Ever wondered what it takes to strike a perfect balance in the high-stakes realm of World of Warcraft PvP? Strap in as we dissect the intricate dance of Destruction Warlocks with their Dimensional Rifts and debate the potential need to recalibrate Demon Hunter abilities. We're not just talking tactics; we're diving into actual gameplay, analyzing the impact of world bosses, time-walking events, and mythic affixes. Join us for a spirited discussion on the GTKP phenomenon, where I'll share my unfiltered take on the contentious system that's got the community buzzing. It's a rollercoaster of opinions, strategies, and insider knowledge that will elevate your play and provoke thought about the future of Azeroth's battlegrounds.
Setting the scene for an epic journey through Azeroth's history, we trace the footsteps of mighty heroes and notorious villains across a landscape rich with storied lore. I'll navigate you through the ideal play order of Warcraft's expansions, teasing out the narrative threads that weave together the fabric of this legendary universe. From the cataclysmic reshaping of the Old World to the climactic battles in the Shadowlands, each chapter is a piece of a larger puzzle. For those hungering for the full flavor of Warcraft's lore, we'll discuss why starting with the Wrath of the Lich King can be a revelation and how dipping into the classic Warcraft games can provide a foundation of understanding that enriches the entire gaming experience. Prepare to immerse yourself in the legends, the adventures, and the timeless battles that have shaped a world and captivated millions.
Hope you all enjoy and hope you relate to any of these stories. And I will speak to you all in the next episode!
quality. 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. Grab a bottle or a pint, sit back and enjoy. This week we'll be going over many different aspects of World of Warcraft people just starting playing the Contraursy with GTKPs, fixing PvP, many different things essentially and going to be giving my takes on them and, yeah, would love to hear yours as well. But we obviously have the weekly news. As always, we have the three world bosses, basil Zakkali, elders and Aerostar, located in the Azsar Span, saralak Caverns and Emerald Dream respectively. We have Missa Pandaria Time Walking as the bonus event for the week. This is where you can buy reputation mounts, anything like that, with Time Walking badges from the Missa Pandaria era. The what is it? The brawl for this week is Arathi Blizzard. This means that it is a Arathi Basin, but the visibility is limited to, I think, about 20 yards, maybe something like that 15 to 20. It does look like a really cool landscape and it is actually really enjoyable to play. It really does mix it up a bit. This is also in conjunction with Battleground Blitz. I'm not sure if there is a bug there, but I have two Battleground Blitz signups instead of an Arathi Blizzard and a Battleground Blitz. I'm not sure what's happening there, but hopefully you know that gets fixed. Or it might just be a Battleground Blitz and they haven't added it on the calendar. I really don't know. It might just be a little bit of a bug there. The mythic affixes for this week are Entangling, bolstering and Fortified Entangling just don't stand still, you'll get rooted and stuff eventually, and slow down. So you want to be keeping on the move. Every now and again. Bolstering when a mob dies, it will yell out a scream increasing the damage and health of nearby mobs by a certain percentage. You want to kill everything within the same sort of time period. You want it all very low when you kill the mobs, essentially to stop this from stacking too high and eventually, you know, becoming a problem. And Fortified this is the non-boss week, so non-boss enemies have more damage and take or and more health. So bring a talent build that can accommodate for that. So first thing that I want to be going over is PvP and this is what I found, what some people think, or this is what someone has thought on how to fix PvP. So let's see it Enough. Destro, warlock, dimensional Rift. Increased cast time on fear Fear has a very decent cast time for what it is because it can be dispelled. It can be tremoured and I think that that's very fine. Fear, the Dimensional Rift. It's most of their damage because it's their tier set at the moment and, to be honest, chaos Belt in the actual meta itself. It's still very powerful, but the thing is you have to hard cast it to get it off and it's very tough to do so. Having these instant casts makes it a lot easier and a decent source of like damage output. When you can get, like, some CC on the healer and stuff like that. I think Dimensional Rift isn't too bad. I think it's in a good spot, I think it's recharge is a good time and I think the Immolate and how much it refreshes