Blizzard is always fighting a quiet war with World of Warcraft dataminers who scoop info out of the game files that they aren’t always supposed to see yet. These days, the discoveries are relatively minor, but they can still hint at future updates that haven’t been announced yet.
During the alpha and beta testing period for the Midnight expansion, players found an island that wasn’t accessible by normal means and would kick you out if you stepped foot on it. That area, Atal’Utek, is still around in the final release and more players are starting to realize that there’s something fishy going on with it.
When you enter Atal’Utek in Midnight, you’re hit with a debuff called “Coiling Suffocation” that eventually ports you back to where you came from. Lore heads might hear alarms go off when they read “coiling” in the debuff and “UIatek” in the icon names because there exists a serpent goddess named Ula-Tek. Trolls from Zul’Aman—which happens to be a new location in Midnight—worship her, so it would be a convenient time to bring her in as a big bad for the next raid.
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As far as a timeline goes, Blizzard has announced that the next major patch, 12.1, will be released in the summer. If these clues turn out to be true, that’s when we’ll probably see the island open up with a new storyline and raid to cap it off.
Whether these hints were left there intentionally or not, I always like when developers do a little bit of teasing for what’s coming next. WoW has done it for quite a while via NPC dialogue and quest text. Datamined hints are not quite as cool as stumbling into something you don’t understand yet in-game, but I’ll take it.
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