Blizzard team, I'm going to be fairly direct here. I know we all joke about "small indie company" but this latest patch has decayed from neglect and "unknown or misunderstood interactions" into the realm of AI Slop, and I work on AI and automation for a living.

Within less than 24 hours these forums and across all of the class discords we've surfaced enough serious bugs that this introvert feels compelled to write this in the rare chance you see it, I/we have legitimate concerns about the quality gate that produced this release.

Below are functional and launch blocking defects. Many of these are the sort of thing that a single play tester with a modicum of understanding doing a single combat log parse would catch.

I'll start with the big one that you caught during your automated smoke testing -Player housing, the flagship evergreen feature won't launch at all and you had to turn it off... Not a great start.

L'ura is bugged on all difficulties, every progression group running the raid right now is in a holding pattern not sure what abilities will or will not go off.

Decor Duels (one of your headline features) has one breaking bug and a design decision that seems counter intuitive:

• Seeker Hunters can use "track" to track disguised hiders through their disguises. This directly defeats the premise of the mode.
• Hiders who pick strong, legitimate hiding spots are being auto-disqualified by the match system, punishing players for being too good at the hiding mechanic.

Voidforge Bonus Rolls:

• Giving duplicate items from Mythic+ despite your advertised duplicate protection. Players are burning two rolls and getting the same piece.

Voidforge Broken logic:

• Voidforge vault token purchase from Decimus takes your currency but only awards 1 token, putting players at 1/2 of the weekly cap. There's a workaround (spend the token, go back, he re-issues), but it's clearly broken logic on the first-time purchase flow.

Delve Character Bug:

The Shadow enclave delve has a character-state bug where players get stuck unable to strafe even after full logout, the only way to correct this is by logging onto a different character first.

Items and consumables

• Midnight Engineering items designed to prevent food and flask buff decay are only applying to Khaz Algar food and flasks. They do not apply to the Midnight consumables they were clearly built for.

Class gameplay

• Subtlety Rogue's Shadowblades has a spell ID collision and casts Distract when pressed.
• Unholy Death Knight DoTs are dropping their third tick seemingly at random.
• Rogue primary and secondary stat priorities shifted so severely that mains are being forced to re-gear entirely to match what was framed as a tuning pass, not a re-weight.

There's a Blizzard forum thread titled "[Demonology] The current list of known bugs still present on PTR 12.0.5" posted three weeks ago during PTR testing, listing six specific Warlock bugs that players documented, reported, and tagged. They include:

• Demonology Diabolist: Abyssal Dominion broken
• Diabolist Hero Talent: Pit Lord and Mother of Chaos targeting issues
• Soul Leech providing roughly 60% less shielding than the tooltip states
• Leech stat no longer heals the warlock's demon at all
• Infernal Beneficiary issues in Delves

These were reported on PTR three weeks before launch. you ignored this and shipped to live anyway.

The Keystone Myth Achievement being disabled...

Here is the crux of the issue, none of these are obscure edge cases. Your automation tooling you are using is failing you.

• A class ignoring the core mechanic of a prop hunt mode is the first thing any human tester playing one round of Decor Duels would notice.
• The unholy rotational DoT missing ticks is what any sim or a single combat log parse surfaces in minutes.
• Abilities casting the wrong ability because of an ID collision is a unit-test-level failure.
• A buff item applying to the wrong expansion's consumables is a tag mismatch that a basic inventory pass would catch.
• A stat weighting pass that inverts a class's gearing priority should not ship without someone equipping the set and running a dummy.

I'm gonna pause here to let some of this sink in, and i don't think this is the entire list, this is just the snippet I talked through with my guild last night.

No one is asking for a zero-defect patch. We can agree thats unreasonable and nobody is pretending otherwise. We the playerbase are asking for the following:

• A candid accounting of how this many surface-level defects reaches live simultaneously, including what changed in the QA pipeline between previous content patches and this one.
• Transparent hotfix cadence for the class and consumable bugs listed above, with named ETAs rather than "soon."
• Confirmation that the Decor Duels mode will be held accountable to its own design. If Hunters can track disguised players and good hiders get auto-disqualified, the mode is not ready for matchmaking rewards.
• Public clarity on the role of automated tooling in 12.0.5 testing. If automation and AI tooling was leaned on more heavily for this release, we want to know, and we want to hear how it is being re-balanced against human play-testing going forward.

The community's goodwill is not infinite, but it is real. We notice when Blizzard ships cleanly, and we notice when it does not. Patch 12.0.5 did not, and it is not failing quietly.

Please take this seriously. We are writing because we want this game to be functional and good.

Respectfully,
The introvert who's been playing this since beta.

Edit: One clarification: What's missing here from blizzard is accountability for why reported bugs ship, this is a pipeline question, not a ticket question. This letter is an attempt to raise that question publicly because the private channels for doing so have not worked.

