Three Announcements From BlizzCon That Are Going to Get Me Back Into WoW

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since mid-Burning Crusade. I’m a pretty loyal fan, but I will have to admit that Warlords of Draenor has not been my favorite expansion. In fact, I really haven’t completed the bulk of the end game content and haven’t touched much since patch 6.2 came out. All the announcements at BlizzCon this past weekend, however have gone a long way to making me excited about the game again. There are a few things that truly are renewing my love of Warcraft:

Fixes to Transmog
Possibly one of the biggest changes coming with the upcoming expansion is the new transmog system. Transmog was released in late Cataclysm as a way for players to customize their characters by changing what their characters’ armor looks like. The only problem is, you have to have the piece of armor that you want to transmog into, leading to a very quick hording mentality that has left quite a few plays with absolutely no bad space for even daily questing. I love my Troll Hunter, but I don’t enjoy playing him right now because anything I get in a quest or while adventuring either has to be discarded or has to replace something else I was holding on to in case I wanted to transmog into it in the future.

The new system will get all those items I’ve been holding onto out of my bank and into a dedicated tab, leaving my bank virtually empty! This is great because now I can spend time exploring and acquiring different armor pieces I haven’t bothered with because there was simply no place to put them. This might be the single biggest change to draw me back to the game.

A New Focus on Classes
As I said, I play a Troll Hunter, specifically a Beast Master Hunter. Blizzard is making huge changes to make me feel like my hunter is different than someone else’s, while at the same time bringing me together with hunters of all specs in their new Class Hall. This new player hub will be the focus of class specific story lines but will not be instanced like the current Garrisons, so players will be able to interact with other players and won’t feel so isolated. This new focus on making a character’s class both distinctive and plot relevant makes me very excited to get back behind my bow.

Major Changes to Professions
More story driven and relevant, the new professions system looks to make gathering and crafting something it always should have been…part of the character’s story. With profession based story quest lines, players will get the chance to interact with their professions and not just mindlessly slog through the daily crafting grind. Warlords’ crafting system was especially tedious as the amount of materials needed to craft even the simplest of items made the process overwhelming. I’m excited not only to see what they do with my professions, but the secondary professions like cooking, fishing, and archaeology which the devs have promised to make more story and adventure based.

While things like story telling and PvP are also making me very excited about getting back into one of my favorite and longest played games, these three things, more than anything else have made me confident that the people at Blizzard are still excited about putting out a game that is fun, story driven, and full of surprises.