Dimensional Rift is in a very good spot as well. So what Warlocks do is they emulate spell Every tick of damage it does. It has a chance to reset one of the what do you call it Stacks? I guess no One of the one of the dimensional rifts. You have three charges. That's it charges, that's the word. It resets one of the charges of dimensional riff, potentially for every ticket does so. If you're lucky, in three ticks of emulate you can get three dimensional rifts back. But it's a very low proc chance. So you're not seeing this too much, but you do notice it every now and again. To be honest, I don't think Dastro Lux are a problem. I think they are a problem because what is being paired with it. So what's being paired with it is demon hunters and rogues. Rogues obviously have very good shutdown and CC capabilities that allow the warlock to get, like chaos bolts off, to do a lot more damage. Demon hunters have a lot more consistent damage and they do have the stuns as well. So therefore they can lock down the target, the warlock to just pump damage into and and they don't have to worry about trying to set up their own sort of go, essentially With their mortal coils and stuff like that. The second part of this is nerf, dh damage and defensives remove, never walk and nerf, nerf, bler. Now I've spoken about DHs a lot. The problem with DHs is they can do everything at the moment they do a lot of damage, they have very good defensive utility, they are CC immune, they have very good mobility, if not the best in the game. They, they just have everything and there's no real weakness to them at the moment, which isn't great if you're looking at a balanced perspective in the game or on an MMO. So, in my honest opinion, the way that they need to be nerfed is Via their CC immunity. I think that making the vengeful retreat Made it, make it so that you can't be CC immune while you use it, because having a 20 second cooldown that makes you Immune to CC is Not good for however long you're in the air. I think just simply removing that and you should be a bit better. I Personally think that, yeah, by doing that it's, it's gonna be like a lot better just to Get rid of that CC immunity, because their damage is very good, but you can obviously CC it, but then they have so many things to get rid of it. So you shout a mild one, you kick one. Well, you kick one and then you shout a mild one, and then you vengeful retreat one and then you kick one again and you know, by that time you may as well not have pressed your CC on them and, just you know, kept trying to do damage yourself. But the thing is. There's a incident that I had where I had a demon hunter training me and and my mage was trying to be in the middle of him and the healer and the healer was the opposite side of the map and I dragged the demon hunter so far away that I tried to solo him, but he out healed my burst damage. A demon hunter who is not a hybrid class, was out healing my burst damage as a boomkin, which shouldn't be a thing, should it? It really shouldn't be a thing. And yeah, that's. It's really not great. To be honest with you, and I Think the only thing that you do need to like look at is Eventual retreat CC immunity. I think that that will clear a lot of things up for DH and I don't think that's a bad thing to trade as well. I think DHS would like to keep everything else, like mobility, damage, etc. Etc. Etc. Shamans, static fill totem should be removed from the game as there is no counterplay to it. There is counterplay. You kill the totem that has like 20k health. That's the counterplay. The counterplay to totem or to shamans in most PvP instances is by killing the totems, that's it. That's all it is. It's crazy that so many people don't do that. I understand that this guy posting this is a warlock. He might be a D-my warlock, in which case he needs instant demon bolt procs. But essentially, yes, there is counterplay to it. You just need to be better at switching to the static fill totem to kill it. That's it. Bruid increase cast time on Cyclone and its duration. They want to increase Cyclone's duration. When they did an entire patch that nerfed CC. Yeah, that makes no sense Because that would mean that everyone cries about Cyclone and it's like oh my god, it's an 8 second CC, I can't dispel it. We need it to be dispelled. Then that just brings so many more issues. The problem with Druid again if you're getting trained by a couple of melee or anything like that, you have to get your pre-cog in order to do this. Then you have to get through a spell, reflect a CC immunity with vengeful retreat, then shadow melds, then storm bolts, then another kick because you don't have pre-cog anymore. Multiple things that can stop you from doing this. If you're a warlock, you can just pull away from the Cyclone. If you can see it coming, you can kick it as well. You can