 Hello. How's everybody doing? Welcome. Classic Cast is back finally after so long. It's been, I guess we did our last episode. This is Classic Cast number 33. Our last episode was right before Classic Launch and we weren't planning on taking so long of a break, but we were playing the game so much and just kind of with all our schedules and how everything goes. We haven't really been, we haven't really had a chance to get back to Classic Cast. So we're glad to be back. We're excited. I'm here with Tips Out Baby. I'm here with Stay Safe TV and we're going to have a really good show today. We're going to talk about BWL. We've been busy. We've been busy playing the game. Classic's been out for how long? Five months? Five and a half months? How long? Almost six months. Yeah, really long because it came out August 27th. So yeah, we've been looking at, yeah, almost six months. So yeah, it's been a really long time, but we're excited to finally get back to Classic Cast. And it's actually so funny because there's probably so many people who started watching our streams and started watching what we do and have probably no idea what Classic Cast is because of how long it's been. And now that we've actually had the game, we've all been playing the game instead of doing Classic Cast and doing other forms of Classic Content before the game could come out. But we're back. We're here. And like I said, we have a lot to talk about today. The first thing we want to talk about is actually getting kind of going over what's happened since Classic Launch. I think we've all, everybody's had a different journey, right? As far as Classic Launching or sorry, the Classic Launch experience, what's happened since then. People are in different guilds. People are doing different things. Some people are leading guilds. Some people are rating. Some people are playing casually. Even between us, we're all doing different stuff. Go ahead. What's your favorite part of Classic so far? What's the most fun thing you've done in Classic so far? The most fun thing I've done? Nothing. It's terrible. Sucks. I think like as far as like the most fun thing, for me personally, I enjoy guild leading. And guild leading has like its own stresses, right? Like sometimes, you know, you have to deal with like random bull crap that was just like, okay, dude, I don't want to have anything to do with this, right? But there's a lot of reward that comes out of guild leading, right? Like you feel like for me anyway, like I feel like a lot of like fulfillment out of guild leading, raid leading, doing this kind of stuff and seeing people get to enjoy the game kind of under the unified vision of our guild. So I like that a lot. But what about you guys? Go ahead, stay safe. You want to go? I think the first like 10 days. So then that's that's the fabled fresh experience, right? Classic fresh. It was the most fun you can level. I mean, now like, I've said this a lot, my favorite thing to do in Classic is level and level through Stranglethorn and do all these quests. Now, I mean, this is this is a streamer problem. I get it, but it's it's hard to have that sort of class authentic classic experience. These days, whereas for the first 10 days before there were 60s running around, everyone was doing their own thing. I could kind of have that back in the day. Now it's super hard to do that. So that was for me the most fun. It's funny you say that because like the first 10 days for me for the worst, like by far, by the end of it, I'm pretty sure everybody in our leveling group just wanted to strangle each other. And I think a big part of that was like the whole dungeon meta and just like spamming dungeons over and over again. But I think it was like right after that for me where I like made the conscious decision where I was like, okay, I'm going to take some time off streaming, just relax a little bit and just try to enjoy the game off stream. And I think that's when I started to enjoy it a lot more. And it's been fun. I mean, there's a lot that's happened. Like you said, as fan, you know, the guild that I came in is is no longer with us. Rest in peace bunch of idiots. Rest in peace, Nick Polum. But but it's been fun. And I think there's a lot of really cool stuff coming on the way. So yeah. Yeah, I think it's been good. Well, what's coming? What are we here to talk about today? So the big thing is BWL. So that's that's one thing that's really exciting. And you kind of touched on this already. But you talked about how for you stay safe. You're the big thing that you enjoy doing plastic is leveling. And that's why the beginning was so fun. For me, I like end game content. I like I like playing at level 60. And I like PVPing and doing all that kind of stuff. I like rating. We're in this point where the domino effect is about to start where you have the big of the first six months where level do MC the ranks started for people who are ranking people who are interested in ranking that kind of stuff. Battlegrounds came out all that. So that's what that's good for is like you can casually play, you can PVP, or you can rank whatever. Now, when BWL comes out, it starts this domino effect of basically it's not really dominant. I guess chain reaction has been a word of a bunch of content coming out that works really well together. And it gets really fun. BWL hits this Wednesday, I believe at I believe at three o'clock central time, five p.m. PST, I think is I think is when it's whenever it's going to drop. But BWL is going to hit probably a month after that or next sometime next month. We're probably going to see a Rathi basin. And I think probably sometime in the month after that we'll see ZG. So one more battleground is going to get added. Zilgurub is the best battlegrounds I'll add. See, I like Warsaw my car. I so here we're totally different than I actually really dislike. It's not that I can I dislike it. I don't like worse. I don't like all truck Valley after spending several weeks in all truck Valley and worse. I guess all truck value was one of those like, okay, maybe I'll like it. You know, maybe I'll be okay. Because I never played Northdale, which is when the all truck Valley ranking meta sort of sprouted up. Yeah. So okay, maybe it'll be fine. No, I hated it. It made me stop writing. That's one of the reasons why I stopped. Yeah, AV was a was a nightmare. I just don't like war song but a ratty basin man that is a that is a good battleground. I think a ratty is the best to pug. It's super fun to pug and just do it like solo queue. But I think worse song is really, really fun if you have a really fun pre made because like the very least, like you've got the comms going you've got like the some sort of like competitive feel, which is pretty rare in classic. And that's like kind of, you know, titillating, titillating. Yeah. So I'm actually exact opposite tips. I like I like war song as a pug more. And AB is a pre made more. The reason why I don't like AB as a pug so much is because when you join an AB, I feel like what happens a lot of times and this is a human problem is people will take the path of least resistance. Right? So people run in there, they go they rush blacksmith on both sides. Some people will kind of filter out and go somewhere else and try and like capital flag what happens two, three, three, two, one side or the other. And then what people are just kind of like, okay, well, that's it. And they just AFK at stables. It's like, that's it's super, super annoying. But I've been in way too many games where I'm just sitting there. I'm like, dude, like somebody do something. So AB is going to be fun. But I enjoy it as a pre made a lot more than I enjoyed as a pug because I feel like people just give up quickly. And they're like, well, I could just say that we have to pre made it together and tips you have to do you have a 60 on Alliance on Furlina? Yeah, I have a plan. I have an Alliance on Furlina. I also have an Alliance on grobulous. That's further along. I've got an Alliance on Gahannos as well. So actually the only server that I play a hoard on is Furlina on my main account. But I don't know if you guys can convert me if you guys can flip me, we'll see, you know, maybe by the end of this podcast, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. But yeah, I think like, you know, we've had on our server, we've had like a little bit of like faction difference, population imbalance type of stuff. I think it's leveled out a little bit. It was pretty bad at the beginning of phase two. Now, this is something that we talked about. And this is something you know what's going to make the faction balance real quick, super, super apparent is day one blackling layer when you're trying to click on the orb to get it assumed. I'm assuming everyone's already tuned. If you're not, you should go to upper block or expire, get a tune and quest. But day one blackling layer. I think probably there's going to be 600 horde camping the Uber's area up there. And it's going to be super hard for lines to get in. Well, you know, what's funny is, I don't know if this is true or not, but people might plan to like camp it or whatever. But I think you can click the orb while you're dead. I don't know if it can't. Okay, the first time you click it, there is a text dialogue box. You have to say like, you put your hands up to the orb only the first time, I believe. So and I don't think you can click it the first time when you're dead. Yeah, maybe, maybe I don't know. Well, there could be a text dialogue that pops up because there's the there's the ghost dwarf and BRM on the on the coffin in the middle. So I don't know. Maybe maybe you can do that too. But either way, it's going to be it's going to be pretty interesting to see. It's going to be interesting to see how that pans out. Because I don't think it's going to be that bad. Like I mean, the people like are going to try and camp it on both sides or whatever. But it might not be that big of a deal, because people can either just spawn and use a macro to just like click it and go through the macro and get through the text like super fast, or they can or they can actually clear UBRS and run through and they can go like like four 10 man groups and go through UBRS and just run in and make their group right before they enter. There's a one minute window where you could do it, I guess. Yeah, that's that's probably the safest bet. Yeah. So what are the other but I mean, ultimately, if you're not trying to go into black wing layer with with world buffs, like the reason to have this conversation is you want to bring world buffs in. So if you don't care about dying a couple of times using world buffs, it doesn't matter. It doesn't doesn't dumb conversation to have, right? Yeah, that's true. I like that, though. I like that people won't be able to do black wing there with world buffs. Ideally, hopefully, even on Horde side, I hope I hope there's enough warfare where nobody gets in with world buffs. I ideal world. And here's another thing. I this is how we did this in the past and how I feel about this. If you if you want to go in with world buffs, I think it's fine. But I don't want to like ask people to go get world buffs and stuff like that. Because in early progression, because like we might wipe on a boss or something because there's something stupid early on, like don't worry about it, right? Like I'll even go and I think how I'm going to do this whenever we lead our raids is now my guild, like we're not trying to speedrun, we're not trying to push for server first or anything like that. But we want to do the content and we want it to be a fun, good environment. So what we're probably going to do is we're probably going to go first attempt. You can pop consumes instead of if you want. But depending on if we wipe or whatever, depending on how bad the wipe is, then I'm going to say don't pop consumes until the next boss probably unless it's really close, right? And they're like, OK, pop consumes and we have a few attempts in. Like you got to play it by ear. I just don't like making people feel like