0hp: Patches

Old School RuneScape ships the rest of Summer Sweep Up, with only the pets held back

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

Jagex, which is the studio behind Old School RuneScape, shipped the rest of its Summer Sweep Up on 2 September 2026. Everything landed except the pet updates, which its own note says are planned for release within the next two weeks. The changelog is mostly small mercies: stackable Unsireds, a lectern that remembers what you were making, inventory locking in the Seed Vault, and four amulets for spellcasters plus a fifth that combines them.

A little of the game's own vocabulary before the numbers. An Unsired is a drop from the Abyssal Sire, one of the game's bosses, traded in for a reward. The Seed Vault is the storage room for farming seeds. Runecraft is the skill that makes magic runes. GP means gold pieces, the currency. A raid is a dungeon built for a group. And Permanent Deadman Mode, which the changelog names as such, is a high-risk mode where dying costs a great deal.

The numbers worth writing down

Change	Detail
Necklace of Fangs	+12 Ranged Accuracy, +1 Ranged Strength, 1 in 128 from Turoths; also drops from Spiked Turoths, at a rate Jagex does not give
Elemental jewels	1 in 64 each: air from Killerwatts, water from Sea Snake Hatchlings, earth from Molanisks, fire from Infernal Mages
Elemental amulets	+10 Magic Accuracy, +2 max hit, Runecraft 18 to 21 by element
Elemental amulet, combined	The four elemental amulets plus 500 runes of each element, Runecraft 30; +10 Magic Accuracy and +2 max hit on all elemental spells
Shark lures	1 lure, 50% chance of 5 ticks becoming 4; 3 lures, always 4; 5 lures, always 4 with a 50% chance of 3
Fishing Sacks	500 Molch pearls reclaimable per extra sack, from Alry the Angler
Permanent Deadman risk floors	at least 100,000 GP in alch value to attack other players, at least 500,000 near the chest; raid entry needs at least 1,000,000 AND no Deadman protection remaining

Alch value, in that last row, is what an item is worth when magically turned into coins.

Our take: what it means for players

The Unsired fix is the model here, and it is worth explaining, because it shows the right way to solve this kind of problem.

Unsireds could not stack because each one, in Jagex's words, had to retain separate information about its potential reward. Jagex moved the roll to the Font of Consumption instead. Our reading is that this is the harder of the two available fixes and the better one. It makes every Unsired the same item, rather than bolting on a storage exception that would have left the oddity in place. A design fix rather than a convenience feature, and it costs the player nothing.

The same instinct runs through the rest. A lectern that remembers your last tablet. Ghommal's Lucky Penny working when consumed rather than worn. Inventory locks in the Seed Vault. Abyssal Lanterns storable in Magic Wardrobes, which the changelog credits to popular request. None of that is content. Most of it is friction with no benefit to anyone, and removing friction is the cheapest respect a studio can pay to the people playing.

Deadman is the one that will start an argument, and we think Jagex has it right. You now need at least 100,000 GP in alch value to attack another player, and at least 500,000 near the chest. Entering a raid area needs at least a million risked and no protection left. A player who risks nothing can no longer farm players who risk everything. A permanent mode where players fight each other works best when the attacker has skin in the game.

The one blemish is a promise rather than a change. The pet updates would let pets follow you into content like the Gauntlet, Fossil Island's underwater area and various minigames, and respawn with you on death. They did not make this batch, and Jagex says only that they are planned for release in the next two weeks.

What's next

Jagex plans the pet changes for the next two weeks, and lists the Phosani's Nightmare pillar health bars for a coldfix next week. Phosani's Nightmare is a solo version of one of the game's hardest boss fights. Nothing new joins the calendar from this batch.

That coldfix note sits oddly, and our reading is that it is worth flagging. A line further down the same page says the totems and pillars at Phosani's Nightmare were not showing their health accurately and have been fixed, while the Known Issues box still lists the problem as outstanding. Jagex never says the two are the same bug.

The page does carry two dated events: LANscape on 5 September, which is the studio's own in-person day where creators play together, and Dragonwilds 1.0 on 15 September. Both are already on the calendar from their own announcements.

WoW's 1 September hotfixes lift thirteen specs and cut boss health in the easy queue

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

Blizzard's fix pass dated 1 September 2026 points in two directions at once. Thirteen character specialisations went up in World of Warcraft, while several healing and defensive numbers came down where players fight each other. Ten of the thirteen took a damage increase, two took healing and one took survivability. It all sits on Blizzard's running hotfix page, which is edited in place as fixes land rather than reposted each time.

