Update January 19, 2018: Solved! The latest WoW mega-secret is finished with, and the reward is adorable, if not particularly useful.
As predicted, things moved fast once everyone could get involved with working out the Uuna secret. A few more steps lead to a short scenario that had players fighting off Uuna’s darkness, and then taking her on a world tour. Once complete? She’ll regularly hug the player. Aww.
For the next big step for the game, here’s what we know about World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth.
To confirm there wasn’t a mount or pet reward – as most secrets have had – a few folks check with Jeremy Feasel. He responded on Twitter:
Yes, the reward is hugs, and the gratitude of a little girl 🙂
— Jeremy Feasel (@Muffinus) January 19, 2018
Her model also changes through the course of the quest as you find her variuos items. The secret finding Discord have a complete list of what you need to do to finish it all off, and Wowhead have their own step-by-step guide. Unfortunately it currently only seems to be possible for Horde players who have finished the Insurrection questline, because it uses areas of Suramar to spawn various items. Feasel said he’d be looking into that today, so it should be completable over the weekend unless there are major issues.
He also mentioned that the storyline was inspired by Ubisoft’s Child of Light:
Thanks to @UbisoftMTL for Child of Light and the inspiration for the content 🙂
— Jeremy Feasel (@Muffinus) January 19, 2018
Of course none of this has stopped the community believing there’s more to be discovered, somewhat egged on by Feasel’s other tweets. Whether it’s a deeper hint at storylines to come or simply a man who enjoys torturing his community, we’ll have to wait and see.
Update January 18, 2018:The hunt continues to help Uuna, with a little assistance from Blizzard to let everyone get started.
As noted yesterday, the latest WoW mega-secret focuses on Uuna, a draenei ghost child. She’s been in-game since last patch as a pet – an NPC you can have follow you around – but had an additional quest added in 7.3.5. However you still need to get Uuna before you can start secret finding with the rest of the community, and before now she was quite a rare drop. That’s since been fixed.
Here’s Blizzard’s Jeremy Feasel – who helps put the puzzles together and generally acts as the official voice from Blizzard about them – confirming as much:
Good news! A hotfix has been deployed that significantly increases the drop rate of Uunas Doll. Join the secret hunt to save Uuna! https://t.co/CQUx9YwsKs
— Jeremy Feasel (@Muffinus) January 18, 2018
The process to get Uuna is still rather lengthy, but shouldn’t take that long now that the drop rate is – presumably – much nearer 100%.
Over night the secret finding Discord has also gotten all the usual goodness in place, including a complete guide as to how far they’ve gotten with the puzzles and a list of things they’ve tried to do next.
The process has mostly been worked out – eight triggers have been datamined for Uuna to say various lines of dialogue. How to actually trigger those hasn’t been discovered, so the people are working backward from the dialogue and the names of the triggers to figure out where they have to go. So far, six have been worked out.
It’s assumed that after the eighth, a final scenario will be available which involves battling “the darkness” that is persuing Uuna, defeating it and restoring her faith. This will allow her to be offered a place in an afterlife, but she will decide to stay with the player and see the world. There are then a large batch of further datamined lines for what is clearly some sort of world tour of Azeroth.
At current rate it’s likely the riddle will be solved before the end of the week. However, the actual reward isn’t known yet – if there is one at all. In previous secret hunts, the reward has always been known beforehand, making this one even more mysterious.
Original story January 17, 2018:Another patch, another mega-secret for World of Warcraft: Legion. With the introduction of 7.3.5, Uuna – the ghost of a draenei child – is now the focus of WoW’s dedicated secret finders, teased as always byBlizzard’s Jeremy Feasel, one of the masterminds behind the in-game ARGs that have accompanied every major Legion patch.
We’ve come to the Uuna secret very early, so very little is known about both the end goal and how to get there. Uuna was initially added to the game as a pet (an NPC you can summon to follow you around, sometimes they’re wolves, sometimes they’re children) in patch 7.3, which introduced her homeworld of Argus and the various horrible monsters that killed all her friends and family. She was a drop from a rare boss with a relatively difficult process to unlock it, a mini-secret of its own.
When 7.3.5 reached the PTR Uuna got a significant upgrade. As noted by Wowhead at the time, a series of triggers, dialogue lines, and seemingly an entire scenario were discovered. Now that the patch is live, the brave souls of the ever-present WoW secret finding discord jumped into action.
So long as you have the pet, you can pretty much kick off into trying to discover things. The secret progress channel in the Discord has a record of most of what has been discovered so far. The goal is to find ways to trigger the various bits of datamined dialogue, either through emoting at her – whistle, hug, and roar have all produced reactions so far – or being in certain areas of the world.
In general, Uuna’s dialogue and quest relate to you being a light showing her the way to defeat darkness, eventually leading to her rejecting heading to the afterlife with her family to go on a world tour of Azeroth and staying with you as a collectible – or that’s at least the current best guess. Based on the datamined text there’s going to be quite a lot of moving about, and at least one instance of heading into a specially designed scenario to “save her.”
Exactly what the reward for all that will be, considering acquiring her as a pet initially is still the same as before, isn’t yet known. Things usually move pretty fast with these secrets, so we’ll have a better picture of where things are heading over the next 24 hours as more players log on and get to work.