World of Warcraft’s latest patch is a bugstravaganza the likes of which I haven’t seen in my 21 years playing WoW
World of Warcraft’s latest patch launched Tuesday in North America, and players are still encountering massive, gamebreaking delays and bugs in nearly every aspect of the update more than 48 hours later.
Originally, the 11.1.5 content update appeared to be packed with new features:
- A new faction to grind and related rewards to earn
- The return of Battle for Azeroth’s Horrific Visions scenarios, and their massive power-boosting Corruptions in the form of a new helm enchant
- A new version of bad-luck protection
- Dastardly Duos, a two-bosses-at-a-time group challenge
- A new Cooldown Manager UI update that is intended to offer a built-in alternative to some popular player mods
- And a leveling event with some fun twists.
Unfortunately some of those features are delayed, nearly all of those left weren’t functional, and additional tweaks and bugfixes that went live over the past couple of weeks were reverted with the patch. In addition, a whole crop of bugs not related to the new content popped up.
That new Flame’s Radiance faction? Players were still reporting bugs preventing servers from finishing its activities two full days after launch. I delayed writing my own detailed impressions of this patch as a result—there’s simply too much of it I can’t even test out yet.
Horrific Visions are timegated until May 20. Their helm enchants have been oddly tuned down so far they will have a negligible effect on players’ output (less than 1% by most estimates). Dastardly Duos has also been timegated, to release on June 3 and lasting for six weeks, though the bugged in-game calendar suggests they were also available two weeks ago (??).
“Is it me, or Patch 11.1.5 is officially releasing in a month?” asked one player on Reddit this week.
“Day two of patch 11.1.5 and I still have no idea how the main event of this patch works. It’s stuck on 00:00 since the patch released,” wrote a second.
The Cooldown Manager launched without any abilities for players to customize what was on those bars, or even what order they’re arranged, and it took away previous functionality that put some items on players’ personal resource bars. (Blizzard has declared that last effect to be a bug that will be fixed.)
Amusingly, considering the Manager was supposed to replace mods, a Cooldown Manager Customizer add-on has already been developed by players as a band-aid.
The new bad luck protection was delayed, with promises to announce the new plan Soon™. The new solution was finally posted in a Blizzard forums post Wednesday afternoon—but it won’t take effect until May 13.
Originally the first piece of gear wouldn’t have been available until May 27, and would include two items. After community uproar, a change was posted Wednesday night to increase to three items, with the first available on May 13.
In addition to the patch’s disappointing debut, odd tweaks and the return of old issues and new plagued the release.
Problems on problems
The Liberation of Undermine raid’s penultimate boss, Mug’Zee, was so much harder than the end boss that some guilds paid a reported 85 million gold ($6,835 in WoW tokens at the time this article was written) to get their hands on a raid lockout that already had him dead on Mythic difficulty, so they could just kill the end boss Gallywix instead, to receive credit in the Hall of Fame.
Blizzard swiftly made it necessary to kill all of the last three bosses to get listed in the Hall of Fame. But then guilds who legitimately killed Gallywix after having killed those bosses and using their own Mug’Zee lockouts didn’t receive credit, and had to rekill him after the patch, putting them dozens of places lower in the Hall of Fame. Mug’Zee was nerfed multiple times, including one time that was reverted after the patch, then replaced with another new nerf Wednesday.
Dizzy yet?
The title awarded to guilds who killed Mythic Gallywix was also bugged and fixed this week.
Simultaneously, a recently added skip to the One-Armed Bandit, the first of those three bosses, was inadvertently removed in the patch. It was later added back.
The raid’s reputation track was bugged by the patch, so that players logging in on multiple lower-level characters were automatically awarded massive reputation, in some cases maxing them out and giving them additional power in the raid plus many other rewards. The raid power was rolled back, but the other rewards appear to remain for those players.
Undercoin, one of WoW’s many currencies that buys goodies from running the game’s single-player Delves dungeons, was changed to be shared across players’ characters in a previous update. That update was reverted with this patch, apparently in error. Some players reported losing coins as a result.
The weekly Great Vault, which awards players gear options to choose from for completing dungeons, raids and delves over the previous week, bugged out. It broke a longstanding feature that prevented players from getting the same gear item in multiple slots. Players who were affected by the bug were informed that they were just out of luck for this week, though a fix for the issue (for those who hadn’t yet opened their Vaults) went through yesterday.
And somehow the problems keep getting weirder.
Some players found their video settings had randomly been changed. The game’s own AddOn Profiler, which affects performance for some players, could no longer be turned off as of 11.1.5.
Monks’ Zen Flight, a slow-moving levitation ability, was randomly nerfed so they can no longer mine or pick herbs while using it, another likely bug. Demon Hunters’ major Aldrachi Reaver talent suddenly stopped working. (A fix Wednesday finally attempted to put that one to bed.)
I’ve been playing WoW since six months before its original release, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a patch launch with so many delays, version control issues and major bugs, and certainly none that lasted so long.
“Dear devs: We do not need patches every eight weeks, if it means the patches have to be timegated across seven weeks and the content we do have on launch is bugged and broken more than half the time,” said another Reddit commenter. They might be on to something.
Many of these issues didn’t crop up on the Public Test Realm (though some did); it’s unclear what’s causing them to arise now. Servers were shut down Thursday morning for the third time this week as developers attempted to fix the issues.
Blizzard’s teams have their work cut out for them. In the meantime, players just become more frustrated.
