Blizzard's 12.0.7 Fixes: A Game-Changer

[00:02] honestly, I think it's kind of true. You see, 1207 does a lot of things. One of leveling, or at least give you a new option for that, where instead of a massive grind where you set aside half a day and just resign yourself to the

[00:14] drudgery, they want you to be able to do it efficiently, just one chunk at a time, and actually in current content instead of playing the same old campaign or the same old set of dungeons that you've perhaps grown sick of by now. And

[00:27] that we've literally been begging for since at least Dragonflight. And that is, I It's crazy to say this, them fixing obvious problems with the patch dur- during the PTR before the patch actually goes live. This is no guarantee

[00:42] it will go live and bug-free, but there are design changes, fairly last-minute ones, that are fantastic. If you want to know why that's important, just read the comments of Warcraft videos. Just remember how bad a lot of this has

[00:54] gotten. Patch day in WoW has become unpredictable for years. It's almost a the pattern is a new thing comes out, then Blizzard scrambles to fix it over the next few weeks. Bugs are a part of that, and those are bad, but today, what

[01:08] that's an extreme contrast to their recent history. Take Mop Remix, it ended up having to get post-launch an entire novels worth of patch notes. Then the 20th anniversary event needed tons of reward tweaks, and the trend has only

[01:22] gotten worse for Midnight. In the pre-patch, they even needed to hotfix the rewards. And they clearly didn't learn because the Void Assaults were, and still are, essentially useless on your alts. Not that it was much better

[01:35] for mains, because Field Accolades were just used for frustrating gacha game-style blind boxes. Bit of a self-own there, Blizzard. So, because of all that negative stuff, I'm incredibly happy to say that they've now

[01:49] done the crazy thing of stopping a reward design train wreck ahead of time, and in doing so, they may have just saved the main feature of patch 12.07.

[02:01] a feature where we go to another planet and kill some people, but what it actually is is a showdown against the people who were doing all the void invasions in 12.07. It's kind of neat how they're tied together. And as bits

[02:14] of content, showdowns are genuinely good. They have great world building that we've been covering our lore videos, but they do suffer or did suffer from the same issues as we saw last patch. The rewards are tied to field

[02:27] accolades and void light marrow, the existing currencies. And the rewards themselves are mostly just recolors of midnight gear, which have, you know, got a little bit boring by now. Obviously, there's gear and crests for player

[02:39] toward the end of a season. Then there's the problem of no meaningful progression there. Heroic world tier is a bit of a fix to these problems where, yes, hard as hell, the gear will actually be useful. And in

[02:53] terms of raw video game design, there's plenty of unique challenge and design elements to the heroic mode. And it really does deliver on the premise of hard world content. And that adds a real selling point. Gameplay that you can't

[03:07] If Blizzard wants someone to come back for a patch, I think messaging like that because it's hard, Blizzard have added some juicy gear rewards. But they know have unique cosmetic rewards or any other reason to go out of your comfort

[03:23] zone if you're a collector. And that leaves less sweaty players, which is the biggest proportion of the player base, stuck. Stuck with a system that is, let's uh put it kindly, not set up for success.

[03:39] That would have been the case when this patch launches, but now it's changed. The biggest threat to showdowns in 12.07 is essentially the same problem that's been plaguing almost all of WoW's recent content. There is plenty of mild novelty

[03:54] and a pile of mid rewards, but there's absolutely no long tail. Even if they're no reason to stick around or to come back later. It's just another patch feature, which if void assaults are anything to go by, well, do seem to be

[04:10] forgettable, short shelf life distraction bits of content rather than being things that are genuinely adding something new to do in World of Warcraft. So, what's the fix for this? Well,

[04:22] been shipping the whole thing under tuned and ruining patch day like usual, they instead buffed everything. As an example, crest rewards went up by a full level in each. So, quests and rares on normal give you champion crests and on

[04:37] heroic, they well, give you hero crests. Then, they changed achievement rewards. You see, achievement rewards also used to ask you for fat stacks of void light doing enough already. It's that frustrating thing where maybe via a

[04:52] renowned or an achievement, you lock a cool new reward that you can buy at a vendor and it ends up being really expensive, which makes it feel like your reward for doing the content was the opportunity to be able to purchase

[05:04] something using resources you would then have to go and grind. Feels bad, man. Now though, Blizzard have changed it. Once you get the things from the vendor, but you only pay 15 marrow. It takes

[05:17] seconds to earn that. And on top of that, the previously buffed field accolades have now got even more use. You see, when 12.0.7 launches, you'll be able to buy gear boxes for a specific slots. It's champion gear for

[05:29] specific slots. It's champion gear for 100 field accolades and hero for 750. So, straight up slot based hero gearing, which will then take you up to heroic world tier, where you can go and farm their upgrade crests.