Three words to carry through the rest of this. A hotfix is a small change applied to the live game without taking it down. A spec, short for specialisation, is the role and playstyle a character picks inside their class. A raid is a dungeon built for a large group.

The numbers, against monsters

Spec	Change
Frost Death Knight	Howling Blast and Obliterate +15%, Frost Strike +20%, melee +10%
Protection Paladin	Blaze of Glory +150%, Consecration +30%, Divine Guidance +30%
Feral Druid	all ability damage +5%, auto-attacks +10%, Ferocious Bite +10%
Beast Mastery and Survival Hunter	+7% each, Survival only +3% against other players
Frost Mage	+6%
Fire Mage	+3%
Restoration Druid	healing +4%
Fire Mage	+3%
Restoration Druid	healing +4%
Fire Mage	+3%
Restoration Druid	healing +4%
Fire Mage	+3%
Restoration Druid	healing +4%
Vengeance Demon Hunter	Demonic Wards 15% (was 12%), Fel Devastation healing +25%
Mistweaver Monk	healing +5%, tier 4-piece proc chance 25% (was 20%)
Havoc, Balance, Windwalker	+4% each, against monsters only

A tier set, which is a matched set of gear whose pieces give a bonus when worn together, is what the Mistweaver "four-piece" row is about: wearing four of them.

Five of those rows carry a developer note explaining the intent, and the notes are more specific than the numbers. Frost Death Knight is aimed at single target and two-target cleave. Vengeance is called out as still short defensively. Feral is called short in raids. Mistweaver is said to want more healing and more value from its four-piece. Protection Paladin is behind other tanks in dungeons.

Our take: what it means for players

This is a difficulty correction aimed at the bottom of the ladder rather than the top, and that is the right end to aim at.

The Venomous Abyss, which is the raid at the centre of the current season, has four difficulty settings. Raid Finder, the automatic queue that puts strangers into an easier version, sits at the bottom. Then Normal, then Heroic, then Mythic at the top. Every Venomous Abyss change on 1 September touching Raid Finder, or a smaller Normal or Heroic group, makes the fight easier. Inside that raid, Mythic is the only setting that gets stricter anywhere, on the Twin Fangs, though two abilities on the Coiled Altar, one of its boss fights, were cut there as well.

Nek'zali the Soulcoiler lost 15 percent of its health in Raid Finder, the Entombed Sentinels the same, and Vexhul and Ithraz 20 percent. On Mythic, Eternal Venom now takes ten applications to kill instead of fewer, and Ravenous Feast hits at least four people.

Read that split as a statement about whose evening matters. Midnight Season 2 is the game's current run of months, and Blizzard's own schedule for it puts wing 3 of that raid in the week of 1 September, so it opened the same week these numbers came down. A group walking in that night met a trimmed version rather than the one that had been standing. Nobody had to buy anything to get that. The fight moved. A player with a couple of evenings a week getting a fix in a hotfix, for free, is how this is supposed to work. Worth saying out loud in a genre where the same problem is often solved by selling somebody a shortcut.

The pass for fights between players runs both ways, and the healing cuts are unusually blunt about why. Healers keep topping people up too fast. So the Gladiator's Distinction set bonus now grants 5 percent primary stat for healing specialisations instead of 10, Restoration Druid's Swiftmend heals 20 percent less, and Mage barriers absorb a quarter less. Those are pace changes aimed at shortening matches rather than at any one class, and the studio saying so in the notes beats leaving people to guess from the numbers.

Where we would push: a fix pass this large arrives as edits to one running page, dated by day rather than laid out change by change with a build behind each one. Six weeks from now, working out which version your Tuesday night sat on means reading the whole page again.

Credit where it is due: Wowhead is where the community keeps a running record of these hotfixes.

What's next

The Venomous Abyss finishes opening with Raid Finder wing 4 in the week of 8 September, the last scheduled unlock of Midnight Season 2. That date, and BlizzCon, which is Blizzard's own convention and which we wrote up in our piece on its running order, are both on the calendar with the day we last checked them.

Albion's Dragonfire update puts a 20-player dungeon above the clouds, safe from raiders

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

Albion Online's Dragonfire update went live on 31 August 2026, and Sandbox Interactive's own launch post leads with a 20-player dungeon where nobody can attack you, and calls it the greatest challenge against the game itself that Albion has seen yet. The route to it runs through the Ancient Lands, which is a new region of floating islands where rival groups very much can.

That contrast is the whole story, so here is the vocabulary. Albion Online is a fantasy world where items are made by players, and where in much of the map other players are allowed to attack you. PvE, short for player versus environment, means fighting the game's own monsters. PvP, short for player versus player, means fighting each other.

