Basically, 0 work has been done on the game’s performance since November, and the performance is horrible in Valdrakken and every time there are a lot of people on-screen during a major event. World bosses run just like Val if not worse, and WoW is currently the biggest and worst-running MMO on the market.
I was refusing to play ESO and GW2 for years because they ran like trash too whenever you were near a city, but even those 2 now run drastically better while WoW is embarrassingly bad despite being the most profitable one, and much worse now after 10.1.
Prior to this patch, I was getting about 60-70 in Valdrakken during the day (also terrible compared to the rest of the world because frame times are awfully erratic), which has now dropped to the mid-40s. The only way to get back to the 60s now is to drop view distance and environmental detail to 0 and have the game look like a joke and worse than the original vanilla in 2004.
Here are SSs for the game with max settings, sliders dropped to 0, and the system specs (imgur . com /a/qz4NrIb). I wouldn’t be surprised if the game is still using one or two CPU threads properly like we’re in 2004 once again.
Zaralek entrance is also a joke because it is the equivalent of squeezing through narrow crevices and trees in the last gen of AAA games, it’s a loading screen but worse, because actual loading screens are faster on fast CPUs and SSDs. This just wastes your time like Shadowlands wormholes, and it’s not immersive because you just know that it’s a loading screen.
It existing in the world this way and possibly even degrades performance everywhere because idk what else could have dropped my average Valdrakken fps from 60-70 to 40-50.
Edit: updating with hardware since I don’t know if anyone can access the link: 4080/5800x3D/32gb 3600mhz/NVMe
Updating the main post with this as well so people can try it out:
I managed to narrow it down to AMD SMT (multi-threading), since disabling it in BIOS got me back to the framerates I was getting prior to 10.1, 60s or low 70s when the crowd isn’t completely wild. This is still bad obviously and it doesn’t account for Valdrakken’s awful performance in general, but it mitigates the 10.1 degradation.