WoW Factor: Exploring the content and systems of World of Warcraft’s Curse

I’m back in World of Warcraft after a short break, and while I was initially overwhelmed by the amount to catch up on, I have now had time to properly play through the new content from the 12.1 patch, otherwise known as Curse of Ula’tek. I’ll be dividing my thoughts into two pieces. Today I’ll be talking about the gameplay and new features, while saving the story for later.

Much like Midnight as a whole, Curse of Ula’tek feels like a very middle of the road patch. It makes a few things better, while making a few other things worse. It’s far from Blizzard’s best work, but also by no means their worst.

Of course, there are the expected new raids, dungeons, delves, and zone. I’ve said before WoW has had so many dungeons and raids that it’s pretty hard for any of them to stand out these days, and that remains true of the headlining Venomous Abyss raid. Their push to improve clarity in fights following “addon-pocalypse” continues to meet with mixed success. They’re doing a much better job of visual indicators for what mechanics do and how to interact with them, but many fights are still suffering from overwhelming visual clutter.

I will say the 12.1 content is a very rare example of Blizzard’s art team disappointing. The new zone, the Coiled Isle, looks mostly the same as Zul’Aman, which makes sense in terms of lore, and Zul’Aman is a fairly pretty zone, so it’s not the worst thing, but it does make Coiled Isle feel like an addition than something truly new.

What bothers me more is the extreme neon green aesthetic running through the Venomous Abyss and much of the other new content. Again, it makes sense thematically, as we as a species have long decided that “poison = green” in video games, but it just doesn’t look good, and it creates extreme visual monotony throughout the patch. It’s also pretty much the same colour scheme they gave the Burning Legion, and while I don’t think anyone’s going to confuse a bunch of Troll-snake people for demons, it feels weird for two unrelated villain factions to get the same visual identity.

Speaking of raids, 12.1 includes a big overhaul of world bosses with the new “lair” system. Or Blizzard is calling it a new system, anyway. In practice it doesn’t really feel that way. Essentially instead of doing a new world boss, they just added an additional single boss raid instance, but the LFR difficulty (called “world” difficulty) requires you to actually physically go to the entrance instead of using the regular LFR UI.

I gotta be honest, this feels like a complete downgrade in almost every possible way compared to traditional world bosses, with the only upside being one more boss for organized raid groups to fight. You don’t get the epic feel of fighting a boss in the open world, but you still have to travel out to them. While I wouldn’t say the boss is hard by any stretch (at least on world difficulty), it is a significantly longer and more involved fight than the loot pinatas world bosses tend to be, which would be fine, except it now drops Veteran gear instead of Champion, so you’re working harder for worse rewards.

To be clear, world bosses were never a very important part of the game, so this isn’t a serious issue, but man, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a clear cut case of an MMO developer just straight up making a feature worse in almost every possible way.

They say this is to reduce lag in the open world, but Curse Surge events have the same impact — actually I’d say they’re causing worse lag — so it seems a bit futile. Perhaps they were concerned about the impact of having both a Curse Surge and a world boss fight going on at the same time, but if that’s the case, just use sharding to split them up? Or make it so world bosses don’t spawn during Curse Surges?

Also on the subject of casual raiding, another point of frustration with this patch for me, as mentioned in my last piece, has been the increased difficulty of gearing up for LFR. I wanted to check if my memory was accurate, so I looked up the minimum item levels for some previous raid tiers, and I was correct that this was a bigger jump between tiers than usual, though admittedly not by as much as I thought, at least when looking at recent tiers.

The minimum item level for Manaforge Omega was roughly equivalent to heroic Liberation of Undermine gear, while the ilevel for Venomous Abyss is about equal to mythic March on Quel’Danas gear. But if you go back to Mists of Pandaria, the minimum item level gap is much smaller between raid tiers — about 10 points as opposed to 53.

I think to some extent this is a result of the massive item level inflation created by the gear upgrade system introduced in Dragonflight (which is otherwise a very positive addition), but it still feels like something is broken when you need the equivalent of last tier’s Myth gear to do this tier’s LFR difficulty. I feel like last tier’s LFR should be enough for the current tier, or close to it.

It should be an easy fix: Just reduce the required ilevel and nerf the bosses appropriately. I suppose they may be worried about people steamrolling fights once they have better gear, but LFR is already the easy mode, so… let them? Worst case, just implement that gear scaling tech from the open world.

And that does bring me to my other point, which is that by the time you’re geared enough to do LFR, you’re also geared enough to get much better rewards from delves and prey. LFR increasingly feels like it’s heading to that weird limbo heroic dungeons are stuck in, where they don’t have a clear place in the endgame.

They did make raids a bit more rewarding (on all difficulties, including but not limited to LFR) by upping the ilevel of their associated rewards from the Great Vault and bonus rolls, but that has the downside of making it harder to get LFR colour tints for transmog. Weirdly we may have now reached a point where LFR appearances are among the hardest to get.

Meanwhile, the prey feature got a bit of an overhaul with new affixes. They’re much less annoying than the old nightmare affixes, but I do want to stress I said “less annoying” not “more fun.” It’s mostly just a lot of being ambushed by more mobs, which is just not that fun of a mechanic. Prey is also still suffering from its biggest flaw: Every hunt has the same affixes and thus feels the same.

I think part of what made delves so successful, and what subsequent attempts at endgame solo content have failed to deliver, is variety. There are a dozen delves, each with at least three variants, and only four are active per pay, plus you can run them as any role, so delves continue to feel fresh even when you’re running them daily for weeks on end. If you’ve done one prey hunt, you’ve done them all.

I’m doing a lot more hunts this patch, but only because item level inflation has made their difficulty trivial and thus rendered them an easy source of free gear. I’m still not actually enjoying them, and I think at this point I consider the entire feature a failure. I hope it does not return in future expansions.

I want Blizzard to keep experimenting with challenging open world content, but they’re clearly struggling to do so in a fun way. We see this in another of 12.1’s features, the Vaults of Ula’tek. This is a large underground elite area full of constantly rotating events. WoW‘s been adding more and more open world events for several expansions now, but this one is more challenging and group oriented, with commensurately better rewards (Champion gear).

I like the idea, but I haven’t enjoyed it in practice. It’s chaotic and overwhelming, and it’s one of those things that immediately became hijacked by the “go go” mentality of MMO players. It only took me about a week after the patch’s release for me to join the Vaults, but by then it seemed everyone had already learned all routes and shortcuts, and I found myself struggling to keep up with the zerg while constantly being dazed by packs of elite mobs. It would help a lot if flying mounts worked in the Vaults.

If all this reads very negative, don’t let me send the impression that the current state of the game is all misery. The new features may underwhelm, but the core of the game remains strong. Mostly what I’m doing these days is running delves and doing LFR wings (now that I’m finally geared enough), and that’s all as fun as ever. The foundation of modern WoW as established by Dragonflight and The War Within remains very solid; Blizzard just seems to be struggling to figure out how to build on that momentum.

War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with over two decades of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join MOP’s WoW fans for new installments of WoW Factor as they examine the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.