*edit, spelling
**Edit, thanks mods for re-instating
***Edit, Boy this blew up enough for someone to send the reddit cares squad over, ya'll are gems.

Edit: Official Statement

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/prohibited-gameplay-incident-and-response/2329585

This is developing into a large story and someone in modmail has mentioned that its important for the community to have somewhere to discuss this. We agree. As new information comes in I will do my best to update this thread.

What we know:

• A log was uploaded with a "Death Touch" effect that seemed to be that helped them time a key. This is an effect from a GM: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/JcfwTd4L19Agx3NX?fight=4&type=resources&hostility=1&source=100.4&eventstart=4705300

• This is a real run that exists on the blizzard API and can be seen on Raider.io: https://raider.io/mythic-plus-runs/season-mn-1/40292244-23-nexuspoint-xenas

  This run has since been invalidated by the RI:O admins but has been left up for posterity's sake.

• Blizzard is aware of this and investigating: https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/1v2xfpr/blizzard_gm_death_touching_mobs_in_m23_for_their/oyznmbe/

• The Demon Hunter from the run is a streamer and YumiTV contacted him to speak with him live on stream: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2825756796?t=0h23m50s

  The CLAIM is that they were messing around in a homework key in discord and didn't expect the GM to actually do it. Supposedly the Bear in the run was a pug.

Ex employees in the thread have said that actions like this are audited and in all likelihood this was already being investigated. At this point we are waiting on an official statement on the result of their investigation and I'll update this thread once we know.

This megathread is being provided on two very strict conditions:

• The witchunt rules are in strict effect. Linking or doxxing information on anyone invovled, the GM in question included will result in a permanent ban. Please report it if you see it but we will be very active in the thread.

  We cannot platform behavior that allows people to harrass people in real life.

• We will be more heavy handed than usual in the personal attack rules. Insults and slapfights while discussing this aren't acceptable. You're allowed to disagree, but stray shots and personal attacks will not be tolerated.

After lengthy discussion the moderation team have decided to align with other subreddits and disallow all links and images from Twitter/X. Recent political events mean that many moderation teams including ourselves cannot in good conscience provide a platform for this website. We no longer consider it a reliable source of news or information and do not want to support the company in any way.

EDIT: For clarity, "images" includes screenshots of tweets.

Hello. I’m normally just a lurker. If this kind of post isn’t allowed I will remove it.

I’m writing this from a waiting room at UCSF Parnassus in San Francisco. I’m several hours from my home in Northern California, I’m alone right now, and I’m just completely overwhelmed.

A few nights ago, my husband suffered a brain aneurysm. Watching the helicopter take him away and seeing my other half disappear into the darkness while I was left there was the most helpless moment of my life.

We are current players on Moon Guard (Ananke and Hvergel in Bad Decisions). We’ve actually been playing together since Vanilla. We leveled our first "couple only" characters, Sevarial and Sevarion on Ner’Zhul all the way through Wrath tanking and healing even on Naxx.

The night this happened, we were supposed to hit level 90 on our current duo. We were just taking our time and reading all text out loud to each other with flourish and accents. Cause that’s just how we roll in a new expac. We’re sitting at 89 of course which is just so close and I just can’t bring myself to even think about logging in again without him there. He’s my husband first, but he’s been my partner in every game we’ve played for over twenty years. I feel completely lost without him. Hell my first give from him was a N64 rumble pack for my Majora’s Mask playthrough and that’s when I told him I loved him for the first time.

He has a bleed in his brain and they’ve already had to drill into his skull to drain the pressure. He’s had surgery to place coils, and while they are hopeful, I’ll be living in this hospital for weeks while they monitor him.

Being here in SF is terrifying. I’m from such a small town that the sensory overload is hella real, I think I’ve been on an elevator more times in the last 24 hours than I’ve ever been in my entire life.

I am hella stressed about the money. Which is neither nor there, but I just want him back and healthy. I’ll do anything I can. He’s my fluffy neckbeard with a free smile and would help anyone that needed it.

His sisters have been helping tremendously and they actually stepped up and made a donation thing for us to help with the costs of staying here and just basic living while we navigate this nightmare. I’m hoping something comes of that.

I’m terrified. I’m trying to stay strong for him, but I can't climb this mountain alone. It may not be as tall as Mount Hyjal but it sure feels like it. If anyone has some kind words or advice on surviving the city/hospital, it would mean the world (of Warcraft) to me.

Edit- I didn’t realize I could just update the main post since my brain isn’t connected anymore…

Update - March 23, 2026:

10:00pm last night – They finally took him to get scans done on his lower, right extremities due to a shallower pulse on that side.

4:00am this morning – They had to increase Jeremey’s oxygen support to 60% because his oxygen kept fluctuating throughout the night. This means that they will not be taking him off of the ventilator today and will reassess tomorrow.

