World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

“War has come, war will come again, I am old enough to have watched my people rise and fall and rise once more, and I myself have withered like the winter tree before blossoming anew.”

A new World of Warcraft short story is now available to read: A Moment in Verse!

First Arcanist Thalyssra and Regent-Lord Lor'themar Theron set aside the troubles of their individual worlds to spend one beautiful evening in a contest of verse—and in each other's hearts.

We’re excited to share this bright and charming new tale by Madeleine Roux (author of the upcoming Shadows Rising novel) with everyone, and we hope you enjoy a brief escape into the tranquility of Suramar. Read it now.

Stay safe and healthy, everyone!

Items and Rewards

• Preserved Contaminant and Gouged Eye of N'Zoth can now be applied to items acquired from weekly rated PvP quests.

Player versus Player

• [With regional restarts] Corrupted Gladiator's Spite on use effect now keeps the afflicted enemies in combat for the full duration of its effect.
  
• Fixed an issue where Mantid Fire Bomb damage was scaling incorrectly against players.

WoW Classic

• Black Lotus now spawns more often and can appear in many new locations.
  
• Black Lotus cannot be seen on-screen or on the minimap by players who are dead, unless they have Herbalism at level 300 or higher.
  
• In Warsong Gulch, several locations outside of the intended play area have been blocked off.

We think we’ve found a way to fix a bug, and we’re planning to deploy the fix in the next day or two.

The bug is with the Corruption Effect Ineffable Truth and its interaction with abilities like Fist of Justice causing more than the intended amounts of cooldown reduction.

The hotfix will make it so the flat cooldown reduction provided by Fist of Justice (and similar abilities) will not be unintentionally increased by effects that increase your cooldown rate (such as Ineffable Truth).

We’ll confirm that the fix is live in our hotfixes update posts.

Via hotfixes, we’re working on several quality-of-life improvements that should go live in the next few days.

Black Lotus scarcity has been consistently among the top issues we’ve seen player feedback about, so we’ve decided to update how we handle Black Lotus spawns. Since the launch of WoW Classic, the game has used the spawn times and locations from original World of Warcraft, but population and social factors have led to Black Lotus being much more scarce than it was in original WoW. While these issues affect all mining and herb nodes to some degree, Black Lotus is especially affected because it has the special property of only having one spawn up at a time in each of the zones it spawns in.

In original WoW, designers planned Black Lotus around a technical limitation – only 10 spawn locations per node type could be active at the same time in the same zone. We no longer have that limitation, but it gives us a design intention that we can work with: Black Lotus was supposed to spawn in the widest variety of locations, while there could only be one up at a time in each zone. As always, our goal is to minimize differences from original World of Warcraft, and we feel this is a case where we can follow that design intention in a way that is warranted by modern conditions as well as beneficial to players.

We’re going to increase the spawn rate of Black Lotus, and we’re going to add many additional possible spawn locations in each of the Black Lotus zones. With a different hotfix, we’re working on making it so that a player cannot see a Black Lotus on-screen or on their minimap if they’re dead, unless they have 300 Herbalism.

For Warsong Gulch, we’ve identified a number of locations in the battleground where clever players have found ways to get to a place they were never intended to go. These exploits are decidedly unfair, so we’re putting a stop to them. In most cases, the way we prevent such things is to place an invisible gate that blocks the unintended path. However, that’s sometimes impossible, so we make the out-of-bounds location fatal.

We’re also working on a hotfix that should put a stop to one small annoyance – now, if a player is actively engaged with the mailbox or bank, they will be considered “busy” if someone else tries to initiate a trade with them.

We’ll have all of these changes noted for you in the next Hotfixes Update that follows them going live.

Thank you!

In an upcoming Shadowlands Alpha build, Blood Elves and Void Elves will be receiving some new customization options that some of you may be interested in. We wanted to give you an early look at a few of these new options available to the two races, with the first being several shades of blue eyes to choose from.


Additionally, Blood Elves will have the option to choose from a variety of new skin colors and Void Elves will inherit the skin color options that are available to Blood Elves. Here’s a glimpse of the potential characters that you can create with some of the new options.


This is just a sneak peek at some of the many customization options coming to your characters in Shadowlands! We look forward to seeing all of the creations that you come up with in the future.