Blizzard Watch Weekly: WoW patch 10.1.5 goes live, Diablo 4 Season 1 starts soon, and more in the world of Blizzard

Happy Friday, everyone! It’s been a pretty busy week, with a new WoW patch and a pile of events across the Blizzard game catalog. Here’s what happened over the last week, as well as what’s coming up next week.

Now live

• WoW patch 10.1.5 has arrived! There’s a huge amount of content for an x.5 patch, including a brand new spec for Evokers: Augmentation, a support-oriented spec that’s a brand new style of gameplay in WoW. Early impressions are positive, though damage meters don’t quite know what to do with a class whose damage is based around buffing others. There’s also a whole lot of Bronze Dragonflight content, with the Dawn of the Infinite megadungeon and the Time Rifts event. There are also a lot of little quality of life changes, if you’re into that sort of thing.
• The Overwatch 2 Summer Games is back with yet more Lucioball as well as the brand new Winston’s Beach Volleyball event. So jump in for some fun in the (virtual) sun: the event only lasts until July 24.
• The Midsummer Fire Festival is live in Hearthstone, bringing a quest chain with packs and skins to earn as well as the return of quests to Hearthstone Battlegrounds. I’m a big fan of the way quests make Battlegrounds a little more unpredictable, so I’m pretty excited about this one. The event wraps up on August 1, though I’m not sure whether Battlegrounds quests will stick around after.
• The WoW Companion app once again allows you to sell things on the auction house from your smartphone. This feature was removed from the app about a year ago, but now it’s back to help players everywhere maintain their gold-making empire on the go.
• The semi-vampiric new Blood Knight class has arrived in Diablo Immortal — the first new class to come to the Diablo franchise since Reaper of Souls added Crusaders in 2014, and even then the class was reminiscent of Diablo 2’s Paladin. We’re already wondering if the Blood Knight might make an appearance in Diablo 4, which we talked about on the latest Blizzard Watch podcast.
• You can get the Diablo 4 Brackish Fetch Mount Armor by being an Amazon Prime subscriber. I don’t care for the look, but I claimed it anyway, just in case it’s a look I want later. To get the mount, you have to link your Twitch account to your Battle.net account and then claim the reward on Prime Gaming.

Ending soon

• This week’s Hearthstone Tavern Brawl is Mimirons’ Faceoff, a brand new Brawl that pits Mimiron against Mimiron in a battle to determine which of you is the imposter. It’s always fun to see a new Brawl, though this one doesn’t have a lot of strategy. The Brawl runs through Tuesday, with a new Brawl starting Wednesday.
• The WoW Picnic Basket toy is the game’s latest Twitch Drop, but it’s only available until Tuesday, July 18. To earn it, you need to watch four hours of WoW streams on Twitch and be sure your Battle.net account is linked to your Twitch account.

Coming soon

• Diablo 4 Season 1 starts next Thursday, July 20, with a pre-patch going live on Tuesday, July 18. This is the Season of the Malignant, in which we’ll see corrupted monsters springing up on Sanctuary, which need to be eliminated. Also we’ll be wearing their hearts as jewelry, which is definitely a great idea that could never go wrong. We have some more information on Seasons in general as well as the Season Blessings buffs you’ll be able to earn.

And last but not least…

• It’s likely Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard will be going ahead after the court challenge by US regulators was dismissed. The deal still has stumbling blocks as UK regulators are still holding out, and if Microsoft doesn’t manage to close the deal by July 18 the company will have to renegotiate terms with Activision Blizzard. We’ll see what happens this coming week.

That’s all for this week, everybody! Have a great weekend and I’ll see you again next week.