Update 7.4, “Chains in the Dark,” is now out in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

In this guide, I’m going to give you some spoiler-free steps on how to take a look at all the new content in the game. If you want to have a better gaming experience in this new content, it is very necessary to prepare sufficient SWTOR Credits!

New Story Continuation: Chains In The Dark

The biggest addition to the game in this update is a continuation of the main storyline.

You can start the “Chains in the Dark” storyline once you have completed all previous storylines, including Ruhnuk and Voss Interpreter’s Retreat.

New Story Area: Kessan’s Landing On Ord Mantell

Once you have, you’ll automatically get a quest called “Road to Nowhere” in your quest tracker.

You can launch it, which will eventually lead you to the new area on Ord Mantell called Kessan’s Landing. This is the main story, but there are some other stories and quests to pick up.

The first is Lane Vizla and Basilisk Droid story continuation. To get it, start the “Road to Nowhere” quest. The next time you log off your character and log back in, you’ll automatically be granted a quest called “Eyes on the Prize” that you can start by answering your holocom.

The second is the Ord Mantell dailies. You can pick these up after you’ve completed the main quest from the terminal in Kessan’s Landing, near where you load in. These are the repeatable quests tied to the Kessan’s Landing reputation track and rewards.

Lastly, there’s a secret quest nicknamed the “Geothermal Shielding” questline. This quest, properly called “Schematic Aspirations,” has a bunch of different quests, is well-hidden, and is picked up at the very south of the Kessan’s Landing city from a large terminal in the Runoff Control building. You do not have to complete or even start the main quest to do the Geothermal Quest. It will eventually lead you to a super hidden “Lava Problems” quest, and you need to complete the Geothermal Shielding Quest before starting Lava Problems.

Once you’ve wrapped up the main story, you might want to explore Kessan’s Landing a little more. There’s a whole hidden questline related to the Geothermal Shielding, a new Datacron, a handful of hidden achievements, and so on. And working on the reputation track for Kessan’s Landing by doing the dailies will grant you access to the reputation vendor, which includes a new armor set, a new mount, a new Nexu pet, as well as a bunch of decorations.

New World Boss

Lastly, there’s a new world boss that has a chance to drop a rare mount walking around in the north.

If you’re a newer player and you don’t care at all about all this endgame stuff, if you already finished the story, there has been some cool new stuff added for you, too.

Cinematic Lighting

The biggest one that players have been talking about is the new cinematic lighting, which is across all of the game’s cutscenes.

This changes the way that cutscenes look compared to before the update, with improved lighting. So, if things look a little different, you know why.

They also kind of overhauled the way some of the starter planets work. The most noticeable is on Korriban.

Gearing Changes

Circling back to those level 80 players, let’s talk about gear in this update.

The way that you gear up has changed quite a bit, or rather, new easier options have been introduced, whether you’re a solo player or a group player. But the treadmill to gear up has gotten longer as now item rating for almost all items goes all the way up to 344.

So, the good news for gearing is that all players, including solo or casual players, now have the ability to earn gear going all the way up to item rating 344, which is way overkill for any type of content they’re going to play. This is because you can now exchange currencies you get from different types of content for the currency you can use to purchase Rakata gear, which is the best in the game.

The downside is that is a long set of steps to take. Good luck out there to everyone trying to get their endgame gear to 344.

However, one nice little update that will make you stronger without making you go crazy is that Hyde and Zeek, the vendors that sell modifications, now go all the way up to 340.

So, if you’re already familiar with how Hyde and Zeek works, go ahead and upgrade what enhancements and mods they have available to you. And don’t forget, you can now upgrade your legendary implants to item rating 340.

GTN Overhaul

Another big change that affects all players, new and old, is the GTN overhaul.

The GTN is the player-run market where players can sell and buy items from other players. The most obvious change is that the way you search for items has changed. You’ll notice instead of seeing a whole bunch of different listings for one item, they’ll all be condensed into a singular listing. And you can see how many are for sale total, and you don’t know who’s selling them. So there, you just kind of see the lowest price there.

When you buy an item, you can also claim it straight from the GTN. Behind the scenes, when you’re selling, there is a new fee just to list an item that is non-refundable, as well as the way taxes are applied to items is a bit different. These changes are part of the economic initiative that developers started about a year or so ago to combat inflation.

This GTN overhaul seems to kind of still be a work in progress, so feel free to give feedback to the developers on the forums.

Events

Now let’s talk about what’s coming up in the future. There’s a bunch of events that are going to be tied to update 7.4 that are coming up.

First off is the limited time Life Day Event that only comes once a year. That’ll be starting on December 12th and running until January 9th next year. Life Day this year will have a new reward in the form of an armor set.

Some of the normal events will be running, for example, Swoop Event starts December 12th, Rakghoul Event starts December 26th, PvP Season 4 is running until January 29th, and Galactic Season 5 is running to February 24th.

The event that players were most excited about and looking forward to being announced is the Double XP Event, and that will be taking place near the end of the year, starting on December 24th, lasting 2 weeks until January 4th.

So, if you want to level up super fast, that’ll be the time to do it. Not to mention, it gives you bonus Valor for those of you PVPing.

Cartel Market

In addition to all of those, they also added some new Cartel Market items to the game.

They were very proudly showing off the new color, Specularity Tech and new Metallic & Pearlescent Dyes when they announced this update. However, we only recently learned how they were going to be selling them and what they would cost.

First off, all dyes included are single-use and they’re not available in collections. The developers decided to use a fear of missing out tactic to sell these dyes and said they will only be listing them for direct sale for a limited time and will be rotating them out weekly.

As of the time now, the Metallic Black and Matte Black and its reverse dyes are each for sale for 1,750 Cartel Coins, making them the most expensive dye on the Cartel Market. The Chrome White and Metallic Gold and its reverse are also available in a bundle for 2,500 CC.

Not only are they incredibly expensive, they also have this kind of timer on them. So, you have to decide whether you want to buy them or not because the only way to get them later, they said, would be from Cartel Packs, the ultimate packs, or from the GTN at really, really high prices as it seems they’ll be in very high demand.

In addition, they’ve also been showing off and will be releasing some other more normal Cartel Market items. For example, the new Suppression Trooper’s armor set, which I think is 2,200 Cartel Coins, and the new starm toy that’s 800 Cartel Coins. So, if you’re waiting for the Sabine Wren-style armor set and the Defiant Maverick armor set, just keep your eyes open for the Cartel Market.

They also announced a whole bunch of daily sales rotating each day, and most importantly, a collections-wide unlock sale starting on December 20th.

In Elden Ring, you’re going to find many different items. But the Deathroot item is something that you are going to need for not only a questline, but also to get some really great rewards in Elden Ring.

So, here, I will show you where all 9 of these Deathroots are located in Elden Ring. Also, I will take you through the questline that’s going to start here at the Bestial Sanctum.

If you want this process to go smoothly, you'd better use Elden Ring Runes to buy some good weapons and armor to improve yourself!

Undead Mariner 1

But before we get to the Bestial Sanctum, let’s go ahead and gather all of the Deathroots within Limgrave and Liurnia.

Your first Deathroot is going to be found in Summonwater Village. You can start at the Summonwater Village Outskirts Site of Grace, and you can run into the village. There’s going to be a Tibia Mariner there. You need to kill him and grab the first Deathroot.

Deathtouched Catacombs

Staying in Limgrave, you’re going to Deathtouched Catacombs.

Head to the Deathtouched Catacombs and you’re going to go through the entire dungeon in order to kill the end boss. You will fight a Black Knife Assassin for the boss of this dungeon.

But after you defeat the boss, there’s a chest there. Open it up and that’s going to be your second Deathroot.

Undead Mariner 2

At this point, we’re going to move into Liurnia of the Lakes.

Right on the east side on the map, there’s going to be another Mariner. All you need to do for the Deathroot is to kill him and grab his Deathroot from him.

Black Knife Catacombs

At this point, you’re going to continue north all the way up until the Black Knife Catacombs.

You want to make your way through that dungeon all the way until the boss room. At the end, you will fight a Cemetery Shade with a bunch of skeletons.

But after you kill him, you will have access to the chest in the middle of the room. Grab that chest and there is going to be your Deathroot.

Guraanq Questline Check In

At this point, we’re going to go visit Guraanq, possibly for a second time, depending on if you started this questline or not already. I will assume that you have. But if you have not, you need to head here to the Third Church of Marika.

Right behind it is going to be a portal that will drop you off right here in front of the Bestial Sanctum. Gurranq Beast Clergyman is going to be there and you need to give him all the Deathroots you have received so far.

You should have 4 at this point, and that will net you the Ash of War:Beast's Roar, Bestial Vitality, Bestial Sling, the Clawmark Seal, and the Beast Eye (which is going to allow you to detect when other Deathroots are in the area).

There is something to take note of here within Guraanq’s questline, because after you give him the 4 Deathroots, the next time you come back to him, he is going to try to attack you because he’s gone mad. You need to get him down to half health and then he will calm down. You need to rest at the Site of Grace and then give him the rest of your Deathroots in order to complete the questline.

Undead Mariner 3

The next area in the Lands Between you want to venture to is the Wyndham Ruins in Altus Plateau.

There’s going to be a Mariner there who you need to kill, and he is going to drop for you your next Deathroot.

However, in order to get to Altus Plateau, you need to get two separate pieces of a medallion - Dectus Medallion (Left) & Dectus Medallion (Right). The first of which is going to be located at Fort Height in Limgrave, and the second piece is going to be located all the way to the east in Fort Faroth in Caelid.

Once you have both of those medallions, you can go up to the lift and you can get right into Altus Plateau to find this Deathroot.

Gelmir Hero’s Grave

Next up, you’re going to be heading into the Gelmir Hero’s Grave, and you will be following the Chariot all the way down the lava path until you get to the point on the right where you can jump down a little hole that will take you directly to the boss door.

And after defeating the Red Wolf boss, there’s going to be a chest at the very end of the room, and that is going to hold your next Deathroot.

Also Read: Elden Ring: How To Find All 13 Ancient Dragon Smithing Stones?

Undead Mariner 4

Next up, we are going to head north to the Mountaintops of the Giants, where there is yet another Mariner who you need to kill in order to get the next Deathroot.

Take out the skulls rolling around, dispose of the Mariner, and that Deathroot will be yours.

Giants’ Mountaintop Catacombs

You’re now going to head to the Giant’s Mountaintop Catacombs, where you need to make your way through that entire dungeon to get to the end boss fight. It can be a little tricky to get through, but if you feel like you’re going insane, you’re going in the right direction.

Destroy the Ulcerated Tree Spirit at the end of this dungeon, and in a chest at the end of the Boss Arena is going to be your second to last Deathroot.

Hidden Haligtree Path

At this point, we’re going to need to pick up our very last Deathroot, which is located in the Hidden Path to the Haligtree.

