Since I’ve been playing an absolutely insane amount of WoW in the past few days, due specifically to the experience point boost from Demon Invasions, I figured I’d jot down a few thoughts about what’s changed, exactly, from Warlords of Draenor.
- Many quality-of-life improvements made their way into the game. Almost all transmogrification equipment now being bound to your Battle.net account, and not needing to be in your inventory, solved my problem of having a full bank for pretty much two expansions now! There’s also no “dual-spec” or anything of the sort – you simply switch to the spec of your choice at any time when you’re out of combat. The same goes for the talent themselves, which can be switched at will in cities (a special item is required to do this outside of safe zones, but that’s an acceptable compromise to make the Inscription profession relevant). Glyphs disappeared completely, which is one less thing to worry about for character development. I’d call it “stream-lining”, to say the least!
- And that applies directly to the ability sets of every class! Each one of them now feels distinctive, which certainly wasn’t the case before. For example, I always found Hunter boring, precisely because Marksmanship, Survival, and Beast Mastery mostly played the same. Part of that comes down to ability overlap between all three specializations, which had the same abilities for the most part. That kind of bloat is completely gone, and in its place all three different play styles now have their own ability sets and unique skills with little shared between them! I mean, seriously, Survival is now a melee spec, which sounds completely nuts, and Marksman Hunter don’t even need to have a pet, supposedly the defining attribute of the class! But, all these little tweaks make it feel much more distinctive.
- That also plays into the simplification of rotations. Specializations now specialize in particular kinds of damage. After playing quite a few classes for some hours, I can say that ability rotations got a major overhaul. 5 buttons seems like the maximum amount of regular buttons for your mental stack, with a few cool downs thrown here and there for good measure and class differentiation. That goes for the tanks too, which all have unique strengths which the new systems now play into (Death Knight has a lock on AoE tanking, just for example, and Warriors still feel like a jack-of-all-trades, for good or ill).
- In something I thought I’d never say about World of WarCraft, it now feels a lot more like an action game than an RPG. For whatever reason, Blizzard completely revamped the animations, esthetics, and sound effects of nearly every combat action you take in the game to make them more…satisfying. A Fury Warrior’s Whirlwind attack now sounds crunchy, as your avatar spins like a maniac with red swirls following the edgers of his blades. This is, of course, a more intangible factor, but man if this doesn’t improve a lot of what has made this 12-year old game feel much duller over time. I think Blizzard must have realized this too! Anyway, I like this change a lot, and it makes fighting stuff much more interesting despite not adding anything on a mechanical basis.
- I like these Demon Invasions, which I point out is part of the reasons why I’ve been playing the game so much. Hearkening back to the world events of old, Legion forces rain down from the skies while Alliance and Horde work together (or don’t, depending on how aggressive everybody feels) to kill all the things. Surprisingly, this works a lot better than you suspect – they function like timed raid instances, with tons of bosses and mechanics you have to pay attention to in order to survive. For max level character, gear upgrades are incentive enough, and for lower level players the experience gains (at least, as of this moment after the Friday hotfix) are enormous. Thus, everybody rushes to the invasion locations, and the grand scale of the conflict really comes into view. This is how you do large-scale events in an MMO, guys! Course, there’s the problem of being flagged for PvP, or getting ganked by high level players with seemingly nothing else to do but annoy you (you don’t get experience if you’re dead), but that’s always been a part of the game.
- Last, but not least, Demon Hunters are…interesting. I’m not sure what to think of yet another DPS/melee hybrid class, but so far they seem like an interesting variation on the archetypes already in place. Think of them like Rogues, but with a surprisingly amount of mobility and probably the best interrupt in the entire game. I’m not sure how they’re going to fit in the pantheon of tanking classes, or what role they fill exactly, but I’m interested to see how things turn out in the metagame. One thing’s for sure: they will be PvP monsters.
So, that’s about it. I’m sure I will have more to say when the expansion comes out good and proper!
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