Pig & Whistle Tales - A World of Warcraft Podcast

The Ashbringer Returns: Season of Discovery Phase 8 Unveils Classic WoW's Greatest Mystery

• Gabriel • Season 4 • Episode 98

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Patch 11.1.5 introduces new features to World of Warcraft while Season of Discovery Phase 8 delivers the long-awaited Ashbringer questline alongside a brand-new raid.

• Weekly world bosses: Kordrak and the Gobfather in Azoroth and the Undermine
• Delves as bonus event with increased rewards from Delves and Solo Shuffle
• Salmshore versus Taramil is the weekly brawl (requires good PC for 40v40 combat)
• Patch 11.1.5 adding Cooldown Manager to baseline UI, reducing addon dependency
• Dastardly Duos introduces 2-player PvE arena content with cosmetic rewards
• Race to World First ended quickly with Liquid winning but Chrome King Gallywix falling after only 100 pulls
• Season of Discovery Phase 8 launching April 8th with completely new content
• The Scarlet Enclave raid features eight bosses including lore-significant characters
• Legendary questline allows players to finally cleanse the Corrupted Ashbringer

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:

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 through a variety of subjects with regards to World of Warcraft. Go for a variety of subjects with regards to world of warcraft. Take off a bottle or a pint, sit back and enjoy this episode. We'll be going over, uh, multiple bits and bobs, to be honest. We're going to be looking at the race to world first. We're going to be looking at patch 11.1.5, we're going to be looking at season of discovery, so a whole plethora of things, um, but we obviously have the weekly news, as always. So we have a kordak and the gob father as your world bosses for the week. They are located within uh, oh no, I've forgotten that again, as our guy is the zone dawn ago is the city, the, the first zone, the first zone in Tornagol, and the Undermine is where the Gobfather resides. You have Delves as your bonus event for the week. You get more rewards from completing Delves and Solo Shuffle. Salmshore versus Taramil is your brawl for the week. This is essentially a 40 versus 40. This will crash your PC if it is not up to scratch, so please make sure that you actually have a PC that can handle this. It is a bit shit, I know, but it is good fun if you can, and it is just an absolute cluster of everyone spamming everything. It is good fun in its own way, but being a melee in this is kind of rough, I'm not going to lie to you, so let's get straight into it all.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to start off with patch 11.1.5. Now, there isn't much that is going to be happening within this patch, but there is a couple things that I'm going to talk about. Firstly, this being cooldown manager. Um, and what is this? You might think? They are adding a Cooldown Management setting within the settings and this allows you to track certain cooldowns that you want to track, and this is really good, because this is usually done via an add-on in WoW.

Speaker 1:

So they are actually attempting to slowly phase out add-ons, which is a big thing in WoW, because over the past 15-20 years now, the add-ons in WoW have been very, very big. They have always, like, been there, essentially, and they've constantly gotten better and better throughout the years of playing the game. Essentially, now a lot of people rely on these add-ons they really rely on them, actually and this means that people miss out mechanics, they aren't doing their rotations like perfectly, they aren't seeing the game essentially, and I think that adding these as a baseline option for you to change and customize your ui however you want and like have these sort of things, is really good for the game and it's very good for it long term, because it means that people who are wanting to get into World of Warcraft aren't suddenly overwhelmed by like oh, I have to install add-ons to the game. Why is this not a baseline thing? And it's like well, because you know there's an add-on for it, but why wasn't this a baseline before an add-ons to the game? Why is this not a baseline thing and it's like well, because you know there's an add-on for it, but why wasn't this a baseline before an add-on like if it's that sort of important? You know it's these sort of things and I think that it's very good that they're moving away from it, um, from add-ons, and hoping to eventually get to the point where no one will need add-ons at all. I really hope we get to that point eventually, but it's going to take years upon years of sort of UI improvements or just baseline sort of improvements to the game itself in order to get there, because a lot of people won't be able to live without their Wii Coras, essentially in the game, people won't be able to play the game without their weak auras.

