World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

See You in Hell on June 6, 2023! Pre-Purchase for Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo® IV Available Now
The darkest, most expansive vision of Sanctuary to date offers players an abundant number of options to play their way

Raise Hell with the pre-purchase of the Diablo IV Standard, Deluxe, or Ultimate Edition, available now

IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 8, 2022-- Diablo® IV, the next generation installment in the genre-defining series by Blizzard Entertainment, will be released on June 6, 2023. Diablo IV will feature cross-platform play and progression on Windows® PC, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, plus couch co-op on consoles at launch.

“We are excited to soon be opening the gates to our most brutal vision of Sanctuary yet with Diablo IV,” said Rod Fergusson, general manager of Diablo. “We are bringing the darkness of the original game, fusing it with the progression elements of Diablo II and the visceral combat of Diablo III, culminating in the vast, active overworld of Diablo IV, which has been built to be supported for years to come. Players will have more choices than ever before as they battle unspeakable horrors, explore dungeons, collect Legendary loot, and uncover what the return of Lilith, the Blessed Mother, means for the world of Sanctuary.”

The demon Lilith and the angel Inarius united to create the world of Sanctuary in their desire to escape the Eternal Conflict between Heaven and Hell. But now, decades after the events of Diablo III: Reaper of Souls®, they are bitter enemies who have resorted to war against each other with their respective followers. The lands of Sanctuary have become plagued with ceaseless demons, and only the most steadfast of heroes will be able to hold in the face of darkness. Players will enter the world with their choice of five classes—the shapeshifting Druids, agile Rogues, elemental Sorceresses, brutal Barbarians, and cunning Necromancers. As players grow in power, they can build their gameplay experience in directions that appeal to them, experimenting with skill trees to showcase complimenting spells and abilities.

Debuting in the Diablo universe is an expansive overworld. Players will drive back the demons of Hell across the diverse zones of Sanctuary—the snow-frosted forests of Fractured Peaks, the windswept highlands of Scosglen, the festering swamps of Hawezar, the barren wastelands of the Dry Steppes, and the deserts of Kehjistan, home to the central city of Caldeum. The non-linear experience consists of a captivatingly epic story, over 140 dungeons, side-quests, and a plethora of loot. Mighty World Bosses will emerge, taunting players to defeat them in groups for a chance at their spoils, and Strongholds stand in wait for heroic adventurers to claim once again for the citizens of Sanctuary.

Also advancing the world-class ARPG experience is a robust end-game system, where players will continue to grow in power as they take on a medley of challenges. There’s the grueling Helltide, a regularly occurring event that brings a surge in demonic activity to Sanctuary, new ferocious and particularly challenging Nightmare Dungeons, an updated Paragon Board system to continue customizing heroes to new heights of power, Whispers of the Dead which grant Legendary rewards for selected world bounties, and Fields of Hatred offer designated grounds for building PvP renown.

Digital Pre-Purchase Editions & Bonuses
Diablo IV is available for digital pre-purchase as a Standard edition ($69.99), Deluxe edition ($89.99), and Ultimate edition ($99.99). Each digital edition includes one or more items to enlist against the Hellspawn that plague Sanctuary:

Standard Edition: Includes Open Beta Early Access*, the Light Bearer Mount in Diablo IV, the Inarius Wings & Inarius Murloc Pet in Diablo® III**, the Amalgam of Rage Mount in World of Warcraft®**, and the Umber Winged Darkness Cosmetics Set in Diablo Immortal™**

Deluxe Edition: Includes everything in the Standard edition, plus up to 4 days Early Access to Diablo IV's Launch***, and Seasonal Battle Pass Unlock in Diablo IV, the Hellborn Carapace Mount Armor in Diablo IV, and the Temptation Mount in Diablo IV.

Ultimate Edition: Includes everything in the Deluxe edition, plus an Accelerated Seasonal Battle Pass Unlock in Diablo IV (a Premium Seasonal Battle Pass Unlock plus 20 Tier Skips and a cosmetic), and the Wings of the Creator Emote in Diablo IV.

