you
I can't wait until he puts the joke.
Okay.
What's the joke remote again?
And I know someone added it.
There's another one too, Barrow, Maximum Dent or something.
All right, this will be fun.
I'll probably hit like a quick little Q&A.
Maybe you react to some stuff that I've missed over the last week or two.
And then see where it goes from there, which you could tell, by the way, all from the stream
title.
I don't even know why I'm, uh, why I'm even, you know, mentioning it.
Have you seen that guy Max on Twitter beefing with Scrape?
I'm not even beefing with Scrape.
He just said that we didn't have the bug on our, he like made a couple assertions
of like the bug wasn't happening on and a like the coiled alter nerf weird thing
uh...
and then i just showed it that that wasn't true i don't think there is any
drama
Max, the fact that the raid was so mid-effect motivation
slash morale a little bit near the end. Did it affect viewership? I don't know.
Maybe. I have no idea what the viewership was, but there's a lot of factors that
could have contributed to low viewership, right? Like a bunch of splits, people
being over it, the race going longer than normal. There's like precedent from
before that if the tier goes long that people are going to start tuning out as well.
It's a reptile, not a bug.
Yeah, yeah, that was a good reply.
Well, is that song that played the one about madness?
You're not gonna believe this, but it's called Madness.
Yeah, I just heard that during this race. It's from a band called Tribal Blood. Oh, and it's apparently not even there.
It's like barely cracks their top five, and they only have like 60,000 monthly listeners.
Are we buying in early? Hold on.
Songs from like five years ago, too.
Was everyone at the facility?
Not everyone, but almost everyone.
Max thanks for winning now my mate needs to go get a buzz cut for a year made my day dude. Yeah, that actually I feel bad for people a couple years ago who are just for the past couple years that made some bet like dude there's no way echo loses this and it looks like in the moment they're totally right and then they just make a bet and then they just lose.
I don't know how much I'm going to go to BlizzCon this year though.
I know I'm going to go at least one day, but honestly with it being in such close proximity to the race,
I don't know if I'm going to be super motivated to go because I don't know.
Usually after the race, I have to power up.
because I don't know, I just,
like usually after the race, I have to like power down
for like usually a couple of weeks.
Max, if the next rate is that disastrous
in terms of quality and bugs,
what will that mean for the race moving forward?
I mean, obviously, it wouldn't be great.
But I mean, I'd be more worried about the game going forward,
you know what I mean?
Like, I think cracks showing in the we're doing raids every,
we're going to be pushing out expansions
with three major seasons every 18 months.
And like, you're starting to see the consequences of that.
If they continue that schedule, I just
feel like it's just the expectation from a player
is that like every patch in season
is just going to be low quality.
And if that's the case, I feel
That's actually the worst possible thing that could happen to the game, so I hopefully
not.
are so good players they have new players and they are not so good mentally ready to
clutch the final line and win. Alright I'm just going to stop reading that bro. You're
just fucking saying shit. You have literally no idea what you're talking about.
Who is who would have thought like it was gonna Natty 16% dude? I swear you guys should have learned
in the past couple of tiers though. At least with Lura. Like in Lura, Echo had like a low
wipe and we had like a 20% wipe or something. And Chat, it's like Chat isn't convinced that
you can win from 20 to 0 unless you start getting like low wipes first. But like when
you're fighting an end of a fight that's like kind of easy, you can just do massive
jumps like that. And kind of case in point, like Echo went from like 30% to 7% earlier
in the day and that jump would have been even smaller. Also we just had like
infinite dam. Not really sure what was going on with that. I think maybe what
happened is they were like starting the day with some cooldowns in P2 just for
consistency and then they were taking them out one by one and then they were
like oh this boss is killable and maybe they didn't like fully damage
optimized yet where like our thing was we started the day before that with
all CDs off of everything but the boss. There were also some small
comp differences which maybe made a difference but like we actually we had like a lot more damage than
them on the boss like on each of our best pulls. Do you guys know what Echo's best pull was entering
the last phase? Like how low they got it going into the last phase like ever like whatever their best
pull was? Like 43 or 42? Okay so yeah like on their best pull they're like 2% behind our best
full, but that's like a pretty big number, right? I mean it's enough to where if they had the same
boss damage as us they probably would have won, right? Because like on their 1% wipe the boss would
just be dead.
How crazy did you feel that they lost another 1% boss kill? Did you see my reaction to it?
Like I literally like didn't even like go fucking crazy screaming. I was just like there's no fucking way this is happening
Like what is fucking going on like how yeah, okay the Joker laugh
I do look so stupid
I actually look so stupid in that.
And then of course, every single like wow head,
my own fucking editors, everyone just uses the Joker face
as like the thumbnail.
I don't know how that was a thing.
All right, hello
Actually, I should eat some more of this rice. I got that panda
the next race that is not good do not do not gamble like at all
Panda Express, Beijing beef is this.
No, it's just trash.
So tier list of Panda Express flavors.
And this is objective, by the way.
Double S tier at the very top.
And they only have this very rarely.
I think they just got rid of it actually recently.
It's like a seasonal thing.
The hot orange chicken, the like orange chicken,
cause like obviously orange chicken is super goaded,
but like the orange chicken,
but also it's like way fucking hotter.
That shit is goaded.
All right, just under that is the sweet,
the dynamite sweet and sour chicken.
It's also, I mean, I guess if you don't like spicy food,
you wouldn't agree with this,
but this is an objective list.
It's not subjective.
It is, yeah, the dynamite sweet and sour
goes crazy. And then after that, there is the regular orange chicken. And then after that
is the honey walnut shrimp. And then everything else under that is just mid. Or it's fine,
but it's not as good as those. Are you still at the event? Yeah, I think everyone else
actually a lot of our Raiders are actually staying at an Airbnb until BlizzCon starts.
I think some people are flying home and then flying back, but some people are just actually staying here.
here but no one's at the facility except for me and that's purely because I have
been too lazy to move my setup back to my house yet and I'm probably going to do
that when they make me or or when I get tired of having to drive over here but I
live 10 minutes from here so
Just perma live there dude. I mean low key if they would let me keep my streaming setup
here I actually would drive over here to stream because it also means I could get like lunch
and dinner every day, which sounds fucking incredible.
you
I think the more and more you win, you can do that.
Now, is it nice that you were still able to win even in a scenario where you feel like
you were nowhere near your best?
Obviously, yes, but it's fucking terrifying.
It would feel so bad to lose and no, it's because you basically didn't really try as
hard in a way.
You talk about the worst ways to lose, it's like you barely lose, you get shit on,
whatever.
The best way to lose is like you lose by a decent amount,
but you know you tried your best and someone was just better than you.
You can kind of just go home at the end of the day after that.
Like I tried, we tried our best, someone was better, all good.
And then like just a little bit worse than that is like,
you played really well, but you barely lost.
Because then when that happens, you start nitpicking every single decision
that you made, and because like it could have just been this one thing, you know?
And then there's like the really bad ones,
Which is, we lost and it's because we didn't like,
clearly did not do up to our normal standard.
And like now that's like,
you're just asking questions about that forever.
And somewhere down there by the way is winning
but also playing like shit.
Like I know winning is awesome.
But like, it was just fucking like embarrassing,
you know, like this whole tier.
Like I feel like, if you were just watching our guild,
it just wasn't even like watching the same thing.
It looked like you were watching us
you like wash the fuck up until like the last two days.
And while it is true that because streaming in the race
is like you kind of just get a bunch of information for free
you kind of can just fuck around for the entire race
until the last two days lock in and win
as clear evidence by this tier.
But it's still like terrifying and it also isn't fun.
And I feel like the players, it's not fun for anyone.
It was really not fun for me.
So, obviously gonna try to fix that going forward.
I guess it's kinda nice to win
with such clear problems that you can fix, you know?
But I've said that before
and then we ended up still in this position.
So, hopefully it's not gonna take us losing a race
to like actually give a fuck
and try as hard as we possibly can.
And by the way, I'm not pushing that on to anyone else.
That is like absolutely me, bro.
Like I feel like last year,
I just went AFK basically after we won and we did some farm re-clears and then I
showed up for PTR testing basically. Our PTR testing was fucking average and
then AFK'd again until this fucking season came out and that's and it
turns out when you do stuff like that you end up looking like we did in this
tier you know so hopefully it's not going to take us losing for us to like
actually like really really try for this because obviously we were getting paid
to do it.
you
People are calling me a crybaby bitch.
I start to feel really like a crybaby bitch.
And that feels terrible.
But with Skype, he, I guess, just doesn't give a fuck.
He's just gonna fucking, he's just gonna keep slamming it.
I honestly have tremendous respect for that because he just doesn't give a fuck what any
of you all think.
He's just going to say it.
So yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I felt that way after tears for sure.
There are tears that we lost that I 100% think if Blizzard had their act together, we would
have won.
And the number one by far is Eternal Palace.
I will go to my grave thinking that the wrong guild won that race, right?
Stripe seems like he will go to his grave thinking the wrong guild won this race.
I understand that feeling.
I'm just, I'm like too soft to just like fight a thousand
EU fans on Twitter about it.
You know what I mean?
I'm not, it's a lot to deal with, man.
But, yeah, and also I feel like a lot of NA fans
are like kind of having the wrong response.
And maybe this is my fault too,
even though it was happening before I did this.
But I tweeted yesterday.
I said, someone was like, yeah, okay,
You guys had the bug too, but it didn't like ruin any of your kill poles and I just said get just get out of the pool
Bro, that was basically just like memeing on a like a reply guy basically just going for some quick like gif aura farming points
but
If I'm echo and I read that I'm pissed and here's why because
You're still unlucky like like if you were getting it
Let's just say two guilds had the same meta poles in the last phase
They had more way more than us past like the third circles and
One guild was even let's just say the bug could have happened on both
But it actually we were both doing the same strat and it just happened to them more or something
And we were all going in the pool where it kills you
That's still unlucky as fucking you would be mad about Blizzard because you do not expect bugs to randomly happen
also another thing is is people are implying that them jumping into the pool is like
Cheasing or exploiting the boss and I think the term exploit has a lot of nuance in this game and
And I don't think it's really fair to just say like first of all Blizzard literally clarified it wasn't an exploit like they were working on fixing it
But they said you can keep doing it which by the way that was kind of weird response by Blizzard will get into that later
But like they did not consider that an exploit right?
So like I think all the TOS andes the most insufferable people in World Warcraft by the way
They like are they're like powered down at their in their house like they aren't just not plugged into the wall
for the most of the year and then like someone plugs them in as soon as anything
remotely exploity happens and then they start quoting paragraphs from the terms
of service about like how anyone that exploits anything for any reason
regardless of how severe it is to just instantly get banned forever and those
people I think got plugged in before this happened so they were like super
up in arms about it but like there's nothing wrong with doing that strat
Like you can say
That okay if they happen to not do that strat
Because they didn't know about the bug yet and instead they stayed on the platform and they were still wiping to it
They weren't wiping to it like it's still bullshit that it happened to them there
And if it did actually ruin and a kill poll or what could have been a kill poll that is bullshit
You would be mad about it and you would be thinking about that for the rest of your life because we like really care about these races, right?
I would do the exact same thing like just saying like oh you should have gotten out of the pool
Dude, this is so fast-paced you think you could lose at any moment like the casual fans of this race or like dude
I liquid that 30% like this is it like I promise you and we were awake echoed new that they could lose in any moment because this is
Easily a boss where you could just live to the end of the fight and it dies, right?
So in that moment, it's really hard even though you have analysts and stuff you guys always mention that it's really hard to like
Fully diagnose the bug and see what's happening, especially because it's in the pool
You have to like okay did they fix it our waves hitting us now because it's just dying to a wave, right?
It's the same spell
So, it's hard to be like, okay, well, this isn't working and let's change our strat
because maybe we could deal with it.
Like, I think that's kind of a revisionist history, like, not fair thing to them because,
like, I don't think we would have done that either.
Like, I think we would have just been, like, it bugged or something and next pull it
won't bug.
It seemed like it happened about 25% of their P3s and we only had four total late P3s
on the day we killed it and it happened on one of our pulls.
So, 25% sounds about the likelihood that it would happen.
I also have a fear about how it happens,
but I'm not gonna bore you with that
because it's just like some technical thing
about how the mechanic works
and I don't think most of you care about that.
They killed it right after not using the scuba strat though.
Yeah, but that doesn't have to do with the bug.
Like, okay, let's say they never did the scuba strat
and they still died to the bug a couple of times
or something, it's the same thing, right?
I guess it makes it like slightly easier to deal with,
but I feel like some people are saying,
well, the bug was there
and if you hadn't have done this strat,
it wouldn't have affected you as much.
So you messed up by doing the strat.
But when they made that decision,
There was no way to know that.
And people are blaming them when they should be blaming Blizzard.
It's absolutely some bullshit by Blizzard.
Also, this is an all-time bad quality of design tier for Blizzard.
It is genuinely worrying for the future of the race.
I don't know about the rest of the patch,
but the raid in particular was like,
it feels like we went back in time kind of shit.
So I think you guys should give them a little grace.
I wouldn't say that I would be faring much better.
I definitely wouldn't be PVPing everyone on Twitter
because I'm just softer than Skype.
I just care more about what people think about me
and if everyone called me a crybaby bitch,
I would feel like a crybaby bitch
and everyone's calling him a crybaby bitch
and he doesn't give a fuck.
Which is honestly fucking beast mode.
But yeah, like I would feel very similarly
our whole Guildwood and truly,
if they felt like they lost this tier due to bugs,
I mean that is fucking bullshit
and that would feel really bad.
So I think like there's just there's way too many stupid replies to them.
There's way too many replies that are like, oh, well, you should have done this.
And they're just by people who know absolutely fucking nothing about how this works.
They're like, oh, they should have done this.
Well, you should have done that strat.
Well, of course, you guys are trying to cheese it.
Anyone, literally anyone that said you guys shouldn't have tried to
cheese the boss, total fucking dumb ass, by the way.
And that's like a litmus test.
I just, you can know that right now.
Um, but like the, yeah, it's a, just a lot of really, really bad takes
about their situation at the end.
But there's also some bad takes going on as well that don't have to do with that, but anything regarding to the bug is like objectively that really fucking sucks for them, so.
Max, we did a poll count prediction game in our wow guild.
How many polls did you guys get at the end?
Warcraft logs says 311, Raid Oreos says 307, and Wowhead 306.
Literally no clue.
No idea.
I'm assuming what that is is like they basically have cutoffs on the pull of like when something
is counted as a wipe.
Like for example what happened way too much this year actually is we basically someone
would just like pull the boss and we would slowly wipe over 30 seconds.
And I think like some things count that a wipe and it's hard for them to do that
because they have, there are bosses where wiping in 30 seconds
could be completely legitimate.
And bosses with that would never be the case.
And I think it's kind of hard to determine
whether it was actually a wiper or not.
Max, the raid was quite easy.
The pull count was so low.
Pull count, not a good thing to look at for that,
but for difficulty.
But yeah.
I mean, it's hard too because we did so much stuff
in week two and week three gear.
Could Cizerak and Twinfangs have racked up a lot more attempts had we fought them in the week that they were supposed to be fought at, but we just didn't get the splits instead?
Same thing with Coiled Alter. Like how hard would it have been if we were like minus 2 or 3 eye level or something?
Like it would have been fucking nuts, right?
A lot more optimization needed.
Max, thoughts on bringing heroic week back?
I mean, okay, I'm a fan of it, but I think it might be a little worse than you guys think.
Can you guys imagine how hard this would hit in parentheses, not hard?
Where we do a week of heroic week, you guys are finally ready for mythic, and then we
do a reek of mythic splits, and then we don't start progression until a week later.
I feel like that combo would go crazy.
Um, yeah, I really hope mythic splits don't become a thing in the future.
I think it's certainly possible.
If you go back and look at previous raids, I think every tier where in the first week
mythic was available, you were either able to get to the second to last boss or meaningfully
progress it or kill it.
I think it would have been correct to not do myth exploits.
However, in any tier where you only kill like four or five
or six bosses in the first reset,
and you barely even start on the second to last boss,
I think in hindsight,
it would have been better to do myth exploits maybe.
However, there's one huge caveat.
In past tiers, you didn't have this coin thing.
Coins existing majorly enables this myth exploit thing
because you don't need to kill late bosses in the tier
to get good gear, you can just coin it the week after,
which is, yeah, I don't know.
I will say, to me, if the future of the race
becomes in the first week, you're just planning
for mythic splitting from the very beginning,
that would be one of the absolute worst things
that could happen, and I hope that does not happen
for our sake and viewership's sake.
But it's kind of on Blizzard a little bit,
but also, for example, if coins are really good
for the majority of the game, like everyone likes coins,
then like why would they change that just for the race?
I do have a small bit of copium or hopium maybe
that Blizzard might look at this splits thing.
And why they haven't before is it's been
like a high level gameplay problem,
but as every single, as every tier goes on,
splits are more and more infecting the normal
like weekly gameplay of like Raid Guilds that are way below a rank where you think that would affect them.
And that to me would maybe, if that starts affecting enough people, I think Blizzard maybe look at making that less valuable somehow or, and I don't even know how the fuck you would do this, by the way, and let's not even, we're not doing that today.
Not on this, it's a Saturday, we are not giving our takes on how they can fix splits because I promise you it's flawed or you're wrong.
But if Blizzard could ever fix that, maybe this is like the time where they could actually look into it because it's just like actually affecting the daily life of the wild player that is a lot lower ranked than you think.
think. And then people are posting their takes. Okay. What about these fucking dog shit add-ons
and arrows showing where to go is just weak or is right? I mean, dude, we could do an entire
stream on that. The add-on shit was even worse this tier, man. Like, okay, also, like, how
How can you, with a straight face, say you're designing raids without add-on solutions when
you make Twin Fangs kicks or the Coiled Altar kick adds that are alive for like a full minute
with like a detailed kick rotation?
Like, bro, it would be so much fucking harder if you didn't have that stuff.
And then on top of that, you have like fucking arrows pointing you where to go on Cizerak
And on on it like it's it legit is like the old like exorcist Gul'dan like weak aura stuff like just
Just complete nonsense, right?
I
Am really happy that our add-on guy is Jesus like actually Jesus Christ. He is him
He just
The only time he talks is he's like I know why that went wrong. I'll fix it reload less than 10 seconds
It's fixed or like hey, can you make this? Yeah sure. I'll work on it next poll. It's ready like just actual legit real Jesus
But even then it's still just
It's just so frustrating man
That it's even such a thing cuz like you just can't even I may be like if you're gonna give Blizzard some credit
You'd be like, okay. Well, they're gonna run into a boss like let's say you couldn't possibly make a kick out on anymore
And then you had to do a boss like Twin Fangs
obviously nerf. Well, I mean, you can do without on Twin Fangs. We did it on PTR, actually.
We tested Natty Waze, which was like, you whisper the person in front of you and ping
their character in your kick macro. But that's like so much fucking harder, by the way. But
even on like Coil Valter, like just, you would, you would have to wipe to a kick
mechanic and then they'd have to nerf it and then they'd learn going forward what
kind of kick mechanics are too hard without add-ons. And they just haven't run into
that yet because we can still make them.
Max was ulotech possible to kill week two?
Uh possible probably but like way fucking harder.