Now, there is a very special way you need to get here. You’re going to need the entire Secret Medallion. The first half is going to be located in the Liurnia of the Lakes, given to you by Old Albus, and the second portion of the medallion is going to be located in Castle Sol, on the Mountaintops of the Giants.

After you defeat the boss, continue running through that area and take the lift up, and you will be able to grab this medallion at this location.

You’re then going to take it back to the Grand Lift of Rold, go up to the lift, and it will give you a second option to lift the Secret Medallion, and then you can access this area.

Now that you have access to the Hidden Path to the Haligtree, you’re going to see that your Beast Eye is going to quiver. So, I want you to follow the path (the invisible pathways) until you get to the portion where you can jump off and fight one of the very large Land Octopus.

Right behind that octopus is going to be a lever, which is going to open the boss door. Dispose of the octopus, pull the lever, turn around, and follow the path all the way until you see the golden boss fog. You will not miss it because it’s going to be directly in front of you.

But before you fight this boss, take off your weapons, because it’s going to be a Stray Mimic Tear, and whatever you have equipped, it will also have equipped. So, it can be either as easy or as hard as you want it to be.

After defeating the Stray Mimic Tear, there is a chest in the back of the room. Open that chest and you will receive your very last and ninth Deathroot.

Finish Guraanq Questline

At this point, we’re going to tie up loose ends with Guraanq, so you’re going to head back to the Bestial Sanctum in Caelid, and you’re going to approach him to give him your final remaining 5 Deathroots.

After you give him the 5 remaining Deathroots, you are going to get some really cool dialogue from Guraanq, and then you are also going to be rewarded with a few different Elden Ring Items.

And just a side note here, you can also return every single Deathroot as you get it.

And after you do his entire questline, you will receive an Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone, Gurranq’s Beast Claw, the Beastclaw Greathammer, the Stone of Gurranq, and the Beast Claw Incantation.

That is going to be the entirety of Guraanq’s questline, as well as all 9 Deathroot locations.

BizzCon launched to exciting fanfare, moderate disappointment, some controversy, but overall satisfaction. And in that controversy, we have Season of Discovery.

Season of Discovery is Blizzard’s take on Classic Plus. It has completely changed how classic will be played, and what at its core is that it is still Classic WoW. The changes are staggering and amazing.

By the way, if you want to be far ahead of other players in WoW Classic SOD, having enough WoW Classic SOD Gold must be the key to your victory!

Quick Summary Of Content

The most exciting change of Season of Discovery is none other than the Rune Engraving system.

It’s a new class augmentation, where by exploring the world, doing quests, killing bosses, or whatnot, you are able to equip spells, abilities, some item effects, some abilities from other classes, some racial abilities, and some enchantment directly onto your armor, and acquire those passives or abilities.

When we start the game, the level cap is only 1 to 25, and we only have access to three armor slots: chest, legs, and hands. Whilst I will dive into runes for all classes later in this guide, some noticeable runes are Crusader Strike for Paladin and Wild Strikes for Druids.

Now, these two abilities are quite incredibly powerful whilst they alone don’t change the game. Considering that you can get three abilities like this at this power, at level 25 is staggering. This doesn’t even account for reaching max level and having the ability to unlock over 10 abilities, depending on if you can equip runes on weapons, shields, and trinkets.

But because discoveries are secret, and no one knows where they are. You’re probably saying it’ll be datamined. There’ll be 50 YouTube videos and 20 icyvein guides before Season of Discovery even launches. And whilst typically you’d be right, in this case, you’re wrong. Because one of the best decisions that Blizzard has ever made is the following chain: there is no public beta, alpha, or anything.

Every single person is going in blind. The only knowledge we have of the game is what they’ve said to us during BlizzCon, and the people that actually got to play the BlizzCon demo for the 10-man raid Blackfathom Deeps.

Another facet to the game is the following. There are now new tanks and healer combinations. The meta has been shifted, and many classes can do things that they couldn’t do before, like Shaman, Warlock, and Rogue tanking. Also, Paladin is fixed and can properly tank now......

Level Banded Content Phases

Now that you know what runes are, and you learn what the level cap at the start of Season of Discovery is, you’re probably asking, what does that mean?

It’s a new system that Blizzard has designed, called Level Banded Content Phases. And what this means is that Phase 1 of Season of Discovery is capped at level 25, and after a period of a few weeks, it will increase to level 40, the cap for Phase 2.

The phases are as follows, based on Blizzard purposefully leaking the next three 10-man raids, which are: Gnomeregan, Scarlet Monastery, and Karazhan Crypts after Blackfathom Deeps.

Now, though, based on the dev interviews, here we have the following phase bands. Phase 1 being Blackfathom Deeps at a level cap of 25. Phase 2 being Gnomeregan at a level cap of 40. Phase 3 being Scarlet Monastery at a level cap of 50. And Phase 4 being Karazhan Crypts at a level cap of 60.

Whilst Blizzard didn’t announce a Phase 5, I wouldn’t be surprised if Phase 5 was 40-man raids being redone. There could be a Phase 5, which starts at level 60 with a completely new 40-man dungeon raid, perhaps Dire Maul. And then Phase 6 is Molten Core remastered and onwards.

So, with those phases explained, why did Blizzard choose Phase 1 being level 25? Blizzard said that the feedback during the classic betas back in 2019 was that people enjoyed it and it was a fun time rediscovering, exploring and doing things at the level 25 cap back then. So, they chose their cap based on that, especially since it allowed them to redo and reuse old content, especially low-level content that people wouldn’t visit again otherwise.

Another major reason is since phases last a few weeks, assume between 4 to 10 weeks per phase, it means you’ll never be too far behind as a new player or someone with IRL responsibilities. You can always jump back, jump back out, play other games, not feel pressured or compelled to grind to max level immediately. You’ll have plenty of time to do that.

And the final reason is that they add exciting, unique and new content with each level banded content phase: new items, new quests, new NPCs and mobs, new discoveries and world quest, new PVP and more. And they can do this over the course of a year or two.

The other main reason is that it allows them to treat each phase as a mini beta within itself, testing what works, is overpowered, is meta, isn’t meta and allowing them to give breathing room to make each consecutive phase better and better.

With level banded content phases covered, let’s talk about the last bonus of the system. That is a new mechanic. There will be a massive XP boost to previous phases, allowing you to catch up faster or level up alt faster with every new phase. I don’t know what this XP boost will be, but I assume it’s 2x experience, maybe even as high as 5x experience. We’ll have to wait and see on that front.

Also Read: WoW Classic SOD: How Forced Faction Balance Affects The Season Of Discovery In Hidden Ways?

Endgame Content

Now that we know we’re stock at level 25 for 4 weeks minimum, up to perhaps as long as 12 weeks, what is the endgame for such a low level?

As I said earlier, there are now new 10-man raids, taking all dungeons and remixing them into raid content. And the first of these level-up raids is Blackfathom Deeps. They’ll be taking familiar settings and characters, giving them new mechanics, changing the quest around these dungeons and making it feel like a legitimate raid. Blizzard’s goal here was to make the world feel more alive, tempered and past, allowing us to take an Azeroth for all its glory and prestige.

Since Blackfathom Deeps got a full-on redesign, let’s dive into this exciting and wildly new content. Blackfathom Deeps is an ancient elven ruin with evil stirring within, familiar but mysterious. Most of you probably don’t even remember the bosses there. But even if you do, they are now completely different.

With a 3-day lockout, much like Zul’Gurub, we’re going to have plenty of time to master this level-up raid and figure out everything there is in there and every little secret. And there are plenty of secrets in Blackfathom Deeps, for example, the secret of the Black Feather Artisan, which sounds like an incredible crafting recipe skill set, as well as the mysterious new world buff Boon of Black Fathom.

And now, let’s dive into the bosses. BFD has seven new bosses, all fully reimagined encounters, and all quests and loot for BFD have been completely remastered and remade. You now have level 25 loot being better than perhaps even level 40 classic loot. Don’t quote me on that, as I don’t have a full item list, but what we did see is pretty incredible, since this is essentially level 25 raid loot and not dungeon loot.

But onto our first boss, who is Baron Aquanis, who is no longer a quest NPC and is now the first raid boss. He’s empowered by Fathom Stones, which have to be disabled, as well as jumping puzzles and a very obnoxious knockback. This knockback throws you off the platform, during which you have to jump puzzle your way back up, only for the ability to be off cooldown, so he knocks you down again. Kind of annoying as far as combat mechanics go, but it’s very interesting, nonetheless.

Then, we have Ghamoo-ra, now the second boss of the raid instead of the first of the dungeon. And he’s protected by a magical barrier, which we have to break through to be able to burn down the giant turtle.

The third boss is Lady Sarevess, a Naga Sea Witch with a retinue of Blackfathom Elite, and we have to turn her own spells against her to stop her from overwhelming us with unending adds.

The next four bosses we have almost no information about, but here they are: Gahz’rilla, the Void Murloc, followed by Lorgus Jett, and then Twilight Lord Kelris, before finally we confront Aku’mai, the Voidscale Hydra.

And that summarizes Blackfathom Deeps. I’m beyond excited to dive into this new content and see just how fun and intuitive it really feels.

Rune Breakdown

Next, I would cover runes in more depth.

As I already said, they’re treating each phase almost as if it’s a beta in of itself, which means runes will only get progressively more wild and interesting, seeing how players lean into them and how the class balance turns out.

Since Rune Engravings can be found all over the world, from quests, dungeons, raids, bosses, PvP, and who knows what else, I can’t cover every rune at the moment, just those that we know of.

At level 25, we only have access to chest, legs, and hands. Runes are permanent essentially a new talent system, which can be applied and removed at will, with no limitations or costs. You simply have to be out of combat to apply and unapply runes. The greatest benefit that runes provide to the game, though, is the simple fact that formerly faction-unique bonuses, buffs, and racials are now available for certain classes, removing that faction buffer. They are also making talent respecs cost far less, but they didn’t tell us how much less as of now.

Every class has its own runes. There is an insane amount of new abilities for player to choose. But it’s going to be a great few weeks as everyone attempts to figure out the new meta, only for the next phase to come out and completely invalidate every single guide that people write. This is good for creativity, exploration and fun. It’s terrible for min-maxes and meta chases, since your meta will never be meta for more than a few weeks or months at best.

Class Design Goals

This all ties neatly into the fact that Blizzard wants to shake up the meta with Season of Discovery, changing the concept of metas and data mining.

Meta in Season of Discovery will never be consistent or stable and thus don’t chase metas. Otherwise, expect to level a new character in every phase and completely learn a new class every phase for the most OP and broken character of that phase. Some of you will do that, that’s for sure, though.

