The Delver's Inn
A cozy space for World of Warcraft Delvers to discuss what's new with delves, lore, and WoW-life balance.
The Delver's Inn
The Delver's Inn Episode 4
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Today we talk about community events, prey system, crafting, and of course delves!
Ald El Shalom.
SPEAKER_02Anuballore del Anna.
SPEAKER_03Keep your eyes on the horizon. Gather at the inn. It's safe there. Our hospitality is yours.
SPEAKER_02All guests are welcome here.
SPEAKER_04Hello and welcome to the Delvers Inn. Please excuse our extra coziness tonight, for plague and pestilence has descended upon our household, and I place the blame squarely at the feet of the affliction warlock.
SPEAKER_00Nope, it's the tiny child.
SPEAKER_04No, no, no. Despite you being the person who leaves the house and spends the least amount of time out in public of any of us in the family, you got sick first, then you got better, and then the kids got sick, and then you got really sick. So I think this is all on you.
SPEAKER_00I'll take it. I don't think that's right, but I'll take it.
SPEAKER_04So we are a week out from launch and another week yet until season one starts. So what are we doing in World of Warcraft?
SPEAKER_00So I've been focusing on just kind of gearing up my main quite a bit. I'm doing those community events, doing my praise, doing some delves. I did get my first alt to 90. Priest is good to go, working on the warrior. And I've been doing some crafting.
SPEAKER_04You get you get plenty of praise as a good husband and father. You don't need to go out seeking additional praise.
SPEAKER_02Just saying.
SPEAKER_04I have been, you know, trying to catch up. I feel like I'm always a little bit behind you. So I uh had gotten my main to level 90, and then I wanted to make sure I saw all of the delves. At least get my delves up to tier seven, past tier seven, so that I'm ready to go. Try out uh all the community events, and then of course do some prey. A little bit skeptical about the prey because I don't really like things jumping out at me. But it turns out it is quite predictable when they ambush you pretty much every three seconds as soon as you pull something. Just like, oh, look, I'm about to pull this big group of mobs. I bet I'm gonna get ambushed. Sure enough, there he or she is. And I know at the start of the expansion, you're supposed to feel a little bit undertuned because that's the challenge of it, right? It's before you get geared. However, and I heard about this from one other hunter on Twitter, the pets are not doing well. The pets are just dying faster than a hamster in a kindergarten class. Like they are dying to air and it does not feel good. So for the first time in forever, Frozen Song, not intended, I have switched from beast mastery to marksmanship because the pet deaths were getting so annoying that I was not enjoying the content. So I don't know if the pets need to be hot fixed or what. But at least as a marksmanship, when the pet dies repeatedly to nothing, I still have attacks I can do until I get around to rezzing them. But man, so then I was feeling like, oh, like, you know, this isn't feeling good. Do I just need to focus on getting geared so that I can actually have fun doing this stuff? But then, of course, you know, doing the prey and some of the other things to try and get geared was a little bit frustrating. So I worked on some community events, and you know what was a heck of a lot of fun? Abundance.
SPEAKER_00I love done done.
SPEAKER_04Abundance was it's that's how we get it done dun done. Like I gotta say, it was a hoot. And then I did circle back around to getting some quests done in an attempt to get my renown up because that is another path to getting a few pieces of gear.
SPEAKER_00Great. With you get the level nine with Silver Moon and Zulamon, get the eight from the Heron Deer, Rank 7, and the Void Storm, each of those will give you a quest. You can go do the community event in the zone, and you'll get a nice piece of champion gear. And then since since that renown is account wide, as soon as you hit level 90 on an alt, you can just immediately go and get those pieces of gear for a nice easy power boost. That was definitely something I could feel when I hit 90 on the priest. I think I might have to walk back some of my statements of how easy Prey was. Had a bit of a different experience on the priest. Warlocks might just be overpowered. Like you're talking about your pets just evaporating for no reason. My void walker just doesn't care. Like he can tank everything. I'm out there able to solo like level 93 elites, rare spawns.
SPEAKER_04I mean, I feel like there might be a lore answer for that. Like when we're when the void storm is hovering above us, or we're in the void storm, and suddenly your void walker is just extra tanky and sassy, might be connected. That's all I'm saying.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, it's I think it's entirely due some to some talents in the warlock main tree. You can get quite a few that buff up your drain life to where it heals for like 700% of what it normally does. And then you've got another talent that when you heal yourself with that, it also heals your pet. So just cast that, a single channel takes the pet all the way back up to 100. Yeah, definitely not the experience I had on the priest, though. I tried going in and doing a delve to see what healing Valera might be like, and that was not a good time. I think I did that at like 87. So maybe the scaling's just a little bit out of whack, but that was quite difficult to keep her alive.
SPEAKER_04Were you going disc?
SPEAKER_00No, I was holy.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I played I played holy in delves like last expansion, and it was pretty pretty straightforward. Just doesn't s didn't seem to feel good at 87. I'm guessing that's just a gear slash tuning thing.
SPEAKER_04You don't want to just play shadow in the shadow expansion?
SPEAKER_00Not in delves. Like in the in the war within Warlock, I think, well, and Warlock and Hunter, the pet classes, were the only ones that I had a really good time on in delves as DPS. All the other w classes that I had, I was doing tank or healer. Because they just the mobs in there get quite strong, like to where you're just being killed by white hits. Yeah, so like I I mage seemed okay, because I played Frost Mage, and you could kind of lock down the mobs and make it to where they wouldn't even get to you. Do some kiting, freezing them in place. Rogue felt really bad. I never figured out really how to do great things on the rogue and the delves. So no, I don't really want to do shadow.
SPEAKER_02I'll just let Valera take all the damage.
SPEAKER_04I mean she she does her job and uh doesn't make too much of a fuss about it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, sh well she's when she goes tank, she's got that nice brewmaster ability where they shrug off uh percentage of the damage that they take, and then it gets applied as a dot to them. So she's not taking like super huge hits, like it's pretty constant damage, and it makes her really easy to heal. Similar to how healing brewmaster monks is pretty smooth. You don't get those, oh, and there goes half their health kind of moments. Yeah, she's got a version of the stagger mechanic that they have.
