560 hours of patch 9.1 of World of Warcraft. That's how much time I've spent these past two months in the new raid, the new dungeon season and the new pvp season. Here are some thoughts (ramblings if a madman perhaps) after spending the equivalent of 9.3 hours per day for 2 months playing World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands

June 29th (for US players) and June 30th (for EU players) marked the release of patch 9.1 of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. In the modern era of WoW, these big patches always bring with them a few things; a new raid tier, a new season for dungeons (m+) and rated PvP. Content outside of those three pillars is not as set in stone.

This time, we did get a new raid called Sanctum of Domination and the new seasons for dungeons and PvP. We also got a new zone with daily quests to trudge your way through for a marginal increase in player power.

By many accounts, this patch is straight up garbage and has been met with a lot of negativity online. So why have I spent nearly 500 hours playing it in the month and half that it’s been out?

The easy answer to that would be my guild and friends. I raid on the hardest difficulty, albeit not in any sort of high-ranking guild, and raiding is in my opinion always enjoyable in WoW, and the general consensus seems to agree with that. Where people usually differ in their opinions is the things you do outside of raid days. My guild raids two nights a week, leaving a lot of free time for other WoW related activities.

To many, the new season in M+ doesn’t provide any significantly new gameplay, it’s the same dungeons we had last season but with a new seasonal affix (modifier). In arena, the metagame has become so bursty and damage heavy that healers are having a tough time, and people have a tendency to die very quickly in some setups.

A lot of my time spent outside raids is spent both doing dungeons with my friends and raiding on a separate 3rd day, where we are raiding at a slightly lower level but also having a ton of fun.

Keeping my character up to date for all of this has proven to be really fun, but after 500 or so hours the magic is starting to wear off and I think I’m heading back towards a routine of playing WoW during raid nights, and going back to playing other games in between.

As far as non-raiding content goes, I’ve hit my personal goals of 2200 rating in m+ and 1800 rating in PvP (specifically 2v2 Arena). The only thing left to do in this patch for me is to go about my usual collecting shenanigans, where I look to get most, if not all, of the achievements that were released with patch 9.1 along with as many mounts and toys as possible. Collecting is in and of itself a very time consuming way of approaching the game, but I figure that this patch is gonna last a good 6 months or so, at LEAST, so I’ll have plenty of time to dip in and out.

I agree with the sentiment that the expansion as a whole feels very heavy on “chores” to keep your character up to date. Each week, you have to do 2 weekly quests to keep your “Renown” level up to date (up until this week you also had to do 1 weekly chapter of the story campaign), 2 wings of Torghast (which is WoW’s version of a rogue-lite dungeon) and some dungeons to populate your weekly vault (each reset, you’re treated to a chest with loot that is filled with different levels of gear depending on the content you did that week, and players are incentivized to do as much content as possible to get as many options as possible in this weekly welfare-loot system).

And if you’re stupid enough to have multiple characters, you just go through that list of chores and do it all again a second, third or even fourth time depending on how many characters you have.

I’ve always enjoyed playing around with multiple characters of different classes and seeing the same content from slightly different perspectives. This patch is the first one in a while where I’ve felt like doing that would severely impact my overall enjoyment of the game, so I’m opting out in favor of just focusing on my one main character and letting the rest of my characters idle for at least the remainder of this patch.

Overall, I’m happy that I have people to play this game with as I’m not sure I’d be able to stomach the grind if I was going about it as a purely solo player, but I’ve done the majority of my grinding for this patch so I’m happy to step down for a while and focus on other games.