Lessons to take from Mists for Expansion 5

I'll say it again: Mists is a damn fine expansion. The environment, the way that the lore is worked into the game, and the way class mechanics have been refined (Warlock revamp - for example) has all been great.

But it's not perfect - nothing ever is. So what might we do to improve upon the style of Mists to make the next expansion even better?

1. More Granular Power While Leveling

While I think the talent system really succeeds in allowing for meaningful choices (as someone who loves reacting to procs, I tend to go for things like Divine Purpose and Thrill of the Hunt) one of the problems with it is that you only get a new talent every 15 levels. Likewise, the new abilities you get come somewhat infrequently as well. What this can lead to is that "dinging" can feel somewhat unimportant. If you're in the Badlands and you go from 45 to 46, and you don't get any ability, that can feel pretty darn anticlimactic.

I know that they want and need to cut down on button bloat, but I think there must be some way for you to make more character improvements as you go. Even bringing back some of those crit or haste bonuses, but purely as spec-based, automatically gained passives (so you don't have to give up the more fun or weird talents to get them) could be cool. Remember stuff like Reckoning? Or Bloody Vengeance (I think it was called. Old Blood DPS talent that made your crits increase damage done for a while? Similar thing for Ret Paladins.)

2. A Real Final Zone

Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King both had you eventually come to the expansion's big bad's home zone. From level 67, you got to quest through Shadowmoon Valley, seeing the worst of the chaos the demons had wrought on Draenor, and you were able to besiege the Black Temple, which did a great job building up the stakes for when you finally went after Illidan (though they probably should have spaced out the raid tiers a little better.)

When you hit 77, you were able to go to Icecrown - an intense zone that literally didn't have any friendly place to land until you carved one out. For all of Wrath, Icecrown Citadel towered above everything, and it really made finally being able to get into the place feel like an accomplishment.

In the previous two expansions, the "final zone" has been the home of the first tier raid. Yes, I do think that the Dread Wastes build up one's anticipation of doing Heart of Fear, and Twilight Highlands was all about pushing in to eventually assault the Bastion of Twilight. The problem is that these threats were dealt with very soon. In both cases, later in the expansion's cycle, those problems felt over and done with.

Now admittedly, the Isle of Thunder does a good job of building anticipation to break into the raid, but the place was only released with the raid itself. If this had been around from the beginning, we would have been able to build up greater anticipation to our showdown with Lei Shen (whose resurrection was only known to players who happened to do a particular quest chain in Kun Lai - the zone with the most freedom to do different quests.) And even then, when 5.4 comes out, Lei Shen will be an old problem - already dealt with.

All of Wrath felt like a siege on Icecrown Citadel, which I think really helped build up the tension. Also:

3. Let us interact with the Big Bad more

I know some people complained that the Lich King let us get away too much in Wrath, but I think his having a cameo appearance in almost every zone was a great decision. Even if you didn't know anything about Warcraft 3, a player leveling up through Wrath knew exactly what kind of villain Arthas was. I never felt more personally invested in taking down a boss than I did when fighting the Lich King.

Now sure, Garrosh has had a lot of appearances over the course of the last several expansions, so perhaps we don't need to introduce him so much. However, if the whole concept of this expansion is that the Horde/Alliance conflict is the big bad, and Garrosh is the embodiment of that conflict, we probably should have seen a little more of the big guy causing problems.

4. New Dungeon Tiers

Raid Finder is great, and serves a very useful purpose. However, I don't think it should be the only method of progression in PvE. 5-man dungeons have been the backbone of WoW since its inception, and I think the marginalization of 5-man content in Mists was a real mistake. Heroics become simply a source of valor points after you qualify for MSV.

I think that giving rewards that are maybe half a tier below the previous raid finder would be a good place for them. For example, if with 5.2, we had gotten dungeons that granted 476 gear (I'm calling MSV half a tier below the rest of tier 14,) you'd be able to gear up through them, but need to either do some raid finder or get some VP gear to qualify for ToT.

But some people don't like to raid, and I think that's fine. I just don't think you need to draw a stark line between "dailies and more dailies" and "raiding is everything." Let's have a middle ground.

5. Vary Up the Factions

I think it's fine to have some factions that require you to do daily quests. Should they all? Probably not. If I could go back and change how the factions worked, I'd have had maybe Golden Lotus stay a pure daily faction (though I'd also change it so that instead of an increasingly long chain, you'd just go to different parts of the Vale each day, sort of like how the Klaxxi work.) But then I'd have something like the Shado-Pan or the August Celestials simply require that you run dungeons. There would be one dungeon rep, and you could grind that one out for gear. And then finally, you'd have a faction that focused on running the current raids (or perhaps one per raid.)

The point is, varying up the factions would make each faction seem both very different and also more optional. Sure, Golden Lotus might get you some great shoulders, but you've already got some decent ones and really hate dailies, so instead you just focus on running dungeons.

6. More Alt-Support

People love playing alts. But when you have so much gating - and gating that is tied to being able to log in every day for several weeks - it makes it very hard to put any serious time into your other toons.

I think Grand Commendations were a good start, and allowing you to at least get a little reputation from dungeons runs was also good.

Really, the main barrier to alts these days isn't that they put anything exactly in their way - just that the time commitment to unlocking all those factions is hard to justify on a third, fourth, etc. toon. Back in the day, alts were easy because you could just run dungeons on them when you felt like it - maybe you'd spend a weekend working on that toon, and you could make significant progress.With dailies forcing you spend an exact number of days or weeks to get what you need out of a faction, you can't really grind hardcore on a couple days to get that alt where they need to go (raid finder as the main gearing path for PvE is another barrier to this. You can't just chain run heroics to get decent gear. You now need to run the raid every week.)

I think that either we need to see some sort of return to the gearing options from previous expansions or we need to implement dramatic catch-up mechanics. Think Grand Commendations that stack with each toon that reaches revered. The first toon gets normal rep, the second gets 200%, the third 300%, etc.