SPEAKER_04Oh, let me just heal you back up, Darius Midge.
SPEAKER_00Well, I yeah, I just didn't have the healing throughput, was the problem. Like spamming heals, and her life is just continuing to ebb away. Yeah. Hopefully that's just a leveling issue. And that'll feel better once we get some more gear.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I'm looking forward to be a little bit more geared and then maybe go back and because I know a lot of people are talking about the grounded questing experience, right? I just I wish I had time for that. I wish I had time to just immerse myself and but I just and maybe I wasn't geared enough going into this expansion. I don't know. I mean I had full heroic gear, and it just it was too annoying to just die all the time. So I'd rather get geared and then go back, and maybe that's not the ideal experience, but I think it's the experience that I'm gonna have to have.
SPEAKER_02But yeah, doing the community events has been fun.
SPEAKER_04I'm glad we have a good one. Um a few good ones. Abundance is very silly, it is it is incredibly silly, and I love that.
SPEAKER_00Um when you get multiple of those like ore or herb nodes in a row and there's just abundance everywhere, and you've got your buff stacked up to where your movement speed is through the roof, and my computer's just making sad noises as I'm running around way too fast everywhere.
SPEAKER_04One thing of note though, if you have any meta quests or anything like that related to the abundance, and you want to get real silly and join a raid group, just remember that you won't get progress on your quests while you're in the raid group for abundance.
SPEAKER_00Great. We we both ran into that this week because I was trying to do the quest for the champion piece, and you were doing the one where it wanted you to go to like all differ all four different abundance sites, right? And we did like eight in a row, and then neither of us had completed our quest.
SPEAKER_04We were just having so much fun running around for the rat that we didn't even notice our quest completion wasn't coming through.
SPEAKER_00Oh, and I love his voice. Yeah, like it's it's good that he has a good voice because he's just constantly saying his lines over and over again in the abundance.
SPEAKER_04Um you know who who I think had the same energy? And it like if you're talking about Loa's and like a whole pantheon of Loa's, he he has big Yani energy to me.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_04So he's like, I mean, he's fun, like we're interacting with him and doing things with him, but he's almost kind of like the comic relief of Loas. And you should see him in a crown.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I love his crown.
SPEAKER_04I it took you a really long time to find his crown.
SPEAKER_00I yeah, I don't know how I missed it. I was convinced that it just wasn't there.
SPEAKER_04It's just a minuscule little crown.
SPEAKER_00It is. It's and it kind of hides on the back of his head and the way that he's kind of floating in the air at an angle.
SPEAKER_04With his glow effect.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, I was convinced that I I got that achievement that gives him a crown and that he still didn't have a crown. But it was there. I am just blind.
SPEAKER_04I'm still not super sold on. Well, so we do get some cool rewards from doing those with the currency that you can only get from the abundance, right? That's kind of the point of it, right? To get some of those. I mean, if there's a mount there, you're gonna do it.
SPEAKER_00So right, you've got some mounts, some toys, some transmog. I found out yesterday that there's also a crafting reagent from that vendor that's required for quite a few things. So that makes a few of these events as the only way to get certain crafting reagents, like the tormented tarantulum or whatever it is you can only get from prey, the petrified root you can get from dungeons and delves, and now it's a reagent that you can only get from abundance.
SPEAKER_04And it's gonna be really interesting to see if they change this, but the the main vendor, like the renowned vendors and other vendors, especially for housing items, everything from the vendor seems really, really expensive for the void light marl. Like almost like where I get sticker shock from those prices, and I feel like, God, I'm really gonna have to grind the expansion currency this year to like get everything that I want to get. This expansion. And I haven't felt like that in a previous expansion, but now I feel like that about previous expansions because all of that housing stuff came out for War Within, and I was like, oh good resonance crystals. Finally, I have something to do with my resonance crystals, and I start like buying stuff, especially to outfit our inn, right? Because we because I'm trying to, you know, make it nice in here, so I have a lot of cobalt candles, right? But then so I'm like buying up cobalt candles and stuff, and all of a sudden, where did all my resonance crystals go? So what am I gonna have to go back to war within and farm the expansion currency to get more stuff that I want from that expansion? Do I need to go back to dragon flight and do I don't even remember what that was anymore? Like, because I went back to get a couple things, and I'm like, well, that was my currency and all the all the reagents and mats and things that you just trashed because you were going into the new expansion. Now, if you want to get some of that stuff and going back, like you're gonna have to farm that.
SPEAKER_00I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't trash anything, it went all into my reagent bank.
SPEAKER_04But you know, like you when you at the end of an expansion, when you can like convert currencies and like you empty out your bags, and maybe you don't know, maybe you've never done that, but because you're a hoarder, but a lot of people do that, and now I feel like it's like surprise, you should have held on to everything. Never mind that we didn't give you like decent bank or bag sizes until now. Like, go back and do all the content all over again.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I mean if if you want it like immediately, I can see how that could be overwhelming.
SPEAKER_04I need it now. Yeah, I have an inn to set up, and I don't have like a hunky Hallmark man to come and set up the the cutesy little inn with me, right? Like, this isn't Vermont, this is Azeroth. I gotta be a big kid and like buy my own interior decorating stuff.
SPEAKER_00I think it adds something else to do in the end of expansion lull. I mean, we didn't really have one of those this year, but maybe we will in the future. Yeah, because usually I'm farming going back in raids and farming transmog or working on that mount that I never got. Um would be a good time for going back and getting some of those decor options.