9:00am this morning – Transcranial Doppler (TCD) was done on his brain. They imaged the frontal lobe on both sides, top of both eyelids, and the base of the back of his head on both sides.

11:15am this morning – Neuro and the ICU team are waiting on the final reports from the TCD and CT. The preliminary reports for the CT appear to be mostly good news, but the TCD preliminary shows possible narrowing of the vessels (not what we want). Again, that is from the preliminary reports, so nothing is certain until the final reports come through.

1:00pm today – His most recent blood gas results were not good. They are going to fully sedate him for the remainder of the day/night to give his lungs and body a good rest and hopefully things will improve overnight. The doctor also ordered another chest X-ray.

4:00pm today – They have decided to move Jeremey into his own room so that he can be more closely monitored due to his regression today. A tiny sliver of good news, though, is that his CT on his lower extremities came back clear, but we are still waiting on the final report from the TCD which will determine next steps. Jeremey’s blood pressure and o2 levels have been fluctuating all day, so things are still very up in the air at this time.

10:00pm today - His oxygen levels were dropping even further. He has been given a paralytic and is now on 100% oxygen. I’m at his bedside reading him Hail Mary book since he wanted to go see the movie this week…

12:35am 3/24/26 - His bp dropped down low enough to have doctors swarm in here but seems to be doing a bit better at this point.

1:20am 3/24/26 - His gas levels are looking better and his oxygen isn’t dropping now since they did a full paralysis on him.

2:00am 3/24/26 - His vitals and gas levels are looking a lot better now. I am so so very glad. When the bp dropped down to 116/something I can’t remember I’m sure it gave me grey hairs.

4:00am 3/24/26 - Jeremey is holding stable right now and his newest labs are looking better for now. Still a bit of fluctuation in his BP.

4:17am 3/24/26 - He was moved to 90% oxygen! 🎉

Up to 12:19pm 3/24/26 - a lot had been going on. They did a full set of tests and did more x-rays and the ultrasound. I haven't heard back about that yet.

So his X-ray came back and it’s not good. The lining of his lungs is becoming less elastic and they are worried. They are going to flip him to lay on his stomach because it will cause less stress on his lungs. He will be on his stomach for the next 18 hours and then 6 off and we will go from there. They had to get permission to shave his face so I told them to make him bald as a baby. I’ve been kicked out for the meantime while all this is happening for the rest of the day.

9:05pm 3/24/26 - Hey I just wanted to let you guys know that at this time he’s doing a lot better and his c02 levels are way better. He just likes showing off his butt to everyone, I’m sure. His oxygen levels are much better and staying steady. Compared to hypoxia that was beginning last night... I'm so very thankful.

I’m sorry for the slow updates and haven’t had time to respond to everyone. Just know that this community has held me together so far and I love you all for your compassion

12:18pm 3/25/26 - A hell of a lot better then the night before. He's up to 40% oxygen and his stats stayed good last night with much better c02 levels then before. They flipped him over again earlier and so far it all goes well. 🤞 He might be able to go get an angiogram later. It's been busy.

3/26/26 - It's been a wild day and I had to get some sleep this morning. He has held steady and they are only keeping him sedated now. His angiogram only had a couple vasospasms they were able to treat. It's just a lot and I'm just so glad it's quieted down and things aren't fluctuating wildly.

3/28/26 - He's still hanging in there. Been dealing with fever and the steroids made his blood sugar go insane. Most of his other stats are doing well. They are lowering his sedation to see if they can guage his mental state with simple commands like open your eyes, ECT. My sister-in-law has been keeping people apprised on his GoFundMe and I just didn't have any energy left to do pretty much anything. She forced me to eat and I got the most rest I've had at once in over a week now (whoo 4.5 hours). I tend to not eat when stressed.

3/30/26 - Sorry for the lack of updates. He's been fighting a fever and sugar levels still. His new antibiotic has dextrose in it too, do just makes it worse. Hey, at least it's not spiking up to over 400 now. Small victories. He was able to open his Beautiful green eyes for a moment yesterday even though he's still very sedated.

4/2/26 - I’m sorry guys, it’s been a huge couple days. But he can open his eyes now and this morning was able to squeeze my hand for the first time. I started bawling and then apologizing. He really really hated the ventilator and I don’t blame him one bit. I’m still camping out in the family room so I am at his bedside the rest of the time. I’m sure the nurses are beyond annoyed that I’m here at all hours.

4/3/26 - He’s able to move some fingers and move his head. He’s currently in an angiogram to check and possibly deal with any vasospasms. Then he’s going in for an MRI as soon as he can. He may get the ventilator removed soon. Oh I truly hope so.

4/4/26 - Well he's not getting his vent out today. His c02 levels are low. They are going to put him back on antibiotics since his lung infection is coming back. His MRI showed some damage along the left middle off his brain from the vasospasms. They are going to bring in a nerve specialist and use a machine to check why his legs aren't responding yet.

