Patch 10.1.5 Goodness

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.

Dragonflight and Patch 10.1

Dragonflight had its 10.1 patch the other week, which added a new zone to the Dragon Isles, the Zaralek Cavern. I have to admit I was a bit suspicious of having an underground zone in an expansion about riding dragons, since those things seemed kind of thematically at odds with each other, but the cave is huge and you don't really feel boxed in at all.

In fact, I was very impressed that this addition, too, has been integrated into the Dragon Isles seamlessly. I thought that this one would require a loading screen for sure, but nope! The tunnels into the cavern wind back and forth a couple of times, presumably to give the game time to load all the assets, but aside from a little error message that currently pops up when you go through, the transition between underground and overground is seamless. There are even entrances to the cavern at several different points of the map, to add to that feeling of it really being right underneath the zones we already know.

The new faction of mole people is a bit silly, but I like them, plus the little treasure hunting expeditions you can go on a couple of times a week are once again a fun little distraction with more of a puzzle than a combat focus. I really appreciate that the devs have been trying to give us more things to do that aren't about fighting all the time.

The main storyline also continues, and it was nice to actually be caught up for a change (the husband and I took forever to complete the base campaign because of how much of it was tied to hitting certain renown levels with some of the factions and just a general feeling that it was a bit all over the place). After all the moaning people did about how terrible they thought Shadowlands' writing was, I've seen relatively little discussion of the Dragonflight story, and in a way that's a shame because I think it's quite good. It reminds me of the Jaina story in BfA at times in the sense that the characters feel a bit more mature and like their reactions to events are more nuanced and not as cartoonish. During one of the recent chapters I actually said to the husband: "What is this, everyone acting like adults and actually apologising after saying something stupid?"

Plus, I actually just... care? I said during Shadowlands that I still found its story entertaining, but it was a bit like a soap opera where you're kind of laughing at how ridiculous everything is. Dragonflight doesn't feel that way, and there've been several story beats that have actually made me feel things, most recently the attack on Loamm. It's good stuff.

In terms of activities, Blizzard seems to have managed to find a good balance between world quests, regular quests, and limited-time events, and they continue to add more content following that formula. There's a lot of new mini events in particular on the Zaralek Cavern map, often quite small in scale, but they can be fun to hop in and out of.

On the surface there are now also Fyrrak assaults, which seemed to be super bugged during the first week but seem to mostly have been fixed now. Sometimes Fyrrak just flies over the zone, yells a lot and burns a bunch of people, as a throwback to Deathwing scorching whole zones during Cataclysm. You can tell the primal incarnates are a lot less powerful than the old Earth-Warder though, because when he caught my demon hunter fighting a rare, she actually survived the burn and didn't get the achievement, only dying to the mob she was fighting moments later due to how much her health pool had suddenly been depleted.

I keep thinking how much of a shame it is that Dragonflight doesn't seem to have been a big financial success (by Blizzard standards) when it gets so much right. Is this how people felt during MoP, which a lot of people hated because of the pandas but which seemed to get a lot of praise in retrospect? Mind you, I did play at least for a few months during MoP and I think Dragonflight is better than MoP so far...

I have to admit that it's slowly transforming my attitude toward retail. Whenever I log in and start playing, I find it easy to keep going for hours because there's just always something fun to do, and of course there are now also the weekly dungeon runs with my mini guild to keep me busy. It's not a replacement for Classic or SWTOR, but I'm increasingly seeing it as pretty damn decent in its own way.