We're into the second week of Dragonflight and a lot has happened, we've got big changes to rep/renown farms, weekly events, bug fixes, there are really weird ways to gear up super quickly, we have more rewards to look forward to. Loot is being changed in Mythic raids, alts have more and better skits, experience gains have been slashed in half for some activities and the Darkmoon fair is better than ever. Today we break down what's been happening in WoW for this past week as well as some very important updates for the game as a whole.

New Changes & Nerfs for Dragonflight – Rep/Renown Farm, Experience Gain, Weekly Event

• 1. No BoE from Mythic Raid

The first Dragonflight raid the Vault of the Incarnates will open up next week and there's an interesting change coming through for how bind on equip gear will work for the first few weeks of the new raid on Mythic difficulty only, remember that Mythic does open up at the same time as everything else for this expansion and Mythic difficulty BoEs will not actually be bind on equipped, they will instead be bind on pickup meaning you will not be able to trade or sell them outside of your raid group. This means that the highest item level bind on equipped gear you can get from the raid in the first few weeks will be from heroic, not Mythic, no Mythic item level gear circulating through the economy which also means there will not be a part of the race to world first in any capacity. Usually guilds spend millions of gold on buying any piece of BoE gear they can find, just to get every shred of advantage they can muster, but that won't be a factor this time. It's healthy for the game overall to delay that big spike of easy to acquire max item level gear. After a few weeks of the raid being open, the dev team will readdress the situation and might re-enable Mythic BoE gear, but at that point only new drops will be BoE. So you can't hold on to them and sell them at a later date.

• 2. Super rares and crazy gearing strats

While we're on the topic of gear, Dragonflight has been a bit weird so far in terms of how you can gear up. We've had the typical dungeon farm, normal into heroic into Mythic, get some shiny gear from those Mythic zero dungeons and then we usually wait for the raid to open up in Mythic plus and all that jazz. But this time world content seems to be the king when it comes to getting the best gear. The weekly world event rewards can be very lucrative including the weekly quest for aiding the accord, Reds can also drop some good gear and WoW quests are scaling higher than we've ever seen this early in an expansion. But the real outlier has been the so-called super rares. Super rares have loot that scales with your item level and they can drop gear up to item level 385. Most of these rares are over by the Obsidian Citadel in the Waking Shores or in Backenhyde Hollow over in the Azure span. They are being heavily farmed and camped which also means there are usually a lot of groups active whenever a rare does spawn. So even if you can't see the rare in your shot or server be sure to check they're looking for group tool for any of the rares names that you're interested in, when that rare does pop up somewhere, anywhere you can almost guarantee a group will be made. There are a few different addons or weak auras that help you track which super rares you've killed for the day and what loot they drop you can loot these every single day, so a lot of people are just farming them repeatedly as often as they can, so you can see which ones might give you some good upgrades and which ones might just not be worth looking for whatsoever. 

There is one rather large caveat here because this gear scales with your item level, you are going to need some gear before this gear becomes super valuable, so those Mythic 0 dungeons or crafted gear or any other more reliable source of higher item level gear, it's still going to be very valuable for you because that gear will also increase the value of rare or super rare gear. So if you aren't getting the higher item level drops from these rests just yet, try increase your item level in other ways as well, don't just rely on the super rares because their loot is also random.

• 3. Siege of Dragonbane exploits fixed

You probably know about the various weekly events, the Community Feast, the grand hunts and the Siege on Dragonbane Keep. They reward you with a nice box of goodies and loot for the first time you complete them per week, and they have okay rewards if you do it more than that. But oddly enough, those rewards didn't have a lockout on them at all, this is important because the Siege on Dragonbane keep is a bit different. You can progress it faster or slower depending on your shard and the group you're running with, so you could complete the event on your server or shard and then use the group finder to find a shard that was still in progress. This meant you could earn rewards from your siege and then from someone else's siege right after and you could keep going until you could no longer find groups in the group finder. Wowhead made a post suggesting that you could get up to 6 or 7 loot boxes per Siege which runs every hour. This led to folks earning up to 6 to 7 times more rewards than was intended for the siege event, so you can bet your dragon riding vigor points that everyone was flocking over there to take advantage of.

• 4. Wrathion rep grind nerfed

Another change or fix or nerf depending on which word you'd prefer to use came through for the Wrathian and Sabellian reputation farm. This farm was and still is pretty simple, kill as many monsters as you can as quickly as you can, loot them for key fragments, combine them into keys and turn them in. It was also incredibly efficient if you had a good group or a nice setup of a 2x4 group and you could just grind the Knight away. Until Blizzard nerfed it, apparently the respawn rate of monsters in the Obsidian Citadel area was significantly reduced, meaning you would have to wait longer and longer for the monsters to respawn, slashing the effectiveness and overall efficiency of the farm into tatters. So if you start the rep/renown farms now and try to grind monsters, you're doing the exact same thing, you're just going to see far fewer monsters in general and they will respawn much slower, meaning you have to move around to find monsters a lot more, then just slowed it all down massively. Because the big ticket items available towards the end of that reputation farm are pretty powerful, completing this rep farm in 8 hours was a little too fast for Blizzard's liking, so they nerfed it by quite a bit. You should expect to spend quite a bit longer than those early folks grinding mobs if you really want to push this rep before the raid comes out.