SPEAKER_04So I guess what I was trying to get at was I don't know, maybe it's good that we have some of these like special currencies and things that we can only get through certain events so that we can target our efforts a little bit more. And I don't know if it comes out to be cheaper, like if the total cost of the abundance currency to obtain some of these things is a little bit less than some of the renowned vendors, and they're just generic expansion currency that they're asking for. Is it is I know finding the moths in hairnier, like there's some things you can get from that. Is that you know, I guess it depends how badly you want the certain things from the vendors, but I don't know, maybe it's a good thing to kind of spread those out and have different ways of obtaining cosmetic items.
SPEAKER_00Right, not not literally everything is up for sale for Marl.
SPEAKER_04Did we talk about how weird a currency marl is?
SPEAKER_02No.
SPEAKER_04So I was like, I feel like this is a vocab word. What is a marl? So marl is an unconsolidated sedimentary rock or soil that historically was used as fertilizer. So a marl is a little pile of sand or dirt. But apparently this is void dirt. And it gives me very dirt. It gives me very like you know, manifest destiny prospector vibes paying in like gold dust.
SPEAKER_00You just whip out your bag and dump a pile of sand and the vendors outstretched.
SPEAKER_04Like I feel like all the vendors should have little like scales that they're measuring our little piles of dirt with. Yeah, kind of an interesting choice because usually it's been some kind of coin or at least like a crystal, you know, something tangible and countable rather than you know having to set up a little way station. I don't know. I just thought that was interesting. That that's the currency.
SPEAKER_00That's weird.
SPEAKER_04Currency is this this expansion. Little piles of dirt, little piles of void dirt, and that's what is being charged exponentially for all of the items that we wish to obtain. Yeah, so I'm I think I feel like now I'm with housing items the way you are with mounts. Like you would do some real shady stuff for mounts, and I feel like I'm like What do you mean shady? You like I'm actually thinking of that like fake Klondike bar commercial that they did in Family Guy, and he's like, What would you do for a Klondike bar? Because like the real commercial is like, Oh, would you do a little dance? Like, would you do something kind of silly? And then in the family guy thing, they're like, What would you do for a Klondike bar? Would you would you kill a guy? And like he's like, Oh, I don't know. Like, but you do it all the time. Somebody said gives you a quest, like, go kill that guy, and you're like, Is it for a mount? Yeah, heck yeah, I'll do it. So, yeah, you would do some real shady stuff for a mount.
SPEAKER_00I see. In-game shady stuff.
SPEAKER_04Speaking of shady stuff, what's going on with like the prey system? Because there's, you know, like we're doing it for gear and and things like that, and like the little trophies, right? That the busts of the people that we have murdered as home decor. But we are harvesting their suffering. Am I getting that right?
SPEAKER_00Right. We're we're using the magic to siphon the anguish that we're causing.
SPEAKER_04Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00And we're all just cool with that. I guess. Somehow using that energy to enchant things and empower things and even heal people. But there's definitely a a follow-up quest where you go and check on some of the people that what is an Af Astelor? I always get him confused with the vampire rogue from Baldur's Gate 3. He's Asterian, I think.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Astalor is given.
SPEAKER_04You don't want to bring up Asterian. We'll get all the way off topic.
SPEAKER_00He's given some of these people some jewelry and trinkets that he's enchanted with the suffering magic, and asks us to go check on them, see how they're doing. And they've become like quite aggressive. Weird fighting for like no reason. Very paranoid. Like one of the guys definitely had a straight up gollum, like, no, it's my My precious moment. So yeah, I'm I'm interested where that story is going to go. Also interested in just what Astalore is. Like with all of the red magic, he definitely evokes like Aventhir in my mind, being one of the vampire bitey boys myself in Shadowlands. But he's not a Vinthir. He looks like a blood elf, but he's quite pale. So like, is he a San Lane? Is he one of the vampires? Just not sure really what his story is.
SPEAKER_04I would read that story. That would be big on the romanticy circuit. Christy Golden, get on it. But yeah, yeah, it's it seems very shady and interested to see where it goes. Big twist. He's actually evil and like we shouldn't have been killing all these people. Shocked. I would be so shocked.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, profiting on the suffering of others, maybe not the best thing to do, but also there's kind of a there's kind of a history among that in the Blood Elves, right? Like going all the way back to the Burning Crusade, that's that's how they became paladins originally. They were just draining the magic from a Nehru and injecting it into themselves, right?
SPEAKER_04Well, there are some Nehru that deserve it.
SPEAKER_00I did like that they put that cutscene back in in the game in Void Storm. I liked watching that again.
SPEAKER_04Basically, as a are you sure? Are you sure Nehru must all be protected? Yeah, we kind of failed that one Nehru guy, didn't we? Poor Nehru. Very sad. Anyway. So yeah, the the prey system. It'll be interesting to see. Do you so we have a journey for prey, similar to how we have a journey for delves. Do you do you think there's more plot coming?
SPEAKER_00I mean, I I definitely do. Every time you kind of unlock another rank, it seems like there's a little quest to go do. Um like you you originally went down into his his basement, his secret rooms down there where he does his experiments, right?
SPEAKER_04That's where he trust him down into my basement.
SPEAKER_00And, you know, enchanted one of the arcane golems that the blood elves had, enchanted one of the mana worms, but then you come back a little bit later, and there's a blood knight who's been injured by the void and has this ongoing malignancy that they can't cure. And so you infuse him with the Anguish magic, and it it fixes it. And the reward for that is a nice backpack. So it does seem like whenever you unlock a new thing so far, you've just gone on a short little quest that's telling you a little bit more about Anguish and what Astalore is up to with it. So yeah, I'd I definitely expect more stories to come as we progress through the journey and unlock more things.
