Rather than writing a bunch of longer posts about each topic here, I wanted to look at some recent WoW releases and news and talk about them individually in a long but overall shorter post, along with my general mood about them. No more preamble, here we go!

Neutral – The Nightfall/Light’s Radiance Content of 11.1.5

This patch’s new content isn’t bad or anything. In fact, the farm for decent gear on alts is pretty reasonable with it. I find myself neutral on it for a few reasons – one, it’s just kind of the same fill-the-bar quest style we’ve been getting for years now, so it’s not exactly exciting or novel, and two – it’s been extremely buggy and lacking performance in the main scenario area. Losing your progress bar is common, and the scenario chugs awfully if there is any decent number of players present. In addition to the gameplay reasons, I find the reward cycle a little baffling – basically all drops are Warbound, which is cool and what I would prefer, but then the token to buy gear and the gear purchased with tokens is…soulbound? Make it make sense, Blizzard!

Thematically and location-wise, it’s neat, aspects of it fit with my speculation that we’re going to see Deepgrove as the final zone of The War Within in 11.2 before we turn eyes to Midnight, and the weeklies that have you go out into Khaz Algar to do different stuff are fine, but it feels a little flat. Again, not bad – just not great. I’ll plug some more time into it to get my army of alts up to around 640 item level before 11.2 and that should be nice, but otherwise, it’s nothing that has gotten me so excited that I have to do it. x.1.5 content do be kind of like that in recent years though – 10.1.5’s Time Rifts were just sort of okay, not really bad (short of the handling of a particular iffy subplot from WoW’s past in a tone-deaf and idiotic way on PTR that didn’t make it to the final product), and Dreamsurges were kinda similar in that way – I don’t hate them, don’t love them, just feel a general sense of apathy towards them.

Positive – The Season 2 Turbo Boost

Announced last week, Season 2 of The War Within is getting a feature called “Turbo Boost” on May 13th. As a feature, it encapsulates a number of changes. Firstly, the seasonal uncapping of upgrade crests begins with this feature, as does a new perk that makes Valorstones warbound. To facilitate the upgrades of gear even further, gear on the Hero and Myth tracks, currently limited to 6 tiers of item level upgrades, will be extended by 2 tracks to 8 item level upgrades, meaning that Hero track gear should top out at 671 item level and Myth track will go to 685. An augment item is also being added to extend crafted gear by 6 item levels, meaning top-end crafts will be 681 and the Enchanted Runed Crest crafts available to most players can go up to 664 item level. There’s some mention of Delve improvements including increased Brann experience and more rewards like upgrade items and Delver’s Journey. Overall, this is something that I think is really cool as an idea – because at first it sounded like branding talk for a paid character boost, but the overall package we actually get is strong.

Provided that Blizzard has the tech in line to ensure existing Hero and Myth track gear on players is extended the new upgrade tracks (and thus not requiring refarming entire character loadouts!), this is all pretty solid…wait, I’m missing something, you say? Oh right…

Negative – The Puzzling Cartel Chip Disaster

Okay, so while I am playing into it here (nothing if not self-aware!), there is a level of hyperbole around Dinar v3 that I think is unhelpful. The rundown, TL;DR is that the Turbo Boost adds a new version of raid-gear-buying Dinars into the game, which require 3 Dinars per purchase. You get, after some flexing by Blizzard, 3 Dinars week 1 and then 1 per week thereafter to a seasonal total of 9 (3 pieces of gear), earned by doing a weekly quest to kill 4 raid bosses in Liberation of Undermine. You can buy any items from the raid including the Very Rare ones, but there is a caveat – they are track-locked like the normal raid items, and getting the Hero track version will require killing the boss that drops it on any difficulty of the raid, but getting the Myth track version requires killing the Mythic version of that boss at least once. This is…kind of bad for a few reasons.

Firstly, for Mythic raiders, this simply allows them to buy what they want – very cool, no opposition here, but a bit of a rich-get-richer moment. If my guild can already kill Mythic Gallywix, then I likely don’t need anything to push my power much higher – sure, having a Jastor Diamond or Eye of Kezan will help that process for reclears, but I’m not excited in the same way – it’s more of a “finally!” instead of a moment of fun gearing. However, because other players might also want those items from Dinar, then it incentivizes the purchase of raid carries from those same Mythic guilds, keeping the value of a raid carry higher than it otherwise would have been. I don’t fully buy the notion that the developers want to create a market where buying more WoW Tokens is the right play to gear a character, but I do 100% believe that some bean counter from the Activision or Microsoft organizations would want it. Gotta offset those huge losses from betting on genAI, after all!