Speaker 1:

Um, now, and what a weak aura is is essentially, if someone presses, you can do a weak aura for anything. So a good, simple example is someone uses a big offensive ability, who you're playing against, your weak aura will pop up with a symbol and it will make a noise, it will make an air horn or something, and it will be like beep and it will tell you, essentially, that this person has popped their offensive cooldowns. And this is when you're like, oh shit, I need to be careful because I can die, or this is when, like, I can get killed, essentially from these cooldowns. So it's just something to play the game for you, almost, and I think that it's very, very good that they are slowly trying to add more and more things to the base UI that allow you to customize it however you want, without sort of compromising, um, people's ability to customize it as much as they can, if that makes sense, because people still want these things. Some people might need them to play the game. Some people might, um, need them just through disability, like um reasons alone, like someone might not be able to uh something very well, so they need big sort of like symbols on the screen to show something's happened or something. You know these sort of things, and I'm glad that they are moving away from add-ons, or this is what the direction is. It's what it looks like to be happening, which is very, very good.

Speaker 1:

Next thing I want to talk about is something called Dastardly duos. Now, dastardly duos is something that's going to be introduced in this patch and it's something that I looked at and was like okay, doesn't sound interesting, sounds kind of like pve based and it's going to be boring as hell. It is pve based, firstly, but I've had a look into it and it does look pretty cool. So what Dastley Duos is? Essentially, you grab a friend and you sign up for this sort of arena. Ok, now it is in a PvP arena. This is PvE and you get your buffs. You get whatever you can I think there's a few like different buffs, potions and stuff that you can take in sort of a starting room and you go out into this arena and you kill as many mobs as you can and you get a score based on your damage, your healing, how many mobs you kill, how many bosses you kill, etc.

Speaker 1:

And you can get gear, cosmetics, mounts, all of this stuff from dastardly duos and it's really really cool. It's a good way of mid-maxing, like a duo sort of thing, and just killing as many mobs as you can without essentially having to worry about anyone else, like in, uh, the game. Okay, it's another instance diversion of stuff. It's a small dungeon. Okay, it's a delve times two. I guess um, delve 2.0, maybe, I don't know something along them lines, but it looks really good.

Speaker 1:

And the thing is that you get some gear from this. Okay, you're not going to get incredible gear. You're going to get the same equivalent as normal dungeon gear. I think um is what I believe that you're going to get. I don't think it's going to be much more than that. So you're not forced to do these for the gear. You are purely like doing them for pretty much the cosmetic base of things. You're doing it so that you can get cosmetics, and that's really really good, and anything like this is added that gives you cosmetics is a massive bonus in the game itself.

Speaker 1:

I always stand by it when I said that if Torghast was purely cosmetics only, it would have been one of the best features in the game ever. But because you were forced to do Torghast back in Shadowlands, it was awful, ok, but if it was cosmetic based, it would have been so much better. I enjoyed playing Torghast when they basically I forget the name of it they made the last sort of wings of Torghast, where it was just cosmetics that you get an amount at the end of it, because that allowed me to just enjoy it. It allowed me to enjoy the powers. It allowed me to just take my time. I didn't feel rushed in doing it. I didn't feel forced to do Torghast, I just did it as and when I wanted to.

Speaker 1:

