However you may feel about Dragonflight, it's hard to deny that Blizzard has been knocking it out of the park in terms of patch cadence this expansion. Every time I find myself thinking that I'm kinda done with the latest content and that I should maybe take a bit of a step back from retail for a while - boom, there comes a new patch. They were right on time with 10.1.5 as well, with it releasing literally the week after I hit Renown 20 with the Loamm Niffen.
I really like these medium-sized intermediate patches. They don't contain that much new content, but it's something new to check out and log in for, and then you might as well keep playing since you're there already.
The (in my opinion) main event of 10.1.5 is a new public event called Time Rifts. Blizzard seems to be leaning really heavily into public events with this expansion, something that hasn't really been WoW's focus traditionally. Mostly I've been quite enjoying them, but I do worry that in the long run, the concept might not be compatible with Blizzard's M.O. of always pushing everyone towards the newest content and away from the old, as it means that older events end up being deserted and quickly become hard to impossible to complete successfully. Zaralek Cavern for example (the patch 10.1 zone) has already gone from being a place where you'd blink and miss a rare or event if you didn't join in fast enough, to rares and events being up seemingly 24/7 because nobody wants to do them anymore (and many of them are hard to impossible to solo at this point).
Anyway, Time Rifts: the idea is that once an hour, an alternate timeline starts leaking into Thaldraszus and the bronze dragons ask you to help out with cleaning it up. In gameplay terms, it's kind of a mix between the community feast and a massive world boss, in the sense that everyone is given individualised tasks to complete (either to kill some mobs or to do something involving clicking on stuff) but a lot of people will end up with the same task anyway, meaning that you're spending a lot of time running around in a massive crowd AoEing things.
At the end you go through the rift to kill the anomaly, which manifests as a boss that usually dies really quickly because of the massive number of players joining the fight. The first few times I did this part, the lag was insane and I could hardly any get any abilities off. This was particularly funny when the fight in the alternate timeline involved an Arthas lookalike that cast Defile while everyone was lagging so hard that they couldn't even move. I was one of the ones who died as the whole platform seemed to get covered in deadly black goo, but somehow the boss still died, so... 🤷♀️
Either way, I've found these rifts quite enjoyable and they're a nice source of catch-up gear for alts.
There's also this new whelp daycare... thing where you do time-gated quests to help hatch eggs and raise dragon whelps that eventually become your pets. It's very cutesy.
Finally, there's a new mega-dungeon which is only available in mythic difficulty. My guildies and I gave it a go last weekend, wiped on the first boss about half a dozen times and then gave up. Clearly not intended for players of our skill at this point.
There are also some other new features I haven't really looked into, such as a new spec for evokers (something I really didn't expect them to add mid-expansion), and new race options for warlocks. I just think it's nice that they keep adding all this stuff in smaller chunks to keep things fresh between the major content patches.
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For me, as someone who isn't playing Classic Era, the return of Vanilla Scholomance and the ability to collect (most) appearances from 40-man Naxxramas has been the most motivating thing in the patch. While collecting the tier appearances is going to be a very long term project/gold sink, I'm fine with that. The game does need gold sinks and I have no problem taking my time to try to collect things. (I have some mounts/appearances that are years-in-the-chase.)
ReplyDeleteAll this said, I am happy to see Blizzard putting more variety of small content in the patches. It gives the game a nice drip of content for us casuals over just chasing loot or grinding out reputation you don't care about.
:chuckle: I had the same experience on the Lich King. Lag made that defile quite deadly before folks could move out of it. Oh, on the Zaralek Caverns stuff, I suspect Blizzard knows that it will be revisited by players who want the items in a later expansion when they can solo everything with ease. After all, there's a fair number of us do that now. Sucks though for people who would like to finish things off now, though. :/
You always tell me about patch content I didn't even know about! I went to look it up and it's really fascinating to me that they're bringing back an actual piece of Vanilla content that they removed in MoP. Wonder if this is going to be a trend? I'm guessing that with everything ported to the current back-end for Classic, it's probably not as hard to do that kind of thing as it would've been in the past, but it's still some work...
DeleteThere's so much varied content these days it is easy to miss things. Even the devs don't get it all in the patch notes! Apparently you can now by the Zskera Vault keys from the Renown vendor in the Forbidden Reach since that area is effectively dead now. (Wowhead post via a Twitter post from a dev.) It's a reasonable solution for content they are admitting is effectively dead now. All of which is a sea-change for Blizzard if they keep adding in these sorts of mechanics.
DeleteI do hope it is a trend for them to add the older content back in. While I would love to revisit the Classic content with my Vanilla-era characters, having the original versions of the instances would be sweet. I suspect we'll see more, maybe UBRS at first if they decide to add the old Dungeon Sets back in. Yeah, you can get the replicas at the Faire, but you can get T3 still on the BMAH, so having multiple avenues would be cool.