Welcome back to the news! okay right a lot of things have went down so let’s just get stuck into it starting off with the dragonflight updates, decently big milestone actually because the bait is here and now we have got level 70 pre-made characters so this isa good big step.
Now they are restricted to just Stormwind and Orgrimmar and not a whole lot of content yet so they are trying to do things in a bit more of a focused way but at least we can test full Talent builds which is definitely nice of course, overtime Mythic plus and raiding will make it in but first they're going to be doing the rated solo Shuffle with around of testing next week so it'll be interesting to see how well solo queued Conquest earning PvP with rating is going to feel.
Also we've got the season one dungeon pull right from ethic plus Ruby life pulse agathar Academy not good offensive as a revolt and then for the returning dungeons Halls of Valor Court of stars Shadow Moon burial grounds and the Temple of the Jade serpent, you know what those are four returning dungeons that uh I really like but I would would say blizzard don't be cowards inflict Sky reach upon the people maybe I'm just a sadist okay.
We then just have a whirlwind of little changes for the expansion so here is a map uh yeah here’s where the aisles are at an increase in increasingly crowded and not a scale world map for talents then a nice new little feature where blizzard are adding in suggested starter builds for people, this is just really great and the good thing is it works not by preloading a whole build at once but it actually guides somebody Talent by Talent through making a build so hopefully they will a not feel off around and B actually learn something.
Then gearing while gearing and raids isa bit more different now because it spans four item level brackets within the same difficulty instead of just the final two bosses being a higher item level basically it's just more granular rewards, I wonder if that'll cause any loot table Funk but I suppose Blizzard’s overall intent is just that you progress you know as you progress the harder bosses you do just get better loot right, so I think they just want to do that to try to make the race feel a bit more rewarding and I suppose also have the item level actually reflect that difficulty curve.
Leveling then so XP they have brought back the XP to its heavily Nerf values and this absolutely crushes the likes of level 50 to 60 which of course you'll be able to do in chromy time and I suppose overall this probably means that 1 to 70 will take about as long as 1 to 60 will.
They’ve also rescaled some item levels for loot to just make that whole thing a bit more smooth class changes there's actually been quite a lot of them then so there was a bit of a drama with Warriors who can now get a mass grip but it targets only well only four targets and 10 yards range and it increases heroic leaps cooldown by 45 seconds so initially people were worried it was way too much and the dks felt a bit hard done by but now like it's nice utility but you certainly will pay for it.
For the hunters then there is also a little bit of utility drama where binding shot was turned into a route that would be consistent with other routes break with damage and uh following clear instance and uh pointed feedback it’s now a three second stun rather than a um yeah rather than a lot of otherwise been so I suppose a bit of a win there.
For the warlocks you are getting spell lock added back to your Fel Hunter because they wanted to keep that part of the class fantasy then for what seems to be my new main class priest we've got some more business now with renew and Flash heal being disc’s new bread and butter for spreading atonement, they are considering just doing some pruning like things like removing Shadow mend and they said that overall they're happy with the class and spec trees but that said there is a funky thing, silence won't be added to the class tree and that means that Holy and disc are the only two specs in World of Warcraft that don't have an interrupt that blizzard said like yeah you know not everybody has to have everything but it does feel a bit weird so uh yeah who uh who knows there I mean you could maybe let it be taken but put it into a less convenient part of the class talent tree ah I'm not really sure uh dispersion is going to remain Shadow only and Shining Force is being removed they’ve just cited a broad availability of knockbacks and also some PVP concerns and even though it's not elegant they could just make it not work in players if they wanted to so look there’s good and there's bad here at a very basic level.
The renew and Flash heal change seems pretty good tome but there are some outstanding concerns and I'd recommend if you are a priest head up Jack's video for uh I guess a more educated breakdown and things because I am but only a newbie priest.
Balance Druids then you guys have got an update too and uh yeah it's it’s a really pretty damn chunky one and it does represent a lot of Druid changes too because of course Feral got a whole raft of changes a little while ago as well which definitely has been good because they've been doing a lot for a long time okay balance then not only has your Mastery total eclipse been redesigned to Mastery astral invocation but uh star surge, star fall and the general behavior of eclipses have also been have been redesigned so that’s quite something and you know it's kind of interesting to me because the changes that they've made I mean um like the eclipses they no longer you know have to be like one then the other so you can just stay in whatever Eclipse makes the most sense for the situation that you're in and in a way that could maybe be a little bit more dull but also there was like a lack of control in the eclipses and essentially this is them really combating feedback that they got in the alpha of shadowlands so uh yeah I guess they kind of only just got around to it.
Now for the hunters, this ain't a class change thing, but it is kind of nice and it's The Taming of less or dragonkin that actually does include a few neat dragons in the shadowlands as well so a nice little thing.