Um like to me doing p2 in time without that extra reset of gear would be like fucking
Insanely hard like it would be so hard, but yeah, probably
Do you think using a private tournament realm? Oh my god the stream just started how long has it been?
45 minutes. We're going for a speedrun.
Did it feel good to win when you made a decision to gearless characters?
I guess, did it feel good to win? Answer that question, yes.
When you made a decision to gearless characters?
I think the less characters thing felt really bad.
Like I'm going to be completely honest with you.
When we were in the middle of week two and we were just fighting bosses that were way
harder than other guilds because we were doing them minus a couple eye level.
We were also being very greedy with what we sent and we probably should have sent earlier
Would have saved us some time on coiled altar for sure, but like I
Think they were all thinking like man two more extra characters going into this tier would have fucking made me feel way better right now. I
So I don't know exactly. I don't know if it really felt great to do that
I still it would be so great the only that feels bad is that you have less characters than other guild
But the thing is is every guild wants to play less characters. So what I'm saying is we need to all make less characters
I don't know why this can't happen other guild leaders and and brethren. Let's just make like guys
Let's just make ten characters, right? Like why fucking not?
It would be amazing just make ten guys do ten splits and and if the bosses are too hard
They'll nerf them to whatever gear we have
It makes this so much better for all of us
Anyways that
What was the other thing you asked?
Is this potentially affecting the amount of characters you're rolling into next year?
I don't know how many characters you're doing next year.
Ideally we have very few, and so does every other guild, but I can promise you after doing
one tier of running less characters than your opponents, there's a reason we haven't
done that before, and it feels really, really fucking bad.
It feels really, really bad, man.
Ten is already so much.
Well, I mean, okay, I still think you need a decent amount of characters because you still need to like have items like no
No, we're used to like really geared characters now
Did really suck to go into a tier doing zero splits and like literally everyone's character is complete and total dog shit
Like no one even wants to play a dog shit guy
So like you'd want to have enough splits to at least feel like you're geared like you'd have less like amazing items off
The last two bosses, but as long as that was true across all the guilds is chill, you know
Are you eating and sleeping now that the race is over?
Yeah, I had a big ass sleep last night.
What do you think about the Echo Twitter crash house? I already answered that.
What are you going to do an unbanned requestering?
Do you think it's weird Blizzard didn't give an ETA on the pool strat fix and said you can both do it while the fix wasn't live?
No, because I think that's just they were doing with whatever they could like they basically had a talk in the office
And they're like do we want this to be a way people kill the boss and they're like no
So they decided to fix it which again is an interesting choice to make because let's just say this happened
Let's say
they fixed the pool strat and
Non pool strat was much harder and let's say it took our guilds another like two hours to kill the boss like something throughout the tier
It happened to where everyone was two hours later
and
Then like echoes going in the pool while we learned the non pool way because they say like okay
You can kill it like this and it would be a totally correct decision for echo
Or just keep trying to do it because they could kill it any pole and then imagine they fix it
that after Echo hasn't done the other way
and then now we easily win
because we have multiple reps doing it the other way
or something, that would feel really shitty.
There's a reason when they do race world first nerfs,
they try not to disadvantage any team that has like,
for example, if there's a team that's consistently
through P2 or something,
they're not gonna nerf P2
if the other guilds aren't at that point.
They usually do nerfs that will about equally affect
every guild based on how many times they've pulled
the boss or stuff like that.
Like Tindral Seeds.
Tendril seeds were the most unbelievably overtuned thing of all time, and should have been nerfed from the beginning.
But because us and Ekko were able to get through them kinda, they couldn't really nerf it, because if one guild was better than the other guild out of it, that would like affect competitive integrity.
So like that's how they do nerfs, right?
I think this one was kind of on the line.
Like, the other way to do it was really easy, but I could definitely see a scenario where they nerf it after Ekko dumps a bunch of time into it, and then we don't, because we just woke up later.
And then they, they like, I don't know, I can see that have been really weird, right?
Um, and then yeah, usually, I mean, what was the exact thing?
We want to give advance notice that we're working on a hotfix to allow
caustic waves to hit players in the water surrounding Ulotec.
Okay.
So, I mean, they just posted that because they're letting you know they're doing it.
The alternative to that, because they don't have it ready yet.
They're not waiting to put it in.
They're trying to make the hotfix work.
So, yeah, I don't know, it'd be a weirder if they didn't post it, and then they just did it live.
They were like, this has now been hotfixed. I feel like the advance notice is nice.
Max what would have happened to the morale if you lost they would have been worse
But I don't think it would have hit us like a truck because I feel like we were playing I
Feel like the the whole tier people were like dude
We could definitely lose this race like we are not playing well at all
I feel like we never really talked about that but that had to be what everyone was thinking
Like I had already like kind of accepted losing this race because like during the race
something like bro we were so fucking complacent we absolutely deserve to lose
this race and then so if it happened I would have been like that makes sense
you know he said mural not morale yeah I know but I just assumed it was like
miss Bell or something I could answer the mural version of the question but
Or the yeah, I don't know. I
Just love reading X after someone it's called Twitter after someone wins the race world first
Fanboys on both sides have the largest amount of brain rot. Yeah
I mean, I just don't even usually say anything because it's just you're just gonna get the worst takes from the dumbest people
But again, Skype is a beast. He's he just doesn't care
He'll fight them all day, which is really really like not even I'm not even meaning. It's very admirable
Like I fucking wish that was me. I wish I just could PvP them all day and not care about it
Max if we had heroic week would have made it felt better having less characters
It would have felt significantly worse if there was a heroic week if we had less characters
I
Preach saying that when you guys did it in less polls was sad. I have no idea what Preach said, but
The less polls thing is kind of a meme like we were like EU this year
Like we literally just woke up every day and just fucking stole what they were doing because we were playing like dog shit the whole race
We didn't like do anything on our own bro
We literally just woke up and had to do whatever they were doing every day. It was like a morning ritual
So the reason we had less poles is because whenever you're doing that you just spend less poles because they freaking shit out for you
Which is also why playing bad is like kind of okay as long as it's not in the last couple days even though it feels really bad
Max, do you think if they didn't try the cheese strat, they would have won?
I'm not sure.
They had a lot of pulls with the cheese strat where they were just off the damage or had
deaths and stuff, which probably would have been the case if they also stayed on the
platform.
But knowing how the bugs worked, it's very retroactive thinking or hindsight thinking.
Like, yeah, I mean, for example, if two people randomly
get a spread circle that weren't expecting one
and you're not all sitting in the lava,
you would just like spread them out and you would live.
But like, I feel like that's one of the very bad takes
NA fans are giving Scrype, which I mean,
I do expect people to give Scrype not the benefit
of the doubt because he's putting himself in a situation
where people are going to think that he is like,
you know, being a crybaby,
so they're just gonna like keep owning him.
But like that part is kind of stupid,
like well you could have just done this other strat the whole time it would
have happened but like when they made that decision there was no way to know
that information and either those people know that and don't care or they
don't know that and are just saying things but it's really frustrating either way.
Do you expect mythic splits next here? Right now with no changes to the loot
system. I think it just kind of depends. Like this tier, the reason everyone did mythic splits was
because we got done with splits like on the weekend instead of like Thursday night or Friday morning.
If they make a raid that doesn't take as long to clear with splits and we're done with them by
Friday again, I'm honestly it's gonna be pretty hard to make the decision of fully
committing mythic splits when you have like four days left in the walkout honestly.
Max, you were saying pre-raid that two target cleave classes are going to pop off.
That seems mostly correct.
Did any spec or class miss the mark from where you expected it in the race?
Yeah, arms warrior.
Arms warrior was not nearly as good as we thought it was going to be.
We were potentially going to run like three or four of those on the last two bosses.
And part of it was they just made the fights to where you wanted a different damage profile,
specifically spread out to target cleave on both bosses and there's being a
shitload of little ads you needed like basically moonkins took their spot but
shadow priest is way better than I thought if we would have made any comp
changes we would have brought a shadow priest instead of the second moon can I
think. Max, with their sub 5% wipe, would you say it came down more to comp? I don't
know enough about that. I haven't seen their low pulls. I don't know if they wiped to damage.
I find it very hard to believe they wiped to damage ever. Like they probably wiped to
deaths. Like if everyone lives I just can't see how you would ever wipe the damage. You
could probably kill that boss with 10% more HP if you optimized.
going to BlizzCon? Yeah, I mean, I live pretty close. So I'll probably scoot over
there one day. I think I'm streaming from BlizzCon. And I think I also, Scott said
something like this, I never know what I'm doing until it happens. But I think
I think we're interviewing someone on stage. So hold out for that. But I don't
know when or who or if that's true.
With Skype.
Dude, yeah, that would be fucking amazing.
Can you imagine me and Scott and Skype interviewing a developer and then Scott and I sit there
silently in fear as Skype kills them?
Bro, that would be so scary.
Max, do you think the pool strat is either than the normal way if they never hotfix it?
I don't know, we never really got to try it.
Like we tried to do it one pull right at the very end,
but we wiped to something else, and then we never did it again.
Max, what made you decide to go double rogue?
They just did the most damage.
I think rogue's the best class on that fight.
Well, the rogue is the best class on that fight
after the singular moon.
Can you need to break the eggs in time?
But then it's rogue.
And AUG, oh yeah, AUG too.
Second AUG might have been better than something as well.
Is Windwalker just a best mystic touch spec?
Yes.
I mean Windwalker wasn't bad, but yeah, it's definitely was like the least bad thing
of all the monks.
Max, do you think stacking Soaks is what made P3 so easy?
Yeah, I think if you had 12 spreads every single time, it would have made it harder for sure.
I mean, yeah, last platform.
I feel like on the very last platform, though, you would have never done that.
If you could have Venn diagramed, but it was way less punishing, I feel like on the
Last platform you would have done it, honestly.
Like even if it meant resing the players basically,
if it was like too much damage to ever heal.
With stacking soaks, you would have just killed
it the night before.
Nah.
Honestly, we might have lost
if we had stacked the soaks the night before.
Cause if we had like a 15% wipe,
would have been really, or a 10% wife, it would have been really hard to go to bed.
And then also, Echo would know at that point how capable it was, which they
wouldn't until they got there themselves.
Maybe that changes their motivation.
Also, like, certainly we would have problem solved some things that they
wouldn't have to problem solve themselves.
They went through a few hours of figuring that out.
People are shitting on Echo and really poured their heart into something that's not enough.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Yeah, I don't really know how well Echo played this tier.
What I mean by this is like, I feel like if anyone is ever saying Liquid is playing
bad, Liquid is playing amazing.
Echo is playing amazing and Echo is playing bad.
I feel like all of this is said purely out of the relation of how well or not well they
are doing in relation to the other guild, and that's it, right?
I don't think fans really have much of a way to really see that.
Oh, they kill the boss in less pulls.
They kill the boss faster.
But that could be because a guild played great or the other guild played bad, right?
I know what it feels like to be playing well and Echo to be playing fucking crazy well
and you lose because of that, right?
tier we were so so fucking bad that that is why I don't think Echo had like an
absolutely amazing tier because if they did if they if we fought the version of
Echo we know we've played against in the past where we were playing well and
they were like fucking incredible they would have won by like three days bro
we were we were dog shit for most of this rate if they were like at their
absolute best I think the reality is it probably like they had a normal tier
for them, and we were just absolutely horrible, so it made it look like they were playing insane.
But like I think from a viewer's perspective, it's really, really hard to like parse exactly
which one of those two is happening.
Why do you think you guys weren't playing up a standard?
I already answered this earlier at the beginning of the stream.
Max, when the Ocarina of Time Remake gets released, wait, when does that come out?
out of time.
Are you going to hang out with Roger during BlizzCon?
I mean, I hung out with Echo people with BlizzCon last time.
So I'm not quite sure.
I mean, I know we're playing them in the first round of the,
like, MDI at BlizzCon.
It's basically there's four teams playing and it's single limb.
So there's like, I think like three or four games or something.
I don't know if there's like a third place game, but yeah.
We're basically playing, so because the other team, Dignitas, they're playing the Chinese team, and Liquid is playing Echo.
I think they're called mandatory, but it's Echo, right?
The Liquid vs. Echo game is like the non-getting shit on by the Chinese team championship.
The no-China bracket, because the Chinese team is going to beat everyone by a lot.
It won't be close, unfortunately.
So at least before we have to potentially play them,
we can play Echo first.
And then, yeah, I mean, I'm sure
it will be at the same thing for that.
And yeah, I'm sure we'll talk.
I mean, honestly, it's gonna be weird though,
because like this is a race where I think
they feel really weird about losing,
and it makes sense for a lot of reasons.
And typically in the past,
there's never quite been like a full understanding
of every race where both guilds feel like the right thing happened.
Sometimes you just don't talk about it and it's chill.
But I think one thing that's cool is there's shared experiences.
You're one of the few people that have gone through things
that other people have gone through.
I mean, also, everyone's drinking.
So you get along.
It's usually fine.
But also, maybe there will be a fistfight
and that would be fun.
Maybe like THD will just start swinging on some random echo player.
He's, he's, uh, he's hard to read.
It's a Cuban thing. Yeah.
I mean, T.H.D. likely isn't going.
Like, T.H.D. doesn't leave his house unless he is contractually obligated to.
Max, you previously said you love the problem solving process of the race.
Do you feel like you missed out on that this time?
some on the macro level but not in like the like the problem solving is the stuff you hear us talking
about in between each poll which is usually some kind of small change like one thing on Ullatech was
watching the vods of everyone who died to a wave in p1 and trying to see if there was a way that
they could consistently live that set since they're kind of deterministic and we saved a lot of
wipes by coming up with ways to do that like that's just an example uh coiled altar absolutely
as well but like macro level strap making kind of because we just like didn't do it
It's as if we didn't do PTR testing, by the way.
It was as if we walked up to every boss
and had not looked at their dungeon journal before.
That was like our preparation for this raid.
Why do you think there was so much less prep for the already I'm said earlier?
What does it take to become an add-on guy for a guild like Liquid?
Be Jesus.
At least that's recent.
Dude, I need chat.
I need another game to play on my couch to just decompress from the race and not be
near a computer.
I'll give you some examples of games I've played previously.
one I hadn't played an assassin's creed game in a while and I played like the black flag
remix and I was like all right this is kind of cool but like I haven't played a recent
assassin's creed game in a while so I just played assassin's creed shadows downloaded
that the game was awesome was really fun but I need like a I need something need something
to like like hardcore on the couch hang out just hang out with my dogs which by the
Lily got one of her last doses of chemo the other day.
Her white blood count was not insanely ideal,
but she's powering through. She's a good girl.
Well, fingers crossed, well, sorry, I should be more clear.
She has a form of cancer that is not going away.
It is, unfortunately, in dogs, it will absolutely spread to her lungs.
All chemo does is delay that.
So it's not like a thing, like fingers crossed, it'll go away.
never going away, unfortunately. But we do think it will like meaningfully extend her life, so.
All right. And that's her, by the way. Let me show you a picture of her,
because I'm trauma dumping right now. Here you go. Look at this baby girl. Hi, Lily.
Max, what's your opinion on the fact that currently 70% of the guilds in the top 800
are running splits? Is that a real number? Like it's that widespread. Dorkylinked a
reddit thing. Okay. Last season there was a lot of talk about splits. Many guilds
increased the number. Many people still claim in this day that nobody besides the
top 10 or 50 is doing splits. No one does that except idiots. I have built
RaidSplit tracker pages.dev that uses historical data from Radar.io to check
this. As you can see in the tables my claim in is ever-growing. This is
further is really further than it ever should have been. The lower guilds have
only decided to do a few more of them. TLDR over 81% of the guilds in the top
400 or bracket are doing splits over 90% in EU. This is not counting guilders
private of their pulls or not tripping Raider IO at all, which is most of
them. This is even excluding the top 50 and Dragonflight season one less than
half we're doing splits.
Oh, wait, so since Dragonflight to now,
instead of 80% of the guilds doing it, it was 38%.
It's doubled since Dragonflight?
Bro, that.
OK, dude, honestly, I love hearing that.
And let me tell you why.
Obviously, I don't love hearing that.
It sucks for you all, but I'm me, and I don't really care.
Here's why I love hearing that,
because that's enough people it's becoming enough of a problem to where Blizzard might actually fucking do something about it where if it only affects the people at the top they never will
Dude, please blizzard
I mean we've talked about this before dude I've talked to the end before and like like first global he just says like alright how can we fix splits like obviously they
They're like, what can we do to have you guys stop doing splits, basically, is the answer.
And really, you don't really have an answer.
And by the way, this is a friendly reminder that I'm not asking for yours right now because it's wrong and you don't have one.
Do you have any place who struggles with eye issues playing so long during the race?
race, actually me. But if I put on like blue light filtering glasses, my eyes feel fine.
But if I don't, they are absolutely burning by the end of the day.
Yep, love my zenies!
Was capping the amount of raid lockouts per, oh my God, how long have I been streaming?
Alright, someone said that Teddles had an interview with someone that answered some questions
about raid difficulty.
I kind of want to look at that.
Max, how did Teddles end up with your jersey?
I don't know, dude, I'm just going to share something with you guys.
If he sees this, this is going to be the most random slander ever.
But when I went back into my like discord, right, as post random things
to find a picture of Lily for you all, the picture right above it is JB
gaming in the closet in that one blood legion doc from like the early 2010s.
And I've been looking at it on my other monitor every now and then for
the past like five minutes and I have to show it to you all.
I'm so sorry, JB.
Jeb, if you see this, I'm so sorry that I'm posting you hitting the shrimp on Twitch.tv,
but it's just, it's fucking insane.
The posture's fucking nuts, bro.
Speaking of JB, by the way, he had an amazing tweet today.
don't understand how impossible it is to make bosses hard enough to one challenge
echo and liquid but also be killable and to also thoroughly test these bosses
it's like trying to make a cage that can hold Superman for exactly 72 hours but
also Superman has analysts just just at a very average routine JB Twitter
bagger. All right, where's this Teddles thing? I mean, it's just got to be on his YouTube.
I got to ask wow devs
wait hold on his titles fucking popping off on twitter reason or on youtube
i had a really bad rate night four days ago one hundred thirty seven kv's i got
to ask wow devs the most important questions eighty six kv's one hundred
thirty one
i mean he's kind of going hard
as my channel doing
Maximum clips
140s
Dude, I love this channel in particular
Because absolutely zero thought goes into this I pay this is not fronk by the way
This is a different editor
That's an absolute beast and he just simply clips me talking on stream that I never think about again
and it just turns into free YouTube money.
It's so beast, bro.
OK, and he's back to the title's thing.
All right, Ian got to talk to Ian and whoever this is.
Very, very handsome man.
All right.
Fantastic news.
Today, I am joined by Paul Cupid.
Oh, wait, we heard Paul Cupid.
Max, recently there's a spike in views since YouTube changed the way it counts viewers.
It's kind of fake now.
Bro, I take whatever I can get.
If I get a viewer increase, it's because I'm better at my job.
All right.
Max, Echo's kill pull was two seconds faster than Liquid's kill pull.
Opinions?
I guess we lost then.
All right, what are the topics here?
We have raid buffs, creating satisfaction.
I'll listen to the questions, and is this an hour-long interview?
You know, I'm over it, whatever.
Let's start it.
