Yesterday was the World of Warcraft pre-patch for Shadowlands and shocking to no one the servers had a few issues as a result. I fought the retrieving realm list boss for awhile and then went through some issues where I would retrieve an empty character list. What I think was ultimately happening behind the scenes were that all of our level 120s were being interactively squished to 50s. If I waited long enough the entire list would load with my freshly vanillafied max level characters. The reason why I think this is that the folks like me that had an entire server full of 120s… seemed to be hit worse than the folks who only had one or two character sprinkled throughout multiple servers.
What I had not anticipated was the issues patching addons. I mean I should have, but for whatever reason they were crammed in the furthest corner of my mind and I was not prepared for how personally unplayable World of Warcraft is without ElvUI. I feel sorry for the folks behind Elv/TukUI because even this morning the patcher client is a smoldering pile of rubble that seems to be unable to connect into the servers. About halfway through the night I managed to manually download the 12.0 update for ElvUI from the website, and that at least allowed me to limp along until everything was back up and running. With the selloff of Curse Forge by Twitch, that means that the Twitch client is no longer a reliable means of patching. Swooping in to save the day is Wowup.Io which seems to be able to automagically detect where your game is installed, the addons you have installed and patch them successfully. It managed to catch pretty much everything that was not ElvUI and the rest seemed to have updated by this morning.
The highlight of this patch however is the new character models and as a result the only thing I actually did last night was log in a bunch of characters and head to the barber shop. The test of this post will be me exclusively talking about a few of these. First up is Belgrace, my horde paladin and at least for the time being the character that I an intending to main going into Shadowlands. The core problem I have always had with Blood Elves is the lack of beard options. Finally we have one, and while it isn’t an amazing one… it works for now. I also decided to go back to long black hair while I was at it and drop down to smaller ears.
Next up is my Demon Hunter, which is also a Blood Elf because racial locking. I am going to be honest I went with a really similar look because I think it looks badass. I dropped the blindfold because it always made things like eyepatches look odd and went with a more pale sickly skin to contrast against the dark hair. I wish Blood Elves had some “unnatural” skin tones like purple or maroon or something like that, but alas they do not. For now I am happy with it.
Female Belghast didn’t get all that many changes, just a few tweaks here and there with jewelry and some warpaint. I also changed the eye color to be a deeper and more vibrant red and shifted from a “cutefase” to a more serious expression. She spends most of her time as a fury warrior, and she should look downright mean, and I think she maybe does a bit more now. I kept the pig tails because I am used to them but I might shift that up at some point.
Now for the character change that I had been waiting for since first playing World of Warcraft. I got rid of my bones! Belgraft the Death Knight now has I believe the mottled skin appearance, which still looks undead but doesn’t make armor look like complete trash now! I shifted from a very pale/blueish skin tone to the darkest skin available on undead. Mostly I just wanted the glowing eyes to pop more as they stand out against the rest of his visage.
While I did a significant number more, the last change that I am going to talk about this morning is Belgrist my Druid. I originally did a dark skin/pink mohawk thing and it was fine, but I decided to go the other direction and choose the pale troll appearance with bigger pink hair. With this patch they also managed to give access to all of the artifact appearances you have spread out between all of your characters. This meant that I decided to go with the Ursoc appearance for bear form, Firelands cat for cat form and then the only options I had for swimming form were color variants of the Zandalari dinosaur form. I noticed there isn’t an option to customize your flight form, but maybe you just don’t collect appearances for that the way you do for the others.
Other than the growing pains and temporary moments of terror as I logged in to an empty character list… I think things went about as well as could be expected for such a major patch. I’ve not spent any time participating in the event associated with the patch, but I will likely spend some time participating to see if the weapons and gear are worth my time. I am still pretty damned hooked on Genshin Impact but the amount of things that I can reasonably do in a day is being limited by Resin so I will have some free time to spend in World of Warcraft in the coming nights.
The scourge invasion won’t be until 2 weeks prior to Shadowlands. However, there are new starting experiences for creating new players culminating in a dungeon for reaching level 10.