they're having to spend a ton of gold and put in a lot of like time investment for something that is like, OK, we're trying to figure this out. The difference is if you're, I guess, PTRing or something, but that's a whole different conversation. You know, that's kind of what PTR was before in private server. Yeah, I mean, one important like this is like a guild leadership thing. You need to make sure that everyone across your 40 man rate is sort of investing the same effort, right? Because if you have maybe 15 people that are showing with world buffs and they're flasking and then you have the other 25 people that aren't doing those things and you wipe on a boss, you're going to have 15 very angry, resentful players. So it's either it's sort of all or nothing up and down the entire raid. Everyone has to be in sync. Yeah, I completely agree. So yeah, that's that's how I feel about that. And there's a lot that we've seen with classic in the last few months that I think the classic has been a lot easier for a lot of people who are sorry, easier than expected for a lot of people who may play private servers or even played retail vanilla. And there's a number of reasons for that. And we can talk about that a little bit. I guess this is the place to talk about it. But I think kind of going with the 1.12 version of everything, including the lack of a progressive itemization, which is stuff that we talked about this before launch. And I don't necessarily want to beat a dead horse. But at the same time, it's been so long since we talked about it. I think it's a good time to kind of bring up some of that stuff. Yeah, yeah. So specifically with the progressive itemization, it's had two adverse consequences, I think the first one you mentioned is difficulty. And, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of different factors as to why classic content is easy right now for a lot of people. Obviously 1.12 talents, 1.12 itemization, 15 year old content, we know how to do it now. No lag better internet, all that stuff. But I think the way progressive itemization has hurt the game the most or the lack thereof has hurt the game the most is what happens right now in classic while you're leveling up, there's this really satisfying sense of progression where you're let's say level 10, you get to level 11 talent point, you know, new ability, new crit chance, new whatever. And slowly each level you get a little bit more stats, a little bit more gear, you get access to that next tier of armor, you go from male to played or you go from leather to male, you get your epic amount, you just you're constantly growing over the course of leveling. Then when you hit level 60, you know, you hope that the game can continue with that sense of progression through gear and end game. And that's how it was back in original vanilla, you would get some gear, then dire mall would come out, you'd get some extra gear, supplemental gear, then you know, you know, molten core items would update or loot tables would be added or changed. You get quick strike ring, which wasn't there originally stuff like that. And there was that constant linear graph that goes upwards, your power slowly goes up, right? Right now with classic wow, because it's 112, no progressive itemization, hit level 60, you got a bunch of really good items. And now you're just waiting. Yes. And some classes are waiting a lot more than others. But you're just stuck there. Like if you're a warrior and you got boner reverse edge week one, was that that guy in your guild stay safe? What was the name? Depot. Yeah, he quit by the way, you got a world first BRE quit. There it is, dude. I mean, you get the best weapon in the game till max because of the 112 form, the 112 itemization. So you're just stuck there. And you no longer feel like you're growing. And I think a lot of people would say that one of the biggest most important components of any RPG is that sense of growth, that sense of character development. And I think that's what, you know, no progressive itemization has hurt the game a lot in that way. Yeah, I completely agree. And I've talked about this a lot too, like for the last couple of years, actually. But this is a big point of emphasis that private servers had. And this is what I say private servers, this is one of our nostallarius came out and set the new standard for what private servers were. They came out and said, OK, we want to make an accurate to vanilla representation of classic, right? And they said, OK, you can't have everything perfect. What makes the most sense? 1.12 talents, 1.12 class balance, all that's reasonable. But other than that, they had eight debuffs at the slot instead of 16, which is kind of a push, I think with classic, it's hard to say. It certainly like makes things easier. But as far as that thing on its own, how big of an impact it has, kind of whatever. But something like progressive itemization where you have the 1.12 version of all the gear items, big ticket items that if you didn't play back in the day, or maybe if you didn't play on some of these private servers, you might not know about is stuff like onslaught girdle didn't exist whenever the game came out, stuff like Savage Gladiator Chain was a tanking chess piece whenever the game came out. There's all kinds of items, all kinds of gear and all kinds of there are a whole level of like power progression that was skipped like you castors at the beginning. You guys remember how mages were like that was probably the most I don't know what the numbers were, but I remember somebody did like a they looked at a census thing using like Warcraft Logs or whatever the amount of mages in raids in the first few weeks of classic just absolutely blew everything else out of the water because mages were leveling so quickly because all the mage gear, all the spell power gear and all the stuff that was there that you could attain while leveling. So mages were already fast already good, but here's the thing with mages like mages performed very, very well without gear. They're the best class without gear. And so if you're going for early molten cores, one, they level fast to they they they bomb they pump without any gear. And so now that we're five months, six months in, everyone has gear, all the gear you could ever want pretty much. It's it's it's everyone. It's warriors. Everybody's going to be warriors. That's a point. I mean, you have speedrun guilds that bring zero one or two, probably zero mages to their to their run. And mages aren't even in the picture anymore. Right. So it was like this weird flip because you had that stuff early. So on top of having a high base, on top of having a high base, they also had like extra gear that they wouldn't have. And then it just like totally flipped on its head. And there's a few things like there's there's a bug with fury warriors that is an accurate to patch one point 12 bug where if you queue up a heroic strike, it calculates all your swings with like I guess if it were a yellow swing for hits. So warriors end up only needing six percent hit. If they're a human, if you're like a human warrior using swords or maces, you only need six percent hit and you swing, queue up your heroic strike. And right before you swing again, because it's on the next swing, you don't heroic strike. So that way you're not doing the extra threat from heroic strike damage. You're not using the rage, but you're getting the benefit of going with your special hit rating. So yeah, so I mean, here's the thing about snowmobiling control station in classic well, like it's this is my opinion. It's it's kind of dead to talk about. They're not going to do it we're six months in. They're not going to do it. Classic was kind of in states as they're putting out content whenever they have to. But it's low investment for them at this point. They're not going to do it. It's not even worth like it's just not going to happen. I'll tell you there is a silver lining, though. OK, as we progress through classical, we get closer. We're playing with next ram is itemization. We're playing with one full of itemization. As we progress through classic, well, the black layer, then ZG, then AQ, the next, the effect that we feel of not having progressed by the station is going to be less and less every face because we're going to be working towards the phase that we should be at with our with our current itemization. So during one court felt really wonky. It felt like everything was too strong and it had to trivialize the content. Black and layer is going to be a little bit less AQ 40. And then ZG or in then in the next, we're hardly going to even notice the lack of progress by station because we're going to be where we where we should have been from day one with itemization levels. Right. So I agree with this. And this is my initial point to. But my concern and this is my problem is there's a compounding effect of because everything is so easy early on and because so much gear is in the game early on, that's not in the game later on. Or sorry, sorry, that's supposed to be added to the game later on. For example, like I use an onslaught girdle as an example earlier, that's added in a month before BWL and retail vanilla. It's added in a month before BWL on private servers. So now in a situation where your guild would be lucky to have like one onslaught girdle before BWL. Now you have a ton of them. Like I know crusade like our guild, we have like 20 onslaught girdles. Here's the thing. This goes for everything in molten core, though, because no one killed Ragnaros until a month before BWL and vanilla anyway. So any sort of BREs, any of this stuff, very few people even had this back in the day. You know what I mean? Right. But I think like I think having that stuff available now, like let's compare it to private servers, right? I think a lot of the back in the day stuff is like it's good. But comparing it to like our experience on like, let's say Elysium, Lightbringer, Northdale, whatever, NOS, any of that. Looking at it to where how fun that was going into it without that much gear. And then also here's another issue that we had with MC is because all that stuff was available now, there was like there was no during that six month period waiting for BWL. We didn't have the we didn't have the carrot on a stick that was added in. Halfway through MC or later on in MC to where it kind of like rejuvenated MC and you're excited to go to MC again. It's like, oh, all this all this new gear is available now. So now to that same point and I think this is probably what Blizzard thought is like, well, is MC going to be boring if none of that gear is available from the beginning? And it's like, well, it wouldn't have been that big of a deal if it took longer to clear it. So doing the one point twelve version of MC in what should be patch one point to ended up making everything like way easier and then everybody cleared it and all that. So at this point, I do really what you're saying. I like this. They're not going to do progress on the station. It's too late. Like the game launched and you can't do anything about it now. But what you can do is you can do other stuff in order to counteract the effects of everything that you have now. And I think that's buffing BWL, which again is probably something they're not going to do because it feels like but Blizzard hasn't really been very proactive with stuff. I feel like the communication before classic launch was really good. We had incredible communication. But then really, since classic launch, it's kind of been like, OK, like there's these problems, what's happening? And then it takes them like a month to fix it, whether it's this stuff with the AV the AV ranking meta, which was horrible, where people would just go cross server discords and queue up and we had all kinds of problems there. And they changed it to where they nerfed AV a little bit to the extent where people are queuing more war song now, which is great. But it took them so long to do it, right? Think about how many people quit the game or quit ranking or just like so lost