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.

World of Warcraft's upcoming Midnight expansion recently went into its first alpha phases of testing, and Blizzard has chosen to give an unprecedented number of players access to a dramatically early phase of development.

That's not surprising, as the company is enacting one of the most significant shakedowns of the player experience ever implemented in the venerable MMO: the proposed pruning of nearly all popular player mods used during combat.

As a knock-on effect, Blizzard is simplifying nearly every character's class and specialization, since mods will no longer be able to smooth over those rough edges or keep track of tricky spell interactions. It's a bold move, one that appears to equal the game's new housing feature as the biggest source of conversation about the expansion.

If done well, it might shake off the shackles of 20 years of accumulated complexity and open the door to new players joining WoW. Done poorly, it'll remove the depth from the game and lead to boring, repetitive combat.

I took the alpha for an in-depth spin in its first phase, which ended this week. I played the two dungeons and three delves currently available, tested out housing, gave the new demon hunter class' devourer specialization a try, monkeyed with professions a bit, and visited the new Arcantina community hub.

It is very, very early days. But Midnight is shaping up to be a solid, respectable expansion that might just achieve its goals. Questing and storylines are fine so far, though the first phase of the alpha only went to level 83 and had no cutscenes. I'll focus on the three major features of the expansion: the revamped classes, housing and the new devourer demon hunter specialization.

Your class, only less of it

It's too early to judge Blizzard's promised in-game UI replacements for the features players like most in their soon-to-be-retired combat mods. (They'll be ready for prime time in a later phase of the alpha.) Instead, I spent a good amount of time playing different classes and encounters to see what the net effects of all that skinnying down of character abilities has been.

The philosophy, as Blizzard developers have told me in interviews, is to cut those class spells and features that were basic maintenance or too complex to track without extensive modifications: buffs that had to be routinely maintained, for example, or spell interactions that didn't make logical sense but resulted in the highest damage or healing.

The results in this early stage are mixed. Those classes that were the simplest to begin with have changed the least. Hunter gameplay is nearly the same as it was. But it's hard to imagine playing a feral druid without managing Bloodtalons, or an arcane mage without managing, well, everything. (I spent two hours once practicing on target dummies with an arcane mage early in The War Within expansion, and barely mastered the opening salvo of spells.)

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and so many talents are yet to be implemented or fixed that it's hard to make a final call on the actual impact. The good news is that for most specs, it feels headed in the right direction. Nearly all need a button or two added in, but most of the bloat was correctly targeted, with a few noticeable exceptions.

I keenly felt the lack of my usual add-ons and WeakAuras in dungeons, which made evaluating that gameplay difficult. We'll know more about how this plays out with a full suite of tools later in the alpha.

Welcome home to Midnight

Housing is clearly the gem in Midnight's crown: Even with the limited number of housing items available in the alpha, I've been frolicking with the ability to design my own abode and see what others have done. The tools are terrific, even in this early stage, and incredibly flexible.

Is that candelabra a coat rack? Up to you based on the size. Or is it a tree, with the candelabra forming the base and a fluffy top made from a resized patch of grass? Your call! Maybe it's spikes growing up from where you buried it in your floor, or hanging upside-down from your ceiling like a stalactite pendant light. You can resize, rotate, flip and overlap items to your heart's content, leaving them floating them in the air, placed wherever you want, or snapped to a helpful grid. With 20-plus years of Warcraft items to eventually choose from and a wide variety of ways to transform, combine, and place them, housing is almost definitely going to be the collector's dream.

I'm a touch worried about time-gating on this important feature—things like how many items you can have at once are locked behind a Neighborhood Favor reputation-style system. Collecting items already takes time, and iterating using an ever-larger collection is going to keep people engaged, so these additional delays may add a sour note to an otherwise open, deep and incredibly entertaining system.

Devourer demon hunters are demon runners

I had planned to play the new devourer demon hunter specialization for most of my time in the alpha. This new hybrid spellcaster/melee combo dealer is only the second mid-range class in the game. Its visuals are frankly stunning; the dark purple, void-powered, dramatic animations of so many of its abilities made devourer exciting for me to pick up and play.

Devourer demon hunters carve off cool voidy-looking souls (think the evil Xal'atath's shoulder orbs) with the Consume ability, which also generates their Fury resource. You can pick them up by traveling over them or by taking a big swing with Reap. Souls fuel their Void Metamorphosis transformation, which allows you to cast the giant damaging void meteor of Collapsing Star. You can then spend Fury on Void Ray, which is devourer's version of the other spec's Eyebeam (but much cooler, since it's a torrent of void energy). Blizzard posted a nice blog entry if you'd like to see videos of the spell animations—the visual effects are awesome.

Unfortunately, as happy as I was to get my hands on it, I was just as grateful to put it down again. The spec loses the leech and self-healing built into the other two types of demon hunters, so despite a good complement of damage reduction abilities and a one-minute cooldown that heals some (but never all) of the damage you've taken, it feels incredibly squishy. A single additional monster or two was enough to make my character fall over.

Most ranged classes without self-heals have terrific crowd control (CC) abilities, so they can stop mobs from reaching them. Unfortunately, that isn't true with devourer, particularly with the short range of its spells. While it does have some CC, it feels like it either needs some better slows or stops (which could make it overpowered in some content) or, more likely, to just have self-healing from Souls put back into its kit, perhaps at a lesser rate than other demon hunter specs.

As far as the combat rotation, it's still early and very janky to play. It was far too easy to lose your stack of split-off souls before reaching the "explode for damage" stage. Melee combos felt terrific, but were far too infrequent, and brought you into range for mobs to smack you, which you then couldn't fully recover from.

As with all things in the alpha, there is still time for Blizzard to supply what's missing and polish up what isn't, so I'm reserving final judgment on devourers. The specialization, and the expansion as a whole, have great potential, even at this early stage. But there is a lot remaining to do before Midnight—and the clock is ticking.