Hellfire Citadel the Final Raid, 6.2 Likely the Final Major Patch

Blizzard has confirmed what we likely expected, which is that Hellfire Citadel will be the final raid of Warlords of Draenor, and that it's unlikely we'll get another major patch before the next expansion.

Let's start with the potential bright side: Blizzard said that they might make the expansion shorter if they were confident the next expansion could be delivered more quickly, and this seems to indicate that they are confident.

But to undercut that optimism: if they had only planned out two raid tiers and one major patch, even if they found themselves pressed for time, it would be very difficult to derail the expansion development in order to put people on designing a new zone like Farahlon (which seriously, of all the zones in Draenor I wanted to see... gah.) We just won't know how successful this strategy will be until we get a release date for expansion six. But I'm not really ready to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt here, because every expansion since Wrath of the Lich King has gone for roughly a year after its final patch. Expansions take a long time to plan out, and even if they've won themselves a head start that will allow them to release expansion six "one tier earlier," meaning some time next summer, that's still a year of no new content and is just as much of a problem as we had in 3.3, 4.3, and 5.4.

But on top of that, there's the disappointment of Draenor. For the record, I think that most of Draenor's content was superb. The leveling experience was the best they've ever done, and while there were definitely fewer dungeons than I'd like, they were pretty much all interesting and fun to run. The endgame content was problematic - Blizzard's insistence on making the Garrison functional rather than decorative was a big mistake if you ask me. Garrison maintenance replaced going out into the world to gather resources for professions and follower missions, while profitable, didn't have terribly engaging gameplay.

The biggest problem, though, is that in WoW, we pay for expansions and for subscriptions. If expansions came free with the subscription like patches, I'd have little to complain about, but the chunk of content that is Warlords of Draenor, whatever its merits may be, is just plain smaller than what we've gotten previously, and yet we paid more for it.

And this is a big reason why I'm not a fan of the "quicker expansion cycles." One should also be able to settle in to an expansion - the effect of gear inflation can get out of control, but a little allows players to feel massively powerful, which is one of the appeals of any RPG.

It's a shame, because I'd like to focus on 6.2, which, if you look at it in isolation, is a perfectly good patch with a lot of cool features. But I worry that we're going to be stuck in Tanaan for over a year waiting on an expansion that will only wind up having a single raid tier.