The structure of the new content

Layer	Party size	Contested?
Ancient Lands portals	Solo up to 20, matched with similar sizes	Yes, deeper routes carry a higher chance of rivals
Leygates, opened with Keystones	As above	Yes, and rewards rise with depth
Dragon Sanctuary, entered with a Spirit Waystone	20	No, no other players can attack you
Dragon attacks, Royal Continent (the safer inner region)	Open, with little warning	Whoever is nearby
Dragon attacks, Outlands (the lawless outer region)	Open, announced in advance	Yes, rivals can contest the fight and its rewards

The Royal Continent is the game's inner region and the Outlands its outer one, where players hold territory themselves.

Rewards run from Dragon Scales, which craft into the Dragonslayer armour set, up to a Fire Drake Egg from Azaryon that can be raised at home into a Firewing Drake.

Our take: what it means for players

The two-tier design is the smart part, and it is a genuine answer to an old argument.

Albion's identity is that everything worth having is contestable, which is also why a lot of players never see its best content. Dragonfire keeps the contest where the value accrues, in the Ancient Lands and on the routes deeper in, and then puts what the studio calls its most demanding fight against the game itself behind a door other players cannot open. You still have to survive a contested region to get the Spirit Waystone. What you do not have to do is lose a two-hour run to an ambush on the last boss. That is a world with rules rather than a lobby with a queue, and it is the right instinct.

The Outlands dragon attacks are the same idea from the other side. Announcing them in advance so guilds can assemble, and letting rivals show up for exactly that reason, turns a world boss into a scheduled territorial fight. Announced contested content beats surprise contested content, because both sides chose it.

Where we would sound a note of caution is the reward ladder. A Fire Drake Egg raised at home into a mount, exclusive cosmetics gated behind Draconic Insight, plus creator giveaways running six weeks. That is a lot of engagement machinery bolted to one update. Nothing in the launch post is sold for money, which is the thing that matters, and it is worth watching that it stays that way.

What's next

The launch gift in Albion's own shops runs to 7 September at 10:00 UTC, and doubled Twitch drops, which are rewards for watching a stream, run to 14 September at 09:30 UTC. Both dates are on the calendar with the day we last checked them.

FFXIV Patch 7.56 lands 8 September, and closes a reward season under it

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

Patch 7.56 for Final Fantasy XIV is dated to the start of downtime on Tuesday 8 September 2026. The date comes from Square Enix's own notice that PvP Series 11 ends with the patch. PvP is short for player versus player, the part of the game where players fight each other, and a Series is a numbered season of its reward track.

That is a useful reminder, because the deadline people actually miss is the season closing under the patch rather than the patch itself.

What changed

Several things move on the eighth, and not all of them are updates.

What	When	Detail
Patch 7.56 downtime begins	Tue 8 Sep 2026	Brings beastmaster, a limited job (job is this game's word for a character class)
PvP Series 11 ends	Tue 8 Sep 2026	Series experience and level reset, rewards replaced
Series 11 rewards claimable until	end of Series 12	Trophy crystals carry over
Switch 2 free subscription period ends	Mon 7 Sep 2026, 23:59 local	30-day free play then starts 8 Sep
Moogle Treasure Trove, First Hunt for Astronomy	Wed 9 Sep 2026	Two installments, uolon horn reward

Beastmaster is the patch's headline, and it comes from a different notice. The Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XCIII digest was recorded at Fan Festival 2026 in Berlin, which is the game's own convention. Lead battle content designer Masaki Nakagawa walks through live gameplay of beastmaster there. Square Enix calls it the limited job introduced in Patch 7.56, a job being a character class and a limited one being a class that only works in certain content.

Before and after, for anyone on Switch 2

This is the quiet one, and it is a bill rather than a patch.

By its own notice on Switch 2 subscription fees, Square Enix ran a free subscription period on the Nintendo Switch 2 version, introduced to help ensure server stability. That period ends at 23:59 local time in each region on Monday 7 September, the night before downtime. From Tuesday 8 September, the 30-day free play window that came with a Starter or Complete Edition registration begins. Those are the two bundles the game is sold in. A subscription, which is the recurring fee you pay to keep playing, is required once that window has elapsed.

The same notice carries the part that decides what you pay. A Switch 2 subscription is separate from every other platform's, even for an existing subscriber. It is half price with an active subscription elsewhere, and that discount does not apply while a 30-day free play period is running on the other platform.

