The Voidforge brings two new gearing options in WoW patch 12.0.5 (with a little help from Decimus)

One of the new features coming in WoW patch 12.0.5 on April 21 is something new called the Voidforge. Everyone’s favorite suspiciously-nice Domanaar pal, Decimus, has been working on something new with our assistance — if you haven’t seen these quests already, you may need to complete the quest Artifice of Aggression, after which he’ll start asking for an Elementary Voidcore each week, which comes from doing Season 1 content such as raids, Bountiful Delves, or Mythic+ dungeons. But just what is this thing that he’s building, and what’s it going to do for us? Well, it’s kind of a two-part feature, one of which is the return of something haven’t seen since the Great Vault was implemented: bonus loot rolls.

Nebulous Voidcores: Bonus rolls, but with a much-needed twist

When I said “bonus rolls,” I’m sure some veteran players who have memories of dutifully farming up their various Seals of Fate from Mists of Pandaria through Battle for Azeroth immediately had flashbacks of throwing those coins away for a handful of gold. Luckily, Nebulous Voidcores, the first output of the Voidforge, are a significant improvement on that process.

Once you help Decimus accumulate six Elementary Voidcores to complete the forge, you’ll be able to start accumulating Nebulous Voidcores. The maximum amount of Nebulous Voidcores you can obtain each week increases by two, and you’ll have multiple ways to obtain them from Decimus — including gold, Voidlight Marl, and Veteran Dawncrests. You can then spend two Nebulous Voidcores to obtain a random item after defeating a raid boss, or one Nebulous Voidcore to get a random item from a Mythic+ dungeon, a Bountiful Delve, or a Nightmare Prey Hunt.

After you obtain an item by using a Nebulous Voidcore, that item is “removed” from the loot pool for future Nebulous Voidcores. So, for example, if you’re an Agility-based spec and you use your Nebulous Voidcores to obtain bonus loot from the Heroic Crown of the Cosmos encounter, one of the items you can obtain this way is the Ranger-Captain’s Iridescent Insignia. Next time you use your Nebulous Voidcores on Heroic Crown of the Cosmos, you cannot obtain the Ranger-Captain’s Iridescent Insigna — it has to be one of the other items you’re eligible for. In this way, you can slowly whittle down the loot pool from a raid boss or dungeon (or Delve… I guess?) until you get exactly the piece of loot you want. That’s right: Blizzard has finally implemented a way to target specific pieces of gear, and it’s the return of bonus rolls. Who could’ve seen that coming?

A couple of additional notes: if you’re a raider, using these on raid bosses is difficulty-specific: if you get Alleria’s insignia trinket from Normal Crown of the Cosmos with a Nebulous Voidcore, you can still obtain one with a Nebulous Voidcore in Heroic Crown of the Cosmos — they’re two separate loot pools. Secondly, if you’re using these in a Mythic+ dungeon, the gear you get will be at the level of gear you’d get from the Great Vault, not the level from the end of the dungeon — making it much easier for Mythic+ players to accumulate Myth-track gear!

Ascendant Voidcores: The modern Turbo Boost

Once he finishes the Voidforge, what else would Decimus need next but a hammer? He and your Warband will start working on the Ascendant Nilhammer each week, and once it’s complete, he’ll also be able to provide you with Ascendant Voidcores. Rather than obtaining them from Decimus, though, these will drop from all the sources of endgame content — raids, Mythic+, Bountiful Delves, and Nightmare Prey Hunts. What you can do with them is much simpler, too: you can use them to increase the item level of a fully-upgraded Season 1 Hero, Myth, or maximum-quality Radiance Crafted weapon or trinket.

This is somewhat of a replacement for the Turbo Boost feature in The War Within, where suddenly upgrade tracks for all items would gain an additional two levels. Rather than forcing players to grind currency to increase their item levels more, these simply let you boost three or four of your max-upgraded items; the downside is that unlike previous seasons, you can only upgrade your weapons and trinkets with Ascendant Voidcores. This may be Blizzard’s compromise to let players gain an important power bump midway through the season while keeping gear item levels from inflating too much over the course of the expansion.

Either way, I think it’s obvious that between letting us obtain our white whale loot items and then upgrade them beyond their maximum, Decimus and his Voidforge mean nothing but good things for us, and we should definitely trust this Domanaar who has only tried to kill us like once or twice. What are a few murder attempts between friends? Especially when there’s sweet, sweet loot in the offing?