It's sort of a hot topic. Everybody speculates things about raid buffs,
whether or not they exist to keep one class in the raid.
Is it true that that is their purpose?
Is it seen as a as a failure on the raid buff system if they don't exist in every single rate?
Wait, hold on. Tettles with fucking heat right out of the gate?
Competition
One class in the raid pick everybody speculates things about raid buffs whether or not they exist to keep one class in the raid
Is it true that that is their purpose?
Is it seen as a failure on the raid buff system if they don't exist in every single raid competition composition rather?
I mean, broadly, I think that is a big part of the function they've served for, like, 15 plus years.
I mean, very early on, like, back in 2004, some of the origins of things like Fort or Mark of the Wild
or whatever, when everyone didn't have them, was more just, you know, the idea of synergy and
support and feeling stronger when you're in a group, you know, when you're in a rage,
you have all these buffs on you, that just makes your character more powerful. There's
or something cool mechanically about that.
But yeah, I mean, in practice, especially in recent years,
I think we view them, we do view them as a bit of a backstop
to ensure that the best raid composition
is a varied raid composition.
If they didn't exist.
How did JB even hit that shit?
You know what I'm talking about?
Like you gotta get some serious fucking lean.
I'm going to pull this out a little bit.
It's like, I have to aggressively try to like fucking,
you know what I'm talking about?
He's hitting like the, I can't even do it.
Look at that turn and plug push this camera down,
or move over maybe.
He's got the like, I can't even do it.
It's like almost impressive the amount of mobility
has in that position.
What a beast.
Just at all, some of this is we know
community meta pressures,
if you're gonna fit seven range DPS into a raid,
well you're gonna take the one or two
that have the best damage profile
or perceived as the highest DPS.
Actually, I think what it is,
is it might be impossible to achieve that posture
in a blacklight chair.
You know what I mean?
Like they're designed in such a way
where you have good posture and you can't actually
even intentionally get into posture like that.
Yes, for this tier and just stack those.
And we, there's people who play every class, every spec.
Ideally we want them to be able to find a home
in groups and guilds and so forth.
And so, you know, while of course we do ongoing balance,
I think that's a little,
like the buffs are a little bit of a backstop
to make sure that if you're a pug leader
putting a raid together and you don't have one of a class,
you should be looking for the class you're missing
before you're looking to bring the third mage
or the third priest or whatever else.
Now, and you don't have one of a class,
you should be looking for the class you're missing
before you're looking to bring the third mage or...
That's not true.
That's not true for a few reasons.
Number one, every time you bring a new evoker,
you gain meaningful raid utility,
plus one times viral, plus one rescue, plus one Zephyr.
Like it is, it is extra, like, and it is, there's plenty of scenarios where that is better than bringing the single of something for sure.
Oh, he's saying pugs. Okay, hold on, hold on.
Well, of course, builds and so forth.
And so, you know, well, of course, we do ongoing balance.
I think that's a little, like the buffs are a little bit of a backstop to make sure that if you're a pug leader putting a raid together, and you don't have one of a class,
class you should be looking for the class you're missing before you're looking to bring the third
age or the third priest or whatever else. That's probably true. Like I think the most obvious
issue with that is death knight and maybe this tier especially that way because DK and EPS are so
bad but there's also a ton of blood DKs so like even though you don't need grip on every fight
or any fight in heroic Vashnik I bet you'd like put a DK in your comp because you might
end up pulling Vashnik though, you know?
Dude, fun Vashnik fact. It's actually easier to do the Vashnik in quotes cheese on mythic than
heroic because on mythic it only ramps by 100% every time you go to the same thing over and over
again and on heroic and normal it's 200%. No one knows why. Why is it easier on mythic?
Yeah, they take different forms. Some of them are just you know.
No, they changed it on Heroic.
Oh, OK.
Well, that's how it was when we did the bosses, though.
Passive stat buffs or direct stat buffs.
Others, I think, have a clear utility effect.
I know there's been a lot of debate in the past of, like,
does Death Grip count as a raid?
And it's like, no, it's not a traditional raid buff.
But it's very much a reason to brain a death knight.
The reality is that some of those utility effects,
though.
I mean, you can only be thinking
about that in terms of a pug when you're
planning on just going through the whole raid.
In a mythic grade, that's not how it works at all.
You don't need DKs for anything in this raid
until the very last phase of Ullitech,
which is like low key Galiwix P2.
You don't even need a DK in the last phase of Ullitech,
by the way, if they have zero HP,
you can just have your range swapped to them.
They have less HP than the X-Hat and Heroic
when they don't move.
Really only matter at our scene
at the highest levels of cooldown.
You want them for Vashnik?
We killed Vashnik in a split without a DK, I'm pretty sure.
And also you want them for Nermissa?
That's true.
But by the way, I feel like people are not talking enough about how we also got world-first
Nermissa this year.
Pregnated play.
I'll say it.
Like, yeah, when you're putting together a mythic raid comp, you might need an extra
skin feeding roar, and that might justify a specific inclusion.
You might need a second grip.
Generally, when someone is forming a heroic pug or an AOTC pug or whatever, though,
that's not going to be the way they're viewing it.
And so part of what we've seen is that even if death grip might get definitely a slot
in high-end cutting edge rating, it's not necessarily going to translate.
I'm pretty sure Kithix would be 10.
I mean, we're not going super hard for Kithix.
Without something else to back it up at all levels.
Sure.
Are there specific considerations for things like you're kind of saying with DK, maybe
even a Voker with blessing of the bronze?
They don't have a standard upfront power gain kind of buff.
Is there extra effort that kind of goes into making sure
that those are valuable pieces of a holistic RAID comp?
Yes, I mean, like ultimately, right?
We look at balance through two lenses.
One is the raw numbers like, you know,
Warcraft logs and community perception and all of that,
but then also just representation.
And I think what matters most at the end of the day
to us is representation.
Whether it's dungeons, raids, pvp, those can all be different ecosystems, but you know,
someone has their favorite spec, whether it's because of the fantasy or the mechanics that
they enjoy, the moment-to-moment rotation, and they shouldn't feel...
You know, when I hear people say class fantasy, it's kind of a meme, but it is such a
real thing.
And the prime example of this is there was like a guy in a racial world last guild
was playing a Windwalker Monk and he was hitting the fucking IRL Fist of Fury, mid Fist of Fury
channel, killing like a mythic end boss. And that's when you know that actually like probably
a lot of people choose a class because they're just straight fucking about that shit.
So like they can find home in the content of their choosing. And if that's not happening
for us, like that's one of the biggest warning signs that we need to do something. And
So, you know, rate buffs are like T H D T H D has had skulls in his bedroom, his his uncle
or something or stepped out.
I forget exactly who it is.
Someone very close to him as a witch doctor.
So he just ended up being a warlock.
One of the surest ways towards it.
It's a cute thing, but it's not the only way.
If there's a spec that doesn't have a clear like throughput buff, but we see them consistently
well represented, we probably consider that fine.
And that has been the answer for something like DK for a long time,
where, you know, we might have taken action had community trends look differently.
But generally, when we feel that, hey, if you're playing the spec
and you're looking to find a group, you're looking to find a home in your content of choice.
OK, everyone's complaining about DK, but we saw the data that everyone was like playing DK.
So we thought that wasn't true.
Yes, but also they happen to be extremely fucking good
for like the two tiers surrounding that instance, you know?
I think people are worried about the scenario
where they're really bad and they don't get brought
where if another class is really bad,
they do because they have the buff.
But like, it was just right after they made that change,
it just so happened that even if Deathgrip wasn't
even an ability, you would have played two DKs
because they just did infinite dam couldn't die in,
never could be moved in any way,
which was really important for a few raid tiers.
Interestingly enough, didn't you guys notice that was like kind of not a thing this raid tier like scissorak?
Maybe but like it's a piss one-shot boss, right like I feel like
The I feel like the last like two years honestly, I feel like every boss it was like death's advance was the most broken
The most broken ability in the game because every boss was just doing crazy movement shit in this tier
just like that. That randomly was just like missing. If you can find that home, I think
we're all dead. Very fight profiles are another, you know, big way that we make sure that we
do have representation from all different classes and specs as well. You're going to
be good at something, you're going to be good at spread cleave, you're going to be
good at single target, what have you. And, but yeah, it's, you know, put it that
the, the rate buffs are a nice backstop. Ask about the two target cleave the whole
rate. You know, you can avoid those incentives to just stack for like, okay, if this is
spread cleave fight then we're gonna want to stack spread cleave this way and of course we could
make every fight say well you know there's a little bit of single target and a little bit of AOE
and a little bit of spread and so on but then your fights start to become homogenized. Would I
look sick like Paul if I had a little gray in the beard? Like would it be one of those things
where I look more intelligent because I've like I'm more experienced or would it make me just
look like oldest fuck. Like could I pull it off? You know what I'm saying? Like not a lot of gray,
but like enough gray where you're like okay he's like been through some stuff. He like knows about
what to do here because he's experienced more of life. You'd look even more like you host game
What the fuck does that mean?
What is game changer?
I have no idea what kind of a fucking...
this guy?
Sometimes I actually like fucking hate you guys.
I'll keep it a bug.
It's a little more interesting world to have varied fights where you do have opportunities
for folks to shine and then raid buffs just make sure that everything stays well with
the band.
And I'm mad.
And now I'm mad.
Just a quick follow-up on that.
You guys use the word homogenized and I think that that's a perfect word.
Do you think that raid buffs that were more like group utility base such as like Stamping
Roar, Gateway, Death Grip, Darkness, like-
Hey, that was a real fucking thing this year.
We were going to play two Druids on the last boss even though the second Druid spec wasn't
like the best before like, this was before you saw how many Moon Kins you needed.
We thought you only needed one.
You actually probably did only need one in week two.
week two of the of the boss but I uh we wanted we thought that Ulitec on
heroic you would have lost a lot of polls if you only had one win rush and one roar
and i still feel that way i've started thinking about that more and more as
like tears go on that like if druids and shamans aren't really strong
sometimes like you'll take a lot of polls off of a boss by just having an extra
movement speed thing. And time spirals kind of deal with that, but they also kind of don't.
And evokers are just always really OP for some reason, but I feel like movement speed is really
underrated in RAID comp building when you're usually just trying to increase your DPS as much
as you can. That kind of stuff, do you think that those are more interesting than say the
conventional style where like Mark of the Wild went sky fury, whatever?
I mean, yes, but I think as noted earlier, you know, there's a lot of groups that aren't
coordinating or doing content that requires that level of coordination such that if the
only thing you bring is, you know, one of those utility buffs, you know, many people
many groups just aren't going to value that enough and it's not going to achieve a representation
goals.
He's talking about heroic, by the way, like normal and heroic, I think pretty frequently
in Mythic, he makes the assertion that you should try to have one of everything.
So if we could get there through Just Utility, then that would be awesome.
But it also makes it important, if you're focused on a specific dungeon, you're focused
on a specific boss, not every one of those tools is going to matter on that boss.
And so if the only reason you're being brought is for that tool, that again can
be a problem.
So that's kind of let us down the path that we're on.
Sure.
But yeah, but that's a stampeding row or our dope.
left things like that. Oh comparing death grip and stampeding roar. Actually I think those are like pretty
I think the difference is like stampeding roar is kind of always nice but like stampeding roar never
has the death grip thing where it's like they've designed a fight to where if you don't have this
you're completely fucked but maybe the reason you feel that way is because mark of the wild
exist, you always have one in your raid anyway. But those are like similar and different, you know?
Make your class feel unique, special, you're thankful when your warlock puts down a gate
or cookies and whatnot. Yeah. Okay, something that I really wanted to talk about is how to
keep players satisfied. World of Warcraft has been around for a really long time. And as a personal
player, it feels like WoW has kind of been moving away from the friction of like traditional
MMOs, where the focus really is heavily into in-game activities like Raiding Mythic Plus.
While early season with alts, it feels great not being burdened with chores, but over time,
players want to maybe sometimes focus on like having one really big character, right, and progress
their main. Where characters power, it's kind of weird where they sometimes don't log in,
well they'll log in, and they don't feel like they have a lot of stuff that they're compelled
to do, even though on paper there's more activities than ever. One of the most important
aspects I think is kind of like watching it's like an RPG element where you watch
your power increase and so like it feels like Blizzard's been making attempts to
fix this with systems like the Omnifolia and the Turbo Boost but within my
circle these have felt sometimes a little bit unsatisfying you log in once
and you're done is there he's kind of throwing me any choice of like steering
the ship back in you know maybe a more traditional MMORPG sense are you
kind of looking to give players who like love investing time into one
character, that or is the current state of the game actually being just changed and what modern gaming is is very different?
That's a great question. I wish there were a straight forward answer to it. I think it's like,
there's like, there's that exact tension that you describe and I think, you know, some of the pendulum
swings over the years in systems like borrow power and how we approach progression have kind
kind of reflected us, you know, trying to focus on one portion of that audience at times,
and then hearing enough negative feedback from the other portion that we kind of like swung
things back in the other direction. But yeah, I mean, for someone who isn't necessarily
an altaholic, they love playing the game, they want to log in, they want to feel like
they're accomplishing power progression goals with their time spent, and they want
to go deep on one character. Yeah, something like Legion was perfect because, right,
You could always get a bit more AP.
I'm like, we had this diminishing return system,
so you weren't like way, way stronger than other people.
But that effort mattered,
but that comes directly at the expense of the feeling
that someone who has less available time has,
but even more prominently,
feeling the people who wanna play multiple characters have,
where it feels like if you,
you're splitting your time between alts,
now all of them are falling behind as a result.
And so, yeah, I mean,
we looking at the state of power progression
over the course of the season.
Right now, from an RPG progression perspective,
it's too front-loaded.
Like your players are getting probably like 90%
or more of the power that they're going to get
over the course of the season
in the first four to six weeks,
if they're really hardcore about the content they're doing,
maybe a few weeks longer if they're less so.
But like, and so like part of us would love
to have a smoother progression curve
over the course of those months.
it also solves some other problems,
like feeling like gear can help you overcome challenges
that you're struggling with.
And so I think like because gear is so front loaded,
we need to do things like progressive raid buffs
or systems like the Omnifolia
or just targeted blanket nerfs to help groups
that are missing and can't meet a DPS check
feel like there's hope on the horizon
that something's gonna help them over that hump.
It used to be that you just keep getting stronger,
statuallize or gear-wise.
And like, typically you're close to saturation
But the flip side is, that's amazing for all of us, as you noticed.
People want to play different characters, they want to jump in, you take some time off,
you want to catch up and feel like you can actually play with your friends,
instead of feeling like, well I missed the first couple months of the season,
I guess I'll see you guys in four months because I'm too far behind.
All of those are huge downsides of the other end.
And so we debate this a lot.
I hope, you know, like I would love, hopefully when, you know, this conversation kind of trickles out and fans out across the community, I can't wait to hear all the discussions around this exact topic.
And, you know, what players from different perspectives, what years they've liked and what ideas they might have for what they think would feel satisfying to them, because it, you know, we could use help, frankly, it's a tough problem.
I think that was a good answer.
I mean, I've specifically talked to him about Legion and stuff like that and like where the game, like such a drastic turn away from it.
And he had like pretty similar to this conversation he's had with him, like pretty insightful answers on like how there is no one best thing.
And I also think it's just like one thing could be amazing for one player.
Like there's there's some players in the game that would love this game so much more of artifact power never left.
And there are so many players that would absolutely hate this game if artifact power stayed
and
They have to do something that I think is doable for everyone or making the least amount of people mad
So that's part of the issue with wow
Being something that's so many different groups of people are into for different reasons is it's really hard to make the game
Just fucking amazing for any one of them
Yeah, and just to add on to that, this is not an area where when we look at the state
of how you get gear from mythic lesson rates now added in things like the omnium folio or
even the cork.
Oh, someone else asked, where is it?
Max, why is it a bad thing to be done with a season if you play one character and
take a break from while and play something else until next season?
So first of all, there's nothing wrong with that.
In fact, if you were to, there's no official study on this,
but if you were to find out who the most happy
wild players are, those are those people.
People who play wild while it's fun for a season
and hang out with their friends,
and then they kind of move on for a few months
and then come back for the next one.
Like, typically the unhappiest people
are the ones that are trying to have it
be the only thing that entertains them for six months.
Now, it's bad, you ask who's it bad for?
It's bad for Blizzard when you do that.
That's the reason they want your sub, right?
Why do you think they want you to log in at the start of every month for the trading
post or why do you think they add so many extra things in the 0.5 and 0.7 patch now?
Because they want to appease those players and they want to turn you into someone that
is using WoW all six months for your entertainment before the next season comes out.
But it's also really hard to do that.
It's really hard for any game to do that, by the way, unless you're just, like,
not familiar with a lot of other games and genres and stuff, but Max, I'm
I'm a very happy person and I play WoW without taking breaks, okay?
All right, whatever you say, bro.
It's cool.
Rose of Codex in Curse of More Tech and whatnot,
that this is sort of the agreed upon.
Like, this is how itemization or progression will always work.
We're always gonna keep making adjustments.
We're always gonna keep listening to feedback
that comes from-
This is completely not related to this topic right now.
But can we talk about how at the end of season one,
Everyone was saying Method is like going to win the race and more specifically, because
this isn't Method Slander, how everyone was saying what happened to Echo?
What's wrong?
Where's Echo?
What's happening?
And literally the only thing that happened was Echo prioritized doing their splits in
a different order where they did more two out of eight mythics before doing Vashnik
and they ended up with more gear than anyone else after the first week.
So they literally did splits the best.
the narrative was, where is Echo? How is Echo doing this and also methods on a heater?
Can we just talk? Have you guys acknowledged like any caught any people caught in chat?
You're like, fuck, that was me. I'm totally like, like, what happened with
with that? You know, like I, I swear that was like the narrative was everywhere.
And like that first mythic week, bro, like
Look the echo slander was crazy
Max I just always wanted liquid to win and didn't care about anything else lol
It's not that deep bro my goat the community and also just injecting novelty into the also
That's you guys by the way, and you just really just want liquid to win
And I'm sorry for what you had to witness for the first two weeks of this race.
I promise you it wasn't fun doing it either.
I know it probably wasn't fun watching us be that bad, but yeah, we'll try not to do that again.
Because there lies danger when we say we have solved character progression.
This is how it's going to work for forever.
We're always going to be looking for either new ideas or looking back to the past
for inspiration from systems like artifact power or systems from other itemizations tools
that we've used in the past.
So, yeah, it would be great to hear feedback from folks
and also know that these are balancing issues
that we keep in mind as we're starting to plan
what we're building next.
Perfect answer.
I think that that kind of encompasses
like the satisfaction of what it means to play in MMO.
That's always gonna be a tough thing.
Also kind of keeping in the same vein,
recently the 12.1 patch, there's some gear that is,
in kind of a similar track, like nine out of six myth,
players are starting to dub this as like myth two.
And Ian, you had a recent cyber interview where you-
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dude, I'm gonna be honest,
when I saw them do the nine out of six mythic loot,
I thought there was a like 10% chance
that that actually went live,
because so many people weren't mad about it.
Even though it makes sense, like,
for example, does it make sense
that Coiled Alter on Mythic
would have dropped one mythic track higher
So like instead of three out of six, it would have been four out of six loot than
twin fangs due to its difficulty.