stun it, you can fear it. There's many different counterplays to Cyclone. I just don't see the problem with Cyclone. I think a lot of people have become a bit more aware of it since all CC got nerfed and there wasn't many people playing Druid as much. It is what it is. Everyone will find something to complain about. In an arena, mage remove that blink back thingy and decrease duration on ulti time, the blink back thingy, the displacement. So essentially, mages can take a talent where if you blink it will put a little sort of arcane orb where you blinked from. What you can do is reactivate displacement and it will TP you back there and heal you for a certain amount. Now this is very good for mobility. This is very good for kiting. Personally, as a warlock, I don't notice mage blinks. I, as a pastor, do not notice mage blinking at all. You can see them when they run, maybe like very far, but I really don't think that mage blink is a problem at all. Shadow make Dark Ascension 1.5 minutes and make it slightly stronger 1 minute. Void volleys are stupid. I'm not going to lie. If someone is getting hit by void volleys then that's kind of on you because they are very easy to dodge. I get if you're stunned and stuff, but it's not that big of a deal. I think you could maybe put DRs on void volleys like full DR. Just they DR themselves, nothing else. But I don't see a problem with this at all. Retparally increase forbearance time. They can just cycle through defences to no end and also provide allies with them Broken in the right hands. Remove Blessing of Sacrifice for Ret. Blessing of Sacrifice, that's the defensive one. They mean Sank. I don't know if they mean sank or not. I'll go over both of them. Essentially, rets have couple of Defensives. They have a 30% wall on a 1 minute cooldown. They have Shield of Vengeance on a 1.3 minute cooldown Essentially a 1 minute cooldown. They have Bop slash, spell Bop, which is a shield that makes you immune to physical or magical damage, depending on which one you pick. Then you have your Divine Shield, which gives you complete immunity, oh, plus Lay on hand. These are big cooldowns 7 minutes for Lay on hand, 5 minutes for Divine Shield and then a few minutes for your Spell Bops, and the others are relatively small. Now for Barrens, there's 30 seconds lockout. And what for Barrens is, for those that don't know, if you use a Blessing of Protection or a Divine Shield or a Lay on hand, you are given a debuff, called Forberance, for 30 seconds. This prevents you from using your Divine Shield or Spell Bop. Slash Physical Bop for that duration. Now this is a long window in PvP sense because there are potentially diminishing returns that come off cooldown in this time. So if you're a Rogue Mage Priest, your next go you can definitely kill a Paladin because he has no way of getting out. He has Forberance, so he can't bubble, he can't Lay on hand, he can't Bop himself. As for Blessing of Sacrifice, blessing of Sacrifice is a good way to help your team out. A lot of DPS have these ways of helping their team out. This is one of them for Rets. Rets also have Blessing of Sanctity which can get them out of Fears, stuns and stuff like that of Nature, and this is just utility that every class has. Essentially, warlocks have the same. Warlocks have Spam, fear, demo. Warlocks have a stun. You have Coil. You have Curses for Warlocks which make people unable to crit, like physically crit, like unable to crit immune yeah, crit immune. Essentially it makes the casters and their teammates to be crit immune from that target. For Priests, you have Leap of Faith, shield, void, shift, fears, roots. There's many different things that you can have to help your team Warriors, have them Intervene Rallying Cry Warbanner. You know it isn't new for a class to have these sort of things in the game, so I don't think Paladins are that big of a deal right now. In my honest opinion, buff, holy Palahealing and Mana for the Maestro Not sure who the Maestro is and no idea. I like how there's no mention of Outlaw Rogues and I like how this guy says Buff, palahealing and Mana. I've been in massively damp games with Holy Paladins because you can run Divine Plea. Divine Plea does give you two mana bars. Essentially it gives you 500k plus worth of mana and it's absolutely crazy. In the right hand, holy Paladin is very, very good. I think it could do with a little bit of a buff. Potentially there may be more like I want to say casted a bit. I don't know. It could do with maybe a bit more of a buff to bring it in line with other healers. But I think it's just based on the meta if Holy Paladin is good or not. I think it's in a decent spot right now with Rogue somewhat being there, but it's overshadowed just by like a demon hunter that can train them down and like the melee cleaves that can honestly just train down a Holy