As a routine World of Warcraft player, I’ve been pretty warm on Midnight—at the very least, the offerings it provided on launch all seemed well put together, with a few asterisks. Those asterisks are starting to bog down the sentences they’re attached to, though, as the game’s latest patch, 12.0.5, is utterly rife with bugs. Some small, some large, and some just completely baffling.
We’ve already reported on the new prop hunt decor mode getting ruined by players with access to the “track humanoids” ability or certain consumables, but if you happen to either do too well (or too poorly) in a round, you’ll also get punished for not participating. Which seems to me a pretty glaring oversight, given prop hunt incentivises you to, you know, stay still once you’ve found a hiding spot. It’s the entire point of hide and seek.
If you’re too good at hiding in decor duel, you get flagged as not participating and don’t get rewards even if you win from r/wow
Then there are more issues with loot. The Voidforge, which shouldn’t give you duplicate items, is doing just that—with one unlucky player getting the same shoulderpads three times in a row. That’s since been fixed, but it’s far from the only major flaw in the patch itself, as detailed in this roundup thread by Reddit user SgtFolley.
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Player Housing went down for multiple regions when the patch dropped, and there’s a delve that prevents strafing if you pick up a mirror. Multiple classes entered the patch with major bugs—for example, Holy Paladins have an FPS-tanking talent and a missing hotfix that puts them a whopping 50% other healers in terms of damage.
As SgtFolley points out, certain bugs impacting Demonology Warlocks were reported on the PTR almost a month in advance, and weren’t fixed before the patch went live.
The final boss of the new raid also appears bugged for some players, who are unable to cleanse a stacking damage buff as intended and wiping the raid. Some players can mount up while moving, for some reason. The Keystone Mythic achievement had to be disabled, though players will receive it if they qualified retroactively.
One particular foible that I’m staggered by are these tooltips, which clearly missed a second round of editing: “The first thing you need to know when investigating a Ritual Site is that with so much magic in the air that while in combat Regeneration Orbs will manifest healing you for 15% of your heath.” I’ve italicised a typo—it actually says heath, in addition to feeling like an excited toddler explaining their favourite toy to me.
These bugs range from complete head-scratchers to relatively minor, but even small bugs have a way of building up fear in the playerbase. And while I’m usually one to remind folks that game development is far more complicated than it looks, even I’m sitting here wondering how some of this stuff made it to the live servers.
Back when I put together my World of Warcraft: Midnight review, I wrote: “Given how reactive Blizzard is, I believe it’ll get a handle on the expansion’s wonky class design and bugs within the coming months.” And while some of these issues have been fixed, proving Blizzard’s reactivity, it’s clear something is wrong here.
New problems are clearly being brought up faster than the studio can tackle them, and if every patch comes with a barrage of issues like this, it’s not going to matter much if Blizzard’s sticking to its roadmaps. Especially if, like the Haranir clipping bugs, they’ve already been raised among the playerbase for weeks or months. Something’s gotta give.
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