Blizzard Watch Weekly: Year of the Snake

It’s Lunar New Year, so everything is snake-themed, even the hairstyles.

Here’s what happened this week, what’s happening next week, and more stuff.

What Happened This Week?

• The Lunar Festival in WoW, January 28 to February 11
• This week’s Hearthstone Tavern Brawl: Lunar Blessings (Wild, Deck Provided)
• Active Twitch Drop campaigns
• Epic Games Store free game of the week: Undying

As the real life Lunar New Year begins, this week we saw a bunch of in-game events and fun based on the Year of the Snake. The Lunar Festival began in WoW this week, and though the core of the holiday is mostly unchanged, there were some Elders to visit added to Khaz Algar and a new mount to obtain. The Lunar Festival is also one of the best times to level alts, since the Elders give a decent chunk of XP, and are scattered around a lot of the areas you might decide to hang in as you level anyway.

Also introduced this week to Overwatch 2 was a rebalancing to the new player experience, which seems largely targeted at making smurfs less of an issue in the early placement process. This has already been implemented, but I’d guess we’ll see a greater impact with this change when the season rolls over in a little more than two weeks.

If you — perhaps like me, though I admit to nothing — are struggling with the current no-frills-no-trinkets-no-nothin meta in Hearthstone Battlegrounds, we made our resident Hearthstone expert Phil “Red” Xavier explain what’s broadly effective.

Also, if you’re looking for something to do this weekend, in addition to our usual Friday column to highlight fun little indies and other games that might not be on your radar, the OWCS season starts today. Even if you’re not all that jazzed about Overwatch esports, the swag you can earn from watching is pretty sweet, so you may want to have it up on your second monitor while you play something else. And speaking of fun, perhaps not-so-little indies, we took some time this week to compare and contrast Path of Exile 2 with Diablo 4 — and what we think Blizzard should steal from that game.

What’s Happening Next Week (and beyond)

• WoW Classic Season of Discovery season 7 Naxxramas February 6
• Warcraft Rumble Lunar New Year event through February 5
• Plunderstorm through February 18
• Turbulent Timeways through February 25

While WoW Classic Season of Discovery season 7 began this week, Naxxramas is still closed until next week, which gave us a little time to explain how the whole new Empower mechanic works.

Speaking of upcoming sweeping changes to WoW, a big set of them was announced, coming to Mythic+ dungeons in season 2 of The War Within. Also coming in roughly that time frame is a new way to respec your profession knowledge points, though this is also coming with a big huge blinking bold italics underlined caveat that, as of now, you’ll only be able to do this one time ever. Which, I suppose is better than zero times like we have now, but I’d prefer one freebie, and then just make it prohibitively expensive, or locked to once a month or something.

And if you’re not quite ready for patch 11.1 or the next phase of Season of Discovery because you need to find a new guild, we highlighted a utility which aims to help people do just that. VISAGE is specifically aimed at making the process of finding a new guild that is inclusive of women and gender minorities slightly less soul crushing.

Speaking of things that are soul crushing, viral sensation hippo Fiona celebrated her 8th birthday this week so I need to go lie down for a while and contemplate the passing of time.

Podcasts

• Blizzard Watch Podcast: Respect Your Elders (It’s Lunar Festival time)
• Lore Watch Podcast: Why don’t the people of Sanctuary ever learn from their past?
• Tavern Watch Plays Starfinder 2: The Great Planetary Escape

This week we added a “recurring” to our writer Liz Patt as she joined Liz and the boys for the Blizzard Watch Podcast to talk about what is even up with Diablo‘s seasonal cadences. The newest season of Diablo 3 just released today, so hopefully we don’t have to worry about it for a few months. Then, they reminisced about how things were back in their day, just in time for the Lunar Festival. Ah, Elders.

Speaking of Elders, much of Lore Watch this week was devoted to the question of why the people of the Diablo universe keep repeating the same ol boneheaded mistakes they made in previous games. Plus, Tavern Watch rolls on with part 2 of our Starfinder playthrough.

That’s it from us, and we’ll see you next week.