Paladin, stuff like that. So it's very tough to say, but I'm not too sure about this list. I'd say the demon hunter, nerf, is obviously like a given. I think everyone is a given for that, but I think the other ideas just aren't needed to be honest with you in any sort of way. But let's move on to the next topic. So this one I found really intriguing. So what a Warcraft Play Order? I really want to play Warcraft Story from the beginning, but I'm unsure what the beginning even is. Is there a specific race you have to start with, or race doesn't matter to any specific quest? Also, do expansions continue from the last mission in the story mode, main story mode I wasn't able to find any YouTube videos explaining the story mode and that's why I'm asking. I want to play everything this game has to offer, but also learn every lore within it. Now this is quite cool because obviously people who pick up the game don't actually know the lore, how to progress the story, where to start, stuff like that. So I'm pretty sure when you first pick up the game it will put you in a little story mode, the little island thing. Now this is just kind of a tutorial area. When you hit level 10, you will be transported to Stormwind, which is the capital city of the Alliance, or Orgrimmar, the capital city of Horde. Now, if you want to do this in chronological and expansion order, you would go from, technically, burning Crusade now, but you can also start with Cataclysm. Cataclysm is the Old World and it is just revamped. So you know what let's do that Cataclysm technically, and then you would go on to Burning Crusade, rafa the Lich King, missa Pandaria, warlords of Draenor, legion, battle for Azeroth, shadowlands and then Dragonflight. This would be your expansion chronological order in which we experienced it the play of Azeroth growing up throughout the years. Now, as for lore-wise and going from zone to zone, story-wise, each expansion has its own story. It doesn't continue on from the previous expansion, if that makes sense. So you won't go from Burning Crusade to Rafa the Lich King and be like oh my god, I heard troubling news of Arthas reawakening in Northrend. Can you go and deal with him? From Shatrath City You'll get a breadcrumb quest, and what these breadcrumb quests are is essentially I'll go to Stormwind Harbour to. You know, talk about the blight or the blight that is happening in Northrend. You know that kind of deal. So it leads you on to that expansion. But what you want to do as you're questing through the expansion is primarily there are ways to go about questing and storylines within the expansion zones. So for Burning Crusade you start off going through the Dark Portal and you start in Hellfire Peninsula and you realise, oh okay, this is why you know they're fighting. And then it takes you to Zangarmarsh to see what's happening in Zangarmarsh and they each have their own sort of story In sort of Terrakath Forest and then Shadow Moon. You know all of that stuff. They all have their own story. Some lead into them, some lead into the next lake zone, but in the earlier expansions they don't really. Later on in like Warlords of Draenor and stuff, they start to. But yeah, in terms of like, they have their own individual stories, the zones in earlier expansions. So don't worry about missing anything like that. As for the laurist, the most the most lore rich expansion, it's going to be tough to say because so many of them have so much lore behind them that you would have to watch lore videos on them. The best one that I could probably recommend is like Nobble 87, I think, is YouTube does great lore videos, but there's loads out there who do them. But I would say Rathabalichking is probably your best bet to start off with if you want to learn lore, because that would be what a lot of things led up to before World of Warcraft came out. So before World of Warcraft came out, there was Warcraft, warcraft 1, 2, 3, you know all of that stuff, and this had stuff to do with Illidan and Arthas and really set the scenes for the Burning Crusade and Rathabalichking. This is where a lot of the initial lore comes from. They're not mobas, they're RPG games. I think it's an RPG game but, yeah, this is where a lot of the lore comes from. With regards to that and essentially you're looking at Rathabalichking, let's go over this via very lore, specific moments and characters. So I would say it's Rafa the Lich King. I would say you include classic in there. I would say it's classic first technically, but then Rafa the Lich King, I would say it's probably. What would you guys think? I would say maybe Legion is good, but it's got a lot of Nisha lore elements to it. Maybe Burning Crusade yeah, maybe Burning Crusade. And then technically, you can put cataclysm slash classic here, because it had a lot of stuff to do with deathwing and I Would