Pig & Whistle Tales - A World of Warcraft Podcast

Exploring New Horizons: The Exciting Potential of World of Warcraft's Season of Discovery

• Gabriel • Season 4 • Episode 58

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Imagine exploring Azeroth in a whole new light, with mysteries and challenges lurking around every corner. That's the kind of adventure waiting in World of Warcraft's Season of Discovery. As the excitement of Retail slows down, many of us, including myself, are finding solace and a fresh wave of excitement in the Classic Era and its Season of Discovery. It's a journey filled with innovative class roles, challenging raids like Blackwing Lair, and the tantalizing thought of what might have been if these elements debuted post-Naxxramas. Join me as we unpack why the initial hype may have waned and the potential these new features could have had in reshaping the World of Warcraft landscape.

We also step into the transformative possibilities of Season of Discovery, focusing on the evolving dungeons and eagerly anticipated raids. From finely tuned mobs in Blackrock Depths to dynamic class rotations like druid eclipses and tactical mana management for mage healers, Season of Discovery breathes new life into the game. Despite Retail's current dominance, there's a sense of optimism for this season's growth, especially as new raids like the Karazhan Crypts promise to enrich the experience. We'll speculate on future expansions and the promise of fresh content, tantalizing our imaginations with unexplored regions and previously cut content, ensuring World of Warcraft remains as dynamic and engaging as ever.

Hope you all enjoy and hope you relate to any of these stories. And I will speak to you all in the next episode!

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Speaker 1:

Music. Thank you, hello, and welcome to the Pig and Whistle Tales from Azeroth. As always here at the Pig and Whistle Inn in Stormwind, I go for a variety of subjects with regards to World of Warcraft. So grab a bottle or a pint, sit back and enjoy this midweek episode. We're going over Season of Discovery and I kind of want to go over what I've been doing recently on Season of Discovery. So let's get straight into it. There's no dilly-dallying around, we're just going to get right into it Now, with retail obviously being out for a month or over a month.

Speaker 1:

Now, is that really over a month? Am I crazy? It's two months, nearly it is two months. Yeah, it's been out two months now. Retail, um, but essentially retail starts to slow down because obviously patches don't come out, um for a bit, or major patches. So you're kind of doing the same thing for a couple months, so they naturally slow down until that next patch comes out. It's a natural thing in a moba game not a moba game, mmo, um.

Speaker 1:

But this allows the player base to obviously explore the different world of warcraft variations that are, uh, available to. So you have Classic Era, you have Classic and you have Season of Discovery. Now I play Classic a lot of the time, or at least I raid with my guild, and these are people that I enjoy raiding with and this is what I use Classic for. For the others, classic Era and Season of Discovery I use these as very much chilling out World of Warcraft. So I think that they are a lot simpler in their design, because Classic, when it was released, was a lot simpler of a product essentially than what retail is currently. So it takes a lot less brain power for me to play in the in this world in comparison to when I do my activities on retail, because on retail all I'm doing is pvp. On season of discovery, all I'm doing is raiding, like very simple raids, or doing dungeons or leveling, you know them sort of things. So over the few weeks I've actually been getting more and more into Season of Discovery again and I have a very on-and-off relationship with it, but I've been playing my Druid and I've been leveling a Paladin as well.

Speaker 1:

Now this got me thinking why didn't season of discovery retain its player base? It like to a certain degree? Now, don't get me wrong, every world of warcraft's player base drops off at some point, whether it be there's no patches going out whether there be, uh, people just don't enjoy the content. You know there's many different reasons for it, but Season of Discovery started and everyone was really hyped about it. You know, level 0 or level 1 to 25 was the first phase, and then to level 40, from there the level 50 and the level 60. And now you have phase 5 that's out, which has Blackwing Lair and stuff like that, quing lair and stuff like that. Um, but at that initial stage a lot of people dropped off very quickly, uh, in the early stages of season of discovery.

Speaker 1:

So season of discovery was something completely different. When it comes to classic, you obviously had different runes that you could get that were either from older expansions of world of warcraft or just completely new, such as Shaman Tanking, healing Mages, stuff like that. And this is where the drop off happened, because there's not a lot of things that you can do at level 25. There really isn't. You don't have a lot of your core abilities and I think this is where they kind of lopped with season of discovery. I think they, if I think if they went for like level 40, I think it would have been a lot better because it allowed people to get the full use of their talent trees, maybe done something along them lines, but then you would have had bigger patches or certain phases wouldn't have been able to come out at certain times. You know bits and bobs like that can occur, but that's besides the point season of discovery.