Onto more updates then well we’ve got a raft of UI updates we've got this which is the dragon Isles like content window thing with the wraps and the dragon uh riding talents and stuff on it it looks pretty nice and also here’s the new player frame which I do think looks quite slick and they've also added more to the edit mode, it's not complete yet and it certainly is not a full replacement album UI but it is a massive Improvement to the Baseline experience of World of Warcraft and I suppose the hope is that at least for some players it will be enough to just do what they want okay.
A few tidbits then so there's a progress bar for the dragon Isles dockmaster which uh I guess means you won't miss the boat I think it’s like a little bit of juice just being a bunch of You Are I slapped into the game world but yeah whatever.
Moving on then, Soul shape so actually your soul shape is staying around by a new toy that you can pick up from lady man in the new expansion it's got a 10 minute duration and five minute cooldown which does mean a 100 up time but it is just a cosmetic effect yeah but still this is good obviously blizzard hat to Sunset all that shadowlands borrowed power I’m just happy that you know for the players who like went and collected all the soul shapes they're not out of luck.
Now so overall then where we are is basically end game testing is about to start soon enough that will cover the Dungeons and the raids and they ‘restarting off with solo Shuffle overall this does mean that we are rapidly moving towards the Finish which of course we would have to because this expansion is coming out within three months maybe two and a half months and that means that a bunch of systems have got to be ready for perhaps one and a half months’ time when the pre-patch goes live which will contain the class changes and all those things uh like that and I suppose what I will say is that by this stage in shadowlands we had a significantly larger number of Dramas going on I mean do you remember talking about the rip cord talking about conduits people wondering when the mob was going to like have more things to do in it all that there is so much more drama by this stage in that and certainly there was still loads of drama by this stage in battle for Azeroth is really.
Dragonflight like it does have a lot of class feedback and plenty of iteration to do but there's no major foundational drama which is certainly a good sign and also if you want to test this stuff yourself well you might not have beta access but dragonflight pre-patch is on the public test realm so you’ll just be able to copy your live character over and just see how it feels and before wrath classic a little bit on Modern right gold restrictions have seemingly disappeared from character transfers and based on wowhead's follow-up investigation of that using Way back machine it looks like this happens sometime after August 11th.
Now they tested moving 2.6 million gold and it worked so this is a subtly big change at least for some people I mean there’s actually some players of the game who earn loads of gold by just exploiting Market differences like between servers and they can actually make so much gold by doing that that all their server transfer costs are paid for byBattle.net balance so the people who enjoy that will certainly uh certainly enjoy how they can move their money around a lot more easy now.
The only other thing for modern is um actually kind of neat so they did this thingy is cash it was a charity event with liquid and Echo it's just a neat little I think two-hour ish long event that they hosted over on I think twitch or their YouTube whatever um but what's cool about it is that it featured dual fated effects as being turned on to spice up the challenge for the gills and now they've just went ahead and added that to the live game now you're not going to get any more loot if you activate two visa fixes it’s just there is a neat option so I think that’s kind of nice and there's actually a few cases where the boons that you can get from those new faded affixes can actually make the fights easier.
Next then the big impending thing wrath classic so then the release schedule is out and it’s quite nice for us in and around Europe because 10 a.m which is uh perfect for a full day of goblin mode gaming demand though has been absolutely humongous and that has led to some woes, first off we've got two new PVP Fresh Start Realms being added which likely is to help with congestion and maybe fill a bit of a gap.
Now people have been having like big cues to get on to battle that and then big cues to Q for the game and the queuing can actually take six hours in some of the mega servers which is crazy and blizzard are targeting that problem by disabling incoming paid transfers locking the Realms indefinitely and offering free outbound transfers it's this thing that’s happened where the community's basically thought like we have to go to the mega servers those are the only ones that are viable to play on and that broad Community perception according to blizzard isn't exactly uh well something that they can fix by just throwing more Hardware at the problem and also isn't as much of a thing as the community thinks it is because there are some servers that are not being considered as viable as the mega Realms but those Realms have actually got two and a half three four times the concurrency of 2008 servers so fairly interesting.
And yeah there's a lot of people coming back for wrath classic and of course blizzard you know that they’re not going to open a humongous amount of servers because you know if they opened you know all that stuff for the initial rush and obviously there's going to be an attrition then they could be left with too many servers and players spread too thin and that could probably exacerbate the mega server problem so I think it’s the sort of thing where ideally you do want to get away with the smallest number of servers that will do the job, interesting.
Now some of the players logging in have been doing so to unlock the frostblood protowyrm mount on the live game it's a Cross promo blizzard are doing and you get it for completing the DK starting experience and if the prospect of loving a character up to 55 or maybe even buying a boost so that you can then make a DK that seemed funny to you uh don't worry because you can actually make a death knight on a fresh like classic account and without having to get another character up to level 55 providing or not doing it on a fresh start server and I guess for me like in fairness the blizzard the mount looks great and with all of this being under the same subscription I'm not going to begrudge them some cross promotion.
