and shattering sky damage reduced by 10 percent. So more nerfs happening this week, as well as I expect more nerfs happening in future weeks to this fight, until they start seeing the numbers they want to see happening. And I do think we might say more nerfs. I mean, even on heroic difficulty nerfs that are going to be coming in to help teams get there, because like fewer than 5,000 teams have killed it on heroic, which feels really weird at this point when it's been out for a few weeks, for a couple of weeks, because it means that those mythic teams like mine are not going in there and killing that boss. Like they normally would, which feels very weird. But we'll see what they do. As far as housing goes, you can now shift-click on Decor to link it in to chat, and if you click on Decor links that are in chat, it will open the catalog to that piece of Decor. So you're able to actually figure out what people are referring to when they do that, which is pretty cool. So I'm glad that they added that in there. I wanted to make sure I mentioned it. The cooking and vendor refreshments, this is outside of housing obviously, are now restore that percentage based restoration as opposed to a fixed amount, which means that it hopefully means there's viable foods from earlier vendors. If you want to eat stormwind cheese to regenerate your health as opposed to eating something from Silvermoon, you can because it would be a percentage based restoration as opposed to being something that's fixed for the current expansion. So I'm looking forward to drinking some moonberry juice or something to be able to get my mana back that way, as opposed to having to buy something from Silvermoon to be able to do that.

Speaker 3:
[119:55] Get your RP hat on for your character's diet.

Speaker 2:
[119:58] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[119:59] If it's like literally every item ever in the game is like health percentage, then that is actually kind of a cool element. Go to your racial capital and buy your species food.

Speaker 1:
[120:16] I like it a lot. The one thing that I'm questioning is whether the percentage is the same. Whether it's like you get 5% every second for 20 seconds versus you gain 2% every second for 20 seconds, depending on the level of food. So you need to get the better higher percentage food. I don't know what they're choosing to do with it, but part of my brain goes towards like, hey, there's a cost associated with food. Early food can't cost the same amount as late game food because people don't have the gold slash coin to buy the food. So unless they're homogenizing the cost of food, which I would be okay with them doing, because really the only people who buy it are healers who buy water to drink and our peers who buy it for our P purposes, I don't really see why it needs to be a group thing.

Speaker 3:
[121:02] I feel like we're dealing with Vendor food, really, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[121:04] But it's one of those cases where it depends on how they implement it. I do hope it is just like static, like percentage, it'll get you to 100 percent, it's five percent every second for 20 seconds, whatever it is, right? Hopefully, it's like seven percent every second for 20 seconds, so it goes faster. But we'll see what they choose to do, and if it's across the board, then yeah, I'm going to totally get some RP on and have some better food that I can use for my character, that I enjoy eating. We could have chocolate cake at every meal. Think about it that way, like really, you know?

Speaker 3:
[121:37] You just spoil your dinner.

Speaker 1:
[121:39] That's right.

Speaker 3:
[121:39] All you want, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[121:41] As far as interface goes, you can now shift click a features checkbox in edit mode, those grayed out boxes. You can now shift click those boxes to turn on that feature, so you can then edit it. Right now, currently, you open edit mode, and if one of those things is grayed out, you then have to go into your options menu and hopefully search, because that's the fastest way to find it, search for that feature and turn that feature on and then go back into edit mode and then you can actually edit it. Instead, when you open edit mode, if it's grayed out, you can shift click it and it should now activate that feature so you can do the edit mode stuff with it.

Speaker 3:
[122:13] This is like an incredible change, actually, because, you know, there have been a lot of new updates to edit mode, which are very good, but it can be a little confusing to tell how to turn all the features on. And currently, in, you know, 12.0, you can't do it from edit mode, and you're like, where is this thing?

Speaker 1:
[122:32] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[122:33] So being able to do it from here is awesome, although the fact that you have to shift click it to turn it on could be a little awkward. So just, you know, another thing that hopefully gets a call out, like maybe, you know, a tool tip on MouseOver or something that says, hey, shift click to enable this or something. Just make it easier for people to understand they have the option and to be able to use it because I've had a lot of times where in voice chat or whatever, I've had to walk somebody through toggling on and configuring, you know, the built-in cooldown manager or the boss alerts or something. I don't mind really, but I think that kind of indicates that maybe we could make this a little more intuitive.