• 5. A new round of twitch drops

Gear up for the race to world first: Blizzard just announced that we will see another round of twitch drops. If you tune in to the WoW streams over on twitch between December 9th and December 13th, you can grab yourself the Cenarion Hatchling pet as well as the Swift Windsteed mount. You will need to watch 4 hours to get the pet and then an additional 4 hours after that to get them out and you will have to claim the pet before you can start your progress towards the mount according to the post. So another two very easy to obtain rewards, all you have to do is watch a bit of your favorite our streamers over on twitch.

Watch the race to world first: In addition to this new round, there's a few changes to the Perpetual Purple Firework twitch drop. When this drop starts on December 13th when the raid opens up, you'll have to watch very specific channels to be able to earn it, that's markedly different from all of the other drops which have been very open for the most part. But this purple firework toy is to celebrate the race to world first event, so you will need to watch a twitch stream from one of the 5 top guilds, include Team Liquid, BDGD, Echo, Method, and Averesion with links to various streams under those labels. The watch time is still only at 2 hours though so that should be a really easy drop to pick up especially if you actually want to watch the race to world first.

• 6. Experience from crafting nerfed

Leveling via crafting professions was a little too powerful or just too easy because it has been nerfed quite considerably. Previously, you were able to earn a very nice chunk of experience with up to 60 first craft bonuses through any crafting profession, this would net you about 700000 experience or about two levels total if you did it towards the end of your leveling adventures. That number has been slashed in half, you can only obtain experience for 30 first crafts now which probably means you can only get about a level out of your professional experience gains going forward. The experience you get doesn't seem to have increased at all, so it seems like profession leveling has been nerfed by half which means it will be significantly less efficient or effective going forward. 

The main reason for this nerve was probably to discourage players from picking up a profession and then only using it for experience and dropping it afterwards for another profession and just keeping the cycle going until you capped out your experience gains. 

• 7. New ways to get profession knowledge

On the topic of professions, there was another new discovery this week that can boost your knowledge levels in any profession that you might be interested in. By this point, you probably know about the first craft bonuses, the various quests and weekly activities you can do, as well as the profession knowledge treasures. But on top of all of that, there are also hidden profession masters out in the world, they are typically squirreled away in their own little profession haven but thankfully Wowhead has a post that goes through every profession and its master and exactly where you can find them including some quick little tips to make sure you don't get lost.

When you find your profession master, all you have to do is strike up a little conversation, you should get a chat option like “teach me about my profession, free knowledge points, the gathering professions”. So mining herving and skinning will all get 10 knowledge points to spend and then the crafting professions which is pretty much everything else will get 5 knowledge points to spend. You also get a nice chunk of Artisans Mettle too which is a nice little bonus. So if you're trying to find every knowledge point possible, be sure to seek out your profession master for a quick boost.

• 8. Darkmoon faire changes are huge

Darkmoon faire profession quests have been up dated for Dragonflight and they're now more valuable than they've ever been. Not only do you get two free profession points by completing these very simple quests, which will let you slowly work your way towards that 100 skill cap, potentially saving you a whole boatload of gold as you go, but they also now reward you with some Artisans Mettle and some knowledge points for your professions. That's a very nice neat and valuable package of rewards for anyone interested in their profession progression. These quests will not be available as often as most of the sources of repeatable knowledge, the fair only comes around one week per month, but a few extra points once per month will definitely add up over time. 

With the Darkmoon Faire back in town, we can also take advantage of that shiny 10 experience in reputation gain's buff. So if you're still leveling or if you're leveling any alts or just working on any reputation grind in particular, you can use the Darkmoon faire to give yourself a nice boost.

• 9. New skips for alts

For Dragonflight alts, there is a very nice quality of life change for any alts you might want to level up. Until now, every character had to complete the Thaldraszus campaign storyline to unlock the engine of innovation and get started with their Sparks of Ingenuity which allows you to craft the big ticket profession items. That requirement was just removed, so your alts can hop on over to the engine and start that questline and start collecting their Sparks of Ingenuity right away, no questing required. You can even start the quest sign while you're still leveling. You can even earn a little bit of experience for something that absolutely everyone and every character should definitely unlock. The Sparks of Ingenuity give you access to some of the best crafted gear you can make, so it looks like we can start gathering those on alt way before we can even use them now. But the main takeaway here is that you don't have to go through the Thaldraszus campaign on every single character anymore.

• 10.  Azure span lag fixed?

One of the last hot fixes that came through recently is to address the lag over in Azure span. The Community Feast was the main culprit even though the Cobalt assembly contributes at least a little bit, but Blizzard has apparently made some changes on their end to hopefully smooth out the overall experience of the Community Feast itself, but to also try and ensure that the event doesn't completely the Azure span zone while it's active. If you've been playing a lot over the last few days, you'll know that the Azure span has been in a rough spot upon crossing that zone perimeter, as soon as you enter the Azure span, the 5 to 6 second delay kicks in and it made doing anything in that zone quite tedious and frustrating.

That's all the big updates and WoW news for this past week. What do you think of all the various reputation grind nerfs and changes? How do you feel about rares and world events rewarding some of the best gear?