WoW – Battle For Azeroth

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.