Like no, if you're doing the RPG, like you try to match the difficulty with the
reward, like no, it would be higher than that.
But is it supposed to be nine out of six?
That's a fucking crazy jump.
Like they're not, and they're also doing the very rare thing again.
They're doing the very rare super OP item bit again, but not only that,
They're also just giga-eye level, and even though you could convince yourself from a game design standpoint that something like that makes sense, it's still just so polarizing that I'm surprised they even went through with it, honestly.
Like really, for a lot of player gear is a means to an end staying in line with character progression.
How do you make your gear feel rewarding yet not impede players goals with the content itself?
I know those things like crafting the vault and the catalyst make it hard to feel like you earned the gear,
but also there's like an apathy that some players have, or they're like,
I can't play the game if I don't have it.
I mean, yeah, I think it's an example of a compromise there.
This is so far, 13 minutes in.
Like these first three questions are like all within the top five questions I would want him to ask.
Nice. And there's so many systems.
The give players a deterministic path towards the items that they want.
Void cores being available from the start of the season now, you know,
and I just want to roll out the second half of last season or a piece of that.
So yeah, on the one hand, it's easier than ever to get the vast majority of the year.
Yeah, actually, hold on.
First of all, he looks insanely grumpy in this picture
for some reason, Tettles.
Has he been hitting this frown for like more
than a couple of seconds?
So yeah, on the one hand, it's easier than ever
to get the vast majority of the gear that you want.
I did just pause screen him.
He looks so upset.
Okay, but dude, I feel like you guys,
you guys take Tettles for granted.
Like, Tettles will just say something
a little zany one time,
and you'll just be like, fuck Tettles,
fuck Moonkins, and you just get so mad.
Oh, fucking Wii U Wii U, Tettles made a take, shut up.
Like, you just cannot stand this guy.
And then like when he's his normal self
and just asking good, he's just creating good content,
you're like, dude, I fucking loved it.
Dude, Tettles my goat, I love this guy.
How do you guys switch up so much?
On the other hand, yes, for many players,
gear is a means to an end.
There are other players, including players who do high-end
plus who are doing with the grading
for whom the gear is part of the end.
It's not a whole thing.
Speaking of Moonkins, by the way,
Have they ever been so fucking back in as far as raiding?
I feel like their value on Ullatech, they have not had a boss like this since Sylvanas.
Right, and they want the best loot.
That's part of what's exciting.
It's part of what makes it worthwhile to spend 20 hours wiping through a boss at the
end of a tier with your guild.
You want to feel like you're getting an upgrade for that.
You want to feel like you're getting something particularly powerful.
It is kind of a bummer to clear a tier.
you get your cutting edge achievements,
maybe you can get your Hall of Fame achievement
and you're looking at the boss corpse
and it's like, eh, it's actually not,
that part's not that exciting.
And so we wanted to make sure that it was
and that it would be.
These are, it's a small handful of items,
but yet they're meant to be the best around
and that should represent a milestone
for everyone to strive for.
Mythic Plus, pivoting a little bit to Mythic Plus.
Mythic Plus gearing assignment
continues to be pretty low cap
since you're kind of beholden to the vault.
to be able to get myth track pieces of gear,
but yet at the exact same time it's insanely strong
since it's the only source of no lockout hero track gear.
Are there any plans on making like a Mythic Plus vertical
from a gearing perspective,
allowing it to be more consistent
with other gearing options in the game?
I was wondering if you could sort of elaborate
what you mean on Mythic Plus vertical.
I think it sounds like an interesting idea, but.
So like Mythic Plus players, I'll make a pitch.
It's like Mythic Plus players,
They, let's say they get one piece of myth track year a week
from the vault, and then they get half a piece
of myth track year a week from crafting.
You can craft every other week.
And so for them, whenever you compare them
to their peers who are also doing high-end content
and say raid, the people who are doing raid consistently
are going to be getting significantly more loot,
which is, I mean, it's just how it works,
you know, mythic bosses drop mythic pieces of gear.
And also the last two bosses
dropped like next expansions gear, yeah.
There is a level where players are going to be doing a 10,
and they can get a mid-track piece from that.
But players who want to push past that,
the only sense of accomplishment is related
toward achievement-based progression.
You're pushing for your 3,400, you're 0.1% rewards.
While those are, in my opinion, fantastic,
there's no gear that's dashed with it.
At the end of the day, a lot of people just play
because they love the gearing.
And feeling like there isn't like a full vertical
for getting the best track of gear from Mythic Plus.
I've seen that cause strife from people who...
Why does a plus 35 not drop nine out of six Mythic loot?
Let me guys ask you a question.
How many guilds have killed Mythic Google Tech?
Three?
Okay.
How many Mythic Plus teams have timed a plus 70?
this season. Zero, I rest my case. Maybe don't want to step foot into RAID specifically, Aimee.
So I think that there are, it's designed that there are pros and cons of each of these gearing
tracks and a little bit of healthy envy that goes both ways.
So Mythic Plus is harder. How can you argue otherwise?
out or looking at Mythic Plus players early in the season who are like decking themselves out in
in gear, the flip side, yeah, there's some envy that goes the other way obviously. I think one
distinguishing feature of like the high and competitive ecosystems of raids and dungeons
are that like raiding competitions about doing it as early as possible and front-loaded at the
start of the season. Whereas when it really comes down to the wire, you know, Mythic Plus
prestige is at the back end of the season and in that sense the fact that you know it may take
longer it does take longer for a mythic plus player to like acquire something closer to their
best setup through these incremental sources isn't actually out of step with that it's like
yeah I get that everyone wants everything early and then people would prefer to have
more mythic pieces you know week four this season but like whenever it comes down to it
you're not being measured, you're not having to compete in a final sense at that point in the season.
It is much later on. Now, you know, some of that can touch back on some of the nine of six pieces
that we talked about. Yeah. And yeah, it's nothing new that there are a handful of items
from raiding that are desirable for dungeon players, just as there are a handful of items
from dungeons. It's way different than that, right? Both paths can be completed thoroughly.
Like, okay, these two things are not the same. So there are items from raid that Mythic
Plusers will want that hasn't changed but like how much better it is than the alternative has never
been hired dungeon stuff is worse this season it seems relatively and the stuff from raid is like
Astro OP like anything off the last two bosses on mythic is going to make your character a
fucking freak beast compared to being in mythic plus loot even on myth track like and it's never
been bigger it's not even just the very rare dap like in like the first season of like
like Vault of the Incarnates.
You need all the infinity stone pieces.
It has that.
It has all the cantrip items.
And it's like nuclear eye level gap, like it's a-
It all levels without that crossover.
But yeah, if you're pushing for a title,
if you're pushing for the top 0.1% in the entire game,
I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that you consider-
Ooh, okay, Ian, Ian, Ian saying,
if you're trying to push to the 1%
in any part of this game,
it is not too much to ask that you do both.
I think, hold on.
We're here that are desirable for dungeon players,
just as they're hand-hold on.
From dungeons, they're desirable for raiders.
Hold on.
Both paths can be completed thoroughly at all levels
without that crossover.
But yeah, if you're pushing for a title,
if you're pushing for the top 0.1% in the entire game,
I don't think it's unreasonable to ask
that you consider branching out
and using some of the vast network of great players
that you've surely encountered
in your high-key pushing
and also tri-rating.
Did, is he cooking?
One second, let's ask Dorky.
Is he cooking?
Yo, I'm in a key right now.
You're in a key?
Is it a hard key?
Yeah, we're up.
Let's just say 18 murder roll.
Is that high?
It's like mid-core, I would say.
So can you answer can you not like the difficulty of like mythics and things?
Okay, so it's absolutely terrible got it. Okay, but
Okay, I haven't even like talked with you since the end of the race. We haven't done a podcast yet
But I do you have any rebuttal to what
Ian just said it is it is not unfair to ask
People who are trying to push the top point one percent of mythic plus to also raid to to get these items your thoughts
Yeah, but it's not about the difficulty of rating, it's how much of a fucking job and
a chore it is.
Like, bro, you have to apply to guilds, you have to have a resume, you have to make sure
you have experience, you need to interview with them, you need to be there for set days.
Like, bro, I'm just trying to play a fucking video game, I'm not trying to work a goddamn
job.
But aren't you trying to be at the top of the video game?
Yeah, it doesn't mean you're trying to work a goddamn job, like if you're
You're playing League of Legends and you're not out here working a job.
You can still be one of the best League of Legends players about working a job.
Wait, is that true?
Of course.
Is it, though?
Just solo queue.
But like...
Oh, I shouldn't have owned, holy fuck.
All right, all right, I'll let you focus on that, see you later.
I hung up on him.
And...
By the way, I don't...
I'm not familiar with the league scene.
But if you're a waging league, aren't you going to get absolutely turbo blasted by some
dude that doesn't leave his basement?
People who have been able to get title without, you know, without those advantages, but every
bit helps and that's understood.
Like not always.
Like that guy just started playing, but like two people have both been playing for two
years.
One plays for four, four hours after work.
The other one plays 16 hours a day.
likelihood like if you run that simulation like out of a million times
maybe the other player is just like so insanely talented and the guy who's
playing all day every day is just an idiot
wait he's calling one second what's up hold on bro I just wiped you the job
doesn't mean okay I'll be all right I love below these fucking idiots in chat
first of all hold on we're gonna job doesn't mean you can't play 24 hours a
day like you can work you can play 24 hours a day and it's still not a job
There's a difference yep
Yep
That's all they'll say did you oh you fucking hung up. I mean god damn it
Wait what happened with course um
In the same realm of satisfaction actually one talk about expansion launches and patches a little bit in the past
I would say expansion launches for World of Warcraft has meant that everybody was in the same zone kind of the same power and players who
fell out of the game, this was the time where they felt like they had a pretty easy jumping
and point was like the beginning of an expansion.
Something that I've noticed that as expansion launches and patches have gone on, basically
since Dragonfly is kind of when I notice this, they feel very similar where catch-up
is fast, the in-game pillars are all fairly continuous.
Wait, is this argument going to be that it's actually harder for someone to jump
into the game because they feel like they haven't been here since the beginning
of Dragonflight and had had these systems like all like add-on one by one rather
than it just being like brand new?
and everybody can jump in and out as they please.
Now that has resulted in many patches
since Dragonflight, feeling like extensions of a similar.
Yeah, it does.
It feels like Dragonflight too and Dragonflight for you.
For some people, instead of like brand new experiences.
But weren't there problems before that though,
where like the expansions were so different
and it felt like you were throwing away
so many good things just to like start like,
like I know you guys and remember the feeling
of like leveling up in BFA
with the dog shit initial artifact or as a right armor
and you lost like your entire everything
that was cooking by the end of Legion
and it was just gone
and it was like, holy fuck this game feels so much worse
but maybe the argument is it's easier to jump in
because it's all new.
Like someone else.
I think it kind of included that wow as healthy
there was like one continuous evolving game
instead of having massive shake ups
because I remember like the olden days
like going from one to Legion was like an insane
difference just in terms of all of the stuff
that you got.
Yeah, when it comes to resets per patch or resets per expansion, a lot of that is intentional
for sure.
Like you pointed out to make sure that folks have a good jumping on point.
If you are a new player, you want to bring some of your new friends in and you don't
want them to feel like they're already starting miles behind or someone who just dropped
a patch or dropped an expansion wants to jump in, that it's easy for them to be
able to catch up.
But I think what you're talking about is something that we also talk about as
well which is like there is something nice to carry something forward one season
to the next.
if you have invested a lot in the previous season
that you should feel like you have something to carry forward.
We've seen some of that when things like legendaries
in the past, right, where like these are things
which do naturally carry forward from one patch to the next,
maybe even expansion to the next in some cases, I'm sure.
But having folks be able to carry some of that power forward.
So this is something we do talk about
as we look at sort of the cadence of our patches
and our seasons as they roll out.
more broadly speaking, big monumental changes
for the way that gearing works, the way that system works.
I mean, we're going to continue iterating.
I think you're absolutely right that that change
from Warlords into Legion was a huge one.
Ian, correct me on my date if I'm wrong,
but I think there was also a 13 month content gap
between the final patch of...
Pretty close to that, yeah.
Yeah, of Warlords and Legion.
And so there is some correlation there
with the amount of change that you see all happening at once.
There's a lot of changes that you go into World of Warcraft,
but you see them happening in more often updates now,
or more frequent updates where we do.
Puzzlebox is one thing I really didn't want to carry forward.
I feel like Puzzlebox is unfairly hated.
Like, I get you're casting it, but there is a benefit.
You're getting way more fucking stats
than you would get if you didn't cast it.
You're saying like, oh, I wish there were worse trinkets
this patch and I just pressed it and it just worked
instead of casting it, but then you like wouldn't
pop off as hard, you know?
Like for me, there's a few classes I've played
with the puzzle box where like it kind of feels amazing
because you're going so crazy on it.
And like if it had way less stats
because it didn't have a cast,
I don't know, it would feel like kind of whatever.
Although I have weird trinket tanks,
I also really loved playing with that Dathia trinket,
like the one where you like become completely,
can't move for 10 seconds, but like it does insane AoE.
But only because I played classes
that could like move during it.
Like you could set down like a transcend during it.
So you could like,
there was like an interesting little mini game
to like outplay dying to that thing.
Yeah, boon, yeah.
See these types of changes.
So we may be boiling the frog at the same speed.
It's just, you know, noticing it was quickly.
Yeah, I think we just, I mean, with more frequent patches.
Speaking of Teddles, here's a picture of Teddles
after the race.
You guys notice anything?
Besides fired up looking dapper.
Oh, that's weird.
He's wearing my fucking jersey.
Okay, back to the video.
Also the ability to hot fix more.
I think we see it as like,
There's a really broad spectrum of like all the different tools
and time scales we can operate on and how big
and how potentially disruptive it changes.
All right, so there's some things that based on feedback,
we might just hot picks in.
Other things might wait for a minor patch.
Other things, you know, whether it's a class overhaul
or a whole new reward progression system
are gonna be something that we tend to drop in a new season.
And then of course, things that are even bigger
than that, you know, land in an expansion.
But I think with more updates, more patches,
We also have a chance to experiment a bit more
and test drive some ideas,
you know, reflecting like the Crest upgrade system
was rolled out as a dragon flight specific system
in the middle of dragon flight, right?
Like, and that was something that me at the time
built very heavily themed around dragon flight
with the idea of like, if this doesn't work,
we'll just kill it.
And we won't have this going forward,
which is like we have-
It's weird seeing the puzzle box discourse.
I don't remember having anything negative
with Font of Power.
Ooh, real facts.
Isn't Font of Power basically the same thing,
except instead of mastery or whatever its main stat?
But Font of Power was like this really long cast,
but it made you super strong after.
They're both the same thing.
It was twice as long, right?
Could you move while you channeled it though?
You couldn't move?
Was it just that it was more powerful, but it's like do you understand though puzzle box is halfway in between a font
It's half the cast time not as OP, but still way more OP than I don't know
I think there's room for stuff like that in the game
I think blizzard doesn't get enough credit for trinket design because like they could make a bunch of cool trinkets
But if a robot doesn't tell you that it's the best one then like you just will never even know it exists
And you end up just using the ones that are the same every tier
They're like stat sticks or every now and then they come up with a cool one. They've kind of rotated the same for you now
Right like the silken core trinket they just keep remaking that basically
But I don't know I thought they've made some cool trinkets
But the reality is that the trinket says like summons a Zandalari warrior to sweep your foes like 99% of the time
It's dog shit, but if they ever make it really strong
It's like really cool and it's different
you know, but like it just has to come down to tuning.
But I bet like you guys are bored of stat sticks,
but I bet if there was a season where there weren't any
stat sticks that were good, people would miss stat sticks.
Not doing it for a new expansion,
but like actually wanted to use a patch mid expansion
to test it out with a bit more.
Actually, I think that's the right balance for Trinket.
It's like ideally the robot tells you
that your best Trinket setup is like a passive stat stick
and then a Trinket that's like cool and different,
like one of each.
Flexible.
Two creative trinkets is too much.
So that we could either refine it or back away from it.
So really just taking advantage of the flexibility.
By the way, quick shout out.
If you like playing double-on-use trinkets,
you should be institutionalized.
But we have, while being mindful,
that we don't want to completely disrupt the game,
where you just log in one day and suddenly it
feels like something drastic changed out from under you.
Yeah, perfect.
Thank you for that insightful commentary.
I feel like that answered the question perfectly.
Okay, so now jumping into Legendaries and Borrowed Power.
Borrowed Power was a popular buzzword for people to skip this.
Maybe we'll skip this.
Negatively on the game, almost exclusively in like 2022.
There is an interesting question I like to ask them
about Legendaries.
Where the launch of Dragonflight,
there was like kind of a promise
to remove Borrowed Power as we knew it.
Since then, have there been considerations
in order to bring back some long-term player grinds?
Obviously it's gonna be,
People are just going to call it borrowed power.
I don't know if you're going to get away from that.
But from an outside perspective, things
like the Reshy Raps and the Cersei Circle and maybe
in tier sets to a lesser degree are borrowed powers.
So what is the internal line?
And how has that been moving as time has gone on?
Yeah, it's like alternate progression or borrowed power,
however you want to refer to it.
It does exist in some form when
you look at things like, for sure, the Reshy Raps
or Cersei Circle or more currently in the Omnium
right where you have some progression as part of your character, which is going to exist for some time,
and that it will not exist past midnight.
The corrosive codexism were a focused one in patch 4.1 where it's focused on outdoor content,
but still this is something which is going to be focused on 4.1 content
and is not relevant outside of those spaces after that point.
So I think the big difference is what you talked about with those long grinds,
And this touches back on what Ian was mentioning earlier,
where you have that sort of conflict between,
do I prefer to play a single character
versus do I prefer to maintain a stable of alts?
And whenever you have that altered progression,
which feels like it's compulsory,
it's a big part of your progression,
and it also takes a lot of time,
then you start to see some of those pains that we saw.
Back in the Legion era, right?
Or we saw that like, oh, this actually makes it
really hard for a lot of players to make sure
that they're able to play the different characters
that they want to be able to play,
it because of the asks of the system.
And then you'll also see some,
this is actually as informed where the Ami-Ampolio came from
is the amount of work that you're doing to get that
makes sense in the time when it came out in 1207,
where you were just doing a decent amount of work
in that content of that patch
to give your character some reasonable goals
to work towards.
But if you drop in to catch up now,
it's not a huge amount of catch up.
And more importantly, it is account-wide.
So you don't have that sort of-
I remember this.
I wanna do the legendary thing.
Now, talking about legendaries as well, one of the things that showed up a couple of times
in Dragonflight were legendaries with Mizzero and Fear of Lath, both of them seemed to
be, it was so-
Tettles asks something along the lines of, can we ever have legendaries that feel cool
again?
If everyone feels like they have to get it, and because of that, it can't be like
super powerful, like our legendaries really legendary, some shit like that, that's
what I want to know.
