Blizzard Watch Weekly: Hamilten

Hamilton turns ten this week, and Lin-Manuel Miranda announced that it would be coming to theaters in September, so I’m having a Hamilicious week. It’s a good time to be a former theater kid.

Let’s not throw away our shot to 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?

• Ghosts of K’aresh patch 11.2 releases August 5
• Hearthstone Battlegrounds season 11 begins August 5
• This week’s Hearthstone Tavern Brawl: Heroic Brawliseum Tavern Brawl (Wild, puke emoji)
• Active Twitch Drop campaigns
• Epic Games Store free game of the week: 112 Operator and Road Redemption

Ghosts of K’aresh, patch 11.2, released this week, and as we killed time by watching King of the Hill waiting for servers to come up, we were all very excited because that brings us one patch closer to Player Housing. But there’s the usual new patch stuff to get through, of course. We have a hot tip on how to lifehack your way to slightly better renown gains with the K’aresh Trust, for one. There’s also a new World Boss, Reshanor, to defeat. And, as usual, we were catty about the transmog options coming out of the new raid, because judging transmog is one of our core values as a group.

We also kept this week’s Cute post on topic with the battle pets of K’aresh.

Just this afternoon we also got word that Rod Fergusson, General Manager of the Diablo franchise is stepping away. We don’t know what’s next for him, but we do wish him well.

We have this week’s hottest game releases to show you as usual. Speaking of game releases, this weekend (through August 14) is a celebration of Wholesome Games, including both deep discounts and several new releases.

Oh, and speaking of game releases, Hearthstone Battlegrounds had its latest season kick off this week, with Rally minions finally helping to bring down the power creep of some of this scaling. Or, at least, that was the aim. Ahem.

 What’s Happening Next Week (and beyond)

• Gamescom August 19-24

There was a ton of new TTRPG news from Darrington Press for future projects announced at GenCon. Among them was the surprise announcement that Brennan Lee Mulligan would be taking over the GM’s chair for campaign 4 of Critical Role.

Further down the line, there’s even more Guild Wars 2 news, with the final set of Elite Specializations for Visions of Eternity being announced earlier this week.

Unfortunately, there was no new stuff on Player Housing this week, but we expect to get some more details at gamescom on August 19, immediately following Opening Night Live. Because it is a live show there will likely be some degree of timing issues, but ONL starts at 8 pm CEST, which is 2 pm EST, and is slated to run for 2 hours, putting the Midnight discussion at around 4 pm EST.

This week’s podcasts

• Blizzard Watch Podcast: As Ghosts of K’aresh releases, what’s up next?
• Lore Watch Podcast: Welcome to Jurassic Park: how it kicked off a cultural phenomenon

This week the crew on the main Blizzard Watch Podcast talked all things K’aresh, plus the very interesting (rumored, semi-leaked) pre-order perks for Midnight, which includes early access to Player Housing. You know we’re all in when it involves Player Housing.

The Lore Watch Podcast discussed the first few entries to the Jurassic Park universe, both books and movies. It was a deep dive including the accuracy of the science involved, the differences between both works, and how it shaped culture as a whole in the 90s.

I hope you have a great weekend — sing a song or two while you’re out there. I’ll see you right back here next week.