Secondly, Blizzard is insisting that for a “normal” season and not the Season 4-style all the raids at once thing, Dinars shouldn’t work the same – they should strictly be bad luck protection so that deep into a season, without your BiS items, you can amend that deficiency through your own purchases. Okay, sure – fine, but that is at odds with the early interviews where it was compared directly to Dragonflight Season 4, the best iteration of Dinars to date, where you could buy raid gear limitlessly at a rate of 1 piece per 2 weeks, could upgrade it to max item level with the side consequence being that it started at Normal raid level, you could earn Dinar from non-raid activity by doing the Mythic Dungeon weekly quest when that event week was up, and you could buy any cosmetic-only version of raid weapons and off-hands/shields for 1 Dinar a pop if you just wanted the appearance unlock. Comparing that system to this shows a clear downgrade for the current version. Also, tangent time – who fucking cares if a world quest player gets a Myth-track Eye of Kezan and doesn’t change it out for the rest of TWW? Literally whom? We all know that if somehow a trinket is god-tier entering the next season, you’re just gonna nerf it anyways, you always do! The DF S4 model worked so well because it asked players to invest a surplus of upgrade materials into getting their Dinar items up to snuff, so I don’t see what the issue is with that model. Do we not want to hurt Mythic raiders’ feelings? They already think you’ve abandoned them because participation in Mythic raid is dwindling over time and there has been a lot of high-end players asking for 10-player Mythic this expansion – but also, if we care about their feelings, many of them have also said this Dinar system is bad, so make of that what you will!

Thirdly, while bad luck protection, if we assume it is the goal, is a decent one (rolled out poorly in those initial interviews and such but hey), then it raises an secondary question – what about M+ players? M+ has a very permissive loot system that is excellent until you push high keys, at which point it becomes among the worst contraptions in the game. Getting Myth-track M+ gear that would be ideal for your character is a slot machine purely and simply – you can never guarantee that you’ll get a Myth-track Signet of the Priory, Improvised Seaforium Pacemaker, or anything else good, you just need to ensure you get as many pulls as possible by filling your dungeon row with Myth-track slots by doing eight +10 or higher keys. There are around 80 items my Monk is eligible to receive on Windwalker spec, 84 in Brewmaster, so I have roughly a 3.5% chance of getting one of the things I want…if I fill all 3 slots to Myth level. 1 slot puts that probability to 1.2% (rounded, of course) chance. Not being able to buy Mythic Plus items in a similar fashion feels worse because there is no way to get them to drop at Myth track – I need the Great Vault to be generous. Oh, and that even shortcuts around the biggest issue for M+ mains, which is that Dinars are just not available to you at all unless you raid, so if you’re trying to get some of the best trinkets in the game, you have to raid, both to unlock the Myth track versions (good luck doing Mythic One-Armed Bandit for House of Cards!) but also just to get Dinars at all in the first place!

So sure – it’s bad luck protection for raiders because it is a normal, non-Fated season, and that’s fine – it’s not completely awful or a crime or anything. But it is reflective of a general lack of quality communication from Blizzard and a dogged insistence that loot should be forced in a way that complies with their design goals, but their design goals are, in this matter, sort of antithetical to fun and a good experience. Even if we acknowledge that M+ has the ultimate bad luck protection for loot up to Hero track – just run the dungeon again, 4head – Myth track and the power of raid items are both things that I think should generally be more open including to Mythic Plus mains. Gating those players out of the system altogether seems like a mistake, because if they don’t already raid, it’s not exactly going to be popular to force them to, but at the same time, a lot of them, particularly those pushing for 0.1% title contention, will do it and grumble about it. We all know you’re gonna do the thing you always do where the first 4 weeks of a new season includes a handful of hotfixes that nerf and further nerf items from the prior season, so why not just let everyone get a Myth-track House of Cards and then bomb it into worthlessness next patch (which you are almost certainly going to do anyways!)? While we’re at it, give us M+ bad luck protection or loot targeting in the Vault and make everyone happier!

Neutral – Blizzard Escalates the War on Addons

In a WoWcast released today, Ion Hazzikostas, sitting down with Dratnos and Max of ThePoddyC (and I guess Max runs some kind of raid guild, I dunno) revealed that in patch 11.1.7, Blizzard would be adding a rotation helper to the baseline UI, including a Hekili addon styled action predictor and the option to turn on a one-button rotation that would incur a higher GCD and thus not be as performant, but allowing you to just kind of zone out and play the game. Alongside this, Ion specifically mentioned a project on an undetermined timetable to slowly begin to limit combat-facing addons, to be done only once Blizzard can replace their baseline functionality with stock UI components. A damage meter, boss mod for callouts, and nameplate changes were all mentioned as a part of this effort. Once those things are deployed, the idea is that Blizzard would then tighten the WoW API to limit the access of addons to combat data, making the in-game official versions the only way to get that information reliably while still allowing cosmetic mods and more general utility to come from addons.

