World of Warcraft cultist ritual is teasing some future content

World of Warcraft has had its share of strange Easter eggs over the years. However, as of a few months ago, stranger things have started to happen on the Broken Shore, one of Legion’s end game zones. A group of cultists is counting down to something, possibly the loss of our artifact weapons.

Players who you make their way toward the center of the Broken Shore will come across a small band of Xorothian Cultists, worshipers of the gigantic demon army, the Burning Legion, who come from the planet Xoroth. These four strange NPCs are channeling a spell called Fel Channeling. NPCs channeling a random spell isn’t completely out of the ordinary. However, the time remaining on their ritual is.

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If you look closely, the Cultists have another 517 hours of channeling before they finish their cast. (This screenshot was taken earlier this week.) That means in about three weeks, Fel Channeling will be finished. Will this actually do anything? Probably not, if history is any indication. However, it may signal the coming of a small patch.

This isn’t the first time Xorothian Cultists have made this long channel. In fact, the last time Fel Channeling was cast, patch 7.3.5 hit the live servers. If the 7.3.5 release is any indication of what comes next, we could expect another small WoW patch on March 7.

Players have been speculating in the comment section of WoWhead since the site first reported this new channel. While there are plenty of suggestions as to what this countdown could be signaling, the most obvious event would be the quest that causes players to lose their artifact weapon.

The all-powerful, historic weapons introduced in Legion will not be coming along for the next expansion. Thanks to some datamining, we know the scenario where something happens to our weapons, rendering them useless by the time Battle for Azeroth comes around this fall.

Seeing as how players have not yet encountered this event in 7.3.5, it seems likely that we’ll see it at a later date. Perhaps this time, the Xorothian Cultists aren’t warning us about a future patch. Instead, they’re letting us know that the time with our precious weapons is coming to a close.