interest during that time. I just got a pause. When you say buff BWL, how do you think? Like, what do you think they should do? Well, I think I mean. So so calling back on your point earlier, we're like what you're essentially saying is like BWL came out in patch one point six. So if BWL comes out in patch one point six and we're playing on patch one point twelve, there's inevitably less stuff from patch one point one. To patch one or sorry, patch one point six to one point twelve, then there is to patch one point one to one point twelve. So there's less opportunities for stuff to have changed just by the number of patches. So I don't know this specifics off the top of my head. I'd really have to go through and research and do this kind of stuff to see what all was changed in BWL from launch to the end of vanilla. MC, like there's, you know, we have some stuff documented, like how how rag worked and stuff like that. Certain fights just being easier than they were on on private, for example, where they tried to do as they tried to do. At least this was my understanding from from whenever I talked to one of the devs on on recent private servers, they tried to do the hardest version of every fight that happened in vanilla. So like I know, for example, in raid three, my guild on on private servers two years ago, like we we we wiped on Gar for like two or three weeks before we got past him. You know, Gar the Gar ads did a ton of damage. Now we were a we tanking Gar, which we didn't do until late BWL on private servers. We started a we tanking Gar early on, like within the first couple of months. So my concern is that if they don't do something and it doesn't mean like changing mechanics, but everybody is going to do so much damage if you played back in retail vanilla. And we even saw this a little bit on private servers. Vale was a big wall that people had to get through because it was such a big gear check. People had trouble getting past Vale because they just didn't do enough damage. It's a DPS race from start to bottom. I'm concerned that a fight like Vale or anything with that sort of idea is just going to be lost because everybody's going to have so much gear. I think I definitely agree with that. I don't know if you guys watch Star Wars the last Jedi or was not last day. What was the most recent rise of Skywalker? You're still the whole I didn't see it, but I have an idea. Go ahead. So here's how it feels like right now. I could totally be up. This is kind of like my my personal feeling with classic. I feel like the content is obviously very easy. And I think a lot of us in our heart of hearts knew it was going to be easy, even though we did on private servers. We had some inklings that, you know, some things on private servers were buffed, but we also had some hope that maybe private servers got it wrong. And maybe it would be a little bit more challenging or at least preserve some level of challenge. The fact that it's been so easy, it almost it almost kind of tarnishes the memory or the legacy or the like mythology behind those original raids, like original Ragnaros. I think if you ask anybody that's played classic and killed Ragnar, if they feel like Ragnar is this big epic fight, it's like, no. Right. Kind of the new version kind of hurt the old version. And when it comes to BWL coming out in a couple of days, it feels like, you know, we're at risk of that as well. And that's kind of what happened with Star Wars. This new Star Wars trilogy feels like it's kind of tarnished the original trilogy because it's been so bad. And I'm not saying classic is bad, but, you know, like that kind of same parallel. I got to ask is I genuinely don't know what is the new version of Ragnar. What is I as far before this conversation, I didn't think they change anything throughout vanilla. What is new version versus the first version? What did they do? So they really good. Yeah, good. Well, I mean, you can go on more if you want tips, but like they changed stuff with like how like melee damage, like physical damage versus fire damage and like how the knockback works. Like there's like there's like little stuff. But I just I just said rag as an example. That's that's just like one thing, right? But. They I remember at the end of vanilla, whenever I was playing original retail vanilla, wow, I was I was more of a casual player. I was a Guildhopper, whatever. I kind of I peaked in Burning Crusade. I wasn't that great in vanilla retail vanilla. So I remember pugging MC at the end of vanilla. And it felt to some extent kind of like it does now, right? Like we went in there. We'd be in there for a couple hours, maybe two, three hours. And it was not that hard. People did not have that much gear. It was a lot of casual players. It was a consistent pug, right? So like you you kind of had the same players every week. But that's how it was now at the beginning of vanilla. It wasn't like that at all. And I don't think it's as simple as saying, like, oh, well, everybody knows everything now. Everybody knew everything at the end of vanilla. Like people people had that back then, right? Like how many world first raiders are there is 40, right? So at that point, and it's not quite as readily available or as as much of it. But it's not like people didn't have the Internet. We're playing the game on the Internet. So at the point, I have I have a counter-anitone. I and maybe I'm just the worst pug leader of all time. I've plugged molten core a couple times on my alt two weeks ago. I led I led a pug run on my Holy Paladin two weeks ago. And we couldn't kill Major Domo. We stopped. We never killed Major Domo, right? Mm hmm. So it goes both ways, I think, right? Yes. And I know there's like, I mean, I did a pug and C once and we had to come back a second day to do rag. But how I feel is like at this point in classic to be able to do that in the first place. I think to be able to do that in the first place or get that far in the first place is like too much. You know what I mean? Because like I don't feel like I don't feel like they're they're a pug should be able to in a reasonable amount of time just grab a bunch of random people together out of trade chat. And now here's the thing. Now this this kind of idea of like getting a bunch of random people out of trade chat or whatever, this goes in favor of the point of like, well, everybody has the information now, right? People had all the information once it was all cleared, but there's that big period of time where not everything is cleared yet. That's one thing I didn't finish my last point. So there's like two parts to that statement. I think I feel like if I were to get a pug together, I shouldn't be able to do that. But. There are the intangible differences in the game now where we're better gamers now. We have the discord, we have this, we have that. Like there are some intangible things to it. Now, not being able to do this real quick, like I think that progressive atomization is probably the the biggest thing undermining the state of classical right now. And like I said, they're not going to change. It's too late. It just is what it is. But it is the biggest problem with class. Well, that being said, what's impacting gameplay more than even progressive atomization is just the way people play with the game. The knowledge people are min-maxing, they're optimizing their raid comps, they're optimizing their specs, they're coming in. Frickin' metaslaves, man. They're metaslaves. That's that's that's the that's the biggest thing that has changed the vanilla slash classic gameplay experience. Yeah, I think so. I think and this is something that I think it's kind of been the biggest surprise to me. I don't know if it's just because it's more public now and it was such a big deal on launch, but maybe people just thought they had like more to gain, I guess, more popularity or whatever by just going like super min-maxing and stuff like that. And that's not that's not something I like. I like to play the game. I like to play it for like playing my rep palette and like trying to min-max stuff like that. But I think seeing how hard everybody went all the time or like people still go, I don't think there's like a big scene for people who are and we talked about this before Stay Safe. This is a big scene for people who are like super min-maxing now. Like now it's like people care a lot less about it. Do you feel like? Sorry, go ahead. Do you feel like we contributed to that in some way? Like, do you feel like our like videos and just like us talking about classic every day and going over like leveling routes and guides and talking about all that stuff? Well, I think I think that's calling us out, dude. Who feels like we did? Well, I think it depends. I think it depends on type of content you do. Like, I've always been pretty like, I know from from the point whenever I was talking about like my guild and stuff and like what kind of guild I wanted to run, like my guild ended up being much better of a guild than I expected it to be. Like I was going to be more more of a casual, like progression style, a rating guild, not quite casual, but just more progression style. Like I didn't expect to kill BWL in week three or whatever we did, right? I thought I didn't expect to go in on week. I think it was week two. I expected to go in on week three. And if we're lucky, then maybe we'll clear it the first week, but I didn't expect that at all. As I said, BWL, I'm an MC. But I mean, I feel the same way now. I wouldn't have expected to be able to clear BWL in week one, but we'll see what happens. Like my guild is just, it has a lot better players than what I expected. And maybe it was just like the environment of content creation and stuff like that. And like you said, tips, like the guides and stuff like this. So I think it just depends. I don't think, okay. So where's the baddies? No, no, here's the deal. There's nothing wrong with making content that you are personally interested in. So for me, if I'm making a leveling guide or a raid guide, how to optimize warlock specs, whatever. And then I, this, like, I don't want to like fucking weird flex or anything, but it's like, okay, we did a, we did a World of Six Ragnaros. We leveled up fast. It was day nine. We did, we got whatever, whatever, whatever. It's like, okay. What I've realized in hindsight after doing that, after engaging in that sort of classic WoW gameplay, what I've realized at this point in classic WoW, no one cares. No one cares about any of that. And maybe I'm just, maybe my outlook has changed and I'm projecting. I feel like no one gives a rat's ass who the top 10 molten core speedruns are. No one cares who got whatever, an xc kill. No one's, I also kind of feel like no one's gonna care who got world first nefarion. I feel like, and this is something that I did in YouTube videos. And also it was my gameplay at the start of classic was trying to find some competitive outlet in classic WoW. And it's just not the game for it. Classic WoW is just not a game that fosters that. And so at this point, yeah, I'm still prepping and practicing for BWL. I'm leading my guild. I'm still leading a guild. We're gonna be competitive, right? We're still doing that. But also at the same point, at the same time, it's like, I kind of don't care. It just, it's just a personal thing. What makes competitive classic WoW gameplay feel cool is having other people think you're cool for doing it. And the reality is, no one cares. No one cares. Exactly. And maybe it's not no one, right? It's speaking a little bit of hyperbole or whatever, but it's certainly not, I feel like a lot of the people who cared back in, let's say, again, let's use private servers as an example, as opposed to back in the day, because I do think private server is a more relevant discussion just because it's more recent and deals with some of that stuff. It's like everybody who cared played on one server, right? So they cared even more because they were all like directly competing against one another. Now you have like those same people that cared so much and