Tag: Blizzard Entertainment

WoW unveils 8 new hero tree previews before The War Within, one of which makes you 5% taller than everybody else at all times

One of the marquee features of World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion The War Within is its hero talent trees, an extra layer of icing to Dragonflight’s talent rework cake. They’re flavourful, themed additions to your core abilities that are meant to be “an evergreen form of character progression”.  Blizzard’s been harvesting feedback in the run-up […]

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Diablo 4 sorcerer build vomits up so many fireballs you need the minimap to see where you’re going

Sorcerers are Diablo 4’s ultimate chameleons with the number of builds they have capable of crushing the RPG’s upcoming leaderboards. Last time, it was a lightning build that was so fast it made the game a slideshow, and now it’s a build that fills your screen with bouncy fireballs. Diablo 4 streamer Rob2628 is back […]

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Conversations from the Dice Awards green room

Last week, the luminaries of the game industry accepted awards on stage at the Dice Awards event in Las Vegas before hundreds of their peers. The message from Larian Studios, which made the Game of the Year — Baldur’s Gate 3 — was particularly appropriate amid the opulence of the event. “Many, many people were […]

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Overwatch fans call for boycott and recast after Pharah voice actor calls to ‘free Palestine from Hamas’

Overwatch fans are calling for the recasting of Pharah—one of the game’s lineup of DPS heroes—following comments on the current situation in Israel and Palestine made by her voice actor, Jen Cohn, in a TikTok and YouTube livestream. In response to viewers commenting “free Palestine” in the chat of one of her Ask Bird Mom […]

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DPS heroes rule Overwatch 2 now, but Blizzard isn’t ready to nerf their controversial new ability quite yet

Play a single match of Overwatch 2’s newest season and you’ll know immediately just how powerful DPS are now. Their new role passive reduces the healing their targets receive, which has had a huge impact on how a typical Overwatch team fight plays out. Support and tanks get shredded and the game’s meta has started […]

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The server tech that saved WoW 10 years ago is causing problems for Classic’s Season of Discovery, dev reveals: ‘a layer is actually just sharding with a lot of sticky tape’

The second season of WoW classic’s Season of Discovery (SoD) is live—and the layers are acting up again, this time in Stranglethorn Vale (STV). For the uninitiated, this season brings Blood Moons to STV: 30-minute PvP brawls that tick around every three hours. The main issue? The bouncers at the door aren’t great at their […]

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A group of Diablo 4 masterminds made a sorcerer build that zooms through dungeons in under 2 minutes

With Diablo 4’s leaderboards update on the horizon, players are brainstorming what kind of builds will go the fastest. A group of expert build crafters might already have the answer: a sorcerer build that teleports through dungeons so fast that it barely looks like you’re playing Diablo anymore. Diablo 4 streamer Rob2628, along with sorcerer […]

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If you’re wondering why Diablo 4 has a horse for sale with $65 of premium currency stuck to it, let me introduce you to ‘price anchoring’

If you’ve looked at the Diablo 4 store and wondered why you can’t buy something without it being part of a bundle, I regret to inform you that it’s super on purpose. I talked about this earlier in the week, regarding a set of class-locked portal recolours going for $20 (with a mandatory $10 purchase […]

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Diablo 4 dataminer finds out why its most powerful items are impossibly rare and how little Blizzard’s recent fix did to change that

Lothrik, a dataminer who previously made accurate build planners before Diablo 4 was out, has released a sheet of data that supposedly shows the likelihood you’ll find an Über Unique in the wild. Blizzard hasn’t confirmed whether the data is correct, but the numbers line up with D4 Craft’s datamined info from last year. Diablo […]

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‘Aiming is optional now’: Overwatch 2’s bigger bullets divide players as they adjust to Blizzard’s season 9 rework

In Overwatch 2’s newest season, every hero shoots bigger bullets and it’s driving players mad as they watch clips of the most egregious examples. It was hard to visualize just how much Blizzard had increased the size of weapon projectiles in Overwatch 2’s newest season until a bunch of people started firing at a Tracer […]

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The patch Diablo 4 players hoped would fix its worst endgame grind hasn’t fixed its worst endgame grind

Diablo 4’s newest patch could’ve been Blizzard’s solution to an endgame that mostly consists of grinding a single boss for the best loot, but it doesn’t seem like it went far enough. Among a list of bug fixes, patch 1.3.2 brings two changes aimed at making it easier to get Diablo 4’s most powerful items, […]

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World of Warcraft’s lead storyteller quietly left Blizzard last fall: ‘I’ve felt the itch to stretch my creativity in new directions’

