Blizzard Watch Weekly: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

This week around the office was mostly dominated by the World of Warcraft team giving us a teeny tidbit of news about Player Housing. I cannot express just how feral I already am for this feature, and I’m already excited to make it a beautiful day in the neighborhood — yes, even if my weird neighbors go full Horde and decorate everything in spikes and dust.

You know, a little light arson to enforce HOA covenants shouldn’t be punishable. Any jury would exonerate me.

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

What Happened This Week?

• WoW‘s Love is in the Air holiday, February 3-17
• This week’s Hearthstone Tavern Brawl: When Clones Attack (Wild, Deck Provided)
• Active Twitch Drop campaigns
• Epic Games Store free game of the week: Beyond Blue

The biggest news this week was the unveiling of some additional information about WoW‘s upcoming Player Housing feature. Specifically, they told us the first location for housing would be in either Elwynn or Durotar depending on your faction. They told us your Warband could share a house, though it was unclear just how many houses you were allowed to have — my Gnome Monk is gonna be so mad if she has to share a house with my Blood Elf Hunter and her bestie Rutherford Bear Hayes. They did tell us that we get to keep our house forever and not worry about losing our creation, even if we uninstall for a while. There are still a lot of unknowns with the player housing feature, though.

It’s the beginning of the month of February, so we have the new rewards from the Trading Post. And speaking of February, the Love is in the Air seasonal event began, along with the yearly disappointmentfest that is the search for the X-45 Heartbreaker rocket mount. We’ve heard it’s a lot easier to get, and even if you’re still trying for it, the new Love Witch Sweeper’s drop rate seems weirdly high.

We also looked ahead and discussed the four (five?) Goblin Cartels we’ll be allying ourselves with in patch 11.1.

The Dungeons and Dragons team just released a new playtest with new subclasses to check out.

Lastly, just in case you need a reminder, we’re coming up fast on a Superb Owl Sunday. If you’re not into owls for your weekly dash of cute, maybe a Puppy Bowl would do?

What’s Happening Next Week (and beyond)

• WoW Lunar Festival ends February 11
• Diablo 4 Lunar Awakening through February 18
• Plunderstorm through February 18 (estimated)
• Turbulent Timeways through February 25

A whole lot of WoW seasonal events will roll off in the coming week. This is also (likely) the last full week of Plunderstorm, but the February 18 an unofficial projection — there’s no official source for an end date currently.

This is also the last full week for Diablo 4‘s Lunar Awakening event. If you need to roll a new character soon, just know that we still think the Spiritborn is very much worth playing. We also have some tips for speed-leveling through season 7.

Overwatch 2 fans might want to clear their calendars the afternoon of February 12, since they’ve planned a presentation called Overwatch 2 Spotlight that afternoon with new map and hero hints. They explicitly said “PVP” though, so don’t expect more co-op story content. Not that we were expecting any PVE content out of that franchise again or anything, but sometimes the hopium kicks in, you know?

Speaking of hopium, we have a great slate of games that just came out to show you this week.

Podcasts

• Blizzard Watch Podcast: Blizzard Watch is 10 years old!
• Lore Watch Podcast: Why World of Warcraft’s Odyn is both a Titan and a titanic jerk
• Tavern Watch Plays Murder on the Eberron Express 1: It’s going to get him killed one day

This week’s Blizzard Watch podcast is pretty much what you’ve come to expect from us: just bringing you the news and some opinions on Blizzard and gaming, as we have for the past ten years. Yep, it’s our anniversary. We checked the calendar and everything. So this week’s news mostly came from WoW‘s slate of a billion events all going on at once. They also talked a bit about the Diablo Lunar Awakening event, and how this season of Hearthstone Battlegrounds is shaping up.

Lore Watch focused largely on one of Matt and Joe’s favorite topics: why Odyn is just the worst. The topic came from a question from a listener, and it almost feels like bait.

Finally, if you’re up for some train riding and murder, join Tavern Watch for the start of our playthrough of Murder on the Eberron Express. It’s as good a time as murder can be!