Nonetheless, Blizzard wants to give each class something to brag about. They want to stick with what’s popular in the sense of abilities, item effects and more. Rather than just give random or terrible runes to people, they want to let people let loose and have fun.

Some of the runes will be new and unique spells never seen before. Some will be from future expansions, but they did say that they want to stay true to classic overall and not introduce anything too modern. So don’t expect spells from beyond WOTLK Classic or maybe even Cataclysm. They want to focus on class fantasy and make sure every class feels true to its fantasy.

New PvP Content

Finally, we move on to PvP, the lifeblood of WoW for some people. And what they’ve done cooked up for PvP is phenomenal and amazing.

Allow me to introduce you to Ashenvale, which lore-wise is a hot spot of war between the Alliance and the Horde since the days of Warcraft 3. And now it truly is a war between the Alliance and the Horde, not just in quest or Warsong Gulch.

Welcome to the Ashenvale PvP Zone, a massive zone-wide PvP event that will completely change how Ashenvale operates and make it a bloodbath.

On the side of the Alliance, we have the Priestess of the Moon, the leader of the Alliance forces in Ashenvale. On the side of the Horde, we have The Farseer, the leader of the Horde forces in Ashenvale. These two bosses are empowered by numerous other clans, which buff each respective leader. And whichever side can figure out a bug and blitz through into the enemy boss and kill them will get the whole experience nerfed.

Jokes aside, like Alterac Valley, you will have to defeat the numerous camp bosses to make the Priestess or the Farseer a weak enough to be defeated.

And as a special unique feature at level 20, you’ll be able to acquire a mount solely for usage in Ashenvale as a PvP unique mount, so it’s not to make the massive Alterac Valley size battlefield and event take 7 hours to complete.

But unlike Alterac Valley, there is no player cap on an open world PvP event, meaning you and your teammates will be able to group together in a massive 5 FPS 400 MS experience, where you don’t know if your side is winning or losing because there are 800 people in Ashenvale pvping at the same time or layering.

In this guide, we’re going to be going over thrown utility in Dark and Darker and what exactly can affect their damage since I often find people don’t really loot or use these Dark and Darker Items as often as they should when they give such a massive advantage in fights.

Explosive Bottles And Oil Lanterns

Let’s start with the Explosive Bottles and Oil Lanterns, also commonly referenced as Mollies.

Explosive Bottles: Throw an explosive bottle at a target location that will cause a bottle that creates a fiery explosion upon impact, scorching the surrounding area and inflicting area-of-effect (AOE) damage to all within its blast radius. It is lootable. The damage it deals depends on its tier. The higher the tier, the higher the damage it deals.

Oil Lanterns: When in someone’s hand, emits light that illuminates the surrounding area. Additionally, it can be thrown in a similar fashion to an explosive bottle, leaving fire that deals 3 magical damage per second. They can be found in loot chests.

These throwable utility items will deal no impact damage and instead spawn a ground AOE that deals 3 magic damage per second, no matter the Rarity.

Right now, I’m actually not sure what rarity does for Explosive Bottles. It seems like it only affects the sell price to the vendor. The duration and base damage are the same across the board. Anyway, if you want these bottles, be prepared with plenty of Dark and Darker Gold.

Since Explosive Bottles and Oil Lanterns are magic damage. Their damage will increase with Magic Power Bonus, + Additional Magic Damage and + True Magic Damage, all at 50% scaling.

The burn effect or tick damage can stack up to 3 times and randomly appear in the AOE. This is why Explosive Bottles may sometimes seem ineffective and other times very powerful.

Here’s just five ticks at plus 4 magic damage on my Fighter. Of course, the duration is a bit exaggerated here for demonstrational purposes since usually won’t cook for more than 2 or 3 ticks if you just run through them. Still, it’s a decent amount of damage.

Francisca Axes And Throwing Knives

Now, let us look to the Francisca Axes and Throwing Knives, which do a single instance of on-hit physical damage.

Here is a rule: just follow basic weapon damage for most time. So, + Additional Physicial Damage, + True Physical Damage, and any form of physical power will increase the damage from these two utility items at 100% scaling. This is where perk and spell bonuses make things a little crazy.

As not only do they benefit from weapon perks, like the Barbarian’s Axe Specialization, and Executioner for Francisca Axes, they will also benefit from any kind of Applied Damage Buffs, like the Cleric’s Divine Strike and the Wizard’s Ignite.

At full buff, this can cause some absurdly high damage numbers, even with absolutely no gear. For example, I can hit in the high 60s with the Starter Kit Franciscas Axes, which deals only 18 damage at base.

Note, that’s over three times the base damage.

All we need are our two strength skills, our applicable Barbarian perks, and a base gear Cleric to give us Divine Strike and Bless.

You can even throw Ignite on for more damage as it still applies to utility items even though the VFX doesn’t appear.

Another key feature of thrown physical utility is that it has a fairly strong on hit slow, actually very strong on hit slow, as they currently sit at 25% and 20%. These stats are both higher than the long sword and it sounds kind of crazy.

Now, Ironmace has addressed the effectiveness of these two utility items in the past by adding both damage and velocity falloff, making them slightly less effective at longer ranges.

However, an in-game mechanic that people often don’t know about is that you could hold down or charge up your throw over a couple of seconds to bring it up to maximum speed. And it honestly makes a pretty big difference.

One last note on these two thrown utility items is that it will trigger any on hit skills or perks, like the Barbarian’s Achilles Strike and Reckless Attack, the Fighter’s Victory Strike or the Rogue’s Rupture, Weakpoint and Poison Weapon.

Even though it doesn’t show up on the training dummy and yes, they’re not damaging utility items. But throwing torches and lanterns also can be used to apply Achilles Strike and Rupture.

Conclusion

Now, I know this isn’t exactly game-changing knowledge for those who have been playing Dark and Darker for some time, especially those who’ve been around since the early play test and witness firsthand the Francisca Axe is at their peak power.

But the bottom line here is that these items still scale up to be incredibly strong and they’ll give you huge advantages in PVP. They’re definitely worth looting and buying for cheap price since chances are your class is already optimized to deal with high damage with them.

Different Path of Exile players may have different preferences. For example, some people like to create unique characters, others are looking for extra challenges, and some just crave the thrill of intense battles. Therefore, GGG will hold three events in November based on the preferences of different players:

1. Krangled Passives (November 3 - November 10)
2. Blast From The Past (November 10 - November 17)
3. Shifting Stones (November 17- November 24)

Today, we’re diving into the intricate world of one of the special events, the Krangled Passives.

About Krangled Passives Event

Krangled Passives is the first event.

In this event, the passive skill tree and all ascendancy trees are jumbled. Minor passive skills, notable keystones, minor ascendancy skills, and major ascendancy skills have been internally scrambled within those categories. This means that a notable passive skill remains a notable passive skill, but it’s now randomly assigned.

Additionally, all players will be working with identical skill trees, but the Scion character class is not accessible in this event. The GGG team has introduced a range of additional POE Items for players based on their level achievements.

The rewards become increasingly valuable as your character’s level rises. The top three players overall will receive a full microtransaction bundle.

Tier S -Totem Build

Totems will be the first build that comes to mind. This is because Totem life bonuses are somewhat dispersed throughout the standard passive tree.

Ancestor Totem attack builds may function effectively with a Krangled skill tree. But I believe that native spell totems, such as Holy Flame Totem and Spell Totem Support builds heavily rely on the Ancestral Bond keystone.

Consequently, these Spell Totem setups may not perform as well in this special event compared to the base game. Nonetheless, we believe that investigating totem builds is a worthwhile endeavor during this event.

Here are some builds you can follow: Shockwave Totem and EA Ballista.

Tier A - DOT Build

In the regular game, damage over time is typically balanced in comparison to instant damage, which is often reliant on Critical Strike.

This balance remains consistent in this special event, although critical strike is hard to get here. So, we’ll need to locate the various damage multiplier nodes spread across the skill tree.

Notably, elemental damage has captured our attention, as it appears to hold the most promise in this event. This is because elemental damage can be amplified by various statistics and it’s already in a favorable position in the base game.

Here are some builds you can follow: Toxic Rain Ballista and Cold DOT.

Tier B - Trap (Elementalist Build)

In the case of Traps and Mines, it is important to note that the majority of Trap and Mine builds heavily depend on Critical Strikes.

However, it is worth mentioning that there are Trap and Mine builds designed around elemental damage. And we anticipate that the Trap and Mine builds will be one of the most popular and effective choices in this event.

Here are some builds you can follow: Righteous Fire + Fire Trap and Hexblast Mines.

Also Read: POE 3.22 November Events 2023 Is Coming Soon! - Everything You Need To Know

Tier C - Minion Build

Next up are Minion builds.

The critical components of the passive tree that enhance minion abilities are widely dispersed, which may pose challenges.

However, it is essential to stay vigilant as a particular ascendancy class might offer a concentrated pool of powerful minion related bonuses.

If such an ascendancy exists, there is a chance building around minions still works. But for now, we have to wait and see.

Here are some builds you can follow: Absolution and Poison SRS.

Tier D - Build Around Crit

We think Critical Strikes are going to be the hardest or near impossible to pull off in general.

In the normal game without the Krangled tray modifier, there’s a synergy involving a base tree. Critical clusters grant you both Critical Strike multiplier and Critical Strike chance together in the same cluster.

This is important because you need to have both stats for either of them to become good.

Here are some builds you can follow: Lightning Arrow and Spark.

Last Notice

There is one last to notice: when it comes to builds you want to, have a look and see or any of the base classes are ahead just due to having more options or better patterns. Of course, no matter what your options are, you’ll need to have plenty of POE Currency to craft these builds.

And one of the things you’ll notice if you look into this is that some of the ascendancies have more notables than others. The Witch starting area is stacked with more notables than the rest of the tray is. And that means there’s more chance for those notables to be good now.

This doesn’t guarantee that these ascendancies or that the witch class are going to be better than other options. It just means that they have more chance to be good.

I am pretty surprised at how good Chain Lightning is in Diablo 4 Season 2. I take down bosses almost 30 levels higher in only 8s. I soloed all Uber Bosses pretty easily, including Duriel that I slayed it without even knowing its mechanics.

With further optimized gear and fully upgraded Vampiric Powers, I chilly beat nightmare dungeon Tier 100 fast at only level 86 multiple times, with no elixir and sometimes no death.

The build has the damage to nuke everything plus the survivability to facetank everything. Be prepared with plenty of Diablo 4 Gold if you want to make such a powerful build.

Key Synergy & Aspects

We use two DPS skills in this build, Chain Lightning and Ball Lightning.

We use Chain Lightning directly on the skill bar to take down both melee and ranged monsters fast for speed farming.

We also use Ball Lightning indirectly for insanely high AOE damage from two sources:

One from the Enchantment Slot where all Critical Hit trigger a static Ball Lightning on the ground at a decent chance, unleashing massive AOE damage. Make sure to get high Crit Chance from gloves and two rings to feel like a Thor.