The World of Warcraft community discovered almost by accident recently that the lead creator of the game’s stories has quietly left Blizzard. Warcraft narrative director Steve Danuser’s departure wasn’t announced, but rather discovered by fans who noticed an update to his LinkedIn page that sets the end of his Blizzard employment to last November, right […]

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World of Warcraft’s subscription is about to get almost 3,000% more expensive in Argentina—and it’ll ‘only get worse with inflation’

Last month, Argentinian World of Warcraft players found a nasty surprise in their inbox—an email from Blizzard announcing two separate price hikes to their World of Warcraft subscriptions, making the game prohibitively expensive. Firstly, though, some context is in order.  Last November, fellow PC Gamer writer Joshua Wolens covered the explosive increase of Steam prices […]

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Some class-locked portal reskins? That’ll be $20, please—Diablo 4’s hellish microtransactions continue to sting

Microtransactions in fully-priced games are (unfortunately) here to stay for as long as they keep working—that’s a bitter pill I’ve swallowed at this point, though every now and then something comes along to make it sting all over again. As is the case with Diablo 4’s recent “Dark Pathways” pack, which wants you to shell […]

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Blizzard finally has a solution for the unlucky Diablo 4 players with Uber Uniques they don’t want

Hours of grinding for Diablo 4’s rarest and most powerful items, Uber Uniques, won’t guarantee you’ll get the one you actually want. I’m in this situation right now. I’ve killed the boss who drops them almost 100 times and he refuses to give me the one I need. But next week, my bad luck with […]

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Diablo 2 speedrunner effortlessly trolls audience by breezily selling ultra-rare rune it’s taken others 20 years to find

Your wedding day, the birth of a child: life is full of precious moments, but let’s be real, nothing compares to the narcotic thrill of trolling a helpless audience. No one knows that better than Kano, a Diablo 2 Resurrected speedrunner who recently subjected his viewers to emotional whiplash so severe it was probably illegal. […]

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Former Overwatch 2 artist alleges shocking mistreatment by Blizzard management: ‘I spent most of a year stressed out of my mind’

Blizzard’s reputation has taken a pummelling over the last few years. In 2021, horrifying descriptions of the company’s toxic workplace culture spilled onto the Internet, after a lawsuit was filed by California’s Department of Fair Employment regarding “unlawful harassment, discrimination, and retaliation”. Following the lawsuit, Blizzard made extensive promises about how they were going to […]

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Diablo 4’s forgettable XP boost event has me crossing my fingers that its upcoming leaderboards won’t be as dull

Diablo 4’s Lunar New Year event doesn’t feel like an event at all. The promised cosmetic rewards take about an hour to earn and trying to find the XP-boosting Lunar Shrines is harder than trying to find an Uber Unique. It’s as if the event was designed for the Diablo 4 that existed before season […]

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Blizzard reveals a new era of Overwatch 2: Bigger health bars, self-healing, and a reworked Competitive mode

The list of changes coming to Overwatch 2 next week are bigger than anything Blizzard has done since the introduction of 5v5. In some ways, it’s a new era for the hero shooter that has struggled to find its footing in the year since its release. To start, Blizzard is increasing health pools across the […]

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The impact of 16,000 games industry layoffs, in one chart

Blizzard’s Unannounced Survival Game team, laid off in January 2024. Photo via a developer who asked to remain anonymous. (Image credit: Blizzard Survival Game team) The scale of the past year of videogame layoffs is a hard thing to wrap your head around. We’re confronted with more big numbers almost every week: the latest “regrettable” […]

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Blizzard dares its richest World of Warcraft players to pour 70K gold down the drain for a meager achievement

A new achievement tied to World of Warcraft’s annual Valentine’s Day-themed event might be one of the most transparent gold sinks in the MMO’s history. For the next two weeks, players who are carrying around 70,000 gold, can toss it straight into the void for 10 achievement points and the sting of being played. To […]

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Diablo 4’s little robot spider is actually an apex predator who can solo bosses, and it’s about to get even stronger

Diablo 4’s hardest bosses have a new threat and, surprisingly, it’s not a barbarian with a giant hammer. It’s the free robot spider pet that everyone thought was useless before Blizzard dropped an emergency patch to help level it up. Now it’s crushing endgame bosses for billions of damage, and tomorrow it’s going to do […]

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WoW’s experimental ban on ‘GDKP’ raids in Season of Discovery has set the community on fire—here’s why

As announced by Blizzard in its Season of Discovery Phase 2 post, gold dragon kill points (GDKP) raids in World of Warcraft Classic are going the way of the dodo on February 8. The dev team wants to “try things without this type of transaction taking place”—that’s a huge experiment, considering how GDKP raids have […]

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