WoW's Plunderstorm mode is back, and it just lets you buy what you want with your in-game dubloons instead of having to grind

Plunderstorm Returns | World of Warcraft - YouTube

World of Warcraft's Plunderstorm is back for another go from January 14 to February 18. If you've got no idea what I'm talking about, let me explain—Blizzard put a pirate Fortnite in their MMO. Why? Well, for the most part, the company's making an attempt at branching out and evolving its existing game systems—having a little experiment, as a treat. The second part is that it's a good bit of fun to grab some pirate swag.

As mentioned in a Blizzard news post, this season of swashbuckling gives new points of interest, mob spawn camps, and makes it so that all non-elite enemies will respawn, which is great news for folks who don't know the map like the back of their hand or—and yes, they do exist—are annoyed that they have to PvP in an entirely optional game mode.

Naturally, there's also new spells and balance tweaks, alongside other upgrades. You can futz about in the lobby for as long as you like, choose your drop location instead of having it assigned, and, most importantly, you don't have to grind a big ol' battlepass this time around, like PC Gamer's poor Fraser Brown who lost sleep the last time this event happened to get all of the rewards.

Now, cynically-speaking, this is because there's less of 'em. If you got everything last time the event happened, you'll have around 39,000's worth of plunder to earn to get the new rewards—some of which are simple recolours of prior prizes.

Winning a game usually gets you anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 plunder, depending on how much you pick up during the course of the match (with the baseline bounty for a chicken dinner being 500), so it's a downright breezy grind compared to last time. Your first completed quest of the day also nets you 800 yarrbux, which is what I'm calling them because I think it's a better name.

One could make the argument that there's less content here, to which I'd say that not everyone's an obsessive, FOMO-driven collector like me, and I'd wager there's more than enough players who missed some of these items the first time around. Secondly, I'm fine with a chiller grind, considering Blizzard's past history with slightly-too-stingy rewards.

You can play Plunderstorm if you've got an active subscription by selecting it in the "modes" tab of the character select screen. If you're interested in grabbing some new items, here's what's available:

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.