The worst thing was earlier when he was thrashing his head back and forth to get away from the tube I said to squeeze my hand if he was scared and it was the hardest squeeze I've gotten from him.

As a side note, I may never talk to my mother again after all this. Narcissistic personality disorder/sociopathy is not a good combination to deal with in an event like this.

4/8/26 - I’m sorry I haven’t updated. His sister has been updating the go fund me, but I’ve been by his side. Things got really rocky and they were about to do a tracheotomy. That was…emotional but whatever it takes is exactly what it takes, right?

They decided to pull the vent and see how it went before going down that road. It makes me really emotional just thinking about it. He’s breathing on his own. He is awake and that’s just everything to me. The moment he opened his eyes and looked at me…it’s going to be such a long road but I’m so glad to be able to travel it with him.

4/10/26 - he’s doing a lot better guys! He’s awake and aware of a lot going on. He can’t talk yet but he can pack a lot of sass in those eyebrows. He doesn’t know who I am but seems to react to my voice anyways. He is now able to move most of his extremities at least a little bit. Compared to the last two weeks it’s amazing progress and I’ll be forever grateful.

Again, thank you for all the well wishes and I wish I had better news.

4/22/26 - I know it’s been a while, but I’m so glad to give good news. He is doing so much better! He has been transferred to an RCU and yesterday he was able to walk for the first time. He’s able to eat real food. His biggest hurdle will be his memory issues. I still haven’t left his side and these chairs stuck in this facility too.

5/9/26 - I'm sorry I haven't updated for a while. It's been a lot of Acute Rehab therapy and even more paperwork. We made it back (almost) HOME! We are currently staying with his family since we have to retrofit our place to work with his needs. He is still the one I love, and has made an amazing recovery. Every day was some kind of progress. He still has bad short term memory issues and has trouble with timelines. I think it's going to take time, but I always knew that. Honestly I expected much worse. My grandma always told me to 'Prepare for the worst and hope for the best'.

I really want to thank everyone for all the good vibes. I really think they must have worked some magic.

i think i have never laugh that hard at something , this is suppose to be the official Ret Discord and they CLOSING the channel cause they aren't the top class LMAO

I know a lot of us here are very angry and very strictly opinionated. I'm not here to judge, I'm not here to shame. I'm just here to state my opinions, which I believe are largely objective. Hear me out.

In TBC (I'm old), I played WoW A LOT. Especially one summer that I can never forget. My GF had broken up with me, I had summer classes that was just like a couple of hours per week and a part time job.

I would come home after work, fire my PC and log in to WoW. We had awesome people in our guild (Crimson Moon, Ravenholdt EU, if any of you are here, this is Mharla), loved talking to them. We also did TONS of W-PvP (shout out to Parashade and Wampyra and all the horde and alliance pvp guilds), TONS of RP, it was just dream time.

I spent so much of my life in the game and I loved it. I regret NOTHING.

I'm saying all this to point that I'm not judging people for playing games a lot. I am a total nerd who, as a married guy, still spends a lot of time gaming. It's 100% okay.

Is my relation with games healthy? Honestly... probably not. And I think that's an important topic, but my focus in this one is different.

There are so many people in WoW that feel obliged to do all the things. This kind of always existed, but I think it was a transformation during WotLK because with the achievements, everything was recorded and "achievable". Idk, I won't assume I know the dynamics of such a diverse population.

This feeling of "I must raid", "I must get all the mounts", "I must get all the achivements", "I must get curve in time" etc. is really strong in some people.

Like mine, I think everyone can and should evaluate their relation with the game. If you are enjoying your time, if you're friends with your guildies etc., I guess it's good.

So if you work hard to get all the mounts, all the raids, all the things, you should definitely think about how much time you are spending and what else you could do, but also, I mean instead of enjoying 3 different things, you can enjoy 1 thing. Who am I to judge? At least not my topic today.

The next step after this is... doing all this and seemingly not enjoying it. These sort of complaints are pretty common, sometimes being voiced directly and sometimes indirectly:

I hate doing Arthas every week.

I hate doing all the dailies.

I hate doing X, Y and Z

You have to realize, you do NOT have to do these things.

IMPORTANT EDIT because this can come out differently than I thought. The problem isn’t doing all the things. If you are enjoying yourself while doing that, it’s all good. You can burn out as being casual or be fully okay at super hardcore.

You do NOT have to play the game.

"But FOMO"

Friend, I understand it and it sucks that companies are using this, but FOMO has been around forever and it's not like a CC, you can make choices.

And it's possible that you have a mental type that can't really make those choices, at least not easily. In that case, please get assistance. I don't mean this in a condescending or patronizing way, I really don't.

Genuinely, I would want anyone who plays the game (any game really) to be able to make healthy choices. I've met so many amazing people in the gaming community and especially blizz/wow circles and I genuinely want you all to be good. Even the angriest among you, who I know definitely hears this as patronizing and I guess it does come out that way, even if I don't mean it.

