Watching Blizzard: Good news, everyone!

Hello, my Blizzard-watching family and friends. As you may have noticed, we are trying to grow our team, so if you are get hype about Blizzard games I encourage you to apply! Warning: must be able to tolerate Mitch and Rachelle’s ongoing Priest war.

But enough about us, because there’s news to talk about. We had a Q&A with Ion today which dropped a few Battle for Azeroth tidbits, a bit of beta news, and Rossi continuing to talk about Diablo because people keep reading him talking about Diablo. Let’s get to it.

And also bad news, particularly for transmog fans…

• Your Artifact appearances will be tied to your specialization.
• There’s a ray of sunshine for some classes, though, because you will be able to transmog a spec-appropriate Artifact appearance over any type of weapon. So a Holydin with a sword and shield could transmog to the Silver Hand and wield a giant hammer instead. That’s pretty great for me, but of more modest value to a lot of other classes.

War Mode will be here soon

• In 8.0, PVP servers are going away and you can toggle War Mode on or off when you want to jump into world PVP.
• And even if you aren’t a PVP fan, it may not be a bad way to level come Battle for Azeroth since it offers an XP boost and you’re doing leveling in a faction-specific zone.

There will be no gear swapping in Mythic+

• It’s not a bug: on the Battle for Azeroth beta, you can’t swap gear once you’ve started a Mythic+ run. Adam doesn’t see the problem, I think it will discourage experimenting with gear and builds, and Mitch is currently writing a post he’s titling “Removing gear swapping from Mythic+ is stupid, and Blizzard’s justifications are bad.” (Whether it goes live with that title is to be seen, however.)

Also from today’s Q&A…

• Ion talked a bit about the buffs each class will bring to the raid. While none of it was new (except for his particular take on it), here’s a rundown of the buffs everyone is getting if you hadn’t kept up.

Ready for Diablo Season 14? 

• It starts on the 15th (which is either today or tomorrow, depending on your time zone), so if you haven’t decided what to play, Rossi has a rundown.
• Or you could just roll a Barbarian. That’s good too.

And that’s all for now! Until next time, this is Liz, signing out.