This week Manny and Joce talk about account wide essences, cloak progression and LFR, the impact of Coronavirus on BlizzCon, and the add-on Corruption Tooltips. All this and more on this week’s For Azeroth!

Account Wide Essences

Community Manager Kaivax, announced that with the realm resets of March 17th. Essence acquisition for alts will become a lot easier. On Monday, items were detailed

  • Players that have earned a Rank 3 Essence will now have the ability to purchase the rank 3 from MOTHER on any alt on that account.
  • Essences are sold for 500
  • Largest amounts come from full clears of Horrific Visions and the weekly chests. (M+//PvP)
  • A new currency, Echoes of Ny’alotha can be earned doing 8.3 content to pay for unlock
  • Each specific Rank 3 Essence must be earned on the account to be available to alts EXCEPT Nazjatar and Mechagon Essences
  • The goal is that you can unlock one Essence a week with little difficulty

Black Empire Assault – 125 Echoes + 2x Lesser Assault – 75 Echoes + Horrific Visions – 150 Echoes for a full clear + 2x Emissary Caches – 50 Echoes = 525

The Corruption Spreads

Further adjustments are coming to corrupted gear but this time targeting acquisition of the corruption. Gear from Horrific Visions will now always come with a corruption effect.

N’Zoth destroys LFR

Last Tuesday March 10th, the final LFR wing was released to the public and it was absolute chaos.

  • Engaging N’Zoth without the legendary cloak equipped will cause your character to be automatically mind controlled.
  • Players were finding half their team suddenly turning against them on pull and draining the sanity of their peers
  • Blizzard quickly hotfixed a new requirement: in order to queue into wing 4 you must have earned Ashjra’kamas, Shroud of Resolve. However, this has not stopped some players who are intentionally trolling.
  • March 11th Hotfixes

Malefic Cores

Next week marks the point where players will be able to reach rank 15, the max rank, with their cloak. Beyond rank 15, progress can continue by augmenting the corruption resistance with Malefic Cores.

  • Beginning the week of March 24th, Malefic Cores applied to rank 15 cloaks will increase Corruption Resistance by 3.
  • These can be obtained by defeating N’Zoth the Corruptor on Normal or higher difficulty or 5 chesting a Horrific Vision.
  • If you are at the cutting edge of progression you get 1 Malefic Core from the first of these activities you complete each week.
  • If you are trying to catch up you can complete both activities each week for two cores until you reach the cap.
  • Malefic Core Blue Post

BlizzCon 2020

As we now are mid way through March, people have been wondering about the lack of information regarding BlizzCon. Uncertainty which has only been compounded with precautions and outright cancellations many event organizers are taking in light of recent events. A Reddit thread has also pointed out that every weekend in Nov already has an event for the Anaheim Convention Center which traditionally hosts BlizzCon each year. 

COVID-19 and Blizzard 

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, World of Warcraft is not untouched. Blizzard announced both it’s Irvine and Austin offices have rolled out Work-From-Home policies. Other offices are said to be following the direction of their local government.

Conversely, researchers interviewed in a PC Gamer Article are talking about how their time studying World of Warcraft is helping them to understand aspects of COVID-19. 

Corruption Tooltips

Corruption Tooltips is a lightweight add-on that includes the name and rank of any item with corruption. Which helps easily identify what corruption is on your gear.