SPEAKER_04As far as other community events go, Stormarian Assault seems very, you know, standard defend the castle type business. I mean, we had that assault in Dragonflight that was kind of the giants area that we took over. This is a more defense plot, but you know, kind of pretty standard little scenario that plays out. Legends of the haironier also felt kind of standard, like very similar to the the questing campaign, and and the you know, there's a lot of themes there where you're going back in memories and like learning more about the haironier. And I wonder why it is so very important to them that everyone has a thorough understanding of the haironier's history and what they're about. Like they seem to be really pushing that. Like, you cannot get through this expansion without us understanding how very, very important the haironier is and their history. I mean, I'm I'm sure that's just you know, them trying to write a good story, and there's nothing more to that. But the the soiree, I felt like was a little bit interesting. It ends up kind of being a weekly quest hub. And so it it might just be very basic and standard, but I'm curious with the with the way that they do the rep, if you if there's a way to like be very Game of Thrones about it, like if the choices matter and like, oh, if I do like this faction, you know, will that will something happen with this? I don't think it is like that, but for but for a second I wanted to pretend like it was because I you know I find those kind of intrigue things very interesting, and so maybe I'll just pretend that if I if I play all these different factions against each other, you know, I can be like the winner at the end of the Game of Thrones or something like that.
SPEAKER_00No, it definitely seems like you're just raising the bars for all of them, and you'll end up with maxed out reputation with each of the groups.
SPEAKER_04But I thought it I just thought it was interesting that depending on who you chose to invite, you got different values of lessening your renown with some of the other factions. So it's like, oh, you get such and such, but then you get minus 500 with these guys and minus. I'm like, ooh, is there a way to like min-max strategy this so that it's like depending on what order you do?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you'd you'd get like minus 100, maybe minus 125, but then if you take one of the ones that gives you minus rep, you also get a fourth one of those tokens to do a daily quest. So then that gives you if you do that daily quest, that gives you a hundred rep right back. It seems like the correct like if you're wanting to do the math, the correct way to do it is to choose one of those that pisses off somebody and get the extra quest. Because overall, like you'll just get more rep total. If you have one group that has some stuff that you want and you just want to kind of laser focus on that group, then going that route wouldn't get you there as fast. But if your goal is to get everybody ranked up, I think the winning strategy is just always picking the one that gives you an extra token.
SPEAKER_04Well, I'm just gonna pretend I'm a super spy and that like gonna play all these people against each other and learn the weaknesses. And actually, I'm just running around doing weekly quests, but in my mind it'll be extra fun.
SPEAKER_00They go nice with prey though.
SPEAKER_04They do, yeah. It's a good thing to do while you're running about after prey. Less so the uh the other community events don't aren't quite as no.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think I think Storm Arian Assault is my least favorite. I think the other ones are all pretty good. I mean abundance is just silly. The Soiree is a nice little questing hub to go around and do everything. And then Legends of the Heron Ear, you just get some nice new lore and a new story every week. I did run into an issue with Legends of the Heron Ear on my alt. I tried to uh do the world tour quest, where uh you get tasked to do each of the community events, and it gives you what your your spark of radiance for the week. It didn't let me do Legends of the Heronier on my priest. I had already done like that for the week on my warlock. And so then when I went to go to that building and try to talk to him and like choose a thing to go do, there just was no way to do that. And then when I went to the other NPC to get the quest for the champion gear, it just auto-completed. So that was very weird. I'm not sure like if I'm just missing something obvious or if there's some a sort of bug there with not being able to complete Legends of the Heronir on more than one character a week.
SPEAKER_04More alts, more problems.
SPEAKER_00I guess.
SPEAKER_04Oh. But then next week we'll have much more to do because we'll start really hitting delves in a real way with uh the advent of season one.
SPEAKER_00Right, we've got tier eight through eleven opening up, we've got bountiful delves opening up, be trying to get our keys to be able to open those chests at the end of the runs. And we'll have Nightmare Prey opening up. So quite a lot to do on Tuesday with the reset.
SPEAKER_04Mm-hmm. Which, I don't know, be real for me, is not gonna happen until the weekend. But at least this weekend, the kids are sick, so they'll be sleeping a lot.
SPEAKER_00I'll be sleeping a lot.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, maybe I'll catch up. But yeah, it has been a long week, and what do we do when we're sad?
SPEAKER_00Add to cart.
SPEAKER_04Add to cart. That's correct. I know a lot of people have been kind of upset about the new store offerings. And I'm not like, I'm not someone who buys everything they put up on the store, but if it has something that like you know, the targets my aesthetic or anything like that. So this week, not only did I buy one of the two offered housing decor packs because I had to have the gnomes and the mushrooms, more gnomes, more mushrooms, more cottage core, basically. So I did that, but then you pointed out the squirrel mounts to me. Like I didn't do the panda mounts because I thought they were kind of dumb. And the pricing is kind of weird because if you buy one like a single mount, it's like half the price of the four-mount pack. So I don't know why anybody would ever buy a single one. Like it kind of it's kind of like you gotta buy the whole pack. Well, if you only like that one coloration, or I only liked one coloration and I still bought the whole pack. And then, like, you know, hopefully someday they'll do like another little mushroom get up. But in the meantime, I you know, I talked last week how much I love our you know, former enemies turned friends and uh cosplaying as them. So of course I had to get the cobalt getup, and I'll just like do a little twirl for everybody. But got some nice candles on there, and you know, come in four different colors. It's quite cute, it's it's cozy little like onesie jamas, which is definitely my thing. However, with how angry everybody is about the store, I'm like kind of a little bit embarrassed about it. So give me your hot take, Bubber. Why should I not be embarrassed about my store purchases other than spending our money?
SPEAKER_00So I think two reasons. We both work in corporate America, right? This art didn't the the models, right, for the mounts for the transmog, they didn't just come out of nowhere. Like, you can't tell me that that cobalt costume was something that was designed for a completely different part of the game somewhere, and then they ripped it out, and they would have otherwise just been in the game for you to get for free, and then instead they put it on the store and put it behind a paywall. Somebody was tasked specifically with creating that cobalt costume to be put on the store, right? People don't just exist without work to do, like there's just not artists at Blizzard like sitting around with nothing to do for no reason. So they had to hire somebody like to do that that was spending that time not working on something else. And you have to justify any hiring requisition that you have, right?
SPEAKER_04Or they transferred from one of the other game development teams of a game that's dead.
