World of Warcraft players have spent the Patch 12.1 pre-season doing something slightly unusual.
Filling a Season 2 Great Vault before Season 2 has technically started.
Naturally, the Vault immediately found a way to make that confusing.
Blizzard has hotfixed two Great Vault problems affecting Patch 12.1 activities, including incorrect reward previews from Ritual Sites and missing Vault credit from one Delve.
The important part is the good news:
Blizzard says next week's Great Vault should award the intended rewards.
Ritual Sites Were Showing the Wrong Great Vault Rewards
The first problem involved Ritual Sites.
Players completing the new Patch 12.1 activity could see Great Vault reward levels that did not properly match the Ritual Site tiers currently available during the pre-season.
That understandably caused some concern.
If the interface tells you that this week's activity is preparing a certain reward for next Tuesday, most players tend to assume the interface has at least consulted the game first.
Apparently not.
Blizzard says the bug caused Ritual Sites to
appear to grant Great Vault rewards inconsistent with the available tiers.
That display problem has now been fixed.
Next Week’s Vault Should Still Give the Correct Loot
This is the most important clarification.
The bug did not mean Blizzard intended to hand out the incorrect rewards shown by the faulty preview.
Blizzard says that when the Great Vault opens next week, it will reward the
intended Tier 1–6 reward levels for activities completed during this opening week.
So if you looked at your Vault and thought the numbers seemed suspicious, you do not need to redesign your entire Season 2 gearing plan around them.
The interface was wrong.
The eventual reward should not be.
That is a substantially better problem to have.
Shadowguard Point Wasn’t Giving Vault Credit at All
The second issue was more concrete.
Completing
Shadowguard Point: Shadowguard Survivor could fail to grant Great Vault credit entirely.
Blizzard has now fixed that too.
This matters because the Patch 12.1 pre-season is already counting eligible activities toward the first Season 2 Great Vault.
We've seen Blizzard deliberately make this week more meaningful than the usual quiet gap between seasons.
Mythic 0 is already dropping useful Champion gear.
A carefully used Trovehunter's Bounty can even produce Hero-track gear from Delves.
And the activities you're completing now are building toward next week's Vault.
Losing credit because one Delve forgot to tell the Vault you were there was therefore rather more annoying than an ordinary cosmetic tracking bug.
The Timing Could Have Been Much Worse
Fortunately, Blizzard caught these problems before players could actually open the first Season 2 Vault.
That gives the developers time to correct the tracking and reward systems before the theoretical numbers become actual loot.
It also prevents one of WoW's least enjoyable Tuesday traditions:
Opening the Great Vault.
Looking at the item level.
Looking at your activity history.
Looking back at the item level.
Then spending 45 minutes trying to work out whether mathematics has changed overnight.
Season 2’s Great Vault Is Already Complicated Enough
The Great Vault is becoming particularly interesting in Season 2 because it is no longer just about choosing between pieces of equipment.
We recently looked at how Nebulous Voidcores may make skipping actual Great Vault gear surprisingly attractive once Bonus Rolls become available.
That system already gives serious players plenty to calculate.
We probably don't need the UI inventing additional reward tiers for entertainment.
For now, Blizzard says the Ritual Site display is corrected, Shadowguard Point should grant credit properly, and next week's Vault should deliver the reward levels it was always supposed to.
The Great Vault remains mysterious.
But at least it should now be mysterious on purpose.
Source: Blizzard Entertainment, August 13 hotfixes.
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