WoW demon Cortyn has given Patch 9.1.5 a chance – and it is surprisingly fun. But a bitter aftertaste remains.
Patch 9.1.5 of World of Warcraft has been live for about 10 days now. I actually thought beforehand that the patch wouldn’t interest me much. After all, I know the content well enough, have farmed Korthia often enough, and I’m quite fed up with Torghast.
Nevertheless, I logged back into WoW with Patch 9.1.5 – and much more often than in the days and weeks prior. In the last 10 days, I had a lot of fun leveling new characters, collecting glory with them, and simply experiencing a new class.
The number of glory levels one can earn “incidentally” seems almost ridiculous compared to the time before Patch 9.1.5. A visit to Torghast gave me 4 glory levels (and almost half a level of XP), every small bonus quest in the Shadowlands gives glory, and in the end, you also get the rest through the calling quests.
Freshly level 60, my glory was already at rank 70. The last 10 points came during the introductory quests in the Covenant sanctum and two to three rounds of PvP.
In a fraction of the time, the character was ready to tackle Mythic+ or to find a group for the current raid. This was also possible because I can simply invest excess valor points from my main character into the twink to give it a more than solid starting gear at item level 207 to 210. That opens the gates to almost all kinds of content.
I want to be honest. For me, it was not a problem that you couldn’t easily switch covenants. I liked the permanence of the decision and the fact that you sometimes just had to make the best of it, even if that meant not having the right buff in a dungeon.
However, I also don’t mind that it is different now. Especially from the perspective of my transmog collection, the feature is a blessing. Collecting everything and being able to use everything is pretty cool. When my addon “ALL THE THINGS” shows me that over 40 templates have been unlocked every time I switch covenants, that makes me happy.
Everything goes so fast – What was done before?
But it is also clear: The bitter aftertaste that everything now goes so quickly and smoothly remains. When you remember how much time a character took to reach glory level 40, 50 or even 80 just a few weeks ago, it feels bad. It feels like wasted life time – at least when all the grind was done just before the patch.
I don’t think Patch 9.1.5 was the great savior that will pull Shadowlands out of the dirt and make it one of the best expansions of all time. But I do feel that Patch 9.1.5 was at least a clear “stop” to the downward trend of the last months.
It suddenly becomes fun to level twinks and deal with them. The glory levels tumbling across the screen is great. That bonus areas go quickly and are no longer an endless grind feels good. That Torghast actually brings something during the leveling phase that you can invest in meaningful items at level 60 is awesome.
I was quite skeptical at first whether Patch 9.1.5 could really bring motivation to log in again and play content that I actually know well enough. At least for me, Blizzard has succeeded – and the info that Patch 9.2 on the PTR is not as far away as feared makes me mildly optimistic.
Patch 9.1.5 did not save Shadowlands. But it is a huge improvement over the state that prevailed just a few weeks ago. Now Blizzard just needs to carry these lessons into the future and not forget again with Patch 10.0 everything that has been painfully learned in recent months.
What is your opinion on Patch 9.1.5? A clear improvement of the current game? Or has everything just become much worse?
