Matt’s Notebook: The Forever Edition

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Alright, let’s go ahead and get the quick hits out of the way. There’s a lot to update the team on (all five of you readers, that is). As I’m writing this, I’m currently auto-running my way from Ashenvale, into Stonetalon, into Desolace. But first, some Venomous Abyss updates since it’s been some time.

  • In Death Jesters, we’ve reached Ulatek finally. Phase 1 was the biggest learning sink with four different movement combinations that the team had to get used to based on the spawn of Ulatek and his tail. We did end up seeing phase 3 a few times so that kill should be imminent this week.
  • Over in Last Call, we’ve progressed into Coiled Altar. The big nerf that happened last week has been huge, which freed up a whole set of interrupters for us. We were able to get through phase 1 and all of phase 2. Now we’re getting into phase 3 and are at the point where we’ve taken Heroism off of phase 1. Our plan is to save it for that intermission push. Recruiting has been abysmal for us, as free agents have dried up. Every week, 1 or 2 players couldn’t make it to raid. The team’s been fortunate enough that we can pull from DJs or our friends to help us out. Come check us out and apply if you’re looking for a long-term raid to join. It’s definitely been a rough month and has been part of the reason why I’ve been quiet.

The other reason I’ve been quiet is all these other games that’ve come out recently. FF Resonance has been fantastic. It’s a great 40-hour side quest for me to get through, and I hope Square gets more of those types of games made.

How about that World of Warcraft: Forever?

Going into it, I wanted to make a Priest again. At the last second, I pivoted and decided to go with a Mage instead because I wanted some sustainability during the leveling process.

With a name like Mana Kendrick, how could I not? So far, my experience in Forever has been this mixture of fun and frustration. Yes sir, we’re all the way back like it’s 2004 again! The launch was excellent and was one of the smoothest in history. A few doomers were on the DJ Discord, but I kept my uncharacteristic optimism, banking on the fact that, surely, this time Blizzard Engineers learned a lot from their beta experience. Death Jesters has an Alliance presence on the Normal ruleset, and Zeroes to Heroes has been established Horde-side (also on the Normal rule set).

At the moment, I’m level 37 and slowly grinding my way up. The layering out in the world zones have been on and off, in my experience. The first few days, some areas were devoid of people which was glorious for the leveling. Mobs were plentiful. But I guess there were some complaints about the emptiness of certain areas, so that ended up getting tweaked. Now I end up in areas like Stranglethorn Vale trying to take down Crystal Basilisks or those Medicine Men and soldiers by the Colonel Kurzen camps where there are barely any spawns and is saturated by players also trying to get kill credits or quest items. Surely there can be some kind of middle ground area that works here. Whenever I’ve made those remarks, I’ll get dogpiled by the internet going, “What’s the rush” or “Slow down” or “Go back to retail” and so on and so on (and that attitude is a whole other topic of discussion). I’m comfortable with the slow pacing of combat and the lack of shared tagging. But it’s not fun when I try to go after mobs and then get beat to it by someone else (or there are next to no spawns of what I’m looking for). I can’t help it if I just like levelling. Some people prefer to stop, look around, enjoy the sunshine and flowers. It all visually looks stunning, especially the water, but I can appreciate it quickly then move on. If people want to take their time dawling and leveling, I’m all for it. Personally, I want to get to a spot where I can check out the new zones since I’ve levelled through these areas before in the past. So pardon me if I don’t want to read the same book again.

I also saw that they recently buffed dungeon experience, which is nice. As it stands, most dungeon experience seems to be limited to quest rewards. For most players, they’d just go through it once, then move on back to the world. This meant there was little reason to go back unless you were chasing specific item drops. It provides a nice alternative way to level up if the zones you were planning to quest in are overpopulated. I’m pretty sure the experience gain is still less than what it was during vanilla, however.

