At its launch earlier this year, World of Warcraft Midnight seemed hopeful. It started engrossingly, described as the darkest expansion, where everything that could go wrong did. We’re now over seven months into the expansion and know what’s coming next in patch 12.2. But the expansion has been rougher than usual since shortly after launch. Patch 12.1.5 especially feels like a low point that Blizzard needs to fix ASAP before Modern WoW and the culmination of the Worldsoul Saga crashes and burns by being a rushed mess.
The first three raids were interesting, with fun and complex boss fights. The second tier of the expansion, “The Venomous Abyss,” took everything that seemed to be expanded upon at launch and abandoned it all. Poorly designed and overly punishing bosses. None of which will end up being memorable in the annals of WoW’s history. With a final boss teased for some time and a compelling origin in the latest saga, the way it ended was akin to a wet fart.
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To give more clarity to the poor quality of “The Venomous Abyss,” a record number of high-end raiding guilds are calling it quits. They’re disbanding, some with roots in The Burning Crusade like the former Race to World First guild Vodka. Even my guild, NCGB, which has approached raiding with more of a dad-vibe, one-day-a-week raids with a set goal of hitting Ahead of the Curve each tier, has already discussed ending our raid early before we kill Ula’tek on Heroic. Something my guild has never done since it was formed.
12.1.5 seemed like the most exciting update in the 2026 roadmap.
Mythic Plus isn’t faring any better. Weekly M+ runs are at an all-time low. A poorly picked dungeon pool definitely doesn’t help. An even worse pool of dungeons in Season 3 absolutely will make more only touch M+ if absolutely necessary for crests and vault filling.
Not to mention how horrible M+ gearing has been this season. This is partly because of the unbalanced gearing changes between M+ and raiding, and because the bonus roll token was introduced at the start of the season through the Great Vault instead of during the .5 or .7 patch.
To top it all off, just about every big patch release for Midnight has been horrendously buggy. Blizzard even had to apologize after releasing 12.0.5 because the game was so unstable. Their apology also included a promise to make patch releases more stable going forward. Yeah… that didn’t work out. This brings us to the recent release of patch 12.1.5, which ended the Quel’Thalas and Zul’Aman storylines.
When we got the 2026 roadmap earlier this year, 12.1.5 seemed the most exciting of all the major patches Blizzard was cooking up. It’d include a second one-boss raid that would be more story-focused, an evolution of the Delves with the release of the Labyrinth (a mega-delve with a new nemesis boss), and a new world event. The first two items, in particular, felt like a return to older Blizzard and WoW development. It tried cool new things in a mid-season patch and adding more of what the game is known for: cool, well-designed raids.
The recent character death in Midnight feels completely pointless.
In reality, the patch is fine, but it was a buggy mess at launch. The new raid involves a long-awaited fight against an Old God general, Kith’ix, and is a nothing burger. The fight feels uninspired, added only to tie a bow on a story that ultimately didn’t need telling.
Plus, the ending was further proof that Blizzard’s mid-expansion storytelling is at its weakest. At the end of the raid, a character that’s been around since TBC died. Not from being killed by Kith’ix, but by sacrificing herself to the Light to empower us and our allies to defeat this threat that not even the Titan Keeper Tyr could defeat.
The death is completely pointless when compared to what other characters have gone through in recent years. Let alone what some have gone through specifically during Midnight. Alleria gets stabbed by Xal’atath, loses a massive source of her power, and falls through the Darkwell and is somehow alive. But Liadrin? Nope, she has to die because she got tired. There was no build-up or hint that Liadrin was even capable of performing a feat like this. Just, during the fight against Kith’ix, she says lines about using her life energy to make us stronger. So if you’re playing without any dialogue, the death is even more out of left field.
If this is an example of how everything we do ends with things going wrong, it’s a bad example, and it makes me scared for how this expansion will end. I wasn’t mad at how the finale of this patch’s storyline ended. The bloodshed between the Amani and Blood Elves has been building for quite some time. But Blizzard taking a main character’s life, one who was only recently fleshed out, dilutes all the work done up to this point. It’s a second death in two patches that felt entirely predictable and unnecessary.
Then there’s the Labyrinth. It’s fine. But it was also a buggy mess at launch, leaving many with unnecessary deaths or forcing them to restart this hour-long instance. It also doesn’t even deliver on the core promise of Labyrinths: that you can leave and return to complete the rest of it if you leave early. Instead, you have to complete all nine chambers and the Nemesis boss in one run for the best loot.
Each chamber is basically a mini Delve. Short objectives, yet full of enemies to kill to progress. The biggest downside to the Labyrinth is just how little variety there is in the available scenarios. For something they’ve been working on for so long, you’d think they’d have made enough variety for the chamber scenarios to not have repeats in a run. Just today, I had a run with three of the same objective out of nine! Something is definitely off with the RNG for which scenario each chamber will have.
The final “big addition” was the Aqir Invasions event. A long-dormant foe is returning with Kith’ix’s rise, and we need to defend Zul’Aman and Silvermoon City from their forces. Cool concept, but another invasion event. This isn’t just another mid-season invasion event being added. We’ve gotten one basically every mid-patch since Dragonflight launched. This is the fourth invasion event this expansion. On top of it being another world event that just adds to even more map clutter, something they said they’d work on reducing.
It feels like Modern WoW is suffering while Forever gets all the attention.
There’s absolutely nothing that makes the Aqir Invasions stand out from any of the other invasion events we’ve gotten to date on an execution level. The only standout feature is that they happen at the top of every hour and reward reputation for a limited-time event (supposedly, since the related achievements are Feats of Strength, unlike any other invasion event achievement). It’s just another time sink that adds to zone lag and gets boring before you even finish the first run. Critically, there’s little to no creativity in how Blizzard fills out mid-season patches anymore.
They just break out the “old reliable” event, change the models out, make the rewards current, and call it a day. At least in The War Within we got the occasional new zone for the tedious content to happen in. At this point in a Saga, they could use this time to expand the world of Azeroth even more. Instead, Xal’atath’s threats feel even more isolated and only a problem for the Blood Elves, not for everyone living on the planet.
The idea of returning to Quel’Thalas over 20 years after its initial addition to the game in Burning Crusade was exciting. The start of Midnight gave hope that Blizzard would pull off something cool they hadn’t done yet in the game. Instead, we’re getting cookie-cutter content on top of bland new features and poorly designed raids/ encounters, with everything being inexcusably buggy at launch in North America. We’ve gotten one apology this expansion for the lack of quality control. I’d put money on another coming very soon, too. Something needs to change, or The Last Titan will be doomed.
Either change the frequency of patches, devote more resources to content generation for these patches, or just cut back on what’s added. Less is more, especially if it comes with a boost in quality. And a twist of the knife in all this is how much TLC is being given to World of Warcraft Forever. Yes, that is a whole new WoW product. But it does feel like Modern WoW will suffer for a time while Forever gets its feet under itself, instead of both thriving simultaneously, as they both deserve.