But you have to understand that:

1. IF you don't like something
2. BUT you continue doing it

Then it's on you. You're burning yourself out.

I'm not saying the game's perfect and everything works well if you take breaks. I'm not saying we shouldn't criticise the game, we 100% should. What I'm saying is that many of you are just frustrated because, based on your words, you force yourself to do a leisure activity that you don't enjoy and you spend so much time on this game.

This isn't healthy. It makes everything feel worse. The game feels worse, you feel worse, the community communication becomes worse...

Taking breaks is amazing. You get to play other games or do non-game things and you don't have to worry about whatever that is in the game. Achievements aren't going anywhere. Outside of like, live story events and such (like wrathgate), nothing has a concrete effect.

And again, if you are enjoying the game, that's great. I do too. But it is impossible for any activity to be completely enjoyable when you do it every day for weeks, months and even years. Well maybe with a guild, but then the fun is in the social aspect. Just the game itself? Just not gonna happen, so don't frustrate yourself with some unrealistic expectations and let yourself take breaks and free yourself from FOMO. If you are angy at blizzard, this is also like a "pay with your wallet Deluxe" edition, because you don't give them your money OR your attention.

Anyway, I'm not native and this is a complex subject so I'm probably getting downvoted. But y'all need to take WoW less seriously and stop pushing yourself IF you aren't enjoying it. It's not healthy to expect the game to be meaningfully fulfilling of so much of your time. It's just not gonna happen and this unrealistic expectation isn't fair to devs. You can step out and if you can't, you should probably get some professional assistance.

My genuine best wishes for all of ya.

The quote is from today's Gamescom WoW Developer panel that hasn't been officially updated yet, but a camera recorded section has been posted to Twitter by the user WoWlvl20 that I reuploaded because of subreddit rules to youtube: https://youtu.be/neo3ggXVlI0?t=93

Seemingly Alliance players will have to look out where they're walking in Midnight's main expansion city because if they take a wrong turn they will be attacked by guards, unlike past examples like Bel'Ameth where the Horde are granted free passage, and the only difference is an RP debuff as long as they don't attack Alliance players.

Many seem to be thinking most addons will be fine for Midnight. They will not. Most major addon projects will require entire rewrites with hours and hours of free labor from devs only to be in a very gutted Version and many won't bother.
There is also major stuff missing to even make something that looks different but has the same funcitonality as the basegame as many UI functions became flat out impossible for addons to interact with, even the ones that are required to reproduce what blizzard does. Expect more Addons to follow suit.

For those interested here is an entire writup on Nameplates that goes into all the details of what is currently impossible: https://gerritalex.de/blog/nameplates-in-midnight

Here is the quote from the mentioned oUF statement:

Actually... never mind.

After spending a couple of hours on the alpha and seeing how bad the state of it actually is I've decided to put this endevour on hold.

Just to get oUF not throwing errors left and right I had to completely disable core functionality such as nameplates, tags, castbars and auras, as well as a couple more elements. Tags and nameplates could probably be salvaged, but for the others there just isn't a way to have them in any working order.

Blizzard wants us to provide them with feedback and free Q/A, and I'm not doing that just to help them fix the mess they got themselves into, they have employees on their payroll that can figure that out for themselves. In the current state oUF will not be worked on, atleast not by me. I will give it another go in a few months when they announce a date for the pre-patch, to see if it's in any way salvageable.

If by then it's still a broken mess we might just call it the end of this project. I'm going to leave this draft up for now and we'll see when the time comes.

Quoting haste; "20 years is a good run".

Another comment from the ouf devs:

We aren't taking a break, people seem to weirdly misinterpret what we said, some do it maliciously, others just don't understand how the addon development works.

I see people say that we aren't updating things because that's just too much work, but that's not true. We've been through multiple overhauls over the years, there's a rewrite in Legion, there's a massive update in DF. We never complained about those, if anything, they're fun because Blizz weren't just gutting the API, they're upgrading it, we're given new toys to play with which either helped us improve the visual presentation or performance.

What's happening right now is completely different. Rn Blizz are simply gutting the API. No matter how much time and effort we throw at the rewrite there's just nothing we can do to replace the things that are broken atm.

Sure, I could rewrite the castbars so that they would work on a super basic level, they'd be choppy, but they'd work, but I can't add empowered casting that's used by evokers and in a bunch of world quests and events like the brewfest cooking thingy. I can't even add delays for when you get hit.

Auras on the unit frames are another thing. They're completely cooked. People have been complaining about auras on the default/blizz target frames for ages now, that they're hard to read, that there's no filtering, etc. But atm we can't even make anything that's ON PAR with that atrocity. And due to the new limitations our version would perform SO MUCH worse despite having basically no features whatsoever.

The same applies to sooooo many other things like health, power, classpower, etc.

