It's been a long day of prog on Mythic Dimensius in the Manaforge Omega Race to World First, and still no one has come out ahead.

This week was dominated by the Midnight infodump from gamescom.

It's Friday again and that usually means it's New Video Game Time with Chris.

When Phase Diving was first announced for patch 11.2 I figured it was going to be a sort of “Maw lite” with harder challenges and trickier navigation (no flying? in 2025?!?) but it turns out that Phase Diving not only isn’t that hard to deal with, it actually makes getting around K’aresh faster and easier. Don’t want to be phased anymore? Just click off the buff that puts in you the phase — even if you’re being dogpiled by elite mobs. Want to quickly get from Tavazesh to the Oasis? Dive into the phase and teleport over. Have a challenging treasure to get? Fly to it in normal space and quaff an Untethered Xy’bucha and you may even get an achievement for your “hard” work recovering it.

It’s like the dev team got through 90% of phase diving development and remembered that the vast majority of the playerbase hated the Maw and scrambled to remove the worst roadblocks. I’m not complaining, mind you, as the Forge knows I have precious little time to play as it is. There’s just a dissonance between the challenge that phase diving wants to be and the fact that it actually provides some quality of life benefits.

I do look good in translucent sparkly pink, at least. Speaking of phase diving …

If you thought this week's show would be entirely about the new Midnight trailer and the information we're getting out of gamescom, you would be right.

There will be 11 new Delves in World of Warcraft Midnight to explore across the expansions first four zones.

The tenth day of the Manaforge Omega Race to World First sees the gap between guilds narrowing significantly with three different groups slugging it out against Mythic Dimensius, albeit it at different phases, though it's been a slow day overall for other raiders.

After unearthing treasures in Delves throughout The War Within, Brann Bronzebeard will be hanging up his remaining hats to make way for our new Midnight companion: the Blood Elf Rogue Valeera Sanguinar.

Not only is World of Warcraft: Midnight looking to be the epic Void versus Light battle we've desperately craved, it's glowing up some beloved (and previously abused) locations on Azeroth while introducing some new ones.

I mean, sure, it’s Paradox Interactive so I can’t pretend to be surprised, but finding out that two of the playable Vampire clans in Vampire the Masquerade — Bloodlines 2 are going to be locked behind a $20 paywall has really bummed me out.

There are six playable clans in this game, and of the four you get for the purchase price of $70 USD — the Banu Haqim, Brujah, Tremere and Ventrue — only one of the four is even remotely interesting to me. But I’d play the heck out of a Toreador. And the idea of having to spend ninety UD dollars just to get a clan I actually want to play does not exactly fill me with excitement.

Anyway, with that out of the way, let’s talk about Arator’s weird facial hair.