Speaker 1:

Over the past few weeks of me playing it, I've realized that it is a very good product and a lot of people need to understand that. Yes, this is classic, but it's classic with a twist and people just think, oh my god, then you know these. They've just added spells from later expansions, so this is just classic with, you know, wrath or cataclysm spells. No, that's not the case. This is, this is a sandbox world of warcraft, this is sandbox mode, and you can see that with what they're doing, the ideas that they're trying to implement a bit more. This is if blizzard had a kind of free create oh my God creativity or free reign, essentially to do what they want. It's like they've given a group of 100 people to just say go and make what you can of this, you know no restrictions, make kind of what you would want to see in a sandbox World of Warcraft mode, and that's what they've done, with nefarian being at the front of the blackwing lair, where you can enable these different difficulties. Same with molten core, where you have different difficulties. You've got shaman tanks, arcane mage, healers. You have specs that weren't as good, that are becoming a lot more viable, such as protection paladins, feral druids, even bear tanks, like they weren't a staple point of classic warriors, were really the only tanks, but now that they are becoming more and more impactful because of the runes that they have or because they've changed certain settings with spell power or attack power, you know these sort of things and I think that it's really, really good to see and I think about it, I think about Classic, you know, back in 2019, 2020.

Speaker 1:

And I think what if they did this after Naxxramas? So, going back to Classic, yes, it was a great journey, the nostalgia was amazing and I understand people not wanting any sort of changes, but I wonder if after Naxxramas, they simply just went look, we're not going to move into TBC, we are simply going to turn this into more of a sandbox feature with these runes that we're going to add. We're going to add new raids and stuff. I wonder if it would have been more of a hit than where classic went, and that's my honest opinion. So I think that they would have given us a chance to move our characters over to classic era so you could have picked like when they released tbc, you could pick between carrying on your character or remaining in classic era. A lot of people went on to tbc.

Speaker 1:

I think that it would have been better because people still would have gotten that classic experience where there's like very little changes. You got to experience the leveling in that you got to experience the classic raiding environment through molten core all the way to nax ramus, and then season of discovery would have been like okay, now all of the raids are going to be somewhat locked, but you have the ability to unlock them in a different manner so you can go into these raids that you've already cleared with your runes like on your mains. But if you want, you can do a sort of alt only or season of season of discovery only character where, or like raid. You know that kind of deal. Now this obviously would have been a continuation of classic. So after nax ramus they would have released karazhan crypts or a scarlet monastery dungeon or what else.

Speaker 1:

What else is a mystery in world of warcraft? I can't really think of any, maybe like swamp of sorrows again. They could have done something with that. They could have turned the blasted lands into a giant like raid, like they could have done that. Maybe they turn, yeah, the blasted lands into a giant like raid, like they could have done that. Maybe they turn, yeah, the blasted lands just into a giant raid like survive the oncoming threat of the dark portal or something you know. Go that, go back in time to do that now.

Speaker 1:

I get that that was in burning crusade in caverns at time, don't get me wrong, but they could have made the entire zone into a raid and you could have, like, mounted up, gone to each of the corners and had to defeat a certain boss or a certain you know mob from the horde that came through the dark portal and then your final boss was Gul'dan or something you know. They could have done this stuff afterwards and I think they kind of missed out on it. I get that they're doing it now and this means that they've got two different products, that they have World of Warcraft Classic Cataclysm at the moment, as well as the Season of Discovery product. But I don't know. I just I always think what could have been if they carried on with them characters, because I loved my characters. I still do love my characters that I have on Classic. I have great memories with them.

Speaker 1:

I have gear that I've still kept in the bank since Classic. I know I can sell it all and stuff, but I absolutely adore that gear. I hoped, or I really did, want them to maybe do something like a sandbox feature, like a Classic Plus. I think it would have been cool, but you know, we kind of went a little bit off track there. I want to say how actually good my season of discovery experience has been. It's been out for several months, season of discovery, and now that it's in sort of a middle phase, I would say, because you still have Uncaraj and Naxxramas to come out, it's in the middle of the late phases. Okay, the leveling in it is really good. I really enjoy it. You still have somewhat of a tough leveling progression but at the same time it does make it quite easy to level up and get alts up to scratch with the uh delight buff, the 150 increased xp. So I'm absolutely enjoying it. I'm loving playing it with people that I play it with and I think it's very good that they can do that from an alt perspective, because everything that Blizzard have fumbled on in the past is making stuff alt friendly, and that includes classic all the way up to retail about a couple of years ago when Shadowlands was out, because alts in Shadowlands weren't existent, they were very tough to actually maintain. So I'm loving that.

