Blizzard Watch Weekly: vacation?

This week has been the most sedate so far this summer, and as such, it flew right by. Also I was working the whole time, and didn’t really get to sleep in. But I did get to drink a lot of coffee, so at least being an adult has that going for it?

While I see about Irishing up this cuppa, let’s look back at what happened this week, what we have to look forward to next week, plus some stuff you may have missed.

What happened this week?

• Summer Games Done Quick started on Sunday and runs through July 13
• The Lost City of Un’Goro Hearthstone expansion released July 8
• WoW Classic Anniversary Realms phase 5 released July 10
• Collector’s Bounty in World of Warcraft through July 29
• This week’s Hearthstone Tavern Brawl: Lost City of Un’Goro Recipe Brawl (Standard, Provided)
• Active Twitch Drop campaigns
• Epic Games Store free game of the week: Figment 2 and Sky Racket

Phase 5 of WoW Classic Anniversary realms started this week, which means the AQ War Effort is underway, with the AQ raids opening as people open them up.

The latest expansion for Hearthstone released this week, alongside the cutest wittle predatowy monetization scheme we ever saw, yes he is. The Lost City of Un’Goro brings back Quests and adds a Kindred mechanic, plus you’ll have to complete and/or purchase the seasonal Tavern Pass again, and buy a bunch of packs if you’re playing Constructed.

We updated our guide to soloing LFR and published a guide to finding all the legacy raid entrances as a part of the Collector’s Bounty event, which goes until July 29. And speaking of short term events, we ranked our transmog options that come from the Greedy Emissary event.

For fans of indie games, you’ll be happy to know Stardew Valley just surpassed Portal as the highest rated game on Steam, so that’s definitely one option for the weekend.

Our Cute post this week features people rescuing wild animals responsibly. This is a great reminder because this is the time of year when the baby animals of spring are starting to be on their own, so finding a baby fawn on the lawn or raccoon in the attic can be relatively commonplace. Wildlife rescue is a tough job, but we’re glad we can watch someone who knows what they’re doing help these cuties.

 What’s Happening Next Week (and beyond)

• Winds of Mysterious Fortune buff returns to WoW July 15
• Mists of Pandaria Classic full release July 21
• Ghosts of K’aresh patch 11.2 releases August 5

Ghosts of K’aresh has an official release date: . With that release date comes tons of information about the upcoming content patch, including a newly released trailer. We also published a few guides to the patch, like a guide to the upcoming Reshii Wraps system. It’s somewhat familiar if you’ve been around since Wrathion first handed us a cloak back in Mists of Pandaria. We’re also excited about that what means for our transmog possibilities, especially cosplaying effectively as an Ethereal. It’s thematic. Or, maybe it’s a disguise to curry favor with the Manaforge Vandals, the renown track for the upcoming Manaforge Omega raid.

A new preview and informational post on Player Housing neighborhoods was posted this week, and while it did answer a few of our questions about Player Housing, it mostly just added even more questions to our growing list. We get it, the hype train must build speed, but we promise we’d just like to get our grubby little hands on our house already. We’re so excited for it we started doing things like track down all the fish tanks in WoW, and ranked them by how much we’d like to put them in our house. We also started infighting over who would get the housing plot closest to the rainbow by the waterfall in the Alliance neighborhood.

This week’s podcasts

• Blizzard Watch Podcast: Goodbye Warcraft Rumble
• Lore Watch Podcast: Fragments of worlds and world souls
• Tavern Watch Plays Daggerheart, Episode 1: An invitation to the Motherboard

This week the Blizzard Watch Podcast bid farewell to Warcraft Rumble, in addition to discussing a lot of the Ghosts of K’aresh content we’ve been seeing. The Lore Watch podcast looked further ahead, with what might be happening to Outland’s sundered dying planet, and what might become of Azeroth in the near future.

Lastly, on Tavern Watch, we started a new playthrough, dipping our toes into the new Daggerheart system. Our heroes find themselves in a world without magic, but with a lot of technology, like robotics. It’s a startling first step into a journey usually characterized by fireballs and all that, so we were excited to see what happened next.

We published a list this week of all the games we’ve played through on Tavern Watch. If you were trying to remember the name of the one where Liz DMed and there were a lot of birds, or if you’d prefer to look back through the one where it was Jane Austen, but Kaiju, we have them all listed in one spot for your perusal.

We hope you have a great weekend, and we’ll see you here next week.