Many, I'm sure, are enjoying the double-rate of Valor gains currently live. This should make further upgrading one's gear a little easier, given that all 5.4 gear has been altered so that it can be upgraded four times, rather than two. I know that I have used the buff to raise my Flex-mode sword on my Death Knight to Normal-mode level, and it looks like I can now hit 300k DPS on him, which is pretty damn awesome, as that's ten times as much as I was doing by the end of Cataclysm.
What is the purpose of this buff, though? Why are we getting it now?
There are two answers I can come up with - the cynical answer and the hopeful one.
The cynical answer is that Wildstar is coming out in early June. Wildstar is a very cool-looking new MMO from NCSoft that appears to share a lot of the cartoonish art style and comic outlook of WoW. Wildstar appears to the latest challenger to the MMO throne, and while I'm always hesitant to call something a "WoW-Killer," I will say that it's the first MMO since WoW that's really drawn my interest in a serious way (though since it is PC-only, I won't be playing it.)
Giving a buff like this might encourage people to pick up WoW again if they've gone into "inter-expansion lull mode," and thus draw attention away from a competitor.
The more hopeful explanation (not that it is mutually exclusive with the previous one) is that there might be some big reveal planned for the end of the Heart of the Valorous buff's duration. Otherwise I don't really know why they would end the buff on the tenth, and not just let it continue for the remainder of Mists of Pandaria.
We are now in June, and we have still not begun the Beta for Warlords of Draenor (sad to say, but I think I can definitively say that the time-advantage from having had 5.4 out before Warlords' announcement is pretty much irrelevant now.) Frankly, for both crowd-pleasing and cynical competitor-sabotage purposes, it would behoove Blizzard to start up a Public (but not Open) Beta asap.
One of the frustrating things about waiting for news regarding Warlords is that we haven't really gotten a sense of what is taking so long. Warlords does not have a new class, as Wrath and Mists did. Likewise, there isn't any pre-90 content. Every expansion previous has had something that had to be built in the world for lower-level players. BC had two zones each for the Draenei and Blood Elves. Wrath had the Death Knight starting experience. Cataclysm had... well, Cataclysm. And Mists had the Wandering Isle. but Warlords is truly built as an expansion for characters 90+ only.
The only culprits I could imagine are the garrisons or the revamped character models - something that they never promised would all be in-game with 6.0 (and as cool as that would be, I'd rather they just get the expansion out.)
On the subject of Garrisons, though, it's hard to say. We got that preliminary article about the Garrisons, but as of yet the details are still a little on the hazy side. We don't yet know just how central a role the Garrisons will play. The recent revelations of having smaller outposts that are linked to your Garrison in other zones does suggest that they will be a pretty big deal. I wonder, then, if this was an idea that they came up with later, and had to retroactively redesign a few things, somewhat like how they had planned for Townlong Steppes and Dread Wastes to be a single zone originally.
Obviously, I don't mean to downplay the creation of the more standard expansion content either. Zones, quests, dungeons, and raids all take a lot of effort to put together. But given that by the time the Heart of the Valorous buff expires, it will have been exactly nine months since the start of 5.4, one begins to get a little antsy. Surely they've been working a lot in all that time, and likely before it. Yet for all the stuff we've been hearing about better streamlining of the expansion process and the desire to come out with them more frequently, Warlords looks to be arriving like clockwork, once again, two years after the previous one.
So if I were Blizzard, I'd at least throw the players a bone here. Give us some big preview. Show us how far you've come. Otherwise, I expect a lot of PC-owning players (which has got to be a majority, right? I grew up in the 80s and 90s, so I still think of Macs as being the underdogs, as crazy as that may sound nowadays) might decide to try that shiny new MMO.
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