Patch 12.1 for WoW’s Midnight expansion launched back in August, with 12.1.5 launching last-week as I write this intro, in mid-October. The second season of this expansion has been ongoing for around 10 weeks and will likely persist for another 14 weeks on Blizzard’s current content cadence, and players are getting…restless, to put it mildly. If you’re anywhere near connected to the game’s modern version on social media, you’ve probably seen a lot of headlines and content titled like the post you are now reading, and today, my goal is to sort of contextualize why I agree with a lot of the dragging, why this season has felt not just underwhelming but actively bad, and what I think Blizzard could have maybe done (and could maybe still do) to make it feel less punishing and bad to play.

What Makes a Good Season?

Firstly, let’s dive in a bit to my beliefs on what make a good World of Warcraft season in the modern game. We’ll use the general template of the Worldsoul Saga to date, which means a major patch launch and two minor patches per season, with the assumption of at least one world zone, 1-3 Delves, a new 5-player dungeon across the game’s difficulty gamut alongside 7 other dungeons to comprise a seasonal rotation, and at least one major raid of around 8 bosses. What do I look for in a season to make it feel fun and enjoyable?

-World content should be fun and enjoyable, with a reasonably well-made world event/foundational feature, a unique art asset palette or smart reuse of existing assets in a novel way, clear progression through the various features and content unique to the new zone, and optional deep-dive content I can do at my leisure (rare spawns, puzzles, treasures, secrets, etc)
-Delves that are polished, with interesting story variants, new gameplay, and fun flavor
-A new dungeon that is built to provide new mechanics and challenges with fun scaling for Mythic Plus, a flavor that belongs in the patch while also being distinctive enough to stand alone, and loot that fills important seasonal gaps for the dungeon pool
-A raid with great mechanical density, well-designed and readable mechanics with affordance appropriate to the intended difficulty, that feels fun, challenging, but fair to progress through
-A story that ties into the broader expansion narrative while also having distinctive story beats and interesting diversions to add flavor or setup future storytelling successfully

So all of these, while vague, I hope paint a decent enough picture of what I look for when looking to enjoy a new WoW season in the modern game. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to have a general bent towards being fun, playable, repeatable, with enough novelty woven in to feel like a fresh new experience for a game that is coming up on its twenty-second birthday in just a few weeks.

So with that said, let’s now contrast point by point.

The Coiled Isle is Maybe Like Other Things That Coil

The Coiled Isle as a zone is, all over, kind of just bland and flavorless on its own. The art asset reuse for Zul’Aman is fine, understandable too, given that it is an extension of the ancient Amani empire, but in the past, nearly every x.1 patch has done something with asset reuse but…made it new enough and better, or at least interesting. Undermine reuses Goblin assets but adds a ton of new ones and creates a distinctive flavor. Zaralek Caverns uses a lot of the same stuff we saw with Neltharus on the surface of the Dragon Isles but captures a more raw and interesting flavor for Neltharion’s laboratory compared to that surface level architecture or any past Black Dragonflight lab facilities in WoW. Even Korthia, yes the despised Korthia, uses Oribos and Torghast assets but put them into a striking contrast with the nature of the zone to create something that was novel and visually interesting, even if the zone is still one of the most hated creations in the modern game.

Coiled Isle feels like a miss from the art team because while it is technically well-executed (there’s no blaring weirdness or problems per se) it also just doesn’t have any mindfulness towards the story being told. The use of new ZA assets without any sort of continuity check for aging, weathering, or even the presence of the other Loa visuals in the stonework stands out as sort of disappointing. In fact, the biggest change for Coiled Isle compared to ZA is that there is a lot of neon green poison instead of water, which, like, cool – but that bright green does not a differentiator make on its own. It feels like this zone should have captured a different era of the Amani, with similar but older-looking and slightly differentiated stonework that reflects the time in the lore it existed and was relevant prior to now. All of these apply to the Vaults of Atal’Utek, the “second zone” we get that is primarily 3 airlock loading tunnels that connect to a square of bridges that move players from the dungeon portal to the raid portal, with an overpopulated messy floor beneath that that is not fun to be in that connects to the second raid that was just recently added with 12.1.5. Inexplicably, we can’t fly in the Vaults, even though we could in Zaralek under the same conditions, probably because the zone seemingly only exists to waste player time ferrying between different objectives, along with adding another threadbare world event so the patch can seem twice as dense as most other x.1 patches!

And on that note, gameplay…uh, it’s kinda just not interesting. Curse Surges don’t seem particularly interesting or fun, and I have to say “seem” because I have never actually seen one pop. Apparently these were bugged at one point but got fixed, but even then, I’ve never seen a single indicator of when I can do these or where and I have completed both 12.1 and 12.1.5 story patches! The temple assaults in the Vaults zone aren’t much better, because they’re sort of lacking on meaningful gameplay and are just follow the map marker towards a random rotating objective, with an internal timer dictating if they’re a Strike or Incursion, which I dislike strongly because I vastly prefer such content to be on a fixed timer where I can reliably say that at the top of the hour and 30 minutes I can do the activity instead of this thing where it’s based on the prior completion and a timer from that but also seems to be inconsistent and cycle oddly. There’s a typical selection of world quests and discoverables like rare mobs, treasures, and such, which are fine enough, but because the base gameplay is so dull and based on weird timer behavior, it just doesn’t feel fun. Couple that with how drab and dull the zone is to look at, and my god – I do not want to be on this cursed isle more than I have to. And luckily, I don’t have to – because I can simply run here twice-weekly to run to a raid portal and outside of that I never have to see it, which is fine – but also, I don’t think it speaks well to the quality of this content that most players I know simply make a point of not coming here at all!

Now sure, to a point, “follow the map marker” describes a lot of current WoW’s world gameplay, but plenty of past world events had flavor and uniqueness to them. Feasts were great, Researchers could be kind of fun, Surge Pricing had fun flavor, Abundance was memeable, and even Stormarion Assault, probably the most hated event in the launch window this expansion, still had a consistency to it in terms of timer and activity demands that were quite doable and not bad. Curse Surges and Temple Assaults are just…flavorless. They don’t feel unique or fun, and Temple Assaults are fucking annoying when you’re on the clock trying to move to an event in a zone that inexplicably restricts flight and is also incredibly annoyingly designed with limited paths, dismount areas, and large patches of deep-enough ooze to force you to swim instead of being able to just move freely. I could take not flying if the zone at least had full mount support on the ground – hell, Undermine made me use the dumb car and I kinda came to enjoy it! – but Vaults is a zone I try to spend as little time as possible in because it is just designed to be frustrating and tedious, not fun or interesting. And I know that was not Blizzard’s intention, but they did that thing they used to do a lot more where they got so used to the smell of their own farts and became incapable of smelling the awful stench coming off these two zones. At this juncture, I would rather the dungeon and two raids (three if we count the lair!) here were queued on all difficulties through a menu like FFXIV raiding, because that’s how much I actively despise these zones from a gameplay perspective.

