Patch 9.0 is huge. There's stuff I definitely have yet to do in this first patch of the expansion. The Shadowlands are a fascinating setting and the lore-expansion to WoW is amazing.
It's just a real shame that things have been going so slowly.
Shadowlands was delayed by about a month, and as someone who was playing on the Beta, I was fully in favor of the delay. Things needed another coat of polish, and frankly, it seemed like they put in just the right amount of time to get things working mostly well. 9.0 came in as a big success.
9.1, while it has been announced and we have a good sense of the content it's bringing, is still coming way, way later than I'm sure Blizzard originally intended. Based on typical PTR cycles, it's possible that the gulf of time between 9.0 and 9.1 will actually be longer than the gap of 7.0 and 7.2 - the entire 7.0 and 7.1 cycles combined taking less time than 9.0.
Castle Nathria's a good raid, but I've also hit a point where I'm just not running it anymore, having gotten a bit burnt out. (The fact that the droprates are so low has also kind of sapped my will to try to farm the transmog appearances even though I really, really want to get the full cloth plague-doctor set.)
Now, the explanation for this is obvious: we're now over a year into a quarantine dealing with Covid-19 that has been a huge disruption to nearly every industry. Hell, we were supposed to get the Black Widow movie from Marvel a year ago but as much as I've looked forward to that, I ain't going anywhere near a movie theater until I'm 2 weeks past my 2nd vaccine dose (so a little under a month) and case numbers are down to a point where it's unlikely they'll surge back again. (Remember, contagions work exponentially - if cases begin to drop faster, they'll shrink even faster. Unfortunately, cases are actually on the rise right now, so unless we get serious about masks, vaccines, staying home, and all the other methods we're using to deprive the virus of its ability to spread, it's going to surge back.)
Even if Blizzard has gotten up to nearly their previous capacity for progress converting to at-home work, there was a big interruption, and WoW is a game where the people working on it are always many steps ahead of what's actually live.
So 9.1 is taking far longer than was expected.
It's not something I think any WoW fan is happy about (including those working on the game,) but it's also something that I totally understand.
To me, though, my biggest fear is the pressure of what is to come next. Shadowlands is the high-concept, tier four (to borrow a D&D term) kind of story that I really love playing through in WoW. While I get that grounded stories can be fun, I'll be honest in that I really wish that BFA had focused far, far more on the cosmic-horror epicness of N'zoth rather than retreading the old Alliance/Horde conflict yet again.
I want Shadowlands to have a chance to be everything it could be. Warlords of Draenor was an expansion that was cut short - whether planned to be because of a naive ambition to make WoW expansions an annual thing or simply because they realized that the expansion just wasn't really all that, you know, good. Warlords only really got the one major content patch (people from Blizzard have admitted that the ill-received 6.1, aka "selfie camera patch" should have been a minor 6.0.5 or something) but while it was tough to be stuck in our garrisons for two years, I'm not sure there was really anything I was truly missing from their having jumped off of that to work on Legion (Warlords would have been an... infinitely cooler expansion if they'd leaned into the time travel weirdness of it).
But Shadowlands is such a cooler concept than Warlords was, and it would be a real shame if they cut major content patches in order to keep pace for the expansion to follow it (crazy to think that it's only a few months until we'll find out what that is, assuming that things follow the usual schedule.)
I don't think anyone expected the quarantine to last as long as it has, and unfortunately, the dismissal of its importance has, you know, extended its necessity. The deployment of the vaccine(s) is a very hopeful sign, but we're also basically in the largest drug trial in history, learning how effective it is, and the logistical challenge of getting those shots into peoples' arms is an enormous one.
But if distribution continues at its current rates, there's a chance that by the end of this year, we're going to be looking at a far more normal world.
And hopefully, in the little WoW corner of that world, we'll have the time to see the full potential of this expansion in all its glory.
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