Battle for Azeroth: General Reaction

The follow-up to Legion was always going to be a bit of a step down. But that's ok.

With its introduction of Demon Hunters, the resolution of a shocking number of plots and reveal of myriad long-awaited story moments, its class-centered content, and the introduction of truly effective and clever systems like level scaling and world quests, Legion is, on paper, WoW's best expansion so far. Have there been problems? Sure. But the previous title-holder (and yes, this is a matter of opinion, but you're reading mine,) Wrath of the Lich King, was not without its problems either.

There has been something of a pattern of peaks and valleys with WoW expansions, starting with Wrath (a lot of people are super-nostalgic about Burning Crusade, and just having an expansion at all was so new that it's hard to evaluate it.) Wrath was a high point, then Cataclysm, which on whole was amazing but sacrificed too much of its high-level content in order to revamp the old world, was a bit of a let-down. Mists of Pandaria, despite a lot of skepticism about the cute Pandaren characters, wound up enriching the lore of the world and taking WoW's storytelling up several notches. Warlords of Draenor then plunged WoW to probably its lowest depths, with a story that felt convoluted in order to bring back characters who weren't all that interesting to begin with and then killed them off before we got to know them and then had nearly nothing to do at the level cap. And then Legion came along and fixed basically all the problems that Warlords had. If there are any real flaws to Legion, it's the over-reliance on RNG-based systems like Legendaries and the Netherlight Crucible, but there's so much to like that I can't really be mad.

So where does Battle for Azeroth fit into all of this? Obviously I won't be able to answer that for about two years, until we're in the thick of the expansion.

So let's talk about what I imagine we're going to get:

I think that, following the defeat of Warcraft's big bad (yes, I know the Void Lords have kind of moved in as the new big bad, but we know so little about them that they'll have to develop later) Blizzard wants to try returning to some of the feel of vanilla. In Classic WoW, there wasn't one particular threat we were worried about - it was mostly about exploring the world and confronting or steering clear of the other faction. Even though the two sides weren't at open war in vanilla, there were elements of conflict that were there perhaps not to drive the story, but to establish whose territory was whose.

The key was that the real focus was that exploration.

Given that this is the South Seas expansion (and if you're still looking forward to that eventuality, I'm going to ask you this question: an expansion with Kul Tiras, Zandalar, a bunch of uncharted islands to explore, and Azshara as a raid boss isn't the South Seas expansion? Then what is?) and that the two factions are actually going to be separated on different continents until they reach the level cap (mirroring Vanilla's mostly-faction-associated original continents,) I imagine they want to kind of get back to basics with Battle for Azeroth.

And that makes a lot of sense given how crazy Legion got. We literally hopped in a spaceship and battled space demons. Don't get me wrong: I love mixing sci-fi and fantasy. But I can understand how they might want to pull things back toward a more traditional fantasy aesthetic after Legion got so futuristic, much as they followed up Burning Crusade with their Tolkien-esque Wrath of the Lich King (complete with icy Mordor.)

Now, mechanically, if they can synthesize the lessons from Warlords and Legion (basiclally, Warlords: bad, Legion: good,) they can make for an exciting endgame experience. I am slightly worried about having only three zones to level up in, but then again, we only had four in Legion and that worked out fine. Having effectively three max-level zones with the other continent sounds really cool, and I hope that there are real quest experiences like Suramar in each of them (ok, maybe all three don't have to have quite as much as Suramar, but for the record, Suramar was amazing.)

Here are the keys, I think, to making a good expansion:

Have a variety of fun and rewarding stuff at endgame: raids are great, as are dungeons, but also have more story to uncover at the cap, and with patches as well.

Give us reasons to explore the whole new continent(s,) not just one max-level area.

Incentivize going out into the world. Frankly, I'd just get rid of mission tables, though they've said that might return.

Be reasonable with difficulty tuning: giving all players a way to see the content is good. I think raid and dungeon difficulty on normal through heroic raids and normal through mythic dungeons was actually more or less spot-on in Legion. I can't speak to Mythic raids or Mythic + dungeons.

Give players a clear path to getting what they want. This is actually an area where Legion kind of fails, as the RNG nature of Legendaries and Relinquished gear can get very frustrating. Hopefully the Heart of Azeroth system will be a better alternative to Legendaries.

We'll have to wait and see how Battle for Azeroth goes. I'm not going to hold it to my expectations of Legion, but even though I've never been a fan of the Alliance/Horde conflict, I suspect that that's going to be less of a central plot to it and more of a manner of making the experience of both sides feel different (like, you know, having two separate continents.)