I’m pretty neutral on World of Warcraft’s current in-between patch content—this sort of thing isn’t necessarily Blizzard’s strong suit, and you get losers and winners. I’m already deeply ambivalent to the Omnium Folio, but I’ve been having an acceptable time in its void invasion zones. Sometimes it’s nice to just turn your brain off for a few quests and scrape some hyper-specific currency together.
Well, except for one feature—the Lighthook Grapple. Being an MMO, my action bars are already flooded with mounts, transmog outfits, potions, and my actual abilities. So imagine my surprise when I zone out of Naigtal, and the big, obstructive “put this on your action bar” button for the Lighthook Grapple is still staring at me.
If you put it on your action bar, the button vanishes. If you dare remove it from your action bar, however, it returns like a scorned spectre from beyond the grave. This is the first time I’ve ever felt “Just Monika”-‘d by a user interface.
I should note, for the uninitiated, that this ability is pretty much useless anywhere that isn’t Naigtal, a middle-of-the-patch cycle, optional quest zone with zero bearing on the rest of the game. There’s basically no reason for this thing to be on your UI if you aren’t in Naigtal, it can’t be used anywhere else.
And yet, it insists—as has Blizzard on the game’s forums, with one developer writing: “After investigation by the development team, this is apparently and technically working as intended, and we do not plan on changing how this works at the moment.”
Which is a little baffling. Nothing game-ruining, mind. I can deal with it—but it raises a few questions. If these void invasion zones aren’t time-limited (and it’s likely they won’t be) will the Lighthook Grapple go away, or will it be in my spellbook, and my action bar, forever? And if so, uh, why. Why are we doing that?
Salvation for your action bar real estate might be in the future, though, as a follow-up post by another dev in the very same thread reads: “While we have no specific details or ETA to share, I’d like to inform y’all that the team is still looking into this situation and possible changes/fixes to the Lighthook Grapple action.
“So while what Yryadorne mentioned above still applies, please rest assured that your feedback is heard and options are being evaluated to address your concerns and reports.” As to how this happened, I’ve got some theories. The first is that a developer did indeed look at this and go ‘yes, this is good’, which I honestly think is unlikely.
My money’s on the idea that this is a band-aid solution because for some archaic reason, having it work the other way messed something up. Like that time a fixed elevator from a 13-year-old raid broke Player Housing. And, at some point in the process, a developer went ‘this is good enough, we’ve got a patch to ship’ and put a more reasonable grappling hook on their to-do list.
