World of Warcraft's on the quality-of-life boost warpath, with fixes including an auto-loot setting that's been mildly inconveniencing alt-lovers for years

World of Warcraft's ramping up to its first major "big number" patch, Curse of Ula'tek—in addition to some interesting changes to how world bosses work, Blizzard's also taking aim at some quality-of-life features. And while these updates haven't all exactly been frictionless, I've gotta tip my hat to Blizzard, here—a lot of these are major plusses.

A recent blog details what Blizzard's already implemented, as well as what's to come. The most notable items here are fixes to auto-looting and area looting, but there's also been performance upgrades to the very-pretty Silvermoon City, faster Prey hunts, EXP buffs, and—in a move that's genuinely really important for the hardcore raiding scene—reduced repair costs.

But Curse of Ula'tek's got a few big upgrades to come, too. Profession knowledge points can now be reset once per profession, crafted housing decor should be cheaper, and the Voidforge will be accessible from Silvermoon City.

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There's also UI improvements—and while I'm excited about certain bumps to the experience, like finally being able to see map coordinates without an addon, the most vital by far is the auto-loot setting, which no longer resets when you make a new character.

For those of you who've never had to experience the utter existential horror that is figuring out where a setting in an options menu is more than once, it was genuinely kind of annoying—WoW has a setting that lets you automatically loot everything from a monster with one click, instead of shift-clicking like some sort of peasant.

However, this option was character-specific for some arcane and unknowable reason, meaning any time you made an alt, you'd have the experience of looting your first monster, wondering if you were having a lagspike, remembering that you don't have auto-loot on, and then spending five unreclaimable minutes of your life finding and enabling the option again. No more.

There are also some bug fixes, the one I'm most excited for being: "a number of recurring patterns that could cause players to become stuck in outdoor world combat far longer than expected. This will not address all of these situations, but it should be far less common in Curse of Ula’tek."

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I am not kidding when I say that 90% of the reason I play a rogue is to be able to Vanish my way out of combat without having to wait for whatever's chasing me to stop locking me out of my mount. That, and the big annoying smoke cloud I can ruin people's day with as part of my rotation.