SPEAKER_02Sure.
SPEAKER_00Either way, you you as the manager of this person, like had to justify that person to the higher-ups saying, I want to hire this person. I want them on my team, or if they're an outside hire, like either way. And the only way you can do that is explaining to the higher ups why that's going to positively affect the bottom line. Right?
SPEAKER_02The other take. Sorry, I lost my train of thought. Well, I mean, they have to make profits somehow, right?
SPEAKER_00Right. In in 2006, what was the cost of a World of Warcraft subscription?
SPEAKER_04My weekly food budget. Fifteen dollars.
SPEAKER_00It was fifteen dollars. In 2026, what is the cost of a World of Warcraft ex subscription?
SPEAKER_04One Kindle book.
SPEAKER_00Still $15. So we haven't seen that go up at all in two decades. And the reason for that, in my opinion, is because it's being supported by these other revenue streams, right? It's being supported by the WoW token, it's being supported by uh hearth steel, by mount packages. So in effect, everybody making these purchases off the store is subsidizing everybody else's WoW subscription. So I don't know. If you like it and you can afford it, then you get it. And if you just want to complain about it, I don't know.
SPEAKER_04I mean as much as we understand corporate America, we also love complaining about corporate America, right? Sure. It's valid. But yeah, so I've got, you know, a couple cute whimsical things that bring me joy that I didn't have to farm a bunch of dirt piles for. And well, the other thing about the cobalt is like I I love the little jammy sets. Like the Yeti was cute, but I am so sick of Murlocs. I've never really liked Murlocks. I know I'm in the minority, but Murlocs have never really allied with us. They've always been kind of like evil and like gonna bite my face off. I know there was that one guy that kind of tricked them into accepting him as their leader, but I'm talking about King Murgle Merkel. Yeah, King Murgle, Murgle, Murgle, Merkel. And I've never had an emotional connection with a Murloc. I get that they're ridiculous, but they're also, you know, aggressive and mean. And so yeah, I'm I'm down if we start getting cute merch from other former mobs, current allies. I want to see some fungarian for sure. Because cottage core is very big right now and they fit right in. Cute little fungarian. Oh my god, a fungarian plushie want. Want, but yeah, the the cobalt jammies are super cute. Like very much.
SPEAKER_00I'm glad that you have the fungarians. I'm very happy for that for you.
SPEAKER_04There's one just like happy sitting on a log, and I just sat down with him for a little while. Like in Dragonflight, they had those actual like just sit for a moment, and we don't have those anymore. But I made my own moment with the little fungarians sitting on a log, and we were just sitting, sitting like bumps on a log.
SPEAKER_02It was great.
SPEAKER_04But what else can we do while we're running around trying to get geared up?
SPEAKER_00Well, I was uh pleasantly surprised that the PvP zone in the north of Void Storm doesn't actually require you to PvP if you don't want to.
SPEAKER_04Mm-hmm. I thought you said it flagged you for PvP.
SPEAKER_00So there are I think they're called void touched remains. They show up on the map as like little skulls. If you loot those, it does flag you for PvP. But as long as you don't loot those, you can do all the world quests that are up there. You can get the like world PvP set that's the same as the prey set or the you know campaign set, but it's a nice purple and gold instead of the white and Elyria kind of bluish black, where the prey set is very black and red. So I I quite like the coloration on that set. But it definitely seemed like it was like the world quests have the little crossed sword symbols that historically have meant PvP quests, but all of them do just have the option to kill mobs instead. And if you're not in war mode, you're not gonna be flagged for PvP unless you click the bones.
SPEAKER_04Is it like those PvP world quests that we did in Legion?
SPEAKER_00Kind of, yeah. Those in Legion did still flag you for PvP. And so if there were any of the opposing faction around, you would end up fighting them. But yeah, it's kind of reminiscent of that. That's that's a good point. That's that does make me think of that.
SPEAKER_04I don't know. I don't know. If you you think I've I was giving you skeptical side eye about the prey system, I just do not want to be anywhere near PvP. Although you said we have to do the the battlegrounds. Is that what you said?
SPEAKER_00So I was I was kind of confused. My reading comprehension failed me. Or alternatively, how Dare Blizzard tricked us. Yeah, there was a weekly quest to do three battlegrounds, but it does let you do it in training mode with NPCs instead of other players, and it looked like you would do three battlegrounds and you would get a heroic level ring or necklace, and that's not the case. You do the quest once a week for four weeks in a row, and at the very end you get a heroic level ring or necklace. So four weeks from now we'll have been doing delves and getting heroic rewards from that. Like, I'm not sure it's worth it. Each week the rewards from the quest get better, but you do have to do three battlegrounds every week. Yeah, there was a lot of comments, I don't know, on WoWhead people being tricked and like yeah, I misread it too. But I'm not really upset about it. But yeah, if I I don't think you have to worry about they're not PvP world quests. They're just regular world quests where you go fight ethereals or void entities.
SPEAKER_03Like, I'll think about it.
SPEAKER_04I mean the I if I need world quests, sure. Like, because usually I do enough world quests to get the special assignment, and then I'll do the special assignment and kind of be done with world quests, because that gives me my big renown boost. And unless there are specific world quests that have things I really want. Unless you're gonna tell me that maybe down the road world quests are the best way to get Marl, and then I'm gonna need all the Marl to purchase all of my, you know, very fancy crate and barrel Azaroth housing decor.
SPEAKER_00I mean, they do give like 150 Marl each.
SPEAKER_04I where's where's the Azaroth IKEA? Give me give me some cheap housing decor, I'll assemble it myself just so I can get more stuff in my house. I'm just saying. They can serve little like void meatballs.
SPEAKER_02That just makes me think of the Delve story version.
SPEAKER_00What was it? It was the one that they added with the undermine patch that was in the Ringing Deeps. Um, that kind of like corrupted Titan facility down there. There was one of the story modes where you were working with a chef and you would use like the blades to cut up the void tentacles, like turn them into meat. No, that did not seem good. I don't want void tentacle meatballs.