they're spread out across all the classic servers. So it just kind of changes, right? So there's not as many people and the environment that fosters people caring for it isn't there as much because there might be like one top gilder, like just a few top guilds on a server as opposed to all of them being in one place. So no one is obviously hyperbole. There is a community of people that are still speedrunning every week, but if you look at the total classic community, these are people engaging with YouTube videos and streams and playing the game. What do you think? How many people here can name the top 10 molten core speedrun groups? Very few, if any. Very few? Yeah, no one's really interested or engaged in that. And I think a big reason as to why people aren't interested in the competitive side is because things have been so easy. Like people, you know, MMO RPGs in general, like you said, stay safe. I feel like a lot of the reasons people play MMOs is to like compete with like, you know, a server, compete with like a large group of people and like weigh themselves against a large group of people. When that group of people stops valuing something, stops valuing like the achievement of something, then there's no reason to do it anymore. Like why even play an MMO anymore? And I feel like that's what it is. Because raids have been so easy, such a face roll, because even leveling to a certain extent became a face roll over time with like the dungeon meta, people don't care as much because it's like, oh, you got World First Ragnaros or Server First Black and Leer. Congratulations on your crowning achievement. You know, you happen to be on a server where nobody killed you when you had world buffs and you happen to be able to get through it really fast because you PTR'd a little bit for like, you know, a couple of days. Like, same with like the ranking system right now. It's like, oh, you got rank 14. Congratulations. You happen to be in a circumstance where you could play 20 hours a day and had no other obligations in your life. I don't know where you could do that. There's another level to that. There were people on Feralina that the brackets were very competitive on Feralina. People transferred off Feralina to dead servers to go get a free ride to rank 14. It's like, okay, that's super competitive. And then another thing undermining any sort of like PvE classic competitiveness competition, you can PTR. I know because I'm doing it. My guild's doing it. Every guild that's trying to perform Black and Leer is doing it. It's gonna come down to which guild is gonna PTR the most? There you go. Like, which guild is gonna spend six hours a day PTRing Black and Leer every day for Black and Leer? It's like, that's a huge factor. I'm telling you, if you are not PTRing Black and Leer on a private server, you're not gonna have a decent kill speed going into Black and Leer in an intro. Well, it's just like an experience thing, right? Like you just, you get reps, you see the boss and whatnot. Now here's the thing, I wouldn't wanna discredit people getting rank 14 and whatnot. Like people talk about how the ranking system, and now everybody is known for years and years and years the vanilla honor system is not good. But I wouldn't wanna discredit the time and effort it takes. It takes a lot of time. Like I said. It depends on the server. Like the Grobulous Alliance right now, they're playing six hours a day for Bracket One. Six hours a day. Then the same guy has to play 20 hours on Feralina. It's kind of like Titan Forge. It's the same reason why people hate Titan Forging because some people will do minimum amount of effort and get the maximum reward. Then other people have to put all this effort in and they don't get a comparable reward. And it's like a misallocation of like achievement. You know what I'm saying? Well, I mean, yeah, there's always going to be the, there's gonna be competition on your server, right? It's gonna depend on, not just your server, but your faction on your server too. So managing brackets and stuff like this is important. But something that happened in classic that did change how this works normally is AV was such good honor farm and War Song was bad and you had Cross Realm Bee Gees which ended up being something that, we talked about this and we went back and forth on this before launch. And it was kind of like, is it bad? Is it good? And basically we said it was gonna be like an unfortunate reality situation. Like there's going to be Cross Realm Battlegrounds. But what would happen is whenever we had, at least on the Alliance side, we would have Cross Realm discords of people getting in voice, everybody cue at the same time. And pretty much anybody, like if you got into one of these discords, like you didn't have to be in a set pre-made, there was very little, well, what's the word I'm looking for? It's like on a personal level, you didn't have that sort of, I don't know what's the word I'm looking for. It's almost like you have a responsibility to follow the brackets with other people and to do things the right way. Cause WoW's a very social game. Like that's one of the big things. Yeah, accountability, thank you. Thank you, Houston Superst. Yeah, it's like you have the accountability of following the brackets. Well, check this out. There's something going on for the last couple of weeks you might not even heard about. There are people that are managing very high performance Alliance ranking discord pre-mades, the discords for all truck drivers. They're selling invites. It's $25 to join one of these discords. Like, okay, so if you're not gonna buy into this, you're not gonna rank. There you go, super competitive. Yeah, yeah, see like it's just like, it's dumb, right? Literal pay to win. So, yeah, I didn't even know, I hadn't heard of that yet. But man, that is funny. So like War Song, War Song has kind of shifted and become the meta. AV gave too much honor in War Song. I think War Song, it seems to have like panned out pretty good. I thought it might've even been a problem to where War Song might not even give enough honor. But it seems like it's been okay so far since they changed it. But, yeah, I'm still on the $25 to get into the discord. Like that's so funny to me. Well, I definitely agree with you that I think the current state right now is better in terms of War Song being the meta. I think that that awards players that have good pre-mades. If you're a good player right now, you're putting time to learning the game and executing. You are being rewarded in terms of PVP because if you do better and you get more War Song Gulch victories, you're getting more honor than the next goner server, which is a good thing. What kind of bothers me or thing that makes me sad is like, why did it take so long? And it goes back to what you said earlier as fan with like the whole lack of communication it feels like we've had with Blizzard since classic launch. Like before launch, it was incredible. We were getting updates all the time, super collaborative. You could just tell by the way they were writing their blue posts that they would read the reddits. They would read their forums. They would know exactly how to answer and they gave us what we would want most of the time. It feels like ever since launch, like Blizzard has just disappeared. Like, I mean, I'm just gonna do a quick comparison here. I know every game is different. Every community is different. But if you look at like OSRS, for example, they do like weekly live stream developer Q&As or like mod Q&As. They're all over the reddits. They're all over their forums, constantly answering back and forth because OSRS like classic was meant to be a love letter to the community. They brought back the old version of the game to appease the community. Same thing with classic. And like earlier today, before this podcast, I was going back and reading these interviews with Geal and Brack. Geal and Brack, when he talked about classic in 2017, he was like, this is gonna be a love letter to the community. We're gonna be like super tight with the community. They're gonna tell us, you know, how to guide the directional compass of classic and all that stuff. That was awesome. And it did happen before launch, but like, dude, the game is live now. We're paying $15 a month, you know? So, I'm gonna go Blizzard Shield Defense for us. They could do a lot better, but they're, I'm just trying to be impartial and give credit or credit to them. They did respond to the Altrecht Valley Complaints. They released the Honor System earlier than Battlegrounds. They released Dire Maul early. There are things they have done, but it's always been like a little bit late. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's the biggest thing. It's like, they have done some things. I do feel like they, it feels like they wanted to put out classic and be like, okay, let's just throw that out there and then let's, what can we learn from this? Okay, cool. Let's work on Shadowlands. Oh, people like some of the stuff in classic. Well, let's go back on some of the pruning that we did. Like if you played, and I'm not gonna talk about retail too much, but if you played the Shadowlands demo at BlizzCon, it felt like a BFA patch. They talked about all this stuff like, oh, we're gonna add these abilities back in and this and that. It literally felt like a BFA patch and like nothing else had been done. Like it just felt like I was in a different zone but everything else was the exact same. No details, no do nothing. So I don't know why, it just feels like they put the game out and they just wanted to leave it there. They wanted to learn some things from it but they wanted to focus on everything else. Now, I say I don't know why. I think the reason why is even if, let's say classic has more people playing than retail, we don't know exactly. We do know based on the earnings calls that their subscription number shot through the roof whenever classic came out. And I think they said that it's still over double what it was since before classic launch, which would lead people to believe that there's probably more people playing classic than retail. Is that true? That's what I heard. Yeah, yeah. As of last quarter, yes. As of last quarter. So even out of the case, let's assume that's the case, they probably still make more money from retail because of this, because of micro transactions. The goddamn rap mounts, dude, what's a rap? They probably make more from retail still because people are doing name changes and race changes and this and that and all kinds of stuff, right? So I don't know, maybe they just wanna focus on retail. And I'm not saying they shouldn't focus on retail. And I think anybody who's a fan of wow, whether it's classic, whether it's retail, whether it's whatever, you want wow to be good. Whether it's this version or that version, you should want wow to be good, right? Like people, a lot of the people who wanna play classic, there's a lot of people who just wanna play the old game again. There's people who like the design of the game better, all that. There's a lot of people who, they want to like retail wow, they just don't. It's not really the game for them anymore, you know? I don't know a lot of people who are playing classic at this point who want retail wow to be bad, for lack of a better word. So I think you should always want wow to be good and hopefully retail is gonna be good and all that. But I also hope that we're gonna get classic on the right track and that maybe we'll get a little bit of TBC here and maybe a year or so, year, year and a half or however long it's gonna be. So then let's talk about this. Like obviously there are issues that we've had in classic wow so far. The biggest one for me is probably lack of progressive finalization. I feel like we're all on the same page with that. What should they do going forward? The first thing that comes to mind for me is they should release a Rathi Basin about a month or so, probably after BWL in a month before Zolgrub. That's like, it should be staggered, sort of like Dire Maul was