Speaker 1:
[123:12] Yeah. As far as the other UI based updates they put in, they added the ability to invite cross faction players to a party from the recent allies window. So you can now bring in people who you recently played with from that window, even if they're cross faction. So they're slowly fixing the cross faction shenanigans that exists in the game and allowing people to do more things. So that's another nice one to see.

Speaker 3:
[123:39] Yeah, this is really cool. Like if you just maybe you plugged the keystone with somebody and they were really good. And but then, I don't know, they left the group or whatever, or you left the group, you know, and you want to do another one, you don't have to be Bnet friends with them. You don't have to take that, you know, you have to take it to that level. You have to, yeah, you have to level jump the relationship there. You just find them in your recent allies and you can re-invite them to go do another thing you want to do. I think it's cool. Yeah, I mean, I would love it if there was just really no walls between the factions at all anymore. But obviously, that was so deep in so many of the features. I'm sure there's still technical hurdles to this day. But you know, there's at least one more kind of work around just to quickly party up with somebody again who's cross-faction.

Speaker 1:
[124:24] I will say you still cannot cue LFR with cross-faction people in your group.

Speaker 3:
[124:29] Yeah. It's just weird. I mean, is there a big portion of the player base who's like, I don't want those dirty alliance in my LFRs. Does anybody even notice at this point?

Speaker 1:
[124:43] I just feel like no.

Speaker 3:
[124:45] Yeah, it's weird.

Speaker 1:
[124:46] In our first week of LFR being out, we of course chose to do a guild LFR cue for Chimeras to try and get Chimeras trinkets, because that's how important that trinket is. We actually hit that thing where we're like, we can't cue because people are in here or cross-faction when everyone who was horde had to leave. Then, which meant those characters couldn't come. Then we're like, well, we also want to need to fill out the groups. We don't have a bunch of random pugs who get in. So can you get on random alliance characters and try and get them in? You're like grabbing your friends to try and fill it out with alliance characters. It was really awkward. So I'll be very happy when that gets fixed.

Speaker 3:
[125:20] Yeah, like something like that is probably a tech hurdle, I got to think. I think that's more of a tech decision than an immersive gameplay decision or something.

Speaker 1:
[125:28] Agreed.

Speaker 3:
[125:29] I would hope. So yeah, hopefully they can change it someday because otherwise it gets to the point with some of these in-game features where it's like, what was the point then of taking out the faction barrier if you can't do stuff like run a guild LFR, right? The main thing you want to do with that is make sure that you're keeping the loot in the family, right? So if you got to kick out half of the group so you can queue, it doesn't really work. So, yeah, so maybe someday. Not Tuesday, but it's getting a little better at least.

Speaker 1:
[126:03] There's a new icon for stay a while and listen NPCs. So as opposed to seeing that chat bubble over top of their head, you'll now have an icon so you know that there is another chat option when you're looking at it. There's new sheathing options inside transmogging where you can essentially go in and there's a weapon, a sheath weapon toggle inside the transmog preview pane that allows you to actually sheath your weapon inside that pane but also it allows you to choose from options of sheathing. Whether you want to hide your weapons entirely, have your weapons on your back, have them on your hips. There's a bunch of different choices you can do, which is kind of neat. And there's two more situations they added as well where there's the weather and time of day situation. So if it becomes rainy, you can put on your raincoats and pull out your parasol to be able to deal with the rain.

Speaker 3:
[126:49] Yeah, I'm looking forward to messing around with this because I got that shiny new Sentinels Glaive from the March Trading Post and it clips directly through my character's skull. So I'm hoping maybe it'll look a little bit better on her hip maybe, or maybe just hide it entirely. If it's not going to look good, then I don't need to see it unless I'm in combat and it looks fine when I'm swinging it around, but when it goes on my back, it's a big problem. So, you know, I hope they fix the attachment points on that item someday. But in the meantime, I will use this to maybe make it look better.

Speaker 1:
[127:25] Last but not least, there is a Twitch drop starting up this week. The next Gurgle housing decor item is going to be available. This is the Cuddley Pearl Gurgle. So if you are looking to get one of these starting at 3 p.m. Pacific, 6 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, you'll be able to watch. I think it's still 4 hours, is what they're looking at. Yeah, it's still 4 hours, and you'll be able to earn this somewhere between April 23rd and May 21st, as long as you do that. So get your next Pearl Gurgle and blow it up and throw it inside your house as beanbag chair.

