Blizzard Watch Weekly: dragging ourselves to the finish line

We’re officially in back to school mode in our neck of the woods, which means that in addition to our regular activities, there’s also a ton of additional orientation activities, plus summer wrap up parties, and shopping, and cleaning. It’s always exciting to get a new year underway, but I always feel a little confused — are my children eating their pencils over break? Where are their wired headphones? Why did I go to three different stores in a mad search for lined filler paper only to come up empty? Will any of my children ever need this 6 pack of composition notebooks I bought three years ago?

As I doggedly try to finish the summer strong, 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?

• Diablo 4 March of the Goblins event ends August 5
• This week’s Hearthstone Tavern Brawl: Void Singularity Tavern Brawl (Wild, Constructed)
• Active Twitch Drop campaigns
• Epic Games Store free game of the week: Keylocker and Pilgrims

It’s a new month — yes really — and we’re a little underwhelmed by the August 2025 Trading Post offerings. They’re not poorly done or anything, but they’re kinda chess-themed, and just aren’t our jam.

We hope you’ve been getting your fill of killing Treasure Goblins with the new Diablo 4 event because the little dudes are running amok — and they’ve been fixed, so there’s more reason to kill them than just the wanton murder that lives inside your heart. Though, that’s also valid.

This week’s cute pits the baby duckies of World of Warcraft against real little baby duckies, and it’s just too precious.

 What’s Happening Next Week (and beyond)

• Ghosts of K’aresh patch 11.2 releases August 5
• Hearthstone Battlegrounds season 11 begins August 5
• Gamescom August 19-24

If you have any alts to get up to speed before patch 11.2 drops Tuesday, we’d really suggest you level them this weekend, specifically Sunday and Monday, because a bunch of stars align to add a ton of XP multipliers.

Speaking of patch 11.2, we’re still getting small news pieces on what to expect from Blizzard. This week they showcased the Ecological Succession systems, and the whole thing is exactly what I’ve wanted to do since I saw those ecodomes back in the day. Some of us are also very excited about the upcoming improvements to the Cooldown Manager added in 11.1.5. Plus, they’re retooling spell effects — there’s just a whole lot going on in any given raid, and we’re old and can’t see as well as we did, so they’re giving us some options to tone it down a touch if we want. I mean, we strained our eyes playing so many video games, so I’m not sure how we thought this would pan out.

We’re also continuing to preview the new Elite Specializations coming to Guild Wars 2 (though we’re not sure anything can top a Troubador).

We also took a look at some of the games coming soon from the Nintendo Direct earlier this week.

This week’s podcasts

• Blizzard Watch Podcast: The waiting room for patch 11.2
• Lore Watch Podcast: Answering listener questions from around the World of Warcraft
• Tavern Watch Podcast: Danger from Diamond Comic Distributors (and more tabletop news)

This week’s Blizzard Watch Podcast involved a relatively lengthy Q&A section because we’re just kinda waiting for all the good stuff next week. Cory joined us though, and there were Heroes of the Storm patch notes, so it was fated to be. This week’s Lore Watch also involved listener questions, and we bet you didn’t know there was so much freakin Quilboar lore out there. But there is, and we’re bringing it to you. Plus this week’s Tavern Watch was a discussion episode, running through a ton of the new projects we have our eye on, and some news from the industry.

Have a great, restful weekend, and we’ll see you back here next week.