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5 Thoughts On Warlords Of Draenor

Published Sat, 15 Nov 2014 11:30:08 -0600

We are over 2 days since Blizzard released Warlords of Draenor, the latest expansion pack for World of Warcraft. I've been playing it on and off since the expansion dropped, leveled my warlock Tzelmoth up seven of the ten new levels and will most likely finish it up today… server willing. But here are some of my initial thoughts on the expansion.

1) The Dark Portal starting area was interesting story wise, but a mess when it went live at midnight. There were so many players in the area that you couldn't find the NPC's from the crowds and trying to kill a mob with anything but an instant cast was impossible. Blizzard handled it better with the Wraith of the Lich King expansion where they had two separate starting areas to choose from.

2) Garrisons are an interesting addition to the game. They will give a player something to work on once they've maxed their "toon" and the followers are nice for building it up. But the fact that each of the Garrisons are basically a personal instance put a huge drain on the world server and caused a lot of lag. This is something that should work out great once the swarm of players calms down.

3) The new zones are gorgeous. They did an amazing job on the different ones I've gotten in so far. The landscape seems much more varied and dense. The detail work is beautiful and every new area seems unique to the game, not just a rehash of zones from previous expansions.

4) The questing is far more story / lore driving now. When you are running around collecting things for someone, you have a good idea of why you are doing it and it's towards a purpose. Not just because some gnome on the side of the road asked you to. They've streamlined the questing and use it to push the story forward and to guide you around a zone.

5) With the change to the questing, they added bonus objectives which you can do or completely ignore. They pop up when you enter a specific area and list what you need to do, usually kill X number of things and or collect X number of things. This is a great way to get XP and level faster but they can easily be ignored if you are someone who wants to level strictly through the questing and lore.

Putting aside the DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack that Blizzard had to deal with since the launch causing a lot of the lag, I think they did an amazing job with the expansion but could have handled the roll out a bit better.

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