Speaker 3:
[127:57] Make it like, make it your entire house.

Speaker 1:
[128:00] Speaking of...

Speaker 3:
[128:00] Scale it all the way up and then, you know, just live inside of it. But you know what? I guess what we're going to do is just a new Gurgle every month as a Twitch drop for a month until, I don't know, next expansion. I'm here for it, but yeah, I mean, it's cool. They've been doing drops more consistently, but now it's like they have it all the time pretty much. So you basically have, you always have some kind of rotating window where you can watch Twitch streams of WoW and then get something cool for your time spent there. Yeah, I'll be dishing these out the next week.

Speaker 1:
[128:33] So it'll be cool.

Speaker 3:
[128:34] And then, you know, I'll have to go put it in my house. I don't put anything in my house with my Gurgles. And you can buy more of these from the vendors in the city, which I love they do that with the limited stuff where it's like, well, you're only going to get one of these from some promotion. But then for a relatively nominal fee, you can go get as many of them as you want.

Speaker 1:
[128:55] Very happy about that as well. And yes, Blizzard Store, Large Cuddley Gurgle Beanbag Chair is wet. All right. With that, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons. They contributed a ton to our show and help us to improve on the content we create. Today, I'm giving a special shout out to Agriphobia, Anthony, Bruce, Chris, James, Garrett, Kapowee, and Shorl. Thank you so much for all that you give towards the show, as well as all of our patrons, past, present and future. We appreciate you. Thank you so much for going on over to patreon.com/thestartingzone and signing up at the tier of your choice to support the show. We really appreciate it. Those funds go towards keeping the show running every week, getting the hosting costs covered and posting costs covered. The technology involved in the show, all that stuff, is what we end up using patron funds for. So we really appreciate it very much. Thank you. And yeah, if you're looking for it, I would recommend using your web browser, not your phone, because those phone companies will take a cut. They'll charge you more. So just use your web browser on your computer. Go to patreon.com/thestartingzone and sign up there today.

Speaker 3:
[130:02] Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[130:03] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[130:03] Thank you, patrons, so much. We really couldn't do it without you. It makes a huge difference for keeping the show on track, on schedule, getting those episodes posted, and keeping them online for you to peruse the archives. We really couldn't do it without your support, and you've been supporting us for a really long time. So thank you so much. And if you like today's episode, thank you, patron.

Speaker 1:
[130:26] All right. With that, I want to say thank you very much. It's going to wrap up episode 732 of The Starting Zone. If you want to go to show notes for this episode or leave us a comment on the show, you can head on over to thestartingzone.com, the official website for The Starting Zone Podcast. Another great way to support us is by heading on over to your iTunes, your Apple Podcast, your Spotify's. Leave us those five star reviews. They really help out the show. We love seeing them come in and the numbers go up from our patrons. It helps more people find the show and expands our reach. So thank you. Another way to help us out is by going on and reaching out to contact us on your, I guess, social media app of choice, whether that's bluesky at thestartingzone.bsky.social at X or Twitter at the Starting Zone, or you can join our Discord server, thestartingzone.com/discord. If you have any questions or whatnot, you can always email us at thestartingzone.gmail.com and ask us some questions there. Where can folks reach you on the Internet, Jason, if they're trying to find a little more of your stuff?

Speaker 3:
[131:24] On socials, you can find me on Twitter over at shieldwald or on bluesky at jlucas.bsky.social. Video channels are at twitch.tv/shieldwalled and youtube.com/shieldwalled. And I guess I'm just never going to co-stream to YouTube again because we just always have Twitch drops going. So come check out the Twitch channel, streaming raids and keystones and stuff, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Sundays, 7.30 Eastern. Come hang out.

Speaker 1:
[131:48] If you're trying to find me, you can find me on bluesky at spencerhd.bsky.social over on x at spencer underscore Downey. Or you can find me on Twitch at twitch.tv/spencerhd or youtube.com/atspencerhd. And with that, for Jason and myself, we want to say thanks for listening and jobs done.