say battle for Azeroth is up there with lore wise because you have the Zandalari, who are Notorious in World of Warcraft lore, as well as culteerus and stuff like that. They are very much within the Warcraft universe and lore wise they are very Rich in. It is the best way to put it. I would say Legion has quite a bit of lore with Gul'dan, sargeras, argus, with Velen's homework, jaden, archimonde, world, souls, titans you know a lot of that shit happens in Legion. That's probably higher on the list. To be honest, probably I have Warlords of Draenor next, because that shows the old Outland. Like Outland is just Draenor, but essentially the lore behind it is that the world was just split and ripped open by Gul'dan because he wanted to create portals to certain places. So Draenor became Outland because of that and that's why it's kind of like a. If you look in the Outland skybox you see loads of different planets, different skyboxes. It's a shit show. If you look at the skybox essentially in Outland, then I would say probably Dragonflight, missa, pandaria and then Shadowlands is last. It has some Like bits and pieces of lore. Obviously you're gonna find a lot of people from the lore in Shadowlands because they're all dead now. But yeah, I would say in terms of what it offered, like mostly I would say that's the order of it. But Again, I wouldn't be too worried about sort of going through a main playthrough and like a story sense, I would say, pick an expansion and Deal with that expansion story. You don't want to view it as a whole thing because you will be overwhelmed. You want to do so. How many is there? There's classic Burning Crusade, wrath, missa Pandaria. You have all of the drain or Legion, bfa, shadowlands, dragonflight. You have nine different expansions, if you count Cataclysm as an expansion and not classic. Essentially, you can make nine characters and do one of these like Leveling zones each, that where you get to experience the entirety of the questing lore, but behind a lot of the things there is so much more behind it, like there's so much more behind Arthas that you don't get to see from the questing perspective. Though. In Wrath of the Lich King, you free Magni Bronzebeard this is gonna be like story spoilers, by the way, if people don't want to know this but essentially, free Magni and Like in the Storm Peaks and he was the one who trained Arthas and when he was a young lad. And If you kill Arthas by doing the Shadow Mourn quest, you get like some Items off of Arthas and you get a training sword and you train, turn it into Magni and you get a little bit dialogue and stuff. But if you go before that, the reason that Magni, like was in Northrend, was looking for Frostmourne, and Frostmourne is the blade that Arthas wields when he becomes the Lich King and Magni was knocked out by Arthas essentially Acquiring the blade and lost his memory and stuff. Hence why you didn't know that he was like in Northrend and all of that stuff. You know there's so much behind it. And then you go back even further. Arthas was the kind of student of Uther the Lightbringer, one of the first Paladins, essentially, and and Like, yeah, there's so much behind it, you just have to really delve into it. But a lot of the lore does come from books and stuff like books, comics and stuff like that. Even weapons within the game have their own lore. Look at, if you, if you want something to look at in terms of lore base, look at the weapon called Ashbringer. That's got a lot of lore to do with it. Atiesh is another one you have like Frostmourne, which is another one. Like I've already said, there's so many weapons alone that have so much lore behind them that it's impossible to put into every single like story and expansion. You have to actively go and find like stuff on YouTube or Google or anything like that. It's it's a lot. It is a lot to take in, but Hopefully this is helpful for people looking to get into WoW. I know it's very tough and a bit awkward to do so when you do kind of feel a little bit overwhelmed, I would say when it does come to this sort of thing. But it is what it is. It's a game that is constantly growing and all you can do is try and catch up. But eventually you will catch up. You just got to take it at your own pace and if you start joining the game, that means that there's a lot of years to enjoy it, because it's like you don't have to blitz through everything. You can just take it at your own pace and, you know, not go too crazy with it. But that is where I'll end this episode. Thank you all very much for listening. As always, do check out the socials down below. Let me know what you think of the episode. Please rate it, share it. It really does help out and you know I wouldn't be able to thank you enough for it. But thank you all very much once again and go with our friend. Goodbye all you.