WoW Weekly Catch-Up: Midnight Early Access & Raid Schedule — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] Hi, I'm Hazel. It's Saturday today, so let's catch up on the values of the week and what's generally going on in WoW in this last week before Midnight Early Access. We're so back.

[00:13] Speaking of Midnight Early Access, it got bumped up and is now going to be happening on Thursday, February the 26th, launching at 3 p.m. Pacific time. This is a day earlier than our previous date we were working with, which was Friday the 27th.

[00:29] my theory for why they've done this is just to kind of give them a little bit of extra wiggle room so they still provide like three full days even if they have some technical difficulties for some portion of the time it works for me but I'm west coast I'm on pacific time so it's just

[00:43] the afternoon for me I definitely know some people who planned their time off around the old date so thoughts and prayers for your sleep schedule and or final day of work if that is happening to you. Good spot for a reminder that early access is not an early start to the season, but it does

[01:00] give you a few days to level, start your profession, start gathering, start gold making, generally get your bearings in the new expansion, and of course it comes with the most expensive version of Midnight, because why wouldn't it? Speaking of the raid release, we have a full raid release schedule,

[01:16] and to set this up, in case you didn't know, the first season of Midnight Raids is actually three raids. We have the Dream Rift, which is one boss, the Void Spire, which is six bosses, and then we

[01:28] have March on Kaldanoth, which is two bosses. So a total of nine bosses, and hopefully that helps when you look at this schedule. So Void Spire and Dream Rift are the first raids opening. Those will open on March the 17th, and Mythic will start the following week. So that's going to be kind of the

[01:44] main race to world first, I guess. The March on Kaldanoth raid, which, reminder, just two bosses, start the week after that on March the 31st. So even without early access, you'll have plenty of time to get leveled

[01:56] and into some gear ahead of the raid release if that's what you want to do. I feel like these days, raiding is more optional in WoW than it's ever been. There's like so many other things that you might want to do instead.

[02:10] I'm going to be raiding. On that note there will be raid guides coming for me so if you like having a Hazelboss guide to lead you into a fight check back to my YouTube channel Maybe give it a bookmark or something That be it Other things

[02:22] going on right now, we are in the pre-patch event, and we're kind of entering the final weeks of it. I have gotten some great use out of an add-on called Midnight Twilight Ascension Pre-patch, and what this add-on

[02:34] does is it just gives you a nice, clean little UI with timers, and what you set waypoints to specific rares, so if you're working on your two-minute to midnight achievement, for killing each of the rares in the prepatch event. This is a great way to find out how long you might be waiting

[02:47] until the one that you need is actually up, and also gives you a wait point so you can just go wait wherever it spawns. It's worth mentioning that the prepatch event has exclusive mounts and pets and stuff that are not coming back, so if you want them, this is the time.

[03:00] The furniture will be available later, but the mounts and stuff, now's the time. Killing each rare once for the 2 minutes to midnight achievement gives you the mech suit mount, looks like this. We also have another mount and extra cosmetics from the vendor for currency.

[03:12] I have found this event to be pretty forgettable. I did it for all of a day and a half when it first came out and haven't really needed to touch it ever since. Having said that, I don't mind these events being forgettable because it's kind of by design like disposable content.

[03:29] If anything, it would be a little bit weird if it was super awesome and amazingly fun, and then it's gone as soon as the expansion launches because it was always going to go away forever when the expansion launches. So nothing crazy, but it got the job done.

[03:41] Other events ongoing to check in with Love is in the Air is currently live complete with new transmog to purchase on the vendors for love tokens and a new mount that can drop from Apothecary Hummel and the Crown Chemical Co. daily boss

[03:56] which brings us to four things I guess more if you somehow don't have like the toxic oozing or something but there's four mount-ish things that you can get from that daily boss There's the old love rocket, the X-45 Heartbreaker

[04:08] There's the Love Witches Sweeper there's this new spring butterfly and then there's also a drake armor item. So chances are you're going to get lucky with something. Doing the boss once per day per account

[04:21] seems to be your best bet. I just did it once a day. You could multi-box like extra trial accounts to make a party of five for extra chances. I didn worry about it It seemed like a huge pain in the butt Technically possible And speaking of festivals Lunar Festival is also up right now We kind of got like a festival overload

