APRIL FOOLS! NEW: Season 4 Affix Discovered?

Now that the Race to World First for Sepulcher of the First Ones has come to an end (congratulations Echo!), the team here at Raider.IO has finally managed to peel ourselves away from watching, updating, and analyzing. So what have we been doing with all this newly found free time, you ask? Datamining, of course! Blizzard snuck the 9.2.5 Patch onto the PTR while we were all focused on the RWF, so we didn’t get to take a very thorough look at it until now, and ooh did we find something crazy!

Last week, Blizzard announced that they will be introducing a 4th Season to Shadowlands. They are not creating a new raid, but instead are giving us a new Season of PvP and Mythic+, with different dungeons and rewards, and a new “+” version of the Shadowlands raids with the addition of a new “Progenitor” affix. We were hoping to learn more about these Season 4 plans and started looking through the datamined code from the PTR… and we think we stumbled across a new seasonal affix for Season 4’s Mythic+ dungeon pool in the process!

“Reclaimed”: New Season 4 Affix?

As mentioned above, we were taking a quick sift through some of the datamined code on the PTR for the upcoming Patch 9.2.5 when we found an interesting entry nestled in among the usual updates to tooltips, mounts, and heritage armor:



We couldn’t help but notice that this entry had a very weird and ominous description. The title itself leads us to believe that this might be a Seasonal affix for the newly announced Season 4 of Mythic+. Blizzard’s Season 4 announcement was fairly sparse in details, and there was no mention of a new Seasonal affix, just the re-introduction of some old dungeons from previous expansions in the Mythic+ pool. You can imagine our confusion, so we hopped onto the PTR ourselves to see what we could uncover!

In order to test various new additions on the PTR, Blizzard has added vendors throughout Oribos so you can purchase materials, currencies, and more. One of those vendors is a Keystone Vendor which sells scrolls that allow you to add affixes and set keystone levels to a base level 10 Keystone. After finding the Reclaimed entry in the data, we headed straight for this vendor, and lucky us, we found a scroll entitled “Set Keystone Affix: Reclaimed”. We added this scroll to our base Keystone and headed off to some dungeons!



We first headed to Sanguine Depths to find out just what this new Reclaimed affix entailed and what we have to look forward to in Season 4 and…let’s just say, we were shocked. We started to make our way through the dungeon but didn’t notice anything. There were no additional adds, no buffs or debuffs on either trash or bosses, nothing. We started to think maybe it was bugged, but decided to finish the dungeon anyways. We cleared all the way to General Kaal’s platform, and THAT is when we saw it.

The gasps were audible.

The fear was palpable.

We thought it was over. How wrong we were…




There’s no way Blizzard would do this to us, right? We thought maybe they were playing a joke on us, so we headed over to Plaguefall to test out a second dungeon. As we made our way through the dungeon and onwards to Margrave Stradama’s room, everything looked okay. We killed the trash mobs around the room, and with fingers crossed, waited for Stradama to emerge from the pool in the middle. Our fears were confirmed, however, when something else entirely flew out of the slime pool...





Most of the memories of the fights against this so-called “Totally-Not-Halondrus” have been suppressed by our team, but there are vague memories of bombs, motes, and many many one-shots.

We’ll see you in Season 4…maybe.

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