And this is what should be happening. People should have the chance to miss out a couple weeks on something but be able to come back and still be able to do it and not be at a disadvantage in comparison to everyone else who has played it. Now don't get me wrong some systems you will have to put gear behind, such as pvp, such as mythic Plus, mythic Raiding, etc. Etc. These things obviously make sense to put gear behind, but anything like this, this is an amazing feature that is coming in the next patch and is something that I didn't really want. I don't think many people asked for it, but I think that it's going to be a not an immediate hit, but I think that people will, over the course of like when it's there, be quite impressed by it. Okay, and I think there's going to be amazing because it allows you to collect cosmetics. It's something that they can um, it's almost like an evergreen feature as well. They can add to it, they can add new bosses, they can add new cosmetics to buy, new mounts to buy, et cetera, et cetera, etc. Which is really good, and I think that this is going to be one of the most underrated things that wow maybe has to offer at the moment. Um, I certainly think in the 0.1 patch, like through to 0.2, I think this might be one of the best things that they introduced, and that includes, like, the new goblin zone and the raid and all of that stuff. So I I definitely would recommend giving dastardly duos a go when it is out in 11.1.5. Okay, it looks good, it looks amazing, and if you can grab a friend and to like, do the dastardly duos with them, absolutely even better.

Speaker 1:

Next, I want to talk about the world first race. So world first ended a few days ago and liquid are the winners of the race, world first race. Now obviously there's the whole eu versus na stuff and na getting a reset like earlier and stuff. I don't want to get into that. Okay, I want to get into. It was quite an underwhelming end to the race to welfare, so everyone was kind of watching and, to put it into perspective, the race to welfare usually the like teams or yeah, they're essentially teams or groups of players are on the final boss for at least like two to three days somewhere around there. You know, if it's a fast sort of um end boss, I think it took liquid about one day to clear the boss and that's pretty upsetting, to say the least. Now you obviously have a lot of bosses that are going to be tough to tune and obviously they have mistuned galley wicks as a mythic end boss.

Speaker 1:

The thing is, during the race to world first there are multiple bosses that they have to kill and you would usually have like, oh, the first couple bosses will take a couple of pulls to kill, you know, the next two will take about 50, maybe next one's 100. It's really tough to get a good sort of timer on how long a boss should or shouldn't take, but the boss literally died after 100 pulls. Ok, this is Chrome king gallywix. All right, and 100 pulls. You might think, oh my god, that's loads, that's triple digits. To put it into perspective, the boss before this um took 148 like to kill. Okay, and there was even like a boss that was like the fourth in the dungeon that took 114 to kill, which is really weird. You never have a final boss.

Speaker 1:

That is like less uh attempts on it than other bosses in the raid. It's not happened for a very long time. I don't believe. Maybe the first or the last time it happened was shadowlands, to my best knowledge, when maybe anduin was the boss that had the most pull attempts on him as like a sort of end boss. But midway through the raid, um, you also have in um, quite famously by famously, the boss Holondrus. Now, holondrus was a hilarious boss. This took hundreds upon hundreds of attempts, absolutely hundreds, and I think it was around 600 attempts. This took this raid back in Shadowlands, took about two to three weeks to complete on Mythic. That is absurd. To put this into perspective, I think it took about a week and a half and that's on Mythic. That's doing the split, heroic pushes, all of that gearing, all of that stuff and I don't know. The point I'm trying to make is it was really disappointing the end of it and that's my kind of feeling.

Speaker 1:

With a goblin patch in general, it's just kind of underwhelming goblin patches. So I'm glad that it's done, but I'm also glad. I'm also upset that there was a goblin patch. Look, I get that. They need their patches every now and again. We've had night elf patches, we've probably had human patches, we've had dragon patches, we've had whatever it might be blood elf, what is it? Draenei? You know we'll get all of these different patches and people will be like oh okay, this is a blood elf patch because we're going to quoth the last. Or this is draenei because we're going to azur mist isle or something. You know all of that stuff. Um, I don't know the goblin, but it's going to be one of the most underwhelming race to world firsts, I think ever and it's quite sad really. It really really is, because the race to world first is something that is amazing within the game itself.

Speaker 1:

New players will not understand fully what's happening, but they can. After seeing many, many attempts of these bosses, they will understand what's happening. So for myself, I don't really understand what's happening in raids. Okay, I don't look at the guides, I don't read up on anything, I just watch the race to world first and see if they get close to killing the boss or not. That's kind of it. But watching the bosses you're like, oh okay, so they're.