Another source is from the Ultimate, that every Chain Lightning we cast during the Ultimate will randomly cast Ball Lightnings and melt everything around.

I made the build that it has almost 0 Cooldown Ultimate. We use the Anticipation Vampiric Power to get 20% Ultimate Cooldown Reduction. We use Overflowing Energy that translates Crackling Energy to Cooldown Reduction plus two Crackling Energy generators, one from Destructive Chain Lightning and one from Wizard's Ball Lightning for further Cooldown Reduction.

And I recommend getting one extra Cooldown Reduction Stat on Helmet or Amulet so that it feels like we have 0 Cooldown Ultimate and just use it whenever we want.

But why do we want two indirect sources for Ball Lightning in the build?

This is because Ball Lightning does absolutely insane damage in Season 2. It gets 200% benefit from bonus attack speed and we get tons of bonus attack speed in this build.

We run the Accelerating Aspect on a two-handed weapon for 50% attack speed. The Ultimate adds another 25% attack speed as we have close to 0 Cooldown Ultimate.

Plus, we get another 48% from the Ravenous Vampiric Power. If we have Esu’s Heirloom, we get another 75% movement speed for 3s after using evade. This goes back to another 30% attack speed buff from Ravenous.

And we get another 14% attack speed from gloves. This is already 167% bonus attack speed in total that we more than quadruple the damage of Ball Lightning.

On top of that, we run the Gravitational Aspect to keep the Ball Lightning around us to not waste any Ball Lightning DPS and further improve its damage by another 25% multiplicatively.

As a result, we melt monsters, elites and bosses that are even 70 levels higher than us.

Infinite Mana

We will need infinite mana first to run the build smoothly.

To achieve infinite mana, we will use the Recharging Aspect that we get mana from each Chain Lightning bounce and Invigorating Conduit to recover 12 mana per crackling energy pick up.

Build Tankiness Effectively

Survivability becomes much more important post level 70.

We use Ice Armor in this build to get unlimited barrier for 6s. Plus, the 0 Cooldown Ultimate we basically get infinite barrier because we have the Protection passive that All Cooldown Skill cast grants a Barrier equal to 30% of our Maximum Life. Plus, the random Lightning Spear casted from the Ultimate.

We run the Snowveiled Aspect so that we have both Teleport and Ice Armor as Unstoppable Skill to stay safe if we are getting Crowd Controlled. And we get tons of extra Armor as the Armor bonus is buffed from 10% to 30% in 1.2.0.

In this build, Chain Lightning applies 100% Uptime for Vulnerable to all monsters with the benefit from the legendary node in the Static Surge Board. This is also why we don’t need the passive on Frost Nova.

So, we also take the Ice Armor passive to get further barrier to be really tanky. I can facetank butchers easily with Ice Armor on and even facetank T100 sometimes at only level 86.

We also run the Everliving Aspect for another constant 25% damage reduction as all monsters are Vulnerable. And make sure to get 70% All Resistance in World Tier 4 by combining the Resistance Stats on these 4 positions. We can also tweak the Paragon Board Nodes and use Gems if necessary.

Last, get at least 2% Total Armor Stats on these 4 positions. With the Aspect of Disobedience, we are super tanky and facetank everything. I will fast scan my full gear that passed T100 at level 86. I carefully selected all stats on each piece and I used Maximum Life stats on Rings to improve my survivability to just challenge T100.

Also Read: Diablo 4 Ball Lightning Sorcerer Build: Season 2 Best Tank Endgame Build Guide

Skill Tree

For the Skill Tree, we use Firebolt in Enchantment for burning synergy.

This is combined with Devouring Blaze for further crit damage. If our base crit chance is below 25%, replace Devouring Blaze with Elemental Dominance and replace Firebolt with Chain Lightning in the Enchantment for better performance.

If we got a Recharging Aspect that is above 2.5, we can remove all points from Invigorating Conduit and put them to Conjuration Mastery + Precision Magic for further damage.

Paragon Board

As mentioned earlier, the most important node in the Paragon Board is the Static Surge legendary node that enables our Chain Lightning to apply Vulnerable states to all monsters plus some mana regeneration. We will unlock it the first thing after we are on the second board.

Vampiric Powers

For Vampiric Powers, I recommend using:

• Resilience. It is the best Vampiric Power to help us survive in high tiers.
• Ravenous. It gives us 40-75% extra attack speed for great synergy in the build Anticipation. It helps us get, close to 0 Cooldown Ultimate for much more damage and survivability.
• Accursed Touch. It does great AOE damage to further speed up farming.
• Prey on the Weak. It helps us get another 16% multiplicative damage boost as we apply 100% Vulnerable Uptime to all monsters.

Without Gravitational Aspect

Unfortunately, the Gravitational Aspect is only dropped randomly and cannot be target farmed.

If you haven’t got one, I recommend using the Unbroken Tether Aspect for greater Chain Lightning Synergy or the Control Aspect that can be codex imprinted if you don’t have the Unbroken Tether either.

Skill Rotation

There is no specific skill rotation in this build Skill Rotation.

We are pretty flexible to fight enemies both in close range or at a distance. As the Ultimate is free, just cast Ultimate, keep pressing Chain Lightning and witness everything melt in seconds.

Ending

I really like this Chain Lightning build because it has extremely high attack speed, insane damage, superb survivability and free to cast Ultimate to greatly boost damage whenever I want.

I am not only having a blast but also having lots of fun running it.

Lords of the Fallen has nine classes, each with a different melee weapon, ranged weapon, and item.

Introduction

While it shows you the stats of the character, those might not make sense if you're not familiar with souls-like games.

And even if you are you don't get stats on the weapons, it doesn't show how much stamina each attack cost and you don't know how long things like windup animations take for each weapon.

After playing the opening with every class, there are three which stood out as the best, though two of them require getting a particular Lords of the Fallen Item while you're still in the tutorial.

A quick note: two factors that didn't come into play for determining which class is best were Armor and Starting Health.

At the first boss and beyond, most things do so much damage. It doesn't matter which class you pick. Getting hit was almost always a reason to panic, so one class taking slightly less damage didn't matter nearly as much to survival as their damage output.

Orian Preacher

If you want to focus on dealing damage, pick the Orian Preacher.

Despite some middling initial stats, the Orian Preacher Hammer and its two-handed combo attack easily makes them one of the best starting classes. But that's not the only thing making them great.

On basic light and charge heavy attacks, the hammer deals decent damage doing both physical and holy damage, which is a separate type of damage, like fire damage.

While even light attacks carve a chunk out of your stamina, it deals more damage than most other starting weapons and is even faster than several of the weaker ones. So, just using normal attacks, the Orian Preacher is still among the best.

But what makes it arguably the best starting class is the Orian Preacher Hammer's two-handed combo attack. In Lords of the Fallen, using L1 + R2 does a unique multi-hit attack, which changes whether you have one weapon in an empty hand, a weapon in each hand, or two-handing a single weapon.

While it costs all of the Preachers' stamina until you start leveling it and has a lengthy animation, it delivers three consecutive attacks that devastate enemies. The first two deal about as much damage as your normal two-handed attacks, but the third does around double that amount.

If you can time it correctly, you can one shot many of the enemies at the opening. You will also get a lot of Lords of the Fallen Vigor from this.

That said it does have drawbacks. You're vulnerable during the combo. So, if you don't stun an enemy, they may power through your attacks and hit you before you can finish. You're also exposed after the attack since it takes up so much stamina.

Thankfully, the hammer is still an incredible weapon. So, a cautious approach single hit dodge roll repeat strategy works well against strong and sturdy enemies as long as you're patient.

And finally, it short range means if you want that hit, you'll need to get close. But the Orian Preacher also has a great ranged attack thanks to Magic. The starting spell deals at least as much damage as the mid-powerered range attacks from the other classes.

But the real kicker being able to shoot the spell 17 times, which is far more than the number of times. You can use the ranged attacks on non-magic classes.

Also Read: Lords Of The Fallen: How To Get Fast OP +9 Weapons Early? - Best Deralium / Upgrade Material Farm

Udirangr Warwolf & Blackfeather Ranger (For More Mobility)

But if you want more mobility at the cost of less damage, try the Udirangr Warwolf or the Blackfeather Ranger.

Keep in mind, they'll only get close to the Orian Preacher's damage output after you find the Wooden Cross.

During the tutorial, when you get the prompt about how to use ranged weapons, look for a body hanging above a nearby enemy. If you hit that body with a ranged attack, it will drop the Wooden Cross weapon.

While the the item description for the Wooden Cross says "not designed as a weapon", that's a lie. It is more powerful than several starting weapons. And the L1 + R2 combo attack when using both the Wooden Cross and the starting weapon of the Warwolf or the Blackfeather Ranger in each hand makes for a powerful pairing.

While less damaging than the two-handed hammer combo, those two classes have more starting stamina than the Orian Preacher. So, you'll still have stamina after that big combo attack finishes, allowing for a follow-up attack or dodge roll.

Whether you want the strength of the Warwolf, the fashion of the Blackfeather Ranger or the raw power and magical abilities of the Orian Preacher, you're likely to have an easier time starting Lords of the Fallen with one of them.

Icecrown Citadel is the last major raid in Wrath of the Lich King. With that, every class is getting some of the most insane gear and crazy DPS upgrades that they possibly can throughout this entire phase to end off feeling like god.

But you might be a little confused on how exactly you’re gonna get all of your gear, how do you get your tier gear, what are the fastest ways to gear up your character, and what are some of the catch-up mechanics.

So, here, I’m going to try to break that all down for you.

ICC Raid Intro

Before getting into the raid itself, the patch will launch two days early on NA and one day early on EU. This will give you some time to catch up your character with any of the gear you don’t have yet from the last few phases that could be some of your business items.

How To Get All Of Your Gear?

Specifically, I’m talking about trinkets mostly, like Comet’s Trail, Death’s Choice, Flare or Rain. You can actually get these just from running the new Titan Rune Gamma dungeons. These are the heroic plus pluses.

The easiest way to do this is to just queue up for your random dungeon finder because this should ignore any lockouts. This means that by just doing this method, you can spam these all day and get an infinite amount of these as well as you can also buy some Primordial Saronite from this and probably make a ton of WOTLK Classic Gold on day one through the first probably two weeks. This will catch you up very quickly.

How To Get Tier Gear?

We probably won’t have the Vault of Archavon bosses released yet. You don’t want to do VOA on the patch day. Wait until the raid launch because you probably will lock yourself without being able to actually defeat the boss.

But the new boss will drop some tier pieces as it always does and these tier pieces will be from the 25 Man difficulty. This will save you a ton of emblems because emblems are the only way we’re actually going to be able to get our tier gear and even upgrade our tear gear. So, there’s a major change in the way we actually get our Tier 10.