staggered outside of its proposed phase. Other than that, what do you guys wanna see? Tips you wanna go? Yeah, sure. For me, it's not even really about the content. I think in terms of content implementation, the most difficult part of that is behind us now. The hardest thing was going to be the launch and how they handled the honor system. From here on out, it's pretty straightforward. You've got, you know, BWL coming out, six weeks, ZG, you know, two months, AQs so on and so forth, that's kind of easy. It doesn't impact the game that much. If there's anything that I wanna see, it's I wanna see Blizzard take one of these cameras and just turn it on once a week. I wanna see Omar Gonzalez's big, beautiful face sitting next to him, Josh Allen. He's got the fro down to his shoulders and they're just chilling on those little comfortable Blizzard chairs like, what's up, classic community? We're back for another developer Q&A and they just talk to us and they hang out. It doesn't have to be formal, no pressure, anything like that. I just wanna feel like Blizzard is with us. They're playing the game as well. We're all in this together. You know, maybe they talk about events. Maybe they wanna host their own events, all that stuff. Just, I wanna feel like they're involved. To me, that would be, that would mean the world. In other words, you're saying that the comms have been too clear. You'd like them to unclear the comms. Frickin' absolutely, okay? Absolutely, 100%. Where's it clear? They took it too early, man. I think, no, I think, yeah, I think doing like developer Q&As and stuff would be good. I'd love to hear from Omar and Brian and whoever else. We don't know a lot of the people on the classic team, but you have designers, right? Any sort of, when you have a game, you have different parts of the team. You have engineers, you have designers, you have this and that, there's people that should be working on this game, we wanna hear from those people and be like, okay, we're kinda seeing this. Now, sometimes people go and they complain about stuff and you could be wrong. People are like, oh, this actually doesn't turn out that way, but that's what the designer's job is, is to go take a look at it and be like, okay, let's try this out and see how this looks, right? Like, for example, let's use the example of me saying, maybe you need to buff BWL by adding a little bit more health, a little bit more armor to the bosses, maybe they do a little bit more damage or something like that. Well, what the designer would do is they would go and they would just turn the knobs, twist all the knobs, increase this a little bit and see how it plays out with a great testing team or whatever. So yeah, it'd be cool to hear from these people and be like, yeah, we tried this and we thought that this wasn't a good idea or whatever. Maybe they don't have to be so candid with it, but it's one of those things where having some form of communication like we had prior to classic launch would be really good. Now, back to what Stacy was saying, like we talked about, you said AB next month after BWL, like in March, and then probably ZG in April. I think that sounds great. Probably looking at ZG like, let's say in the next six weeks or so, that would be what, end of April? Or beginning of April, that'd be beginning of April and then AB sometime like middle of March, I think would be good. The dragons, Emerald Dragons will probably come out not too long after ZG. And then I would like AQ in the summer. Like if we have AQ 40 in the summer, AQ 40, AQ 20 and then that way you have a whole summer to do stuff. And whenever you talk about the release of AQ 40, so there's two big, I talked about like the chain reaction like the of BWL comes out and then there's just a bunch of content classic now like AB comes out, ZG comes out, AQ 20, AQ 40 comes out, Emerald Dragons are here now. So now there's four more world bosses added into the game. The game feels much more alive. Once BWL comes out, it starts the chain reaction. So this is an interesting point. I think, and this is gonna sound weird because I know I said the most fun part of classic was for me the first like two weeks or so. I think the best half, the best part of classic is the second half. Like phase four onwards is gonna be so fun. Right now we're in like the, it's like, okay, let me ask the question. If you've been not really enjoying classic, you've been sort of in stasis. It's whatever for you so far you tried it. You kind of burned out. Is Blackwing Lair gonna reinvigorate the game for you? Probably not. It's another raid. It's not my favorite raid. Some people like it. Some people don't. But Zogorub, Ratty Basin, and AQ20, AQ40, Green Dragons, Naxra, that's hype. That's crazy cool. Okay. And that's more casual friendly content. So like ZG was added in as like a catch-up mechanic for people who like to play more casually. There's two resets a week. You do a weekend ZG. It's fun, whatever. AQ20 comes out. That's again, it's more casual friendly content. Stuff that maybe new players can do in classic to be able to fill in to 40 man raids because they have some gear that's pretty good. Now, a lot of people say like, I get this almost every day on stream. Hey, is it too late for me to start playing classic? Absolutely not. Because one happens throughout the course of Vanilla WoW is stuff is added in the game that allows you to catch up one. And two, if you get a chance to get into a raid group, if you get a chance to get into a raid group with other people who've been raiding and they've done all the stuff, they've gotten a lot of the stuff. Like my guild, the majority of my guild is stacked. So when we have a new player come in, it's usually like, they almost get funneled loot because they end up getting geared faster than pretty much anybody else, any other individual in the guild got except for maybe the main tank and the raids. So. So you're saying if I roll the lion cess fan, I'll get Thunder Fury. I'll get Hand of Rag, Boner of Reset. Look, you can fill out an application we can interview. Yeah. All right, let me say this. I know it feels like classic is kind of in a bit of a lull right now. There's not a lot going on right now. Obviously, Blackling Layer is coming out a couple days, but it's been kind of in a chill period. What was I going to say? I totally just lost my train of thought. We were talking about- That's fine. What was I going to say? We were talking about players getting geared up really quickly whenever they were new, coming back into the game, or coming into the game new. But yeah, kind of just like continue on with that while you remember what you're saying. Do you remember? No? Okay. No, I don't. I don't at all. I don't at all. Dude, we've been playing too many games, dude. We've been playing too much games. No, so kind of continue on with that. I feel like this is something that people are scared of. Like they're not going to get any gear or they don't have any gear and they can't compete. It's like, look, you're not going to do as much damage as somebody with more gear or you're going to have some trouble there, sure. But as long as you can get into one of these groups, then it's going to allow you, you're going to have plenty of opportunity to get a bunch of stuff and start playing the game and get geared out and all that stuff. I remembered. So yeah, go ahead. Listen. Is BWL Zogorub, like there are people that obviously have quit that haven't kept playing. Like I said, it feels like classical has kind of been in the down period, but classical was actually killing it. We found out from the report the tips is talking about. It's over doubled. Yeah, as far as the amount of people playing it. Like there might not be as many people played on launch. Yeah. But there's still a ton of people playing. Right. It's a grower, not a shower. It's a grower, not a shower. Now, do you think that people are going to be willing? If they've burned out, if they've stopped playing, are people going to be willing to give classical a second chance and get into it when there's more stuff to do? Because right now, there's not been a lot to do. So tips, you want to go ahead? Do you breathe? I heard you breathe and I thought you were going to talk. The grower shower thing got me on heavy, but no, what I was going to say was, I actually, I do think to answer your question, stay safe. I do think people will come back. And you know, one of the beautiful things about vanilla design is unlike kind of the more modern iterations of WoW, every patch doesn't take away content. Like I've heard Asman say this a couple of times in retail WoW today, you play the patch, not the expansion. And that's because with every single patch, essentially the previous playbook gets thrown out and you have a new playbook, a new raid, a new system of Titan forging or essence, corruption or whatever it is, and that's the new thing. And everything else before that is pretty much just irrelevant. With classic, the game builds upon itself. You're going to still be running molten core down the line. You're still going to be running BWL down the line. ZG, I don't care how progressed you are, you think ZG is a 20-man raid, you're still going to run ZG for the enchants. You're going to run it for the mount, potentially the edge of madness trinkets or the blood vine if you're a caster. There's so many different things that even the later raids add and the early raids still retain their relevance down the line. And it's just a big part of the design philosophy of classic. So if anything, the game is just getting bigger. It's expanding over time. We're in the most content light phase of the game right now but it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So there's two points I want to talk about. One to what you said tips and then one to what you said stay safe. You talked about how ZG specifically ZG and we'll talk about this more on a future classic cast which we will continue. This isn't the one off thing. We're going to come back with classic cast at a semi-regular interval, okay? But with ZG, again, it's a 20-man raid and why I said it's so casual friendly is because you have higher gear, people who have been playing more hardcore players who they still want the ZG enchants running ZG to get those enchants but they might not need a lot of the gear. So a lot of the gear that drops in ZG which might not be quite as good as some of the raid gear or maybe ranking gear or whatever else they have can then go to the players who are maybe a little bit lower tier of gear and they can get that stuff and kind of get carried a little bit. So that to your point tips, like that's a huge, like hugely, it's a good thing. It's massive. It's really, really good for the game. And yeah, that's why I like ZG so much. Now to what you said, stay safe. You were talking about, you were talking about how the game are people are going to be willing to come back. So I'm going to call on our buddy Nixxiom, right? Our buddy Nixxiom said this and he made a video about this saying there's going to be the big hype for classic. It's going to drop but he thinks it's going to slowly start to raise over time and I completely agree with him. I do think it's going to slowly start to raise over time because what happens is, and wow in general, wow is a very seasonal game. So whether it's retail, whether it's classic, whatever, new content comes out, people did the new content and they dip off and they come back for whatever the next tier of content comes out. Classic is going to be like this too a little bit but there's a little bit more of a, I think consistent grind to classic where you want to keep running it every week and getting your stuff or doing the raids to get your gear and all this stuff a little bit more so than retail. Like I don't know because I don't mythic raid in retail. But- Neither does anybody else. Well, yeah, well some people do. Except like Lemon and yeah. Except those guys. But no, like I think with the mythic raiding and stuff there's people go and they do it and they push for