Shadowlands Pre-Patch Event – The Climb #628

Wednesday 11^th November 2020

Today was the World of Warcraft Pre-Patch Event.

Normally this arrives with the pre-patch itself but this year has been a little different, with the release of the expansion being delayed.

The Pre-Patch event is basically a limited time event where we get a taste of the bad guys we’ll be facing in the upcoming expansion. We had legion invasions for Legion. We had faction wars for BFA. And for Shadowlands, the undead have risen.

We had a similar event for Wrath of the Lich King, 12 years ago. Back then the Lich King was releasing his forces against us, forcing us to go to Northrend to deal with him. This time, the helm of domination has been shattered and with it his control over the undead.

Aside for being a small story note to get everyone in the mood for the upcoming expansion, these events often serve as an easy way to get catch up gear. Over the course of an expansion such as BFA you will have leveled your character to max level and then run dungeons to get better gear. And with each patch release, you would then go into harder content (new raids or areas such as Nazjatar) to get improved gear to deal with the harder content.

It means that gearing a new max level character now is complicated and requires a number of stages to step your character towards the gear they’ll need to comfortably enter the start of the new expansion.

And pre-patch events have been great at short-cutting that, dropping gear of a level and power that it matches those that played through the various stages of the old expansion. It signifies that the last expansion is ended and the new one is about to begin.

Usually it’s really simple to gear up. With the Legion event, I fully geared up a number of characters despite playing less. However, this pre-patch event is both good and bad.

Gear comes from an event currency. You get these from killing mobs, elites giving you more.

The good is that there are a load of elites spawning in the Icecrown region and they occasionally drop incredibly good gear themselves as well as the currency. They are on a fixed rotation, so if there is a specific drop you want from a specific mob you can predict the time they will spawn to pretty much the minute.

The downside is that they are on a rotation, each elite spawning twenty minutes after the last. It means that if you, for example, want the bag that drops from one mob and it doesn’t drop for you, you then have to wait 6 hours 40 minutes until the next spawn of that elite.

The long and short of it is that, gearing of character isn’t as simple. Even with the twenty minute wait between elites, gathering enough currency to buy all the gear is going to be slow.

What was intended to be a quick way to gear character for the new expansion launching in two weeks is now not the fastest way and I’m now scrambling to see if I’ve unlocked world quests for all my characters.

Yes, it’ll keep me busy during lockdown, but I’d hoped that I could get it easily all done for all characters with just a couple of hours play a day.