Midnight Launch: Last-Minute Updates — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:01] Hello everyone, Everettel here. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. to a weekly reset special, an EVE rundown of the midnight launch because

[00:16] rundown of the midnight launch because midnight is here. It is live as of 300 midnight is here. It is live as of 300 p.m. PST on February 26th for Epic Edition holders. That is Midnight goes live for everyone else at 300 p.m. PST

[00:29] on March 2nd. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But Evie, I already know all about midnight and what's in midnight because I've been watching videos about midnight literally all year." And that's fine. But no,

[00:43] actually, it's not because it turns out there's loads of stuff that's happened in the last couple of days that you also need to know about. And you don't want to be the only one who doesn't know about them, right? So, join me for an

[00:56] extra special rundown of everything you'll want to be aware of as Midnight you'll want to be aware of as Midnight finally goes live in early access for people who purchase early access, but it also applies for everyone else from the

[01:09] also applies for everyone else from the second. Okay, let's run. For those of you ringing in the launch by watching your favorite live streamers live streaming Twitch drops and support a streamer will be live at once in

[01:22] celebration of the midnight early access launch. The Cuddly Alliance Blue and Horde Red Gurgles, that's their scientific name, are housing decor items that will be awarded to anyone who watches 4 hours of WoW streams from

[01:37] watches 4 hours of WoW streams from 10:00 a.m. PST on early access launch day. But that's not all for stream enjoyers because the support a streamer promo is returning as well, rewarding the insanely adorable Fishmonger May pet

[01:51] to anyone who gifts at least two subs to a streamer playing WoW. But note that this one goes live simultaneously at midnight early access launch. So 300 p.m. PST. Hold out on those gift subs until midnight early access is properly

[02:07] live. Otherwise, you'll have to gift them all over again. Oh no. It would be terrible if you had to do that, wouldn't it? Hey, remember how all your healer friends have been in a state of near constant despondency and sadness for the

[02:20] last few months because the add-on and API changes meant that none of their healer frames worked properly and the standard Blizzard UI frames were somehow even worse than they were before. Well, Blizz have just announced that many

[02:34] healer spells will no longer be secret auras for launch. In a lastminute lifeline to healers and the add-on makers that care for them, a healthy list of healer spells have been whitelisted, making them trackable. The

[02:48] post has made it sound like a temporary fix, though, as they say, "We will likely reprotect these spells once our own filtering solution with its own add-on hooks for display customization is in place." So, confirmation that

[03:02] Blizz are indeed working on their own filtering options, too. But in the meantime, let's see what magic the add-on makers can work before season 1 launches in 3 weeks. No pressure. Meanwhile, crest upgrades and costs have

[03:18] been changing almost nonstop on the beta in the leadup to launch. And with midnight early access here, the cost of upgrading gear with crests has changed yet again. Provided there aren't any further changes, the system looks like

[03:33] further changes, the system looks like this. Crests now cap at 100 per week, previously 90. Crests now cost 20 per upgrade, previously 15. Crafted gear now costs 80 crests, previously 60. And each gear track now only accepts a singular

[03:50] type of crest. So, champion gear accepts champion crests the entire time. There's no overlap. And each track has been standardized with six total tiers. But what does it mean, Abby? Well, I don't know. I'm just a girl. Like many of you,

[04:07] in times like this, I turn to the experts in our community, the real big brains. And in this case, I mean, I open Larius's Eternal Abyss Raiders Guide Midnight Edition. Can we please give a round of applause to Larius for writing

[04:22] and rewriting and rewriting this thing? Please throw them a coffee, too, while you're at it. So, what are we looking at here? The new upgrade system has some wider ramifications. Normal champion items are a lot less powerful now as

[04:36] they cap out at the equivalent of two out of six heroic rather than four out of six heroic. So, you'll be replacing them more quickly. On the flip side, hero crests are a lot more powerful and you should be able to boost your eye

[04:50] level more quickly this season. And with these new crest changes in place, weapons from your vault and crafted weapons will now be competitive again. You'll also be able to convert some hero quests to mythic quests through some

[05:03] interesting shenanigans. For example, if you get a 1 out of six mythic helmet from your vault, you can upgrade your hero track item in that slot to five out of six, which is the same level as 1 out of six mythic for free. At this point,

[05:18] you can upgrade your five out of six heroic helmet to 6 out of six, which then lets you upgrade your 1 out of six mythic helmet to two out of six for free. effectively converting 20 heroic crests to 20 mythic crests because

[05:33] you'll be done with heroic crests around week six in theory. Any extra crests you this is great for me because I'm like always hitting that mythic crest cap. I'm sick of hitting my mythic crest cap.

