Get the Tin Foil! Naval Missions a Hint of What's To Come?!?!?!?

As you can tell from the absurd title, I'm taking a big ol' grain of salt with this. But it is interesting that one of the big new things coming in 6.2 is the addition of a naval port to our garrisons. Interestingly, when imagining the next expansion (I believe in an earlier post,) I had thought about the possibility of a naval yard in our South Seas garrisons, should we find ourselves there.

Could we infer a battle with Azshara from this feature?

Well... no, probably not. It's really early to say what aspect of Warlords, if any, is leading directly into the next expansion. I don't even think we can expect a Legion-heavy expansion to come, because we're already building up to a confrontation with alt-Archimonde, and unless you go all the way to Sargeras, there's not really enough ramp-up space to build an entire legion expansion to come next.

It does really seem like Azshara's time has come, especially if we have a surviving alt-Gul'dan coming to Azeroth to follow in his main-universe-doppelganger's footsteps and try to plunder the Tomb of Sargeras for relics that could bring him power.

But we've been wrong about that before. Hell, I think most of us were convinced that Azshara would be center-stage before the announcements of Mists and Warlords. I even remember, after the name "Mists of Pandaria" was leaked, thinking that it would still have to be an Azshara expansion (at the time, the canon...icity? Canonicity, is that a word? Apparently, as there's no squiggly red line below it. Anyway, at the time the canonicity of Pandarens was sort of up in the air.)

I'm actually not even so sure about these new naval missions - it seems primarily like a way to reset the progress for those of us who spent time leveling and gearing our followers.

But I do think we could have some exciting action on the high seas. I know a lot of people disliked Vashj'ir (personally I thought it was the most memorable zone in Cataclysm) but I think there's huge potential for zones taking place over the water (I'd love a zone that's like a massive floating Booty Bay.) And island-hopping would be a cool alternative to the traditional expansion-continent, as you could still have them all be in the same continuous game area, and maybe have remote islands - outside of any particular zone - with cool secrets dotting the map.

I expect that the naval missions in 6.2 are going to be basically just a new form of the follower missions, but thematically, it could hint at things to come. Warcraft on the High Seas could be really exciting.