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[00:00] Hi, I'm Hazel. It's Saturday today, which makes it time to sit down and catch up on what's been going on in WoW. This week, the Mythic Plus season started, and we finally got our way into keys.

[00:13] It feels like the preseason was so long. This time around, I feel like the rollout was just kind of confusing with how many different layers there were to unravel, but we finally have almost all of it. I guess we still have another raid to come.

[00:27] But Mythic Plus has started, and with it, we now know what the difficulty tuning is like, and many people have thoughts about it. The conversations that I've been hearing have been basically around whether or not this is the easiest that Mythic Plus keys have ever been.

[00:47] I'm here to supply my single personal anecdote as somebody who has been playing Mythic Plus since it came out, and I would say, yeah, kind of. This season, my group that I have been running Mythic Plus with for several expansions,

[01:01] timed 10s on our first night, on our first runs, without even really having things like good trinkets or tier tests yet, which is really, really unusual for us. We would maybe, in the first week in past seasons,

[01:16] get to a 10 and then absolutely struggle our way through it in order to try to get one good option out of all, not just, like, start timing them and knocking out portals on our first run of everything.

[01:28] I think from my perspective, the question here is not so much are keys easier, but why might keys be easier now, and also whether or not that's a good thing.

[01:40] Depending on who you're speaking with, this might be great news, or it might be, like, the great portent of Doom. It is definitely a change, for better or for worse. If we step into a world for a moment in which we imagine that Blizzard has tuned

[01:52] to commit Big Plus to be easier on purpose this season. One potential reason for that, all speculation, but one reason why they may have wanted Keith to feel easier this season is to help people adjust to the lack of combat add-ons that they may be now working with.

[02:08] Lots of people are playing with fewer combat add-ons than they had been before because of the add-on changes that came with Midnight, and I think that if the content had been difficult, it would be hard for a lot of people to distinguish whether or not that difficulty was coming from the content in the tuning or from not having your Wii cores and other like super comprehensive add anymore because they came at the same time

[02:30] Having things be manageable, I feel, takes some of the gasoline out of the conversation around whether or not WoW has died without add-ons. I think that if people show up to Keys and they find that they can still time things,

[02:43] even without Wii cores, maybe even easier than they had done before, That takes a little bit of the heat out of whether or not you really need those things. If you use a tool to achieve a goal, and you're still achieving the goal without the tool,

[02:55] it's not that you can't have that argument. You certainly can, but a few of the teeth are gone out of it. I think it is certainly a change, for better or for worse. I think it's hard to deny that the tuning for Mythic Plus feels different.

[03:07] And I bet that they are keeping a very close eye on participation numbers, because if this is a change they made on purpose, the question becomes, is the amount of people that you lose, because Mythic Plus is no longer challenging enough, enough to outweigh the new people that are now getting into it because it's

[03:24] more accessible? Hi, buddy. I think that personally, just from my own perspective, it doesn't bother me in keys specifically, because if my Mythic Plus key is too easy for me and I'm feeling bored,

[03:37] I can always do a harder keys. Keys are a system that will scale in difficulty forever, because you can always do a higher one. I think a conversation about Mythic Plus being too easy is really a conversation about,

[03:50] are the Mythic Plus rewards too accessible now? Because the easier you make keys, the more people are going to be getting things like Keystone Master and Portals. Some people may feel agreed that something that they saw as prestigious

[04:02] is now more widely available with less effort than it took them to earn the first couple of seasons around. That is a valid way to feel. It's definitely not wrong. It's just not something that I personally share at this time.

[04:15] Other places where you see this difficulty conversation are around things like, did the race to World First, or I guess the race to World First Lord Spire, since we haven't even seen the third raid yet, was that over too quickly? It certainly was over a lot faster than previous races.

[04:29] And then another area where you can see, like, a sort of an easier difficulty is with this season's Delve Nemesis boss. I spoke recently about how Malaeus was shockingly simple after dealing with Kaiviza and Underpin.