[05:46] That's the here and now. But we've also been blessed with plenty of road maps recently. the overall wow road map that Holly Longdale shared recently, the housing road map which has been promised but not yet delivered and now with a

[06:01] class tuning road map. You heard me right. In the spirit of sharing and openness and road mappiness, a recent blue post has outlined team 2's approach to class tuning going into midnight and beyond. Tuning passes have been

[06:17] scheduled for March 17th, the midnight season 1 launch, March 24th, the launch of mythic raid difficulty and mythic keystone dungeons, and March 31st when the March on Keldon goes live. And on

[06:32] April 7th, a few things to note here. First, you heard that correctly. There will be no further class tuning until season 1 launches on March 17th. For anyone who feels like their class is underperforming or needs a bit of

[06:47] tweaking, that's just three weeks of pottering around in new Silver Moon and improvement being delivered with the arrival of season 1. And once it does arrive, you'll have a week to come to terms with your class tuning, or lack of

[07:01] it, because the next round of tuning goes live on March 24th, which is the launch of Mythic Plus. Cool. but also the launch of the void spire and dream the launch of the void spire and dream rift raids on mythic. This bodess

[07:15] for the race to world first. It just bodess. And of course, the following tuning pass will be delivered a week later when the third mythic raid, the March of Kildonas, goes live, throwing yet another wrench into the mythic

[07:28] minmaxer workflow. At the very least, it's going to make for some dramatic watching. And next up, a road map of all of the road maps we're planning to see this year. the road map road map. Also on the beta, a new quest has popped this

[07:41] week which suggests that there will be a rotating housing weekly which replaces the previously data mined housing weekly. The community engagement quest currently on the beta requires players to make a purchase from a neighborhood

[07:56] endeavor vendor in order to receive their choice of crests and some other small goodies. Simple enough, but in order to receive the five community coupons required to make a purchase, players will need to one, own a house,

[08:10] and two, join in an active neighborhood endeavor. This is an incredibly easy quest to complete for some basically free crests. But you could argue that this is an encroachment on the there will be no player power tied to player

[08:25] housing statements that we've seen again and again since the launch of the feature. And you'd win that argument because it does. Community engagement requires you to own your own home in-game and to take part in an endeavor.

[08:40] And even if that does take the form of doing your usual WoW gameplay loop, you're participating in the housing system in a way that the previous quest didn't require you to. Listen, I don't hate this. I will probably use this as a

[08:54] way to reach my crest cap, though, not mythic crest cap, cuz I would have hit that ages ago. And that's fine. I don't think it's particularly damaging to anyone. No one will be forced to do these quests in order to get their

[09:08] these quests in order to get their crests, but crests equal player power. There's no other way of saying it. I would really like to hear Blizzard address their thinking on this if they plan for it to go live. Hey everyone,

[09:21] Everel here just to tell you that midnight is nearly here. Midnight is upon us and it's only right that we deck out our website to celebrate. You know me, Evertell, always doing the website. So, thank you to Squarespace for

[09:35] things first. I love this little header image. But I think it's high time to purple things up. Thankfully, replacing it is super simple. And while I could do the work and source something, nah, Squarespace has builtin stock images. No

[09:51] which is good because I was not planning on leaving the site. I've put in my search criteria, purple obviously, and have found something suitably menacing. something. The image effects panels means that I can add a bit more flavor

[10:06] or menace to my image as I please. From warp effects to grains, I can even customize the effect itself until I get exactly the weirdness I'm looking for. And finally, going into site styles means that I can switch up the look and

[10:21] feel of the entire site with built-in color palettes that swap everything automatically and which can have every individual component changed to really maximize what I want, which is purple. And that's it. Menacing purple and done.

