Role Play: Class Halls and Legion roleplay

Legion roleplay is shaping up to be slightly different than what we saw in Warlords as far as features that work with roleplay activities. Garrisons are a thing of the past — which is both good and bad. Garrisons offered a nice way for guilds to conduct meetings and get together in a semi-private space. At the same time, players spend a lot of time in their garrisons, cut off from the rest of the world — and consequentially cut off from roleplaying opportunities. Were they a useful tool? Absolutely, in the long run, and hey, they can always still be utilized as makeshift “guild halls” for expansions to come.

With Legion, we’re getting something a little different. Class Halls aren’t personal spaces like garrisons, but they are limited access areas — only instead of being limited by the people you have in your group, Class Halls are limited by class. They might seem a little less useful than garrisons, from a roleplay perspective, but Class Halls almost instinctively shape Legion roleplay into opportunities to participate in stories that tie into the expansion itself.

Class Halls and roleplay

Unless you happen to be a guild that consists of one class only, you won’t be doing any guild gatherings in Class Hall locations. But Class Halls provide some unique opportunities anyway — the story in Legion is less about factions, and more about individual class groups organizing themselves to take on the Burning Legion directly. While you won’t see every guildmate you have in your Class Hall, you will see other members of your class. Lots of them.

Which means you’ve just been provided with a very large group of potential roleplayers that you automatically and immediately have something in common with. Classes haven’t really been viewed as a major bond in Warcraft‘s story before — certainly different classes had different organizations, but these separate organizations were more in place for the purpose of reputation grinding than roleplay opportunities.

With Class Halls, you’ll not only be on the same level as your fellow class members, but you’ll have an immediate talking point — that Burning Legion mess that brought the entire motley lot of you together in one place. And that in turn may help you find some new friends and roleplay buddies that you’ve never met before, people outside your guild. Class Halls are almost organically designed in a way that actually assists roleplayers — particularly new roleplayers — in finding opportunities and reasons to talk to other people and make new friends.

For guilds, those Class Halls may end up being pretty handy, too — encourage your guildmates to roleplay in the Class Halls, and you might just end up with a steady stream of new recruits.

Group gatherings

But what is your guild supposed to do if you want to have some kind of large-scale gathering? Well, you could always go back to your garrisons on Draenor…but why hide away on Draenor when Azeroth itself is in peril? Most major cities on Azeroth have nooks and crannies suitable for large gatherings of people. Getting back out in major cities might actually score some new members for your roleplaying guild as well.

So far, the Broken Isles don’t really seem suited to group gatherings, which is honestly a little expected, given the nature of the expansion. The Broken Isles are dangerous, teeming with enemies, and have few spots that are clear enough of mobs to actually offer any kind of suitable gathering space. Dalaran is just as cloistered as ever, and doesn’t have a lot in the way of wide-open spaces.

But there are still some spots that might work for roleplayers. The Broken Isles don’t have many “major” cities, but there are areas where people have settled, places with flight points and vendors. Your character might not have a new home, but they can still find someplace safe to stay when their adventuring is over for the day.

Dalaran’s return

Roleplayers that spent a lot of time in Wrath know about Dalaran — and they’re either looking forward to its return or dreading it. Notoriously laggy, Dalaran was both a well-appointed area for roleplay and a place where players found their framerates abruptly dropping if they didn’t have a computer with enough oomph. While Dalaran might be laggy, it’s also a city teeming with life, and small enough that roleplayers from both factions are apt to run into each other with regularity.

Because it’s small, however, that means that there’s not exactly a ton of spots for regular group roleplay. Dalaran has received some updates on the alpha, and half of the Underbelly is now designated as the Rogue Class Hall — which means that non-Rogues can’t get into the area. But the other half, the Circle of Wills, has been redesigned and expanded to compensate, and actually offers more space than it did in the days of Wrath.

Both ends of the area now have buildings, one side containing a sizeable inn and tavern along with a fairly spacious room in the back that has yet to be designated as any kind of quest area. The other end has a sizable series of building that are completely empty, for now. Note that the Circle of Wills is part of the PVP circus — players who collected enough Sightless Eye sigils can call off the guards and turn the area into a free for all PVP zone at a moment’s notice.

Slightly less dangerous is the mage tower in central Dalaran. Teleporting through to the interior gives players a couple of different wide-open and currently-empty rooms to play with, though whether they’ll remain empty once Legion launches remains to be seen. Currently, both Alliance and Horde players can also access the inns on both sides of the city — the factional divide present in Wrath is now gone, although that may also just be something that hasn’t been implemented yet.

Between the Class Halls and Dalaran, roleplayers should be able to carve out an existence somewhere in Legion’s foreboding and threatening world. Class Halls will give use an opportunity to experience some class-based roleplay, and help new roleplayers find their way into the roleplaying community. And hey — we may not have garrisons to play with this time around, but with the way the Broken Isles are taking shape, it doesn’t appear that we’re really going to need them.