So, to make the section header joke clear, these two zones are shit.

The New Delves Are Okay…But

Not including Nemesis or the Labyrinth, which we will get into, the two new Delves of the 12.1 cycle are both on Coiled Isle – Ring of Glory and Gnarldor Isle. Both are based in the outdoor world of the zone, which is already problem number one, because they adopt all the same issues of visual disinterest and overall meh-ness that come with the parent zone. Having said that, both are pretty alright from a gameplay basis, which I like. Ring of Glory is in the new to Midnight archetype of short, sweet delve in a small space, similar to the Grudge Pit of Harandar from launch, where the point is that the story variants cycle in new threats to the small space instead of being larger and more navigationally challenging. Ring of Glory is probably a sweet spot compared to the Grudge Pit – it’s not so small that you can see the whole thing in a single look, but it’s also compact and has generally fun story variants with unique gameplay. Gnarldor Isle is a little obnoxious because it is larger and also fairly non-distinct in terms of navigational landmarks, but otherwise, it’s fine.

Delves from a gameplay perspective retain much of the value they’ve had since their introduction in The War Within, so they remain the sole viable path for non-raider, non-dungeon players to get access to good loot and crests, a viable pathway for raiders and dungeoneers to accelerate their gearing, and a fun solo way you can whittle away at your free time in WoW with – which is all great. However, I have two beefs this season with Delves, both of which concern the new special Delves we got this season.

Firstly, the Nemesis. Azta’rec is a dull fight that follows a similar template to what we saw with Nullaeus in Season 1. If you’re a tank, he has a buster that hits really hard. If you’re a healer, he has a dispel that does damage by the truckload per tick until dispelled. If you’re a DPS player, you probably have healer Valeera and so you have to make plans to manage the nasty auto-attacks he hits you with coupled with an interrupt mechanic. But the gimmick this tier was a dumb memory game instead of something more gameplay oriented like the add phases and movement checks on Nullaeus, and on ??, there’s an add doing mechanics while you do it which also sucks. Launch week, this was stupid easy to cheese, because helper addons could automate the memory game so you just focused on the mechanics of the add and got where you needed to go, but Blizzard hated that (obviously) so they nuked the addon API options that made those addons work without nerfing the underlying fight, so you’re being taxed to remember up to 7 different directional prompts while also doing a rotation on the add, managing interrupts, dispels, and/or tank busters while your neuroplasticity is being overly tested. It just wasn’t a particularly fun fight, and while the helper addon made it modestly simple to do, that does take more fun out, while the base state sans addons is kind of just not enjoyable (in my opinion). I did Nullaeus last season on ?? over a dozen times on multiple alts because I found the core mechanics fun and the execution check for each spec I did it on to be reasonably enjoyable, but I have not done more than my one first Hall of Fame kill on Azta’rec since the season began.

My second beef with this season’s delves is the new in 12.1.5 Labyrinth of Kindo’jan. This was a great idea and something I was genuinely very excited to see, and then the launch week came and it was…very underwhelming.

Firstly, I have to rake Blizzard over the coals here because a specific promise that was made out loud when these were announced was the notion of drop-in and drop-out gameplay. You were supposed to be able to do Labyrinths in multiple sessions, so you could work on a weekly basis towards a full clear and the fun of that, but instead, it functions like every other delve – zoning out immediately resets progress. Booo. Secondly, instead of story variants for the whole delve, there is a rotating set of objectives per wing that you can find, but the problem is that the pile of objectives are generic outside of a couple exceptions (the boulder run comes to mind as the sole example of this), and the list of objectives is tiny, so it is possible to get a Labyrinth with the same objective in multiple wings. There are some once-per-account puzzles like the ice wall under the waterfall, the larger selection of Sturdy Chests that reward Untainted Mana Crystals (which frustrates me now that I can’t transfer them to alts since of course I did my first run looking for everything on my well-geared main who can’t even spend them productively), and it of course has its own Renown track that unlocks aspects of the Labyrinth for further exploration, mostly shrines with powerups and the Loa rooms with extra curios for more power.

Because of this, Blizzard made Labyrinths stupidly simple – each wing is a single objective (although often multi-stage) that barely takes 5 minutes, 3 wings comprises a full “delve” for purposes of Bountiful chests and Vault credit, and the end result is that while the Labyrinth can be fun…it’s also a smidge too basic and simple in a way that robs them of feeling suitably epic or exploratory. As a first pass and proof of concept? It’s pretty neat, but it also was the thing I was both most hyped for and most disappointed by as a result – and only a bit of that disappointment rests on the fact that they aren’t epic multi-run things you can do. Lastly though, the Labyrinth brings its own Nemesis in Kindo’jan, who is pretty neat conceptually, but the fight has been extremely hampered by its placement. Firstly, it was extremely buggy for the first full week, with any number of things causing the fight to be basically unapproachable like floor despawns. When it works, it is hampered by Valeera tuning, like how she won’t attack the boss on my Priest until that Priest is also in melee with the boss, when suddenly she overcomes her anxiety to fight, or how on my Resto Shaman main for the season, she smokes crack and pops stimulants prior to doing the fight and turns into a top 100 world DPS player, doing more damage than the top 4 in my raid combined and leading to the fight falling over so quickly that no mechanics even happened. When the fight works, it is, like much of the Labyrinth, so simple that it barely feels like there’s value in writing about it – it’s fine given that it comes after doing 9 wings that can take upwards of an hour and you have limited lives given that it lives inside of a rule-bound delve instead of a special Nemesis delve, but none of the mechanics are particularly interesting except bad interactions, like how the puddles you leave can barely be seen and can kill Valeera when she goes to soak if one happens to overlap the soaks mechanic she chooses – but I would stick to calling the fight simply fine even with that.

Season Two Mythic Plus Is Frustrating and Tedious At The Worst Times And Just Okay At The Best

This dungeon season is really a tale of two halves.

