Well, there’s one word on my mind today and that word is FOREVER.
First, there’s the video I recorded. (Let’s ignore the fact that I had a pounding sinus headache and recorded it at like 4:30am on Saturday night.) It’s about 30 minutes long and talks about what we see on the WoW Forever site and a few things I heard in the talks about it and such.
If you watch the video, you’ll know I purchased the Epic Edition, primarily for Beta access. But also because elves. (You’ll also know I spent the gold for the tokens, and Blizzard still hasn’t gotten one penny from my wallet or credit card since they ate much of the contents of my guild bank.)
So I’m excited for Thursday and to see what Beta holds for us. I won’t do All The Things because look, I’ve already done the various starting zones a dozen times on actual realms, and I’m sure I’ll be doing them again at least a few times for Forever, so I may just do a few things here and there and look at talents and the like. What do you want to see from Beta?
I’m looking forward to seeing the full talent trees for paladins and giving my two cents on what a holy paladin should do. Probably also for MM hunters, although I’ve never theorycrafted for my hunter the way I have for my paladin.
I’m also really looking forward to the new graphics. I’m probably going to stick with Classic character models and animations, but I can’t wait to be on my hunter out in Riverglades and other new zones, exploring things.
So far, the plan is: one night elf hunter, one human paladin, one dwarven shaman, and then either a Skyborne mage or druid. I’m not sure I want a druid, though — a lot of the joy I get from my druid on retail is flight form and farming.
Professions: Hunter gets skinning/LW, pally gets herbalism/alchemy, shaman may depend on if dual gathering is “supported” in the sense that nodes for both mining and herbalism are visible at once. If not, shammy gets mining and … engineering??? I have no idea, frankly. It’s kind of wild to think about old-school WoW, without jewelcrafting or inscription. (I’m not complaining.)
The racials are wild. They’ve been amped UP, dudes.
Look at the gnomes, for crying out loud:
EUREKA! Reduced cost at 10% increased damage or healing on next 3 spells or abilities
AND
Expansive Mind: Maximum Mana, Rage, or Energy increased by 5%
Almost enough to want to roll a gnome. Almost.
And Undead get basically a free Lifestealing enchant, built-in!
Touch of the Grave: Sometimes drain health with your attacks
Speaking of Undead, I think it’s wild that we’re getting Undead Paladins in both Forever and Retail. UNDEAD PALADINS. WHAT. They look super cool, I’m not gonna lie, but what the heck. I have mixed feelings.
Now, my biggest thing here is… I hate people. 😂 So how is this open-world hanging out going to affect me? I can be nice enough in-game, but most of the time I just want to chill by myself or play with my brother (or other friends). We’ll see how that goes. I guess having a campsite thingy to chat and chill and get buffs will be helpful. And I do like providing buffs for others, sooooo I guess I’ll be doing that a fair bit?
Also, no servers? Should be … interesting.
I’ve been thinking a lot over the last couple of days, about everything to do with Forever. And my original experiences with WoW. It still astonishes me that so much of my life has been shaped by what server I chose to play on when I first loaded up World of Warcraft in October of 2005.
I literally looked at the list of servers.
I found one that was PVE (that was never going to be in question) and one that was also based in Eastern Time. I could have picked Dalaran or Khadgar or Stormrage. But I saw the name Eldre’Thalas and thought “hey, it has an apostrophe! That’s pretty darn cool.”
So I selected it and began my time playing.
Within hours, I was on the phone with my brother telling him he HAD to buy this game.
When he installed it, he asked me what server I was on, so he created Thefog on Eldre’Thalas, a night elf druid. (Hilariously, throughout all of BlizzCon, they kept talking about Fog and The Fog and I’m like “what about my brother???? Ohhhhhhhhhh. The WEATHER.”)
My brother has always been the extroverted one. I’m the introvert. I like to sit and read a book or play a video game versus going out to hang with people. So I wasn’t particularly surprised when he made sort of friends with people. This eventually led to him getting invited to a guild called Fated Heroes. And then I eventually joined, too. (And then Fog abandoned us for Tempest because they were raiding MC and then, possibly out of pure spite, I worked my ass off to get Fated Heroes ready for raiding. And Fog eventually came back to us anyway.)
So how was that life-changing? Well, without Eldre’Thalas, we wouldn’t have joined Fated Heroes. And without Fated Heroes, I wouldn’t still be good friends with people like Majik and Toga and Kam and Tia and Dar. Like I have met (most of) these people! I was a bridesmaid at Majik’s wedding, where I met legit half my old guild in person, including Maj’s brothers and Dar! Then, a few years later, Majik, his wife, and I went to Toga and Kam’s wedding together, and Dar was there too! These people are still in my life, at least to an extent. All because I chose a realm name with an apostrophe in it. It truly breaks my brain a little bit.
Anyway, with all that said, there’s a lot to look forward to learning about WoW Forever, and I’m planning to help people better understand what’s new in that version of this game we all play.
What are you curious about in Forever? Let me know, I’ll try to find out the answer for you!