Now unfortunately not all was smooth with the pre-patch event and like this led to a massive blue post I’ll basically just make it simple there was internal confusion and miscommunication that led to confused players who didn't know what to expect and were now at a situation where they’ve essentially rebuilt a whole bunch of the pre-patch event to operate in a more modern fashion and things are now going to be proceeding more smoothly where the invasions will play out until wrath launch, the Cure Quest is live in chat wrath right now and cities will come under attack as of Monday 19th so yeah I think that may have been mild crisis mode at the office for a while.
Now there has been a bit of a drama actually where there was a hotfix that’s allowing people to queue for a BG anywhere not just at the war Master NPC and I know that to a lot of modern players who didn't play back then that might seem insane and you won't know what I'm talking about yeah you could not queue for a Battleground when you’re out in a Zone you had to go to a warMaster NPC in a major city and that meant that the pvpers would be congregating around the war Masters um yeah so it's a bit of an odd thing making this change because you can’t queue for a dungeon anywhere you have to go to the summoning Stone so the philosophy feels a little bit inconsistent and I think some people don’t like the idea of depopulating those like common PVP social areas uh so yeah Blizzard have definitely received some pushback on that one.
And finally what about cataclysm classic well of course World of Warcraft is a game that literally has been dying since the moment it hit public beta cataclysm is most broadly the point in time where people say the game was truly dying because it was the time where the numbers you know that they went like this and they went like this and they went like that and this was quite spooky around the time you know total biscuit just started doing the daily uh wow show I've forgotten its name you know it was after the cataclysm beta was humongous on YouTube and New Media.
Cataclysm had a really big launch and then it almost instantly ran out of steam there was dramas I mean I really enjoyed the tuning of the heroic Catalyst of dungeons at the start but for a lot of people playing in pugs it ended up being a really horrendous experience with super long queue times the dungeon finder and they normalized 10 and 25 man difficulty modes whereas in the past 10 had been easier than 25 so a bunch of people who were focusing in 10 what you could maybe call friends and family rating or maybe in normal mode ratings sort of style now that was just not in the game and it actually would not return to the game until Flex mode was added in Siege of Orggrimar and flex then eventually got renamed to be normal mode which of course you know today.
So the idea of Cata classic is interesting because it is where things started to change in some ways for the game and it's something that Ian mentioned offhand to asmongold kind of questioning you know why it feels like the end of an era to some players you know what we do like what we don't like what we'd want changed and a survey came out the survey added actually goes into some detail on that it's kind of fascinating it's all just diving into the many different features saying you know what did you like what do you nutlike what would you not like to see are there changes that you would enjoy and even pitching concepts for cataclysm anode of the pitched Concepts in the one that we saw included things like not adding LFR and a retaining pre-cataclysm features that were in cataclysm streamlined or simplified.
I mean a really good example of that don't know if you were around for ghost crawlers rather famous or to some people Infamous depends who you ask wow dungeons are hard blog post like heroic dungeons what do you do, do you launch with the Nerf version that happened like weeks or maybe even like two months or whatever it was after don't know I definitely say launch of the hard version but I would say that because uh well I did like them so it’s kind of interesting I mean they were obviously a bit more willing to go Infor some changes with wrath classic and I’d imagine significantly more so now yeah for cataclysm classic if they choose to do that and not always in the way of streamlining I think as shown by that survey so it's pretty bloody interesting stuff.
Anyway that’s basically it for the news today for where we are I'm now kind of looking into the content that's basically surrounding what's the stuff that's in dragonflight how does the end game feel that sort of thing so uh that's what Filmgoing to be uh you know having some fun with over the next little while and we’re spinning up some sort of big new you know lower series and things like that that are all quite fun oh there you go it's kind of funny with dragonflight really I mean it's like hey Dragonriding that's the thing that feels you know Uber cool new and different but other than that it's like standard slice of wow but with significantly less downsides than we've had recently and you know a few upsides that kind of feel nice but you can't really you know stand from the rooftop shouting about it it’s the weird thing because it's an expansion that I think is really focusing in on on rebuilding those foundations it means they kind of you know they can't have the Uber sexy features that you know will blow people away right like hey here's player housing and a whole new feature and I don’t know the island Sanctuary fromff14 you got that too you know they can’t do all of that stuff because they need to get the foundations right so I suppose for me it's like will this just be a good you know seven and a half out of ten eight out of ten gives us a good slice of wow doesn't fight with us then they can build on that in terms of patches and then when they're making11.0 they have like just a nice Frigg instable foundation for World of Warcraft that they can actually trust because if that’s the case then I think we might finally get out of this very bizarre and unfortunate cycle that we've been caught in for the last few days few days wow I truly have lost my mind no few years okay before I lose my mind any further thanks for watching and I'll see you next time!