Speaker 1:

The end game of Season of Discovery I I went in my first couple dungeons, again on my druid for like a week or so ago, a couple weeks ago, and you know it was your typical black rock depths and scoluments and these dungeons, black rock depths especially you always think, oh my god, that's such a long dungeon, it's such a drag, but they've tuned it, they've upped the health of the mobs, I believe, um, but they've tuned it in a way that it's actually a decently long dungeon but it doesn't drag on for too long. Okay, scholomance I found that I was really enjoying it. Now there are mobs in Scholomance that if you go back to classic they were tedious to kill, but with the runes it allows people to be able to work around this and actually play around these mechanics of the mobs that are inside there or of this dungeon, and I think this is amazing. I actually really enjoyed doing the classic dungeons, and in classic I thought it was very much a bit of a slugfest where you're sort of dragging yourself through. You don't really want to be, but you kind of have to at some points just to, you know, get some gear or help out a friend or anything along them lines. So you know there's many different points to it, but I think that the end game is very good. I've yet to try a raid as of when I'm recording this anyway.

Speaker 1:

So I've seen the raids though, and what I'm looking at is something that is the same, but it's a different take on it. It's not just you would walk in there pressing a frost bolt, it's not just you would walk in there pressing a sinister strike into an eviscerate or a backstab into an eviscerate. You actually have rotations, and that is what classic was missing. Okay, people were missing rotations when it came to classic, because all I did as a mage, frostbolt, and then, when it turned to fire, fireball or scorch, first get your scorch off and then fireball. You know that sort of thing, and it was just boring. It really was, but people actually have rotations. Now they have mechanics for their class that they need to deal with, such as eclipses for druids, such as if you're a mage healer, making sure your regen's up on people and then dealing damage. You know there's multiple different things that you can do, but that's all classic was missing. It was missing the rotation from the end game content, and that's kind of where it actually has a better impact, in my opinion, and I think that the raids are better off because of it.

Speaker 1:

Now, are these something that are going to? Is this a wow? That is going to be a very serious contender for the main world of warcraft. No, retail world of warcraft will always be the main world of Warcraft. No Retail World of Warcraft will always be the main World of Warcraft. I will say that right now, and I don't think you can tell me otherwise, because Retail World of Warcraft is World of Warcraft. It is the original World of Warcraft. It has a contender to possibly be second best though. So right now I would say that that retail is very much the front runner.

Speaker 1:

And then you have classic, and then you have season of discovery and classic era. Now I think that season of discovery, in potential later phases, has the potential to overtake classic. I genuinely do, depending on the um, depending on the. What is it the content that they release? If they release a brand new raid in Karazhan Crypts or something perfect, a raid that no one else has, no other WoW has, and people get to experience it in Season of Discovery, so people will flock to see this raid and experience the raid for themselves. People will watch the raid and think you know what? I kind of want to play some Season of Discovery.

Speaker 1:

Now you know there's many different factors that can go into this, but I really do just think that Season of Discovery will become more populated the longer it goes on and the longer it keeps getting into the later phases of it. Now I don't know when these later phases will end and if they have an ending for the phases, they need to have content that goes on after that, because otherwise it will stagnate and it will die. But I think that they're going to be prepared for that. I think that they have a couple raids probably that are up um or up in the clouds, probably ready to be plucked out and turned into content for us as a player base season of discovery. Honestly, keep an eye on it. It will rocket in popularity very soon, with its phases starting to roll out into the deeper and later raids of classic, especially when nax ramus comes back. I think we'll be seeing a lot of people do these sort of things or go back to season of discovery, because nax ramus is a great raid in itself. But what you're looking for is that exclusive content that it will have harrison crips and I will always go back to it.

Speaker 1:

Maybe a Scarlet Monastery raid. Everyone loves Scarlet Monastery. It's really good, really good place to put a raid. You have the interior. Just do it, blizzard, please. It'll be amazing.

Speaker 1:

Now, yeah, I don't know, maybe just put different islands, maybe turn the Isle of Quel'Danas into a hub or something for something Like just turn the Isle of Quel'Danas into like a hub or something for something like but just gear or Brands, mog even, or you know anything along them lines. Really try and branch out with the unexplored areas. You know, turn Hyjal into one of the like a new zone or something, or make it a raid. I don't know. They kind of did that in TBC, you know. You know there's a lot of cut content in WoW that they could add Into Season of Discovery and I really hope that they do. But this is a short one, but I will have to call it there. Thank you all very much For listening. Do check out all of the socials down below. Lots of stuff happening over there. Once again, thank you all very much for listening and go aval a friend. Goodbye all. Thank you.