The Midnight launch dungeons that finally see Mythic Plus light? They’re…fine. They each carry some frustration points and some weirdness, but generally, I like them well enough (3344 M+ score as I write this, with Resilient 15s and two +16s on the board). Murder Row’s RP is tedious, the last boss kinda sucks with iffy tanks or bad healers, and there are some frustrating trash mobs. Blinding Vale has painful trash routing on the way to the last boss but has generally good bosses and overall fun flavor. Den of Nalorakk is an open layout with a lot of interesting choices, hampered by boss RP that eats into timers a bit and some mechanical issues. Voidscar Arena has interesting routing choices that hold some frustrating trash mobs and challenging pulls with interesting and unique bosses that offer some fun challenge (that can also be frustrating).

Altar of Fangs, the new dungeon this season, is kinda visually bland because it’s the same radioactive pea soup as the rest of the patch, but slightly grungier tinged, which is nice, admittedly. On a gameplay basis, it has some fun novel mechanics but was hampered by being overtuned for a good chunk of the season, which made you fucking know those mechanics because they’d slap you in the face on even relatively modest key levels. It’s a 3 boss jaunt (fun!) but a linear hallway so it doesn’t have the fun factor of midseason champs from TWW like Floodgate or Eco-Dome Al’dani because there are few routing choices your tank can make – hold W and win, basically, with most routing choices you see pro teams making involving detailed skips or specific mechanical jank. Ruby Life Pools is fine, they made tweaks to it from Dragonflight that make it better than that original version (in my opinion) but it also had ass tuning for the first 8 weeks which made higher keys especially diabolical, particularly the second boss add scaling. Then we have two of my most hated BfA dungeons, King’s Rest and Temple of Sethraliss. BfA was really an interesting moment for dungeon design in that it has two types of M+ dungeon – well-designed open choice layouts with interesting ideas (Atal’Dazar, Underrot, Waycrest Manor minus the stupid doors, maybe Freehold even though I hated that one) and dungeons where they wanted to lean too hard on depleting M+ timers with inane bullshit that can’t be counterplayed or requires too much dungeon knowledge for the average player (Waycrest with door routing changes, Freehold with rotating pirate gangs, King’s Rest RP and the Shadow of Zul trash, Temple of Sethraliss with mazes and the last boss) and hey, wouldn’t you know, both BfA throwbacks this season come from the “inane bullshit” camp, oh boy!

To be fair, with the tweaks they promised to make (and largely did make) these two dungeons are less time-wastery and bad feeling than they were in BfA in my opinion, but they still feel pretty bad to play. Temple of Sethraliss has a last boss that still sucks and creates weird gameplay that leans hard into favoring throughput reactive healers over other styles (one of a million reasons why Holy Paladin is the hot meta healer this season), and while some time-wasting on the second boss and bad interactions like the damage reflection on the first boss were cleaned up or completely removed, it still just doesn’t feel fun to play. King’s Rest is actually decently improved, but it also is dull and hold-W, on top of having some punishing trash interactions in particular spots (second boss room, RP after first boss, hallway to boss 3, Shadow of Zul still sucks eggs but just less of them)that make it just less fun to play.

On top of all of that, a lot of bad interactions threaten players in awful ways this season. Many dungeons have untargeted, instant-cast bleeds that tick insanely hard, which means your healer has no means to prepare and often needs GCD-accuracy on high enough keys to prevent a targeted player from bleeding out insanely fast, there are a lot of mechanics that shower the party in unavoidable rapid-fire damage that requires pretty fast responses to avoid wombo-combos (in spite of adjusting healing again this season to make it more of a triage game), and there are a lot of unclear mechanics that even skilled players might not even know, like the trash in the opening hall of Temple of Sethraliss that will put your tank into a big stun unless they specifically damage the mobs out of stealth, which requires knowing that the mobs are there in the first place. The challenge of these mechanics would be fine with affordance – if you got a target indicator or some sort of even single GCD warning that a bleed was gonna hit X target, fine enough, but you don’t get that, and things like cheap shots in Murder Row can target the same DPS player twice in a row, which is basically a death sentence on a reasonably-high key level. That’s without mentioning the bugs that have plagued Mythic Plus pretty specifically for a large chunk of the season, like the second boss in Murder Row doing fake damage (it would look like your party was getting smashed on their health bars but the damage wasn’t actually being dealt to their health values) which was just fixed without nerfing or changing the mechanic, so now your party takes an absolute truckload of real damage and can die pretty quickly without a strong cooldown strategy, or the bug that caused a weird interaction with Subtlety Rogue DPS cooldowns and Diabolist Warlock bonus minions, where a Sub Rogue popping CDs could cause a spiraling interaction where the Diabolist minions would pull things miles away that you weren’t in combat with, or that targets of melee damage were taking half as much damage as initially reported, as the health bar would double-report the damage taken and then rebound, which would lead to lots of scary interactions and feelings of panic among healers and tanks with strong self-healing responsibilities.

Overall, Season 2 continues the difficulty trend from Season 1, which I think is generally welcome, but Blizzard in this season of errors has made one last one that I think merits discussion. Keystone Myth, the new top achiever level beneath percentage-based seasonal titles and rewards, was added in Season 1 at 3,400 rating. This felt fair and reasonable – all +16s would net you the achievement, title, and mount token, and great. However, Blizzard has done something unprecedented in Season 2, and upped this achievement to 3,600 rating to adjust for difficulty changes this season. In spite of all the rating-based things the game has had in multiple modes like PvP and Mythic Plus in the past, this marks the first time they’ve increased the rating requirement for a level of achievement that exists in the game already. While it is just 200 points, this also represents a sharper climb at this level, as 3,600 will, at best, be reachable with Resilient 18s, but will likely require most players to reach slightly more and put a 19 or two on the board. If we accept the idea that this season is easier than Season 1 (and sure, in some ways, it is, gearing is faster since leveling isn’t as big of a concern and profession grinding is largely done for big crafters), then that begs the question of why the other tiers of Mythic Plus achievement did not receive suitable bumps upward? Because if this season is supposed to be so easy that your 3,400 playerbase can get an extra 200 points no sweat, then why can’t Legend players reach 3,200, Heroes reach 2,700, and Masters reach 2,200? Is it because you know that the Myth-level playerbase will stick with it but that the lower-tier achievements wouldn’t and would drop out from discouragement before reaching the new levels? Surely it couldn’t be that cynical, and yet I find no suitable explanation besides that, especially since Blizzard held this news and achievement reintroduction for the 12.1.5 patch, which does mirror last season to be fair, but at the same time, I know many folks who hit their 3,400, stopped pushing, and were pretty damn bothered by this change, and players who did it well enough last season at 3,400 are questioning the value of even trying this season for that 3,600 peak. To me, this is peak engagement bait – Blizzard set an expectation last season, decided to change it without sufficient advance notice, and is trying to use it to rope high end players back into the pool to keep pushing.