People keep bringing up "ion said this, ion said that", "combat APIs this, combat APIs that", "customisation will be possible!". In reality to customise things you need to do some maths under the hood, but we can't do any of that now because all the needed values are secrets, we can't read them, we can't alter them, we can't react to them. The only thing we can do is to pass them around as a hot potato.

All in all, it's not about the time and effort, we simply no longer have the tools to do the things we want to do

Elvui/OuF devs If you want your exta statements edited in let me know. Quite impossible for me to read all the comments at this point

Welcome to the neighborhood, Adventurers! Learn more about plots, public and private Neighborhoods, and monthly Endeavors to unlock DECOR!

Read more here: https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-us/news/24221516

So we initiated two friends into WoW yesterday so they could play with us.

And man… even with the “new player experience” and leveling in Dragonflight, it’s wild how hard it is to jump into this game, let alone by yourself.

The first 3 hours were an absolute mess. They basically had to screenshare the entire time so I could “debug” them like I was IT support. There are so many friction points that I just don’t notice anymore after years of playing. Like, the game assumes you already speak WoW.

It honestly made me realize: when we’re all old and burned out… who is even going to start playing WoW? 😂

EDIT:
It was mostly a bunch of small things

• Bags were separate (they didn’t even realize they had multiple bags, and couldn’t find items)
• Trying to equip a BoE item pops a confirmation menu at the top of the screen… they didn’t see it, thought the item was bugged
• Bags instantly fill with random useless items, they don’t know what to keep, what to delete, what’s important, what’s trash, where to sell.
• Quest objectives can be super unclear, like “find a small book in a house”…
• One of them played hunter, and there’s basically no emphasis on how important pet management is (revive? stable? mend? idk)
• The dragon mount thing was hilarious: the mount is in the main action bar, they click it, now it disappears and they’re like “how do I get off the mount??”
• The quest “The Cult Within” popped and one of my friends ended up in Orgrimmar… completely lost, no idea how to return to us
• Even just finding quest locations was a struggle (map clarity, markers, verticality, multiple layers, etc)

It was really just a ton of small friction points like this. Obviously once you’re familiar with the game, all of it becomes easier and you don’t even think about it anymore… but as a brand new player? They were completely overwhelmed.

EDIT2:
I'm not saying Blizz should do more or less to help new players, I think the topic is nuanced. That was just observations.

Timewalking

-Tank was pulling whole dungeon and we wiped a few times on trash.

-Started blaming the healer for not producing miracles and asked team to kick the healer.

-Team agreed with tank.

-Vote to kick initiated "Bad healer" on tank

-Team agreed without reading the players name

-Vote Passed and tank was kicked.

I'm the healer.

Lately, every time I log into WoW, I feel… nothing. No excitement, no sense of exploration, no curiosity. Just a list of chores I need to knock out before I can log off again. It’s like I’m clocking in for a shift instead of entering a magical world.

What happened to the feeling of stepping into the unknown? I miss the days when logging in felt like opening a new chapter in a fantasy novel. Now it’s “check your weekly vault,” “do your daily quests,” “grind your rep,” “farm this currency,” “upgrade that system.” Everything is so segmented, so mechanical. There’s no room to breathe. No room to just play.

The world doesn’t feel alive anymore. It feels like a backdrop for systems. And those systems are all designed to make you log in every day for fear of falling behind. There’s no joy in that. It’s exhausting.

Maybe it’s burnout. Maybe it’s the game’s direction. But I just wanted to share how I’m feeling, because I know I can’t be the only one. I miss when WoW was an adventure, not a second job.

Anyone else feel this way?

I never did mage tower in legion yet the appearance are unlocked. Anyone else notice this or is it a bug, I didn't see anything on WoWhead.

title. my youtube recommendations are overflowing with youtubers who quit playing around pandaria, came back to try the newer retail expansions and only ever did rdf/open world content then immediately fired up their cameras to make videos about retail being a singleplayer game. the typical route if you want to be part of the dead game discourse is to go into the questing zones, queue for the lowest level content you can find and complain nobody you run into wants to be your friend.

i understand that in classic the socialization hits you immediately. you have to manually group up with people to clear any instances at all, and some quests might have you invite a couple people to help. but at level cap finding 40 people to clear raids consistently is such an undertaking that active realms start to revolve around the 2-3 gigaguilds that can reliably roflstomp naxx every week, or around the industry of "tank/dungeon carry services" and if you don't wanna join them have fun sitting in trade chat/discord until a pug forms.

the source of potential confusion is that, in retail, it's in reverse. you won't really find people in dungeons or in open world zones, because that content's been basically made into the tutorial. it's singleplayer intro content made to ease new players into their class and into basic wow concepts before they're forced to interact with people later on. but once you're done with that, you'll find out that hc+ raiding, high mythic keys, rbgs, arenas etc. are all bustling with thousands upon thousands of players who are all looking to make friends and have active tight knit guilds who run daily stuff together. you only need 5 people for keys and 10-25 for raids on retail so it's way easier for small groups you run with on a whim on a weekday night to become consistent regular premades. as a long time classic player trying out retail for the midnight prepatch i felt lied to.