In the heroic Trial of the Grand Crusader, as long as we got a Vanquisher token or whatever token for our respective class to drop, then we could instantly turn it in for the max level of tier gear. This is no longer the case. We actually have to upgrade our gear in order to get the highest rank, which is going to start out at item level 251 (lower than the gear we have currently). Move up to item level 264 and then into item level 277 for the best gear in the game.

To get each piece, it’ll either cost you 95 emblems or 60 emblems if you’re just grabbing these shoulders or gloves. This means that if you do get the gloves as well as the legs to drop in Vault of Archavon, this will save you 155 emblems that you needed to get to get this tier gear as well as this will be upgraded tier.

Or, if you actually just get the normal version, this is really useful for you, too. Because if you do it from 10 Man, you can just upgrade it initially. But, you need to turn in your old gear to upgrade it into the next level and then one more time to get that heroic loot.

In total, if you don’t get lucky and get any drops from Vault of Archavon, then you need to have 405 emblems to get your entire set of Tier 10. And if you farm every single emblem you can each week, then you can get up to 104. This means it’ll take you at least four weeks to get all of your tier gear.

And then, you also need to get the marks to even be able to upgrade them, so the mark drops are as follows.

Also Read: WOTLK Classic Phase 4: Changes Coming To Fall Of The Lich King - Raid, Dungeons, Collection Content & More

How To Get Marks?

Any of the endgame bosses in 10 Man heroic or 25 Man normal versions will drop the 264 marks. The endgame bosses are Deathbringer Saurfang, Blood-Queen Lana’thel, Professor Putricide, Sindragosa and the Lich King. That’s five opportunities from normal mode 25 and again heroic 10 Man to get some of your marks to be able to upgrade your tier gear.

If you’re in heroic mode though, you will actually get two of those normal marks to drop and one heroic mark to drop, so you can upgrade it again. It’s going to take you at least a couple of weeks to get all of your tier gear and then to start upgrading it.

How To Get More Emblems Of Frost?

But you can also use emblems for other items. Within ICC itself, there’s an Emblem of Frost vendor that you can go to and he has a ton of things for you, such as trinkets, relics, off hands, cloaks, belts, chess pieces, and your PVP gear. You might actually still get some of your best in slot items from this vendor.

Since you might need even more Emblems of Frost, here’s a quick breakdown of how you can get as many that you can each week.

First of all, there’s a new heroic daily and you can get five of these each day. That means you can get 35 per week just from doing the heroic dailies. Then, there is a new weekly raid quest that will give you 10 each week. From doing the bosses in Vault of Archavon on 10 and 25 and difficulty, you’ll get two emblems each and each boss you kill in ICC will give you two of these.

So, in 10 and 25 Man, clearing all of the bosses will give you 48 per week because there’s 12 bosses. Within the raid itself, there’s a weekly quest you can do on 10 and 25 Man for five each. That’s 10 per week.

An Item level jump from phase 3 to phase 4 is massive with the correct gear:

• If you’re just going into normal 10 Man, you will get 251 item level loot and then the Lich King will give you two 258 item level gear.
• If you do heroic 10 Man, then you will get 271 gear from the Lich King and 264 item level loot from normal bosses. This is also the same item level you would get from normal bosses in 25 Man (the 264 gear).
• But if you just do those bosses on heroic, you will instantly start getting 277 item level gear.

The Fastest Way To Gear Up Your Character

Now, the heroic Lich King is ridiculously hard. Even though he does drop 284 item level weapons, it is really going to be a struggle for most guilds. For quite a while, some people think it’s mathematically impossible to do it on day one without doing 10 Man splits. And we’ll find out on the stream when it happens in race to world first on the 12th where we either see people do 10 Mans to be able to defeat it or not.

But most groups will be opting to kill Lich King on normal for quite a while and he drops 271 item level weapons for you. These are going to be huge upgrades out of the gate, no matter what. Not necessarily as good as the best in slot in the entire game, but they are very strong, just a little weaker than your normal heroic items that are 277.

So, if you want your absolute best weapons, you’re definitely going to want to try to kill a heroic Lich King. But again, I would actually focus on gearing up your characters way more before you really go into this. Because he is a very hard encounter that we have still only heard of one group on all three PTRs ever being able to down it just yet.

Now, I wouldn’t doubt at all that other raid groups haven’t taken them out by this point, but this is how you’re going to completely gear up your characters in the next phase to be ready to move on towards.

If I wanted to look through every single squad, every team, and every league on FIFA, it would take me hours. Sure, it can be tempting to do this when you’re trying to pick your next career mode save. But what if I told you there was an easy way to always get the best team with just four simple steps?

Here, I’ll be showing you my step-by-step guide to help you choose the ideal Career Mode save every single time. Of course, if you want to dominate FC 24’s Career Mode, you still need to prepare a large amount of FUT 24 Coins to upgrade your players.

Just like everyone else, I used to start dozens of saves. I would play one preseason game, then get bored with playing Career Mode. Since I started thinking a little more about what I actually wanted to do in my save rather than just picking the first one, I thought of my saves are now averaging closer to a full season.

Step 1: Choose Your Playing Location

The first thing you need to find out is the general area of the world you want to play in.

If you’re totally unsure, this could be a continent. But if you’re a bit more confident, then it could be a specific nation. Each continent on FIFA has different strengths and weaknesses.

Europe offers a fully licensed Cup Competitions with the Champions League, the Europa League, and the Conference League as well as having the biggest selection of leagues to choose from. The sheer amount of teams and leagues here means there’s always going to be multiple options that meet the criteria you’re setting.

North America only features one league, but the MLS is a totally unique experience. Annoyingly, they don’t actually have any Cup Competitions here and this can make the journey a little less fun.

South America also only has one licensed league, but you can play in Brazil if you don’t mind the fake players. You do get to play in a license continental Cup Competitions with teams from leagues that aren’t actually playable in Career Mode and it does provide a chance to explore football in a totally different culture.

Finally, we have Asia, which is probably the most underrated Career Mode continent. Asia includes an unlicensed continental competition and features a surprising amount of leagues, including the Saudi, Indian, and Korean leagues, which I barely ever see anyone doing saves in.

Hopefully, at least one of these regions sounds like exactly what you want in your next save. When you’ve decided on a continent, drill down and have a look at some of the nations inside it. Each nation has a different feel. They’ll play in different ways and they have different atmospheres. This can make neighboring countries feel unique on the pitch.

Belgium, Holland, and Germany are totally different in Career Mode, despite having very similar cultures as nations. Throughout this guide, I’ll give you some examples of the system working.

So, let’s say that I wanted a fairly long save. I think Europe has the deepest league structures on the game, so that’s the ideal location for this first step of our example.

Also Read: EA FC 24: 3 Most Promising And Exciting New Dribbling Techniques!

Step 2: Define Your Desired Save

The second and probably most crucial step in selecting the perfect Career Mode save is to decide on the type of save your most interested in doing.

You can generally categorize teams into one of these four main groups.

On FIFA, I’d say every single league has at least two teams who are capable of winning the championship who call these the Championship Contenders. These teams are instantly competing for league titles in cups in Season 1. They typically feature the best players and are considered the top teams in that nation. Bayern München, Ulsan Hyandai, and Inter Miami are examples of this kind of team.

The majority of leagues also have a selection of Historic Teams. These are the teams that might have experienced success in the past, but are not currently at their peak. They often have large fan bases, maybe even impressive stadiums. But they also usually have a squad of very average and very overpaid players. I would say that D.C. United, Everton, and Rosario Central are all Historic Fallen Giants.

The majority of the rest of the teams that aren’t Championship Contenders or Historic, I would call Middle Of the Road Teams. These teams are maybe a few strategic signings here and there from becoming title contenders. While they may have a couple of top players in their team, usually up front to be honest, they usually lack the overall quality usually in defense to compete for the title. Think of Crystal Palace, Al shabab, and Orlando City. That’s three good examples of teams that are fairly average, but are very close to being very good.

Finally, the most common type of team to use on FIFA is the Road To Glory Teams. This option usually is a longer term challenge where you have to rebuild an entire squad. Typically, Road to Glory saves involve a newly promoted team or someone who’s looking to establish themselves in a higher division. This generally includes the two or three worst teams in every single league.

If you like the sound of one of these four categories, then that’s great because now you’ve got a location and you’ve got a career path.

Let’s go back to our Europe save example. I said I want it to be long, so surely a Road To Glory Team would be ideal for us here. We’ll be taking over one of the worst teams in the nation that we pick.

Step 3: Determine Your Team’s Level

For step three of our system, we also need to determine what kind of team rank we want to be using.

If you’re someone that doesn’t enjoy using 50 rated players in the lowest leagues of island, you might be looking for a 3-star team here. If you want to be trophy hunting, you also want to be in a really bad league. You might be interested in trying to find a 1-star title contender.

Have a think about how good you’d like your starting point to be because this will easily narrow down the amount of teams and the amount of leagues you can use from the continent you’ve picked.

You’ll never ever get a 5-star Polish team in Career Mode or a 0.5-star French team, so this is the step that will filter out most of the teams in this system.

I could easily pick a 4-star team for my European Road to Glory save. There are loads of teams around that rating in Germany, Spain, England, and Italy. If I wanted a long Road To Glory though, I’m going to pick a one and a half star team, which means we’re going to have a team from League 2.

Step 4: Utilize SoFIFA for Team Search

Now, let’s round off our system. If you’re struggling to find the team with the in-game tools, you can have a quick search on SoFIFA.

You can easily search for teams with certain overall ratings and you can also check things out like the squad’s average age or the amount of potential that every single team has if that’s important to the kind of career mode you’re looking to do.

Back to our example. It looks like AFC Wimbledon could be the ideal save for me. It’s in Europe. They’re at the lowest level in the country and they’re the right star rating to match with everything that I’m looking for. They definitely seem like the perfect save for me to start.

So, let’s quickly run through two other examples of using this system just so that you understand exactly how it works.

I said Asia is fun, so let’s try and find a cool team from there. I fancy playing with a Historic Fallen Giant save, so that’s a team that’s around two and a half stars in Asia. Last year, we could have picked Guangzhou Evergrande who actually spent £1.7 billion on a new 100,000 seated stadium that they never finished. But they’ve actually been relegated on FIFA 24.

Suwon Bluewings is the team we probably go for then: four Korean titles, two Asian Champions Leagues between 1997 and 2008, but nothing since. They have a decent squad. Some of our players are in the 70s, but the majority are in the 60s, so they are actually going to be able to be fun inside Career Mode.

Let’s do one last example. How about a 3-star Middle Of The Road Team in South America? I want to use licensed clubs with real players, so we only have Argentina to choose from. This makes it super easy to see that we actually have several options here. I guess I’d have to just pick on the history kits and stadium I like the most.

