World of Warcraft: Expansion Additions

There's a new World of Warcraft expansion coming out in two weeks and I thought I'd take a look and see what stuff they're adding in this time around. This was probably a mistake because it turns out it sounds pretty sweet and now I'm probably going to end up wanting to play it again. They're adding two new game modes that sound pretty fun and they added one in the last expansion that I didn't really play that they're continuing on that really seemed up my alley. Thematically it sounds like this expansion is trying to return to making the Alliance and the Horde be fighting each other again instead of teaming up to fight the big bad. I don't much care about this one way or the other, but it does mean the mechanics are more PvP focused.

The first new mode is a Warcraft II mode to take over control of a zone from the other faction. Oddly it isn't PvP at all; it seems they actively want the zone to flip back and forth and if it was PvP then on most servers it wouldn't flip at all. Instead it's like a 20 person PvE fight where you build resource gathering buildings and barracks and stuff and then lead dudes into battle. It sounds neat, but probably not something you're going to want to do a ton of. You could just go play WCIII (which got a patch recently to revive that game) instead. But it should be fun.

The second new mode is a 3v3 race to score the most points by doing WoW type things. Kill monsters, do quests, open treasures, etc. The map is covered by a fog of war so you need to explore around and adapt your plan based on what actually spawned in this particular instance. There are a bunch of different islands to create ground rules but the location of things is procedurally generated so you need to adapt on the fly. Blizzard claims to have designed good bots to play the other 3 person team for the easier difficulty levels but the hardest mode requires you to have a premade group of 3 and pits you against another 3 person team. Spread out and get treasures? Gank squad to kill the other team? Someone with stealth and a lot of CC? Healers? Lots of options and it should be fun. Small scale skirmishes are the sort of PvP I can get behind, so hopefully this mode is done well.

The last mode, which existed already, is mythic+ dungeons. It's a system that's been evolving for a while, and has stolen some things from Path of Exile, and seems to be in a pretty good spot now. The basic idea is you do a hard 5 man dungeon with a time limit. Finish under the time limit and you get an item to let you run another harder 5 man dungeon. Beat that one in time and you get an even harder one. As you get harder and harder ones you start getting affixes on the dungeons that change the way things work. More enemy damage, less healing, weird dots... All sorts of options, and they're adding new ones. The loot is good and I think people pushing the really high mythic+s is a fairly competitive thing so I'd like to get in on the ground floor for it this expansion and see what I can do. It takes 4 other people and I don't know people who play anymore, but I imagine my old guild will at least have a few people interested at the start. I'm pretty sure Death Knights rate to be really good tanks for mythic dungeons at any rate, so I have a niche to fill! And who knows, maybe streaming mythic dungeons is a thing people are interested in watching?

August Humble Monthly Bundle

Humble Monthly is a subscription service run by the Humble Bundle people where they sell you a fixed bunch of games for a low price. The bundles tend to be 'worth' about $200 and it costs $12 per month but they are using a non-discounted MSRP to determine that value and you don't get to pick the games you get so chances are you're going to get some games you're simply not interested in due to genres or whatnot.

The trick they use to get people to sign up is they announce some of the key games for the next month shortly into the current month. Typically this will be three games, but when they get a particularly big game they have it as the only headliner. Civilization VI and Destiny 2 are examples of those sorts of games from previous months.

My brother got me a year long subscription for Christmas last year and it's been pretty sweet thus far. I spend too much time playing a lot of individual games (like Blood Bowl in recent times) to play all of them but I have played some of them, that I never would have played on my own, which were great. Quantum Break was a movie/FPS hybrid that I would have never considered getting on my own but it was very cool.

I have recently signed up to be a Humble Partner. Basically this means I advertise for them and if people buy things through my link I get a cut. I did a little bit of this for the game Cultist Simulator which I was given a copy of to stream and generate hype for them prior to release, but I could and should do more.

I think what I should start doing is streaming the preview games for the Humble Monthly with my chat bot periodically spamming the link. Humble really wants their partners to sell the Monthly bundle in that I actually get most of the payment for someone who signs up for the first time. It will also give me a little structure for playing different games, which is always a good thing for me.

The advance games for August were just announced and they are A Hat in Time, The Escapists 2, and Conan Exiles. A cute platformer, a cool looking prison break simulator, and some sort of open world crafting game. The first two were both on my wishlist from browsing through various Steam sales, the third I'd marked uninterested. But it's one of the top sellers of the year, and has a $50 base price, so I'm going to give it a try. Letting people know they can get it (and some other stuff) for $12 could be a useful thing!