So the practical order runs like this. The free period ends the night of the seventh. The 30-day clock starts on the eighth. Thirty days from there lands in early October, which is where our maths says the first real charge arrives for anyone who registers then and does not pay before it elapses. Square Enix gives the first two dates, not the third. The free trial is unaffected and stays free, which the notice says outright.

Our take: what it means for players

We are going to defend the model and then complain about the paperwork.

A flat monthly subscription is the fairest arrangement in this genre, and it is worth saying so while the industry drifts the other way. Everyone pays the same. Everyone gets the same game. Nobody's character is stronger because their card is. Square Enix charging for Final Fantasy XIV the way it always has, rather than opening a shop that sells the difference, is why a patch note like this reads as a schedule instead of a price list.

The paperwork is where we would push. There are three dates in this chain. The free period ends at 23:59 the night before downtime. The 30-day clock starts the following day. Our maths puts the first real charge in early October. Only one of those three lands in most people's heads. Anyone who registered at launch on Switch 2 and has not paid yet will meet a charge they did not plan for, or find their subscription simply stops. Nobody is being tricked here. It is a sequence nobody wrote down for them, and a single line in the launcher would fix it.

The free trial is unaffected and stays free, which remains one of the more genuinely generous things any subscription game does.

What's next

The Moogle Treasure Trove opens the day after the patch, on Wednesday 9 September. The Trove is a recurring event that pays a temporary currency for playing old content, and this run is called the First Hunt for Astronomy.

By its own announcement, Square Enix calls it a special edition celebrating the upcoming release of Evercold, and it runs across two installments. The uolon horn needs an item awarded for minimog and ultimog challenges. The horn is available in the second hunt as well, so missing the first one is not fatal.

Beyond that, 7.56 is a closing patch rather than an opening one. The next thing on the horizon is Evercold itself, which Square Enix names only as an upcoming release. We carry it on the release tracker with no date at all, because it has not given one. Every date above is on the calendar.

WoW's Midnight Season 2 finishes unlocking on 8 September

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

World of Warcraft's Midnight Season 2, the game's current run of months, finishes unlocking in the week of 8 September 2026. That is when the fourth and last chunk of its big group dungeon opens to the automatic queue. Blizzard staged the season across five weekly steps rather than one day, in its own announcement.

The names, in plain words. The Venomous Abyss is this season's raid, which is a dungeon built for a large group and the hardest thing on the schedule. Raid Finder is the automatic queue that puts strangers into an easier version of it, released in chunks called wings. Above Raid Finder sit three harder settings: Normal, then Heroic, then Mythic at the top. The Great Vault is the weekly chest a character earns just by playing. Delves are short solo dungeons.

The unlock timeline

Week of	What opened
11 August	Altar of Fangs, Heroic and Mythic 0 dungeons, the new eight-dungeon rotation, Tidebound Grotto on World difficulty, Prey Normal and Hard, Nemesis delves at the first difficulty, arena training grounds
18 August	The Venomous Abyss on Normal, Heroic, Mythic and Raid Finder wing 1, Mythic+ Season 2, player-versus-player Season 2, bountiful delves and keys, Prey Nightmare mode, Great Vault season rewards
25 August	Raid Finder wing 2 and the raid's story mode
1 September	Raid Finder wing 3
8 September	Raid Finder wing 4

Mythic 0 is the detail people miss in that table. It ran on a weekly lockout in the first week and moved to a daily reset in the second, at the same 292 item level either way. Item level is the number that says how strong a piece of gear is.

Our take: what it means for players

A five-week ramp is a decision about who the season is for. Read it in order and it tells you who Blizzard expects to be where.

The first week is a gearing week with no raid in it at all. The second carries almost everything competitive at once: the timed dungeons, the fighting between players, the raid on Normal, Heroic, Mythic and the first Raid Finder wing, and the Great Vault, all turning on together. The three weeks after that add the raid's story mode and three more Raid Finder wings, and nothing else.

That last part is the interesting choice, and we think it is a good one. A schedule whose back half is built entirely around pacing the story for people who do not raid on a fixed night treats a casual evening as a legitimate way to play rather than a lesser one. The competitive players got everything in week two and are not waiting on anybody.

For a returning player the practical read is that arriving now costs almost nothing. Every source of gear except the last two Raid Finder wings has been open since the week of 18 August. The dungeon rotation is fixed for the season. The rating thresholds are published up front: 1500 for the title "the Venomous", 2000 for the mount Breath of Blight, 3000 for Breath of Ruin. Rating here is the score a character builds from timed dungeon runs. The top one percent and top 0.1 percent of players in your region settle at the season's end rather than on the way through. Thresholds published up front are the difference between a goal and a treadmill.