Quick hits on the new dungeons:

  • Hall of Thanes: Great intro dungeon and rivals Ragefire Chasm quite nicely. Was chuckling at the players asking for summons when it’s right inside Ironforge.
  • Excavation Site: Wetlands: Felt a bit overtuned when I went in there at 28. Beware the tall grass. The raptors there aren’t stealthed. They’ll spawn after a while of players mving around the tall grass.
  • City of Dalaran: It’s weird seeing Dalaran grounded and not floating around. It was fun exploring both the city and the dungeon. It does get faster with repeats. It’s one of the few places with blueprints for the Enchanting and Tailoring camping items, so I’ll need to run this a few more times to get it.

All in all, I’m having a decent time with it and Forever has served as a nice distraction from the retail game. I’m hoping I can get to 60 before Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out. We’ll see if I can get that accomplished!

Warcraft Forever: It’s not the Death of Retail

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I mentioned earlier that I didn’t think Forever was going to be for me long term, and maybe it won’t be my primary game. The sentiment online seems to be that the game is well received and is the solution to everything that is wrong with World of Warcraft. In fact, it will be so good that it’ll absolutely crush Retail’s numbers, and Blizzard will have no choice but to sunset the game.

Absolutely preposterous.

Retail’s too popular and too good of a game for Blizzard to end. People like the raiding, the dungeon system, housing, all the collectibles, etc. It’s got something for everyone even if it doesn’t have everything for everyone. Despite the presentation comments about helping Azeroth “one last time”, Paul Kubit (Associate Game Director) explained that many of the story beats will get resolved in the last expansion of the Worldsoul Saga, which will pave the way for more stories afterwards.

I do want to add that this discourse of Retail vs Classic needs to stop. We’re all playing in one big sandbox. I don’t see why one has to end for the other to live. I don’t agree that one version of the game is infinitely better than the other, simply because there are too many individual preferences. I’m not going to condemn someone for living in Retail exclusively versus another who heavily favours Classic and wants to play forever in that era. They’re two different games. People need to stop shitting on other people for enjoying other games. It was like this decades ago with all of the different MMOs of the time. Between Tera, SWTOR, Rift, Wildstar, and all of these MMOs that were billed as the next WoW killer, Warcraft has outlasted all of them.

But I’m telling you, not even World of Warcraft is capable of killing World of Warcraft.

These purists just need to take a step back and tone down that rhetoric. It’s not necessary anymore in this day and age. If Forever has too many changes (like this Undead Paladin), Classic proper itself is right there. I don’t think that’ll be killed off because there’s a definitive community for it.

Most of this “Retail is dead, Forever killed it” energy I keep seeing is coming from Twitter (or X). Twitter WoW discourse has always run hotter and angrier than the actual playerbase. It’s a small, loud slice of the community, and it rewards the most extreme take, not the most accurate one. A quote-tweet dunking on Retail gets more engagement than a nuanced “actually I enjoy both” post ever will, so the algorithm just keeps feeding you the loudest voices.

We’ve seen this exact cycle before.

With Shadowlands launch, Dragonflight’s slower opening months, you can pick almost any expansion and you can find a wave of “this is the one that finally kills WoW” tweets. None of them were right. The subscriber base didn’t evaporate, the raiding scene didn’t fold, and here we are years later still running progression on multiple teams.

None of this is to say the criticism of Retail is baseless. The gearing treadmills, M+ score gatekeeping in pugs, systems bloat between Delves, Bonus Rolls, and tier sets, weekly reset chores piling up. Those are real complaints and I’ve felt some of them myself. But there’s a difference between “this system needs work” and “the entire game needs to be sunset so Forever can take its place.” The Twitter framing collapses that distance entirely, and it makes the actual, fixable complaints harder to take seriously because they get buried under this apocalyptic rhetoric.

Running raid teams gives me a different vantage point than most people tweeting about this. I’m not about choosing a side. I’m trying to figure out how to fit Forever into a schedule that already has four Retail raid teams in it. From where I sit, the “pick one or the other” framing doesn’t even reflect how people are actually playing. It reflects how people are performing their opinions online.

Another topic I want to weigh in on is that the new race coming into Warcraft Forever has a price tag on it. I saw some discourse about how it was a big ol’ cash grab and unfair that things cost money.

That’s crap, man. This game is a part of the subscription and there is no box price for it like paying for another expansion in Retail. If you think about the fact that WoW’s subscription has not risen in years (at least, in certain regions in NA), you’re getting a deal. You can still access the rest of the game easily with any of the base races and classes.