[04:42] And I tried him actually on double question marks this week expecting that to be harder And it wasn It was longer I was fighting it for a long time but he still really didn do anything

[04:56] Side note on Hard Mode and the Lance, I was talking with some friends, and it seems like the word on the street with him is that he is much harder as a tank. If you are playing a tank spec, and you're fighting Hard Mode and the Lance, his tank

[05:08] buster hits so hard that it's actually a fairly challenging fight, whereas if you're a DPS, You just kind of interrupt the cast and kill the adds, and that's it. That's the fight. I've also heard rumors that doing Neleus as a healer and having Valera DPS for you is fairly straightforward and easy.

[05:28] Again, takes quite a long time, but not necessarily difficult, just long. Anyway, so sum up my thoughts. I think that the content, at least this season, is certainly a bit easier than it has been.

[05:41] I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I also think there's a chance, and we can, you know, time machine back later to see how this prediction turns out, there's a chance that Blizzard overcorrects, and some things may live a little too long

[05:54] or be a little too challenging next season. That'll be kind of the challenge. Do they overcorrect, or is this like a lasting design philosophy that they're pursuing? I don't know, we'll see. Other things going on this week.

[06:06] There was a notable bug concerning recrafting gear and losing crests. Effectively, what had been happening is some people recrafted an item of gear and then had it revert back to its original form later, randomly, with no refund of crests.

[06:24] So they might have spent 80 myth crests to recraft, like, a blank item to a myth-level item and then had it just kind of pop back and their crests are just gone. This happened for not everybody, but enough people, and really one, would have been a huge problem.

[06:41] And the notable thing here is that we have a blue post update on this, saying that they are aware of this bug, it should not be happening anymore, which is good, and they are currently figuring out whether or not they can restore crests to affected players.

[06:56] The fact that not is an option is crazy. But at least they're being honest about it, I suppose. Hopefully they are able to restore those to affected players. I know I not the only one who heard about this bug and held off of recrafting that weapon It sounds like it is now safe to do although I still feeling nervous about it because this just doesn look great

[07:19] Other hot fixes and changes this week. Prey Journey Progress is no longer cast quite so much until you reach Journey 4. It used to be that even from the beginning only your first four hunts of the week would give you a thousand Prey Journey Progress and then they would go down to 50,

[07:34] and now they will continue giving you a thousand progress every hunt, as many of them as you want to do, until you reach level 4. So if you are late coming to prey, and you have not yet unlocked Nightmare Prey, you can spam prey and even spam random hunts to catch your journey up to the point where your main and all of your alts can enjoy Nightmare Prey.

[07:52] Speaking of enjoying Nightmare Prey, though, one tip that I gave in last week's news video I'm sorry to report is no longer valid. I found this one out the hard way. They nerfed Critter Hand Cannon. It used to work. It no longer does.

[08:05] You can summon critters with it, but if you kill them, it will no longer count for Asselor's kill command mechanic. You can still kill other critters. Critters in general still count, but the summoned ones from the critter hand cannon are no longer going to work.

[08:18] It was good while it lasted. We also have a brand new twitch drop starting. This one is a void color murloc plush decor. standard Twitch drop rules. It's around for about a month. You watch four hours of a qualifying

[08:31] Twitch stream, such as, but not limited to my own, in order to get the decor. We've had a few recolors of this, and I honestly will take as many recolors as they have, because I am recreating a plushie shelf in my wow house, and I need more than just, like, a lot of copies of the same one.

[08:47] I will take a lot of copies of the same one in a different color. And that's the week so far. I can sum up my WoW lately with lots of keys, and rain has actually been very good, too. We killed a couple more heroic bosses.

[08:59] We are currently stopped at the Twin Dragons fight on heroic, which is a hard fight. It actually held us up for a while on normal, too. So if you are stuck there, I feel you. Thank you very much for watching this week.

[09:11] If you have any questions or just want to say hi, feel free to stop by my Twitch stream. I'm on live five days a week, nine in the morning to noon Pacific. I appreciate you being here, and I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful day. Bye!