BlizzCon Day 2: Sunday

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My Sunday started off well enough. I was able to sleep in and fuel up with breakfast. I didn’t feel compelled to go in early today since I decided to give up on going to the gear store or hitting up the Darkmoon Faire. Instead, I sat down at the main stage in the morning to take in some more information on the Warcraft Forever panel. They touched upon some key aspects:

  • Talents (with Paladins as an example)
  • Transmog
  • Legacy System
  • Server infrastructure
  • Camping
  • Itemization

Reaction seemed generally positive especially with servers being decided via rulesets instead of individual realms. There’s a lot of questions here. Can a player on a PvP ruleset change to join a friend on normal? What about RP rulesets? Is there an option like flagging yourself for PvP (similar to retail)?

All of it was fascinating information. I can’t wait to look at the Priest talents further.

My level of involvement in Warcraft: Forever is a challenging one to answer. I’m on four different raid teams. Of the four, two of them are CE focused that I help run to some degree. The third is another CE team where I’m just a player. The last one is a simple AotC team that I joined so I wouldn’t have to queue into group finder for. Picking up Forever means making compromises and dropping some of those teams.

After it ended, I wandered around the show floor to explore the different things that were going on that I didn’t get a chance to from the first day. I ran into the boss man GM and he told me one of our former raiders wanted to meet up with us, so we trekked over to say hello. Seeing people and guildies is a priority that I try to make happen.

The Diablo Immortal line was next. I should’ve entered the phone line instead of the PC line. I tried out the new Tempest class since everyone who participates gets one of three different pin types. I wanted Malthael but my loot luck rewarded me with Andariel instead.

Biggest highlight of the day was participating with my guild in a miniature tabletop session with my friend and former WoW Insider colleague, Anne. She was GM’ing for us. It was a short 20 to 30 minute experience. The story is that Khadgar got himself locked away and we needed to help free him. The party involved a Warrior, a Paladin, a Shaman, and a Mage (me)! I started the game off by casting Invisibility on everyone. Our Shaman went ahead and looted a potion to throw on top of one of the three Ogres that happened to be in the room. Me (in my oh so infinite wisdom) strode over to the weapons rack to see what I could find and somehow pulled a Gorehowl which had to attack someone (and I knocked off the second Ogre). Our Paladin, who rolled a natural 20, tried to speak to the third Ogre to see if it knew anything about what was keeping Khadgar at bay and locked up.

As we should have known, Ogres aren’t bright at all and did not know how to answer a question while it was busy using a table leg for a tooth pick. At least the Ogre was polite and offered another table leg to our Paladin.

Turns out the solution was quite simple. All we had to do was blow up a crystal which lowered all of the shields and countermeasures. My assumption is that the Ogres were a defensive mechanism conjured up by the crystal (which also happened to trigger the wards up in the room that trapped Khadgar). All in all, an enjoyable time! My legs and feet were cooked after standing in line for about 90 minutes.

Having access to NFL Sunday Ticket made lines bearable. I was able to watch stuff during the wait. But this can be substituted for a stream, a Youtube video, or a book.

After all that, we left and got something to eat since everyone was on different schedules. Wished everyone well while I went back upstairs to my room to refresh!

Things I would have done differently

Let’s talk about some BlizzCon lessons.

  • This is my 12th BlizzCon. I don’t need to go in to the main stage to watch the opening ceremony anymore. I can watch it and stream it direct from my room after sleeping in and eating breakfast. I’ve done enough of that. I can give up my seat for someone else who has never had that opportunity.
  • More undershirts and underwear for sure. This time of year was atrocious with the humidity and the heat. It needs to be back in the October and November time frame.
  • Gold Bond. I didn’t think I’d need it this time, but chaffing is awful.
  • If I really wanted stuff, outright skip the Opening Ceremony and start going to the stores immediately.

How I wish BlizzCon were done differently

I understand that this is the first BlizzCon back since the disaster that was 2023. But Blizzard needs to start working on getting their fastball back.

  • Let’s get that date back to the late Fall. Mentioned it earlier up, but it bears repeating again.
  • Line management. Lots of misinformation or misunderstanding regarding lines and where people are supposed to go for the store or for entry into Darkmoon Fair.
  • Line activity. PAX West does a great job of this for attendees in lines. But just having something engaging to do to help pass the time is nice. I spent most of my time watching Sunday Ticket.
  • Store inventory. Lots of stuff just went out of stock quite quickly. I’d flag Battle Net accounts tied to BlizzCon attendance with store exclusives that attendees can ship home, if they wish.
  • Professions section had great turn out. Those lines were jam packed every time. Easily one of the more popular attractions and maybe having more staff and space for it would help.
  • Participation prizes? Immortal demos gave away some pins for trying out their game either on PC or on the phone. I never would have tried it otherwise. Battlegrounds demos for some swag would’ve been a good pick. WoW probably wouldn’t need any incentive prizes.
  • Multiple stages for opening ceremony. That one year when all stages were used for their respective title announcements was amazing. It helped distribute people throughout the venue.