We actually have some pretty big teams for a save in this kind of area. We have Newell’s Old Boys, Rosario Central, Banfield, Unión de Santa Fe...... There’s so many choices. So again, one of these is likely to be the perfect Career Mode save for me on my next go.

Hopefully, you can now understand how the system works that I use for every single save I do.

Do you want to get that Level 40 mount by the time you actually hit level 40 or get that Epic Mount at level 60? If you do, you must have enough WOW Classic Hardcore Gold. Here is a guide to help you obtain raw gold, specifically while leveling.

Intro

I’m doing this mostly from a Solo Self Found perspective. Because I believe that even if trading is allowed, some players will play on a Solo Self Found basis. And for raw gold, most of it comes from vendoring items anyway, so you can do it completely without having to rely on other people to buy whatever you are selling.

Having access to raw gold early will also be incredibly valuable as the purchasing power of each individual gold is at its absolute peak early in a server’s lifespan. And the purchasing power will go down every single day as more and more people get access to raw gold.

What I mean by purchasing power is that 100 gold will get you more stuff in Week 1 than 100 gold will in Week 2, due to how inflation works. This is important because of, for example, investments or if you just want to stack up on some materials, you might want later and get them while they’re cheap.

Get Skinning

Advice number one is to grab Skinning.

Skinning is an insane profession to have while leveling. Because it simply benefits everyone in terms of increasing the amount of gold you get while leveling up.

Skinning also allows you to skin beasts for additional materials. And although they do not give the most amount of additional to begin with, this scales incredibly well with your level.

By level 10, you might have gained a couple extra silvers. But, by level 40, you will most likely have obtained anywhere between 10 and 40 extra gold, depending on how you level.

Some of the locations where you can farm for the most raw gold per hour, you actually end up killing beasts. In that case, having Skinning will further increase your gold per hour from those locations, pushing you closer to that 40 gold extra by level 40, which is basically half of your level 40 mount.

And especially on Hardcore Servers, many people will choose professions that benefit their profession in terms of survival. Two big professions here are Alchemy & Engineering.

Alchemy is mainly supported by Herbalism, and Engineering is mainly supported by Mining. This means the most popular professions on these servers will be Alchemy, Engineering, Herbalism and Mining.

This is important. Because that means while everyone is leveling up, there will be a lot of skinnable mobs just laying on the ground giving you free skill-ups & free Hardcore Gold. And there are many locations you will find during your Hardcore Journey where you can just sit in one location and skin other people’s mobs, like, for example, the Yeti Cave in Dun’Morogh.

So seriously, if raw gold is something you’re looking for, I always recommend Skinning. Even if you want to have Herbalism & Mining eventually, I would use Skinning while leveling up to 60, then swap professions & farm herbs and mining veins with that level 60 mount. This is also because Herbalism & Mining nodes will be incredibly competitive at launch and will slow down your leveling process, while Skinning you can pretty much always keep up with your level.

Now, when farming raw gold, there are mainly 2 different farms you want to think about: Humanoid Farms & Beast Farms.

Humanoid Farms will give you raw gold by itself through looted silver values, and it will give you Cloth, which you can either sell for vendor loot, or turn into Bandages for even more gold before selling it.

The bonus of Humanoid Farms is that they also have a bigger drop rate on Grey, White & Green items, specifically grey items like Weapons, which can vendor for about a gold per piece (plus / minus). This means in some cases, Humanoid Farms can be better in terms of gold per hour, but they also rely more on RNG because a lot of gold comes from those Grey weapon drops.

From Beast Farms, you will get a very steady amount of gold per hour due to your gold value being derived from what the mob actually drops on a regular basis. Whiskers from Cats, Mane’s from Wolves, Crocodile Pelt and so on, even Gorillas drop a lot of good vendor value items.

For Beast Farms, you can also obviously increase that gold amount by having Skinning, like we just talked about earlier.

Also Read: WOW Classic Hardcore: How To Make Gold From Level 30-40?

Raw Gold Farming Locations

So with this being said, let me show you some of my favourite locations for where to farm for raw gold in Classic WoW.

First off, let’s cover 4 different farming locations I personally use in order to farm enough gold for my level 40 mount, all of which are beast farms and you want to have Skinning.

You have the Tigers in Swamp of Sorrows. Now, I say Tigers here because they will usually give you the most valuable items, but the tigers are also found throughout the entire zone, where you will also find crocodiles & spiders, which are definitely worth killing.

You also have the Gorillas in Stranglethorn Vale. And here, I will show you 2 different farms that are pretty close to each other, giving you 2 different places to farm.

These Gorillas have a pretty lucrative loot-table and will give you the best raw gold you can get at this level, especially if combined with Skinning.

And the farm I personally do the most: Tigers in Badlands.

This one is incredibly slept on and I don’t see many people farming here, which is why I personally really like it here. Because there’s almost never any competition, and they can drop really good vendor-value items, like Long Soft Tails, Bristly Whiskers, and Wicked Claw.

You also have some farms past level 40. For example, my personal favourite is this one killing Steeljaw Snappers in Tanaris.

This one is very known from farming Turtle Meat and as a pretty decent experience farm. But these turtles also drop pretty good vendor loot, even better if combined with Skinning.

How To Maximize Your Raw Gold?

With farming covered, there are a couple more steps you can take to maximize how much raw gold you make and how to make sure you can afford your level 40 mount and get closer to that level 60 mount.

First off, you can save a lot of gold by not training all of your class abilities. Let’s be real, in Classic WoW you get way more abilities than you actually need, at least while leveling. And many of your abilities are only useful in very niché situations, in which case I rather not learn them until I have to and save my gold instead.

Exactly what you should and should not train depends on each individual class. But personally, I only train spells I use on a regular basis, plus any class-buffs I get access to and any defensive abilities I get.

As a Warlock, for example, I can opt not to train Soulstone, I can also choose one or two demons and therefore only train abilities for the demons I actually use. I can also save gold by not training every single curse I get access to. Because personally, I don’t use all of them until very high levels, anyway.

Plus, some classes get a free level 40 mount, like Warlocks & Paladins. But, pick and choose which spells to actually train and upgrade, and you can save a lot of gold while leveling.

When questing, if the quest doesn’t offer an upgrade, pick the item with the highest vendor value. This sounds obvious. But some leveling addons have auto-complete enabled where they automatically pick items in slot 1 or slot 2 or anything your class can use, or maybe you personally also always choose whatever Cloth Item you get from the quest if you play a Cloth Class. Then, check if it’s an upgrade atferwards.

So my advice here is, check if the quest offers an upgrade before accepting a quest reward. And if there are no upgrades, choose whatever has the highest vendor value.

Of course, if you want to involve trading and using the Auction House, you can also make a lot more gold.

New World is a MMORPG that’s had an interesting lifespan so far. During the beta phase, the red flags were obvious. The game released on September 2021 and was insanely fun until level 30 or so. Then, it fell off a cliff with many people discovering game breaking bugs turning the game into a meme goldmine overnight.

The devs didn’t give up. They went away and started addressing issues one by one, leading to the game having a major resurgence in player numbers for its first major update: Brimstone Sands in October 2022.

Since then, New World has been rather quiet. Over the course of the past year, it’s been losing players again month on month, which is mainly due to no new big content, other MMO releases, and players just running out of stuff to do.

Recently, New World has announced its first real expansion “Rise Of The Angry Earth”, which will bring massive fundamental changes to the game, increase the level and gearscore cap as well as finally add mounts to the game.

Here, I’m going to discuss everything you need to know about the new New World expansion as well as jump into the game now in its current state to prepare my character for the new content. Also, I will also show you what other cool changes have been added to the game over the past year.

Some Surprises About Returning To New World

The last time I played New World was during the PTR of the Brimstone Sands expansion. I didn’t actually play the game when the expansion fully launched because my main server was dead due to everyone playing fresh start and I really didn’t want to start again. I log into the game and I immediately see people spamming X EGG in chat, so I did the same thing and got invited to a 20 player raid group.

If you played more than a year ago, you’d know that you couldn’t make raid groups in New World previously. The max group size was 5 players, so straight away I was surprised and happy with this change. We basically went around the map in this group and did some seasonal daily event called the Siege of Sulfur where you protect eggs from waves of mobs and get good rewards.

Pretty cool and I’m a fan of any kinda content that brings players together in an MMO. Basically, within minutes of logging in, I was in a massive group of players doing massively multiplayer things.

Next, I wanted to finish getting all weapon masteries to level 20 to prepare for the new expansion. I only needed to level the Greatsword and Blunderbuss, so I looked online for the best strat. And the current best method is to go do a repeatable Thorpe event at the area in Great Cleave.

It was here where I stumbled upon another new addition to New World, Augments, which are basically boosters that you can buy off the cash shop. The most significant ones in my opinion are the Weapon XP and Gathering XP boosters, which basically double your XP. You’ve also got Season XP and Territory standing boosters, which do a similar thing and a proficiency booster, which increases your gathering yield by 10%.

If these boosters were in the game at launch, everyone would be complaining that they are pay to win and rightly so, I guess the games been out long enough at this point that most people have capped gathering and weapon masteries, anyway. So it’s not a big deal. Either way, I popped the weapon XP booster and got both weapons to 20 mastery super fast at the Thorpe spot.

Another nice change, if you hold control + C and left click, you can spam click to very quickly salvage all your crap. You’ll be doing this a lot during your time playing New World.

The next amazing change made to the game since the last time I played is the addition of multiple gear set loadouts. This was one of the most requested features to be added since launch and I’m happy to say it actually works very well except for one caveat.

The thing I love about New World’s gear set system is storing gear in these templates actually removes it from your inventory, which is nice because if you’ve got 3-4 different gear sets your bags would be an absolute mess otherwise. The caveat here is that if you want more than 2 gear set storage, you need to buy it off the cash shop for roughly $5.

I started working my way through the Brimstone Sands MSQ and realized I was earning Season XP, basically a Battle Pass you can work through, which gives various rewards such as furniture, skins, gypsum, currency and so on. Your typical battle pass, love it or hate it, it is what it is, at least it gives players at end game something to work through when they’ve completed everything else.

As I was questing through Brimstone Sands, there was a few things going through my mind:

1. The Greatsword feels way more fun and better designed than every other weapon in the game.
2. Visually, this game is still one of the best looking MMOs out and the sound effects are best in genre.
3. The general movement in New World feels so fucking scuffed at times that the game feels like it’s in alpha in some places.

Like you still can’t swim in New World, your attacks will very frequently just not register when hitting mobs. Relentless Rush with the Greatsword is a great example of this. It’s a double hit ability where 50% of the time only one hit will register.

