World of Warcraft's long-awaited 9.1 update, Chains of Domination, is now live

After waiting a staggeringly long time, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands' first major update is now live. Yup, after 218 days (the longest stretch between an expansion launch and its x.1 patch in WoW history), Chains of Domination is finally here.

That means there's actually a whole new swathe of things to do in the Shadowlands again—including a whole new zone to explore, more Covenant levels to grind, and (starting next week) a new raid, mega-dungeon, and seasonal update for Mythic+ dungeons and PvP. 

I've been hesitant to get my hopes up over update 9.1, but I'm actually pretty excited to jump back into the Shadowlands again. There's dozens of significant changes that address a lot of the complaints players had with Shadowlands' endgame, including a sizable overhaul of Torghast, the new roguelike dungeon that was added back in November. Torghast no longer imposes a limit on how many times you can die before failing a run but instead awards a score based on how efficient your run is, and it also has all new wings and secret levels that can lead to some nifty cosmetic rewards.

In addition to that, players can now fly in the Shadowlands' four main leveling areas and use their non-flying mounts in The Maw, which also has had a facelift and is now much less imposing and threatening.

There's still a lot to talk about—especially as the weeks go by and new features are rolled out including the Sanctum of Domination 10-boss raid and Tazavesh megadungeon. For more info about Chains of Domination, check out our comprehensive overview.

Or you can just log in and start playing it.

Steven Messner

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.