And that’s represented in how hard it is to find high keys at this point. While there is a population that always pushes still online and doing keys, finding high-teen keys at the hours I play went from being pretty easy to being frustratingly hard, and there have been some nights where I haven’t found a single 16 or 17 to do and just logged out after refreshing LFG for an hour, and that’s as a healer main. DPS mains unquestionably have it worse, and while tank mains can find keys much easier, they need the other roles too and at these higher key levels, that’s not always a given! Oh, and to top all of that off, the loot table for dungeons this season is one of the worst the game has ever seen, with far too much Versatility for how unhelpful it is to the majority of specs, meaning that trying to gear in dungeons is largely a wasted endeavor if you want to optimize to any real level (unless you’re a Vers spec, in which case, have fun big dog).

So while I’m still planning to push to 3,600 and finish strong, I have much less innate desire to do so, and it feels grumpier and more annoying to do so, which is amplified by how this season’s baffling design and layers of frustration have led to declines in active players, even both before and after the WoW Forever beta. There’s no part of my brain that even imagines trying to push 1% title, which I did briefly play around with last season before ultimately losing steam (although I did almost get my Mistweaver to Myth level rating anyways as I pushed in that direction!), and a large part is just that I feel so overwhelmingly disappointed with this season and the choices made around it. But I still generally enjoy Mythic Plus, which is more than I can say about the raid this tier…

The Venomous Abyss is One of the Worst WoW Raids of All Time

Most WoW raids, across the full history of the game, are comprised of a few meh to stinker fights and enough good to great fights to place most raids in that general good-to-great rating for most players. There have rarely, if ever, been raids with all bangers, and even the best raid tiers usually have at least 1 stinky boss fight that people don’t really like.

The Venomous Abyss is largely meh fights at best, with a couple of super stinkers that are so bad that they drag the tier into being one of the worst raid tiers in WoW’s entire history in my opinion, and easily the worst raid the game has seen in the 2020s, edging out Sanctum of Domination for me quite handily (I was not actively playing for Sepulcher of the First Ones, which has some parallels to this raid that we will get into).

Fight by fight, I can summarize the raid and then we’ll get into some specific sticking points for me.

-Nek’zali – fun flavor, but bland room with poor marking and low affordance for the corpse burning mechanic on Heroic and up that creates frustration with two punishments for each failure
-Entombed Sentinels – cool idea for a council/shared health fight, execution is a bit boring and green lines to the green boss need to connect to the boss for clarity
-Lost Explorers – actually fun fight, visually readable, good layering of mechanics that plays out reasonably well
-Vashnik – awful boss where the Blood quadrant mechanics are so bad you literally never play it and the punishment for doing so isn’t tuned to be punishing enough unless your raid is bad, difficulty of debuff mechanics is pretty high but mostly for healers who are very taxed throughout this fight
-Sszorak – awful fight, bland symmetrical room with no visual distinction requires long camera pans to world markers to place mechanics, random-assigned debuffs given to an unskilled player can literally kill the raid, damage amp during forced movement is a neat idea but functionally just feels bad, wind jumps are fidgety and can sometimes be buggy
-Twin Fangs – decent enough fight, visual clarity on the rotating breath attack could be better, too much ground stuff and too big of punishment for poison stacks accruing too high, but reasonably fun at its best
-Coiled Altar – “coiled” in the name because it’s shit, cool idea, cool P1 and P3 with the fight totally hampered by how absolutely restrictive, buggy, and unfun P2 is to play, forced damage stops feel terrible
-Ula’tek – another boss with a nondescript room that can be hard to distinguish position in the moment, tight P1 and P3 damage checks, overly punishing tank mechanic in P1, eggs carry obscenely high penalties for failure as do soaks in P3, affordance on many pivotal mechanics is just totally insufficient

And outside of the Venomous Abyss, the Lair boss and Kith’ix both have problems as well!

-Nymrissa Tidecaller – basic fight with a couple of core mechanics that are easy to do but can carry high failure penalties, although at this point of the season it’s not too bad
-Kith’ix – interesting idea for a fight, but the chaotic nature of mechanics on Heroic and up leads to low affordance for mechanics like Bomber Beetles, who often wipe groups due to low mental bandwidth while also dealing with adds, handling debuff movement, grabbing light orbs, and avoiding tank circles and Hulk cleaves

So there are a few common themes I want to really hit on here with the summary out of the way.

Nondescript Symmetrical Arenas – Blizzard has made a lot of bosses this tier that use their rooms heavily but their rooms are perfectly symmetrical and unmarked in any way except player-placed world markers. Telling left from right on Ula’tek can be challenging, Lost Explorers is a big fuckoff circle that can be hard to navigate in at times, but the key example is Sszorak here – an octagon where you have to watch for wind to place debuffs on the OPPOSITE side, which requires panning your camera around to world markers and then responding quickly enough. Place a debuff wrong and it will often kill your raid on anything above Normal, because the damage and forced knockback of it can have a ton of negative interactions. This fight sucks so bad to farm because there’s just not enough visual information built into the room and the best way to get what you need is to have one player who has to do a stupid amount of camera movement. It would be infinitely better if the tunnels where wind can pop had literally anything to distinguish them – my dream would be same props on facing sides, so two tunnels opposite each other would have like a shipwreck, the next two facing each other would have like a snake statue, and the last set could be undecorated or have like spider webs or something, so you could call as a raid leader “windless ship” or something instead of having to pan your camera around like a doofus to see what opposite marker is, or use a helper addon. Hey, aren’t we trying to reduce addon dependence this expansion? Interesting design you got there for doing that, Blizzard!