Speaker 1:

For example, they have sticks, bunker, bunk, junker or whatever this boss you had to roll around and pick up some trash heaps and these trash heaps, essentially you rolled into the boss or into certain explosives. You rolled a couple into explosives so they didn't detonate the raid and you rolled the rest into the boss to do damage to the boss. And you know it's a very cool mechanic. It's one that I wouldn't have understood. I would have gotten to this trash pile and be like where do I go? What do I do? And just ran it into a wall or something or stunned all of my fellow raid members or something like that.

Speaker 1:

But it's really cool to see all of these different mechanics and the sad thing is this is when a lot of the mechanics get seen during the race to world first and well, they're gonna associate this raid with being one of the most disappointing race to world firsts in recent, if not all, of wow's history, which is quite sad. And the thing is, with the race to world first there was also bugs for um, the end boss. So when liquid and echo and method and all of that were clearing, like through the raid, there was a guild that essentially one shot not one shot, but cleared the mythic world first and they got mythic world first on this raid. But the thing is that they bug abused and they were quickly taken off of that and it was quickly fixed. So you've had the shortest race to world first probably in recent history, one of the most disappointing end bosses in recent history, for sure. Plus, it was also bugged heavily that a guild abused it and got the race or the world first kill but also was taken off of that. So like there's many different things that went wrong with the race to world first in this patch, but I just hope that the next one is actually a lot better and they sort of kick back from this patch and, you know, prove to them that they can do raids because they can, they really really can, or like the tuning of raids, because we know they can. They did some amazing raids at Castle Nathria. They did the um, evolved the incarnates.

Speaker 1:

I I'm awful with raid names, aren't I? Um? Hellfire citadel you go back into wrath of the lich king got. Icecrown citadel, black temple, sunwell. You know, you've got all of these amazing raids and every now and again you're going to litter in some that are a bit disappointing. It's just what's going to happen. It just is. It just is. But yeah, I thought I'd share that one with you. It is a bit disappointing, I'm not going to lie. That race to world first, um, how it ended essentially.

Speaker 1:

Now, quick look at season of discovery. So season of discovery is going into Phase 8. And what Phase 8 brings is that everything is completely new. Okay, there is no content that is within Classic going into this phase. What I mean by that is every single phase. There was something a bit different with it, which had a Season of Discovery sort of twist. Okay, whether it be Karazhan Crypts or sort of new, I forget what they are recipes, alchemy, potions, whatever it might be. Instead, you get a brand new patch, a patch that has never been in any sort of World of Warcraft ever, and this patch is basically the Scarlet Crusade patch. So it's going live on April 8th and essentially you are getting a few different things so outdoor content, profession content in New Avalon, the Scarlet Enclave related quest content, and then on april 10th you have the scarlet enclave raid and legendary weapon quest line available and this is amazing. So what this is? Uh, there will be a couple spoilers in here. If you don't want to know what the legendary weapon is and stuff like that, please don't listen. Um, for the new legendary quest line, it's the ashbringer in classic.

Speaker 1:

Um, everyone obviously knew of the corrupted ashbringer. Everyone knew that you could obtain it within nax ramus and there were multiple things that were hinting that you could cleanse the ashbringer. And many people did many different things within Classic to attempt to cleanse this. Okay, people went fishing in Altrac Valley, people went absolutely everywhere within World of Warcraft to try and cleanse this Ashbringer and essentially no one could do it. And it makes sense, because it wasn't in the game at all, you couldn't cleanse it at all. And it makes sense, because it wasn't in the game at all, you couldn't cleanse it at all. Now, what people did was they thought oh OK, it's going to be in Outlands because they found Nat Pagel's journal or something referencing Mograine's son, and like they said, oh, you'll find him in Outlands. And everyone was like, oh, ok, so when the new expansion comes out, that's when we can, um, cleanse the weapon essentially. And you know, all of this stuff, like happened, we went to Outland, mograine's son wasn't there, so everyone kind of gave up on it and it's like, oh okay, it's just not a thing. It's essentially not a thing at all, which is a bit disappointing.

