World of Warcraft: Midnight Prepatch Day 1

Yesterday was the first prepatch day, and I went online to see how many changes from beta made it to retail. I knew that demolishing my addons was going to happen, but it still exceeded my expectations, and not in a good way.

In beta, I tried to play fully without addons, using only the tools that Blizzard provides. Sadly, that felt like moving from a modern game, which WoW with addons feels like, to something that didn’t age well. It’s like some of the games that try to modernize a classic game and then it just feels weird and out of place. That’s exactly how I feel about the Blizzard UI at the moment and their damage meter.

While I must say the cooldown manager is quite nice, even though it has terribly limited options in customization. With little to no complexity left to the game and classes, it works just fine. I can see this being a replacement for WA. Not a good one, but not as bad as the damage meter and nameplates.

Unlike most people, I wasn’t one of those players who used Plater. I used Threat Plates for PvE and BetterBlizzardPlates for PvP. Threat Plates were fully customizable, with a lot of easy tweaks without overcomplicated options like Plater, but it still suited me fine as a casual raider and 3k M+ player. I’m not in any sense a pro player; therefore, it felt like enough for me.

BetterBlizzardPlates works great in PvP as you can customize almost everything for every PvP situation. So I would just jump between these two with preset profiles ready and change depending on if I was playing PvP or PvE content. Even though both can work in PvP and PvE, it’s just a habit that I have. Now with Blizzard nameplates, there is basically no customization. These few things that you can tweak are not enough to call it customization. It is so far from Threat Plates or BetterBlizzardPlates, not to mention Plater that has unlimited options.

I feel like thanks to WA taking it too far, Blizzard took a needed action but then took it too far themselves, and now the game looks terrible. In beta, I realized how easy bosses are. Mechanics are simple; you don’t really need any addons to tell you what to do, but their DBM replacement is just awful. There is a timeline bar on my screen showing me the next ability that the boss is using, but that’s all. It doesn’t say soak, move, pop defensives, or anything. So basically, it doesn’t really help much, does it? It will help for farming stuff once we know every ability and mechanic, but until then, it doesn't help anyone to learn anything. In a way, that was part of the reason why they did all this with Midnight, because they wanted it to be more casual friendly. Classes lost their complexity, dungeons lost their difficulty, and bosses lost their complexity, and then the lack of information during the fight kind of counters all that and makes learning worse than it was with the way DBM worked.

I preordered Midnight, and I know that no matter what, I will play it. Not because of the game itself, but because of my guild mates, I dare to say online friends that I don’t want to lose contact with. But Midnight feels like it’s not doing anything for the existing fanbase, honestly. It makes the game easier in a sense, yes, but what about people like me who spent 20 years plus playing this game? Kind of sucks, doesn’t it?

Going through some classes and changes, I must say some changes are great. Unholy DK finally feels like a melee with tons of unholy damage and an army of undead. New Survival Hunter does look promising. Enhancement Shaman as well. Yet my main, Feral Druid, is so boring in beta I will be playing Guardian in Midnight. I don’t want to give up on my Druid, but man, when one of the most complex classes becomes a three-button rotation class with a one-button combo point filler, that is a hard pill to swallow.

But it’s not all negative and dark. I really appreciate what they did with Silvermoon for Midnight. I love to see these old zones getting some love and redesign as it’s long-awaited and really needed. It does look beautiful. People who enjoy lore and exploration will enjoy Midnight, that’s for sure. I think casual-wise, the game is going into that direction to have an absolutely amazing amount of content to do without ever trying to push some keys and do mythic raids and such. And that is amazing.

Some classes really needed redesign and some classes really benefit from it. Like Affliction Lock that felt very neglected for a long time. Not to mention Outlaw Rogue, Survival Hunter changes are in my opinion great even though feelings on that one are mixed in the community. But some classes really benefit from changes and it doesn’t feel bad if they got less buttons to press because they really had too many, like Enh Shaman. So in a way, it is a step in the right direction, just taken too far and too extreme.

What Midnight will bring and how many changes await us in Azeroth until the next expansion is yet to come, and as we know Blizzard, changes can come at any time. So let’s hope that Blizzard listens to the community as a whole and not just one targeted group of people and then tries to rebuild the game to be somewhere in between what it used to be and what they want it to be.

Time will tell. And I’ll keep making articles and videos about it. I’ll see you all in Azeroth. May Elune guide your path.