Low Affordance Mechanics – Affordance, as Blizzard describes it, is a generalized concept for the ability to process and handle a mechanic, often rated based on the intersection of how easy the action needed to resolve a mechanic is coupled with how long you can spend resolving it. A mechanic can be low affordance if it is super easy to resolve but needs you to react instantly and precisely, or it can be low affordance if you get like a minute to resolve it but have to solve an intricate puzzle to determine exactly how to handle it. A lot of the mechanics this tier are simply tuned poorly on affordance, so you just have insufficient time for how complex something can be or you have to do something far too precise to solve it. Coiled Altar is ruined by how fidgety and bad the ghosts are in P2, because any ghost fixating you means you have to look at it nearly immediately, any look away lets the ghost sail towards you at a rapid pace, and failing to lock your ghost is punished in increasingly bad ways per difficulty (a huge knockback on Normal, MC on Heroic and Mythic, Mythic also adding that if your ghost touches another player’s ghost, both players linked to those ghosts die immediately), but also seeing which ghost is yours or all the ghosts out is nearly impossible, the ghosts move if you are barely off-axis of your character looking at them (not even the camera), and because the ghost movement speed is insanely high, any break in eye contact results in the ghost creeping up on you like your clingiest ex. Oh, and you also get multiple mechanics that force you to move quickly to avoid bombing the raid or making things worse in other ways, times where the ghost will often get allowed to move and cause chaos, and that shit sucks. If the viewing angle to consider a ghost “seen” was like 30 degrees wider, if the ghost movement speed was like 25% slower, and if the visibility of all ghosts in the fight was cranked up to 11 (with your ghost cranked to like a 25) then maybe this would be fine, but even on Mythic, often this mechanic involves players stopping anything else they are doing so they can just stare bug-eyed at the stupid fucking ghost until the tank cleaves it with the buster, which is hardly fun for anyone involved. (Oh and the Glory achievement for this fight involves every player in the raid ending the fight with a ghost, which, good fucking luck).

Visibility of Mechanics – In addition to the problem with bland arenas that don’t use clear visual demarcation, a big problem this tier is the color palette of debuffs and core mechanics on many, although not all, fights. Sszorak has green tornados with green orb debuffs and green cleaves to soak, Ula’tek has green eggs with green waves in a green room on a green pile of sludge (but then also has bright red soaks, so hey, thanks for that I guess), Nek’zali has a necropolis color palette room with spirit adds that blend into the floor a bit, tornados to dodge in dark green and black that are hard to see, and the killer line from the boss to her big adds in intermission is also a well-blended death color tone that can be easy to miss. Entombed Sentinels has one boss with bright red, easy to see things, and one with green on green, Vashnik is color distinctive (least of the fight’s problems but hey, a win is a win), the aforementioned Coiled Altar ghosts blend in too well (if you can even see other player ghosts at all, which does matter for Mythic and raid leaders at least!), and Twin Fangs is green on green but with a couple red breaks. To their credit, Lost Explorers is a highly visible fight mechanically, which is great and why it is probably one of the better fights this tier!

Tuning – With the gearing changes they made this season (more on those in a moment), Blizzard specifically indicated that they had tuned up the difficulty of the raid to match the idea that we would have more gear and better gear. The theory is sound enough, but in practice, from most raids I know, the gearing changes, especially to raid, have not resulted in a significant-enough bump in average raider item level to warrant such a drastic overcorrection. While the idea is sound enough at the start of a season, where raid vaults giving the next upgrade level up means slightly-higher item level to start for raiders, it very quickly flattens out such that the raid loggers are still about where they would be normally, dungeon runners are still about as ahead as they would typically be, and so for a guild like mine, we are fighting uphill against harder tuning with what has netted out to basically 0 increased item level. In fact, if I compare Crown of the Cosmos to Twin Fangs on Heroic, fights at a similar prog point for us, our raid was closer to season max item level on Crown of the Cosmos (9 ilvl off at raid average) compared to Twin Fangs (16 ilvl off), so while we were closer to maximum on Crown of the Cosmos (and by a fair bit too), that fight’s tuning was not adjusted to account for item level assumptions in the same way that this tier was buffed across the board to compensate for what Blizzard thought we might be bringing. Even if I take our Coiled Altar Heroic prog and compare it to L’ura Heroic for fun, we were about 6 item levels from season max for our AOTC kill on L’ura while Coiled Altar wipes last week (with a Mythic raider husband of one of our raiders along to skew the item level higher even) we were still 10 ilvl away from season max on average! So sure, theoretically, great idea, makes sense to tune up – in practice though, I’m not sure it actually needed to be done and I think doing it has hurt the raid overall, especially when coupled with the other mechanical issues.

Random Assigned Mechanics – I’m going to say something controversial here about most Heroic raid teams, including my own, that I have observed in the wild enough to be true – most of them are held together by a couple of reasonably good players and then there’s a rapid slide down from there. In most cases, this is fine – raiding is social and if you enjoy playing with someone enough socially for their lack of play skill to be tolerable, then hey, we’re cooking, right? Where this becomes a problem is when the game gives out mechanics randomly, and when those mechanics are exceptionally difficult, low affordance, or high punishment like raid wipes or immediate multiple deaths for mishandling. In my raid, if I exclude myself and my two tanks, then there are about 5 players out of 14 who I would probably assign everything to if I could, to be honest. When that isn’t an option, it can be fine, but as the penalty for failure is ratcheted up, this becomes more and more punishing. Sszorak blobs, Gloombombs on Coiled Altar, ghosts on Coiled Altar, eggs on Ula’tek, red debuffs on Twin Fangs, the red soak on Vashnik (if we ever did that quadrant in the first place!), goop on red soaks on Entombed Sentinels, bombs on Lost Explorers, tornado debuff on Nek’zali – all of these are mechanics that get randomly assigned this tier that can cause some huge problems. A dispel target on Nek’zali not waiting at the wall can make the room treacherous for the entire fight, as can goop assignments on Sentinels. An iffy player with red soak on Vashnik is probably just dead pretty quickly (that’s why you never play it!), a red debuff moved slowly on Twin Fangs can clip the raid and even potentially cut off sections of the room in a bad way, and most of the Coiled Altar, Ula’tek, and Sszorak random assignments can lead to full raid wipes if just one goober does the thing slightly incorrectly. Sure, Ula’tek eggs aren’t technically random – but the second egg spawn requires so much of the raid to pick them up and play smart that it functionally feels like a “Jesus take the wheel” moment where my breath is held and my butt is puckered. Okay, fine – maybe not every mechanic can or should be assignable through tech or baits or trickery, but I would like to see raid wiping deathballs be more controllable such that I can shelter a few players who just can’t handle the responsibility from ever having to whiff it. A big part of why this tier feels more difficult even outside of tuning is those random assignments carrying such a high failure penalty.