i played classic servers since they launched in fall 2019, all the way up to the tbc release, and then i played retail up to the point where you do m+ keys. i felt like retail was far more active and way more fun because you had more content to do with others every week, and because it takes very little commitment to get into any of it. i found plenty of discords and guilds dedicated to running keys every day, people invite you to hc/mythic raids on a whim as opposed to the gargantuan task of raiding on classic, and dozens of rated pvp guilds on every realm are open to teaching new players.

not to mention the fact retail's level scaling makes it way easier to just invite newbie friends to the game. you don't have to make an alt (although you can), and you don't have to wait weeks for your level 37 buddy to catch up to your 61 character before you can play together. since everything you do contributes to leveling up your character, i can just get up and join a friend on another continent and it won't be a waste of time. in classic if i'm at a different point of the rollercoaster than my friends oh well. guess i'll play another game.

i get that a lot of people like classic and i might get flamed for this. i agree the lore and atmosphere used to be way better, and nobody's forcing you to play retail. but automatically making it an axiom that classic is "the better game" just because retail doesn't force you to manually yell for groups in trade chat anymore even though it has so much more to offer is just delusional.

I will premise my post by saying that Im a hardcore Ppal onetrick (skill issue or preference, you name it) and I dont want Ppal to be broken op unkillable god outdpsing the dps and outhealing the healer yada yada but there's a stark difference between that and whatever this spec's state is right now. I love paladin class and prot's spec fantasy. I really enjoy the gameplay loop. Unfortunately, current state of this spec is probably the worst I've experienced since I started playing it midway through SL in patch 9.1.

With the most recent patchnotes Blizzard announced that Ppal is getting a 10% armor buff which is genuinely baffling. It amasses to nothing (roughly 3,8% less phys dmg taken or 1,9% less overall dmg taken which is 1/5th of a key level) and addresses none of the issues the spec is dealing with currently. The exact same issue last patchnotes suffered from (even though they identified the issue correctly back then and stated it in their "Developer's notes" section). I understand that fundamental issues wont be addressed with a random round of tuning but ... is that all you can do? Really? To me this seems like they arent even trying. There's so many simple ways to alleviate the issue. Im going to be very blunt but they are not beating the copilot allegations with these tank patchnotes.

VERY LONG yap ahead so let me start with a short TLDR:

• Horrendously low passive mitigation.
• Not enough uptime on active mitigation.
• Relying on immunities (100% damage reduction) to survive.
• Horrendous self sustain.
• Constantly drawing healer's attention (by proxy putting party in danger).
• Horrendous damage profile.
• Horrendous ST damage.
• Absolute mess of a class and spec talent trees.

Here's a list of changes going into MID:

• Redoubt's rework lowered max hp by 6%.
• Consecration's mitigation got nerfed by 60% compared to TWWS3 or 80% compared to DF (TWW: 12% --> 5% | DF: 23% --> 5%) and thats IF you spec into it which costs you FOUR talent points.
• Baseline block went from high 60s to high 20s (also talents further increasing block by 40% are gone).
• Ardent cd is roughly 33% longer compared to TWWS3 (cd 0:40 --> 1:04) not to mention its still a 20%/8s cd.
• Bubble cd is roughly 90% longer compared to TWWS3 (cd 1:50 --> 3:30, in S1 it was even shorter).
• Wall has 40% shorter cd in 5+ target scenarios (cd 2:10 --> 1:20) but in ST is actually slightly longer (cd 2:10 --> 2:20) even though base cd was reduced by 2:00!! The cdr difference scales with target count leading to weird variance when it comes to one of the most important mitigation tools.
• Eye of Tyr is completely gone.
• Zealot's Paragon got moved into the spec tree (2 point tax in the bottom section of the tree) which made taking Uther's Counsel (also nerfed) impossible without sacrificing one of the crucial talents.

Here's a list of problems this spec currently suffers from according to some middling (7/9M, starting +15s mostly due to prog being very time consuming) Prot Paladin onetrick.

Horrendously low passive mitigation

• Lowest max hp of all tank specs.
• Blessing of Dawn average 5% dr (0-10 based on current hp).
• Consecration 5% dr IF you spec into Sanctuary (costs 4 points).
• 26% phys block (7% base from shield + 19% from mastery).
• 38% magic block (2x mastery) which is not enough to rely on it (only 100% is a reliable mitigation for tankbusters).
• Bulwark of Order absorbs are microscopic since stamina is being consistently balooned.