The devout can also purchase the Diablo IV Limited Edition Collector’s Box**** ($96.66), which includes a double-sided electric Candle of Creation, a cloth map of Sanctuary, an Occult Mousepad, a pin of the Horadrim, two matted fine art prints (18.54” x 10.79”), and a Diablo IV Collector’s Edition Art book. Available for pre-purchase starting December 15 from the Blizzard Gear Store, and via select retailers in Australia and New Zealand.

Learn more at https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/diablo4.

For screenshots, video, and other assets, visit the Blizzard Entertainment press site at https://blizzard.gamespress.com/Diablo-IV.

*Actual platform availability and launch date(s) of the Beta subject to change. See Diablo.com for more details. Minimum Open Beta duration is 2 days. Limited time only. Internet connection required.

**Downloaded separately. Availability varies by platform and region. Diablo® III, Diablo Immortal™ and World of Warcraft® sold separately.

***Up to 4 days based on estimated access; actual play time subject to possible outages and applicable time zone differences.

****Limited edition of 50,000. Please note: no game included in box. Game must be purchased separately.

With Dragonflight’s recent launch behind us, we want to take some time to talk with you more about what occurred these past few days from an engineering viewpoint. We hope that this will provide a bit more insight on what it takes to make a global launch like this happen, what can go right, what hiccups can occur along the way, and how we manage them.

Internally, we call events like last Monday “content launch,” because launching an expansion is a process, not one day. Far from being a static game running the same way it did eighteen years ago—or even two years ago—World of Warcraft is in constant change and growth, and our deployment processes change as well.

Expansions now consist of several smaller launches: the code first goes live running the old content, then pre-launch events and new systems turn on, and finally, on content launch day, new areas, quests, and dungeons. Each stage changes different things so we can find and fix problems. But in any large, complex system, the unexpected can still occur.

One change with this expansion was that the content launch was triggered using a timed event —multiple changes to the game can be triggered to all happen at a particular time. Manually making these changes carries the risk of human error, or an internal or external tool outage. Using a timed event helps to mitigate these risks.

Another change in Dragonflight: greatly enhanced support for encrypting game data records. Encrypted records allow us to send out our client with the data that the game needs to show cutscenes, share voice lines, or unlock quests, but keep that data from being mined before players get to experience them in-game. We know the community loves WoW, and when you’re hungry to experience any morsel, it’s hard to not spoil yourself before the main course. Encrypted records allow us to take critical story beats and hide them from players until the right time to reveal them.

We now know that the lag and instability we saw last week was caused by the way these two systems interacted. The result was: they forced the simulation server (that moves your characters around the world and performs their spells and abilities) to recalculate which records should be hidden more than one hundred times a second, per simulation. As a great deal of CPU power was spent doing these calculations, the simulations became bogged down, and requests from other services to those simulation servers backed up. Players see this as lag and error messages like “World Server Down”.

As we discovered, records encrypted until a timed event unlocked them exposed a small logic error in the code: a misplaced line of code signaled to the server that it needed to recalculate which records to hide, even though nothing had changed.

Here’s some insight on how that investigation occurred. First, the clock struck 3:00 p.m. PST. We know from testing that the Horde boat arrives first, and the Alliance boat arrives next. Many of us are logged in to the game on our characters sitting on the docks in both locations in one computer window, watching logs or graphs or dashboards in other windows. We’re also on a conference call with colleagues from our support teams from all over Blizzard.

Before launch, we’ve created contingency plans for situations we’re worried about as a result of our testing. For example, for this launch, our designers created portals that players could use to get to the Dragon Isles in case the boats failed to work.

At 3:02 p.m. the Horde boat arrives on schedule. Hooray! Players pile on, including some Blizzard employees. Other employees wait (they want to be test cases in case we must turn on portals.) The players on the boats sail off, and while some do arrive on the Dragon Isles, many more are disconnected or get stuck.

Immediately we start searching logs and dashboards. There are some players on the Dragon Isles map, but not many. Colleagues having issues report their character names and realms as specific examples. Others start reporting spikes in CPU load and on our NFS (Network File Storage) that our servers use. Still others are watching in-game, reporting what they see.

Now that we’ve seen the Horde boats, we start watching for the Alliance boats to arrive. Most of them don’t, and most of the Horde boats do not return.