World First and it's cool, it's a cool event, all that stuff. But with classic, like I feel like you have to keep running it to get your stuff because there's lutes distributed across so many people it's kind of harder to get stuff as far as the time commandment goes. So you have this and then it's gonna go back up. MC and BWL, you have two raids a week. And then AQ40, now you have three raids a week but also by the time AQ40 comes out you have ZG and AQ20 to do if you want. So now you go, not only three raids for MC, BWL and AQ40, you now have ZG and AQ20 as well. So now there's five raids for you to do. And then you have this big, I think you're gonna have a, the next real content drought that you're going to have in classic is going to be between AQ40 and Nax but what you gotta remember with AQ40 launch is AQ40 launches but it doesn't really launch because you have to do the war effort. So who knows how long that's gonna be. That could be immediately for some servers like for a server where you have guilds that wanna go for world first or whatever if they care about that but for other servers they could try and hold it. They could try and hold AQ40 and which is what we experienced like all the top guilds got together and they said, no we're gonna wait and we're gonna get scareblorn for a bunch of people and then we're gonna do AQ40 after like a month. So yeah, we don't know exactly how it's gonna pan out but there's going to be a period of time after AQ40 the patch actually launches to where AQ40 actually comes out and then you have content drought until Nax, Nax comes out and then there'll be another, it's gonna dip off a little bit at that point until BC or Classic Plus which, I think we're probably gonna go with TPC. Let me ask you this, do you think it's possible that the only people that have stopped playing Classic are Zoomer hype gamers that wear Supreme, they're vaping, they're flossing in Fortnite, they're walking around in Yeezy's. The only people that left, is it possible that they're only hype gamers? Is that, and then the actual, the actual, yeah, the hype kids left? I think a lot of hype beast kids left, yeah. Yeah, and I think there was a lot of them. Yeah, I think so too. I mean, I think there was probably like original vanilla players and non-hype beast kids that were probably disappointed and have quit as well. But I do think, yeah, like you probably had, the biggest majority of the people who left are probably hype beast kids, right? Like, you know, you know. Definitely. I got a question about the AQ thing. Can we all like everybody here, everybody watching right now, can we all just agree and just like make a secret promise that we're not gonna stockpile on all of the materials required for the war effort and just turn it in on day one? Because like, remember when we were talking about the whole like, you know, we don't want to ruin the past experience and the legacy of like classic, I feel like, why no, why no? Okay, you know how much it would suck if you like log in later that night after the patch drops and the event's already over and all the materials have been turned in and then you got to wait those five days or whatever before, or you got to wait six days for Scarab Lord or whatever, and that's it. So like, you can't even be a part of that anymore. Good, how is that good? Dude, I wonder how that's gonna go without layering. Like layering had its own set of problems, but I do think it was the best option of the bad options that you have overall. Like layering had its own issues. Are we gonna have log in for AQ, do you think? Yes, absolutely. I feel like if there's one event that's left in classic that's going to bring everybody back, regardless, it's gonna be the AQ gates. Everyone's gonna want to experience that. It's so fun. It's so epic and it's got that legendary aura. Like, oh, the big event, the Alliance at Horde had to work together. The Scarab Lord mount, it just has so much hype behind it. I think everyone's gonna come back for it. Yeah, I think it's gonna be big. Oh, there's Nixium too. Nixium, what's up, dude? So the, I kind of want to expand on this. Layering is like dead and gone for a while now, but I just kinda want to expand on what I said just to like talk about it fully. We talked about dynamic respawns and other options that they could have done whenever layering was kind of the final decision on what they decided to do. While you have layering that kind of matches the problem that dynamic respawns fix of having the same amount of mobs for the amount of people on the server or a relative number of time when people are on the server, but one thing that dynamic respawns didn't do is kind of address like the, there's like an N squared like population issue, right? Where you end up having more and more people and then you're gonna have a big problem with server load with dynamic respawns. So that's why I think that unfortunately, like while layering had its problems, it probably was the best of the bad options. Not a good option, but I think all the options were bad, right? So... I almost forgot it happened. Yeah, I mean, it's been so long. I just kind of wanted to, it's been so long since we've done a class guest, right? So I just kind of wanted to give my general opinion on that, just to... Layering, and we all knew this was gonna, it's easy to forget. Layering did a lot of damage. Layering did a ton of damage. I know people that have 700, 800 black lotus, they layer hops all day. Then they have, there are people that seriously, because of layering, they have enough gold the last term through classic vanilla. The gold's gonna last them through classic TBC. It'll last them through class graph. Like these people never have this farm gold ever again. They're done. Yeah, well dude, the amount of inflation too that we've seen on the servers, like I'm saying like, it's funny, it feels like there should be more stuff, right? But arcane crystals and black lotus are way more expensive than I've ever seen before. Flaster super, because of that, like flaster super expensive, like any sort of craft is really expensive, like fees are really high. It's kind of wild, because even though like, you feel like if you were able to abuse layering to where abuse is like, people play the game, right? Like they take advantage of it, whatever. So they take advantage of layering the best they can to get the most items they could. There's going to be more stuff in the economy and stuff's gonna be cheaper, right? Supply and demand. But for some reason, there's allegedly more stuff in there, but the costs are also higher. So it's kind of weird. And I think it's probably just because, yeah, somebody said it, they're holding Matt's hostage. Yeah, like it's almost like they're taking everything and stockpiling it. And then they're just kind of trickling it in. I was gonna say, it's an interesting discussion. Like I've seen recently on forums and on YouTube comments, people suggesting as of late, I think it's because they're prepping for BWL saying the Blizzard should increase black load of spawns because there's obviously way more people on the server right now than there were in vanilla. And you have people that stockpiled hundreds of loads during the layering phase. And so Blizzard, please, I don't necessarily feel this way, but the Blizzard should increase black load of spawn to accommodate current player load and sort of help mitigate the effective layering and total economic control that people have as a result of layering. Yeah, I think that probably would not be, I haven't thought about it too much, but I have thought about it a little bit. I think it probably wouldn't be a bad idea. And they've touched, they've had touch like spawn rates and stuff like that before because we saw that, how they did that with devil sword leather, right? They did do that with the devil sword spawns in early. Yeah, I don't know if you guys know this. Like in Blizzard just made a change and they never announced it. It was actually very substantial change. This actually is the reason why a devil sword mafia is pretty much got destroyed very early on. So you had, what was it? Devil swords that were on, I think it was 15 minutes, spawn timers or something. Blizzard just overnight one day, it was a fix, it wasn't a fix, it was just unannounced change. They made the spawn timers like six minutes or something. Just one day we logged in, boom, spawn timers for devil swords six minutes. It was like 15 minutes before that. So they, and they did it just to, just to mess with the mafia and then economic control. So it's not like Blizzard hasn't done this before and they never even announced it. They never talked about it. They just did it. Yeah. And I think like shadow government, man. Well, I think something like that, if... Those dinos, man. The male dinos, I've been seeing them commune together on savory ways. Yeah, it's been bad, it's been bad. But I think the, I think if they were to do something about like low to spawns, veins, archangels, that kind of stuff to make up for people who took advantage of layering early on and then now having very low respawn rates. Cause I guess we can delve into this a little bit more, right? Talking about like supply and demand. There was really high supply early on and then everybody stockpiled it and now they're waiting. And now there's really low supply out in the world, but the demand is really high because now people are getting ready for BWL and whatnot. So yeah, to kind of help counteract that and to help basically the monopoly that's forming with people who took advantage of layering early on. I think, I don't know. I think it could be something that's good, but I haven't really, I haven't really thought about it too much just a little bit. So. I do like the idea that flasks are like super ultra rare right now because it's kind of an indirect buff to this nerfed content. In the sense that I don't think you can reasonably expect like a semi hardcore guild or like a progression guild. It's very difficult to reasonably expect everyone in that kind of guild to have a flask for example, just cause it's so rare, it's so expensive. So in some sense, I think, okay, that's pretty cool. It makes the game indirectly a little bit more difficult, but I do get the concerns for sure. Well, I grew what you're saying, but I think it also kind of takes away from having different types of gameplay available, right? I think if people want to speed run and min max and push everything, just push it to the limit, I think you should be able to do that. I don't think you shouldn't be able to do that, but I just think the more ways that you have for people to play your game, for different types of players to play your game, the better, right? Which is why a lot of people wanted classic. They felt like it was to some extent casual friendly because people could go and they could do lower tiers of content like for example, ZG, we've talked about all this stuff, so I won't go into it. But yeah, I just think it's good to have different types of players be able to play the game. Another world objective would be nice, yeah, I agree. Let's talk about BWL a little bit before we run out of time. I want to go in on BWL. BWL is coming out on Wednesday. We started a little bit and then we backed off and look, when it's the first episode you've done in six months, like we're going to be a little bit all over the place, kind of recapping things that have happened over the last few months and also airing our grievances. So I kind of expected this to happen to some extent. But looking forward, BWL. Stay safe, you already said that you're not the biggest fan of BWL, that's just for you in general. Just in general, you're not the biggest fan. Tips for you, what are you most excited about as far as BWL goes? I just want to go on the record. BWL is my favorite raid in Classic. I've never done Nax, so I can't speak to that, but it's personally my favorite. I think there's a lot of really cool stuff there. I'm personally raid leading the Clearcoms pug this Wednesday. Full