WoW Is it Worth Returning to before next Expansion?
When World of Warcraft originally came out back in 2004, all my friends and I were playing it, even those that have never played an MMO. I played other Blizzard games, like Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo, but I can say that WoW was the first game I really got addicted to and wanted to play all the time. Because I had to balance end of my high school years and going to college, I didn't invest much time into the game after the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I did return for free trials but didn't want to pay the subscription knowing that I had already sunk so much money into the game.
However, I was always looking for a game to fix my MMO itch, playing almost any free MMO that I heard anything positive about. I was always left disappointed with other MMO games as I realized they were not very fun. So last month after seeing Wow Legion on sale, I decided to finally but it and resubscribe to the game. I was surprised on how much things have changed, and after playing I'm not sure if even this game itself can satiate my nostalgia for the original game. For those that are on the same boat as me, and want to know if WoW is worth returning to now before the next expansion, Battle for Azeroth, I'll highlight my experience with the game so far.
So right into the questions is WoW worth returning to before the expansion? Its a loaded question, but a now after canceling my subscription after 3 months my opinion is no, and let me explain why.
If you're looking for value, especially for those who haven't played for the game for a few expansion you will definitely get your money's worth and dozens of hours worth of new content. Legion has one of the best story-lines of all the expansions to date, and it definitely feels all the games in the Warcraft franchise have been building up to this epic conclusion against the Burning Legion. The main reason I returned was to play through the story campaign and I was surprised how much content there way just from the Legion expansion. Which was spread out in large content updates after Legions release. Playing either faction gives you access to the shared story-lines, but playing as an alliance for this expansion is the way to go. You will get the sense of both factions coming together to fight the legion in shared class halls and quest hubs.
Cons:
While the intro and some story quests are great, you are forced to soon take on quests to build alliances for the new races in the game, such as the Highmountain Tauren and Nightborne. Even though Blizzard is doing a lot to try to make the grind and level progression more diverse, many of these quests were boring and uninteresting. I understand they do need to introduce content and more factions for future content, but where not nearly enough quests focused on the alliance and horde leaders, especially after the set-up from the introduction on the broken isles. Since the story focuses how the burning legion is the enemy and is going to destroy the world, and how the horde and alliance team up against, it would have been so awesome to actually interact with or get quests from leaders of the opposing faction. Getting to fight alongside the opposite faction could have been included in at least some of the dungeons. Similar to other Blizzard games, Diablo or Starcraft, the two sides are at an eternal conflict. I guess it wouldn't be called Warcraft if they worked together and achieved peace.
Pro: Questing
With so many previous expansions it is often hard to know where to get started or what quests are connected to the main storyline. A great feature that was new to me was the quest log now shows your progression of each story related quest in that specific area of the map. If you are new you also go back and play out quest lines for pre-Legion content.
Cons:
For people that are coming back for the story, one of the most important tips I can give you before you start or use your level boost is to pick the right server. I would suggest a Roleplaying realm or PVE realm. I screwed myself up by picking an alliance character on a heavily populated horde PVP realm. Some areas restrict any combat, but most neutral areas, such as the Highmountain town hub allow high levels to gank leveling players. This has always been part of wow PVP servers, but since you still get honor from killing other players and town guards basically do no damage to decked out players, some people will just camp your corpse because they have nothing better to do. I actually like the upcoming change in BofA that allows any player regardless of realm type to turn on or off pvp. There's nothing worse than trying to read or turn in quests and being one-shotted by other players.
Another thing I have to gripe about is that this game is definitely catering to hardcore players. In my opinion, Blizzard knows that at this stage in the game's life cycle they need to keep their hardcore fans happy because they are the ones spending the most money and constantly playing their game. So in order to keep giving players a sense of progression after hitting max level, the game focuses on having players grind for higher item level gear. Once I hit max level, I was still getting one-shotted by people with good gear. With world/daily quests it was hard for a new player to level in the same areas you had hardcore players flying around doing similar quests nearby, always killing you. Again I just could have moved to another server and started a demon hunter, but similar to vanilla wow, one of the main reasons to get good gear was to get revenge on some of these people. The power creep is real and even after farming to get my item level higher after about 2 months, I still wasn't close to being able to compete with some of these top geared characters.
Pros:
I do have to hand it to blizzard for revamping classes and making each fun to play. I liked the artifact weapons, reworked skills, and animations for each class. Similar to the original I always want to create new characters and level them once I see other classes in action. I played a paladin, so I was able to play all three class roles for any group by simply changing my spec. Your character definitely feels powerful and the combat is more fast-paced as you can take on hordes of enemies at a time. Running into unique monsters marked on the map was fun and had me exploring areas I normally would run past.
Cons:
This is a common criticism of the game ever since the game was released is how balancing each individual class detracts from the group and party roles for each class. If a class is either a DPS, tank or healer, whats the point of looking for warlock if you have mages that can fill the same role. I don't mind this much because I was playing this game mostly as a solo player.
Conclusion:
Overall I think that Legion is one of the best expansion in terms of story since the Wrath of the Lich King. There's more to do in the game than ever before. I look forward to the Battle for Azeroth expansion and see how Blizzard will continue to keep this game fresh after so long.
I hope you like this short review. If you've been playing Wow for a long time, let me know in the comments below what you are looking forward to the most or what you want to see in the upcoming expansion.
Thanks for reading, See you all again soon.