Fractures in Time hit servers this past week and brought Time Rifts, a new mega-dungeon, and a brand new evoker spec. Additionally, there were several other updates, including the ability to trade with players cross-realm, which has sadly been disabled because it caused some server instability issues. However, for this column, I will focus on the first three updates I mentioned and the ups and downs with each. Even though this is a “mini” patch, there was too much to review in one article.

Time Rifts

As I mentioned in my previous column, I was disappointed with how engaged I felt with Zaralek Cavern. Not needing to log in a lot worked out well because June was incredibly busy, but I also didn’t have much I particularly wanted to log in for aside from raiding. I was hopeful that the Time Rifts coming with the Fractures in Time update would be fun and give me a reason to do things out in the world. They have, but it took a little to get there, and there are still some issues with how they run.

On the Tuesday of the update, I grouped up with some of my guildmates, and we tackled the Time Rift together to see what was up with it. Well, first, we didn’t know we had to each talk to Soridormi to start things off; we thought just being in the area would be enough. So, a few of us had to loop back and talk to her to get assigned tasks. Secondly, we quickly noticed that being in a group didn’t mean anything. We were all getting different tasks all over the area of the event. I’m unsure if splitting groups like this is a good thing in open-world content, but it was a bit of a disappointment since we were looking forward to experiencing everything together.

The other thing that was a bit of a surprise was that occasionally items would drop, giving a quest and netting us some extra rep and extra currency for the new rewards. However, since these items are small and on the ground, where hundreds of other players are running around, seeing these items was a challenge at times. I didn’t even know it had happened until one of my guildmates mentioned it. Since then, I’ve primarily relied on seeing the ! pop-up on the minimap to let me know when there is a random quest to get.

After the first section of the event, which resembles the fish feast in that players are assigned tasks and completing these powers up a bar, leading to better rewards, the last phase is entering the time rift and fighting some alternate version character to restore our timeline. Some of these are quite interesting, but I wish Blizzard had scaled them up to be bigger than they are because seeing who I’m fighting is difficult with all the other characters and spell animations flying around. For example, I was fighting alternate Varian Wrynn in one, but I only knew that because of nameplates. If not for that, I could have been fighting any humanoid and would have never known who it was. If he had been enlarged a bit, which might have been a bit silly, but it also would have allowed us to see who we were fighting, making the whole process feel a bit more interesting.

The biggest issue I’ve encountered is the immense amount of lag during both the open-world part and the rift instance. I don’t need to tell you it’s incredibly frustrating to encounter lag like this, but one way or the other, that’s bound to get better over time. Some of the other bugs I’ve seen are a more significant issue. The most frustrating thing is that if I’m at all slow to click and enter the time rift, I won’t get put in one. Instead, I’ll get a loading screen and appear back at Soridormi. I kept trying, and when I finally loaded into one, it was finished. I also saw another player who said they were randomly kicked out of the instance while fighting the boss, which is also a frustrating bug.

I love that the time rifts happen every hour on the hour, making them easy to plan for. No matter when I log on, it won’t be too long before another occurs. Also, it allows me to easily do other things between them. For example, I wanted to do a bunch of the time rifts Saturday morning, but I also wanted to spend some time leveling my rogue and working on her class hall. So, I ran around doing things on my rogue until about two minutes before the hour, then I switched to my main, did the time rift, then switched back with no downtime, and didn’t miss out on anything. It was an enjoyable way to spend the morning, and I quickly earned enough currency to buy the first mount I wanted from the vendor.

Dawn of the Infinite Mega-Dungeon

The mega-dungeons have generally been enjoyable in the past, though sometimes, getting a group together to work on a dungeon that can take multiple hours can be a real challenge. As such, I tend to enjoy them more when they are split in two. That said, I was really looking forward to Dawn of the Infinite as a new challenge and also because, unlike the previous mega-dungeons, this one had story implications for the main storyline of Dragonflight.

One significant point of contention with the mega-dungeons has always been that the difficulty can feel exclusionary. Having completed it this week, I have to say it feels like the most well-balanced mega-dungeon we’ve gotten. I went into it with a group having ilvls between 430 -437, so we are geared, but we aren’t at all mythic geared, and it wasn’t too bad. Most of the fights, we wiped once and could see what we did wrong, and on the second try, we killed the boss. Morchie was the only one we struggled with, and that had more to do with the fact we all play zoomed out all the way, so telling which was the real Morchie was a bit of a pain. Also, sometimes I would accidentally hit my friend with her frontal while trying to trap my clone. That fight will still probably be the hardest, but now that we know how to handle it, we shouldn’t have too much of an issue.

All that said, I was really excited when I heard they were planning to release the mega-dungeon in two parts that would be queueable in heroic. Unfortunately, they decided to hold the heroic version for 10.1.7. Even though, as I just explained, I’m not being kept from the content by it not being in the heroic queue, I’m disappointed they didn’t release it simultaneously. Sure, they’ve never done that with a mega-dungeon before; there’s a lot they’ve done in this expansion that they haven’t done before. Also, it would have helped more players to play the content now when it’s new, and doing so would have in no way negatively impacted the experience of players like me who want the harder challenge.

Aside from the heroic version yet to be released, my biggest disappointment with this dungeon is the reward for turning in the quest to complete it. Each boss in the dungeon drops aspect fragments, which is brilliant, and I need those. It also makes sense because it is a harder than normal mythic dungeon. However, the quest to complete the dungeon rewards wyrm crests, a lower tier reward than what the dungeon rewards. It just didn’t seem to make any sense and was incredibly disappointing. Also, I need something to do with all the lower-tier fragments/crests. My bags are overflowing with them, and deleting them feels terrible.

Augmentation Evoker

Ok, cards on the table; I’m sad that the black dragon aligned spec isn’t a tank. That just made so much sense to me, and it would be cool to have a mail-wearing tank. Nonetheless, a support spec focusing on buffing your friends is an exciting idea, and one some players have wanted for years. After one week with them in dungeons and raids, I love having them around, and their effect on the group is noticeable. Even without looking at warcraft logs, it just requires you to think about how much more other people are doing rather than focusing on what the evoker is doing.

It'll be interesting to see how things shake out over the long term, and support specs can take a lot of work to balance well. In other MMOs, support specs can swing wildly between not having much of an effect/not feeling rewarding to play and being so powerful that you think you always need at least one. The problem of Augmentation evokers being kicked out of groups is most likely a short-term problem, especially with how they are currently tuned. As more people get familiar with it and how to look at things, that should subside. I worry more about the feeling that it is mandatory to have them, especially in M+ content. That would leave all the other DPS fighting for one of two spots in groups if they all decide they need an Aug in the other DPS spot. I like that Blizzard is doing something different, but they have set themselves a challenging task.

Overall, I am enjoying this newest patch, and I am looking forward to spending more time in the mega-dungeon as well. However, there are some apparent gaps with this one that feel weirdly overlooked. One that I didn’t mention before was that the rep earned from doing time rifts doesn’t count for the weekly helping the accord quest, which is certainly a choice. I was so ready to be incredibly happy with all the new things, but the things tripping everything up for me feel conspicuous, and some of the choices seem incomprehensible.