WoW – Battle For Azeroth

6 November, 2017. 595 words.

From the media assets on the Battle for Azeroth web site.

In general, I don’t think about WoW very much, but when Blizzcon comes around every year, Twitter explodes with chatter about this game. Even more than the moderate level of chatter that persists year-round. It continues to amaze me how many people seem to live completely inside a Blizzard bubble.

I guess there’s nothing wrong with focusing completely on WoW, but, to me, WoW is just one game out of a hundred, a game that remains dormant roughly 22 months out of every 24 months.

But Friday, we learned there’s a new WoW Expansion Coming Soon, so it’s time to lavish attention upon it! (Incidentally, this expansion announcement comes about two years and three months after the Legion announcement.)

I enjoyed the last expansion, Legion, but I only played for a month. Actually less than a month, because half of my subscription fell during the pre-expansion Invasions, which were arguably more fun than the expansion (to me). I took a lot of screenshots in Legion, leveled exactly one character to 110 (another to around 105), and then stopped. I haven’t thought about WoW since.

So what’s in this new expansion? I actually wouldn’t know very much about that from Twitter chatter, so I consulted this post on MassivelyOP.

Level cap increase to 120! Yay, stuff for me to do! Leveling one or two characters from 110 to 120 will probably be the only thing I do in the expansion.
New races! What, I’m supposed to start a new character? From level 1? Are you kidding me? No thanks.
Jaina is back! … who? (Actually I think I vaguely remember this was the woman who inexplicably stormed out of some meeting near the beginning of Legion. I only remember that because a lot of people at the time wondered why she did that and speculated about whether it was SOMETHING. REALLY. IMPORTANT.)
Island Expeditions! Um, okay. Probably won’t be doing that.
Warfronts! Nope.
The Heart of Azeroth! What the what? If it’s anything like the Artifact thing I hope I won’t have to deal with it much from 110 to 120.
10 New Dungeons! Okay. Unless they are similar to Legion, where there’s one at the end of each zone, I probably won’t be seeing these.
Level-Scaling! Yuck. Though it sounds like it won’t be full-blown yucky forced level scaling, but more of a compromise between yucky and good. “You won’t ever out-level the zone you’re in.” I don’t remember where I read that, but I like the idea of that statement. However, wouldn’t it be easier to just give out less experience for quest rewards? I guess they want people to experience the rest of the zone if they *want* to, but still give hardcores the option to zoom to the next zone after only completing 10% of it.
PvP! Nope.
Legacy Servers! I’m sure I will take a look at it out of curiosity, perhaps even record some videos, but it’s extremely unlikely that I’m going to pay a subscription to re-experience the days of taking 40 levels to get a slow mount.

I guess the all-important question is: Will I buy it?

Probably. Although at this particular moment, shelling out $50 (a guess) plus the $15 for a month of subscription seems like a fairly big ask just to write a few blog posts and record a few videos. When I think about how much I played the last expansion (less than a month), I’m not entirely sure it was worth it.

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