So we arrive at the pre-expansion patch. I recently resubscribed about a month ago, after taking a year-long break from World of WarCraft. Somehow, Blizzard failed to release a single piece of new content in the interim, so I felt content to ignore Blizzard’s cash cow. Much as I loved Mists of Pandaria’s setting, music, story, and changes to the game, I can’t say I enjoyed the thought of paying Blizzard tons of money for zero effort on their part. Having done Siege of Orgrimmar enough to gear several characters to a maximum level (just on Raid Finder – I don’t have the patience for the rest, quite honestly), I “completed” the game for the time being.
Of course, like any good student of the School of WarCraft, the incoming bombshell that is Warlords of Draenor enticed me enough to come back – especially for pre-expansion patch! Usually, pre-expansion patches give you a taste of the overall mechanical changes World of WarCraft’s newest content will bring. From what I can tell, there’s not as many changes as you might suspect. Certain specs play pretty much the same as they did a year ago with minor changes here and there; a few changed completely, especially in overall playstyle. If there’s one thing that characterizes all of these changes, however, I think we could call it “streamlining”.
Like any long-running MMO that no one planned for a decade in advances, Blizzard kept adding abilities onto the core game. Rather than subtracting, they just kept adding until it reached a zenith in Wrath of the Lich King, where 3 different 71 point talent trees, glyphs, and giant spellbooks with dense ability rotations greeted the typical user of the game. Vanilla WoW was far too simple; tanking raid bosses literally consisted of spamming one ability, and that could be said for most classes in many contexts with rare exceptions. Burning Crusade fixed many of these issues by making classes far more interesting, but Wrath of the Lich King, though easier than its predecessors, just took things too far.
Since Cataclysm, they’re been pruning the list of skills to the bare essentials (or, at least, as simple as it could get without becoming boring), and I think they’ve just about hit the cap on how much pruning they could do. I tanked the newest 5-man dungeon, a revamp of Upper Blackrock Spire, and I could barely detect a difference between Toroenfuego from Pandaria and Toroenfuego from Warlords. Other than removing Cleave (which is now rolled into Heroic Strike via glyph), a few extremely situational cooldowns (mostly banners) and getting rid of rage generation from shouts, the rotation feels just as smooth as before. If anything, they have made tanking much more difficult via increased cooldown timers for your avoidance/defensive abilities like Shield Block and Shield Barrier (12 seconds, up from 9 seconds). With the reduced health pools from the item squish, using your abilities at the right time plays a far more important role than merely hitting those rotation cues.
The boss fights, for their part, seem tuned to kill you unless you’re over-geared or actually able to deal with various mechanics at once. One boss requires all players to move out of poison pools, stay behind several enemies, and also interrupt the boss on cue – if you don’t, things will go very wrong quickly. The new healing mechanics mean that a healer must plan their heals; faster casts heal the same amount as slower casts, but cause much more mana. Hence, if you throw a wrench into their plans by accident, they need to quickly make up the deficit. That means fights require pretty much everyone to know what’s happening, and that’s a notable change from Pandaria. In fact, I’m tempted to say that crowd control might actually make a return in the near future (at least on a PvE basis). Even DPS have to think, since all the bosses require them to deactivate switches or position themselves away from damage.
In this sense, Warlords of Draenor seems a return to Burning Crusade’s sensibilities (minue the annoying PvE gating) while keeping the continual improvements done to the game’s overall improvements to convenience and design. I am only making a very preliminary judgment on this, though, but much of UBRS and the various classes I played seem to confirm this move towards accessibility, interesting choices, and actual challenge. That’s all good! That they finally removed Justice and Valor points (making certain transmog gear more accesible) just seems like icing on the cake – getting rid of all these strange arbitrary gating mechanics seems fine and dandy.
On the other hand, the actual leveling process ends up ignored. Since you obtain a level 90 boost for buying the expansion (or paying $60 dollars), Blizzard simply added a giant experience bonus to each dungeon and almost every quest. I found myself gaining a level or more just through running one dungeon; before the patch, that would only give me a fourth of a level, and this is with full heirloom gear equipped. I imagine most people won’t go through the hassle of leveling (except me, because I need to play Druid BECAUSE), but it’s notable nonetheless. Probably the worrying part come from most of the people I met in dungeons having zero experience with their class, jumping right into instances with their fresh level 90 character. Most of them seemed fairly competent, but it’s pretty amazing what people don’t learn after playing the game for so long.
In any event, Warlords of Draenor looks like a rather good expansion from this cursory glance, although the lack of new options (and the removal/combining of old ones) means some classes don’t play all that different. Perhaps Blizzard will make up for this seeming detriment in the content to come, and I wouldn’t find myself surprised. Pandaria upped their ability to make good PvE content, so Draenor might take all that experience a step further to more interesting heights.