The raid's rewards are unusually generous for housing, and this detail is worth copying. Defeating Ula'tek drops the Venomous Abyss trophy decor for every raid member at 100 percent, on every difficulty. Heroic adds a second trophy and Mythic a third. A guaranteed drop rather than a chance is the right way round for a cosmetic. It pays the group that finished the raid, rather than the one lucky person in it.

Credit where it is due: Raider.IO is where a lot of groups will actually watch those rating thresholds move.

What's next

After the week of 8 September the season has no further scheduled unlocks. The next dated Warcraft event is BlizzCon, which is Blizzard's own convention, on 12 and 13 September. Its published running order carries a "World of Warcraft: What's Next" session and a second one numbered II. Both sit on the calendar with the day we last checked them.

RuneScape starts enforcing a 300 furniture limit in player houses again

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

RuneScape's September Patch Week landed on 1 September 2026. Its longest section is housekeeping for Leagues, a temporary game mode with fresh characters and its own rules. The line most players will feel sits in the housing block of Jagex's own patch notes: the 300 furniture limit in a player house is being enforced again, with a warning on entry for anyone already over it.

A player-owned house, to be plain about it, is a building each player customises and fills with useful rooms. It is a long-running side system in this game, and most of what goes in it is there for the look of the thing.

What actually changed

Six names in the table need a line each.

They are all the game's own words. Dungeoneering is the skill built around descending a randomised dungeon. Prayer and Summoning are two more skills, one powering protective blessings and one calling creatures to fight beside you. A Godsword is a family of powerful two-handed weapons named for the game's gods. Miscellania is an island players manage for a steady supply of resources. Anachronia, in the hotfix row, is one of the game's islands. Anachronia, in the hotfix row, is one of the game's islands. Anachronia, in the hotfix row, is one of the game's islands.

Area	Change
Player houses	300 furniture cap enforced again with an entry warning, bigger limit promised, undated
Player houses	Miscellania table recipe from Royal Trouble, Ports table recipe in the Ports Reward Shop
Dungeoneering Remastered	Prayer and Summoning doors capped at 99, Follow the Leader completable after a party member leaves, bound blastboxes and surgeboxes no longer lost on floor completion
Leagues II Equilibrium	Eleven quests and area tasks auto-completed, five quests and six tasks, divine boons at half energy with the Divine Druid relic, poison-only kills now award experience and drops
Leagues, hotfixed	The Leagues rare drop boost now applies to Godsword shards in the God Wars Dungeon, Clue Connoisseur gives 3 charges per outfit piece, Anachronia's base camp tutorial auto-completes on region unlock
General	Soul altar no longer demands a pure essence in the inventory, items sold to Tom's Trove buyable back, chicks added to four farms

Our take: what it means for players

Take the good first, because there is a lot of it and it all points the same way.

Auto-completing a quest a Leagues player cannot reasonably do, rather than making them do it, is the correct call every time. Eleven auto-completes went in this week: five quests and six area tasks, plus one more in the hotfix block for Anachronia's base camp tutorial. Alongside those came a fix so enemies killed only with poison award experience and drops, and a Wiki button that now points at the Equilibrium page. That is a team watching a temporary game mode and clearing the potholes as players hit them, which is what a seasonal mode needs and rarely gets.

The housing cap is the other thing. Enforcing an existing 300 item limit again is not a nerf on paper. Our reading is that in practice it is one. The patch note adds a warning "on entry to any players above this", which is Jagex confirming those houses exist. A warning on entry, no way to raise the ceiling, and a bigger limit described only as coming soon, leaves those players holding a house the game now flags as a problem. Housing is exactly the kind of long-horizon, no-power, purely-for-love system that keeps people subscribed to old games. It deserves a date rather than a promise.

Credit where the source gives it. Jagex points at Mod Yuey streaming Dragon trophy tips on 3 September alongside Maikeru and RSWillmissit. Mod is the prefix a Jagex staff member's public name carries. The notes also highlight community work by Casillio, Artwle, Bucket Cultist, Wings of Absurdity, Lily and SaltyxRs. The Pink Skirts run their usual week of open events, including Vorago, one of the game's boss fights, on 6 September.

What's next

The Month Ahead for September was due mid-week, and the community API and plugin update from Mod Fable has moved to the week of the seventh. An API is the interface community tools use to work with the game. Neither is a dated commitment, so neither joins the calendar until Jagex gives a day.

WoW's Curse of Ula'tek adds an island, an eight-boss raid and a Discord link

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

World of Warcraft's Curse of Ula'tek update went live on 11 August 2026. Blizzard's own summary leads with the Coiled Isle: a new outdoor area off the east coast of Zul'Aman, with an eight-boss raid, a three-boss dungeon and three new delves behind it. The raid arrived a week later.