pug, 100%. We're going to go into BWL. We're going to destroy it. Razor gore, he's going to drop the untamed blade. Vale, first attempt, easy clap. We're going to one shot nefarion. It's going to be the greatest thing you've ever seen. Yeah, I've been plugging the past like two months in Classic and I've absolutely loved it. And yeah, I'm very, very excited for BWL. It should be fun. One of the most fun raids that I've had yet is outside of the beginning Classic Launch, was whenever we pugged that one week. It was holiday week, so we're like, okay, well, we have a partial group. I'll just take them and then we'll fill it in with half pug or whatever. And it is fun just because it's a little more difficult and just the randomness is just kind of funny. So yeah, we'll all be doing BWL. We'll all be doing BWL on Wednesday, so it'll be fun to see how that goes. Stay safe. Like your guild, you guys want to try and push for server first, right? Yeah, I'll tell you unfairly. You know, the server first competition, it's very competitive. We had a guild transfer over. There's two guilds on Horde that are going for it. There's two guilds, three guilds on Alliance. There's five or six guilds that are all practicing. They're all coming full flasks. They're all doing full world buffs. They're all PTRing. It's a real deal. It's a real deal. Yeah, for me and my guild, we want to have fun. We want to go in there. We want to have a good time, a little bit more. We just, that's just kind of how I like to play the game is I like to play the game where it's more, it doesn't have to be Superman Maxi for it to be fun for me. So yeah, it's going to be a good time for sure. I like, what I like about... I'll tell you this, I want to add real quick. The most, I think my best raid stream ever has been a pug. I think pug stream content is 50,000 times more entertaining and more fun than hearing a bunch of nerds complain about their parses during a raid and stress out over losing world buffs. Like it's just not a fun environment. It's not a fun stream. Exactly. Pugging is way more fun to stream. If you watch a guild run, you know the outcome. You already know the end of the movie. You know what's going to happen. They're going to clear it, loot, whatever. When you watch a pug, you never know what's going to happen. Yeah. The most exciting pug I ever watched, this was last year, I think sometime, a guild called dogs in black wing layer, as fate would have it. They spend, I want to say three or four hours wiping on razor gore. And it was probably the most entertaining stream content I've ever seen. Now, since then dogs has become a great guild. They're on Feralina. I think they're the number one or number two speed clear guild on Horde side for Feralina. But yeah, stuff like that, like after the first couple of weeks of classic competitive stuff, like I kind of got over that. That kind of stuff is fun to me now, so I'm excited for it. Yeah, I don't know, cause I haven't been falling with the logs and stuff, but I'll say with my guild, same thing. Like on raid three on private, it was, I think what made those streams, part of what made those streams so good is like we had like people become, like let's say you have a guild. There's different parts to this, right? Like let's say you have like a guild raid. And this isn't just, I don't want to go too much on like stream type stuff right now, but I think like having like those consistent members of the raid that people are used to hearing, like like deputy, like everybody, like the deputy memes were a thing. Like people were talking about Morocco and all these guys, which was actually both still in my guild now. But people knew these guys, like we had Black Panties, our tank. Like people would say, like Black Panties would tell me, we got messages from people all the time. He's like, dude, people whisper to me and be like, oh dude, I love you on S-Fan stream and it's cool watching you guys and this and that. So having that consistency there is kind of cool too. But I think what made the raid three stream so good was the guild wasn't particularly good. Like I know we had a situation where we were very similar. Like we wiped on Razorgore. We went in with like 20 people. Like it was like 29 people I think was our number because it was like a holiday week or so. I don't remember. For some reason, we had a bunch of people dodge week one of BWL. So we tried to go into BWL with like 29 people and we couldn't get pugs because everybody wanted to run with their own guild. So we tried to do Razorgore and it was just a complete mess. So it was very similar to us too. Having a guild that like wasn't super great, I think it ended up making it like a lot funnier and a lot better for stream. But kind of moving on from that, I think that BWL is, I just like the art. I like the vibe. I like the dragons. I like the whole draconic. Like everything looks cool to me. Like I like that a lot, you know? I like that a whole lot. So yeah. It's cool. It's a big change of pace. Like the jump from Molten Gore to BWL, I know we've been talking about how simple the raids have been and stuff like that. But if you've never played vanilla before, never played classic before, the jump from Molten Core to BWL is pretty significant relatively speaking. Like even the first boss, Razorgore, it's like a three, three and a half minute encounter. That's already the length of Ragnaros for most guilds. If not, you know, it's right in that ballpark and things only get harder. I think a lot of guilds are not gonna clear BWL week one in terms of like just the general population who's never really rated vanilla before because Veil of straws despawns after one hour from first pull. So if you don't kill Veil within an hour, you're done for BWL for that week. And there's gonna be a lot of people that are gonna struggle on Veil, I think. Now, obviously you're gonna have the apes and the progress is in those top end guilds just coming and clear it in 20 minutes, not 20, but clear it really fast and stay by. But I think the overall general population of classic, the average guild in classic, I think it'd be in for a little bit of a rude awakening. I gotta ask, cause I don't know, is that how Veil operated in 112? Because we had speculated the same about Ragnaros, how he would despawn after two hours in 112. And I've never heard of a Ragnaros despawn. No, he does. He does. And then you can go come at your dome again. That's right. Okay. Okay, yeah. He does. No, I think there's a respawn timer on Domo, like a long respawn timer on Domo. Yeah, there is. Six or eight hours, yeah, something like that. There is. Okay, Veil, one hour, okay. It's a long one. I don't know exactly what timer is on Domo, but I know it's long. But yeah, no, I do like, I like how BWL progresses too. Like just the whole raid just feels good to me. Like I know, like again, tips, like I know you said you're not a big, or not tips. Stacey, I know you said you're not a big fan, but just like the layout, you go in, you have a boss right away, and then you have another boss, and then you have a little bit of trash. I like the suppression room. The suppression room is fun. I know for a lot of people it's the depression room, but I like suppression room a lot. I just, it's, cause it's the coordination is fun to me. Like the people communicate, okay, I'm pulling, okay. Wait, everybody wait in this cubby. Do this, go get that trap, this and that. So. Back in the private server days, I used to, when you get to suppression room, I'd put a mage on follow. I'd go AFK, take the dog for a walk, come back in. All right, brood lord time. AFK the entire thing. I will say that BWL has some amazing loot. I think like in terms of like design and actual like effects. You've got the life giving gems, you know, for warriors. You've got all the class specific trinkets. You've got ass candy. You've got, you know, tier two sets, warlock tier two set, full tier two set. Looks amazing. Paladin tier two full judgment looks amazing. Like you've got some really cool gear. Yeah. Yeah, I think the gear looks cool. So the gear originally, in case you didn't know, anybody might be watching you didn't know, the gear originally looked like really bad and then they reworked all the gear in 1.9. They updated tier two a lot for a lot of class. I think majors had like four reworks or something on their tier two. Paladins had like two or three. But yeah, they changed everything in 1.9. I think that was the final update for all the gear. And they made it look way cool. It used to look terrible. It used to look like a green set for some of the classes. Now the rogue gear was like a red version of Shadowcraft, which is pretty cool. But like the cool sets that you see now weren't in the game the whole time. They were added in for like the second half of classic whenever AQ patch dropped. So yeah, I just like everything. Like the design, all that stuff. But is there anything that you guys want to add or talk about before we go on into Q&A? We should do Q&A because I've got to go in 12 minutes. Let's answer some questions. Yeah, let's do that. So guys, anybody in chat who's interested, if you guys have any questions or whatever, if there's anything you guys want to talk about. Then I've seen this guy spamming this and chat the entire time. And I think it's a good question. At as fun tips at Stay Safe TV, have you guys done worse on Gulch as a non-premade? It's awful. You almost always queue up against a premade and get graveyard camped. It's all Torque Valley, all over again. So here's the thing, just get a premade. Like there's a guy, he's actually my guild. He gets Bracket 2 every week and he pugs premades out of trade chat. He pugs him out of trade chat every week. He gets Bracket 2. He's getting what, like 800, 900K on our week. Just make a, you got to have the initiative. Make a premade. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I do think that's the solution to the problem. But yeah, I think ever since they changed the meta and you have more people doing, ever since they changed the meta and you have more people doing what's it called, doing more song instead of AV, you're just naturally going to have more premades. And yeah, sometimes like, they'll just go and they'll go and the idea is, is you want to have people go flag running like a mage in a druid or whatever. And then the rest of the team goes and like farms graveyard or whatever. The best thing you can offer in that case, if it's like a good premade, try and farm some kills or whatever. They did change how honor works to where it's 10% decay instead of 25% decay. And yeah, that kind of sucks. So, but that's just kind of how the game is. And that's just one of the things about vanilla. I don't know a better solution than that. What are the chances they buff blackling layer to make it harder? Zero. Zero percent, yeah. Yeah, I don't think they're gonna buff it at this point. I would have liked them to, but I don't think they're going to do it. That's what kind of worries me, but we'll see. Hopefully BWL is still difficult. That's what I'm hoping. I'm hoping BWL is still like, at least has a level of difficulty to where it's not like MC. It doesn't have to be super hard, right? But I don't think it should be like how MC was. I think MC was way too easy. And unfortunately, I don't know. I could really have to go through and look it up and like see what's documented on like how each individual fight changed or if they tweak this here, they'd buff this, they nerf that on the different fights. But again, to your point, Stacey, earlier, there's less opportunity for change from 1.6 to 1.12 as there was from 1.1 to 1.12 for MC. So yeah, I mean, hopefully it's not that bad. Hopefully it's more difficult than that. Yeah, we got somebody calling us out in the chat here. His name is McConnel Rhett. It's McCumer. It's McCumer. There it is. My question is when can we start asking Blizz for changes to the game? Rhett and Boomkin and Enhancement need heavy buffs and the game sucks. Yeah, so when can we lobby to fix it? And