WoW Shadowlands: Pre-Patch is Finally Live!

Prepatch shadowlands
The Pre-Patch for Shadowlands Arrives! (Image Credit: Activision/Blizzard)

The WoW Shadowlands pre-patch is available for download and ready to play, not before it completely crashed Blizzard's Severs! Nevertheless, we go over what the pre-patch has to offer, so find out about all the recent news right here!

The highly anticipated WoW expansion, the Shadowlands, has been officially delayed and its release date remains unannounced. However, the pre-patch has hit the live servers and players can now test out the new systems and features of the upcoming expansion.

Blizzard uses these pre-patches to transition players from expansion to expansion and to make the experience less jarring. They fundamentally change your character and remove several powerful items you have collected in Battle for Azeroth (BFA). The borrowed power you are given each expansion is taken back to make way for the next set of powerful items.

Shadowlands Pre-Patch Crashes Blizzard Launcher!

The blizzard launcher is basically the Steam Launcher, but for Blizzard games. To play any Blizzard game you need to first open your Blizard launcher, but because of the Shadowlands Pre-Patch, this was not possible. Many if not all players in the EU were met with a log-in queue! A massive queue in some cases!

Players who tried to go around the Bizzard Launcher, by opening WoW directly, were simply met with a login error.

Needless to say, the servers were a little busy the night of October 14, but things seem to be working at the moment!

Server problems aside, which seem to be resolved, The Shadowlands pre-patch brings many changes to the core of World of Warcraft gameplay. The most important changes will be highlighted in the following section and if you are a hardcore WoW fan we suggest the never-ending patch notes posted on WoW’s News page. We hook you up with TLDR!

Returning Class Abilities and Changes

Over the 15 years of WoW, many class abilities have come and gone. Blizzard now brings back several iconic abilities to each class in hopes to reinvigorate the class’ feel. What does this mean? A Hunter feels like your playing a tracker, a master marksman, and an animal lover! For example, you get back Hunter’s Mark! Mages can finally once again use all facets of the elements, Frostbolt, Fireball, and Arcane Missiles! Try to find your class in the pre-patch notes and see the returning abilities for yourself. In addition to returning abilities, each class is tweaked in prep. For Shadowlands.

PVP Scaling is Out!

Finally, PVP scaling is removed! Rejoice! Now if you deal 1000 damage to a player it actually deals 1000 damage on both player’s screens. That may sound obvious, but Blizzard is far from a normal gaming company. They decided to make BFA complicated and scale numbers up and down separately for both players so if you healed someone for 566 HP, on the other player’s screen it would read a different number! As you can imagine players despised this system and are happy to see it gone. Let's keep it simple Blizzard 1+1=2.

Item Changes: Goodbye Corruption!

The pre-patch has removed all Corruption effects from the game, but your Azerite essences and traits still work until the Shadowlands is released. Your Legendary cloak no longer gives you Corruption resistance or an on-use effect, but you still can use it as a stat-stick.

Crafters can now make items that scale with level using the new Relics of the Past system, this will allow you to make items for lower-level characters. Also, the Item level has been squished down from 465 to 120!

Revamped Leveling Experience

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The New Leveling Zone! (Image Credit: Blizzard)

Exile’s Reach is the new starting area for levels 1 to 10. This place is designed to guide players through current WoW systems and core gameplay mechanics in a more streamlined and story-driven way. The level cap has completely changed, it is currently down from 1-120 to the new 1-50 and then 1-60 when Shadowlands is live. Blizzard has stated that leveling from 1-50 is 30% faster than leveling 1-120.

Allied Races Unlocked and New Character Customization

Reputation is no longer needed to make an Allied Race character, but you still need to do the questline to unlock the race in the character select screen. There are numerous new character customization options that we already covered in WoW Shadowlands: New Character Customization.

That wraps up the major changes to WoW and we finally can say goodbye to the very average expansion that was BFA. We can now look forward to the seemingly promising Shadowlands even with the recently announced delays! If you want to know more about the story behind Shadowlands check out the Shadowlands Afterlives series!

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Paul Hayes

I did my BA in English Lit. and Language Studies at Western University in Canada and I use to play MTG competitively, but sadly to no success so I write instead! If a game doesn't challenge me, it's not the...