A picture emerges: the boats are stuck, and Dragon Isles servers are taking much longer to spin up than expected. Here’s where we really dig in and start to problem solve.

Boats have been a problem in the past, so we turn on portals while we continue investigating. Our NFS is clearly overloaded. There’s a large network queue on the service responsible for coordinating the simulation servers, making it think simulations aren’t starting, so it launches more and starts to overwhelm our hardware. Soon we discover that adding the portals has made the overload worse, because players can click the portals as many times as they want, so we turn the portals off.

As the problems persist, we work on tackling the increased load to get as many players in to play as possible, but the service is not acting like it did in pre-launch tests. We continue to problem-solve the issue and discount things we know aren’t the issue based on those tests.

Despite the lateness in the day, many continue to work while others take off to get rest so they can return early the following day to get a fresh start and relieve those who will work overnight.

By Tuesday morning, we have a better understanding of things. We know we’re sending more messages to clients about quests than usual, although later discoveries will reveal this isn’t causing problems. A new file storage API we’re using is hitting our file storage harder than usual. Some new code added for quest givers to beckon players seems slower than it should be. The service is taking a very long time to send clients all the data changes made in hotfixes. Reports are coming in that the players who have gotten to the Dragon Isles playing have started experiencing extreme lag.

Mid-Tuesday morning a coincidence happens: digging deep into the new beckon code we find hooks for the new encryption system. We start looking at the question from the other side —could the encryption system being slow explain these and other issues we’re seeing? As it turns out, yes it can. The encryption system being slow explains the hotfix problem, the file storage problem, and the lag players are experiencing. With the source identified, the author of the relevant part of the system was able to identify the error and make the needed correction.

Pushing a fix to code used across so many services isn’t like flipping a switch, and new binaries must be pushed out and turned on. We must slowly move players from the old simulations to new ones for the correction to be picked up. In fact, at one point we try to move players too quickly and cause another part of the service to suffer. Some of the affected binaries cannot be corrected without a service restart, which we delay until the fewest players are online to not disrupt players who were in the game. By Wednesday, the fix was completely out and service stability dramatically improved.

While it took some effort to identify the issue and get it fixed, our team was incredibly vigilant in investigating the issue and getting it corrected as quickly as possible. Good software engineering isn’t about never making mistakes; it’s about minimizing the chances of making them, finding them quickly when they happen, having the tools to get in the fixes right away…

…and having an amazing team to come together to make it all happen.

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—The World of Warcraft Engineering Team

Lights, camera, and even more action! The WoW Variety Show is back for Dragonflight and gearing up for an even bigger 2-day event broadcasting December 10–11 live on YouTube and Twitch!

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WoW Variety Show: Take Flight

On December 10, a combination of Warcraft Celebrity and Community Contestants will compete in three activities: a leveling competition through the Forbidden Reach, a Dragonriding relay, and a Dragon Isles expedition race.

We’re also weaving in extra fun with two brand-new backstage activities: Fast-Draw Duel and Toy Hunt!

Then, on December 11, more celebrity contestants and special guests from MDI & AWC will race through the Dragonflight Season 1 Dungeons and Arenas to show off the new expansion!

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Details

• Venue: Live Servers in Europe and the Americas
  
• Date: December 10–11
  
• Broadcast Start Time: 10:00 am PST / 7:00 pm CEST
  
• Format: Seven activities during the show
  
• December 10: Leveling, Dragonriding Relay, Dragon Isles Expedition, Fast-Draw Duel, Toy Hunt.
  
• December 11: Dragonflight Season 1 Mythic+ and Arena Showcase
  
• Stream Location: YouTube.com/Warcraft and Twitch.tv/Warcraft

The WoW Variety Show goes live with your hosts, Taliesin and Evitel, and a full lineup of celebrity guests and contestants.

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Stay Connected

Tune in this weekend to YouTube.com/Warcraft and Twitch.tv/Warcraft and follow along for more updates on the WoW Esports Twitter.

Good luck and have fun!

Black Market Auction House

• Fixed an issue where players at max level could not use the Black Market Auction House.

Classes

• Hunter
  
  • Fixed an issue where Sentinel Owl would remove Rogues from Stealth.
    
• Monk
  
  • Windwalker
    
    • Fixed an issue where Transfer the Power was gaining multiple stacks from a single Rising Sun Kick.
      