Have some level of gratitude that the game isn’t more expensive and is financially fueled by name changes, server transfers, faction changes, transmog collectors, and the AH Anniversary mount FOMO players (like me). Paying for a new race isn’t that offensive to help kickstart and sustain a new game altogether.

My Approach to Forever

I’m on multiple raiding teams and I also oversee them. I won’t have the ability or time to dive fully and immerse myself into the way slower game style of Forever. It’ll take me 15 seconds plus a lot of Wanding on my Priest to just kill a mob.

What I need to do is change my approach to the game. I need to think of this as a single player RPG where I can drop in and out. Don’t get me wrong, I love end game content (raids and dungeons) more so than leveling. But if my end game itch is scratch on retail, I won’t need to rely on it in Forever and can just stroll through it like I would in Cyberpunk or Dragon Age.

Raids will come out later in December. Who knows if I’ll have the time to do it as much as I love raiding. This might lead to me dropping one of the other four raid teams I’m participating in.

The Death Jesters and Zeroes to Heroes community is already hard at work laying out the foundation for our Forever guild. If you’re looking for a place to hang out and start, I’d highly recommend it. We had a strong representation this year at BlizzCon with multiple raid teams and community members present. Look at the turnout below!

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You’re welcome to join! We haven’t decided on a ruleset yet, but if I were to hazard a guess, it would most likely be Alliance based on a normal ruleset, although nothing has been confirmed.

BlizzCon Day 2: Sunday

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My Sunday started off well enough. I was able to sleep in and fuel up with breakfast. I didn’t feel compelled to go in early today since I decided to give up on going to the gear store or hitting up the Darkmoon Faire. Instead, I sat down at the main stage in the morning to take in some more information on the Warcraft Forever panel. They touched upon some key aspects:

  • Talents (with Paladins as an example)
  • Transmog
  • Legacy System
  • Server infrastructure
  • Camping
  • Itemization

Reaction seemed generally positive especially with servers being decided via rulesets instead of individual realms. There’s a lot of questions here. Can a player on a PvP ruleset change to join a friend on normal? What about RP rulesets? Is there an option like flagging yourself for PvP (similar to retail)?

All of it was fascinating information. I can’t wait to look at the Priest talents further.

My level of involvement in Warcraft: Forever is a challenging one to answer. I’m on four different raid teams. Of the four, two of them are CE focused that I help run to some degree. The third is another CE team where I’m just a player. The last one is a simple AotC team that I joined so I wouldn’t have to queue into group finder for. Picking up Forever means making compromises and dropping some of those teams.

After it ended, I wandered around the show floor to explore the different things that were going on that I didn’t get a chance to from the first day. I ran into the boss man GM and he told me one of our former raiders wanted to meet up with us, so we trekked over to say hello. Seeing people and guildies is a priority that I try to make happen.

The Diablo Immortal line was next. I should’ve entered the phone line instead of the PC line. I tried out the new Tempest class since everyone who participates gets one of three different pin types. I wanted Malthael but my loot luck rewarded me with Andariel instead.

Biggest highlight of the day was participating with my guild in a miniature tabletop session with my friend and former WoW Insider colleague, Anne. She was GM’ing for us. It was a short 20 to 30 minute experience. The story is that Khadgar got himself locked away and we needed to help free him. The party involved a Warrior, a Paladin, a Shaman, and a Mage (me)! I started the game off by casting Invisibility on everyone. Our Shaman went ahead and looted a potion to throw on top of one of the three Ogres that happened to be in the room. Me (in my oh so infinite wisdom) strode over to the weapons rack to see what I could find and somehow pulled a Gorehowl which had to attack someone (and I knocked off the second Ogre). Our Paladin, who rolled a natural 20, tried to speak to the third Ogre to see if it knew anything about what was keeping Khadgar at bay and locked up.

As we should have known, Ogres aren’t bright at all and did not know how to answer a question while it was busy using a table leg for a tooth pick. At least the Ogre was polite and offered another table leg to our Paladin.