SPEAKER_04I mean, as long as it's not served chowder style.
SPEAKER_00That's I'm I'm sick. Can you not?
SPEAKER_04But actually, that that kind of reminds me of Ourobos, where the the death guys were like, this is food, right? You you eat food. This is these are food things.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they had no idea what they were doing culinary-wise.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, so just like really strange combinations.
SPEAKER_00But salted herring ice cream.
SPEAKER_04I mean, we all have our quirks, right? Some people like to dip their PBJs in chicken noodle soup, and like that's just a thing. It's not me, by the way.
SPEAKER_00I will blame that entirely on my dad. Yeah. He indoctrinated me and my brother very early into doing that.
SPEAKER_04Everybody has their own thing. I like pepperoni on my grilled cheese, like, you know, stuff like that. But at least co cooking seems good so far. It's kind of interesting the the hardy m versions of the food where you can just like basically recraft your recipes for extra points. But I've hit a kind of a wall with that because to make the feasts, I need the the special ingredient that seems like we'll be getting mostly from delves. Like, is there any way to get petrified roots right now in the game?
SPEAKER_00Dungeons.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's dungeons and delves.
SPEAKER_04Is it follower dungeons?
SPEAKER_00I don't know.
SPEAKER_04No, probably not.
SPEAKER_00But I haven't I haven't personally seen any drop from delves yet either.
SPEAKER_04Mm-hmm. Yeah, I haven't seen any quite yet. And the like the the specialized, like, I know for me, like the species-specific reagents that drop for leather working and skinning, those are dropping very low rates.
SPEAKER_00Oh, like the feathers.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, like the feathers are the you know, the the species-specific ones. So now I'm like, oh crap, like I should have been putting all of my points into the the skinning thing that makes them more common. Have you been encountering like special ingredients that are really hard to get and kind of slowing you up?
SPEAKER_00Not really. So I've done tailoring and enchanting, herbalism and inscription, and then mining and blacksmithing so far. I haven't really hit a wall with rare reagents on any of them. The only one that I think I've run into that does have like a rare reagent is mining. You can sometimes get a thorium like drop when you're mining. That's a blue item. Those do seem quite rare, but I also haven't run into a lot of recipes that require them yet. Blacksmithing is is definitely my lowest level profession. Like tailoring. I guess that's kind of the same thing. It's got two blue cloths that drop. I do like how they changed the cloth as opposed to how it worked in Dragonflight and War Within. We went, we've moved away from cloth dropping and needing to kind of rip it up to make thread just to weave it back into a bolt again. I didn't really enjoy that process because I'd I'd end up with like four of the rank one cloth and four of the rank two cloth and four of the rank three cloth, and I need five of any one to be able to rip it apart into its constituent parts. So I very much like that instead like sunfire cloth is just dropping, and then you can weave that into a bolt of sunfire instead of needing to tear it apart first.
SPEAKER_04I hope you wash it first.
SPEAKER_00I definitely don't, but I mean I'm undead, so yeah.
SPEAKER_04What do you care? So yeah, I mean crafting's always been kind of a hard thing, right? Because in order for the if you if you're trying to make it for the gear, like unless you are tunneling crafting, by the time you get your crafting high enough to make competitive gear, you're already kind of surpassed that item level with the other content that you're doing. I mean the weapons usually turn out pretty well, and you can always recraft stuff, but yeah, it wasn't like you were ever able to like completely outfit yourself by your own crafting means, unless that was kind of your main thing. And I mean it's still fun. I still enjoy it. I dabble in it, but it never seems like it's it's been the big powerhouse, and I guess maybe that's by design because they don't want people to just they don't want a lot of people to have to focus on it and make it like mandatory for raiding or anything.
SPEAKER_00I I would say that it is kind of mandatory for raiding.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Like you can you mentioned the weapons, but with the with the crest system that they put in, like you can make very high-level gear. I know we just do delves and stuff, right? But you know, from the gilded crests that drop out of that, we can make better gear than we can get out of the vault.
SPEAKER_04True. It's just now that we have that those extra crests available.
SPEAKER_00Right, right. In the war within, a bunch of those crests were going to upgrading our heroic gear to get the mythic appearance. Or then when they were left over, going into crafting a gilded crest weapon. Um, because that was kind of the highest impact piece that you could craft out of it. But in midnight, now that we're not gonna be we're gonna be getting those gilded crests every week from the tier 11 delves, 21 of them from the chess, and then what like 15 of them from the map? So we'll be getting quite a few of those every week. By the time the season's done, might have several pieces of crafted gear that's using those enchanted gilded crests. That's higher island level than what we're doing.
SPEAKER_03Are there any other tips or tricks for crafting that you want to share?
SPEAKER_00I just I like the callback to the vanilla resources quite a bit. I think that was a cool decision that we're not just putting brand new mining or herbalism nodes in Eversong that weren't there 20 years ago. All of a sudden, the entire bio has like evolved into something completely different, and none of these herbs are present anymore.
SPEAKER_04I mean the light bloom, but sure, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I I like the that we're going around harvesting tranquility bloom instead of peace bloom or sanguithorn versus blood thistle. Is very silly to me. Argent leaf versus silver leaf, right? They're callbacks to those original plants. The the mining nodes are a bit less inspired, I feel. They're just either shiny or dark versions of the minerals that originally existed. So you've got refulgent copper or umbral tin. So it's just been infused by either the light or the void. And then you've got your different kinds of specialty nodes where it adds a little bit of an extra thing, and you'll get a blue moat of that kind of energy that the node's been infused with. So you've got nodes that are infused with light, and when you loot them, they'll start shooting out little balls of golden light that you have to run and catch. Or the ones that are infused with void and void storm, like they make a big void portal black hole that tries to suck you into it. For whatever reason, people seem to really not want to fight the mobs that pop out from the wild node spawns in Zulaman. So, like for herbalism, it'll spawn like four little plants, like the flowers with the thorny vines. For mining, it'll spawn two like rock elementals, and if you kill them, they just drop like gray trash, but then if you mine them, they give you like a whole nother mining nodes worth of ore and moats. But for whatever reason, I I keep seeing people who have invested into being able to mine while you're mounted, and they'll just go loot those wild nodes, the mobs will spawn and they'll take off and fly away. And like, even if you're like trying to optimize your your time, there's no way that just killing those two to four mobs, like and then looting them isn't faster and more effective than like going to try to find two additional nodes to herb. And then unfortunately, you can't you can't harvest the ones that have spawned from other people.