So first, I need to state for my opinion that I find the “addons SUK AND RUINED THE GAME !!111!1” discourse tiresome. Most bosses can, in fact, be beaten without addons, and the game has actually done well at making cleaner boss fights with more obvious tells and in-game shouts that pop-up like raid warnings when something that demands a resolution appears. There is very little that happens outside of high-end late-tier Mythic raid bosses that demands even a boss mod, much less nameplate mods or anything else (where the addons argument has its strongest ground is nameplates for high-key Mythic Plus mob abilities, where Plater is functionally a must). There is an argument to be had about the skill level needed to interpret some of that input, sure – but a modestly-attentive raider can and should be able to use a clean stock UI and still do things well in most gameplay settings outside of the pinnacle of the game. Even then, if you look at most Mythic raider UIs, they’re less the “spaceship docked in my monitor” thing that used to happen a lot and more just like “my cooldowns are closer to mid-screen so I can see them better.” It’s okay to not like addons, and there has clearly been some escalation of encounter design at the high-end to accommodate what players are capable of with addons, but for the vast, vast majority of players, addons just aren’t necessary and the content most of us are playing isn’t designed around or for them – it is a choice, and given that the people I most often see make this argument are Classic die-hards who haven’t played retail seriously in at least a decade, I’m inclined to discard their opinion about how the game they don’t play works in 2025.

That being said, Blizzard’s efforts on this front are kind of neat, if not perhaps a little off. The cooldown manager introduced in 11.1.5 with the intent of replacing those center-screen WeakAura packages is…fine, but it isn’t quite where it needs to be yet. While a Blizzard-sanctioned rotation helper will be kind of neat, I’m also not sure it is going to capture the full range of nuance in playing a given spec with given trinkets and other things, which addons like Hekili try to get (and still often don’t quite get there). I imagine that their DBM and Plater replacements will come with a similar level of caveat – they’ll be fine, but not quite the full value replacement of those addons you might hope they would be.

As for disabling certain combat functions available to addons? Sure, I think Blizzard’s approach is valid here. In many ways, it mirrors what I think FFXIV should be doing – building the functionality into the game and then limiting access through API changes and monitoring that can catch if something is end-running around those protections via Warden. I do think there is a segment of players who will be absolutely fuming that Blizzard sees a DPS meter as worth having in the base game, but I also think there are examples around the MMO genre that show that an in-game parser is preferable as it can also have some limits enforced that Details won’t. My perspective on DPS meters hasn’t really changed much in the last few years, so I maintain that they are valuable as self-improvement and diagnosis tools but I get why some people have an aversion to them and my hope is that Blizzard balances their shot at it with both audiences in mind.

Lastly, I do think that I have some distrust to Blizzard on this effort just because they’ve been aggressively pinning a lot of problem on addons when it isn’t appropriate. The major one of late is the addition of a CPU profiler for addons in 11.1, which eats up system resources so Blizzard can blame addons by showing DBM using 400% (?!) CPU randomly. The profiler runs like ass and adds noticeable delay in the game, but at least in 11.1 you could disable it to gain performance…which they turned off as an option in 11.1.5. The profiler Blizzard added has made my experience worse in every way, including surfacing a bug the game has long had with caching audio where the game can struggle to load in the sound file it needs and introduces a stuttering freeze while the game waits to load the data. When I could turn off the profiler, I was able to stop that from happening, but since 11.1.5, it just happens now and it makes doing any high-end content miserable at times. Blaming addons is fun here, but also I’ve had this audio-caching bug happen from the game’s own built-in whisper notification sound (like seriously, no motion, frozen screen for 3 seconds while the game waited to load up the blew-DEWP sound of some stranger whispering me about doing a world boss) so I would really like to be able to regain that performance Blizzard, please?

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Overall, I’ve been mostly satisfied with WoW in TWW, and Season 2 has been especially enjoyable. These new changes coming don’t do a lot to budge me one way or another, although I am curious to see how some of these things end up working out, as I think there is a lot of room for improvement in both implementation and communication to ensure players have a positive experience with these new aspects of the game. Long-term, I am most curious about the project around addons, because I think that Blizzard has a relatively clear idea of what they want, but there will be player impacts that I think will be interesting to see unfold and it’s not so simple to just simply limit access to things and expect that an entrenched playerbase will be unaffected by what is in actuality a sweeping change to the game. I do like the idea that the game should be functional unto itself such that a new player doesn’t need to download an addon manager outside the game and know which handful of mods do the best job of helping them in-game. How long this project takes is what interests me most, because aiming to replace DBM, Plater, Details, and Hekili while also integrating more WeakAuras functionality into the game is a heavy task with a lot of work to be done, such that I don’t even know if Blizzard knows the actual scope of the work they will need to do.

For the rest of Season 2 though? I’m pretty happy with the game’s overall direction, warts aside, and provided they do all of this while also giving me a way to toggle their stupid CPU profiler (or, god forbid, fixing audio caching in the game!) then I will be the happiest camper.