So, it turns out my kid doesn’t need a bath as often as I thought so I decided to pick up the new WoW xpac and give it a whirl. To give you some background, I haven’t played since vanilla. Last year my friends and I went back to vanilla on a private server to complete end game raids that we didn’t do 10 years ago, but aside from that I haven’t played any of the expansions. It’s a weird feeling to be back.
This isn’t a true review – just a quick run down of my experience going back into WoW after 10 years.
I decided to go back and give it a go after watching a decent amount of it on twitch. There were a few things that caught my eye – the graphics boost, the quests, cut scenes and pvp. The thing that tipped me over the edge was AUSTRALIAN HOSTED SERVERS. That’s right, I am finally able to play a melee character with less than 350ms. What a glorious feeling it is. The first time I hit charge, and actually charged straight away I thought I was speed hacking or something.
I decided to play more casually this time around though. The idea of not having to log on at certain times to raid, or certains times to be in EU/US primetime to be able to actually get a pvp battleground etc was very appealing to me cause of the cross realm stuff. This is old news to almost every person on earth, but coming from an only vanilla background it’s a new and exciting thing for me. The game itself is so vastly different from when I played, that it’s like I’m playing a new game. It’s fun learning it all again, using Glyphs and trying to get my head around the talents etc. Using the group finder is cool. I like that Blizzard have taken a lot of good addons and included them as options for your interface in game. So yes, I mostly just like the game.
There’s so much to interact with while questing/running around the different zones – there’s treasures, bonus quests, random loot boxes etc. I spent a while getting to 100 in comparison to a lot of other people just because I was running around looking at stuff like I was a stupid virtual tourist in Draenor.
I like the feeling there’s more offered for the casual player in present day World of Warcraft. I like that. Especially for someone in my position that has a family, and commitments outside of Azeroth.
So if you’re running around and you see an undergeared orc warrior named Mnk that looks like he’s just going around taking tourist photos of in game lakes and crap, come and say hi. We can be e-friends.