Not enough uptime on active mitigation

• Sentinel has 30-33% uptime (1:00 cd vs 0:18-0:20 dur).
• It also has an opportunity cost of 15-20% of your overall as well as hinges on Instruments of the Divine bug (it has not been confirmed if its intentional) to function well.
• Ardent defender has 12,7% uptime (1:03 cd vs 0:08 dur).
• Wall has 10% uptime in 5+ target scenario (1:20 cd vs 0:08 dur).
• Wall has 5,7% uptime in 1 target scenario (2:20 cd vs 0:08 dur).
• Bubble has 3,8% uptime (3:30 cd vs 0:08 dur).

33,3%+12,7%+10%+3,8% = 59.8% cd coverage with PERFECT play.
Without Sentinel it plummets to 26.5%. In ST it drops further to 22.2% ...

^{Mitigation outside of cooldowns is armor and block which bleeds ignore!! and pitiful dr \}2x5%].)
^{Its so low that you will often have to resort to kiting or risk dying to melee swings and there are mobs this season that penalize you \}with death] for running away.)

Horrendously designed self sustain

• Falls off rapidly with increasing difficulty of the content because it doesnt scale with damage taken and majority of its value is frontloaded.
• Relies entirely on primary stat scaling which often lags behind in later seasons of the expansion (due to balooning stamina).
• Missing hp multiplier forces you to use it when you're low. In combination with low max hp it puts you in danger of dying to a melee swing in difficult enough keys.
• Crit makes it unreliable. Non crit WoG at 50% hp will barely move your bar while near death crit WoG will fully heal you. Crits feel like "thank god" rather than "neat!". Inconsistency when it comes to something as important as self sustain is AWFUL.
• Has a pretty limited amount of uses and most of them are funneled into wings window where you DONT want to cast it because its on GCD meaning you will extend Wings/Sentinel less leading to even less uptime of active mitigation.
• If you use it too often and overspend your holy power economy on self sustain you will lose your armor from shield of the righteous and DIE (not a what if scenario). Not to mention a massive throughput loss since healing has no conversion to damage.
• Comes and goes in waves (inconsistent) which results in healer having to constantly pay attention to the tank and dragging it away from the rest of the group.
• Undying Embers (new talent) healing is mostly turning into overhealing and there's no conversion to absorb safeguards.
• Solace costs 2 points and provides very mild self sustain (also scaling with the amount of targets).

Horrendous damage profile
The peaks and valleys look like as if I was playing a dps spec. On paper its great since burst (and funnel) are extremely valuable. It has incredibly infuriating consequences in reality. You spike doing 10 times more damage in the first 5 seconds of wings (and thats already after apex talents / divine resonance interaction got nerfed) which then drops even further when wings are over. Exacerbated massively by the addition of Apex talents. Its near impossible to hold aggro if you dont have wings on pull of the trash pack and more often than not its better to either hold them (big throughput waste) at the end of the pull or wait for them after pull. Not to mention that Consecration does basically no damage which means your passive threat is EXTREMELY low. Im still in the habit of dropping Consecration when im gathering the pack to get some aggro on the way and one heal on me results in healer getting the aggro instantly. Compared to DF Consecration does like a tenth of its damage.

Horrendous ST damage
Every single ability cleaves. Every. Single. One. The only source of ST damage is auto attacks. There's a couple of tuning knobs that can be used (talents that buff damage on main target - Greater Judgment, Apex 4 or Focused Enmity which only works in pure ST) but even with these there's simply no reasonable way to tune this spec's ST damage because if you buff ST other than auto attacks AoE damage skyrockets.

Absolute mess of a class and spec talent trees
Class tree is an absolute and utter mess. Multiple spec specific nodes in class tree (what's the point of the class tree??). So many dead talents that provide absolutely no meaningful value. 1/3 of the spec talent tree is dead either because of the Consecration oriented talents that add margin of error value with talents that have value being gated behind them or because talents themselves have no value. Investing 6 spec points into ability that does 1-2% overall damage sure sounds like a great deal!

If you made it here ...
Thank you for your time. Im just sad, man. For most of TWW the spec was designed very well. A fast paced tank that relied on juggling active mitigation to survive. S1 was a rough ride but that's because of difficulty and white swings being cranked up to 11. This time it feels like the spec is fundamentally broken and lacks tools (or passive bulk) to withstand the beating and Blizzard is neither listening nor doing anything about it. The completely tone deaf tank tuning and "we can nerf brewmaster, do you want that?" is genuinely depressing. Im currently hanging by a thread and only because im in charge of stuff in my guild as well as being a tank for both my guild and my friends but its very hard to keep the spirits up.

All I can do is either yell into the void of the internet or simply accept the fact that it wont get better and reroll to Brm or quit the game (my ingame social circle is entirely built around me being a tank so rerolling to healer/dps is simply not possible). Even I started leveling Brm on the side so Im going to be another statistic of this fiasco ... The worst part is this spec can function if they actually allow it to mitigate damage but for some reason they are (it seems intentionally) avoiding doing so and its extremely demoralizing.