Any form of slightly elevated terrain in a combat area will make your character desync and the actual running animation in this game feels so scuffed to me. The run animation looks faster than the speed you actually run, idk what it is, but it just looks off. Also, when you log into the game after playing other third person RPGs, you just feel like New World should have a sprint but it doesn’t. I kinda wish it did have a sprint, to be honest.

Right now, my biggest issue with the game is definitely movement, inconsistent combat, desync and certain animations. I continued questing through the Brimstone Sands, eventually fully completing every quest in the zone, including the side quests.

And I have to say that when it comes to questing, New World has come a very long way. This was notoriously dogshit for questing back at the game’s launch. Every quest was “Go to this POI, Loot Crates, Get Item, Run Half Way Across The Map and Repeat”.

But now, it’s much more varied. There’s some actual story and narrative interwoven into it. There are puzzles, climbing quests and more varied enemies. Quest rewards are actually decent now. The difference is night and day from launch and I actually consider New World’s questing to be pretty good nowadays.

Next, I did the Ennead dungeon and was quickly reminded that I do actually enjoy Dungeons in New World and think that in terms of visuals they’re some of the most epic looking dungeons in the MMO genre. I spent some time sorting through my storage and selling some stuff to free up space for the new expansion. If you haven’t played since launch storage in New World is all connected now rather than local to each town and city, which means storage management is much less of a pain in the ass nowadays.

Bags and tools now go up to legendary 600 GS and will probably go higher for the new expansion. So, I replaced my old blues with legendries, got a full set of instruments, made a gear set for healer, strength, dex and mage, then checked out another highly requested feature that’s finally been added to New World…...

A full transmog system comparable to games like Guild Wars 2 and World Of Warcraft, where you unlock the appearance of all dropped gear. Basically, to actually transmog gear, you need transmog tokens, which can be bought off the cash shop, 5 Tokens costs like $10. So, if you’re constantly changing your outfit, it’s not cheap. Just to clarify once you’ve unlocked something. Once you don’t need to spend more to reapply it again, it is permanently unlocked for you to use as a skin at any time. But for additional skins, you’ll need more tokens.

Something that instantly pissed me off with this system is that the preview window to actually view your appearance is dogshit and depending on the time of day like night time, for example. You can’t actually see the colors properly, which is annoying because you definitely want to get a good look at how your character will look before committing to spending New World Coins. AGS please improve the transmog character preview window.

After that, I solo queued some 3v3 PVP arena and despite never doing it before it was surprisingly less try hard and more fun than I expected. I’m glad I was able to solo queue this rather than manually find other players. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. It was enjoyable and rewarding enough that I’d definitely play it again. I spend a bit of time levelling up my music skill, which seems to have had the experience required per level reduced heavily since the last time I played the game.

And finally, I took on a seasonal 10 player boss, which wasn’t overly difficult. But it was fun because the rewards were good. The boss had a few mechanics, and it was easy to join a group for by Xing up in recruitment chat. It seems like New World is actually making a bit of a push to more traditional MMO style raid content.

As aside from the 10 player seasonal raid boss, there’s also a 20 player instanced Sand Worm raid boss that is the hardest boss in the game. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to do it yet as I can’t find a group. But it looks super cool, regardless.

New Upcoming Expansion - Rise Of The Angry Earth

Next, let’s discuss all the info you need to know about New World’s new upcoming expansion “Rise Of The Angry Earth”.

First of all, this expansion will release on October 3rd alongside Season 3 and will be a paid expansion costing $29.99. New players will be able to buy the base game + the expansion in a bundle for $69.99

This new expansion comes with a new zone. Remember “First Light?”, the zone south of windsward? Yeah, that zone no longer exists. It’s fallen to the angry earth and will be transformed to the Elysian Wilds, completely unrecognizable from the place it was before.

Mounts are finally being added to New World and come with a new trade skill called riding, which you’ll be able to level up for upgrades to speed, buffs and higher tier mount consumables. Mounts will come in the form of horses, dire wolves and lions initially, with more likely to be added over time. You’ll be able to name your mount and also deck it out in with customizable equipment, which will probably be sold on the cash shop.

A new weapon will be added to the game in the form of the Flail, which can be used either one had or with a shield. The flail will scale with strength and focus and had abilities that debuff and absorb ally damage, making it a solid choice as a secondary for both tanks and healers, from the sounds of it.

Progression in New World will also be changed quite a bit. You’ll be able to level up your character to 65. Gear score will now go up to item level 700, trade skills up to 250 and the devs are completely removing the expertise system, which means that there’s no tedious barrier to entry grind that new players will need to go through to get decent loot. The new zone will straight up drop gear that’s 625 or higher and the hardest content will drop the best gear, as it should.

There’s also going to be a new tier of faction gear, new faction questline and a new rarity of gear called “Artifacts”, which will need to be awakened via a questline up unlock up to 6 perks with one of them apparently being playstyle defining, which is quite interesting.

There’s also going to be a few revamps to the game. The most impactful one long-lasting one will be the removal of Ward, Bane and resilience stats on gear, which just wasn’t fun and I think this is an amazing change. And the main storylines of both Edengrove and Great Cleave will also be revamped.

Aside from that, the expansion brings with it a new level 62+ expedition, a new heart rune ability, a new season with events, such as nightveil hallow and the turkey terror and a bunch of other stuff.

Overall, after revisiting New World for a bit to prepare for the new expansion as well as looking into all the positive changes that will come with the expansion, I really think New World is heading firmly in the right direction and I’ve actually had a decent time so far returning to the game.

My main issue with New World is still that the movement and animation feels off sometimes as well as the inconsistency with attacks registering and the game still not having swimming.

But almost every other issue I’ve had with the game over the years has been resolved. And now, with the addition of mounts, improvements to progression, large-scale groups and transmog, the game seems better than ever. So, I do think it’s worth jumping back in for the New Expansion because even if you don’t stick around long term, you’ll likely get a few weeks of fun out of it at the very least.

Recently, I have made guides for Path of Exile 3.22’s Ruthless mode. And here, I want to teach you how to create a different version of the Hinekora Righteous Fire build.

When I was mapping on my Hinakora Righteous Fire building, I came to realize that I had invested so much POE Currency into making Righteous Firework that it was unnecessary.

The build felt like it was an actual caster build and that Righteous Fire was just a meme that I’d added on top of it. So, instead, I designed and created this Hinakora Shaman.

Hinekora Shaman

This build is so solid that you can even play it as either cold or lightning. I wanted to push it as far as I could, so I experimented by leveling it up using Wintertide Brand. And even then, the leveling experience was a breeze.

However, due to the resistance ignoring power of the Ramako Ascendancy in the end, it’s far better to keep the build this fire, so that’s what I’m showing you today.

It will work if you want to do something else. But your ability to progress deep in maps will be limited unless you can find relevant support gems that will penetrate for whatever your Elemental Damage type is.

You also can play the build with just Fireball and Flame Wall. But you’ll likely find that your AOE clear speed will be lacking. I would recommend using your first Uncarved Gemstone to pick up either Firestorm, Incinerate, or Flame Blast as a complement to both Fireball and Flame Wall to make your AOE clear speed as fast as possible.

How to Acquire Skill Gems?

If you want to create a Hinekora Shaman, your first task is to make a farm Witch and take her as far as finishing the ‘Breaking Some Eggs’ quest in the mud flats.

This will give you Fireball, Flame Wall, and your choice of either Raise Zombie or Freezing Pulse is temporary filler spells. You also get the extra POE flasks I see a lot of players forgetting.

Please remember that you can sell three small life flasks for one medium life flask and start using it as soon as level 3.

Once you’ve transferred everything to your stash, go ahead and create your Hinekora Shaman Marauder.

Intelligence

You may remember that there was some real nasty pathing that you had to do in order to get your Marauder enough intelligence to use his skill gems.

While it is still slightly beneficial to transfer a Lapis Amulet, in this build, it’s unnecessary. You’ll eventually need to find about 40 intelligence from your gear, but that’s not until the endgame.

And if you want, you can instead spend three passive points to, take the notable skills: Deep Wisdom and Deep Thoughts. This will help your Mana, but it will more importantly solve your intelligence problem entirely for just the cost of three additional passive points and that can all be done after you complete the campaign.

In this build, your intelligence problem completely goes away.

Related: My Ruthless Starter Build for Path of Exile 3.22 - Slam Duelist

Passive Tree

Leveling with the Hinekora Shaman, you take a different approach to solving the intelligence problem as you level.

Early on, you’re simply gonna head straight to Templar college and then keep going to which grad school. With this method, you’ll have far more than enough intelligence to use and level up your skills.

The only annoyance is that you can’t equip Flame Wall until about level 10. That’s it.

This build is a full league starter build that works great as your first character if you want to try out Ruthless mode in POE 3.22.

Eventually, around level 60 or so, you will need to fix your early pathing. When you first level up and you path up to the Templar area, you’re going to use the path on the left. But in the final build, you want to be using the path on the right instead.

All this means is that starting around level 55 or so, you’ll want to double up your pathing on the left, connecting the Devotion cluster to the Barbarism cluster.

Once you are connected on both the left and the right, you’re going to use the passive refund points earned through the campaign to refund the leveling pathing that you used and then you’re done with your pathing.

Ascendancies

For your ascendancies, you’re going to be using Hinekora, Tesalio, and Ramaco.

I tried taking Hinekora first and while it did help, I ran into resistance problems in Acts 6 and 7. I would recommend taking to Tesalio first, then Hinekora with your second ascendancy and then Ramaco before you hit the endgame.

If and when you can finish the Eternal Labyrinth, you would take Valako, Storm’s Embrace.

Endgame Progression

As you progress into the endgame on your Hinekora Shaman, you have three choices.

Choice number 1 is to use this cluster jewel socket that would be best, but of course requires that you have a cluster jewel.

Choice number 2 would be to focus on your offense, developing upward into the Templar area so that you can take Holy Fire and Purity of Flesh.

And choice number 3 instead is to focus on your defense and your life where instead of developing up you’re going to develop downward into the Marauder area so that you can take Bloodless and Soul of Steel.

Conclusion

If you wish to unleash the power of Hinekora, you can play this Hinekora Shaman and become the erupting volcano. You will engulf rayclast in flames and purify everything in the names of your ancestors. And when you hit the endgame, you won’t just work on the atlas, you’ll burn through it.

With the launch of Official Hardcore Servers on Classic Era, I think it’s time to cover what’s different on these Official Hardcore Servers, compared to the version of Hardcore we have been playing in the past with the addon.

So, here, I will cover the major differences between the addon and the official hardcore servers, as they do not follow the same rules and are actually very different from one another.

Grouping

Let’s start with Solo / Duo / Leveling in a Group.

With the Hardcore addon, if you wanted to be in a duo or a trio, you had to be online at the same time, and level together from start to finish. There were several rules in place such as you’re not allowed to be in different zones, basically meaning you had to duo with the same person from level 1 to level 60 and always play together.

