Wednesday, December 10, 2014

My Thoughts On Warlords of Draenor So Far

Warlords of Draenor has been out for a few weeks now, and I haven't said too much about it. When the expansion was first announced, I wasn't too eager to see it really. The only thing that sounded interesting to me were the garrisons. As the expansion neared, Blizzard started releasing these mini movies that gave some background into the upcoming expansion. Those were actually pretty cool, and they got me interested in seeing what the expansion had to offer. I have to say though, that excitement was short lived once patch 6.0.2 went live. You can read about all the changes here, but basically Blizzard wanted to take WoW back to its roots. So we all got hit with the nerf bat and everything sucked. Especially when the dungeons in Panda Land hadn't been fixed yet. That was miserable. And the race remodels. I really didn't like them. My humans looked like taller dwarves, and my undeads just looked....weird. But like with anything in WoW, you complain about it for a while, and then you get over it and get used to it.

So the expansion finally released, and I waited a few days to try and log in. I didn't care about being any kind of server first (besides, most of those went to people that a-beta tested and knew the general gist of how things worked already or b-work for wowhead), and I knew with the amount of people trying to log in, it would be a nightmare. I waited four days after launch to log in, and it still took me hours to finally get onto my server. It was worth it though. I started out with a Horde toon of mine, and shes actually my highest toon right now (94). The quests were pretty easy to do, although I found myself taking a lot of damage from mobs at times, and I'm not used to that lol. But I guess thats part of Blizzard's "taking it back" thing. I remember when I first started playing, mobs were hard to kill. Once you get out of the starting area (and thats not an immediate thing), you go onto Frostfire Ridge (Blade's Edge Mountains). When I started the quest line on my Alliance character, I was expecting to go to the same place. So it was really nice to see that after getting out of that starting area (because you do start the same way, no matter your faction), you do go to a different area to start building your garrisons. The Alliance start in Shadowmoon Valley. I haven't gotten too far into the quest lines with my Ally toon to see how different they are, but at least you have the change of scenery.

I really like the garrisons and all the quests you can have your followers do for it. Yes, followers! You earn them from quests, and they help you complete tasks. The achievement whore in me just loves it because there are so  many achievements related to the garrison and your followers. You can also kill beasts out and about and they give you garrison supplies, plus you can just find them while questing. Also while you're questing, bonus objectives can pop up on your map, and if you complete them, you get gold and xp, which is good. The addition of the reagent bank is super awesome, but I've already filled mine up on my 94, so thats a bummer. That reagent bank saves you a ton of bag space though! It really comes in handy, well worth the 100 gold to get it.

Some things I don't like about the new expansion is that the characters light up when you hover over them. Thats just distracting to me, and it reminds me of EverQuest. Actually, most of this expansion reminds me of EverQuest, which is pretty crappy. Its like Blizzard couldn't think of anything new on their own, so they went to rip off another game instead. I also don't like how squishy I've become. I get hit so hard by mobs, its really difficult to quest alone. I'm not horrible at my class either- the mobs just hit harder. And like I mentioned above, I don't like how any of my toons look remodeled. I like how they looked before.

Overall though, I am enjoying this expansion a lot more than I thought I would. I feel like there is a lot to do in this one so you can't get bored with it super easily (like with Pandaria, even though I didn't even finish most of what was out there).I still haven't tried to do any of the new dungeons though, so that should be interesting. And leveling of professions is different a little now too. There are some items I can use from Draenor that have a really high level with no problem, but items from the old world, that have lower levels, require a certain level in a profession to use them. Its a little wacky how thats done, but I think it has something to do with the garrisons and work orders.

Have you tried Warlords of Draenor? What do you think of it so far? Let me know in the comments!


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5 comments:

  1. I have to say, the reagent bank is one of my very favorite things about this expansion. I am loving the expansion as a whole, but the reagent bank is just so great. And the fact that you can leave your mats in there and still use them to make things! So awesome!!! Hahaha.


    It's been a really long time since Vanilla, so I can't honestly say whether or not we were quite this squishy back then, but it is killing me (literally and figuratively lol). I leveled up my alliance warlock with my husband's rogue, so we didn't have any issues. We did pretty much every quest together, and together, we were able to kill stuff quickly enough that it didn't kill us. Then I went to try out my horde paladin to see what things were like on that side, and I found myself constantly switching back and forth between ret and prot. In ret, I die constantly, but in prot it takes me 20 minutes to kill one mob. I can't win! I just got her to 91 and got her garrison, and she's going to sit there until my husband is ready to play horde with me. lol.

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  2. I didn't start playing until BC, and I remember people complaining then that the gameplay was easier. My husband has been playing since the start though, so I trust what he says. Back then I played on a PVP server, so half the difficulty was that I was dying at the hands of the Horde lol. Now I'm dying at the hands of mobs and it sucks. My highest level toon is now 95 and shes still having difficulty questing alone. I have been waiting for my husband to level up a toon on Ally that he can play with another toon of mine, and he finally got there the other day, so we'll see how that goes. But my Horde toon will forever be alone it looks like :( And I still hate the remodels of toons, I don't know why everyone got so excited over them.

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  3. Agree with the character looks. Was so upset with my Nelf's face, I went to change it at the barber shop too.
    Also, I feel so stupid- is the Reagent bank something special, or just the name for the feature? :P

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  4. Its in your regular bank, in a tab, but you have to pay 100 gold for it. I'm so glad they added it because its way better than that stupid void storage bank where you have to pay like a million gold to store your soulbound items.

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