The latest patch from World of Warcraft is small – and yet it has changed a lot. For WoW demon Cortyn, this is the beginning of a new standard.
The World of Warcraft patch 9.2.5 arrived on the servers last Wednesday and brought a lot of small but fine content with it, some of which even remained hidden from the eyes of the data miners.
To be completely honest, I sorted the patch in advance as a small “nice to have”. A series of small, not really significant changes, which mainly bring the data for Season 4, so that the waiting time for Dragonflight is not quite so dry.
But I was wrong. While patch 9.2.5 is still not a huge deal on paper, it has drastically changed my in-game experience.
Above all, the possibility of cross-party groups turned out to be much more serious than I had thought in the first few days. To be honest, the feature wasn’t that important to me. I usually play with a fixed group anyway, so being able to invite players from the other faction was secondary for me.
But to be honest, I underestimated how many people on my friends list felt differently. How many friends I have in the “other faction” who are now really happy to be invited and taken with them. It opens up so many new possibilities and after just a few days I was able to have conversations with some players and complete instances that I otherwise had very little to do with. It’s really brought a breath of fresh air to my World of Warcraft social experiences.
I’m now playing more twinks, forming mixed groups with players from both factions, and occasionally throwing myself into lower-level dungeons instead of just checking out my weekly M+15.
And if we’re really honest: More and easier access to social interactions has definitely done World of Warcraft good. On the other hand, the “But the faction conflict!” argument simply loses completely. You can still stand in the trade channel clamoring and yelling that “WoW will be completely destroyed if Horde and Alliance are now peace-joy-pancakes in the game”.
Honestly? No, it doesn’t.
No one is forced to join such groups. If you, as an Alliance hordler, still want to “shut up”: Let’s go, no one will stop you. But for a fairly large part of the player base it should be far more important to be able to play with friends who you would not have done anything with otherwise. That didn’t break World of Warcraft. It made the game better because I have more incentive and opportunities to play with more people.
Blizzard hides better, brings more surprises
But I don’t just like the pure content, I also like that Blizzard has gotten better and better at hiding this content. Although dataminers managed to gather some clues in advance that pointed to the release of “Dark Rangers”, none of them were tangible.
What’s also quite interesting, the whole Lordaeron and Dark Ranger unlock quest line was not available on the PTR. This is very rarely the case in World of Warcraft. If Blizzard “holds back” such quests, then these are usually only “Talk to X” quests, in which one hardly finds any errors. But the Lordaeron quest line consists of a dozen quests with different tasks and even vehicle battles. The fact that this quest line worked completely and without errors gives hope.
There was even a great cinematic between Calia and Lilian Voss at the end of the questline:
WoW Cinematic: Lilian and Calia talk about their future with the Forsaken
Hope that Blizzard now has an internal test team that works efficiently and eliminates errors on a large scale. At the same time, it also gives hope that developers are getting better at “hiding content from players” so that details or quests can still be found on patch day or weeks later.
It’s just a great feeling to log in on a patch day and not yet know that all the secrets have been decrypted by Dataminer in advance. This not only keeps the game fresh, but also provides nice surprises while playing, which has a positive effect on the whole climate around World of Warcraft.
Patch 9.2.5: A good sign for Dragonflight
I think Blizzard and World of Warcraft are on a pretty good path with patch 9.2 and 9.2.5. If these two updates are any indication of what improvements to expect in Dragonflight, then I’m really excited and look forward to discovering many small details that haven’t previously surfaced in beta or through dataminers.
In the past I basically always knew what to expect in a patch, apart from maybe a cinematic or two. I’m really pleased that significantly more content can now be “hidden”.
how do you see it?