While it was a bit of a let down on retail announcements, I’m still pleased with all of the other announcements that were made. I wish we learned more about StarCraft and what they envision there.

BlizzCon: Actual Day 1 – Saturday

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What an interesting day! We’re going to just dive into all of the major announcements.

  • World of Warcraft: Not much on the retail side of things which is to be expected since, y’know, spoilers. Warcraft Forever seems like it’ll be well received. I did end up trying the demo for one of the dungeons with the squad from DJs. I forgot how much more challenging it was then with the different spells, the mana, the drinking after every pull, etc. Can’t do it. This version of the game probably isn’t for me any longer sadly. I could always get it and try a different class that isn’t a Priest, I suppose. However, the new Talebound game mode seems like a fun activity to get lost in as well. It’s funny how the crowd was not happy about the new Season 3 dungeon pool but cheered the loudest with transmog opening up to all armor types.
  • Warcraft 3: I might need to pick up Reforged with that new campaign. 30 hours of new stuff? I’m in.
  • StarCraft: Cinematic announcement was amazing. 2030 as a release date seems so far away. Probably too early for gameplay footage but would’ve been nice to see some of that. But hey, it’s an open world shooter. I know not many people were happy about that but I’m looking forward to exploring StarCraft from a new perspective.
  • Diablo: While it’s sad to see that Diablo 4 is finished with expansions, it was a big surprise for me regarding Diablo 5. For it to take place in a new setting and environment where Diablo wins is going to be an all new perspective from previous games where it was always about the eternal conflict. In this case, it seems like the conflict has resolved itself.  Now what? How does the rest of Sanctuary react? Who is left to challenge Diablo? More importantly, the Monk is back! Lastly, this Netflix Diablo collaboration should be awesome. Hoping it bridges the story between D4 and D5.
  • Heroes of the Storm: I never expected to see anything new coming to Heroes of the Storm. Is it coming out of maintenance mode? Xal’atath is entering the Nexus and another hero is slated for release later in the year. It’s enough to get me to reinstall it.
  • Hearthstone: YO NEW MONK CLASS THOUGH.

That’s all! Tomorrow I plan to try out more of the games on the show floor. I want to explore Hearthstone and Diablo for sure. I was going to put some time in towards the store or the Darkmoon Faire, but I fear that may be a bust.

BlizzCon: Day 1 – Wednesday

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It’s been six years since I’ve last been to BlizzCon. Had to get up at 4:30 AM to take the train and get to the airport. Only takes about an hour, so chalk that in the “good to know” list for future travels. The flight from BC to Los Angeles is generally quite smooth and it was sunny from takeoff to landing.

Airport security has changed so much. The gate agents didn’t even ask for my boarding pass. All I had to do was look at a camera and it had everything. Biometrics have made some serious advancements.

It is a little scary.

Once I landed, there was a little trouble with the jet bridge. Maybe it ran out of gas? They couldn’t connect the bridge to the plane and it took them a few minutes to get it going. Once I stepped off, I was immediately roasted with what felt like 40 degree heat (that’s Canadian temperatures, by the way).

Arriving to the main Convention grounds, everything felt familiar. This will be my 12th BlizzCon. But many of my former guildies and past friends will not be. I don’t know if my friends and colleagues from Blizzard Watch will be here. I’m experiencing a new BlizzCon with several community members from Death Jesters and Zeroes to Heroes. I did run into some of the fine folks from WoWHead while I was at the bar here watching the NFL season opener. It was nice just exchanging war stories about past BlizzCons and how the site community has been evolving (or in some areas, stayed the same).

We both agreed that we never look at the comments section, ever.

The community parties and get togethers have vanished. No community WoWHead party, or Con Before the Storm, or any of the other old gatherings. It’s inevitable that the past organizers have moved on to other priorities and other projects but those were definite community staples and will be missed. You think you can live these experiences repeatedly, but nope. All good things do come to an end. Those were the days and some of my favourite memories.

Let’s get to some predictions (and wishes).