Flavor – This one is a smidge subjective, but I think the Venomous Abyss struggles to have any real distinctive flavor of its own or to stand out against the rest of the patch. Even Sanctum of Domination had segments like the piece of Zereth Mortis that was pulled in before we knew what that was, the icy Kel’Thuzad room, and the chain bridge chase to Oribos against Sylvanas. VA has the same basic architecture throughout, most of it lit exactly the same except Lost Explorers, Vashnik, and Nek’zali (which all use gloomier and darker color palettes that look better in my opinion) and Coiled Altar, which is slightly darker but also has a lack of nuclear green around the base environment which helps the mechanics that are that color to stand out better. But the biggest hit to flavor is in voice and personality. Ula’tek is the first raid endboss in the game’s history to have no voiceover at all, no whispers, no taunts, nothing. She barely even makes roars or hissing sounds! And before you say “well, she’s a snake loa, what do you expect?” HER TO TALK LIKE ALL THE OTHER FUCKING LOA WE SEE IN ZUL’AMAN THIS EXPANSION!!! I was actually floored to find in researching this that she is literally the only endboss in any raid in this game’s history to not say anything at all, like surely C’thun didn’t say anything (nope, he’s got whispers) or G’huun (Old God gibberish but voice acted and translatable!), but nope – Ula’tek is indeed, at least to my understanding, the very first endboss in this game to not have a word to say. That’s out of fifty-five total raids in this game to date! If we strike Naxx-2.0 off the list, okay, 54, but still – FIFTY FOUR fucking raids existed from 2004 to 2026 where even some of the grunt bosses in shitty little Molten Core had voice acting, but this huge Loa with some Amani and Void lore significance somehow has nothing to say at all? What’s even worse is that I can’t recall if there is even any voice acting from NPCs in the fight at all – and in a Story Mode pass at it as I wrote this, I did not hear a single voice line from any character during the fight except for the barely-there introduction from Orweyna as you do the ritual to summon the boss.

It feels fairly clear that this raid was supposed to end at Coiled Altar originally, and it not doing so was because that didn’t feel suitably epic, but the problem is that Ula’tek doesn’t feel epic or seem particularly interesting because she’s not a character and has no motivations. She barely even has a story to her, we get told about her exclusively as a thing in this patch cycle and she’s already dead before the halfway point!

Gearing – Blizzard Tried Solving One Problem and Made About a Dozen More

With this patch, Blizz tried to take lessons learned from the Midnight launch window, the addition of bonus rolls in Season 1, and player feedback into account. The common trendlines I think a lot of us saw with gearing as problems were that Mythic Plus tended to overgear players that did it relative to what a raider putting in theoretically equal effort on equally difficult content could yield, cantrip items were too powerful but also too RNG, bonus rolls overcorrected in Season 1 to push players much harder towards Mythic Plus while making raid rolling a meme unless you could clear the boss with your target item on Mythic, crest caps could feel especially punishing for Mythic raiders as Myth crests are generally the hardest to earn and the most lucrative to spend, and tier sets could be bad for some specs because of poor secondary stat itemization.

In response to these issues, Blizzard made some huge changes to how loot works in WoW with Season 2. For those unaware, the summary:

-Bonus rolls were available one per week from the Great Vault starting in Week 2 of the season, as an option instead of loot if you unlocked at least 3 vault slots
-Raid vault slots reward one tier higher (LFR vault slots are Champion track, Normal slots are Hero track, Heroic slots are Myth track) and Mythic raid vault slots are fully-upgraded Myth track (except for last two boss items, which are 9/6 Myth track and creep item level higher than is possible from other sources, which also applies to the items dropped by these bosses)
-Mythic Plus gearing was unchanged
-Bonus rolls now require one token regardless of the content type, and raid bonus rolls now behave the same as the Great Vault this season across the board (raid rolls are next-tier-up, Mythic bosses 1-6 bonus roll fully-upgraded Myth items, last two bosses bonus roll 9/6 Myth track)
-The Catalyst now maintains secondary stats and cantrip effects on items converted into tier, meaning you no longer have to take your least-bad 4 piece loadout or do weird min-maxes like catalyzing off-set pieces to get better itemized gear for a given slot like boots or bracers
-With the addition of bonus roll acquisition outside the Great Vault in week 8, players can only get one roll per week from the vendor and a second from the Vault if they choose, limiting the number of rolls players can get compared to the Season 1 version (two tokens per week but with 1 per roll in M+ and two per roll in raid)

Each of these created a new problem or two, which Zorthas, the beautiful tomato man, recently detailed in an excellent video, and I have stolen his flowchart from that video here (so go watch it too).

What this has done is create a weird series of interactions that has made gearing a character this season feel really dreadfully bad. Firstly and majorly, because of how strong bonus rolling certain bosses can be, if you can clear a given boss on even Heroic in the raid, there is a strong incentive to never take a drop from your Vault and instead take only bonus rolls and use them until you get the items you want. Cantrips from the last two bosses in VA and now Kith’ix in the new single-boss raid are particularly strong and lucrative targets for rolls. Giving loot a tier up for raid slots in the Vault is great until Mythic, but it creates weird challenges for lower-than-Mythic raiders who don’t do other content outside of raid (you never get Myth crests except for one upgrade worth a week from a full Heroic clear) which functionally caps your power near the same level you would have reached with full Heroic track gear while Mythic raiders who take vaults with 6/6 Myth items don’t have a lot of useful spends for their Myth crests, and those vaults then become less valuable at this point in the season where crests are uncapped. For those trying to push the top levels of Mythic Plus, buying a loot carry through Mythic raid (or just being able to full clear Mythic raid) sets you significantly ahead because of the 9/6 Myth loot, and this shows in the leaderboards on Raider.IO, where Chinese teams with 339 average item levels (higher than the 334 max you can otherwise get with full 6/6 Myth gear) are dominating because they can buy carries through the raid and the carry culture is different there, leading to more M+ pushers needing to turn to raid carries for those powerful cantrips. The power of bonus rolls also means that doing actual content on alts is kind of a bum deal – sure, you could do weekly +10s to fill a Mythic row, but if you want a bonus roll easily – 8 Tier 1 delves and done! Mythic Plus having a really bad itemization pool this season also doesn’t help, because the value of dungeon slots is a fair bit lower than it otherwise would be.

