What gaming did you do during the patch 11.0.1 downtime?

The prepatch for The War Within arrived “yesterday” and with it came a lot of neat new features — especially Warbands. Of course we knew Warbands were going to be a significant undertaking with it likely being the biggest technical challenge since connected realms. This was reflected in the initial eight hour downtime announcement, an interval that has almost doubled by the time I’m writing this. While 14 hours isn’t the longest World of Warcraft has been down, it’s not often that we see double-digit downtime these days. That said, with the implementation of a feature such as Warbands you do want to make sure they get it right and I’d gladly take a 24-hour downtime if it meant no serious issues with the conversion.

Just because retail WoW was down didn’t mean all versions were unavailable — well ok, the beta and PTR were both down, but Classic and Cataclysm Classic were still available for all those who were inspired to travel back to a time when double-digit downtimes were more common. The beta being unavailable did hurt though as I could’ve used the time to research the upcoming expansion, and since I never really got into Classic I wasn’t willing to play now just because retail was still down.

Downtime in WoW means an opportunity to do other things, though. I’ve recently resubscribed to Final Fantasy 14 after two years for the new Dawntrail expansion and played a lot of it last night; I’m still working my way through the Endwalker patches before getting to Dawntrail content (I’ve just started patch 6.2) but I got to have a lot of unexpected fun with my pal Y’shtola even though I’m now afraid what she may do to me in retaliation. I’m playing the new Viper job, although I’m not certain I like it more than Reaper — I’ll have to see how it plays at level 100 before I decide for sure.

What did you do during the downtime? Did you play Classic instead? Did you try out the new Hearthstone expansion Perils on Paradise, or maybe you started working on Reinhardt’s new Mythic Weapon in Overwatch 2? Or did you try out the new puzzle game The Star Named EOS which arrived yesterday on all platforms? Perhaps you decided to start your fifth playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3? Or did you skip gaming entirely?