Turns out the solution was quite simple. All we had to do was blow up a crystal which lowered all of the shields and countermeasures. My assumption is that the Ogres were a defensive mechanism conjured up by the crystal (which also happened to trigger the wards up in the room that trapped Khadgar). All in all, an enjoyable time! My legs and feet were cooked after standing in line for about 90 minutes.

Having access to NFL Sunday Ticket made lines bearable. I was able to watch stuff during the wait. But this can be substituted for a stream, a Youtube video, or a book.

After all that, we left and got something to eat since everyone was on different schedules. Wished everyone well while I went back upstairs to my room to refresh!

Things I would have done differently

Let’s talk about some BlizzCon lessons.

  • This is my 12th BlizzCon. I don’t need to go in to the main stage to watch the opening ceremony anymore. I can watch it and stream it direct from my room after sleeping in and eating breakfast. I’ve done enough of that. I can give up my seat for someone else who has never had that opportunity.
  • More undershirts and underwear for sure. This time of year was atrocious with the humidity and the heat. It needs to be back in the October and November time frame.
  • Gold Bond. I didn’t think I’d need it this time, but chaffing is awful.
  • If I really wanted stuff, outright skip the Opening Ceremony and start going to the stores immediately.

How I wish BlizzCon were done differently

I understand that this is the first BlizzCon back since the disaster that was 2023. But Blizzard needs to start working on getting their fastball back.

  • Let’s get that date back to the late Fall. Mentioned it earlier up, but it bears repeating again.
  • Line management. Lots of misinformation or misunderstanding regarding lines and where people are supposed to go for the store or for entry into Darkmoon Fair.
  • Line activity. PAX West does a great job of this for attendees in lines. But just having something engaging to do to help pass the time is nice. I spent most of my time watching Sunday Ticket.
  • Store inventory. Lots of stuff just went out of stock quite quickly. I’d flag Battle Net accounts tied to BlizzCon attendance with store exclusives that attendees can ship home, if they wish.
  • Professions section had great turn out. Those lines were jam packed every time. Easily one of the more popular attractions and maybe having more staff and space for it would help.
  • Participation prizes? Immortal demos gave away some pins for trying out their game either on PC or on the phone. I never would have tried it otherwise. Battlegrounds demos for some swag would’ve been a good pick. WoW probably wouldn’t need any incentive prizes.
  • Multiple stages for opening ceremony. That one year when all stages were used for their respective title announcements was amazing. It helped distribute people throughout the venue.

While it was a bit of a let down on retail announcements, I’m still pleased with all of the other announcements that were made. I wish we learned more about StarCraft and what they envision there.

BlizzCon: Actual Day 1 – Saturday

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What an interesting day! We’re going to just dive into all of the major announcements.

  • World of Warcraft: Not much on the retail side of things which is to be expected since, y’know, spoilers. Warcraft Forever seems like it’ll be well received. I did end up trying the demo for one of the dungeons with the squad from DJs. I forgot how much more challenging it was then with the different spells, the mana, the drinking after every pull, etc. Can’t do it. This version of the game probably isn’t for me any longer sadly. I could always get it and try a different class that isn’t a Priest, I suppose. However, the new Talebound game mode seems like a fun activity to get lost in as well. It’s funny how the crowd was not happy about the new Season 3 dungeon pool but cheered the loudest with transmog opening up to all armor types.
  • Warcraft 3: I might need to pick up Reforged with that new campaign. 30 hours of new stuff? I’m in.
  • StarCraft: Cinematic announcement was amazing. 2030 as a release date seems so far away. Probably too early for gameplay footage but would’ve been nice to see some of that. But hey, it’s an open world shooter. I know not many people were happy about that but I’m looking forward to exploring StarCraft from a new perspective.
  • Diablo: While it’s sad to see that Diablo 4 is finished with expansions, it was a big surprise for me regarding Diablo 5. For it to take place in a new setting and environment where Diablo wins is going to be an all new perspective from previous games where it was always about the eternal conflict. In this case, it seems like the conflict has resolved itself.  Now what? How does the rest of Sanctuary react? Who is left to challenge Diablo? More importantly, the Monk is back! Lastly, this Netflix Diablo collaboration should be awesome. Hoping it bridges the story between D4 and D5.
  • Heroes of the Storm: I never expected to see anything new coming to Heroes of the Storm. Is it coming out of maintenance mode? Xal’atath is entering the Nexus and another hero is slated for release later in the year. It’s enough to get me to reinstall it.
  • Hearthstone: YO NEW MONK CLASS THOUGH.