All of this also couples with how crafting has become less valuable and more rigid than in the past, where you might take two embellished slots or use crafted gear to bridge a drop gap until you get the thing you really want, but the crest cost of high-end crafting is also far worse this season with the changes in bonus rolls for Mythic raiders (outside of that level, it can be useful a smidge more, but still not exactly great). Bonus rolls are also traps at times, because there are plenty of bosses where bonus rolling can give you something you really want…or a really bad item instead.

What I can say from my POV is this – my raidloggers are basically exactly where they would normally be in item level because Myth items they can’t upgrade have a functionally lower ceiling compared to Hero track items they can upgrade, so they’re not benefiting, my dungeoneers are exactly as ahead as they would have been otherwise and not really benefiting from the changes, bonus roll targeting has helped the lower playtime members keep competitive by getting some of their BIS reliably well, and while the change to the Vault means taking a bonus roll is generally better – doing so means giving up the dopamine hit of the dumb slot machine and creates a worse feedback loop, especially if your items of choice in-raid are on bosses we aren’t killing, which creates social tension and amplifies the price of mistakes preventing prog on those lucrative bosses. All of this while Blizzard has, as previously mentioned, tuned up the difficulty of the raid assuming we’d all be more powerful and much higher item level than usual even though my raid is actually, factually, lower item level than we were just last tier in terms of progress against the ceiling even though that was also the first tier of the expansion where gearing is much harder! It is actually insane how the math of this patch was so fundamentally butchered as to make the game fall into this awful state where we’re hitting wall after wall because gear is actually harder this season and raiders are weaker than usual while the bosses have all been tuned up under some really dumb assumption that we’d be more powerful, like did anyone think to math check this? Has anyone been monitoring the item level curve and adjusting, because so far, the raid has been hit with precious few nerfs or adjustments outside of some mechanic tweaks (outside of Mythic, which has seen a higher level of adjustments than any other tier in recent memory). It feels awful and tedious to play and to climb the wall because Blizzard just hasn’t been responsive to the issues a large number of players are facing.

So yeah, the patch is just too hard on a content basis – Mythic Plus has unfair no-telegraph ticking bleeds and combo hits but is mostly fair at least outside of that, while the raid is plagued with visibility issues, poor design, bugs, raid-wiping super mechanics given out randomly to your hunter player (it’s always them, right?), and balls-to-the-wall tuning that assumed we’d likely be 3-7 item levels ahead of where we actually are, because raid still gives loot too slowly and the crest upgrades being locked to same-track as of Midnight means that rewarding gear that is next-tier up without a reliable source of the crests you’d need to upgrade it at a reasonable pace limits how meaningful and interesting giving you that stuff can actually be! But maybe the story saves it, yeah? Well…

The Story of Midnight Is Not Paced Well and The Worldsoul Saga Is Kind of Looking Awful

I am cooking (for how long, who knows) a post on this, so let’s hit the brief(lol) version here because it does matter but there are bigger systemic flaws we also need to dive into.

So, I think the biggest problem I have with x.1 patches in the Worldsoul Saga overall thus far is how sideshow and off the main path they have been. Undermine, while neat to a point, was a story diversion that was barely tied to Xal’atath, Khaz Algar, the Earthen, the Titans, or anything much to do with the story that 11.0 had told us. This expansion, we have the void, Xal’atath renewed and empowered, the Windrunner drama ramping with the momentary return of Sylvanas, and we…put that all on the backburner to do troll stuff? Sure, yes, the troll stuff was teased in the level-up campaign in Zul’Aman, but it has so little to do with the main storyline of the expansion that it feels more than a little far afield. And yes, sure, technically Ula’tek freeing Kith’ix which helps Xal’atath in some way loosely connects the thread, the same way that Gallywix repairing the Dark Heart made Undermine sort of, kind of, fit the story.

More than that though, I just hate the way Blizzard is telling and pacing the story this expansion (and this saga overall). Nothing is allowed to breathe and the cheapest, fastest route to some epic moment is what we take instead of letting stories percolate and develop over the course of the saga, yet at the same time, it feels like nothing significant is actually happening and so the whole saga to date just feels like this empty weird sideshow we’ve run through. Zul’jan is a great example of a trend I plan to analyze more – because at the end of level-up in Zul’Aman, I wanted to see his growth as a character, and I felt like there was more there. But because Blizzard can’t let a story organically develop, it takes a microscopically small amount of prodding for him to land in Malacrass’ arms, and within one patch cycle we kill him as a character. But because Ula’tek was the actual villain and stakes of the patch, we gloss over that to do that fight and then the raid ending cinematic is a backtrack! Like look, I’m not going to say that every story needs to have an epic buildup and years of storytelling slow-boiling into the perfect fever pitch, but I’d like to have some amount of process that shows these characters going for a ride and finding their path forward, instead of having his end of ZA story be basically erased because he wants to cling to tradition, a tradition he knows and has seen is messed up and wrong!

One thing I always applaud Final Fantasy XIV for is letting stories brew for a time – an expansion MSQ at launch never completely closes the door on all the issues and plot threads, and even major issues are left to simmer and paid off later. A part of what made Endwalker work (in some ways and in my opinion) is that threads were left open-ended for years in such a way that the later writers and scenario team could come in and tidy them up in a way that respects the existing story and moves the setting forward. Blizzard seems to live in fear that a plot thread lasting more than a patch cycle is going to die on the vine and lose the audience, but they have instead conditioned people that nothing means anything past the patch cycle it comes in through. Ula’tek is a cool idea – and I think her being a non-voice-acted endboss wouldn’t sting as bad if she had some buildup in leveling, if we got a sense of how big and looming she was, even if it was just hinted at to maintain the sheen of mystery around her status. Likewise, Malacrass comes out of nowhere and seemingly has no real ties to Xal’atath that we know of, so while there is a certain logic to him wanting to free Ula’tek as a weapon, the motivation just isn’t well-developed enough for it to be meaningful. Zul’jan also stings because his whole thing in leveling is that he distrusts the Loa, and while there is debate to Ula’tek being a Loa (a developer interview says no, but it seems that might have been conflated for the idea of a Wild God, and it is possible in the setting for something to be a Loa without being a Wild God, and Ula’tek is revered as a Loa by Nek’zali’s trolls), so for him to suddenly entrust the possible future of the Amani to another entity instead of the innate might of the Amani feels like a disservice to his actual characterization to that point. The guy who most believed the Amani should have a future reliant on their own might instead gives his all alone to unite with non-trolls and the ghost of the treacherous Malacrass in service of a maybe-Loa? It undercuts the whole thing about his story we are told in the launch window, and worse, it overwrites the character development he got by reuniting with his sister at the closing of the ZA story because she is leading the Amani to channel their might in nearly-exactly the way he envisions his people’s greatness! AHHHHHH!

