It's a big day for World of Warcraft secret finders. The final steps of a puzzle that took them over a year to solve have been discovered. Specifically, the 11th and 12th orbs that surround the mysterious Felcycle mount have been lit and the secret is, well, no longer a secret.

A little over a week ago, players found out how to light the 10th orb in the secret lair below the Karazhan raid, which confirmed their suspicions that a puzzle from last year would continue when the Midnight expansion was released. That orb is one of 12 that surround a motorcycle mount players can unlock by lighting up the first nine.

The clever minds in the WoW secret-finding Discord server recently cracked the code on the final two steps. While the second-to-last step isn't required to get the unique transmog appearance, it does reward an achievement. And as we all know: To be a completionist is to have the courage to take on anything to make the number go up, including synchronized dance with a group of 40 players.

That's right—the final step requires more people than WoW raids even support anymore. The days of 40-player raids are long over, but Blizzard apparently wanted to inject a little bit of nostalgia into the solution for this step of the puzzle.

If you can somehow wrangle 40 other people together and bring them to the Divine Flame of Beledar in the Hallowfall region, you can participate in the secret minigame. Everyone will need a buff from the item players accidentally found while trying to solve a separate puzzle, the Oddsight Focus. Then, like many complicated things in WoW, you'll need a mod, or an addon, to synchronize the order of everyone's emotes.

Targeting the Divine Flame of Beledar shows a progress bar for every successful round of emotes. Fail the timing enough times and you'll have to start over, but coordinate all 40 people correctly and everyone will receive the Radiant Singer achievement, and the 11th orb will light up.

For the final orb, you need to head to a specific spot in Suramar (Wowhead knows the exact position). There you have to find an invisible ghost who will give you a bad orb—not to be confused with the good orbs. It's a bad orb because as soon as you stuff it in your pockets, bad guys come after you, and you have to avoid getting hit by them as you travel across the world to Aszuna. I'm getting flashbacks to carrying items through the treacherous lands of Silksong to finish the Great Taste of Pharloom quest, a burden I vowed to never take on again.

Completing this quest—hopefully with your sanity intact—rewards you with an outfit that matches the green Felcycle mount. It's a visual callback to the Legion expansion, which was filled with big demons and lots of glowing green demonic energy. I can't say I would want my character to look like a Mountain Dew ad, but to each their own.

Knowing how complicated the first nine steps of this entire puzzle are, I'm convinced WoW players have no reservations on what they'll do for an outfit. Many people don't even wear this stuff, they just want to collect them all in case the day comes where they want to look like they're made out of Nickelodeon slime. Either way, I can at least respect spending an entire year solving this puzzle just for the love of the game.

World of Warcraft: Midnight's first Season is in proper swing, and there's been a lot of concerns about the difficulty—the first part of the world first race, split up between the Voidspire and the March on Quel'Danas, has come and gone so quickly it's had hardcore raiders sitting on their thumbs.

That's due to a lot of reasons. Thinned-out addons, class simplification, easier fights, and faster gearing methods—and, as WoWHead shares, some of the fastest Mythic+ grind completion times in recent history.

For those not in the know, Mythic+ is the other slice of the hardcore scene in WoW, and is often used by hardcore players as a supplementary gear diet in between raid lockouts. Players level up "keys" by beating timed dungeon runs stacked with extra modifiers. For some, it's even the entire reason why they play in the first place.

There has, however, been a considered effort by Blizzard to make them more accessible—see the new modifier that, at lower difficulties, gives a path for tanks to follow rather than having them rely on addons. Self-described "Loa of statistics" Jordan shares on X that, looking at the Raider.io numbers, around 92% of players are beating them within the timer—compared to the numbers of 78.2%-79.4% in all three seasons of The War Within.

Furthermore, in a separate post last week, Jordan noted that there were "more [level 10 keys] timed in the last 18 hours than there [were] all of week one of [season 1 of The War Within]." As WoWHead notes, one of the modifiers, "Xal'atath's Guile", reduces the timer by fifteen seconds whenever someone dies—and was moved from level 7 keys in The War Within to level 10 keys in Midnight.

The new Prey system also contributes. The hardest difficulty of Prey, nightmare, isn't actually too tough, and also rewards players with "Champion" gear. Combine that with similar gear being available from delves a full week before Mythic+? Players were rocking up to the race with some solid kit.

Either way, hitting level 10 keys in a matter of days is a bit of an issue, because anything higher than that and you're not really getting much out of it. For those of whom Mythic+ is the entire draw of WoW in the first place, that's a problem.

This has brought up some mixed results from the playerbase. YouTuber's Talesin & Evitel remarked on X last week after nearly getting level 10 keys across the spate of dungeons in one night that "I agree the dungeons might be a bit undertuned". Others, such as those in this thread on the r/WoW subreddit, are more enthused:

"For me, the feeling of being able to realistically achieve Cutting Edge and a 3000+ Mythic+ rating without completely no-lifing the game is a huge win," writes one player. "This season being easier has made me feel less like I'm gonna burn out and more like I want to try out more classes once I'm done instead, really enjoying that not everything feels terribly stressful," adds another.

On the other hand, user Strachmed writes: "I am almost there (3k) week one. My vault is already full of myth track gear … I'm probably going to be done with WoW three weeks into the season, when usually it lasts longer."

It's a toughie—you can absolutely make the argument that WoW's higher difficulties have been pretty unassailable in the past, Mythic+ included. The assumed knowledge going into a key was always pretty high, as was the usage of AddOns, and that's certainly something that put me off the last time I gave it a bash in Dragonflight.

On the other hand, not everything in an MMO has to be for me, and Midnight's given me plenty of decently tough solo content with nightmare difficulty Prey and Delves. The question remains as to whether this difficulty'll be a new normal in the seasons to come, or a one-off under-tuning that Blizzard will correct in the future.