 So here's what's happening. Blizzard released the WoW in 2024 roadmap. They're calling World of Warcraft 2024 the road ahead. So this is the roadmap for what's to come in World of Warcraft for the following year, obviously, just as the title suggests. I haven't taken a look at it yet, but people were saying they have some retail WoW stuff in here. They have some classic WoW stuff in here. You're really going to get to see the idea behind what they're going to do with season of discovery. I'm very excited. I'm very excited to see something like this because it's going to allow us to kind of like know what to expect as far as like how drawn out each phase is going to be. I hope. Let's take a look at it. So World of Warcraft in 2024 the road ahead. It's been an incredible year for the WoW team. We're endlessly grateful to our community for being in our world as we grow, change, experiment and deliver as much magic and fun as possible. This time last year I posted our first roadmap. I'm so thankful to our team for seeing it all become real and then some. We know that promising a thing is a far distant second to actually delivering on that promise. With that said, we continue to learn and evolve with each release and announcement this year and we are fully focused on listening and responding to you and building for a strong future in Azeroth for all of us. Listing everything we did together this year is huge. Six Dragonflight content updates, Wrath content updates and then return to Icecrown Citadel, Classic Hardcore, Blizzcon, Incredible Worstable First and Dragonflight Season 3 and just recently Classic Season of Discovery. This year has been one to remember and we want to keep the momentum going. Now it's time to take a look at 2024. In modern WoW, you're going to see three more content updates for Dragonflight. Wait, what? They're gonna have three more patches? That's actually surprising. Three more content updates for Dragonflight arriving before World of Warcraft, The War Within releases next year. In these updates, we'll be wrapping up the story for this expansion and laying the foundation for our next one. Dragonflight Season 4 will revisit Dragonflight's Dungeons and Raids along with outdoor content featuring updated rewards, few new twists. Listen, guys, there's only one twist that we want. Okay, there's only one twist that we want. I don't care about all the other ones. All right, I just want Command to Martyr, please, okay? I don't need these other twists, man. Just give me that big seal twist, okay? Then in the spring-summer, we'll ask for feedback with the War Within, Expansion Alpha, and Beta Test Drop. We'll continue to communicate details, dates, and more goodness as we get closer to content updates just like this year. Coming up next in January, we'll have the Seeds of Renewal content update on tap, and we're currently keeping an eye on your feedback on the live public test rooms for this update. In WoW Classic, we have updates coming for Classic Hardcore with solo self-found support in February. So, Classic Hardcore's solo self-found comes in February. They said they're coming in- They're coming in. They're bringing it in spring, but I guess February it is. There's a new way to challenge players. Add a little more hardcore into your hardcore. Looktar Oghar will have also more phases to release in Season Discovery next year as the adventure continues, and, of course, Cataclysm right around the corner. This is the Retail Roadmap. Oh, when they said content updates, they meant like, they didn't mean big ones for retail. Like, a season is like a raid. Okay, so that's how they're splitting it up. And then, War Within's going to come out summer, autumn, so this is probably going to be in August. Right, there's new retail expansion. That's like their normal time frame for whenever they put out the new expansion. It's usually August, September. For Classic, Winter Ruby Sanctum comes out second week of January. January 11th, okay. Yeah, January 11th, Ruby Sanctum. And then, Season of Discovery, level 40 in New Runes, new PUP event, and then a No-Merghan raid. So No-Merghan will be the level 40. I think they had already said that. By the way, if you missed it, I've had a lot of opportunity to talk to the Classic team. One of the points of feedback that I was giving them was enhancement shamans, two-handed enhance. So people were still asking me about this. They had announced this already, but in case you missed it, they are going to add support for two-handed enhance at level 40. Technically, they didn't say at level 40, but I would expect it at level 40 because they said after Wind Fury. Wind Fury gets put in the game at level 30 for shamans. That's really whenever two-handed enhance, that's when you would really care about two-handed enhance. So yeah, I would expect it if you're an enhanced shaman player to finally get some two-handed enhance stuff coming then. So cool. Pog. Then after that, Solo Self-Found is coming. So Solo Self-Found is coming in February. Based on this timeline, then you can expect Classic Season of Discovery to be at the end of January, probably, which goes in line with what we thought. Oh, well, I guess Self-Found. It's not Solo Self-Found. I keep saying Solo Self-Found because I'm used to saying SSF, but technically it's Self-Found. So let me let me clarify that. It's just a Self-Found mode. That means that you can still group with people. You can still do dungeons. You can still do group quests, all that stuff, which in my opinion, for what WoW is, it's better. I think it is better if you're going to limit the game. You limit the game to Self-Found, but if people want to do Solo Self-Found on their own, then they can do that. I feel like playing Solo Self-Found, requiring people to play Solo Self-Found takes too