It was like they were like disliked by the community because they created this
like weird scene where if you had them you felt like you played the game you
could play the game and if you didn't have them you just like envied all the
people that have them and then you wouldn't log in it has there been any
like thoughts as to how to create legendaries potentially even for like a
midnight expansion and kind of what needs to go into them to make them feel
legendary yet not this like weird thing you have in the middle of the day
just imagine if people had the mentality back in the day that like if
you didn't have Warglaives you just couldn't play the game you couldn't
even log in why why play if you can't have the best gear instantly right like
that's a very like new phenomenon but because of that like if you're going to
make something ultra ultra rare and almost no one has them you can also
make them super fucking powerful it actually would be lame if they were
super rare and they weren't really powerful but like right now just imagine
they actually created something like that and only like two people in the
region a few weeks in to have these legendaries but like they're just
like way more powerful than everyone else everyone would riot but also
Also because of that, legendaries can never feel cool if they have to be balanced.
Yeah, those Dragonflight legendaries were in fact the last legendaries that have reared
their ugly heads in World of Warcraft and so it's been a while.
That is specific to announce at this point in terms of like legendaries coming in the
future but it is something we talk about on the rewards team for sure in terms
of like what best in class legendaries would be.
I think a lot of the benefits of legendaries are for sure.
It's just big and sparkly and orange, right?
And it gives you something to look forward to,
especially if it's something that is particularly iconic
to your class or usable to your class or whatever.
But also it gives your groups something to work forward to,
especially if it's something that comes from group content
like rating and what have you then.
Even if it's not something for you,
if you can get something to outfit your healer or your tank
or one of your DPS members, to make your group stronger,
able to hit your goals better,
then I think there's something awesome about that,
that we're going to work together to get this thing together.
So when we look to designing systems like anything,
but including legendaries, we do look to examples of the past
for like, hey, what do people like about this?
What were the pain points?
How can we do things in a little bit differently
in the future to make sure that it feels novel
and also makes people happy, excited to log in?
The only note that I would add there
is definitely looking at the Dragonflight ones
in particular.
It's an interesting reflection on just the player psychology
that I think probably informs how we would approach
future efforts in that space.
We're like, there's a tipping point.
It was really fascinating to see like
community sentiment around things like Pharrelleth
and Ozero.
Okay, before he answers this though,
I do love the fact, I mean, maybe we're biased
because we were a part of this,
but like no one really knew how the legendary dropped,
but then it was coded to drop
on the first myth that kill in each region.
So like when we killed the boss,
we happen to get the legendary and then Sang got it who like
and then the person who got the legendary would also like got to go do
like content.
They unlocked a quest line that was specific to the thing
and they were like able to like go through that with a bunch of
people in their stream and follow it with them.
And that was like one of the coolest experiences because Sang
is like the person in our guild who tells us all how to quest in the patch. He literally does the
quest a hundred times over on PTR. He fucking loves this game and he was the person that got the
legendary. He got to like unlock this quest line. He was probably the happiest he's ever been in his
life and also everyone was like getting to the community was getting to watch him do it. Like
that was like honestly one of the coolest. I loved how they did that. At least like I know
like the the legendaries were problematic but the way they implemented it was actually like
really cool. Very early on when it was like like literally only a few hundred
people in the world have them or it was a single digit percent of players that
have them overall sentiment was positive like most people didn't have it the
people who did got to feel awesome the people who didn't many of them felt like
hey it's awesome that something like this exists and I can't wait to get it
myself that as that number increased over time right around when you got to
to one third is when it started to feel like everyone was mad.
Because at around that point, like you're now,
there's people who are the only person in their guild
who doesn't have it of that class,
or you're joining groups and there's enough applicants
to those groups who have them that
you can actually feel this bad.
Instead of it feeling like an aspirational goal
or something that's exciting to have,
you're just mad that you don't have it.
Even if technically it was still
the majority of players who didn't.
And so like, no answers there, nothing to announce,
but that's something we need to navigate
in terms of like the method of how it's obtained
and how it's rolled out.
Cause that middle ground where there's a ton of people
who want it, but it feels really common,
we know just feels that.
Yeah, I mean, it was insane.
I'm glad they know that.
There's like a history of what a legendary is
and then sleep.
Yeah, it was so strange.
All right, moving a little bit forward.
Not a bad reply for me.
I have talked to this guy a decent amount
and I have never been under the impression
that he is not the smartest person in the room.
I'll just tell you that.
There's a reason he has that job.
Sorry about add-ons a little bit.
So one of the key messages I saw when add-on changes
were originally announced during the midnight beta
is that ideal situations
that they don't create a competitive advantage
for players, everyone I think would like
to use the base UI as a default,
but the feeling of being at a disadvantage
causes social pressures a lot of the time
download add-on to you. Bro you think he got his job if he wasn't smart as fuck?
I'm not saying that at all but I think a lot of wild players and video gamers in
general who have a very strange like relationship psychologically with the
game developers of the game they really like I think there are people who don't
think that and maybe have never had experiences with them personally to have
that but I can tell you from someone who has that that guy's definitely
knows what he's doing. Otherwise probably wouldn't care to. I know every single
patch we've received add-on updates including this one there was a bunch
like container updates that happen with this patch as well, is the goal with add-on changes still kind
of this at some point we want it to not be competitive advantage, has the goal kind of shifted
since then? How? I mean this was like mid-tier but like...
I don't know. The add-on thing is still a big problem. The goal is stayed the same, no
No competitive advantage.
And in fact, let's continue to make sure that we're
leveling up our system UI and providing more functionality
either in the base UI or for add-on authors
to make sure that they're able to do things that are
that players think.
Oh, I want to listen to the Skype and Roger Echo interview.
Even though it might be a hard listen,
because like I just imagine, like here's what,
it's hard for me to listen to people like that
because I know how I would feel in that position
and I would be devastated.
And listening to someone talk who is devastated is just really sad because you've been in
that position.
You know what it feels like.
Yeah.
That's something that is going to engender that sort of psychological damage that you
were talking about.
If I feel like I need to have this add-on in order to be able to invite it to groups
or whatnot.
And I think there's a fine line there between, like, I mean, I think, especially in, how
many of the race world first players use standard UI?
Okay, I'll ask you to be a little bit more clear. Do you mean like zero add-ons full Natty Blizz default?
I don't think anyone...
Now if you start to loosen that a little more like okay, they have some add-ons,
but they're like more commonly used add-ons like bigwigs and DBM and they use Blizzard Base UI.
It's not like L is mere UI. I think yips and trill both do. Let me find our bot review tool
Then we can actually go through and look at some of their POVs
Where's the best way to find this
Find it, okay, recent fights, pool of tech kill.
All right, so I have a decent amount of perspectives here.
So Anarchy, AUG player very clearly has like a UI setup that's very specific to AUG actually,
also just like your kind of regular streamer UI.
Asshine, not default.
Boomi, not default.
Driny, not default.
Goop, not default.
Hopeful, not default.
Exile, same.
Very, you can tell a lot of similarities, right?
Same with Fired Up.
Ampec wasn't online at the time, but he's not default.
KSP, K, wait, hold on, KSP looks pretty,
this looks pretty natty, right?
So this is why it's not full natty,
like clearly they have like big wigs
or whatever this is right here, right?
But like this, this is default,
this is an add-on right here as well.
This, like these like boss frames are default
because you can't even see how much was left on that.
Name plates aren't nady.
Yeah, I would say like,
there's one thing that I think everyone will have
is I really doubt people use default name plates,
but maybe Trill does.
But this has like a lot,
but like when you're saying like,
does anyone in Liquid use a like default UI,
I think this is realistically as close as you're gonna get,
but I don't know if this means
the answer to your question is yes.
Like does anyone in Liquid play with zero add-ons no,
That would be not ideal slash you wouldn't be allowed to play in the guild because we have a lot of stuff to help you that are add-ons we make and if you didn't have them, you would play worse and that would not be allowed.
So lip is like pretty not default, Malarkis not default, Nick no, Sang maybe?
I think Sang would be more default than most.
I don't think this is default Blizzard cooldown manager, but it might be a skin
He obviously has like different damage frames he has obviously like these are a custom made add-on from us
These are like Blizzard default frames, and then I don't know what he uses for for that. But yeah, he was doing some stuff here
Which by the way you guys want to see what saying is doing saying is not in on the boss
Saying, even up until the moment we were killing it, he was on the bench for this fight, he was turning himself into an analyst in story mode of this boss, trying to find out as much information as possible on how these mechanics work.
And if you guys, just to give you, maybe you don't know this, but the amount of being an absolute fucking beast you have to be spending your time doing this when like, the race is about to end is an extremely high amount, the extremely huge beast.
Um, Scott, uh, definitely there. Okay. So the two that I know, so Trill, I think is like pretty natty.
All right. I'll let it buffer here for a second. Or maybe go to a different part of the fight where it's loaded. Oh my God.
Oh my god.
All right.
For some reason it's just like negative bit rate.
Maybe if I pause it and let it load for a second,
it'll be better.
But I mean, yeah, he has full default here.
His stuff at the bottom is full default.
His damage meters are full default.
So far, this is the most full default player
until we get to Yip's.
His raid frames are full default.
But I mean, he uses add-ons, though.
So if you ask if anyone in Liquid is like, look,
this is like a reminder we have sent him via our add-ons.
For example, would you consider this full default?
It's not, though, right?
But I think there's levels to it.
I think there's some expectation
that you will use something like BigWigs or DBM,
but it could still be mostly full default.
He can't use add-ons in turnies,
so that's the play without it to get good.
That has not been true for 10 years.
By the way, I think this is how the bug works, by the way, because when you spread these debuffs,
you can be in one but not the other, but if you've already soaked one and you've entered
another one, you will get that debuff.
But some circles go away faster than others.
In fact, the spread only happens when the last of these three soaks is done soaking.
If you notice how we move here, sometimes it's possible with the way you move that
Like maybe you'd miss a tick of specifically one of them and the people who were having the bug happen to them
I think were the people that actually had the red circles if I remember correctly and
It's something like if one of them was healed off earlier if like a tank stayed here and missed a tick of this circle
But like hit these two and now this one was a second later. It's possible. They like
Basically the buff because these were not meant to be stacked like the buff
Snapshot it was going to give them a spread but then it regained another debuff which made them not get a spread and still or still get a
Spread but then still keep that this is why I didn't want to go in this earlier
Because this is really confusing if you don't really know how this mechanic works, but like
It's absolutely caused by stacking them and the people who have it aren't supposed to get it
But I think it's them being soaked in a desynced way in some way causes the last tick to like refresh and not consume
them. Anyways, onto Yip's PV. Let's do the rest of them. I'm pretty sure Wall Life is
not like default. Wolf Disco is not default. Zevi is not default. Zevi is playing on like
a fucking IMAX screen. Him and Smacked both play ultrawide. And I think someone else
team maybe Anarchy. And then Yip's, this is Yip's. Now Yip's has the most interesting
UI in the guild in my opinion for a few reasons.
I think, actually, I mean, this stuff in the middle might be like reskin default, but his
boss frames are default.
His stuff up here is default, although he, this is definitely an interesting UI.
It like has these two things up here.
They're not even like, they're not even level with each other.
And then also he has his health down here anyway.
This is a big, like I don't really care about you, my UI that much.
Also, Yip's Easter egg, he plays wow in windowed mode.
So he'll play on like a 27 inch monitor, but like he windows wow so it's smaller to help
his peripheral vision.
So that's why like the elements look a little bigger or closer to the middle.
That's a G kick.
Yipz is like the best player of all time.
Yep, this is so good.
Okay, so yeah, that's the answer to that question about the default Matty thing.
Let's go to the next question here.
Add-on updates.
Let's hear about this.
Yeah.
I think there was a lot of misinformation related towards the add-on updates.
How does Blizzard's company wade through the process of implementing something that, like,
Everybody kind of knows it's going to be unpopular.
A lot of people describe it as like the add-on apocalypse,
or like the removal of add-ons.
But I think it was more just like changing
add-on functionality, whereas there's
something that's so unpopular that it's
potential to make the game.
Twitch or THG said the state of add-ons currently.
Let's watch this.
Oh no, please don't be a Twitch clip that makes my Firefox
have to load for a minute.
OK, this goes out.
Ascat, square, le, triangle, where we just were.
Wait, what, look at the map, bro.
Yeah, I mean, this is the same tech
that makes the arrows work on CISRAC.
It's the same tech that makes the arrows line up
on Vashnik.
So like, if you were someone who had a bomb
and you had to go to X, you would just look at the map
and know you just have to go that way
without actually having to see it.
Zach, get in.
Yeah, I mean, that's fucking insane.
Better if it's implemented correctly.
How do you guys wade through that
with such overt negative feedback?
Very delicately and carefully.
I mean, I think it's always one of the most challenging things
for us to do.
And we know we don't always get it, right?
Like most of what we do,
we sit when we sit down
and we're gonna devote a lot of development resources
to a new feature, to a new system,
to making a new raid, to making a new class.
Like we know it's almost pure upside.
We know we're gonna do this thing
people are excited about.
But part of the burden and the duty
of maintaining a game for two decades and counting
is that at times we do have to kind of curate that ecosystem
and whether it's prune or remove some things
or look at trends that are being driven
by community behavior that we can kind of,
be sent where we can see directly
are gonna keep leading in a potentially negative direction
if we don't do something about them.
And we never relish making changes
that we know are gonna be unpopular with some people.
part of how we handled the add-on initiative
out on disarmament for midnight was to try to take people's
temperature early on.
I mean, like when I sat down, I think with like Max and
Dratinos like a year before that was announced on this.
Not even a year.
Part of the goal was like, just go soft on me.
Let me float this and let me see what reactions are.
Frankly, if the entire community had said,
that's the worst idea we've ever heard, hell no.
If they do that, I'm quitting.
The funny part is, is I think if you only existed
in like the Twitter sphere that maybe you exist in
and the content creators you follow,
that was the reaction, right?
But that wasn't that, I think a lot of times
when you're in like, not like an echo chamber,
but you like, you basically see a bunch of wow stuff,
but it's all from a very specific community.
You start to think that's what everyone's saying,
but then you realize that the high-end wow community
is such an insanely small part of the WoW community,
and they get a much bigger picture.
On mass, we probably would have reconsidered
we'd probably be in a different place today.
But there was a pretty healthy divided conversation
that were of course, some people were freed up.
Are they practicing in the other end?
There were tons and tons of people across,
you know, like content creators, Reddit, social media,
our forums everywhere who were like,
if they can pull this off, it would be awesome.
be great to feel like I don't need to download all these add-ons and I, you know, obviously every
raid leader who spends the first half of their first prognite like wiping to weak aura configuration
issues wants that to die in a fire and so the worst boss that had weak aura configuration
issues it's like fractalus and what brood twister oh brood twister bro
At least Fractalus was easy.
Echo of Neltharion.
Ooh, okay, okay.
Brood Twister, Echo of Neltharion.
Dude, I'm surprised there aren't enough people saying Fractalus.
Like Fractalus, I feel like was so, maybe that's just an us thing
because we were like configuring it to work on the fly
and maybe the average Fractalus thing worked for everybody,
for everybody, but that was the thing for us that wiped us all the time.
Frack was solved.
Yeah, but you could have it solved, but you could have two people on two different versions
of it, and it would just not work.
It was very frustrating, actually.
Maybe it's just like when you're creating the thing, you go through that process,
but once it's created, it's not as big of a deal.
I mean, that totally makes sense.
I can't believe I'm looking at our MDI team.
Our MDI team, I think, went to a different facility.
I think, basically, Blizzard, I think,
rented out facilities in the area for the teams
to practice before BlizzCon.
I believe.
I don't know if it was a, I think it was a Blizzard thing.
And then that just wasn't the TL facility.
So they were at the TL facility,
and they went to another facility like yesterday
to start practice.
Well, at that time, he had a version check,
so you could see before, bro, that didn't matter.
Why didn't Yard go to the race if he's going to the MDI?
I don't know.
Maybe he likes doing the race at home.
Is that NA only?
I don't know.
I mean, maybe it's something Team Liquid figured out,
If I could tell, I think there's another, I think there's like, so what's typical of all the facilities in LA is that you basically rent out the space to other teams who are in town to practice for something or to do a boot camp.
So like, if you just show up to like the Shopify facility, there will be like, I'm just making this up like Cloud 9's Valorant team is there practicing or like, just this happens all the time.
I don't really understand the business behind it other than like the facilities are making money by renting out the space but like
Basically different eSports orgs bootcamp at other teams facilities like all the fucking time
And I think there's one here today, I'm pretty sure I've watched the team come in and get set up
To bootcamp here that I don't believe is a liquid team that was like emboldening enough and encouraging enough for us to say
Okay, let's let's seriously go down this path. I think we tried to communicate it, you know
Who's on the MDI team?
Zasevi, Ashaan, Boom, Wolf Disco, and Yipz.
We're running as much as we could.
But yeah, in retrospect, we definitely
could have done a better job.
I think there was a lot of perception
that all add-ons are getting nuked.
And I remember everyone frames a little bit and wins.
But I would read forum posts of, hey,
I'm trying to get ready for midnight.
I deleted all my add-ons.
And I'm trying to play this way.
And it's like, dude, you don't need to do that.
Okay, but in in the defense of the people saying that though like okay blizzard did into nuke all add-ons
But they did a lot of the add-ons that still existed could still work
But they had to be written in a different way and it was kind of RNG if your add-on was already written that way or written under the old
Rules so it did mean that a lot of the add-ons that still existed were also just still worse
Than they were also some of it was due to some of them choosing not to exist like for example weak ores could have still
existed it just wouldn't have been as good and even in their own posts they're
like yes we could recreate week or as for the mid for midnight but we don't want
to because it would just be a lot of work to put out something that's just
infinitely less capable than what the current thing is and that just wouldn't
be worth our time which is like valid right but it didn't mean it couldn't
be made but a lot of people just didn't understand that so I do I could
see Blizzard being tilted about that because because like now I think of
most of the stuff works that used to work that should still work except for
stuff they don't want to work except for like the add-ons in RAID like the interrupt stuff and the
map stuff which is probably the next thing that's going to get nuked but uh yeah I I could definitely
see them sitting around just being like what are these people talking about? 80% of your add-ons
are still going to work that's not what we're not what we're changing but you know we worked
our way through it um there's no silver bullet or magic formula for doing it it's a lot of
of communication, a lot of listening, and we know that we can always do better there
and we're going to try to.
And I think we learned there are pros and cons to the early announcement, right?
Like that early announcement did give us that big pro of a long time and a lot of time to
be able to adjust and listen to feedback and whatnot.
But it also gave people a long time to sit in this moment of like we don't know exactly
when add-ons will be disarmed.
We don't know exactly what, right?
We feel like we don't have all the information yet in terms of what is going to happen and
that I think may have led to some of the misinformation you're talking about, which came from a place
of fear or not a completely understanding that the goal was not to take away everything.
But if someone feels like that's the case and that idea spreads, then these are lessons
that we'll want to be able to take advantage of when we are doing any future communications,
making sure that we're clear and keep the communication with us.
You know, just refocus.
It'll last forever.
Yeah, I mean, I think it makes sense.
Just like at some point, you've got to lie in the game up.
Nothing lasts forever.
Yeah.
OK, talk about the red.
Talk about something that doesn't last forever.
So recently, there was a, again, Ian had an interview
with Cyber where there was something that peaked my interest.
I remember listening to it and I was like, oh, this is insane.
I want you to elaborate on it a little bit further.
So to summarize, you discussed needing to know when
some things need to shake up.
And change for change is sometimes necessary.
It's been 12 years since the last shakeup with raids
where Warlords of Draenor and Fixed Mythic rating
ended up getting added,
or at least it got added at the end of Siege,
but at the same time.