SPEAKER_04Yep.
SPEAKER_00So like I'm down there fighting them, right? I'm starting to mine the elementals. Somebody else comes down, they loot the thing, fly away. Now I have to fight their two mobs, and then once I've killed them, I can't even mine them for the loot that they've like left behind.
SPEAKER_03How woot.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So it's kind of unfortunate. But yeah, just I don't understand why people don't want their free loot. Like, maybe, maybe they just don't know. Because usually, like, it's not worth it to harvest like the the rock elementals or like all of the plant creatures and hair and deer. Like, if you use your herbalism skill on them, they just drop garbage. Like, I can see how people would think it wouldn't be worth their time. Just unfortunately, in this case, it really is. So kill your mobs, loot your mobs when your wild node comes up.
SPEAKER_04The only the only cool new thing with skinning, like, we don't even have light and dark versions of our mats, it's just all void leather or void scales. But they have introduced kind of these like higher levels where you they'll tag a mob as being like high level and they're outlined in red, and they have like a little bit of like loot sparkle to them. And if you kill them, they and skin them, they'll give you more mats than a normal mob. The only annoying thing is that if somebody else kills them, you can't skinner loot them, but they still show up on your map.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's weird.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, so I'm like I've like traveled to these icons and like it's just a corpse that I can't loot.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I can I can see that buff on mobs. Yeah, that's interesting that if somebody else kills it, you can't skin it.
SPEAKER_04And it almost seems kind of random too, because I've also seen it on mobs that are like flying really, really high, and there's no way to like aggro them down to actually kill them.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I think that's just blizzard not worrying about that too much because the same thing would happen like in region leap region. Yep. Legion remix, when you were on the heroic world mode, you'd get those mobs that had extra buffs and then would drop like extra loot, but then friendly NPCs would get that buff. So it's like, yeah, no, that totally makes sense that this friendly guard captain has all of these buffs. One of which is like when I start fighting them, he's going to summon in a bunch of demons. Like, yeah.
SPEAKER_04I mean, in general, it kind of sucks that there's mobs that are just like flying around that you can't really get in range to aggro, even on a ranged character.
SPEAKER_00Just be a demon hunter.
SPEAKER_04I guess.
SPEAKER_00Fight them while you're flying down from the sky.
SPEAKER_04I was like, am I missing something? Am I supposed to be doing this with like dynamic flight? Am I supposed to be aggroing them with dynamic flight? Is that the point here? But it doesn't really work very well. So I don't know.
SPEAKER_02Maybe I am missing something, but I if I am, I haven't figured it out yet.
SPEAKER_00See, the only thing I've got for enchanting is that it's got a shatter for your purple crystals into your blue shards again, uh, which we didn't have in the war within. So I was very happy to see that, because as the seasons as the season like progresses, you stop getting blue gear. Right? Like going into delves and getting epics instead. So it's nice, I think, that you don't end up running out of sources for some of these materials. It's weird that they got rid of, or like didn't implement the shatter from the blue shards into the dust. So they didn't originally have either of those in the war within, but they gave us the shatter from the blue shards into the dust. And then this expansion, we've just got the purple crystals into the blue shards. Um the last time we had both was Dragonflight. So it's interesting that they don't want us to be able to like go all the way from the top tier enchanting material down to the base. I'm not a economics goblin, so I don't know like why Blizzard might not want to do that. But it does seem weird that they only have one of them, but then they switched which one they were gonna give us this time. But I think I'm happier with the shattering that we've got than the one that they gave us in Warwithin. That was nice to see.
SPEAKER_04We almost forgot to talk about the most important profession of the entire expansion. The get the gathering profession. Lumberjacking.
SPEAKER_02Oh.
SPEAKER_04I I like it is very important.
SPEAKER_00And have you have you got your achievement that lets you to chop down trees while mounted yet?
SPEAKER_04Oh no. So I I know I have not crafted a single housing decor item yet, but I know that it takes a lot of wood to make your your housing decor. So I will like if I'm cruising along and I see a log up for grabs, I will stop whatever I am doing because I got wood for for furniture. But yeah, so that's that's something that's also like very important as you're running around. Make sure you're getting your wood.
SPEAKER_00I thought you were gonna say fishing was the most important profession.
SPEAKER_04I mean it is it is kind of important in this one because it's still integrated into cooking and a few other things, I think.
SPEAKER_00Also gotta get that that TBC style nether drake that has a ridiculously low chance. That's gonna be Mr. Pinchy's crowded box all over again for me.
SPEAKER_04Good luck, sir. Good luck in your endeavors. Oh, not your housing in Denvers. Those are a worth a thing now as well. Which is kind of fun. We all have the the blood elf endeavor this this month, right?
SPEAKER_00Which is it was not a choice. It just everybody got that chosen for them.
SPEAKER_04Which, like, that's great, but it was kind of fun to like hop over and spend community coupons in in other areas.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's a there's a max on how many coupons you can have, right? Just sitting in your inventory.
SPEAKER_04I wouldn't know. I spend them as soon as I get them.
SPEAKER_00It was that was gonna be my question. Is there enough to buy from the Blood Elf vendor to stop stockpiling them? Because with the last Endeavor, I remember we did we jumped around to like several of the other Endeavor vendors to spend some of our currency.
SPEAKER_04Well, that depends on if you're buying just like one of each.