BlizzCon Predictions

  • StarCraft: There’s way too much smoke for there not to be fire here, especially with the ARG stuff going on at the StarCraft website. Some kind of Co-op or team based shooter would be great. I’m hoping for something like Helldivers. It could be single player. I have low odds for it to be a battle royale of some type (very unlikely). An RTS announcement on top of this would be unexpected, but well received. Look how well Age of Empires 2 has been doing.
  • World of Warcraft: Maybe a look at 12.2? I’m sure there’ll be some more Classic stuff, like yet another new game mode. Nothing interesting for me there to look at. I’ve got odds on Plunderstorm making a return on a new map. Will we see a combined Warlords and Legion Classic even though we just had Legion Remix? Is there even going to be another Remix in the near future?
  • Warcraft: Can’t see there being any new developments on the RTS side here, either.
  • Diablo: Dark horse for announcements. I’m hoping for two new expansion announcements, but maybe we’ll get one. Lord of Hatred just got released a short time ago though so maybe it’ll just be a Season 15 look instead, along with Immortal updates.
  • Hearthstone: It needs another refresh. I’m not sure how. The last big feature that was a hit was Battlegrounds. Can they spin up another new mode here instead of yet more new expansions?
  • Overwatch: I haven’t kept up with Overwatch in years. Lost all interest since the announcement of Overwatch 2 and the quiet rebrand back. Not sure what the plan is here and I can’t even begin to speculate, but I hope it’ll be a fun one for the fans.

More of the squad is arriving tomorrow. But for me, my plan is to just catch up with people I haven’t seen in a really long time, then watch some more football. Rams and 49ers in Australia will be a watch.

If you happen to find me and recognize me here at BlizzCon, you may need to reintroduce yourself. It’s been six years and I haven’t been able to keep in touch with everyone.

Why Patient Raiders Win: The Catalyst Charge Trap

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Every tier, the same decision shows up in the first week of raid: you get a catalyst charge, and you get to decide when to use it. Do you convert a piece the moment it’s available, or do you sit on it and see what the raid actually gives you?

This tier, we told the team the answer up front in our orientation. Don’t use your catalyst charges yet. Not on day one, not before we’d even stepped into the raid.

Six players used them anyway.

Sadness ensued :(.

So what happened?

Before we’d cleared a single boss, six players had already catalyzed a piece into their tier set bonus. Not because the guidance wasn’t given. It was, clearly, to the whole team. They used the charges anyway, mostly because the option was sitting there and it felt like free power.

Actually, one of them checked in with us first and due to his raid standing and position in the depth chart, we ultimately agreed to go with it. With scheduling uncertainties, he didn’t know if he’d be able to stick around in the long run, so under that context, it made sense.

The reality is that we didn’t need the tier bonuses to get through normal raid. We cleared it without much trouble. The real value of tier is what it does for heroic, where certain damage or healing checks are tuned with the expectation that you have your set bonuses online. That’s where being deliberate about catalyst charges actually pays off.

The Math Nobody Thinks About in Week One

Catalyst charges can feel like a personal decision.

But they’re not.

They’re a roster-wide resource problem, and using one early can quietly take options away from other people on your team.

Here’s a simple version of what can go wrong. Say you have four mail wearers. Two of them catalyze their pieces into shoulders right away. That leaves two players who could still use a shoulder token. One of them runs a Timewalking dungeon and gets a Champion track shoulder token as a reward. Now you’re down to one player who can use a shoulder drop.

Now imagine after the first day of normal raid, there are two mail shoulder tokens in the same week. One of those tokens has nowhere to go. It’s wasted, not because the loot didn’t show up, but because the catalyst charges already used up the slots that token could have filled.

Wait instead, and that same set of drops and rewards could have built a full four-piece bonus for two players in the opening weeks of the tier. Immediate gratification cost the raid a completed set bonus and burned a real drop in the process.

Vault Selections Count Too

The same logic applies to Great Vault choices. If you’re sitting on one or more tier selections in your vault, using a catalyst charge on the same slot before you’ve seen what the vault offers can put you in the exact same bind. You end up with duplicate coverage on one slot and a gap somewhere else, when a little patience could have let the vault and the catalyst charge fill two different pieces instead of competing for the same one.

None of this is complicated. It just requires waiting long enough to see the whole picture before committing a limited resource.

Is This a Leadership Problem or a Player Problem?

I don’t think any of the six players who catalyzed early were trying to hurt the raid. They saw an option, it felt good to use, and they used it. That’s a completely normal instinct. It’s also exactly why guild leadership has to be explicit about resource sequencing, and why “explicit” sometimes still isn’t enough.

Telling the team once isn’t the same as the team internalizing why it matters. If the instruction is “don’t use your catalyst charge yet,” the follow-up has to be “here’s exactly what breaks if you do.” People respect a rule more when they understand the mechanism behind it, not just the directive. In the future, I’ll need to bake this into our raid orientation about Catalyst charges and illustrate some hypothetical examples.