Recently there've been some experiments
with things like the Tybound Grotto and Rotmire,
and I've seen pretty consistently a bunch of questions
as to what's going to happen with the future rating.
I see 10-man Fixed Mythic returning,
being something that's constantly floated
as an idea, as a huge discussion point,
and that group size being more achievable
for people than 20 players.
Are there any large changes that are planned for rating specifically at this point in time?
I would start by saying hopefully the first couple seasons of midnight have
this abuse of any notion that we are unwilling to change the rating formula
that you know with the three different rates separating into you know
three different locations with the midnight's launch and then addition
of layers as well as mythic flex with Rottmeier and then numerous wave
caller are you know or the rate team is for sure looking at ways we
we can iterate, we can provide novelty,
we can respond to what players are interested in.
And I think, in particular, with MythicFlex
is a space where we've heard a lot of positive feedback of,
hey, I am in an AOTC guild, we regularly hit Herok,
but then we just don't have that loadout
to field a 20-person group for MythicWeathers
to make too small or whatever reason.
MythicFlex is a way for them to keep progressing,
and it feels great.
So we are looking for ways we can continue
shake up the formula in the future.
Yeah, I have to.
Yeah, they definitely shook up the formula by adding a world
boss that's supposed to be one out of six myth track loot and a
bridge between heroic and mythic rating.
And I believe it dot the only bosses that died after the mythic
world boss were coiled alter and will attack on that.
Call attention to two problems that I think we see with the
ecosystem currently and where future efforts are like, you
to focus. One is exactly the one that Paul mentioned. It's, you know, that has them for
groups that finish heroic, that get AOTC, but have more in them, but don't have 20 people.
And I think one off one boss raise, layers, flex mythic are really interesting potential
solutions to that. I think that, I think we continue to feel that for the very, very,
very high end like we're talking final bosses and a tier on mythic fixed size
remains pretty important because I think you'd see a lot of degenerate strats
that don't have great social consequences if group size is flexing up and
down for those bosses but yeah I think we'd love to let people who are good
enough to kill Faroq and bosses dip their toes into mythic and start down
that path and then if they want to grow to 20 to try to finish the
tier, all the more power to them.
On the other end, I think looking at normal
mode rating, actually, normal rating is a little bit
you know, stranded right now in terms of lacking
a clear purpose or correlation between the barriers
to entry of needing to manually form a group
and the rewards that it gives.
That made a ton of sense back in Warlords
where it was like the only way to get that kind
of loot for the most part and even the easiest
mode of rating was still plenty good, but needing to manually form a group, travel to the instance,
all of that, when you can get the same gear from soloing Delves, isn't quite as clear cut.
So one of the things that we're looking at is whether there's room for some more flexibility
there to have a smoother on-ramp inter-rating. LFR is kind of its own thing, but I think
there's a bit more that we could do to make normal feel more accessible. So I think
I think the growth works pretty well solid right now, but I think we're looking at both the on-ramp inter-rating as a whole, and then progression opportunities for people that are done with growth.
Yeah, I will say it just completely anecdotically. We zoned in on Mythic and Wristled Wave call around 25 player the other day, and it was like, wait a second, we can go in there with everybody, hold on.
Yep. All right, talk about PTR testing. I want to talk about PTR testing a little bit.
So, discovery is, for a lot of people, actually a pretty big enjoyment vector. And for some
people, nah.
Talk about the bugs. Bugs were as like, sparked. There was like, a hunter foreset that gave
them catalyst charges. There was like, how do you can coiled all this stuff? Like,
what happened?
I can speak to some specific bugs with any different bug that usually the story
is about.
with the what happened actually. That's kind of, that's definitely on the nose for
both of you. It'd be different. You bring up the hunter two-piece set for folks who
weren't familiar. The survival hunter two-piece set unlocked the catalyst
unbound achievement as opposed to the four-piece set. What that is was just a
flip piece of data. If you think about it behind the scenes there are, for
every spec, there are multiple set bonuses and in this
particular case the four-piece was flipped with the two-piece. And the
The effect of that was people who got their two pieces started getting their catalyst
unbounded treatment a little earlier.
We were able to fix this one.
This one was obviously, it's already since been hot fixed and was hot fixed just a couple
hours after it sort of showed up on forums and reddit posts and whatnot.
So a very few number of survival, a very small percentage of overall survival hunters
were affected, let alone percentage of players in the game.
But that was a case where there was a flip bit of data.
Another example you brought up was Sparks.
And that was also actually the same thing, like one sort of misplaced treasure cable
caused folks to get into a state where they either weren't able to get an additional spark
or they had a spark too many.
And that one has been a little longer to clean up.
We're still, you know, have folks both on design and engineering sort of data analysis
folks who are going to make sure that we get to a place where, like, everything's
even fair.
We've already made the change to increase the cap to four for that first week so
that we have the bank error and the player's favor.
where we're able to get a little bit more power during that first week where the
expectation was they wouldn't have four sparks during that first week and then
for the few people who are still in a space where they're mismatched with their
currency or their and their items that we're getting all that cleaned up. But
like looking forward I don't think that's ideal that sparks are built in a
way which is so fragile that a little flipped bit cause a lot of cleanup.
So we're looking at sparks in particular. I wonder what kind of an
impact that had on this raid. Although I do think it should happen all
the time though. Like, I think your first week of the season, they either should change
how spark crafting works, or they should make sure you have four sparks on Tuesday because
it makes no sense that one handed classes just get their weapon a week before two handed
classes. That just feels like that is something that isn't thought all the way through.
There's a space that we're wanna. So it's good that happened, I think.
Not let something like that happen again. And broadly speaking, I completely understand
a player, bugs are frustrating, right? You're paying a subscription, you're, you know, playing
a premium AAA game, you want to work. And that's a completely reasonable expectation.
And so everything I'm about to say is not an excuse. It's just an explanation for how
these sorts of things happen. It's a fast game with like innumerable amounts of data.
Every panel, like the thing Paul mentioned, like the, and some of this is, you know,
internal tools and processes that we would love to improve,
but it's how the game works today.
That kind of is an unbounded achievement.
That is a designer manually entering
what's basically a list of 40 numbers.
It's 40 spell IDs that correspond to each
of the 40 different possible four piece bonuses.
One of those 40 numbers was flicked
with the two piece bonus instead, as Paul said,
our QA analysts check it,
but the test suite is like,
equip the four piece bonus.
Do you get the achievement?
You did, test-passed, not just right.
So it's like, and a lot of it is needle
in a haystack type stuff is we catch
probably 99% of the bugs that are in a given patch.
There's thousands of them.
We catch 99% of them, fix them,
but that still means that dozens
of often high profile ones creep out.
We do a root cause analysis.
We try to understand and the aftermath,
like how did we miss this?
Was there, here could be improved our tool
to make it harder for a designer to make this mistake
or easier to quickly catch when something was out of whack.
Could we redesign the system?
Could we improve some of our underlying tech
to make it fail in a way that's less destructive
or obnoxious to players?
And hopefully we make a difference
out of mistakes next time.
But at the end of the day,
when you have hundreds of people touching hundreds
of thousands.
I guess they're not gonna say,
I was gonna hope they talk about rate of data entries
for a given update.
what else they would just say the same thing, right?
Some times it happens.
Human error is unavoidable, and I know, you know,
painfully aware of all of the, oh, it's all AI
vibe coded memes across the internet.
No, we're all true at this manually.
I mean, the WCUA team has never been larger
than it is at this point, but we've also never been
doing anywhere close to it.
Imagine how big of an insult that is.
Like if it's true that they, you know,
that they're like full, like just imagine full
Maddy doing something and then everyone on the internet is just saying it's
vibrated that actually has to just make you so fucking mad in any job at any
time in the game's history and so we're always learning or trying to do better
and like I know specifically I had a comment that about fuck fourth boss in
near bar palace ration and I had a comment we were talking about the
bosses before the tier and I said this boss seems like it was made by AI and I
definitely heard through the grapevine that that made made someone involved
with designing bosses like really fucking mad and I'm like yeah I kind of get
that I feel like that would make you really bad. The ability to fix the vast
majority of issues as quickly as possible and you know many of these are
resolved within the day that they're spotted but we always want to do
better. I have a interesting story about a bug I can share I think which
which I think is fun. Ian will probably tell me, don't keep talking about bugs, but I think this one is fun.
We had an issue, it showed up maybe three days after launch where players noticed that if they logged out in certain cases,
their characters kept fighting. I heard this report and said, that can't be true.
So I tested it out myself, logged into Silver Moon. I'm going to stand in this spot right here, logged out, logged back in.
I'm still there. Okay, well let me try in combat. I flew over to a couple sleeping
linkses out in Silver Moon, landed right on top of them, they started attacking me,
I locked out, and then when I when I woke back up they were both dead and they
had loot sparkles and so I was like okay, so my character actually did keep
fighting, something had happened. And so we looked into it and what this is
is that for 20 years your character actually has always been capable of
doing this. If this was your character operating as if it was mind-controlled,
you know, they'll just sort of blindly cast spells that's what was
happening under the hood, but some tech changes made it such that previously your character
was always just stunned when you disconnected and all that forward your character was stunned
and that stun was removed, that stun wasn't triggering and so your character wasn't stunned
anymore. So that's obviously like out of nowhere, some fix to some other part of the game
made that happen, but it could have happened for 20 years. I think that's like a prime
example of when someone says like why this messed up and it's like 20 year old game
spaghetti code issue. That is like an exact example of that app.
Now that on Friday afternoon it was fixed by Friday evening. But it is fun to know that
for all 20 years your character has sort of been like able to come alive like a toy story
doll. Just that's done was the only thing preventing them from doing so.
I mean it's crazy that my pugs they just got better whenever they disconnected from
the game. It's indescribable.
That's right. Yeah, but Blondie's pressing their switch flight mode.
All right, cool.
W. Tettles.
I wonder how close other people are right now
in the progression standpoint.
Let's see.
So it's still us.
They're at 294 poles with their best. It says I won. Is that intermission one? The boss is at 47% going into intermission one.
Is that's how that is?
And then FATREK, yes, is at P2, 100% P2.
I think that means like you've phased into P2,
but not really started it, basically.
I think the biggest thing that guilds
can do from poll one on progression on this boss
is I don't know if there's a publicly available add-on
for this, but the one that we have
is basically there are like three or four variables,
raidplan.io, right?
This is not exactly how it works in the room,
but it's the easiest way to describe it to you.
So we did all of our spreads boss relatives.
So let's just assume the boss is at the top of the room,
and then the tail will pick the left side of the room.
So let's say the tail went over here.
So if this happens, you're looking at the boss like this,
and there's some assortment of like ranged like this.
And then there's like a couple of melee
and everyone has an egg, right?
This is one pattern where the waves can start left.
Is there like a wave icon?
How do I even do this?
Not really.
Let's just say this is the wave icon.
OK, so like the boss will do, you guys know how it works.
The boss will either do like a left wave or a right wave.
Okay, so this is a left-left.
You heard me call this in progression.
Left tail and a left wave.
We actually referred to it as which side was safe.
This would have been a left-right for us.
But this is one pattern.
And then the same wave,
but the tail on the other side is another pattern.
And then, again, that's two of the four patterns
and the other ones are this.
Where you get a tail on the right
and then wave on the right, and then same thing,
tail on the left and wave on the right.
Four patterns, there's always gonna shoot like five blobs
out from each one of these things, one, two, three,
four, five, and then out of the spectral ones
in the back, there's actually seven, one, two, three,
four, five, six, seven.
How the fight works is, and why it feels RNG,
is the boss deletes two of the blobs every time.
two of the blobs every time. So if you're dodging it this time and all these
people move to the left to dodge this wave and the blobs the the waves are
coming out from this guy on one pole it could delete these two so when these
start spreading out for all these three people it's super easy and the same
thing could happen on the pole after where they like deletes it'll just
delete two of them same thing for the spectral waves sometimes it'll delete
these two sometimes it'll delete the two in the middle these are not the
same. So what you end up looking at in a like progression dodge situation and this
is what like guilds can definitely do to be the best that they can be in this
phase. Let me show you this first dodge we do. Or the hard dodge we do. So we go
and pick up our eggs and then we get a left tail and left wave. So left wave
and it's a left tail. And Mark is in the very back of the room. And what
you can see here is he has a note, sit left weight gap.
What that means is he sits left,
he lets this wave up here go by him
and he waits and finds the back gap.
The back gap means this and the weight means
don't move forward, let these waves right here
just come and pass you.
Before he made this note,
whenever waves start,
you have no recollection of where the waves
are gonna be coming from
and sometimes they're nuclear crazy hard
and sometimes they're really easy.
But having this note system makes it so you can remember what you need to do, because it's basically telling you what set it is, and it's like, okay, here's what I did the last time I successfully did this set.
This increases your consistency by like a million fucking percent. It was really smart. We copied this from, we saw Echo was doing this, and we're like, holy fuck, that's so smart, so we stole it.
What it requires is it requires one player in the raid,
we had Yps do it. I don't know if Echo did it outside of raid. I know on Lora they
strapped someone to a chair and had them
click the macro for all the memory games. So maybe they did that again here.
But like what Yps does is he hits left or right tail
and left or right wave basically. And then that makes the week order work and
And that makes everyone get a notification for what they should do on that exact situation.
And that is something that I don't know there's a public add-on for this yet, but like honestly
doing P1 without this is such a waste of time because you will wipe so much just trying
to yowl it.
But when you actually have these notes for yourself, it just makes it just infinitely
easier to repeat.
Because if people are all trying to do the same thing, if you try to dodge in
the same gap as someone else, it can cause a wipe.
But if you both have notes that puts you away from each other, it's really easy.
Well, not really easy, but yeah.
Why does Yip always get assigned the most cogulate stuff in a fight?
Well, sometimes it just makes sense for a tank to do it, but also it's like he's just
he's good.
He's good at doing stuff like that.
Yeah, I would not attempt to do this boss in P1
without a system like this.
You are going to be infinitely less consistent.
This was a major consistency increase for us.
Also, the other strat we did was we
tried to remove the total amount of people in the middle.
Obviously, you can see in a P of E what I just showed you.
We're going to be, obviously, markers
at the back of the room.
But look at someone who's kind of in the middle
of the room, like, splat.
If you have everyone kind of dodging together
in the middle you can see there's a lot less people here but like if everyone's like playing
really close together you're way more likely to have uh like collisions right so you want to
remove the amount of people that are in the soup in the middle and how we did that was we had
a warrior always stand on the side close to the gore rattle and he always just leaped over
the wave you can do that and then we also had a one mage on the left one mage on the right
what they did was blink through the wave, like this.
They basically never moved across the room with everyone else,
just whenever they had a wave come towards them, they just blinked it.
Same thing with the Warlock Gate right here.
We had a Warlock on Fired Upside, T.H.T. would port it.
And then we, on the other side, because there's only one hard set,
we actually utilized Void Elf, so on the other side we didn't have a Warlock,
we actually had Cine, and Cine would Void Elf on this set
to just reduce the amount of confusion and to spread people out more so he knows left side is safe
What he does is he stays in this spot?
He goes over here he void elves through and then he jumps through if we added Cini into this mess of people over here
It would obviously cause a lot more cleaves, but because we're removing wall life by leaping we're removing
Hopeful we're removing Cini it makes these people over here less likely to run into each other
By the way, Void Elf is really underrated. If you guys are playing a class and Void Elf is like
very close to simming as much as like your main racial, I would highly recommend just playing
Void Elf. It is extremely good.
Max, what's something you've learned from another guild during progression that saved you the most time in your own progression?
Maybe Echo of Naltharion, P1 from Echo, they had like the list week aura for determining where people would go.
That was really, really smart.
That was like in the middle of like the private aura disarmament thing.
Yeah, Fractalist. Fractalist is a good example.
An example of something that didn't matter this year was the Prop Paladin
Immuning things on Twin Fangs. That was like, we literally killed the boss longer trying to do that.
If we would have just done it, Natty, we would have killed it faster.
On the pull we killed it, we didn't even utilize the Onk shit at all.
We just basically spell warded one time at the end to reduce some stacks
and it wouldn't have affected our killing anyway.
Nothing really on, like, Coiled Alter this tier.
I don't think there's anything, I mean, the thing I'm talking about,
stealing the shit from Echo this tier about the, like, notes was awesome.
That was, like, really, really smart from them.
Like an under-heralded thing.
Like, it's not, like, a big, crazy thing on your UI to where people really notice it.
I don't even know how many people even noticed that in the race when it was happening,
happening but like that was a pretty big jump in P1 consistency for sure.
I'm trying to think in other raids like what we woke up to and we were like
holy fuck that's crazy that's so good let's do that. I don't know I'm sure
there are some things we've come up with that other guilds have taken as
well but I'm obviously not in their position I don't know like what they
thought of ahead of time versus what they took.
The Venn diagram, we were the first people to Venn diagram.
The macro tech on Firehack, we did not take the, oh, you mean
like something that we did?
I noticed the mage blinking constantly, but not the
reasoning behind it.
Yeah, that was the reasoning behind it.
The Degen strat with the pulsing ring in Nyalotha.
Oh, do you mean, uh, yeah, what boss was that?
Um, Il-Gnoth.
Yeah, we didn't take that though. We did it in Addy.
The top three guilds all did it in Addy and it was like someone coming up with it afterwards and it became like the new strat.
Yeah, Lady Ashtame was good.
Tishi said we knew about the Ilganoff ship, but we thought we would get banned, or they
would change it.
Actually true.
I bet if we were progressing Ilganoff that way, I bet they would have changed it live,
but after we killed it they just didn't do it.
There's a lot of examples of stuff like that
happening back then, where like if it's a way
that something's gonna be killed for world first,
they'll change it, but if like if a world first
has happened and people do it,
they just are clearly paying less attention
to stuff like that.
Did y'all create the smolderon macro?
Oh, because it was a private aura, but it's still,
I mean, I don't know if they also had a version of it,
but I think we killed the boss first
and got to the boss first and we used one,
So maybe who started jumping the walls on Mugsy?
The mage-like alter timing, like porting out, I mean,
it just would have been whoever's on the boss first.
It's kind of like the only way to play it.
Wait, did Blizzard, so BlizzCon posted the like schedule, right?
I want to read through that.
Let's see.
I want to see if there's anything interesting for me.
So opening ceremony, 10.30 a.m. on Saturday, okay, then at 12 p.m. on the main stage World
of Warcraft is what's next.
If I'm going to guess, because I think they're also going to announce the next expansion,
But also, I think Classic Plus is the,
or they're gonna like give you some information
on the last Titan and Classic Plus, yeah.
Dude, I still think Classic Plus,
I know people are so hyped for it.
I think it's going to be very polarizing.
And it's because I don't think the Classic Community
has a very unified thought on what they want from that.
And the more they change about Classic,
the more cool it can be,
but it also gets away from like,
I just think that it's a very, very tight line to walk
of like keeping it still classic
while also making it new,
but it not just becoming retail, you know?
Like, and I feel like there's not gonna be a ton of agreeing
on what that should look like, but who knows.
Now, but either way, they're excited for it.
So that's good.
So that's probably what that's about, I think.
And then Overwatch stuff, that's fine.
Hearthstone, yo.
