I would like to do some honest, straight forward reporting on all the cool new stuff that WoW Expansion pack is going to give us but really, it all reeks of “Same Shit Different Cereal.” Instead of an hour of excitement and unique innovations at Blizzard’s big Gamescom reveal, we got served middling portions of features we wanted to see ages ago and, better yet, features no one asked them to take out being re-implemented.
What immediately springs to mind is the idea of Class quests and class agency. If you’ve played WoW at all, you know they’ve been nerfing and simplifying the way classes played since a few patches into Cataclysm a half decade ago. Where there was once a time you might find a Warlock necessary for their Damage Over Time management and a Mage for crowd control only they could provide. Raids, dungeons and classes had been simplified to the point your two choices are literally “Do I want range or melee?”
Class Questing and Class Utility used to be real things that were -gasp- actually fun. I still keep my fond memories of my night elf priestess soloing her Benediction/Anathema weapon quest, painstakingly gathering the materials for my Warlock’s dreadsteed and taking my Paladin through his early ‘Blood Knight’ quests. A lot of this was removed because who wants actually engaging activities in their RPGs? This new WoW expansion announcement tried to stir my loins with the prospect my classes will matter again, at least lore wise, though I couldn’t help but think ‘Oh sure, gee thanks for giving me back that thing we already had.”
Now there are a few new thin deli slices of delicious class goodness lined up. There are now class ‘halls’ where you can sit down and give Mr. Belding a hard time. You’ll also be recruiting new followers who our WoW spokespersons promise will carry a lot more agency and give your toon benefits, but in all honesty, it sounds more like they’re just condensing ‘garrison abilities’ (for those not in the know: zone wide powers that gave you a beneficial effect) into the 108 Stars you recruit. There was no mention of class utility and if Shaman will actually feel different from Monk which should feel different from Paladin, as when our conference covered dungeons they opted not to talk about class efficacy and armor but rather what cool shades of dark green and dark purple and dark red we’ll see next.
On the subject of dungeons and lore. Illidan is back. Sigh. I jokingly referred to Warlords of Draenor being “Burning Crusade 2” to my friends and guildmates. I now know I was wrong, Warlords of Draenor was instead Burning Crusade 2 Part 1. Since it’s now known Warlords of Draenor was hacked up to meet quotas and deadlines, with a recent content patch just now releasing more features WoD promised, it’s not surprising to see material planned for WoD being dropped into the next expac. Problem is this just makes it that much harder to get excited, especially since Activision-Blizzard (had to remind you Activision is part of this nonsense) wants to push forward a plan to release expansion packs with more regularity. We know how well this tactic did for Ubisoft and Assassin’s Creed, and each Call of Duty Activision releases is sure a fresh and original excitingly good time. But hey, you’ll buy the WoW expansion anyway because how else will you play with your friends?
We will be going to the Broken Isles, which -sounds- like the Southern Isles, but no goblins in sight (because fuck a race after introducing them). We’ll also be delving into Night Elf history. Azshara is mentioned in the reveal but it sounds like she’s destined to just be a raid boss in Asuna. The Emerald Dream has also been reduced to just a raid, because WoW players have been begging for an Emerald Dream expansion since the tidbits we were leaked in Vanilla, so why not have it all amount to a singular dungeon? Sylvanas is yet again skirting a line between good and evil, only now she does it with belly covered up. We’re also going to be getting lore on races you didn’t know you wanted more lore on such as the Val’kyr. “Didn’t we run that into the ground with Wrath and Cataclysm?” you ask. Nope! Because Blizzard says they didn’t tell it right the first time, you didn’t get the -full- story, and the Val’kyr are related to “The Light.” If you’ve been a long time WoW player you know how much simplifying every explanation with ‘The Light” worked for the story. It worked in much the same way Metal Gear explaining every plot hole with nanomachines or Mega Man pinning everything on Dr. Wily did. Badly.
We talked artifacts, class spec and how you interact with the story. This sounds kind of cool but yet again is an evolution of ideas we’ve seen a ton before. You’ll be finding an ancient artifact, a weapon, I suppose you’ll be building up over the course of the game. You can customize your artifact’s abilities and appearances, while Druids will get to customize their cat and bear forms. Again this sounds to be a bit of a combination of garrisons, transmogrification (transforming your gear to look like something else), and finding gear tokens during follower quests. So it’s nice to have this cool weapon that can manipulate your abilities, but this is another big WoW promise that sounds deeper and more complex on paper but might pan out to be simple with defacto cookie cutter builds. TRYING TO BE OPTIMISTIC.
There will be changes to the PvP honor system. They ragged on how horrible the original honor system was (I disagree, I’m one of those who misses World PvP), then the power disparity honor gear could give one player over the other. This latter part I agree with in spirit, it’s nice when PvP are pure skill matches and don’t reward players for grinding, but I’m not really sure how much it bugged me especially if you could still win if your game was strong enough. This new honor system introduces the concept of PvP only abilities and an honor leveling system, in their attempt to ‘balance’ PvP. While this sounds intriguing I can’t help but think this is just another layer of spreadsheet management as I tally up my honor currency to get my honor gear. I’ll be honest, I just want my Battleground objectives back, I had a blast in Arathi Basin and Tol Barad until they could be won while filing my nails.
So now for the big reveal and the only thing players got remotely excited about, including the bored nerdy girl in the front row who kept yawning (not my fault I focused in on her when the cameras insisted on floating her way). A brand new hero class; Demon Hunters. I want to be excited for this one but boy, is it hard. It’s hard for a number of reasons. It’s hard because back when Blizzard nerfed Death Knights to the point of being unplayable, Blizzard claimed it was because ‘hero classes were never meant to be stronger’ – they were, in fact for a time we all thought normal classes could ‘graduate’ to hero classes and conquer content – Blizzard instead ‘explained’ that hero classes are just meant to have a ‘unique starting area experience’ (then how do they differentiate between Monks or Blood Elf paladins or Tauren shaman?) and start at a higher level. Demon Hunter looks to be another primarily tanky class, which again, does little to distinguish it from our last two ‘new’ classes. Finally Demon Hunter abilities sure are Warlock like in appearance. Sort of Warlock/Warrior maybe. Sort of Death Knight.
I guess they have rad tattoos? And they get horns, which our presenter at this point pretty much calls you retarded if you don’t want Demon Hunter devil horns. Their abilities include a lot of metamorphisis *cough*warhammer*cough* and they seem to have a lot more of that movement utility Blizzard began experimenting with using Monks but never took anywhere. Unless you count accidentally pulling entire rooms with your dodge roll. The crowd at this point went nuts over the idea Demon Hunters could double jump, and looking at Demon Hunter gameplay they might have some of the maneuverability other MMO’s have adopted ages ago (even the worst of the worst, The Secret World and Conan, utilized strong mobility tactics). However again my extreme cynicism takes hold. Every class has one or more movement abilities now, and something that was once ‘cool’ when only a class like the Shaman or Druid had it, became commonplace and mundane and at times, flat out useless. I suppose I’ll just enjoy my Demon Hunter for the first month when they’re overpowered as hell then place it in moth balls with my Monk and Death knight.
So Blizzard wants you to join them in the beta open ‘later this year’, which means the expansion itself can’t be far behind. I’ve been pretty yay and meh on the different expansions, Burning Crusade started yay and got meh, Wrath is a firm yay, Cataclysm a huge meh, Pandas a meeehyay and Warlords a yaaaymeh. I don’t really have much faith in this next one, especially since it tries nothing daring and just returns to a bunch of ideas we’ve seen before, but I guess I will be happy if playing a Warlock, ya know, matters again.
