What do you think of WoW’s Dastardly Duos event?

We’ve seen a staggered release of content throughout The War Within patch 11.1.5, the last bit of which is now live this week with the Dastardly Duos event. Players can queue up in Dornogal, Stormwind, or Orgrimmar to teleport to the Demolition Dome and take on, as the event name suggests, pairs of fiends — once again from the long list of foes we have vanquished in adventures past.

I generally have two approaches to chunks of content like this. Sometimes I will overprepare, test things out on the PTR, calculate exactly how much currency I need to acquire to buy all of my chosen rewards, and hit the ground running on the first day of an event. Other times I mark down the date that the new content launches and blindly walk around the current capital city looking for a new NPC to explain what to do. Using the latter strategy for Dastardly Duos has been a bit weird.

Maybe it was all of the promos of Liberation of Undermine with Torq and Flarendo squaring up in Undermine’s version of the coliseum, but clearing some trash only to have a normal-sized Lord Walden and Baron Silverlaine charge at me was sort of underwhelming. Encountering the same few bosses on subsequent runs was also a let down. I had been hoping for a true menagerie of villains of the past.

More bosses will appear, but only after the event progresses over the next few weeks. With the whole run only lasting until July 15, the layering of timegating feels like too much stress for something meant to be a quick, fun diversion. Yes, I want the awesome-looking turtle mount, but which week do I have to complete the quest to get it? Is it just that week?

Making things that much weirder was this week’s hotfix that introduced a bug where your item level will scale to 1 instead of the intended 619 if you are wearing a shirt or tabard. I know that Mages are supposed to be glass cannons, but I felt a little bit more like an aerogel water pistol in the Demolition Dome pit until I found a forum post with many other confused players and a simple, if silly, solution. I don’t know if I’ve taken off Precious’s Ribbon in over a decade, I should probably throw it in the wash.

So how has your Dastardly Duos experience been? Is it what you expected, are you ready to wrap it up and dip back in for a later reward, or are you thoroughly enjoying standing atop the high-score podium?