It’s always a super-comforting happenstance when a game studio decides that it wants to wildly monkey with the current MMO to prepare for an upcoming expansion. That’s the situation that World of Warcraft raiders are heading into with Season 4, as Blizzard announced that it will be making some big changes with raid rewards as a testbed for Dragonflight.
“Season 4 presents a unique opportunity for us to try some experimental changes that might be too volatile for a regular season, but could still provide us with valuable data and feedback we can use to improve the game long-term,” the studio said.
So what are these changes? For starters, Blizzard will be introducing a vendor who will sell gear from Shadowlands raids for a special currency that can only be attained three times during the whole season. “This system initially came about to mitigate the rotational nature of Season 4’s raids,” the studio explained.
Another big change is that by participating in heroic or mythic difficulties, players will gain shards to upgrade any gear with the new Fated tag even if they don’t finish the whole instance. “We hope that this creates more value for simply killing bosses with your group, while also allowing those who dip their toes into higher difficulty,” said Blizzard.
