Ten Days + and an announcement of 5.1

Holy crap, Blizzard is really trying to live up to their promise of more content, faster.

A mere 10 days after the expansion's launch Blizzard has announced patch 5.1, when many people (all but three members of my guild, for instance) are not yet level 90, and we've only just been able to scratch the surface of the various daily reputations (which I'm finding a bit better than older ones, particularly Tillers, but ask me again in a couple weeks if I'm not exalted - Golden Lotus, I'm looking at you in particular. Though the one-shot quests at each rep-level are a very welcome punctuation.)

Anyway, they've announced that 5.1 - which does not include new raids, which is a good thing - is hitting the PTRs soon. Who is going to be playing on the PTR this early in an expansion, I don't know, but there's some cool stuff, like the Brawler's Guild, which will allow you to test your soloing capabilities in solo instances (something I always thought would be cool. Man... I just realized I have not really done any Scenarios. There's SO MUCH STUFF TO DO in this expansion.)

Also, the promised Horde and Alliance armies are going to land. Now, I assume this will either be phased for level 90 people, or it will take place on that mysterious big island off the coast of Townlong Steppes.

There's also some new ways to both improve the quality of captured battle pets as well as using Valor Points to upgrade gear (apparently even in quality. At this point I'm not even thinking about that so much as "oh hey, heroic quality piece. Automatic upgrade!")

Mind you, this is not a raid patch. Nor is it a dungeon patch, like 4.1's Rise of the Zandalari. The new philosophy seems to be more patches, more frequently, but doing smaller bursts of content. Think of it as if Trial of the Crusader and Isle of Conquest were separate patches, or if Transmogrification/Void Storage had been a separate patch from the Hour of Twilight.

I think this is showing that Blizzard didn't really lose their touch in Cataclysm as much as they were just spread too thin. It's easy to remember Cataclysm for the endless months of running Zul'Aman'Gurub over and over and over, or the hours-long slogs through Grim Batol, or those dull, personality-less Tol'vir, but when you look at the amazing effort they put in to revamping the entire 1-58 experience, you have to give credit where credit's due.

Now that the 1-58 climb is in good shape (Outland's probably the weakest step now, but it's not terrible) they can focus on the endgame, and boy howdy did they do their work.

Admittedly, 6 new dungeons and 3 revamped ones is a little on the small side, but then we've also got a bunch of scenarios, and finally another big raid tier. (Tier 11 only had 12, or 13 if you counted Baradin Hold, which I don't really. I consider that to be a medium sized tier.) Mogu'shan Vaults and Heart of Fear each have 6 bosses (they really seem to be sticking to this "multiple small raids" thing, which I still don't like) and Terrace of Endless Spring has 4. Then there are the world bosses, though those are something slightly different from conventional raiding.

Anyway, in the just-over-a-week of Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard has earned back a lot of credibility (not to mention subscriptions.) I encourage them to keep things rolling.