I was out for the weekend (visiting my oldest in Milwaukee) so I primarily found out about the BlizzCon highlights (extremely high level highlights) when I got back late on Sunday. And I also discovered that my Questing Buddy was NOT happy, given that a lot of the people on her TBC Anniversary server raid team are talking about jumping over to Forever. That meant, for her, was that their raid team was about to come to a stop right before Sunwell when she wanted to finally finish all of the TBC raids (our previous raid team in OG TBC Classic stopped raiding after one night’s foray into Sunwell).
That being said, I skipped most of your post because I didn’t want to read anything resembling spoilers yet, but I already know there’s a new Elven race that’s only available if you pay extra. (I think I have that right.) I’d also expect said Elven race to make an appearance in Retail, with Forever giving it a proper introduction into Azeroth. So, pretty typical for Blizzard.
As for me, I have no idea that I’m going to do yet. I’m kind of tempted to reserve a some names and then wait a few months until the massive wave of people rush to the end –because Blizzard has conditioned people for decades to do just that– so that the leveling zones are pretty much cleared out when I finally decide to login and check it out.
To be honest, I have no idea what will await us. Will the newly added quests be more in the Vanilla grindy style, or will they be closer to the Retail style? How will people handle being at L60 for the long term, when they’re conditioned to a progression style which means each new raid eclipses the old one in gear and priority, and more importantly when Blizzard itself has never created an MMO that goes against that design philosophy? Elder Scrolls Online, which does have a hard level cap, still has “progression” in that your gear always goes up in power, it’s just that it doesn’t matter where you go, you’ll still get gear drops commensurate with your power level. True horizontal progression like that found in Old School Runescape is very rare in MMOs, and it’s never been found in WoW or WoW-clones before.
There are a ton of questions I have, but since I’m busy catching up at work and on sleep (I don’t sleep well away from home) I haven’t thought much about it. I’m just going to worry about it later and then post on it.
Totally understand the not wanting spoilers. :) But yes, you’re right about the race and the paying extra.
I’m kind of hoping the starting zones never really thin out? I think, given what we’ve heard from BlizzCon, alts will always be started and such. They are leaning in hard on alt characters.
As to the types of quests, that’s a great question. Quests like drop quests with a tiny drop chance (Vanilla) or things like click on these things in this order (retail)? Hm. Guess we’ll see! I have to presume most will be Vanilla-style, but who knows?
What I find interesting is the L60 question you pose. Personally, I can’t wait. I remember what it was like when BC was announced and I was like “I don’t want to level again!”. And yet we had no choice if we wanted to continue the game. So for myself, I think I won’t have any trouble adjusting to 60 being the cap and more stuff being relevant longer. I just have to put myself back into the mindset of Kurn at 60 in Vanilla. It’s not too hard for me, but I can see how it would be hard for others.
All told, I have levelled Kurn from 1-60, then 70, then 80, then 85, then 90, then 100, then 110, then 120, then back to 60, 70, 80 and now 90. That’s 160 levels. I am Le Tired of levelling Kurn. hahaha. I cheated with Madrana here and there because I used the boost with the expansion to get her to max level, but Kurn is 100% manually levelled. And that doesn’t count various Kurn alts on various other servers, game modes, etc.
And yet I’m preparing to do it all again for another 60 levels in Forever…
In a way, we have to “level” no matter what we want to do in an MMO because there’s a story to get through. Whether or not we actually go up in levels is immaterial given that you still need to play the game. The issue for me is the quality of that process, and that’s something that Blizzard has had issues with the past decade or more. Blizz focuses so much on Endgame –and the associated activity there– that the quests out in the world suffer as a result. When your questing experience becomes a roadblock to actually doing what you want to do, that’s a problem.
Blizz turning that on its head and trying to emphasize the journey now, after 20+ years of emphasizing the Endgame, is going to be a clash of wills.
It’s so interesting to me how various people play this particular game. The story was always kind of adjacent to playing for me. I mean, I fought Onyxia because she was Lady Katrana Prestor and was basically running Stormwind, and I fought Ragnaros because he was a big threat to the world, and I fought Lady Vashj and Kael’thas and Illidan because all were also big threats.
But I never really got into the lore beyond what the quests told me, and even then, I can’t be accused of always reading quest text. ;)
I think the Forever team will do a lot for the perception of the game in Forever. I LOVE that there’s new stuff for us to experience at level X, Y and Z. I think it’s going to be cool to “slow down”, as Chen would say, and just enjoy our experiences.
Oh, and BTW, what blogging engine powers your blog? I recently discovered that all of the blogs in my blog Feed listings that use Blogger no longer have the feed updated. Bhagpuss’ Inventory Full, the various blogs that Shintar posts, and even yours are all showing posts from over a week ago as the “latest post”. Other blogs that use WordPress instead, such as Wilhelm’s Ancient Gaming Noob, are up to date.
I mentioned this weirdness at the end of my last post for reference purposes (which also covers my long-running issue where Google Search isn’t able to directly find my blog, but Bing does).
That’s odd, I use WordPress. I haven’t made any changes to the RSS feed or anything either. I’m so far removed from Blogger (man, it’s been a WHILE since I used it!) that I have no idea if your feed list is a plugin or some built-in thing or whatever, so let me know if I can make any changes on my end to try to get that RSS feed bumped.