SPEAKER_00Oh, sure. Or you know you can just buy multiple copies.
SPEAKER_04I suppose at a certain point you reach your your housing items max where you can't hold any more in your storage and you have to start destroying things to buy more.
SPEAKER_00That seems very dumb to me. I strongly dislike that.
SPEAKER_04Especially when they're so expensive, you know, and sometimes I'm you know, I'm not a I'm a planner, but like not a very precise planner. So if I'm like, oh yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, put a bunch of Delvers candles up in our in our tavern, I'm not gonna like plan out and map and count how many candles I need. No, I'm gonna go over to the to the cobalt vendor and just like mash the button to buy a bunch of candles. And then if I found that I bought too many candles, you know, like that's too bad.
SPEAKER_00All your resonance crystals are gone.
SPEAKER_04All my resonance crystals are gone. It's like, oh shoot, I forgot to buy books from the from from the dwarves because the the most readily available books to stock my huge library were the the Dornegal books. And so I needed to buy, you know, a metric butt tongue of books as I do in real life, right? Because you gotta fill up your bookcases and then get more bookcases. That's that's the cycle. Yeah, it's tough, it's tough to actualize your vision with such limitations like currency. But next week we will be talking a lot more about delves as we discuss the bountifuls. I will say that my favorite delve this week was that very learned, smart man that decided to try and fight the void with light bloom in the void storm. And you know, like it wasn't a bad idea.
SPEAKER_00It uh obviously it didn't work out, but no, he had his light bloom corrupted by void.
SPEAKER_04Which it should have worked though, right? You know, with the plot power of like light blooming flowers. Why do you think it didn't work?
SPEAKER_00I mean they had that bit in the questing campaign in Void Storm where you've got the shadow grafting material and you're gonna use it to enslave Decimus, right? And that's totally gonna work. Elyria like points out that with enough void, like things of light can be corrupted to void, and with enough light, things of void can be purified to light, right? So yeah, it seems like his his light bloom just turned into void bloom.
SPEAKER_02It was it was a great idea.
SPEAKER_00Sometimes great ideas just don't pan out though.
SPEAKER_04Yep. So that was that was my delve moment of the week.
SPEAKER_00How did he get so much of it in there though? That's my question.
SPEAKER_04Like well, they're like tribles, right? Like it it perpetuates quite quickly.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but these were like giant monsters. Like they're the trees were like that's the trouble with cribbles their faces a mouth.
SPEAKER_04Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_04But I'm interested to see, because we haven't gotten all the stories yet, so I'm kind of interested to see the rest of the the Delve stories so we can comment on them.
SPEAKER_00I'm excited for you to see the worst delve story.
SPEAKER_04Better not be at Grunch Pit.
SPEAKER_00It's not. It's the this is just the worst one I've come across so far.
SPEAKER_04Is it like offensive?
SPEAKER_00It's offensive to my eyes.
SPEAKER_04Oh.
SPEAKER_00So it's the one that's in southern Eversong.
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_00And it's like it's very dark. There's lots of shadows. And if you spend too much time in the shadows, you are likely to be eaten by a grow.
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's right.
SPEAKER_00And the groove is real. It does come for you. But to fix that, you've got mirrors. And so you use the mirror to shoot the light beams all throughout the delve. Kind of like they disproved would work in the pyramids. Because you just can't reflect enough of it? Yeah. Well, it works like once or twice. But we're doing it like 12, 15 times in this delve. But so you have to keep standing in the light that you're reflecting through it. And whenever you're in the light, you get a debuff that like makes it 25% more likely for you to be critical struck or something. But you also get a whole screen effect that's like blinding light. It's it's not great.
SPEAKER_04Do you remember how mad I got at Bran for his little Titan orb light?
SPEAKER_00Yes, obstructing your whole screen.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. I feel like this is worse.
SPEAKER_00Because it's it's like the whole around the screen effect, and it's bright.
SPEAKER_04And I was so excited by how subtle Valera's, you know, effect like spell effects were and things like that. Because all of brands were just obnoxious. But that was the most obnoxious one. So what you're telling me is there's an entire delve just with brands obnoxious orb effect.
SPEAKER_00But worse. Yep.
SPEAKER_04But worse. Okay. Yeah. That sounds awful.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I might actually just avoid that one.
SPEAKER_04That might be the new one that I just and now we can do that because it'll be labeled.
SPEAKER_00Right. I won't have to go there and figure out that it's one that I don't want to do.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. You used to complain about the mushroom ones, and you would say, I don't want to do that one.
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah, they fixed the spore bits. The spore bits were awful. They fixed them. Uh there's there's probably like a a setting or an option somewhere to turn off that the screen effect.
SPEAKER_04Um what remember it was something about like w when they did have the spore bits and they had those uh ground effects that you couldn't see until you had to adjust your ground clutter all the way down. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I just didn't and died.
SPEAKER_04You were so stubborn. But yes, I'm I'm excited to start getting into like a delve rotation and finding our favorites, you know, other than Grudge Pit, because obviously that's gonna be the favorite. And then start like bickering about which delves we're gonna do. Like it's gonna be great. I'm looking forward to it.
SPEAKER_00So it's it's whichever one is the pit. You love the pits.
SPEAKER_04Yep. So join us next week as we start to delve a little further into delves. But in the meantime, thank you for joining us today. I'm Sinaila.
SPEAKER_00And I'm Zumanaki.
SPEAKER_04And we hope that you have a great night, and we see you again soon.
SPEAKER_01Check in again soon. Thank you for your visit. Until next time. May the eternal sun guide you come again soon.
SPEAKER_03May the depths bring you wealth. Next one is on me. And don't do anything I wouldn't do.
SPEAKER_02Rest well.
SPEAKER_01Rest well. Stay warm. Travel in starlight, friend. Safe travels. Travel safe. Safe travels.
SPEAKER_02Farewell.
unknownFarewell.
SPEAKER_03Farewell.
SPEAKER_02Farewell.