That’s all! Tomorrow I plan to try out more of the games on the show floor. I want to explore Hearthstone and Diablo for sure. I was going to put some time in towards the store or the Darkmoon Faire, but I fear that may be a bust.

BlizzCon: Day 1 – Wednesday

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It’s been six years since I’ve last been to BlizzCon. Had to get up at 4:30 AM to take the train and get to the airport. Only takes about an hour, so chalk that in the “good to know” list for future travels. The flight from BC to Los Angeles is generally quite smooth and it was sunny from takeoff to landing.

Airport security has changed so much. The gate agents didn’t even ask for my boarding pass. All I had to do was look at a camera and it had everything. Biometrics have made some serious advancements.

It is a little scary.

Once I landed, there was a little trouble with the jet bridge. Maybe it ran out of gas? They couldn’t connect the bridge to the plane and it took them a few minutes to get it going. Once I stepped off, I was immediately roasted with what felt like 40 degree heat (that’s Canadian temperatures, by the way).

Arriving to the main Convention grounds, everything felt familiar. This will be my 12th BlizzCon. But many of my former guildies and past friends will not be. I don’t know if my friends and colleagues from Blizzard Watch will be here. I’m experiencing a new BlizzCon with several community members from Death Jesters and Zeroes to Heroes. I did run into some of the fine folks from WoWHead while I was at the bar here watching the NFL season opener. It was nice just exchanging war stories about past BlizzCons and how the site community has been evolving (or in some areas, stayed the same).

We both agreed that we never look at the comments section, ever.

The community parties and get togethers have vanished. No community WoWHead party, or Con Before the Storm, or any of the other old gatherings. It’s inevitable that the past organizers have moved on to other priorities and other projects but those were definite community staples and will be missed. You think you can live these experiences repeatedly, but nope. All good things do come to an end. Those were the days and some of my favourite memories.

Let’s get to some predictions (and wishes).

BlizzCon Predictions

  • StarCraft: There’s way too much smoke for there not to be fire here, especially with the ARG stuff going on at the StarCraft website. Some kind of Co-op or team based shooter would be great. I’m hoping for something like Helldivers. It could be single player. I have low odds for it to be a battle royale of some type (very unlikely). An RTS announcement on top of this would be unexpected, but well received. Look how well Age of Empires 2 has been doing.
  • World of Warcraft: Maybe a look at 12.2? I’m sure there’ll be some more Classic stuff, like yet another new game mode. Nothing interesting for me there to look at. I’ve got odds on Plunderstorm making a return on a new map. Will we see a combined Warlords and Legion Classic even though we just had Legion Remix? Is there even going to be another Remix in the near future?
  • Warcraft: Can’t see there being any new developments on the RTS side here, either.
  • Diablo: Dark horse for announcements. I’m hoping for two new expansion announcements, but maybe we’ll get one. Lord of Hatred just got released a short time ago though so maybe it’ll just be a Season 15 look instead, along with Immortal updates.
  • Hearthstone: It needs another refresh. I’m not sure how. The last big feature that was a hit was Battlegrounds. Can they spin up another new mode here instead of yet more new expansions?
  • Overwatch: I haven’t kept up with Overwatch in years. Lost all interest since the announcement of Overwatch 2 and the quiet rebrand back. Not sure what the plan is here and I can’t even begin to speculate, but I hope it’ll be a fun one for the fans.

More of the squad is arriving tomorrow. But for me, my plan is to just catch up with people I haven’t seen in a really long time, then watch some more football. Rams and 49ers in Australia will be a watch.

If you happen to find me and recognize me here at BlizzCon, you may need to reintroduce yourself. It’s been six years and I haven’t been able to keep in touch with everyone.