Thursday, September 20, 2012

Serenity Peak and the Future of Class-based Content

The idea of a class home base has been around since vanilla. The small zone of Moonglade, while it occasionally gets people of other classes for the Lunar Festival or the intro to Hyjal, is basically Druid-only (though with the vast simplification of class quests, there's not a huge amount to do there.)

Death Knights are all about their class-home. You won't find DK class trainers anywhere else in the world, and they even start as characters inside of Acherus.

The Monk gets its own class-home in the form of Serenity Peak, which actually allows low-level characters (as long as they're monks) the ability to go to Pandaria way before they'd come there for class purposes. Serenity Peak is the only sanctuary in Pandaria, and is, appropriately, a mountaintop shaolin monastery where you can train.

But by train, I really mean train. There is an entire quest chain there that pairs you up with various trainers to teach you the ins and outs of the monk class. Sadly, my computer overheated and shut down when I tried to turn in the second one (they apparently haven't fixed that on the beta yet, or maybe I just needed to adjust my graphics settings,) but the thing I find very cool is that these quests really are teaching you fundamentals that are not necessarily obvious to the average newbie.

The first one pairs you up with Master Cheng, a Pandaren. You spar with him, and on occasion, he throws down a big patch of flame that you've got to run (or more likely, roll) out of. A quest that teaches you not to stand in the fire? Huzzah!

The second one pairs you with a dwarf lady named Master Woo (I wonder if these were all originally Pandaren, and then they decided to show some love to the non-Panda monks but didn't change the names.) Woo gains a stacking defensive buff that makes it harder and harder to defeat her. However, this buff does not extend to Touch of Death, essentially teaching monks "hey, you have an ability to end fights a little early."

These quests scale to your level and turn into dailies after you've done them the first time. You also get a nice blue piece from each of them. If I understand correctly, Monks do not have the standard level 20 SFK quest, and possibly the level 50 BRD one. Yet here, we have more personalized, class-specific quests that do a good job at teaching you the basics.

I've often talked about how I would love to see more class-homes. Frankly, I'd be happy if everyone got one.

Blizzard often says that they don't do class quests anymore because it takes too much development time for a tenth (and now eleventh) of the players. I would retort that actually, since most people have alts, each class quest would be seen by many if not most players. Another thing is that the biggest barrier to alt-leveling is the lack of novelty. We all know how tiresome the Cataclysm quest grind got after you worked your way up to friendly with Therazane for the sixth time, doing the exact same quests. Having class-specific content makes you excited to go through the process again, as there will be stuff you missed.

It is somewhat ironic to me that they took out most of the class quests in the same expansion where they created the Fangs of the Father. Don't take that to mean I am against an awesome quest chain where the rogue goes around assassinating the rest of the Black Dragonflight. But let's have more content like that, for all classes.

Paladins, Shamans, Druids, Mages, Death Knights, and kind of Rogues all have associated factions (Ravenholt is kind of a stretch.) The Council of Six Daggers is clearly being teased as a future Warlock faction. I would love to see more of these sorts of training quests.

Warriors could have something like Fray Island (remember that place) where the best of the best test their mettle against each other.

Paladins could either re-work the Argent Tournament as a training ground or perhaps a new, more Legion-fighting-oriented Paladin faction could come about, and we'd go to Outland or somewhere like that.

Shamans could have a bunch of spires in Thousand Needles dedicated to their practices.

Hunters could have a hunting lodge. Maybe south of Zul'gurub?

Rogues could have a revamped Ravenholt Manor (perhaps sending them on phased sneaking missions into the major cities?)

Warlocks I imagine could have a cool underground coven, either in the Plaguelands or Desolace.

And Priests could have some sort of cathedral... somewhere.

Serenity Peak is a great start to all of this, and while I realize this might just be a case of "new class gets the cool stuff," I think a lot of people would really appreciate having something different to do between their characters.

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