• Paladin
  
  • Fixed an issue where Seal of the Crusader was increasing all Holy damage taken by the target instead of just the caster's Holy damage.
    
• Priest
  
  • Holy
    
    • Fixed an issue causing Answered Prayers to not be removed when extending Apotheosis.
      
• Rogue
  
  • Subtlety
    
    • Secret Technique can now correctly trigger Alacrity.
      
• Shaman
  
  • Enhancement
    
    • Fixed an issue causing Maelstrom Weapon to not stack past 8 stacks with Raging Maelstrom.
      

Creatures and NPCs

• Fixed the positions of several enemies in the Fetid Encampment so that they are no longer blocked by the environment.

Dungeons and Raids

• Ruby Life Pools
  
  • Kyrakka and Erkhart Stormvein
    
    • Fixed an issue where Kyrakka could attack unintended targets when she lands.
      
    • Fixed an issue that could prevent Flaming Embers from correctly inflicting damage.
      
• Shrine of the Storm
  
  • Tidesage Council
    
    • Multiple adjustments were made to Slicing Blast on Normal difficulty to require fewer interrupts from players still in the leveling process.
      
• Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr
  
  • Fixed an issue that was preventing Death Knights from returning to the dungeon using Death Gate.
    

Items and Rewards

• The Bottomless Reliquary Satchel trinket now provides primary stats.
  
• Greater Obsidian Key will no longer vanish upon leaving the Obsidian Citadel.
  
• Fixed an issue where Waking Earth and Waking Fire were unable to be used when spawned outside the Waking Shores.
  
• Increased affected area of Tome of Unstable Power to 8 yards (was 5).
  
• Fixed an issue where the Darkmoon Deck: Dance was removing players' shapeshift.
  
• Fixed an issue where Missingway Hand Cannon was incorrectly categorized as a bow.

Pet Battles

• Fixed an issue where the Snowclaw Cub could not be summoned from the Pet Journal.

Player versus Player

• Classes
  
  • Druid
    
    • Guardian
      
      • Den Mother (PvP Talent) now affects raid and party members.
        
• Items
  
  • Assembly Guardian's Ring absorption reduced by 60% in PvP combat.
    
  • Assembly Scholar's Loop damage reduced by 60% in PvP combat.
    
  • Assembly Preserver's Band heal reduced by 60% in PvP combat.
    

Quests

• The Azure Span
  
  • Fixed an issue where the Artifact Locator would remain after completing "Can't Have These."
    
• Dragonflight Campaign
  
  • Fixed an issue causing "Renown of Dragon Isles" and "Open Orientation" to not be available to alts who have not completed the Thaldrazus storyline, preventing them from completing the endgame campaign.
    
• Jewelcrafting
  
  • Mundane Gems now correctly drop from Djaradin enemies during "Mundane Gems, I Think Not!"
    
• Obsidian Citadel
  
  • Fixed an issue where Osoria's Assistance would remain in player's inventory after completing "Hands-Off Operation."
    
• Ohn'ahran Plains
  
  • Fixed an issue with "Second Challenge of Tyr: Might" where the second objective incorrectly directed players to speak with the Projection of Tyr and has been corrected to the Maiden of Inspiration.
    
• Thaldraszus
  
  • World Quests
    
    • Fixed an issue where freeing Imprisoned Travelers during "Rebel Concerns" was not correctly providing credit.
      
    • Fixed an issue with "Hydro Tuskarr" where switching watershoes caused the extra action button to disappear.
      
    • Fixed the visual for Watergliders and Waterwalkers when they are equipped during "Hydro Tuskarr."
      
    • Fixed an issue where the Sneaky Youngster could be interacted with multiple times during "Hide and Seek."
      
• The Waking Shores
  
  • The amount of Impressive Dragon Skulls required to complete Tarjin's Tale reduced to 5 (was 25).
    

Reputation

• Iskaara Tuskarr
  
  • Map icons for the Community Feast should now display for eligible alts.
    
• Valdrakken Accord
  
  • Players who have reached renown rank 26 or higher with Valdrakken Accord will now unlock armor for all four dragonriding drakes when they enter Thaldraszus.