Going forward, this is a conversation I need to have earlier and in more detail: not just what to do with catalyst charges, but why the timing matters and what it costs the roster when someone jumps the gun.

But we can still make allowances for exceptions. If it’s a truly harder tier or if someone can make a strong case for breaking their 4 piece early for a 2 piece, we have to keep our options open and at least hear out the player’s logic and reasoning.

The Broader Point

Patient resource management is one of those unglamorous skills that separates progression teams from teams that stall out. It’s not exciting. Nobody screenshots a Great Vault decision they didn’t make yet. But holding a resource for one more week, until you actually know what you’re solving for, is one of the cheapest ways to buy your raid more options later.

Immediate gain feels good right away. Delayed gratification wins heroic checks.

Season 1 Last Call Postmortem: So Close to Midnight Falls

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We threw everything we had at Midnight Falls this last week. Extra hours, an extra day, and on Monday we got Lura down to phase 4 more than once. Our best pull took her to 14%. We didn’t get the kill.

It’s the closest thing I can compare to a Game 7 loss in overtime. We did everything right to get there. We gave it our best shot when it mattered most. And it still wasn’t enough.

By the time we called it, we’d logged 560 pulls on Midnight Falls. For comparison, Death Jesters killed the same boss in 404 pulls. That gap tells its own story about how this season went for Last Call, and it’s worth sitting with before I get into the why.

A Season of Constant Turnover

Over the course of our Lura progression alone, we cycled through roughly 32 different characters. Not 32 pulls with a few swaps here and there. Thirty-two different characters who sat in a raid slot at some point during that fight. One of our locks switched to a Disc Priest because we were down a healer. A Hunter couldn’t make it, so we had to pull in a hunter alt from DJs. A crystal carrier had power issues, so I had to ask for someone else to get it while we grabbed a Ret Paladin.

We never had back-to-back weeks with the same roster walking in the door. Every single time I had to sub a new player in, it cost us about 20 minutes of problem-solving just to get phases 2 and 3 re-assigned and moving again. That’s not a one-time tax. That’s a recurring tax we paid over and over, week after week, on top of actually learning the fight.

I’m genuinely proud of the team we had. But it’s hard to build momentum on a fight that demands precision when you’re constantly rebuilding the roster around it.

Where We Excelled, and Where We Didn’t

Progression-wise, this team is really good at fights that reward preparation. Crown of Cosmos went down in a reasonable number of pulls because that’s the kind of encounter where our strengths show up: strict timelines, scripted assignments, everyone knowing exactly where to be and when.

Beloren was a different animal. That fight demands individual accountability in a way our other kills didn’t. Ball soaks, quill soaks, interrupts, all resting on players managing their own responsibilities in real time instead of following a script. It exposed the skill ceiling of some of our newer mythic raiders, several of whom were tackling serious mythic progression for the first time in their raiding career. We got through it, but it took longer than I wanted, and it was the first real sign of what was waiting for us in Midnight Falls.

The GM Introspection

This is the part of the postmortem that’s less about the boss and more about me.

Every season, it comes back to personnel. Did I have the right players in the right roles? Did I hold onto players too long instead of cutting and evaluating quickly enough? Those are the questions I ask myself every time a season wraps, and this one is no exception.

Recruiting doesn’t make this easier. We raid Sunday and Monday, the last two days of the week, which is not exactly a popular slot for players shopping around for a new guild. It narrows the pool right when we need it widest.

On top of the roster churn, we lost one of our top healers right before Midnight Falls progression started. I also changed my own class mid-season, moving from Shaman to Evoker. Any one of those changes on its own is manageable. Stacked together in the same season, they added up.

A handful of our weaker performers joined midway or late into Season 1. They’ll get another look in Season 2, but with expectations set clearly from the start this time. That’s on me too. Clear expectations from day one would have saved us some of the harder conversations we had later.

Heading Into Season 2

Here’s the strange part: I’m much more optimistic heading into Season 2 than I probably should be after a season like this.

We’ve parted ways with a number of players and brought in some new faces. Some of the new additions are what I’d call project players, people who’ve historically capped out around mid-mythic and are looking to push past that ceiling. That’s exactly the kind of mentality this team needs more of.

Our systems and strategies are already in place. We know how we prepare, how we assign, how we approach a new tier. What’s left is execution. Season 1 taught us where the cracks are. Season 2 is about not letting the same ones open back up.

We fell short of Midnight Falls. But a Game 7 loss doesn’t mean the team is broken. It means you know exactly what to fix before next season starts.