The Queue: This tornado ruins everything

Seriously. That tornado. It’s just there. Nobody actually seems to care; it’s just an eyesore. And it’s going to be there forever.

The 1-60 questing should be self-contained. I’m of the opinion it doesn’t necessarily need to be a huge, epic, sweeping story. The zones should have their own conflicts, none of that content aimed to tie into the latest expansion. Cataclysm‘s big error was trying to tie everything into Deathwing and Garrosh Hellscream — neither of those things matter anymore. The Garrosh links in particular expired almost immediately; Garrosh was on the road to being dethroned as those quests were made. So why design the 1-60 content for levels 80 and 90?

I’ll use Westfall as an example of a zone that was simultaneously great and terrible. The zone was a followup to its original incarnation, but still easily understood if you never did the original version: the various wars the Alliance has been fighting has had a terrible impact on its commonfolk, and its a story of Vanessa VanCleef’s revenge. It held its own story that stood on its own two feet. Deathwing, Garrosh Hellscream, and all of that max level stuff had nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, the landscape was designed with Deathwing in mind. There’s a huge tornado in the center of the zone which is unrelated to the actual story within that zone. It’s only there because of Deathwing. But Deathwing is dead now, and characters that level will never know who or what Deathwing is.

Redesigning the entire world around Deathwing probably sounded really cool at the time — and players found it pretty cool at the time — but doing that placed an expiration date on everything. An expansion continent is different; of course Northrend is about the Lich King. But would it have been a good idea to redesign the entirety of 1-60 content to include the Scourge? Especially if you never see the Lich King in the vast majority of those zones? No. That’d be silly.

Westfall without elemental tornados nobody even mentions would have been a better zone. If you don’t aim for one overarching story, it’s much easier to give love to all of the various races in the world. Night elves can have night elf stories. Tauren can have tauren stories. It isn’t necessary to tie a singular villain into all of that.

Orcs and draenei (and more orcs) were the focus of this expansion. It’s interesting that, because of Burning Crusade, blood elves and draenei will always be tied in players’ minds. Warlords of Draenor certainly did have a bit of that in Talador, but it wasn’t a major story beat. I expected much more out of them this expansion entirely because the draenei and naaru were involved.

I’d love to see the blood elves get a story focus again. Heck, I’d love anyone other than orcs and humans to get more focus — even more draenei would be good, though they just got their turn in the spotlight. Seeing more armor (and art in general) based on the aesthetics of the other races would be an awesome thing. We need our racial transmog!

I do agree it’s gone totally overboard. In an MMO — or in games in general — I expect some randomness. Even if it isn’t my favorite mechanic, I know it will exist and that’s the genre of games I choose to play. In Warlords, however, even the most basic things seem to have been handed over to the RNG system. Crafted items have random stats. If you don’t get what you want, you have to acquire an item that lets you reroll those stats, with no guarantee they’re the stats you want. It could reroll the same stats. You could reroll forever and not get what you want. I’d much rather engage in a long grind with a guarantee of getting what I want at the end. I’ll take effort over random every single time. Followers are the same. Random with the option of rerolls — rerolls which guarantee nothing.

It’s creatively bankrupt gameplay.

Have the ability to play the game without endlessly fighting our own inventories.

(Forgive my snark today. You’re all asking questions begging for snark!)

The implementation of additional Void Storage is probably easier. Implementing Diablo 3’s system in WoW would probably be a huge pain in the butt — but far more friendly to the user.

A warrior using a fist weapon in his main hand.

In the vein of quests for cosmetic bonuses, I’d love to see class quests for transmog gear. Rogues getting a slick black assassin set, warriors getting a big juggernaut get-up, and so on. For me, it’s tough to give an answer to this one because green fire being a big quest event seemed odd — it’s the sort of thing they’d typically handle through glyphs these days. Green fire seems like a dev decided to make it their pet project and nobody else is interested in doing that for other classes. There are plenty of cosmetic glyphs that are really awesome but those didn’t get questlines, so … who knows?

Class mounts would be cool, too. The old vanilla quest chains for the warlock and paladin mounts were always really cool. I’m sure they can make mounts for rogue, warriors, and so on, too. Take a horse, put swords all over it. Boom, warrior mount.