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Greetings Firestorm!

It's been 3 months since the release of our Shadowlands realm: Oribos and we wanted to take this opportunity to gather all of its related information: what you can already experience on the realm as well as what we have in store for you.
If you missed our previous posts, this one will make it up by summarizing everything so make sure you read it thoroughly!

So let's start with the features you're all familiar with:

• Our leveling experience is at an all-time high: from Exile's Reach to BFA's and SL's storyline you can fully level up smoothly without any major issues while Thread of Fate allows for an easier journey for your alts.
   
• All 4 covenants as well as their respective zones are available on top of The Maw, home of the infamous Jailer! We know how painful swapping covenants was on retail and we thus added something to allow you to freely and effortlessly change!
   
• All 8 dungeons are scripted in all difficulties including MM.
   
• All PvP activities are available and the battle to secure gladiator spots in rated rages on!
   
• The raid Castle Nathria is fully available in all difficulties: 10 bosses await!
   
• Valor, a new currency allows you to upgrade dungeon equipment: gearing yourself has never been as easy and pleasing!
   
• We enabled interfaction to ease everyone's experience: this feature was only added later on retail but we chose to release it as soon as possible to remove some barriers. Horde or Alliance can talk, venture and fight together!

All in all we're pretty happy with how things went since the release: we've continuously made improvements to available content while at the same time releasing new one steadily.
That being said aside from the remaining Covenant Campaign chapters yet to be released (more on that below) we're pretty much done with 9.0 & 9.0.5 content, the next step being 9.1 update. As you can imagine this will require a fair amount of dev time and we didn't want to let you guys wait months without any major changes.

So without further ado, let's jump right in!

ORIBOS CONTINUOUS & WEEKEND EVENTS 

Those of you who played on Sethraliss last summer will probably feel familiar with this one!
It's fairly simple: starting right now you will be able to experience 2 types of events on Oribos: Continuous and Weekend ones. The former will be active at all times until 9.1 starts while the latter will activate on Fridays 4:00 PM and will remain until Mondays 4:00 AM server time.

That way you will always benefit from special features, and get even more during the weekend!

Full-time events:

• All experience gains are doubled. This is already in place since last week: a fairly straightforward event!
   
• Gear loot chances are doubled everywhere, including bosses (dungeon, raid, world)! From 30% chance to 60%.
   
• Conduit loot chances increased from all sources from 40 to 60%.
   
• You can now send Soul Ash to your alts by purchasing Packaged Soul Ash from Au'Dara located in Oribos (Ring of Transference, near the flight master).
   
• Valor gains are now uncapped: you can obtain as much as you need without restrictions!
   
• Conduits can now be obtained in various World Quests: it will always be one you do not have or an upgrade to one you own! We made it so you will get on average one conduit a day by this mean.
   
• Renown Catchup has been improved: all activities have double the chances to grant renown, and will now grant 2 at once!
   
• Soulbind trees are now Account bound: you won't need to wait for the corresponding covenant chapter to be done in order to choose the tree you want if you already did it on your main character. This is still covenant specific and the renown restrictions for their corresponding conduits still apply. NB: You will need to connect your main character once to "save" his soulbinds unlocks before being able to benefit from them on your alts.
   

Week-end events:

• A custom World Boss is now available in Northrend (Coldarra - Borean Tundra), rewarding a lootbox to any champion strong enough to defeat him! You can loot it once per week at the moment.
   
• All Mythic dungeon runs will include one additional loot for the whole group!
   
• You can re-run already completed Torghast wings as many times as you want to obtain 20% of the initial value in Soul Ash each time.

All of those events take effect right now: stay tuned as we might add some additional ones along the way!
On top of that, we've got stuff cookin'! Let's see what the future holds!

UPCOMING ON ORIBOS 

On top of those events, and before the 9.1 update is ready we have features in store - at various stages of advancement - to keep you entertained:

• First of all, the Covenant Campaign's 6th chapter should be ready for Monday April 4th. While this is not as huge as the rest, it's still worth noting!
   
• We will be improving the VIP perks to include different teleport locations on top of your capital: Oribos, all 8 dungeons entrances, Nathria's entrance as well as your covenant's sanctum will be added so you won't have to waste time moving to those places any more! As a reminder you can become a VIP by purchasing points on our store (everything is detailed here) but this soon won't be the only way...
   
• Refer-a-friend will make its return, in a simpler way: once per month you will be able to refer a character, boosting it to level 50 with some basic gear. If that character gets to level 60, manages to gear himself up to a set ilvl and completes various activities with you, you will both get VIP for a month as well as a free mount from our store! A comprehensive guide will be made when this feature is released, which is very soon!
   
• Back on BFA we had our very first Firestorm MDI. Well it's time to have another one! We're rebranding it to FDT which stands for Firestorm Dungeon Tournament and will make some organization changes to it so it feels better for you to participate, while also expanding the range of rewards! We're still working on it, but you can expect an announcement for it in the following weeks.
   
• For our PVP enjoyers here we wanted to help re-ignite the spark of challenge by resetting the season: basically, hand over rewards as a regular-season end (with extended range meaning more people will get something) and then restart it over, like a Season 1 bis. While we do not have a set date yet, it's gonna happen in early April so do not waste time and climb as high as you can as soon as possible! We know you guys would like a tournament to be held as well and we'd like to deliver. Still, at the early thinking stages, we'll keep you updated!
   
• Finally maybe our biggest surprise to date: BFA dungeon Timewalking! While it has been done on retail at a later patch (and for Legion dungeons) we believe we can make it work by next month on Oribos as our Quality Assurance team is currently testing it and giving feedback. Some things are still left to be decided (rewards, exact functioning) but we plan on making it interesting for all types of players so stay on the lookout for it! We're also looking into Raid timewalking but this looks more challenging to implement: once dungeons are out we'll try to work things out on that part!

As you can see between our events and the upcoming features we won't let you rest!
It's important for us to keep you entertained: retail has been taking inspiration from private server features so we need to get to the next level. And we believe we have what it takes!

We hope you'll enjoy the continuous and weekend events for now and that you're thrilled about our upcoming releases!

Have a nice weekend,
The Firestorm Team