Initial Warlords of Draenor Thoughts
Today, I started playing WoW: Warlords of Draenor.
After playing for two hours (just hitting level 91), I have to say that it certainly feels compelling: there was essentially no point in the story where I felt like the action stopped. I moved from task to task — helping defeat a massive army, unlocking some members of the Shadow Council, then moving on towards building a Garrison, and establishing a foothold in Shadowmoon Valley — without ever feeling like there was really a stopping point in the action. The quests almost never *felt* like the “Collect N items” variety — there was no point where I was running around lost in the woods looking for that one last kill.
The new quest markers — with world-visible highlighted objects to click on, instead of the old-school sparklies — was an interesting change, as is the outlining of targeted/hovered interaction targets. The Garrison building is interesting.
I will say one thing though: I still have no real clue what’s going on. Part of this comes from the way that I play — I’m pretty rarely one to read quest text, though I will typically try harder than average on my first play through. Still, even more so than usual, I’m a bit lost… like, I came through a portal, and then it was destroyed… but who are all these people who are already here? Are they just people who live here, or also people who came through the portal? Why are we setting up a base — is our goal to get back to the portal, or … what?
I think that I could make reasonable guesses at this, but as is often the case in WoW, I feel like I’m missing some key plot elements here that would explain what is actually going on.
Mechanics-wise, the Garrison functionality seems an interesting change, though I’m having a little bit of trouble following the mechanics. Marksmanship hunters seem like they’ve had a few changes, but so far the only real change I noticed is that somehow my keybinds got reset, so most of my buttons didn’t work; since I was kitted out in reasonably high-level gear before the expansion, killing things is mostly too easy to care about hitting multiple buttons, so I’ll have to learn those things at some point, but I haven’t yet. Also, I think my health is a lot smaller now? And the amount I hit for? But I assume that those are side effects of some kind of numbers change, and not based on any real relative performance change. (I heard an ‘ilevel squish’ was coming, but I really have no idea what happened, since I never paid attention.)
Anyway, I think it’s interesting enough to keep playing, but I wanted to write down my initial thoughts in the meantime.