then he follows that up and he says, you see guys, they won't answer it because they're against changes. Well, if you want changes, McConnel, let's start a number with your streaming schedule, okay? Why don't we change your streaming schedule first and foremost so we can actually enjoy you on stream. But yeah, no changes, no changes. Guys, the no changes versus changes thing is over. It's been over since launch. Blizz has already changed a thousand things. It's way different. Yeah, they changed it. Classic launch was way different than vanilla. And I think not a lot of people know that, right? It might start with itemization, but think about all the other things and all the adverse effects, like we talked about layering and this and that. At this point, you just have to make it good, right? You don't have to go buff classes and stuff like that. Okay, hold on. You don't need to buff classes, but to McConnel's point, I do think Paladins should probably get like Crusader Strike, Divine Storm, Seal of Blood for everybody and maybe just go ahead and give them a silence. Other than that, I think it's fine. Like you don't really need to change anything. So I don't, for real though, I don't think you need to change like class balance or buff or anything like that, but just make sure the game is good. So that's it. Guys, don't worry about changes. August 28th, 2021, you'll be playing classic TBC, okay? Leaks, I know. August 28th, 2021, you'll have all the changes you want, okay? I don't think, I don't think they would, you think Burning Crusade would come out, oh wait, actually 2021, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think by then we could see Burning Crusade. I think by then, I would like to see it at the beginning of the summer, but I think that's a discussion. That's a year and a half from now. That's a year and a half from now. August 31st, August 31st, 2021. I think that's like too long. Oh, hey, Twitch rivals. Holy crap. Thank you, that might be a mistake, but I'm not gonna complain. Thank you for the 100 gift tops. No, yeah, that's from them. Yo, Twitch.tv slash Twitch, baby, Twitch.tv slash Twitch.tv. It's from whenever we competed in Twitch Rivals, what's it called? It's from whenever we competed in Twitch Rivals, a few weeks ago. Twitch Rivals, thank you for the 100 gifted subs. Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate that. That is a lot. Oh, 104. Yeah, 104 gifted subs. There you go. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. So, kind of back to the show. Yeah, I think Burning Crusade. I would like to see Burning Crusade come out at the beginning of the summer instead of at the end of summer. Like I always talk about classic summer and then it was, yes, it was summer, but it was at the end. So, I don't know. I would like to see a classic TVC that's at the beginning of the summer, you know? That way more people, like if they have school, if they're in college or whatever, they have more free time, right? People generally have more free time in the summer. Well, actually, I don't know. Cause I had this discussion with someone before too, where I'm in the mindset of like, people go to school and they do things during the year and then summer is free time. But like, if you're older and you have a family and you got kids and a wife, or more than one, I mean, who knows how many wives you might have or husband or whatever. You're probably going on vacation and stuff during the summer too. So I don't know. Yeah, I think that's the mindset that I have. But it's the mindset of a shut in nerd, right? Because normal people, they go on vacations, they're going to the beach, they're going hiking. Yeah. And they have jobs anyway. They work year round. Yeah. Shops. Yeah, no, I think you're right. But you know what would be really interesting? I would love to see a demographic spread from Blizzard on Classic. I'm really curious. Are Zoomers actually playing? Is it just old people, just boomers like us? Who is playing this game? The best we have, the best way we can tell is our YouTube analytics, right? So I can tell you mine is 100%, literally it is 100% men between 25 and 35. That's it. That is the demographic of my YouTube channel. Mine is mostly women, actually. Yeah, mine is mostly women. Lots of ladies watch my stream and my content. Don't assume. Yes, I'm very popular with the ladies, guys. I would like to make that clear. I believe it. Thank you. Anyway. No, look, so I think we, let's take a couple more. Let's take a couple more questions here and then we can finish up. Let's see. Wait, I have a question. Okay. Tips out, when are we having an Alliance for Alina dual tournament? The CDO Alliance for Alina? Well, you might be very excited. Yesterday, I may or may not have spoken to someone who may or may not have been pivotal in the planning and discussion for CDL season two. CDL season two is going to be cross-faction. Alliance and Horde equal amounts, of course. 100% equality. And yeah, I don't want to say anything more right now, but also CDL EU is coming. Actually, we're going to do EU first and then two weeks later is going to be CDL season two for Feralina. So I can't reveal the details, but if there's anybody out there that would like to sponsor the CDL, we're working with a couple of partners right now, but we want to increase that prize pool as much as possible for the community. So if there's anybody that wants to contribute, yeah. No? I feel... I think Twitch rivals, you're in here, right? Yeah, this is a good up. I think Blockbuster might be interested. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Blockbuster and Circuit City. I think... They're booming. Yeah, they're doing really good. They need all the advertising they can get. So yeah, that's actually pretty exciting. That's going to be pretty good. So we're going to have some EU dueling tournaments and then maybe some Alliance dueling tournaments on Feralina, so. I got a question for you guys. Espen and Stay Safe. When the CDL does come to the Alliance, will you be competing? I'll play, yeah, yeah. But dude, I'll play. Here's my thing is I... And I'll... I know we got to finish up here because people got to go, but I think... And we saw this a little bit on the Horde side, where we saw this happen in people's guilds and stuff. They didn't play the game in normally and they started, I need this for the duel tournament. I need this for this. I need this for that, right? And it stopped being about like a normal gearing situation and that's something that I think your guild is going to have to handle if you're... If you have people that are interested in doing this kind of stuff, you know? So that's a concern, right? So what he's saying is that crusade and power just need to funnel both of us, whatever gear we want. Like, I agree, I 100% agree with that. No, I think this is just something that is going to have to be... If you're a guild leader or raid leader or whatever, that is managing a guild with people who are competing in this tournament, that is going to be an added challenge whenever it comes to doing loop counselor, something like that, if that's the kind of loop system that you run. So yeah, I don't plan on, I don't really plan on changing anything as far as like... It just depends, right? Like how we do our loop counselors, like people that contribute, they do this, they do that. I wouldn't want to be in a situation where we're having to change things for the dual tournament, but I could also see like how some guilds might be interested in doing stuff like that. So I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen, but that's my current mindset. Jump, please, has a very wholesome question for you, S-Fant. He says, at S-Fant TV, tips for someone starting Classic Now? If you want to start Classic Now, the most important thing for you to do is to log in and play a warrior. And play a warrior. So I think, I mean, you can play whatever class you want. Warriors are really strong and they're good tanks, they're good in PvP, they're good in DPS. But at the end of the day, dude, if you want to play Classic, there's so much stuff out there. There's so much information and we touched on this a little bit earlier. The overload of like YouTube content and this and that and this is something that people do on YouTube. They sensationalize everything. Oh, this is the way that you have to play the game. You have to do this. This is the only thing that you can do. You don't have to do that. Play the game the way that you want to play it and find a community of people on the server that you're on that share the same kind of vision for the game that you have. That's how I feel. I think that's the way that the game should be played. You'll go look at YouTube videos, watch them, enjoy them, learn something from them, but take it with a grain of salt and don't think that you have to play the game a certain way. That's the biggest thing that I could say about anybody who's looking to start playing Classic WoW right now. The reason I say Warrior, and there's a couple of the classes I would say, Holy Paladin or Priest also, is that these are classes that are fine to play casually. And then if you decide you want to be in a competitive pre-made or you want to raid competitively or whatever, whatever you want to, these are classes that also are very highly desirable in more competitive environments as well. And you're not going to find yourself as a mage, for example, if you're a fresh mage, first time playing Classic and you decide that six months from now you want to play it competitively, it's going to be very hard to find a competitive guild as a mage. It's going to be very hard to do. Yeah. If there's warriors, it's very easy, Priest is easy, Holy Paladin is easy. Even as a Warlock, it's hard. Like for example, going forward, I'm pretty much switching from my Warlock to my Holy Paladin just because of necessity. And again, it depends on the type of guild that you find, right? So like if you're in a guild like that, like I know for me in my guild, like I like to have a balanced raid comp. Like I don't like to have them in maxi raid comp because if the raid comp is balanced then everybody in the raid will be more likely to get geared out at a better rate by having an even split of classes or a more even split of classes, I should say. If there's one piece of advice, I would give a brand new Classic Wild Player, roll on a grobulous. You will absolutely love it. It's like a time capsule back to 2005. Like there's a couple of competitive guilds but for the most part it's brand new players or players that are willing to help new players. Super, super fun. Shout out to the grob mob. I know there's a server in EU that's kind of like the grob equivalent. It's the RPPVP server but I don't know what it is. I think it's Flame Lash Alliance. Maybe, maybe, yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, that's too bad for me. I was joking. Yeah, that was the server that died. Xandalar Tribe, it's Xandalar Tribe, that's right, yeah, yeah. But yeah, roll on grob if you're in a, you'll have a blast and I'd say roll on Xandalar Tribe if you're in EU, you'll probably have a good time. Yeah, so anyways, guys, I think this was a great return episode. We talked about it a lot, we aired some grievances. We're super excited for BWL and the rest of Classic coming up. Thank you guys so much for joining us. Thank you Tips, thank you Stay Safe for being here. We got the crew back together. It's gonna be fun. This was fun, man, this was really fun. Yeah, I'm excited. We're gonna get back to a more regular schedule doing this. So if you haven't, please make sure to follow Tips, make sure to follow Stay Safe. Their handles are on there, Tips Out Baby, YouTube, Twitter, and Twitch. Stay Safe TV. Yeah, I'm on Twitter. On Twitch and YouTube and then for myself, S-Fan TV on everything as well. So thank you guys so much for joining us. I'm gonna keep streaming for a little bit. I'm gonna take a break and go to the bathroom. But for Classic Cast, we'll see you guys next time. Peace. Later.