Speaker 1:

But how long, 20 years later now they are finally putting the Ashbringer, the original Ashbringer, the legendary version, into World of Warcraft. And that is amazing. That is absolutely amazing. So there is, and always has been, a ashbringer that is in the game files since classic. There's always been an ashbringer in classic in the game files, but obviously people could never obtain this.

Speaker 1:

So this is what the quest line is. It is to essentially line is it is to essentially cleanse the corrupted ashbringer. And that is so cool because the corrupted ashbringer in classic has a couple of rp events tied to it. When you get the ashbringer, you can go to the scarlet monastery, which is a dungeon, level 40 or dungeon and you can go into the cathedral part of Scarlet Monastery and you will essentially get a full RP, and this RP is essentially a ghost that kills the sun and the sun is the one that betrayed them and essentially corrupted the ashbringer in the first place. So there is a lot of lore behind the ashbringer and I'm so glad that they've actually done an entire quest line in order to cleanse it within the patch, and I think that it's very cool.

Speaker 1:

To be honest, I think that it's something that's very unique, something that classic is needing and it's needed to offer for a while, and it does fit in with just world of warcraft in general. It fits in with the classic feel where, um, essentially, you have legendary quest lines such as atiesh. Um, you have what are the others? Thunder fury, you have sulfurous. All of these legendary quest lines are legendary and I'm glad that they're doing the same for ash the ashbringer. I hope that it is as tedious as um a lot of people make it out to be, because it was. You go fishing and then you go here, and then you go up here and then you talk to this person, then you go fishing again and you know. I hope that they have made it quite tedious because the whole thing and the whole like fun around.

Speaker 1:

Oh, we gotta go cleanse this ashbringer is that it was a tedious process to do back in 2004, 2005, when people didn't know how to um or didn't realize that the ashbringer wasn't in the game at all. Actually it was just the corrupted ashbringer and nothing else kind of deal. So, look, you also get um new raid, which is the scarlet enclave. It has eight bosses really really cool. Actually a lot of the bosses I'm not going to go through them, but a couple of them are ones that we know. So balthazar is the leader of the Scarlet Enclave that are within Stratholme. He is the last boss in Stratholme live side um. So this is where he is fleed to.

Speaker 1:

Essentially, you have Lillian Voss. Now people might think I know that name. Lillian Voss, in retail, is currently one of the council members for the Forsaken. And you're thinking but if she's Forsaken, then how are we killing her in a Scarlet Enclave raid? Now, lillian Vos was never in the game before Cataclysm.

Speaker 1:

In Cataclysm she turns into a Forsaken. You see you literally in the tirasville quest line. You go through her, dealing with her transformation into a forsaken and you sort of encourage her that it is okay and everything like will be put right and stuff, and she can't accept that. So she is a scarlet um, I think a guard or something. She is a scarlet guard up until cataclysm and this is really cool because it allows you to see her in her human form before she actually turns into a forsaken, and I think that this is a really cool boss to have. I really, really do.

Speaker 1:

A lot of people won't realize this as well, but I think if you go into the Season of Discovery and do the raid and you see Lillian Vos there as a boss, just remember that is a very lore-heavy character, like right now in retail, and it's not someone you should overlook. And it's really cool that they've almost backtracked her character to show us what she she was, but like back in the crusade, um, but yeah, it's going to be really cool. I'm really glad that season of discovery is opening up a new raid, completely new raid, and I think that it's going to be something very special it. I think that this could be very, very good for season of discovery and classic going forward in my honest opinion. But that is where I will end it for this episode. Thank you all very much for listening. Do check out all of the social media stuff, constant stuff happening over there as well as Etsy multiple things happening on Etsy as well. Do check it out. But thank you all very much once again and go with Valor friend. Goodbye all. Thank you.