many elements out of the game that Hardcore already takes out. I think that's a good idea, adding a Self-Found mode for Hardcore. Okay, so Cataclysm in the first half of next year. I mean, I would expect kind of the same. I don't think that Blizzard should make each season for Season of Discovery longer than two months. I think two months should be the cap. I think six to eight weeks, they're making these level caps so low that you kind of run out of stuff to do on a day-to-day basis, as far as like having a thing to grind if you want to grind that. I would expect this to be what, January, February, March, April. You're probably looking at like April. Yeah, I think if you wait till after the end of March actually, it's going to be a long time. Then you're probably going to get Cataclysm in May. Now, here's what I hope that they don't do, actually. Blizzard does this thing, and at first, like years ago, I was completely against it, but I understand why they do it now because they actually were right. They try and stagger their releases. Things don't coincide with one another as much as possible. Initially, I was like, well, the people that play retail and the people that play classic and the people that do this and the people that they're all different people, I was wrong. Nowadays, so much of the WoW community, it's like this big Venn diagram, not a Venn diagram, a big Venn diagram, and there's a ton of people that do play like two or three versions of the game. I hope that because of Cataclysm launch, Season Discovery level 50 doesn't end up being like three or four months long, because I think that will actually like, they're playing into release hype all year round, when they should, right? Because that's always whenever WoW is always at its peak whenever it plays around release hype. But if we're looking at like three to four months for level 50, damn, that would not feel great. Now, level 50 is a lot better than level 25, for example, but that would be rough, I think. Then again, Cataclysm classic is going to come out. I personally am not a huge fan of Cataclysm in the past. The reason I even came back to WoW after I initially quit and came back for Cataclysm, so Dracova and I had a mutual friend who was trying to get us both to come back. Then I came back to play. I played for like two months and all I did was PvP and I just didn't like it. I was like, I don't feel like I'm playing a Paladin anymore. This class doesn't feel the same. It doesn't feel like I'm playing the same game. I didn't enjoy it. Now, with all that being said, I didn't really raid. I was in a guild called like No Kingslayer. All we did was PvP, all that stuff. So from what I've heard from a lot of other people who played Cataclysm is actually Cataclysm raiding was phenomenal. Sorry I was a little late putting those visuals together for your slideshow, but here's a draft. No, not a men diagram. Okay, unbelievable. Wait, this is pretty good. So anyway, I've heard from a lot of other people that Cataclysm raiding was actually phenomenal. If you guys remember, the whole phrase Wrath Baby came about whenever Cataclysm launched and then the content, the PvE content was too hard for people and then people kept saying, oh, like these kids don't know how it used to be back in the day. These kids ain't got no idea. These Wrath Babies got no idea how it was, man. We grew up, man. When we grew up and going to Molten Core, they don't know how it was in Blackwing Lair. They don't, they, they got no idea. They don't know anything about our SSC, our Tempest Keep Attunements, our Serpent Shrine Attunement. They got no idea. Cataclysm raiding, I never did and I've heard that it's very, very fun and very good. I more than likely will not really go too hard on Cataclysm, but I do think that the leveling in Cataclysm was phenomenal. I had, I actually had so much fun leveling in Cataclysm. So more than likely I will, I will play Cataclysm on launch and level and do that. So after that, after Cataclysm launch, we're going to get our level 60. So this looks like, you know, level 60 New Ruins and game activities. And then this is the key thing to look at here. At the end of the year, season of discovery and game content updates is what we have here at the end of the year. We were probably looking at an October, November, probably after BlizzCon. So it's blocked. Dude, it's like three pixels. Okay. Hold on. There. Saved. Okay. What does end game content mean after this phase right here? Is this like a phase one classic wow level 60 molten core, no dire mall, no nothing? What is this? I think what this is relies so much on what we get here right after Cataclysm comes out right when you hit level 60. I think it is a bad idea to release all the content at once. You guys know my history. You guys know what I'm about. I'm huge on on patch progressive, like a patch progressive release of vanilla wow. So the extreme version of a completely non progressive vanilla wow is what we saw in hardcore. Not only is there no progressive itemization and you know, you're going through the patches and the items get buffed and nerfed as it was originally to where it like fits with the content. But on top of that, you're getting all the boosted ZG gear, all the buffed up aq 20 gear, all this stuff that's supposed to be catch up gear, catch up content for people that are new to the game or new level 60s to do moan core. You can do that before you do moan core. You can do that before you do BWL and a lot of the gear in those dungeons are actually better than stuff that you can get out of the raids. Not only that, in the raids themselves, there is gear that drops in molten core that didn't drop whenever the game came out. There's gear that drops in the game that just didn't exist. There's gear that drops in dungeons. There's