Three words worth unpacking. A raid is a dungeon built for a large group, usually the hardest thing a game has. Delves are the small solo version. Zul'Aman is a region long-standing players already know, so the isle sits somewhere familiar.

What shipped, and when each piece opened

Piece	Detail	Live from
The Coiled Isle	Public events, Curse Surges, cursed fishing, an isle-only talent tree	11 August
Altar of Fangs	Three bosses, up to Mythic 0 (Mythic is the hardest difficulty setting)	11 August
Lairs	World bosses moved into private instanced fights; the notes describe scaling up to flexible Mythic with 15 to 25 players	11 August
Three delves	The Ring of Glory, Gnarldor Isle, and Venomfall Deeps as a Nemesis one	11 August
The Venomous Abyss	Eight bosses, Ula'tek last	18 August, with Season 2
Mythic+ rotation	Altar of Fangs joins seven others	18 August, with Season 2

Our take: what it means for players

Two changes in this update outlive the season around them, and neither of them is the raid.

The first is the Discord link. Discord is the chat app a great many guilds already run on the side. Connecting a Battle.net account to a Discord one and passing messages both ways closes a gap guilds have long papered over with a second app. It changes nothing about how the game plays and quite a lot about who reads guild chat, because the people who miss a raid signup are the ones not logged in. Unglamorous plumbing, and the best thing in the patch.

The second is housing blueprints, and this is the one we will actually praise. Exporting a whole house, an interior, an exterior or a single room and handing it to another player turns decorating from a private hobby into something shareable. The detail that makes it usable is the import screen: it lists what you are missing and still lets you import. A reset option puts everything back in storage, so experimenting costs nothing.

Note what is not there. Nothing in Blizzard's summary attaches a charge to any part of it. No shop entry, no bundle, no currency. In a genre where housing is very often the first thing put behind a shop, a sharing feature arriving with no price on it is worth saying out loud.

The area design earns a line too. Killing a rare tough monster at a Curse Surge unlocks cursed fishing in that spot, which chains a combat activity into a quiet one rather than running them in parallel. Those monsters rotate across five locations, so the isle rewards moving rather than camping. A world that pays you for walking around in it is a world rather than a menu.

Credit where it is due: Wowhead is where the community documents the blueprint format and the rare rotation.

What's next

The last dated step of this content cycle is the fourth Raid Finder wing, which is one chunk of the Venomous Abyss opened to the automatic queue that puts strangers into an easier version of it. Blizzard's own Midnight Season 2 schedule puts that wing in the week of 8 September.

After that the next Warcraft date is BlizzCon, which is Blizzard's own convention, and we have its dates and its running order in our piece on the schedule. Both sit on the calendar with the day we last checked them.

ESO's combat team rewrote Update 51's balance pass after test-server feedback

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

The combat team behind The Elder Scrolls Online went back into Update 51 and rewrote its balance pass. Players had spent two weeks hammering the public test server, which is a copy of the game where changes are tried before release. The team says so plainly in its own post on 13 August: these adjustments answer that feedback, and were not originally planned.

That is a rare admission, and it is why this list is worth reading closely. A quick primer for anyone who has not played. You pick a class, which is the kit of skills your character fights with. ZeniMax is rebuilding those classes one at a time. Update 51 is the next free patch, and a balance pass is the round of number changes that decides which classes feel strong.

The numbers, by class

Class	Change
Dragonknight (a fire and earth themed class)	Core of Flame 12% missing resources (was 15%), Heart of Flame healing down 20%, Landslide builds faster and stacks to 12, Seething Fury halved in player-versus-player, Power Lash damage down
Templar (a light and healing themed class)	Balanced Warrior uncapped and now rewards slotting Templar skills, Judgment's Brand 1600 bonus damage (was 1400), Aetheric Lancer's area effect spawns on a stationary caster
Nightblade (a stealth themed class)	Strife grants 1% damage per 10% of current health while active; the cost increases stay under review
Necromancer (a class that raises the dead)	Nothing Wasted loses 2 stacks instead of 3 but decays every 12 seconds without generating a corpse (was 15), Pummeling Goliath's bash gains a 1-second cooldown and about 73% more damage, Frozen Colossus 12.5% more damage and costs 150 ultimate (down), both to be reverted in a future update
Warden (a nature and ice themed class)	Fetcher Infection 75% every other cast (was 60%), Arctic Blast about 20% more per tick
Sets and skills	Draugrkin's healing reduction halved in player-versus-player and its bonuses moved to weapon and spell damage, Ice Comet about 21% more damage over time and now snares on every hit

Two bits of vocabulary for that table. A stack is a counter a skill builds up as you use it. An ultimate is a powerful ability you charge up before you can cast it.

