World of Warcraft Patch 12.0.5 was pushed live yesterday, debuting new things to do like a bunch of world content themed around stopping the forces of the Void, the re-introduction of bonus loot rolls to help protect against bad luck, a deep sea fishing event, and WoW’s equivalent of Prop Hunt, entitled Decor Duels. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend you participate in any of that, because almost every new thing in 12.0.5 is broken in some way, and a bunch of existing content that worked fine before is now busted as well.
Probably the biggest disappointment out of this entire patch is Decor Duels, aka World of Warcraft Prop Hunt. Prop Hunt is a simple, fantastic game: disguise yourself as an object, hide on a map full of objects, have someone try to find you, switch, repeat. Usually players on both sides have a little toolkit to help deceive or uncover the other person, but other than that, it’s pretty well tested. A lot of folks were excited for this less intense take on a PvP mode, but unfortunately, Blizzard’s rendition of Prop Hunt is both unfun and also broken. The map is small and simplistic with few interesting places to hide. There are too many people in each match. Worst of all, hiders must keep moving every so often or they won’t receive any rewards at the end. Even if you find a really good spot, you have to sit there and wiggle constantly, betraying your position.
Beyond just being unsatisfying, though, there are also ways to flagrantly cheat in Decor Duels. For hiders, it’s trivially easy to get out of bounds and effectively become uncatchable within the time limit. And seekers either playing the Hunter class or in possession of a certain food item can activate an ability, Track Humanoids, that for some inexplicable reason works in Decor Duel and lets you just…see where everyone is on the map.
Okay, so that’s Decor Duels, but surely everything else works fine, right? Wrong. The new bonus roll system is broken, for instance. It was advertised as bad luck protection, where if you got an item on a bonus roll, it would be removed from the pool in the future so you’d have better chances over time to get useful gear. But it just…doesn’t do that:
Housing, one of the big, pillar features of the current Midnight expansion, got shut off entirely yesterday on North American servers due to a “critical bug” that “would cause unacceptable errors for some players.” It’s not clear what that bug was, exactly, and housing was turned back on this morning. But not being able to access homes at all was a pretty jarring thing to log into yesterday.
Some players are also reporting issues with L’ura, the final boss of the current raid tier. In her final phase, L’ura puts a debuff of gradually increasing strength on everyone that does more and more damage with each stack. You can normally get rid of it by standing in a ring of light held by one party member. But it sounds like that light isn’t removing those stacks, making L’ura entirely unkillable if you’re unlucky enough to run into this problem.
There are all sorts of other bizarre things being reported. Paladins seem to be having some really weird damage issues. Some people can mount up or even cast spells while moving which, while very fun, is also game-breaking levels of almost certainly unintended behavior. There’s one Delve (effectively a mini dungeon that can be done by one person) that involves picking up a mirror, but if you pick up the mirror it disables your strafe keys. And there are all sorts of other little things being reported across basically every type of content you can do.
Finally, there’s a lot of text being reported across this update that is in desperate need of a copy editor:
Players are…not happy. One person called it the “messiest patch in a long time“, while others are calling on Blizzard to rethink its current cycle of releasing major patches every eight weeks. Speaking personally, it really is an astonishing amount of issues for a fairly whatever patch. This isn’t a major story patch adding new areas or raids, and while this wouldn’t be excusable there either, it would maybe be a touch more understandable. A handful of fun but inconsequential events shouldn’t break the game for this many people. Blizzard has yet to make a statement about what’s going on here, but I’m willing to bet we see some patches get pushed real quick over the next couple of days.