[04:41] There are some new things for Lunar Festival. They are all on the vendor, and they cost a combined total of 200 Elder Coins, or Good Fortune, or whatever you call the Lunar Festival coins. These are annoying because they are not war-bound,

[04:54] even though, like, Love Tokens and other event currencies have been. These ones did not get the war-bound treatment. and also you get one of them for visiting an elder. So they're pretty stingy. What I ended up doing to get the new items was I used alts to repeat the moon well visiting quest

[05:11] that is picked up here in Moonglade. You get 25 tokens for doing that quest. It's pretty fast to do, especially if you have a druid alt that can use the dream way. If you've done the quest before in that character, you may not be able to repeat it,

[05:24] but if you have a bunch of alts from, say, Legion Remix, This might be faster than flying around to different elders if you're looking to get the coins. Each elf that does the quest can buy one of the weapons, and then you just need to do an extra 50 elders on top of the quest on your last character

[05:38] to buy the ensemble if it's something that you want. Only 50 elders. In other news, Blizzard has a ton of promotions coming up to help push Midnight, and a bunch of them have stuff you can get. There is a support of Springer Pet coming up, so this is something they've done before.

[05:53] It does cost money. you can gift two Twitch subscriptions to a streamer that is active in the World of Warcraft category, such as, but not limited to myself, between February the 26th at 3 p.m. Pacific

[06:05] until the same time on March the 26th. If you do that, you can get the Fishmonger pet, a very cute baby seal situation. If you do decide to do this, please keep me in mind. I'm live Wednesdays through Sundays, 9 through noon Pacific time.

[06:19] Along similar dates, there's also a Twitch drop active as well. you can get Horde and Alliance Murloc plushies. That one is free. It's just for linking your accounts and watching a couple of hours of a Twitch streamer in the Warcraft category. It's drops-enabled.

[06:32] Like me. That is not all. There are also other promotions going on, probably more than I can cover. Two of them that are specifically related to housing. There's a Zillow integration up right now that allows you to claim a free piece of decor.

[06:45] It's a very nice kind of doormat-looking thing. This is free All you have to do is go to the Zillow promo website and claim the item you have to link your account but you can unlink it after if you want It also something that been put on by Blizzard so I think we can assume that Zillow is not going to be stealing our gold Hopefully

[07:02] They're also doing a Pinterest integration of all things in 2026. It's a promo that lets you link your account to share housing screenshots straight to Pinterest with this special new pneumatic toy that they are adding for it.

[07:16] This is reminiscent to me of Back in Pillars of Draenor when they first did the Twitter integration, which I actually enjoyed for a little while back when Twitter was fun. That eventually died. There is no longer Twitter integration for Warcraft,

[07:30] but we're getting Pinterest. I am not really dialed into Pinterest. My understanding is there's a lot of generated AI stuff on there that's hard to sift through, and there's a filter, but it doesn't catch all of it. However, this might be useful for some people, especially if you are a heavy decorator and a Pinterest user.

[07:46] At least it's free. In my life this week, and also just recently since I've been gone from these videos for a little bit, I'm doing good. The animals are doing good. Both Kira and Moose are well, and we're all settling into winter in the new house. It's chilly outside, but heat works.

[08:04] I've been enjoying streaming a lot, and I am starting some seeds for my outside garden come spring. I may have started them too soon. They're getting kind of big and there's like snow on the ground outside. I have been container gardening my whole

[08:17] life and I am very excited to have some real dirt to work with. This upcoming week I am doing a special off-schedule stream on Thursday the 26th

[08:29] so that I can stream the early access launch and level for a while before I decide to go to bed. If I decide to go to bed. For the world, it's been one. We just kind of leveled all night and made it to 80. If you are playing Early Access and you are looking for some second monitor company,

[08:42] feel free to join me on Twitch at twitch.tv slash hazelnuttygames. Thanks for watching. Happy Midnight Week. Thanks for having me back on your screen. See you next Saturday, and have a wonderful, wonderful day.

[08:54] Bye!

[09:09] you