Diablo immortal, boss Gauntlet, let's fucking go.
No way, no way.
Okay, later on that day,
MDI Grand Finals, Dignitas versus Chinese team
that will almost certainly win the whole cup.
Diablo developer update, main stage,
MDI Grand Finals, Liquid versus Mandatory,
That's the non-China world championship right here,
because whoever wins this match is going to get absolutely
smoked by the Chinese team right afterwards.
World of Warcraft, what's next again at 245?
What's next two?
So one of those will be about classic,
one will be about retail probably.
World of Warcraft developer X creator showcase.
What is that?
Maybe that's the thing I'm doing.
I have heard that I'm talking to a developer on stage at some point via Scott, but I don't
know anything else about that.
I don't have any other confirmation.
Scott normally knows what he's talking about.
I don't know if that's me, but we'll find out.
I'm also streaming part of this day.
They have a stream set up for me.
I don't know exactly what that'll look like, but yeah.
LISCON, Community Night, MDI Grand Finals,
so Chinese team versus whoever wins against Liquid and Echo.
And then that's the end of that day.
All right, maybe it's the next day
where I'm doing the thing.
All right, let's say the beginning of the day.
World of Warcraft, Deep Dive.
World of Warcraft, Housing.
Diablo IV, What's Next?
World of Building and Warcraft, Questwatch,
AWC Grand Finals, Art Design, Design Deep Dive,
World of Warcraft Hardcore, What's Next,
Live Performance.
All right, cool.
I kind of don't want to co-stream the MDI here.
I want to like watch it live, although if they could have me co-streaming like really close
to it, that would be really cool.
I could bring like a little iPad with Dorky's PNG on it.
Max, why are you still at the facility?
Do you live close or something?
Yeah.
I do actually think it will be pretty fun to watch the Liquid vs. Echo match because
both teams will have relatively such little practice time.
To give you an idea, I was talking to Yps and Zevi about this the other day, and they
were after we won, and they were like, yeah, it usually takes about three full, like, 14-hour
days to like, fully cook one dungeon to where you feel like you're done with it, and like,
you're doing the thing you're gonna do.
And they have seven days until they have to play from the time that we ended.
So they're going to at most, and there's seven dungeons, they're gonna at most have
one day per dungeon, which is obviously going to be much closer to a W route than coming
up with something really cool. Meanwhile, the Chinese team has practiced for over a month
and they're good. So that is why they are going to absolutely smoke everyone. Oh, yeah,
the EU team has to fly in too. Yeah. So they're like losing even a day probably,
which sucks even more. Yeah, it's a very not ideal race timing and dungeon timing and stuff,
Cush said they have one day of practice, then one day of travel, and then get over the jet
lag and maybe one and a half days of practice in NA before they hit the stage.
Yep, that's even worse.
I mean, like I said, the Chinese team is going to win everything.
It's just more about who wins the other matches because there's no, like, if it was like one,
the one match was on day one and the other matches were on day two, maybe everyone could
just watch the Chinese team play and steal all their strats and maybe have enough time
to perfect it within the rest of the day of practice, but it's all in one day.
So you have no chance of doing that.
Isn't it crazy that the qualifier was different dungeons in another season?
It's a little crazy, but also it's like kind of the only way it could have happened with
the timeline rate of when they were doing this season and when they were doing BlizzCon.
Are there any good EUMDI teams that don't have raced world first players or no?
four qualified for this tournament and I don't believe there was any teams that did not have
it uh raced world first players on them except for the Chinese team. Like pretty much all of the
like really really top top MDI teams are almost always either fully or mostly comprised of raced
first players.
I have a feeling like this stream is ending in the next five minutes.
Hmm.
I actually wasn't thinking about that.
because there is still just like so much to go over, but it does sound nice to do that.
Watch the Skype interview. Oh yeah, I want to watch that. Echo Guild.
Tear down. Oh yeah, they stream their te- wait is this like where all the players are playing?
like their desks were lined up like that. Where can I find a picture of what it looks
like when it's not being torn down? Check VODs rewind? I mean, I guess I'll just rewind
of
I
Roger Roger still there
of
Oh, they still have the PCs out and everything.
Wait, how many players do they have there?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, something like that.
10-12.
Alright, let me find their last broadcast here.
Broadcast which one is it this one was five hours is the rebroadcast or the
They're like all titled rebroadcasts because eventually they all become rebroadcasts like during the night and they replay the stuff during the day
That's definitely not this one. Maybe it's this one
Wait
You know what we should do?
Like the trick where I just disappear and then...
Why is the audio fucked?
Go ahead.
What the fuck?
There is a lot of damage there.
What the fuck is this?
There is this entire thing where...
It was their stream?
Are you sure it's not me?
Here. Boom.
He just hits everyone. Okay. This is it actually echo 7%
Liquid 30 and we've had 299 pulls so we haven't woke up yet
7%
You know, it's a funny story actually like when I got up this morning
Like I went to bed feeling pretty confident about the day
I was like we're definitely gonna kill the boss tomorrow
But I didn't think echo would be as low as they were when we woke up
So I was just, like, you know, getting dressed,
about to leave my house.
It's like a 20 minute drive to the Team Liquid facility
in traffic in the morning, sometimes 30.
And my girlfriend was like, all right, let's go,
let's go, it's time to go.
And I didn't really parse why.
She was just, you know, trying to get me out of the house.
And it was because she looked at her phone,
saw Echo was low.
And, like, I never want to know where Echo is
until I get to the facility.
I just don't look at my phone ever on purpose and she knows that so she didn't tell me
But was like trying to like usher me out of the house to to go to the facility, which was kind of cute
But there is ways happening during this but also they cannot touch they as a whole
Okay, they've got a seven percent wipe still 299 we're still asleep at this point those grasping fans 299 320
We're still asleep. Okay. Now we're awake
But the boss will soon enough cast.
So this is where I think the race world first fan,
and it's really hard to do it because you don't know the fight, doesn't get it.
And they see Echo having wiped at seven and then five and then four and then three
and then two and then one.
And they assume every guild has to go through that.
So they're like, this race isn't very close.
But like at this very moment, either one of our guilds could kill it in every poll.
But the the like the position is like Echo is dominating
and Echo is going to win and no one else is close.
Like for example, Ekko could have killed the boss right here and we could have had a
30% wipe, a 15% wipe, a 1% wipe and we would have all been the same level of close.
If that makes sense, but I feel like if we would have if they would have killed it now and we were still at 29%
It would have been like Ekko won by a mile. This is like Ansurek all over again or something, even though any pull could have been.
The bridge in the middle of the powerhouse.
Oh, Miros is taking a lot of damage, remains.
We need to get some of those shield chickens.
Okay, skipping ahead.
Insane job.
15% HP right now.
We are spreading it.
It's an exciting thing.
Wait, backing up?
That will be it.
I never heard Preach's Na'Vi reaction.
Someone came in and saw me.
I heard his reaction when Ekko killed it, but not when we killed it.
The
There was a time when I was known for casting excellent kills of well first bosses
But I've got even better ladies and gentlemen at saying G
Liquid as they have claimed the world's first pool attack in the last few minutes. How many has liquid one in a row now?
It's a hotly debated topic. You have to talk about which raids you're including. It's like five is probably the answer.
But if you include Void Spire and the Dream Rift as their own raids, it's seven.
Obviously this tier you have to count the world boss, that was its own raid and we got world
first on that.
That's 8.
You have to include Rotmire from last patch which would make it 9.
And then it comes down to Heroic BRD and that can make it to 10.
That's only if you include the really important ones.
I'm actually so sad that we killed it on such a bad DPS pull.
I wanted to just kill it like halfway through the amp.
10% wipes, just straight in.
Come boom, get it done.
I mean, that is what I compete with.
They're absolute masters of doing exactly what they've just done.
Echo absolute masters of the 1% wipe.
Yeah.
Oh, damn.
I mean, we are, I mean, at this point, I think it is fair to say we are masters
of waking up and seeming like we're going to lose and then clutching out.
I mean, that's just, it simply happened for like three straight raids.
And last year it happened on two back-to-back days.
That is something that does need to change, but what a performance.
We just watched the liquid kill as it was happening.
And unfortunately, you guys took a break.
Yeah, how it is, you guys.
Max, why do you trash method, by the way?
Have I trashed method?
What have I ever said in this tier or in general that has trash method?
Like, what do you even mean?
It's like a break.
came in and you're going like like give me what's your name ton to 95 give me an
example it's all right I'm gonna go back I'm gonna say this I don't think you are
I think you're about to say something else like anytime someone asked me before
the tier how method is going to do this tier I'm like I'm not in that guild I
have no way to tell you and but I hope they do well or something that's like
I feel like I'd never say anything more than that yeah liquids pull as it was
happening and then what do you mean I was like look at that screen right
there as the achievement did pop up for them what a stellar performance and once again as race fans
we were blessed with that side by side that we hope and pray for yeah for the race uh echo right
now we're obviously going to try and clutch out i never look at method is pretty harsh but that's
not what i said though someone was like i was like we're waking up and we're seeing what echo is
doing and someone just shadows like do you like how do you think methods doing this here it's
like i don't know because i haven't seen what they're doing like and what i mean by that is
If we're waking up and we're copying shit to have the most efficient raid day we can and echo is the guild in the lead that has gotten the farthest
We're going to look at what they're doing and take what they're doing
Like if method was in that position
We would have watched them. I like but I feel like people took that as me saying like now
We don't watch method because they fucking suck like
Method like like if they were in a position where they were doing stuff that we would
Like on coiled altar or something and then they were like doing some crazy shit
that we would take it, do you know what I mean?
Like, but that's, I feel like that's how you all take it.
You take it like so bad.
I'm just telling you what we're doing.
Like, someone's saying like,
how do you feel like Method's doing this here?
And I would tell you genuinely I don't know
because I don't ever watch other guilds
on my other monitor while we're progressing
because it makes me nervous if they do well.
And we only look at other guilds to learn from
when we're seeing what they're doing on a fight
to change what we're gonna do,
which is only when we wake up and they're ahead of us
and this year that was Echo every single day
when we were on hard bosses.
So like, it's not slander, it's just like what it is.
Like you guys are aware of where Method is
because you're watching the whole race, we don't do that.
This quick second place, I-
Wait, he replied, what did he say?
Where?
We got an orange name, right?
It's when they killed Scissorack,
but you were like, yeah, but it won't matter in the end.
I mean, yeah, that's true.
But like, I feel like you're taking that,
Like someone asked me like,
what do you think about Method Kill instead of Rack?
And I'm just like, ain't shit.
I didn't say that.
Like what I said was people in chat
were talking about how Echo was lost this tier.
And the only goal of that week
was to get as much gear as possible
and Echo got the most gear as possible.
So they objectively did heroic week better
than everyone else.
But the narrative was that method was,
method was an unprecedented owning position
and Echo was behind.
I took ourselves out of it
because we're doing something different.
We're on a different reset.
We lost more time on our first day.
You're not gonna be able to do the same things, right?
We did not have seven full progression days
to do as much splits as we could do
and both of those two did.
So you're comparing them, right?
So in that scenario, you guys were saying
like method is actually on a heater.
They're going crazy,
because they killed two like pretty easy early bosses.
And the only reason,
not maybe not the only reason, right?
But Echo just didn't do that first.
Echo did the bot.
They did Vashnik.
They just did way more two out of eights
and they ended up doing some fours later, but they just did the easy stuff first to get as many mythic stuff as much mythic stuff
done as possible. And by the way, they ended up with more boss kills and more loot than any guild leaving the first week.
So they did the best job in the first week, yet the narrative was the opposite.
So that's what I said was that like people were, I was basically implying that
from the like Echo versus Method comparison that Echo was actually doing better and Chat thought I was like flaming method when I was
just telling you how it works.
I don't think it's objectively easy to understand
or that they were doing poorly.
But yeah, like them going dark
and choosing to do scissorack in week one
instead of more early bosses and more splits
as in comparison to Echo wasn't like an owning moment.
But I understand why.
Like if you're really emotional about it,
like you really want method to succeed.
You want this three horse race more than anything.
I understand how you can take something like that
that I say and you're just, it makes you mad
because what you want me to say is like,
I'm so impressed with them or something,
when in a lot of cases in the race,
there wasn't actually a lot of chances for us to watch them.
And outside of that, I actually do not know.
Throughout the race, I have no clue how low
any other guild is on any boss, except for in the morning,
when we wake up and look at their stuff
to copy for what we can, the guild that's ahead.
And then I don't look at them for the rest of the day,
And I don't look at them when we go to bed, ever.
So like I have no way of knowing where the guild is
when you ask me, right?
Again, I can't tell you what the mood is like in here
right now it is, not happy.
No, they are, we're not pleased.
I mean, what can you do?
They didn't see it's coming.
Grounded wind didn't see it's coming.
Probably liquid didn't see it's coming.
But what an amazing clutch by liquid.
But that does not go against the chief
as an echo has shown for today.
The consistency in the last year hours
has been crazy.
I'd say over the whole race, they have not had a 5th grade day, they should be, I imagine the comments will be and I believe rightly so, we were talking about...
Max doesn't hate Method, he just hates all their players and casters.
What the fuck?
Dude, I had dinner with Sco like two times when he was in L.A. somewhat recently.
Jumping into the pool, Max said he got a bit hilarious when we thought it was hotfix, like, pools closed, pools open!
That's not recent.
Pool's closed, you guys!
It's recently in terms of like since he was in America probably.
for this ride and it has been fantastic to watch on both streams of what has been going on but
a little bit of an overcook I found about about a couple of hours before we started killing someone
came in and told me why you guys are way over killing this it seems unnecessary yeah but they
went for it in theory it worked out but obviously presented a ton of problems for them to I mean
they were in kill position several times the guys know that's all right I want to
listen to the interview now and the way
oh the first guy that's really hard to
watch hopefully I mean there's Rogers
usually a pretty good sport about it
he's a good speaker but it's also this
this scenario is so impossible to be in
like you have to create content for
your stream but the last thing you want
to do after a devastating loss is to
like have people ask you questions
about it, you know?
Yeah.
And knowing, knowing what Scryp has now, he's been PVPing NH adders on, which by the way
is like, I mean, it's respectable, but it's also like it is maddening because these people
will never change their minds.
Like these people are just like, yeah, dude, shouldn't have tried to cheese it.
They have literally no fucking clue what they're talking about and you're trying
to like respond to these people as if that'll ever matter.
It only makes you look like you're basically being a crybaby about it and that's all they're
telling you.
And you have a 0% chance of making them have more perspective on how this works.
They're just, they're rabid animals.
If you don't just say GGs and move on, they think that you're just a crybaby, even
though they have a large reason to be upset.
Well, that really just couldn't see if one of these circuits, and then shot them
shooting waves out of the entire group.
every time we were like we thought this would fix it because it made no sense if it just blew up
but there was a person who couldn't speak to you in the knowledge
oh okay thank you
so they're showing the bug right away we know how the bug works
it's always great every time we were like we thought this would fix it because it made no
sense if it just blew up but there was a person that was bugged from two minutes ago
that was in the camp because we're all stacking up and just blew us all up
oh that's a bummer
have you watched the teal video of Shaq's part of it hope for baking a cake
No, but I saw the cake and I was scared to eat it
Lots of quick fixes coming in the MRISO has been there for seven times
Very overshot the mark. I do have to ask the question though because as soon as I found out about it
I was like why you guys are way over killing or why are we going into the pool?
Obviously, I do know why it does really choose the platform
But considering you guys one shot the box I feel like it's so
Revisionist to be like, why did you guys go in the pool?
When like if the bug didn't exist you could just assume it's a more consistent
It's a DPS increase because you stand still
and don't have to worry about mechanics.
And also it's like a mechanic increase
because you stand still
and don't have to worry about mechanics.
It's just a smart thing to do if the bug doesn't work.
The only reason I would ask the question
is the first time they got to that part of the fight,
they stayed on the platform and it went perfectly fine.
So it's like, why change it?
And I guess the answer is like,
well, it's still just easier.
Like they were probably planning on this
for a while actually.
But like the only reason people are asking the questions of why did you go in the pool is because of the bad bug interaction
Which by the time they made that decision and have committed to it and have done multiple polls with it
they
They like they they had already committed when they found out that the bug exists right and that's still them getting fucked
That's getting fucked by the way. That's not like well
You guys should have learned from it in chain like no they got fucked by that. That's just a death
Well, just play to try it.
I mean, in hindsight, everything you can say is...
Tyneside completely.
...it's a misplay, right?
But in the moment, the thought process is, in that last bit...
But they were told that they were going to fix it and still stayed with that strat.
That's fine though, because what if you kill it that way before they fix it?
You know?
In fact, I believe the boss was killed before they fixed it, or I think like they literally...
Bubba came in on our kill and said they hot-fixed the pool thing.
the only thing that can kind of mess you up is some dodgy waves because they're
full RNG where they come from and you want to eliminate as much RNG in the
fight that's how you typically go about solving fights so the idea was if we
have people jump in the pool then you remove the RNG of getting bad waves
and or having the people that have the red circle. IMO it's not in-site
or hindsight, because doing the phase normally was kind of easy, you can have
certain parts that are kind of easy. Let's say you're doing P1 of a raid
fight, and there's a you can YOLO something or hard assign it, and it's
pretty easy to YOLO it, but if you hard assigned it over a hundred pulls, you
would wipe two times less. It's still true that YOLOing it is easy, but the
better Racer World first play is to just do the thing that is the most
repeatable and consistent, even if it's annoying, to just do the best thing
you can do. That saves you time. That saves you progress. And this is an example of that.
Even if something is easy, if something is better, why wouldn't you do it? And the only
reason you can say why wouldn't you do it is because the boss bugged and exploded you
when it shouldn't have, which is not a reason to make that decision at the time.
And then they shoot waves. Having them shoot the players. So, yeah, it's just about
mitigating energy. And, I mean, this trial works. The bug, we did not expect
because suddenly you just blow up and you have no idea like what happened.
Well we had spent going through the water, right?
Yeah, we were sitting in the castor and we'd see, you know,
the people in the puddle all blow up and think,
what just happened there?
They just suddenly all died and that happens several times in different pools.
Yeah, we were wondering, is it hot fix?
Are they suddenly just taking a large amount of damage from the venom?
But we know that you actually use the encounter room
to go to from phase one, phase two and into the submission.
