Blizzard Watch Weekly: ’tis the season for seasons (and also ducks)

Blizzard continues with a wild pace of new content releases, and right now it’s all about new seasonal content for a whole lot of games, with PTRs for Dragonflight Season 4 and Diablo 4 Season 4, as well as upcoming launch of Diablo 3 Season 31 and WoW Classic Season of Discovery Phase 3.

Also ducks. We’ll get to that in a minute.

Let’s run down the news from the last week and what you can expect coming up in this first week of April.

New this week

• WoW Dragonflight Season 4 hit the PTR, introducing the next season’s dungeon rotation — a straight sweep of the original Dragonflight dungeons — and new Awakened raids and upgraded loot. We all love loot, right? We don’t have all of the details yet, but we’ll let you know when we do.
• WoW keeps making Plunderstorm changes: Blizzard has been making a lot of changes to the Plunderstorm battle royale mode this week, including increased experience gains at lower levels, more mobs in parts of the map with low mob density, and extra plunder in solo matches. That will make it easier to advance through those lower levels to make it to the later levels — and collect more Plunder along the way. These are good changes for everybody, including us poor PVE players trying to collect as much Plunder as possible before getting caught up in PVP. More changes are coming soon, with trio queues promised.
• Operation Gnomeregan and Zalazane’s Fall went live in Wrath Classic. These events originally went live shortly before the launch of Cataclysm. The Cataclysm Classic beta is now live, and we expect the game to launch in June.
• Marvel announced Marvel Rivals, a new PVP shooter developed by NetEase that looks rather a lot like Overwatch, but with Marvel characters, right down to the particular animations. Still, it could be a fun one — but there’s no release date yet.
• It’s now easier to get Taivan in WoW:  And thank goodness for that. It’s still not exactly easy, but Blizzard removed the requirement to get the Seething Cache in Zaralek Cavern, which required you to collect orbs around the zone and then open a chest… and if anyone opened the chest, no one else could get it until the orbs respawned.
• Diablo 3 Season 31 is on the way! The team announced that the new season will revive the Kanai’s Cube theme from Season 20 that we dubbed Kanai’s Cube-o-Rama, letting you stack Legendary powers from any category in Kanai’s Cube, making for some interesting new combos. Heck, even I played that season and I usually don’t have the patience to stick with them. The new season goes live on April 12, and is expected to last around three months.

Coming soon (this is where the ducks come in)

• April 1: WoW Noblegarden starts, and the holiday has gone to the… uh, ducks. There are some new rewards, including spring-themed transmog, a flying carpet, a duck pet, and a Duck Disguiser toy, which is exactly what it sounds like. You have until April 8 to finish the event, so be ready to jump in when it launches, because you will for sure want that duck disguise.
• April 1: April Trading Post rewards launch with spring-forward fashion and my new best friend forever, Aura the duck.
• April 2: Diablo 4 PTR launches. It’s the game’s first PTR, which is probably necessary for the absolutely massive itemization changes coming to the game with Season 4. The PTR is for PC only, so sorry console players, but you’ll have to wait for Season 4 to launch on May 14.
• April 4: WoW Classic Season of Discovery Phase 3 begins, bringing back Sunken Temple as a raid and giving Classic players a chance to venture into the Emerald Nightmare, which took quite a bit longer to get to in the original game.

Get ’em before they’re gone

• Mother’s Blessing is back in Diablo 4 through April 2, so you have a couple more days of speed leveling to go. This +35% (multiplicative) gold and experience buff could help you wrap up the Season 3 battle pass.
• The WoW Fathom pet Twitch Drop is just the cutest, and you only have until April 5 to snag this bedazzled crab by watching four hours of WoW on Twitch.

This week’s podcasts

• Blizzard Watch Podcast: Less time sorting, more time slaying
• Lore Watch Podcast: Should the Azerothian Archives be the future of Archaeology?