Our take: what it means for players

Credit first, because it belongs to the testers rather than the studio.

Nothing in that table exists without the people who spent two weeks on a test server writing up what was wrong. ZeniMax naming that feedback as the cause is the honest thing to do. A public test server is unpaid labour that makes a live patch better, and it deserves to be described that way.

The substance is a studio admitting that rebuilding classes one at a time was always going to break fights between players. Dragonknight and Werewolf got their refreshes before the others, and the post names their "prevalence and often dominance" in that space. Werewolf is a transformation skill line a character can carry alongside their class. The team says part of that is inevitable by nature of going first. It is. That is exactly the argument against shipping a rework class by class in a game where players fight each other. Everyone on a class that has not had its turn waits on a schedule they did not choose.

The Warden entry is the one that should worry people. A class the studio says is still mid-rework gets two number tweaks and a note saying they do not indicate where it will end up. The next stage of that rework has already moved to 2027. That is a long stretch of playing a class the developers agree is not finished, and no amount of Fetcher Infection damage closes the gap.

The Necromancer bash change is the quiet good one. The post says it is aimed at correcting the need to double bash weave, which is the fiddly habit of squeezing two bashes in between other abilities, and gives one harder hit instead. ZeniMax says plainly that this "will nerf some of the ceiling potential", and that it is fine with that based on the logs. Our view is that trading a little top-end power for a far less fiddly ability is the right way round.

What's next

Update 51 lands on 28 September 2026, a week later than first announced (the studio director's letter). The next stage of the class and combat rework is now targeted at 2027. Both sit on the calendar and the release tracker with the day we last checked each.

ESO Update 51 slips a week to 28 September, and two big features slide into 2027

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

Update 51 for The Elder Scrolls Online lands on 28 September 2026, a week later than ZeniMax first said. Three things have moved out of 2026 altogether. The change came on 30 July in a letter from game director Nick Giacomini, published alongside a round of studio changes.

If you have never played it: The Elder Scrolls Online is a fantasy game thousands of people share, and an update is a free patch that adds areas, systems and fixes for everyone. Season One is the game's name for this stretch of the year and the content grouped inside it.

What changed

The letter puts a principle before a date: quality experiences over calendar dates. Here is what that costs, in dates.

The letter gives one old date and one new one. Update 51 "will now launch one week later, on September 28". The 21 September in the first column below is that week subtracted, not a date ZeniMax restates.

Feature	Was	Now
Update 51	one week earlier, so 21 September 2026 by our subtraction	28 September 2026
Nowhere Vault	with Update 51	28 September 2026, with Update 51
Rumors system	with Update 51	28 September 2026, with Update 51
Player experience improvements	with Update 51	28 September 2026, with Update 51
Three-sided Battlegrounds (arenas where players fight each other)	no date stated	28 September 2026, permanently
Crimson Veldt trial (a trial is this game's word for a big-group raid dungeon)	no date stated	2027
Update 52	no date stated	January 2027
Class and combat refresh, next stage	no date stated	targeted at 2027

Everything else in Season One runs as planned. The letter adds a Golden Pursuit campaign, which is a rotating list of in-game tasks that pay shop rewards, called "Straight to the Crate", from 20 August to 17 September. It also dates a High Seas of Tamriel event from 30 September to 14 October. Tamriel is the continent the whole series is set on. Season Two is dated 21 October 2026.

Our take: what it means for players

A week is not much. The rest of the list is, and the letter is more honest than it had to be.

The Crimson Veldt is the biggest thing on the list. A trial is this game's word for a raid, which is a dungeon built for a large group and usually the hardest thing a game has. The letter says it is pushing boundaries with mounted combat. That is the sort of feature a raiding guild plans months around. Moving it into 2027 with no date attached leaves the Nowhere Vault as the hardest new thing Season One offers. The group that was waiting will now be waiting past the New Life Festival, which the letter itself puts inside Season Two. Our reading is that a feature this size sliding out of the season it was announced in costs a studio trust it cannot buy back.

The class and combat rework is the quieter loss. A class is the kit of skills your character fights with, and ZeniMax is rebuilding them one at a time. The letter says the studio is "targeting 2027 for the next refresh", and that it is discussing "some interim options for the classes still awaiting their full refresh".