[10:36] If you want to try your hand at some quickfire change ups, just head to squarespace.com/talies everlies everlick the link in the description below and you can enjoy 10% off your

[10:49] first Squarespace website or domain. That's squarespace.com/talies That's squarespace.com/talies everl. In other news, a new Pinterest integration was launched to celebrate

[11:05] the burgeoning player housing feature and was promptly shut down a couple of days later. On February 19th, a new in-game feature was launched using the so-called pinematic camera toy to capture in-game photos and share them

[11:20] directly to your own Pinterest account. Two days later, the feature was disabled entirely after players who had started using it found their Pinterest accounts being suspended despite using them completely normally with Pinterest

[11:34] issuing the bans due to some activity that appears to violate our policies against spam. Sounds like they're just not used to humans using Pinterest, to be honest. The feature has yet to be reactivated, which is fine by me because

[11:49] to be honest, I don't love it. I haven't used Pinterest for yonsks, particularly since the influx of AI sloppification, which made it literally impossible to find a photo of a real life person with a real life haircut, much to the chagrin

[12:04] of my stylist. And also, let's be real, all of my so-called inspo is drawn from stuff like real life books I read or things I see or okay, Instagram. If we're talking about the online space, rip Tumblr still number one in my heart.

[12:19] Literally just go to Instagram. All the guys and girlies are there and they're serving serving house. Speaking of housing, we were graced with a brand new stateof player housing update which arrived mid Azeroth interior stream and

[12:34] which gives us a promising look of what lies ahead for the future. Most notably, maximum decor storage will increase by around 50% in the coming weeks, and decor storage and deletion will be tidied up so that storage can be

[12:49] maximized without deleting original acquired decor. The insane gimbal rotation bug, which caused items to randomly rotate themselves upon re-entering your home, is being addressed. You have no idea the pain

[13:03] this caused Tally during his MC Cheresque staircase builds. A house XP loss bug is being fixed and it's looking like exterior decor limits will be raised following some rigorous testing. As for looking towards the future, more

[13:18] Endeavor types and cultures have been promised, which is great because many people have collected all of the available decor from the first five already. and hugely the import and export of layouts is on the cards which

[13:32] is a feature that has been widely requested nay demanded since day one. We'll take a closer look at this in a more detailed video but in short snapshotting will be enabled so that you can revert to a previous build, share

[13:46] your build with someone else, swap houses between your characters, or just browse for some inspiration. We've also been told that showcases and visitor codes are in very early development, which will basically be instances of

[14:01] your build, which will allow you to share it and showcase it without having an impact on the actual build itself, and maybe even the implementation of a guest book for your visitors to drop their definitely always kind, never

[14:15] inflammatory comments. Oh, and placeable pets, both indoor and outdoor, will be coming with a future update. Yeah, kind of buried the lead on that one because of buried the lead on that one because this is huge. A placeable pet bed or

[14:30] put in your house and choose whether your pet stays in it or this is the really important bit, wanders around your home. This will be available for nearly every pet in the game, and your

[14:43] little critters can even be placed outside, albeit without the pathing option. Now, I have questions. Is this just battle pets, or does it include hunter pets, too? Because, yeah, all pets are equal, for sure, but some pets

[14:57] are way more equal than others, you know? And more importantly, surely this paves the way for the thing we all really want, which is our alts being placed in the house and wandering around, looking out of windows and

[15:10] occasionally doing a bit of washing up. But my shadow priest doesn't do much else. She may as well earn her key. Oh, and another question is when will any of this be happening? But uh maybe don't concern yourself too much about that.

[15:23] Midnight is here. As always, we've included links in the description to a bunch of Wowhead articles on the topics we've covered today and more for you to peruse at your leisure while you jump into a buttery smooth launch. Come to

[15:38] grips with your perfectly tuned class and enjoy some good old-fashioned new World of Warcraft expansion time. It only comes around once every few years. Make the most of it. If you enjoyed today's video, don't thank us. Thank our

[15:53] patrons who give their actual real life money to make all of our work happen. Without them, there would be a whole lot less Talas and Inevitel. So, thank you guys as ever for making today's video possible. If you didn't like it,

[16:06] downvote the out of it. And remember, our names are Stephen and Soul so breezy. No, my name is Evatel from me and from Talesen. Cheerio. Happy and from Talesen. Cheerio. Happy midnight.