[05:42] That's a system that actually makes sense and it means that these showdowns are now so much more palatable when, you know, you're trying to make progress while playing new stuff and you're actually making progress, meaning that

[05:55] you don't have the usual thing while has where you're just feeling torn between what content you should do because it all feels, I don't know, a little bit But it's not just that they've changed

[06:07] because they have done XP buffs and this is huge because it gives us an entire new way to level our characters. One thing we've noticed, more than ever leveling in Midnight. You see, world quests feel slower than ever to level

[06:22] with, dungeon XP is obscenely low, and the only way to hit 90 at any decent pace was to speed run the campaign. And this was real obvious when void assaults landed in 1205. They felt a lot like the pre-patch level grind event things that

[06:36] we've just been getting since the Legion expansion, except that instead of giving you lots of XP, they gave you laughable amounts of XP. And worse yet, laughable amounts of the actual currency rewards needed at level 90. That meant that they

[06:49] added new content to World of Warcraft that was irrelevant to your main and considering to level up. Pretty damn bad, right? That was a bad state of affairs that told people to just go and level elsewhere and then

[07:03] come back to the new content at max level where it kind of felt a bit vestigial and weird. Showdowns explicitly avoid that problem and I'm so happy I can say that. You see, after the buffs Blizzard have just

[07:16] implemented, the weekly wrapper quest gives you a rather massive 30% of a level. That's not bad for just doing a weekly, but it actually gets even better. World quests on Val and Nagrand, the two new worlds, they're worth three

[07:30] times the amount of XP as a regular world quest and they are positioned way closer together. Each one of them gives you about 9% of a level and the place is Now, the rare mobs found in these two worlds aren't as juicy, but they give

[07:45] you about 5% of a level and they award you [music] a full amount of accolades. So, if you kill them when you're leveling, you get just as many accolades as if you kill them on your max level character. And even better, gearing

[07:57] won't be an issue for you either. That's because everything now drops very strong gear for level 80s. And because you're grounded and the two worlds are fairly dense, oh, you can do a hell of a lot of mob killing. Mobs, of course, drop the

[08:10] standard 0.5% of a level worth of XP per kill, which really does add up when of course, it wouldn't be World of Warcraft if there wasn't some type of catch. Showdowns are primarily tuned for end game, and that means that even at

[08:24] level 80, you don't get that same low-level god mode feeling of just murdering everything in sight from the campaign. And the rares can really pack a punch as well. And the sheer density of mobs, and mobs that have mechanics,

[08:38] bit more carefully. Which, you know what? It is actually way more fun. It's not hard by any means, but you do just have to pay attention. Now, I call this a catch because it'll technically slow you

[08:51] But I can tell Blizzard aren't really thinking about speed leveling here. They're thinking about a shocking concept, and that concept is called progressing in the game being fun. Big question then, does fun beat fast?

[09:08] Well, here's how it plays out. Rares have, of course, limited spawns and the And this is where I think Blizzard has a little bit of a plan. Maybe. Normal world quests are up for half of a week, and then they refresh every once

[09:21] in a while. You can clear the map and pretty much log out knowing that you're It's different with Showdown maps, though. They actually work differently. Where world quests are only up for a short amount of time, but they refresh

[09:33] just as fast. The idea is they feel less like world quests that are just pinned like little events that are going on all of the time in this really packed zone. And that means that if you clear the map and clear all the world quests,

[09:48] some world quests will actually have spawned behind you. full again. And that's really good. These fast-responding world quests are going to be a huge source of XP and field

[10:01] accolades. And they're also brand new quests with often fairly fun mechanics recycled. And together, a pattern emerges here. Shorter session times where you can just keep on going and playing. And within a

[10:16] chunk of XP from the likes of the weekly that gives you a third of a level. And there can be with that an actual end point to log out and, you know, come minutes to an hour that it'll take you

[10:29] to clear the map, you can be super efficient in your leveling speed. And As you do that, you'll keep getting field accolades, you'll keep getting gear, and it'll be fun because you're just in flow, just playing the game, and

[10:41] you don't have waves upon waves of [music] interruptions. I mean, if you're doing one of every single delve in the game just for the sake of those delve or call quests, that is just checkbox chore work. You're

[10:55] into flow. I think that is very much not the case [music] in the showdowns is actually orchestrated by Blizzard's game systems. be collecting enough field accolades to have stacks of hero gear for your fresh

[11:11] character whenever you cap. And you know what? I like that, and I see a plan coming together here. In 1207, if you want to play alts, you can do new That's rarely the case in wow. You can do it in a group if you want for speed,

[11:26] questing vibe. It's new content that's fun, that's rewarding, that's novel, and mode and then get yourself decked out in hero gear, well, then there's heroic

[11:38] world tier sitting, ready for you to, I don't know, I suppose uh grind yourself Pretty good. And everyone zerging the heroic world tier on launch may kind of change how it actually lands, but I'll at least say that thanks to this final

[11:53] form of things on the release candidate on the PTR, I think Showdowns may be the content win that Blizzard have needed for a long, long time. And it means that finally, you don't

[12:05] have to install follow the arrow or put a TV show on to, you know, level a character without losing your mind. But if you take anything away from this video, it's the Blizzard kind of saved a patch before it launched.

[12:18] All that we need for a real clear win, and I guess a reversal in the negative story that's hung over Blizzard's ability to execute patches, well, that's just a relatively bug-free patch day. I hope that'll happen, and if it does,

[12:31] we'll actually have to give them credit where it's due. video, credit where it's due. In older times, I would have expected all this stuff to reach live half-baked,

[12:44] not having that rewards pass. The fact that it has means that patch day can actually feel like a proper game experience, and that makes all the [music] And that's the perspective that can get lost by default when you're a

[12:59] huge company orchestrating huge teams. So, landing. And if you want to know all the other things in that patch, well, watch other things in that patch, well, watch this video next.