A rework that runs one class at a time is a balance problem the whole time it runs, and that is our reading rather than the letter's. Stretch the window into 2027 and you stretch the problem with it. The people paying for that are everyone still waiting on a rework. We wrote up what the combat team itself said two weeks later in our piece on the Update 51 test-server changes.

The studio context is in the letter too, unprompted: organizational changes, departures, and a leadership arrangement in which Giacomini runs the studio alongside Josh Henderson. That is the reason given for the schedule. It is more useful to know than the schedule itself, because it is the thing that predicts the next one. Publishing it rather than letting a date slip quietly is the right call, and we would rather have this letter than a cheerful one.

Credit where it is due: the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages are where the community documents this game's class changes patch by patch.

What's next

28 September 2026. Update 51 and three-sided Battlegrounds.
30 September to 14 October 2026. High Seas of Tamriel.
12 October 2026. Moon Hunter Keep and March of Sacrifices become free for everyone in their group versions.
21 October 2026. Season Two, with those two dungeons in solo form.
9 November 2026. Greymoor and Markarth become free for all players.
January 2027. Update 52, expected to carry the Jerall Pass zone for fighting other players.
2027, undated. Crimson Veldt, and the next stage of the class rework.

Every one of those sits on the calendar with the day it was last checked. The two with no firm date are on the release tracker rather than written up as though they had one.

Throne and Liberty's 4.9.0 makes the Nix region easier almost everywhere

2026-09-03T00:00:00Z

Throne and Liberty's update 4.9.0 followed roughly three hours of downtime, which the notes said would begin at 10:30 p.m. Pacific on 26 August 2026. The patch notes on Steam are dominated by a single theme. Most of what happens in Nix, which is the region of the map where the current content lives, now takes less time, fewer people, or both.

Throne and Liberty is a fantasy world made by NCSOFT, which is a Korean studio, and released in the West by Amazon Games, Amazon's own game division. The Tumgir Vault below is an instanced dungeon inside Nix, and a Skill Core is an equippable item that changes how one of your skills works.

The difficulty pass, in numbers

Where	Change
Tumgir Vault	Chest interaction time down 30%, Skill Core acquisition down 50%, elevator sequences down 40%
Tumgir Vault	Crowd control removed from named enemies on floors 2 and 4 and reduced on floor 3; the Frost effect removed on floor 1
Ritual of Frost	Frost Curses per magic circle down from 29 to 9
Frozen Moment	Three waves down to two, survival per wave up from 45 to 60 seconds
Tumgir Hollow	Water Energy requirement down from 15 to 10, geyser reactivation 60% faster
Scarlet Dream, Primal Trial, Hall of Repentance and others	Maximum participants cut from 6 to 3
Remnants of Nix	Masarax now spawns at a fixed location with a 30% chance at 15 minutes, more rewards, less difficulty

Crowd control, in that second row, is the family of effects that stun, freeze or otherwise stop you acting.

Our take: what it means for players

The cuts are the right call, and the reason for them is not flattering.

Instanced events that allowed up to six players now cap at three, and the interaction timers come down by 30 to 60 percent. The notes give the changes and no reason for them. Our reading is a studio concluding that content gated on assembling six people was gating on something its players could not supply. Better to fix it than leave it standing empty, and the fixes are real: faster chests, fewer curses, fewer waves, and Masarax now spawning in a fixed spot instead of a random one.

What we will not wave through is the note at the bottom about the Battle Pass, which is this game's seasonal reward track and has a paid tier. Alongside Battle Pass: Smoldering Vow, the update says that moving forward, Battle Pass event shops will contain a Premium section. It sells extra Trait Unlockstone Fragments, Trait Enchantment Stone Fragments and Heroic Trait Unlockstone Fragments to players who have bought the Premium Pass. A Trait is a small permanent bonus attached to a piece of gear, so those are character power materials rather than cosmetics. Putting more of them behind a purchase is the plainest form of paying for strength there is. A game that has just spent a patch making its content reachable should not spend the same patch making its progression purchasable.

The Snowsoul tier deserves a flag of its own, for a different reason. A new weapon rank above Ascended Archboss gear, crafted from the weapon you already own, resets the top of the ladder for everyone who finished the last one. An Archboss is the game's largest open-world boss, fought by many players at once. That is the treadmill working as designed, and it is at least earned through Ascended Deluzhnoa and Ascended Giant Cordy rather than sold.

What's next

By the same notes, Vegamor has moved to the end of September and the Primordial Wanderer milestone now ends 24 September 2026. Both dates are on the calendar with the day we last checked them. The handover of this game's Western publishing, which we covered from Amazon's own announcement, is on the sunset tracker.