there's gear that is super strong in dungeons that was not like that at all when the game came out. Very famously savage gladiator chain is is like the best melee DPS chess piece until aq 40. I'm pretty sure that when the game came out, that was a male tanking chess piece. Maybe that's something like an enhanced shaman would wear normally, but that wasn't really a thing in original classic, right? Not not very well anyway. It was it was pretty pretty scuffed. I would love for them to do progressive minorization. They will never do it. It's a pipe dream. I like to talk about it because it's fun because that it changes the game so much. That's by the way, that's what we got on like Nostalrius, Elysium, Light's Hope, all that stuff. Show them. Oh, okay, here you go. So this is like some old stats on gear. So this is the old this is the old version of savage gladiator chain. The original version. So this doesn't get buffed until patch 1.10 in original WoW. Original WoW patch 1.10 was the patch after aq 40. I believe that's the same patch that they added the tier 0.5 quest chain. So a lot changed with vanilla WoW that a lot of people like if you started playing vanilla WoW in classic 2019, you don't know. Or maybe you just forgot, right? There's people forget things all the time. But there's so much about this game that like changed over the years that people have no idea. And I say people, obviously there's people that know, but I would say like if you like the average person doesn't know about like a lot of these minute details. Again, this is a pipe dream. I don't even know why I'm talking about this. I love talking about it, but it I don't think Blizzard will ever do it. That would be the best version of vanilla WoW they could possibly make is if they had peresvitamization in like a classic era setting while tweaking some of the stuff under the hood. That is the best version of vanilla WoW I could think of. Now in a season of discovery situation, I actually don't know if they should do that because they're modifying the classes around what's currently in the game. So if you did both of those things at the same time, it might just be a shit show. I think it would actually maybe be too much to do with them adding all these runes and changing classes so much. Let's wrap all that up and go back to this. And I think a lot of what you see at the end here will be dependent on what you see in probably September, I would guess. Oh my gosh, dude. If it's September, that's going to be miserable. Oh dude, they might stretch this because of this and if they go to March, that would be so long, dude. Now here's another thing though, they might need this much time to just develop it, man. Dude, if you compare this to retail, War Within is probably going to come out. It's probably not going to be staggered at all. Like there's like too much. If you were a WoW player, by the way, this year is going to be crazy for you. You're going to have so much to do in WoW. This is like the year of WoW. If you play Cataclysm, if you play Hardcore, if you play Season of Discovery, I mean just look at this, man. WoW is back, baby. WoW is back. So my prediction for dates of Season of Discovery, looking at all this, I think this will be at the end of January. I think Season of Discovery is at the end of January, phase two. Hardcore solo self-found is in February. I think Season of Discovery level 50, it'll probably be between April and March. I think that Cataclysm is probably going to be in May or June. Level 60 is probably going to be August. Maybe July. I hope Season of Discovery is July. You know what though? I bet level 50 is going to be good content. You are right, N.W. James. You know why? For stream content, trying to do level 60 raids at level 50 is going to be awesome. Project 50. Yeah, literally. You need to be 55 to enter raid. No, I'm saying dungeons, not raids. Did I say raid? Maybe I misspoke. So what do you guys think? Are you guys excited about the roadmap for Classic? Do you guys think it's too fast? Do you guys think it's too slow? I'm a little bit worried about the speed here, and I think as far as end game goes, are we going to see content after next? Are we going to see a natural, like, progressive phase situation where it's like, okay, we got Molten Core here, we got BWL here, and so on? I hope they don't release everything all at once. I think that would be a poor decision. Also, this kind of leads me to believe I think of Season of Discovery as like a Classic Plus Beta. That's the way that I'm thinking about it. But this leads me to believe that this kind of is their Classic Plus, and they might not do a release of like a full, fresh level 60 Season of Discovery Classic Plus thing once it's all said and done. I don't know. That was my initial thought. Maybe they're not going to do that now, or maybe they do this, or maybe they show this as this, and then what they're actually going to decide to do is, hey, we're going to, we're going to do a fresh Season of Discovery starting at level one and go straight to level 60 and all that. So yeah, it is what it is. So anyway, yeah, like I said, let me know what you guys think while I was back, baby. Let me know what you guys think. If you guys like it, like the video, make sure to subscribe. Leave me a comment. Let me know what you think. I'm very excited about the future of Classic personally with Season of Discovery and everything. The Classic team has done a really, really good job. And I said this earlier. I said this after BlizzCon, but this is like the first time I've felt like positively about Blizzard as a company in like 15 years. Everything is SfanTV, Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, Discord, Reddit, everything is SfanTV. Thank you guys for watching. I'll see you guys next time.