So the seasonal story feels empty because it eliminates the good parts of the leveling story in ZA and bastardizes one of the more interesting characters while ALSO taking a detour away from the main plot for flimsy reasons, and we haven’t even touched on 12.1.5 yet! The raid is just a conveyor belt of failed opportunities at building the Amani world and fleshing out what we saw in ZA, but it pushes that away for a paper-thin nothing story, an endboss who has no voice acted lines or even conflict dialogue with NPCs, and then at the very end goes “oh but this did help Xal’atath because actually Ula’tek was sealing her best lieutenant” and it’s like…fuck, this just feels so flimsy, clumsy, and wasted.

Oh and then we get into 12.1.5, which treats the Kith’ix threat seriously (and cool, that’s not a bad idea and he DOES have history in the setting prior to Midnight so hey, points there) but then it also erases the progress made in the launch story by still having the Blood Elves be dickheads to the Amani even after they kind of reach a peace in leveling. The whole 12.1 story kept that truce in place and we do what needs to be done to aid the Amani in putting down Ula’tek, but now we are told this new threat is worse and yet this is now the time where we revoke truces and get catty again? Really? Sure, it makes some loose sense in the lore of the world – Blood Elves kind of suck as a people and that is established lore (sorry pretty Horde players), but it just flies in the face of the storytelling of Midnight to that point. And then Liadrin sacrifices herself to ensure the defeat of Kith’ix, which is vaguely signposted the whole way through the story campaign for 12.1.5 but also feels pretty abrupt because of how Liadrin has channeled the powers of the Light before in this expansion at the Sunwell successfully without giving her life, on top of the fact that Paladin lore generally has been moving away from the self-sacrifice ideal since the gameplay side of things removed Divine Intervention over a decade ago. And like, okay, fine, yes, Paladins giving their lives for the cause of the Light is a part of the setting, but it also feels out of nowhere here because it’s not been built up or paced well outside of this patch and even within the patch, it just doesn’t quite ring like the right outcome. Again, I believe Liadrin’s demise being so poorly received is because the pacing of the story building up to it is poor – Liadrin very quickly changes as a person for her time in ZA during leveling and the campaign against Ula’tek in such a way that she believes in the future and is willing to sacrifice to protect it. And again, that’s actually a cool hook and plot idea, but it gets so little time and shuffled past on the way to Kith’ix that it just feels like lampshading in the worst way – she is so suddenly at peace as to make it feel really bizarre, especially given the urgency of the threat she is heading to face.

I just wish things got more time to breathe in the WoW narrative, because so many of the plot points this expansion aren’t even necessarily bad – they just get underdeveloped and underpresented because Blizzard just jams the whole plot into the space of one patch and isn’t really effectively utilizing the history of the areas of Midnight, which is especially sad because Midnight’s whole hook is that these zones (well, half of them at least) have history in the setting and are well-established! What’s worse is that 12.2, by all accounts, is functionally leaving Midnight behind – 12.1.7 on PTR returns to Dornogal and that is, presumably, going to be where we go to progress forward into the Mantle Vault in the upcoming patch based on the fact that Silvermoon is getting a Dornogal portal to go with it! This ties into the saga idea so great, but it also feels like Midnight was an afterthought and what happened is that they took an original War Within plan, chopped it at the last season, popped K’aresh and Midnight through 12.1 into the gap, and now we’re going back, which I am withholding full judgement on until we see 12.2, but it would be very funny if we’re taking a portal to Dornogal to take a portal to the Mantle Vault (because it couldn’t just be open access in the Coreway since non-Midnight players can be in Dornogal too) and then we have to reverse through the portal limbo to get to the Timeways for Mythic Plus or the Great Vault for our rewards.

In Closing

These types of pieces end up being some of my most popular, but I’ll be honest – I don’t like writing them. I enjoy writing them insofar as the craft of it and trying to make them fun, I enjoy expressing myself, but I don’t like feeling this way about the game. I like World of Warcraft, and I returned to it after Shadowlands because I think the game has a lot of potential and a fun core formula. But it is hard to ignore how thoroughly and frustratingly Blizzard has fumbled this season – nearly every single aspect of the game that any player might interact with is tainted in some way by a lack of thoughtfulness, lack of execution, or some other shortfall on Blizzard’s part – and in a game that is still predominantly a social experience, that fucking sucks. It tears apart groups and pushes people connected by the game away, not just from the game but from each other.

There’s plenty of conspiracy nuts that think that Blizzard made this season stink like week-old unrefrigerated opened canned tuna because they want to push Forever to be popular, but I would simply say to that – are you new here? Blizzard has spent a lot of patch cycles in my lifetime completely convinced they cooked, that the patch they made and the design they went with was so great, and when they get lost in their hubris like that it is always a harsh and tragically slow comedown as they slowly pull their heads out of their asses and realize the mess they made. What defines how big of a mess this ends up actually feeling like depends in large part on how quickly Blizzard acts to correct the state of the game in a player-benefitting way, and so far, they’ve been very slow to course-correct this season, as we are not seeing a ton of fixes and problems like overadjusting Subtlety Rogue or aggro bugs have taken weeks to fix, much less tuning passes at the sub-Mythic raid difficulties or clarity and logic passes at random target bleeds and cheap shots in the current M+ season. That is why I am here writing this and publishing instead of languishing in the drafts, and that sucks you know? I’d rather be tabbed into the game right now being able to find a +17 so I could keep pushing towards Keystone Myth for Season 2, but instead groups are few and far between because even with the mini-Turbo Boost of Venomstones live and Myth gear from the Labyrinth, the core state of the game this season is in such disrepair and disrespect that few are interested in actually playing and that leaves those of us who want to still push and play in spite of that with precious little opportunity to do so.

And I want to believe that they can fix it, that Season 3 will be better if nothing else, but the announced dungeon rotation, general way they treated the game at Blizzcon, and overall vibe from this season on top of the litany of bugs and problems that have plagued Midnight throughout the run of the expansion to date inspires little hope. I think that is why you see a lot of people sounding the alarm, and why this is likely far from the last time you will see WoW players come forward with heat for this season and how poorly it has been handled.