You do have to swim during the encounter.
it's all of it and to be clear with the way like this it's not like the strat is
like easier or let me put like this like we have all of the healing cities to do
that right if you jump in there and you just bait with all of these people like
at some point you just die right like it's a lot of damage to heal but we have
saved cooldowns to use there that's why it's possible so it's not like like I
said it's more about mitigating their energy rather than it being like so much
better to do this yeah I mean they understood why you're doing it that's
for sure it just I think for the viewer perspective it was like so low quick yeah
new kid get it that doesn't have you got a better change your ability we were
tracking your absolute best so it's not been updated for a while but you got
even lower like a 65 7 in P1 going into P2 that which is absolutely wild yeah
damage was 65 7 is not a little bit we had a 63 I think phase 2 especially like
how fast are done from their sides can be somewhere in G right like things can
take an extra second or two so you and the whole team then is slower to arrive but
yeah I think overall our dams was amazing like we didn't have any issues at
any point with the damage yeah I've gotta come back subscribe then I guess
with just a quick question is this time at last race you look devastated like walking corpse around the place
But this time you seem to have changed something you've been much more fresh getting sleep and doing things like some things
This is hilarious
Watching before he went on an absolute
Like rampage on Twitter which I think is an important topic of what you have was in the channel. I've got my sleep
Oh
He means like before he means like during the day or like before the killer something
Not saying like go as hard right as we did back in the back in the old days
Well, it's the four five hours a day and it was I was hating my life
It was too much
We changed all that because the players also wanted to sleep more so I easily go. Oh, do they sleep as much as we do now?
that for a long time we had 10 hours in between our raids and they had nine as
like a daily thing but then also they would frequently like stay up past their
raid time on non-end bosses to kill them which is like actually hard banned in
our guild we would never under any circumstances seriously like the
players would kill me at the facility if we did that and I know like I think
an exact quote from Skype is sleep is fake when like discussing kindrel and
stuff like that and I wonder I wonder when that changed or if that was like
this year like a tier before or something like that but also I think we
just played really good so I was really happy with the performance like I think
this was the closest we ever had the second kill yeah I don't know how much
time was it between the kills like the first pull after I think it's second so I
mean we really was two pulls away holy fuck dude I actually wasn't that stressed
out when we killed it but I should have been I guess with Laura you almost killed
it the very next pull one click would have taken it there was a yeah we've
become real good at that so I didn't think the like the coiled altar
re-kill mattered but in the perspective of like how soon the boss died after
that it definitely did. Like you basically we chose to coin the boss with someone in who is in for
ulotech to have the most damage possible and was that worth like two hours? No. But if the boss was
like way harder and had a way higher DPS check the answer would have probably been yes. Or maybe
even still no. But it's definitely no because the damage check was completely wrong.
I'll say as well though like for liquid I mean these guys I don't know how they do it.
they keep doing it though they clock in and just randomly go what was their best
before I don't know actually 30 I think was it the 26 I mean I wasn't even
looking 16 as I was like I just focus on what we're doing and then suddenly
someone says oh Gigi's like what was happening or did we have a GM never
I can't say anything about them, when it matters it seems like they're really good at locking in.
So congratulations to them.
It is what it is.
We did see you in the last phase putting the three circles on top of each other
saying you guys came up with a lot.
How was it to kind of navigate through Ullatech?
I feel like it was such a fiddly fight with all the different damage profiles
the different cooldowns, phase 2 looking really spicy because you're trying to save some things for later
and of course you're strattening the end with the pulls, you know saving all of your healing cooldowns for that.
Did that take, you know, a while?
Well, I mean like, okay, I will give them some credit of like the whole like you save healing cooldowns for that moment
but we never talked about saving healing cooldowns for that moment
but we had them all up and the reason why is
not a single point of damage happens to you in like three minutes in that phase outside of
single target healing the people with the debuffs from the circles. They just actually like zeroed down.
So...
Yeah, it's not like a crazy thing to have your CDs up there. There's just no reason to use them.
I was quite busy with the planning at some point and it was getting
way too wild and at some point we noticed honestly that you don't need to min-max it so much.
Dude, I want to know when they figured out
the patterns in P1 and decided to have players make notes for specifically the sets. That I think was
just so fucking smart and genuinely hard to come up with. It is much more meh-meh-maxable, like you
could do easily 5% more both HP on this fight. Way more than that probably. Or it was actually
really hard. If you told me I need to do 5% more. On this fight there was a lot of ways
You could optimize things the movement between the egg rooms the carrying of the eggs like even classes
We didn't go for optimal class max. So Shaq doing the same void elf tech that nice means was this
For a hunter or something like that if you could have done a lot of things
But once we notice like oh, it was actually kind of killable. Let's just send some cities here and it's fine
I think that's worth welling on a little okay
That makes sense why their boss damage wasn't as high as I this is exactly what I guess earlier before listening to this
was that they basically were trying to consistently get to the end of the fight so they were and this is a smart progression move
They weren't using as many CDs in the burn
Maybe you move like two of them one on each side to P2 just to more consistently get through P2
And then you're like, okay
We'll move the CDs off if we have to on most end bosses you eventually have to anyway
So another line of thinking is let's do this from the beginning. So we're not learning something and then have to
Unlearning that's another way to do things right
But on this fight, you could definitely do that and just be like, okay, well
Now we have more consistent P3 pulls now. We see the end of the fight now. We know how much damage we need
It's actually kind of undertuned
So we don't even need to move that many CDs there now, right?
We got sort of comp changes days ago, you know, was it just that makes P3 harder for echo
But they have to do P3 more that's correct
But on this fight doing P3 more is better than making P3 harder because P3
Was it a personal thing?
I still don't know how good Red is.
Red is actually surprisingly really good at this boss.
Like that makes a lot of sense to me
that they don't know how good Red is
because like Lip was really trying to tell us like Red's
like really good two target
and just like really good timers for Ultec.
We tried it instead of Holy Paladin
and I think it was obvious that
Ellie Shaman wasn't gonna do it.
So we like just brought the Resto Shaman instead,
which is definitely like not the best healer
for that fight, but it works.
Um
And and ret was something very quickly when we were trying to make comm changes like the big thing was the second hunter
We saw them playing second hunter
But in our opinion hunter was like very mid for that boss
And the second hunter's mark has extremely low value on that boss specifically like you think it does but it doesn't like having it
On the boss during the amp very small having it on the tail during p1 very small
um
And and we thought they knew something we did it and we were like
like what would you even sit for the second hunter?
And like Rhett was never in conversations
of the thing you had changed to like bring Holy Paladin.
Like Rhett was like one of the better classes.
Like Rhett kind of came out of nowhere though,
cause pre-tier before they buffed their like tier set bonus,
they were very bad.
And then the tier set bonus is big.
It did feel like that is like every day
we were waiting for these comp changes to come in
and we knew you did splits for them.
You've got Cush was prepared.
I think Mace Team was prepared.
Darko was prepared.
And then ultimately it's kind of cool that you're like,
don't need to min-max this that much actually and decide to trust in the
players a little bit more is that something that's usually knowing you
you're like this guy's 1% better and what my 1% was it the boss itself that
dictated that are more in the thought process of yourself a little bit I think
the egg carrying is there's two things first of all there's like the chaos
even something is so chaotic as this boss with so many different damage
patterns and so many different like moments like I said egg-carrying like a lot of people having them in melee, ranged balance
You don't know what your change will lead to. You have an idea obviously look at the DPS reader
You see okay this class is a little better than this, but what else is changing, you know
Are we gonna have a different sprint or am I we're gonna have a problem having a person in melee carry the egg?
Are we gonna lose this guy's void elf jump over and then suddenly there's less space for other people
It's very risky to fiddle with things that you don't know.
Yeah, P1 is very interesting that way.
Fully about. And it's very hard to know everything and have the full grasp on all classes and this whole fight and everybody's assignments.
So the idea was change as little as possible and only the necessary things.
And in the end we thought the four year was worth it. And that's why we changed it. Also Spray Link is nice.
You know what? I have slandered Spirit Link totem a lot over the years.
because people are always like listing it with like the very best cooldowns in the game,
but they have buffed it enough and specifically this raid I feel like had a Jesus link moment
on like every single encounter to where I definitely am going to move like of my imaginary tier
list of raid cooldowns where Spirit Link before was like a B. I would move that up to an A.
I think it improved in my eyes in this year. I think mostly because like the things that were
stronger than it had been nerfed over time like disc priest barrier AMZ stuff like that to where
it has just it has just gotten better like if you combine the DR with the
linking of health it's very nice.
Further mid max is like I stopped at some point looking at things but I would guess that the
second rope would have been better than the second hunter.
The AUG is debatable in my opinion even because
it makes some things a little bit harder. I think he might be talking about P2.
I think AUG, at least for boss damage, AUG is like really really really good,
but on the side that AUG is on in P2 it's a little harder so we like
over stacked that side to make up for it.
Times, but it is good for the fight it's just a bit hard
to play, right? Aug is a bit crazy. There's a lot of indexing there was that could have been done,
but also, I don't think it was worth it. I think we made the right call.
Yeah, I think, I think we can probably do at least 5% more of the damage.
Aug is like boss could have a lot more health in the end. Yeah.
Which I don't think we've had this be the case often.
No, it's just a it's just a third reset thing, right?
Like if we're fighting this boss with last reset gear, I promise you the boss health would have been something you optimized for.
Man, we don't pay that much attention to the boss damage, I guess.
Yeah, it's like Galamix.
Yeah, I guess so, yeah.
Did fall a little bit that way. It wasn't as much of a, you know, type finish, I guess.
So you're trying to squeeze out those last few boss percentages. It did kind of fall over.
But I did want to ask as well, we did see the hotfix come in with the way that the waves worked in phase one
How many issues did that cause wait? I?
still am not sure
What they're talking about because I heard our players talk about this
I heard like whispers that echo was saying they like changed the P1 waves
But like I didn't we didn't really talk about that is something that was like a huge thing
But I need to before he even answers I need to even know what they're talking about because they never posted anything about this
Like they've never made the change on like in the discord where they're like we're fixing something about the p1 waves
They the waves were hotfixed to not be dodgeable on the yf y axis
No, that I mean you can still dodge them on the y axis that did not change
You think the patterns changed?
Oh wow, I was not aware of that.
We were talking about how Min Maxi was.
Hopefully they explain it.
That caused quite a bit of reproach.
For sure.
So, sorry.
Yeah, because we played already the boss quite a while before that and the way it works,
I don't know how much the chat knows as well.
basically four patterns in how you do the dodges and it's when the tail is on
the right and the boss like you dobs the boss to the right first okay so we call
that right right and there is a right left left and left right so four total
that's how we coded it let's say as well and you have a plan for each pattern
How are you going to do it?
And then what happened was, Blizzard made a fix.
I think it has to do with some code of how that caustic waves cast the spell ID or something.
Because you could track it somehow and call whether it's going to go left or right.
I think Liquid was doing that at the start.
And then I think that's why they halt-fixed something.
Oh, so yeah, basically when both of our guilds started this boss,
We basically had some super secret technology that made the boss, actually, maybe I can find
this.
So, Team Liquid.
Team Liquid rebroadcast.
It has to be the first day we streamed ULTEC.
streamed
If you use the going dark you would also see it that first night, which was day 12
Keep it real we can you know how many poles are we here 78 per 74 percent p3
We pull the boss, we do the eggs, it does its first wave, like right now, okay, right now.
So do you guys see the boss is about to start caustic waves?
Wait, pausing it three, two, it's right after this, I think.
Oh my God, why is it doing that?
All right, do you see how it already says left?
The boss has casted.
And it just started its cast and it hasn't even raised its hand yet.
But we already know the safe spot is going to be left.
Like this.
So this is when you should know that it's left, but we knew this for like the previous five seconds.
Due to some, I mean, basically how I think this worked is when the boss casts caustic waves
waves and he raises his arm where the left is the safe spot that's one spell ID
and when he raises it to the right that's another spell ID and it's like
pretty much that simple I think and then they still told us to stop using it and
they were like they were gonna fix it and we're like cool it wasn't like
anything against the rules or anything but it was just something that they
had forgotten to fix basically and what Roger is saying is maybe when they
hot-fixed this is when the waves work differently but maybe like they had
already kind of figured out the waves before that point and we had not and it
sounds that's why we didn't realize it changed the back waves to shoot five and
a half seconds earlier with changes how you play each pattern yeah I'm pretty
sure when we woke up on the day and actually started doing the note thing
I'm pretty sure it had already changed so it never affected us but they like
set their notes up and then it changed which made that suddenly you're
you're getting shot from behind much sooner so I would not recommend watching
the highlights videos in this race. I think you do a sneak peek and you're like what is
happening? Don't find me please. I really love my job and so yeah that was that was a bit
frustrating I think I think the mechanic in general is a bit frustrating though
right like because it's it's a pattern but it's not a hundred percent a pattern
Because there are gaps and the gaps are different every time so you get the general idea and you assume
I guess that there are no gaps, but it's it's I don't think this will go down as the favorite thing in the
The rest world first or anyone else was about to prog this fight guys good luck in phase one
Yeah, I think that might get changed and certainly
I wonder how it could be changed the only thing I think it could be changed like the biggest nerf to P1 would be
Remember how I told you earlier how the boss like removes blobs?
So like if this is a spectral coil back here and it just spawned and it's going to shoot out these blobs
Straight across from where you see them here across the platform right now
How the boss works is it picks two of them at random and deletes them
That's what creates the RNG if it if it deleted three or four
The average success chance of P1 would go up by like a thousand percent. That's probably all they need to do
It's been vipers. We don't like vipers.
Jon Vipers, he's been nicknamed, is not a nice man, and we don't like him when he shows up.
There have been some to play. This raid is very fun.
But how has it been as a raid, certainly compared to what we had recently?
Obviously we had a disappointing voidspire, but then we finished with Belarand and Lura.
The whole Demensius raid was very good.
What's been the overall Huletek vibe?
or abyss, that is abyss.
Yeah, it is a bit weird because the early bosses
were like actually hard because we were splitting them,
so we kind of got to progress them in a way,
but it didn't feel like good to progress them
because you knew you could kill it if you wanted to,
but you were making it after-
Making it harder by getting rid of your characters,
and the lower gear characters you could-
Dude, shout out that person earlier who said like,
I feel like the stream is ending in five minutes
and you were fucking wrong, by the way.
to kill them you could gather more loot in that week because you could split more.
So it was like this constant let's weaken ourselves and try to split it more
which like you want to kill a boss once I did. That's what you're going for right?
Like imagine if we're trying to split Ultec it wouldn't be fun right now
because we could kill it with one easy let's say. So that's why the early
part of the raid was kind of sad towards the end I mean twin fangs onwards I
think was good I think I was good full attack yeah in general like box and
stuff were pretty bad with QA I think I don't know maybe if they rush things
because of Blizzcon or something but I would say generally good fights yeah
I think I think I'm just sad a little bit that Cizorak was so easy
because we geared so much for it, you know?
We should probably bring a method here.
You tested all the stuff for you.
Yeah, I had high hopes for Cisarack actually,
because I liked the design of the boss,
so I was hoping that there would be a tight DPS check
and you have to actually play the whole thing.
I think Cisarack is very visually confusing.
But then, yeah, we split so much in the first week,
because this is how things are now.
Don't say that, man!
moved all the kicks from M+, and they were like,
what do I do with all these kicks?
And they threw them in the race.
And it's like.
Like a sands a sack of kicks.
Yeah.
I was like, oh, maybe now I can enjoy M+, finally,
because I hate it that you have to do a million kicks
and stops, and that's the only thing you're doing,
basically.
And now they're putting it in our race.
Like, what's going on?
Come on, like, get that out of here.
Like, I don't know.
And on top of that, they break a lot
of the weak order functionality.
So now you have to do scuffed week orders for kicks, and it's just like, I don't know,
it's annoying.
Stop doing kicks, everywhere.
Every boss has a kick.
Why?
I mean, twin fangs.
Yeah, every boss, I feel like they tried to remove kick add-ons, but then made the
most confusing, difficult kick requirement.
And if we didn't still have a way to kind of do kicks, it would just be miserable.
A lot of kicks.
Yeah, okay.
Twin fangs?
You know what?
There, I appreciate it.
Virten twin fangs sucks that fight a bit more is so bad like a big thing
And it's like for a short time right like you have to do kicks for 10 seconds, and then you're done
But then you go cool down you have these guys that can spawn randomly across the room diagonally super far
Or they can spawn a different position and then when you kick them
They might blink all the way to the corner or they could be all the way to the center and you have to like
kicks are not fun. I feel like in terms of boss design Blizzard has kind of
incorporated a lot of utility use in a lot of bosses even on frack for example
in second phase yet a lot of ad control and control in general pushing them in
phase three of Ulishek for example you know the ring of pieces the grips there
it just seems to be a lot more within a boss fight a little bit mythic
lost all as opposed to kind of just damage and healing. How do you kind of
like twin fangs for example you have to see the max so you can
recommend the second shadow instead of moonkin for ulotech um probably not
because I think like that the second moonkin will give you will make all the
eggs easier like the only thing shadow priest is better than boomkin at is
just boss damage and like the amp but they also kind of do the moonkin thing
Um
It's probably still the second moonken for ease of progression like if the boss damage check was hard a second shadow priest would be better
But it's not
I think that's fine because you plan for it. It's right there
It's just like I said like the things that like the way they did kicks for example a coil out there
I think it's bad and also you go then to Ultec and they're like what should this ad do?
Yeah, throw a cast to kick. Okay
jobs down like
Why why you're you're ignoring that by vashnik
Vashnik you just don't move you just stand still and shoot me
Thank God for that. That was I don't think was cooked good from Blizzard from the beginning. Okay. Yeah
It's become the standard strat across the board now to do that
There is something that happened over the course of this race
You might not be aware of because you guys have been busy points. This is actually yours
right oh
Oh, we reached that you didn't what happened? We reached that you reached that yes, they did thank you so much. They did
thousand children help
They got two hundred thousand in charity this this season
It's that's insane
Overall oh like over all events
okay holy fuck I thought that's a dude
wonderful achievement that was gone as
well as Daniel all 33 you are a winner
of our course at boss drop so make sure
your twitch DMs are open so we go
into you we don't say what's so much
more of your time guys but it's very hard
thought that was fucking with I was
like what are these guys what are these
guys got cooking over there what do you
how do you know is there anything you
immediately think could change I mean
you've had I mean dude it's hard for
them to say what could change like in
their minds they just played really really well, right?
Didn't have, I said to you this day, you did not have a bad rate data this entire time.
Yeah, not one bad rate data.
We had a lot of talking, I think, you know, there's of course always things to improve on
but I think this has been like such a complete package let's say from us.
Wait, are Tobo and them still in the pro lab?
Why do they keep talking about cany at combos?
Hold on.
Yeah, dude, they actually had Keynes somehow just like half of our guild is still in the
pro lab and I thought they like flew home but apparently there's I mean I knew
they were staring staying in an Airbnb until was gone but I didn't realize they're
just still gonna play here basically
I'm more even than the previous tears and the last year I thought already was
better than the previous you know like we're just I don't know I have no no
problems to address and very happy and proud of the team I do think that
But maybe the race is going in a weird direction though, like we've all just talked about.
So I do think, hopefully Blizzard announces something at BlizzCon or there is some thoughts
of changing it a little bit, I don't know, somehow, have some thoughts but yeah, at the
end of the day it's up to Blizzard, because I think it's also not as enjoyable for
anyone at this point, right?
Like yeah, you can say it's self-inflicted with all the splits and stuff, but it's
not just that.
It's getting worse.
A lot of things, like the bugs we're discussing.
So hopefully the race changes a little bit.
I don't get any of the, dude, that's another wow casual opinion.
That gets me good is the like, how can you guys complain about splits when you're doing
it to yourself?
But like, if you just don't do it and other people do it, you just lose.
So it is something you have to do, which is what it is, right?
Direction in the future.
Yeah, in terms of us super happy and thank you for all the support
In chat. I didn't really look at it, but I know it's there. So thank you so much
I saw all the all the helpers in the splits. That was impressive. All right, that's about it. All right. Yeah, make sense
All right, shout out to that guy who said the stream's ending in 13 minutes 13 minutes ago. It's actually correct
I'll be on