Blizzard Watch Weekly: Contentment

Ah, to be a tiny rabbit made of rice, dunking a cucumber slice into a mug of steaming hot tea in a cozy breakfast nook.

Actually, no. It’s Friday, I’m ordering pizza.

While I try to convince the delivery person my actual name is honest to god Anna (space) Bell, let’s see what happened this week, and what we have to look forward to next week, and some stuff you may have missed. You want garlic knots?

What happened this week?

• Journey to the Emerald Dream Hearthstone expansion releases March 25
• This week’s Hearthstone Tavern Brawl: Emerald Dream Recipe Brawl (Standard, deck provided)
• Active Twitch Drop campaigns
• Epic Games Store free game of the week: Cat Quest and Neko Ghost, Jump!

The biggest news this week was the release of the latest Hearthstone expansion Into the Emerald Dream. There are a bunch of cards we found interesting as the expansion launched, but the meta is still evolving so we’ll see if they have a permanent slot in our decks. In the meantime if you’re just all about Hearthstone Battlegrounds, we updated our list of Anomalies that we’ll be playing with for the rest of the season.

As the new season 8 of WoW Classic Season of Discovery gets underway next week, we have a tutorial on Scarlet Crusade disguises — what they are, how to use them, and the mats you need for one of your own. We also put out a guide to get you to the Scarlet Enclave raid entrance. If your approach to WoW Classic is a little more Hardcore, you may be happy to know that the characters lost due to a DDOS last week will be getting restored — and not just the ones piloted by people with name recognition.

We’ve been hitting the skyrocketing hard in the Undermine, so we wrote up an article on how to get Gold on every race, with accompanying videos. While we’re talking Undermine, we also have an article talking about the C.H.E.T.T. list — it’s basically a free cartel faction boost, so you may as well.

We were extremely excited to see Spirit City‘s Cozy Kitchen expansion launch this week. Many of us around the office use this as an aid to stay on task while we work — I’m typing up this article in my little breakfast nook next to my new bentobunny. If you would prefer your cuteness in real life, this week we wrote about the quokka.

What’s Happening Next Week (and beyond)

• World of Warcraft Trading Post rollover April 1
• Nintendo Switch 2 Direct April 2
• WoW Classic Season of Discovery phase 8 begins April 8
• Diablo 4 season 7 end and season 8 start April 28

Just a reminder that while you should never believe anything you read on the internet, on Tuesday you should probably be even more not-believing-er than usual.

There were several announcements for upcoming games to watch this week. As a Blizzard-focused site, we’ve had our eyes on Mike Morhaime’s post-Blizzard studio, Dreamhaven, and this week they gave us a few new announcements like new team shooter Moongate (and some more info on older announcements). But if we’re being honest the highlight for us was the Sugoi Showcase, led with the same unhinged energy and extremely weird (complimentary) little indies we’ve come to expect from TGAGWCAGA. But since most of those aren’t out yet, you might want to see our list of games to check out this weekend. Speaking of weird little guys, a new update for Pacific Drive is coming April 3.

Plus, we’re looking forward to the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct on Wednesday. In this week’s not-2 Direct, Nintendo announced a new app for their announcements, so you may want to give that a spin before then.

This week’s podcasts

• Blizzard Watch Podcast: Diving into the Emerald Dream (in Hearthstone, don’t get your hopes up)
• Lore Watch Podcast: Can you play Hearthstone in the Emerald Dream, and other questions
• Tavern Watch Plays Triangle Agency 3: That’s fine, get in the briefcase

This week we have a whole lot of Emerald Dream going on, with the expansion launch discussed in the main podcast, and a few intricacies of the Dream discussed on Lore Watch. Lore Watch was a Q&A episode so there are several topics at hand, including which games are confirmed to be on Azeroth. Multiple topics is the norm for the Blizzard Watch podcast, with the OnlyFangs DDOS and the Nebula Award for game writing also being hot topics this week.

Our playthrough of Triangle Agency concludes this week on Tavern Watch with a bang — or maybe a sizzle. From what I understand, there’s a lot of electricity involved.