Pre-Patch – The Climb #600

Wednesday 14^th October 2020

Today was a big day in World of Warcraft as the pre-patch went live in Europe.

If you think of World of Warcraft as a house, then the Shadowlands expansion is a bit like putting an extension onto it. As part of that extension, there may need to be some rewiring or replumbing.

Pre-patch is, in essence, the completed house, but with the door to the extension locked. System and class changes go live, but the new content doesn’t. I suspect it gives the developers a little air gap between the code going live and everyone pouring into the new content.

I always love pre-patch. There’s usually an event that builds up to the expansion launch, plus there’s new systems to try. This time is a little different due to the pandemic delaying the expansion. I suspect pre-patch will last longer than normal… but then these aren’t normal times.

With pre-patch comes some confusion. There are, inevitably, some class changes and so the first job is respeccing your talents and working out your new rotation. Some classes you may have enjoyed playing may feel lackluster whilst others may suddenly feel more fun. It’s now that people decide what classes are going to be their main going into the new expansion.

And then there are addons. Most seasoned players have a bunch of these installed. Everything from UI reskins to navigation systems to inventory enhancements to entire trade systems. And inevitably, some of these break. Developers from the Warcraft community may have stopped developing or not had the time or access to beta to recode, so most players go into pre-patch with their UI a mess and everything not working as it did.

That usually settles down after a couple of days. Thankfully, if one addon has died, there are a bunch of others that do a similar role. But it takes time to research, install and get everything looking nice.

My plan is to twitch stream a lot more Warcraft during Shadowlands and so the plan was really to kick that off today. I’d taken time to set up my Twitch so it looked nice and could do alerts. I even got a budget theme to make it look Warcraft-y. And then I played around with the sounds on alerts and broke all the transitions. I have to start over again tomorrow as I think that’ll be quicker than working out what I broke. At least I have a better idea of what I’m doing now.

I did get to try a stream for a while, but… pre-patch is a chaotic time and things are broken and my game just kept crashing. Worse still my UI addon couldn’t retrieve the update from the overloaded servers and so it made the game almost unplayable. But then I went to try an old raid and some of the environmental effects decided to one-shot me. So I ended up having to stop.

With Pre-patch comes a major change to leveling. The levels have been squished to assist new players into the game, and it’s a perfect time for me to level some low level alts ahead of the expansion.

Because I really only know how to play a few classes, I use a fantastic add on that basically runs my rotation for me. It’s not optimal but it’s more optimal than me trying to figure it out. Luckily that addon had been updated ,but because of all the class changes, I still needed to go into each alt and redo their macros.

The end result was that whilst I did get to stream for 30 mins and try out the Twitch overlays before I screwed them up, the game and addons were all so broken I couldn’t really play.

It will settle down over the next few days… and then the leveling of all those alts I’ve got sat waiting, can begin!