On the Official Hardcore Servers, you are free to Solo, Duo, or Trio whenever you want. You can invite whoever you want to your group whenever you want. You could, for example, group up in a 5-man group from level 1-10 and just focus on kill-quests, then split up at level 10 and then solo the rest of the way until level 60. And if you suddenly meet someone you want to duo with for a couple of hours, you can do that as well.

Basically, you are no longer locked into being a Solo, Duo or Trio Character upon starting. Because with the Addon, if you chose to be in a Duo, you were stuck in that Duo. On the upcoming Hardcore Servers, you’re more free to pick and choose throughout your journey.

So basically, Grouping was very restricted before, but now you’re free to group up when you want to.

Dungeons

Now, let’s talk about Dungeons.

With the Hardcore Addon and the Solo Self Found Ruleset, we were only allowed to do one singular run of every dungeon until we hit level 60. This could be very annoying, as a singular mistake, and losing one person could mean you miss out on the entire dungeon. Because if you lose 1 person in, for example, Zul’Farrak or Maraudon, finishing such a high level dungeon with only 4 people can be incredibly difficult and is often a risk not even worth taking on Hardcore.

This could mean you miss out on an entire dungeon because of a mistake someone else makes. And not only that but some dungeon quests were borderline impossible to do with only one run: Like for example the Stormwind Stockades Bandanas Quest, or the Zul’Farrak Mojo Quest, basically quests where you loot mobs for an item with less than 100% drop chance, and even Wailing Caverns with the Deviate Hides, though those could be farmed on the outside.

In these cases, players would literally /roll for who got to complete their quests. And if you lost the roll, you would not be able to complete your quest, which feels kinda weird.

On top of that, you also have dungeons, like Uldaman, which heavily encourages you to do multiple runs of the dungeon in order to complete every quest, although it is technically doable in one instance-run if you time it to perfection.

On the Official Hardcore Servers, all of this annoyance is removed, as we can now do several dungeon runs while leveling, although there has been one modification in order for people not to just spam Dungeon Cleaves like they did in 2019 when Classic WoW came out.

Dungeons now have a 24 hour reset timer from level 1 to 59, meaning this timer is lifted once you hit level 60, so you can freely farm dungeons. But this means while leveling, dungeons will have a daily lockout and you can run every dungeon once per day.

One more change they have made to dungeons is that mobs inside dungeons give 50% less experience, but bosses give a lot more experience than usual.

Basically, they have taken 50% of the mob experience throughout the dungeon and put it into bosses, which is done for two main reasons: Mobs inside the dungeons do reset over time, but bosses have a 24 hour reset timer. And it also encourages people to focus on killing bosses and doing the higher dungeon rather than just AoE farming mobs inside dungeons for experience.

Trading

Next up then, the use of Mailboxes, Auction House and Trading. I’ve chosen to throw all of this into one place, as it all pretty much boils down to one thing: Trading.

Sending a mail between players is essentially trading something, you’re just doing it via mails. Same thing with the Auction House, so it’s all Trading.

On Classic Era with the Hardcore Addon, Trading was not allowed, even for things, such as Mage Food or Mage Water, or Warlock Healthstones. Basically, no trading whatsoever.

On the Official Hardcore Servers, this rule will be lifted and you are free to Trade, use the Auction House, and use the mailbox. I think this is a good thing, because you have another way to make WoW Classic Hardcore Gold.

But what I will say is, all the rules we had in place with the Hardcore Addon, made it so you were pretty much forced to play in one very specific and restrictive way.

And without being allowed to Group, Trade, send mails or use the Auction House, it is a very “Solo” experience. It is definitely more challenging, but is also a lot less social, and Blizzard have verbally stated they want to focus more on the Social Element than the Challenging Element, which I think is great.

The essence of these servers being Hardcore already is quite challenging in itself, and too challenging for most people, considering if they lose a level 60 character, a lot of people simply won’t bother going again.

Also Read: WoW Classic Hardcore: An Elwynn Forest Survival Guide

Class Abilities

There are also a couple of small changes, such as Class-Abilities, which were previously prohibited or the use of certain items.

Number one here would be the Paladin Bubble-Hearth, which was technically not allowed with the Hardcore Addon, but there were a couple of work-arounds. But on the Official Hardcore Server, there will simply be a restriction in place to where Paladins physically cannot use their Hearthstone while under the Protection Effect.

However, nothing has been stated about the Light of Elune plus Hearthstone, so there might be a big favor for the Alliance here.

With the Hardcore Addon, we were also not allowed to use the Auto-Unstuck Features in order to Teleport to Major Cities, and this restriction will not be there on Official Hardcore Servers.

For most people, this won’t really matter much. But for example, as a Night Elf, this means you can use the Auto Unstuck Feature to teleport to Ironforge instead of having to walk through Wetlands, or swim to Westfall, so it definitely has some practical uses.

Minor Changes

Now, let’s talk about some minor things that might not directly impact your gameplay, but are pretty huge changes overall.

- With the Hardcore Addon, we had an Appeal System. On the Official Hardcore Server, we will not have an Appeal System. This means if you die because of a disconnect, your run is over. But, Blizzard have done a lot of work in the back-end to atleast make it so you disconnect as little as possible from the game itself. But if you have terrible internet connection, there’s really not a lot Blizzard can do.

A lot of people have speculated that they could have added a disconnect-protection-mechanic where if you disconnect, you get a protective bubble around your character until you come back in. But believe me, that could be abused and would be just as terrible as anything else.

Imagine if we had such a system, I could just install a flip switch for my internet router next to my PC on a foot-pedal and if I’m ever close to die or in an oh-shit situation, I could just hit that switch and disconnect and get a protective bubble around my character.

- There will be a lot less griefing on the Official Hardcore Server than we had on Classic Era with the Addon. With the Addon on Classic Era, we had people stand on flightmasters with PVP enabled players naming themselves after mobs and forcing you to target them. Basically, people just forcing you into PVP combat then griefing you.

On the Official Hardcore Servers, you have to physically opt in to PVP by typing /pvp in order to get PVP flagged, so that the entire category of griefing is now disabled.

We also saw people drag elite mobs such as Teremus all the way to Stormwind and Elwynn Forest, and mobs will now have a kite-leash-cap, meaning if you try to kite a mob more than 500 yards away, it will reset. So, in this example, kiting Teremus out of Blasted Lands would end up resetting Teremus.

On the other hand, there is a new category of griefs, which Blizzard really can’t to anything about, and that is “Social Griefing” by players pretending to be your friend, joining your dungeon group or raid, then wiping the entire group.

Today I'm going to give you an updated version on how to target farm specific unique items in Diablo 4, but also double your unique drop chance and sometimes even triple it. So there are four components to this article with the last one speed farming being the most important, ideally you should be doing two of these at the same time.

Concept Of Monster Families

I'm going to start off with Monster Families. I know a lot of you are already familiar with the concept, but I'll briefly go over it. Different monsters in the game have a higher chance of dropping certain Diablo 4 Items. For example, if you are a Druid and you're trying to find Tempest Roar, you should be targeting Cultists and Cannibals, because they have a higher chance of dropping Helms.

Let's say you were going to chase Greatstaff of the Crone, well then you would be farming Goatman. Now I know a lot of you in the previous season would rerun the same dungeon, even though it was not a Nightmare Dungeon in Diablo 4. So like Cultist Refuge without opening up a Sigil, you do not want to do that this season.

The reason is that massively increase the chance of a unique item dropping from the rewards at the end of your dungeon, so previously it was one legendary and I think two rare items, now there's a very high chance you can drop two legendaries, but those legendaries can actually convert to unique items as well.

How To Reset Nightmare Dungeons?

This is not only important for Target farming certain uniques in Diablo 4, but you should be doing this anyway just for the experience game, because of how good some dungeons are compared to the others. So to reset the dungeon, obviously open up the dungeon that you want to do first.

Now accept the dungeon like usual when you are in a group, now you want to promote your teammate to party leader, or it might be the other way around, they might promote you. It doesn't matter either way, but you have to exchange party leadership. So in my case, I from loading my friend wolf to party leader. Now he has to decline the party leader invitation or this will not work.

Once this is done, we're going to teleport to the dungeon you can also do this at the start of the dungeon too by the way. Now in Diablo 4, we're going to finish the dungeon you can get your Cliff Awards everything, leave back into town, now whoever was the party leader has to leave the group. Once they've left that group, whoever was party leader, they have to invite you to a brand new group. So you're jumping into their world now, now the dungeon has been reset, so we're going to teleport to the entrance using the open world map and rinse and repeat.

In Diablo 4, there are two more factors that you need to add into this as well, the chances are between 1 to 100 you are going to find at least one of every single unique in the game for your class. I know that's not the case for everyone, it's RNG, some people cannot get say a Tempest Roar and be level 100 and still trying to find this item. So what you want to do is try and farm dungeons that have a way higher drop chance for items in general, and you can get more Diablo 4 Gold too.

Farming Uldurs Is A Good Choice

A really great example that my clan and I have been using, we've been farming Uldurs, the quantity of items that drop is almost double even triple than some of the other dungeons. In fact it's around about two full inventories of just items that can drop on the ground, there is a chance that each item can roll into a unique. So this is just as effective as Target farming certain dungeons, just the sheer quantity makes up the difference.

Speed Farming Is The Most Important

The last which is the most important in my opinion, you should be speed farming. You have to fight the temptation to be pushing dungeons way higher than yourself, so you want to make sure that the monster level is the exact same level as your character in Diablo 4. Because you're farming enemies at the same level as you, they're going to be super super easy, so you don't have to worry about things like damage reduction, too heavily investing in defensive stats, you just want to go completely Glass Cannon.

One of the stats that I've been playing around with that I think is absolutely fantastic that was not good in the previous season, but is now really important for Speed farming and that is the bonus effects after killing an Elite, so it might be x amount of movement speed for 4 seconds after killing an Elite or x amount of damage after killing an Elite.

They can only roll on three specific item slots. So the amulet can roll movement speed after killing an Elite and damage, now your boots can only roll movement speed after killing an Elite and then your pants can run the extra damage after killing an Elite.

Only those three spots make sure that you keep in mind that the movement speed in the game is capped at 100% I believe. Technically you could get 230% movement speed with all of your gear, it's going to hard cap at 100%, so you want to be kind of keeping that in mind.

Outro

This is even more effective now because of the monster density bonus, so just to recap, find a dungeon in Diablo 4 with the specific item type that you're trying to look for, dude dungeon resets with your friend. If you do not have a friend to play with, then go for a higher drop quantity dungeon, which has a higher chance. Because of the sheer number of items and lastly make sure you're speed farming monsters at the same level as you. This is not just for uniques, this is for your experience gain as well.