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FelReaverFeature

In the spring of 2004 I joined the closed beta test for World of Warcraft. I'd tried Everquest in higher and beta tested Asheron'due south Call, merely continuing around in a unmarried spot and killing respawning wolves forever wasn't my idea of fun and the plots of MMOs in those days was pretty threadbare. I'd enjoyed Warcraft two and iii a swell deal and the Globe of Warcraft promised to extend these storylines in new directions while offer better quests, soloing, and an overall story that other MMOs at the fourth dimension lacked.

I liked information technology so much I stayed for vi years. My guild was medium-sized, which meant we struggled in the days of vanilla WoW, when progressing into the endgame meant moving from fielding 10 players at a time to needing 40 in order to fight bosses and see new content (these are referred to every bit raids in WoW parlance). WoW'south first 2 expansions, The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich Male monarch, scaled dorsum these requirements, gave hybrid classes more flexibility, and opened upward fresh 10-man and xx-man dungeons. But as years passed and my life changed, I took to other hobbies, other games. I played the side by side expansion, Cataclysm, only didn't really raid. Mists of Pandaria, which shipped in 2012, but held my interest for a few weeks.

Since so, I've been gone from WoW. I envisioned going back to the game would be easy, like slipping into a familiar pair of pants. Instead, information technology's been more like falling down several flights of stairs or waking up in an alternate universe. The scenery might look similar (though the graphics engine has been significantly updated since the old days), but the fundamentals of the game have changed.

NotBad-Legion

With Legion, Blizzard fabricated significant changes to every course, slashing the number of spells and splitting capabilities to make individual classes feel more specialized. A great deal of redundancy and secondary capabilities were cutting, and former talents that were common to the grade accept been split and separated. The end result is that the number of abilities and spells you need to learn has been drastically reduced — just the changes have too left me repeatedly reaching for spells that don't exist.

Some of the biggest changes to the game since I concluding played are structural — how various in-game items are grouped, how they function, and where you find them. We've rounded these up in a slideshow, along with a few before-and-later on screenshots to show how the game has evolved since "vanilla" WoW, circa 2006. To exist clear, while some of the functions I'll be showcasing existed back in 2011 when I quit seriously playing, their functionality and capability has evolved significantly over the past few years.

There are other changes that don't fit neatly in a slideshow. Servers used to be unique unto themselves — if you played on Zul'jin y'all never saw or interacted with players from, say, Alleria. Subsequently, Blizzard introduced a PvP (Player vs. Player) arrangement that grouped players on each server with a grouping of players on a specific set of different servers, called Battlegroups. If y'all played on Server A, you'd PvP against players on Servers B, C, and D. If yous played on Server E, you PvP'd against players on Servers F, Thousand, and H. Now, the entire server community is nearly merged. I say nearly because at that place are certain actions that y'all still tin't practise — no cross-server trading, for example, and no cross-server guilds. In many means, however, the player base feels unified.

Legion2

At that place are applied advantages to this — it allows for like shooting fish in a barrel group and ensures that zones experience "full" even when players on one zone may exist more often than not asleep. It also makes the game feel a chip less like a community by drastically expanding the number of people and club-names you lot'll see at whatsoever given time. While this might sound a fleck odd, running through Stormwind or Ironforge you got to know the people yous'd see in and around the game, even if y'all never conversed with them personally. Cantankerous-realm groups steal a bit of that — who you encounter around yous changes more apace as players phase in and out and the system feels a bit off equally a consequence.

Initial Verdict

Since I started playing again, the chief thing I've done is level up several characters in the demonic invasion events that occurred across the continents of Azeroth. Now that Legion has launched, I'll be diving into that content and getting a better experience for how the game has evolved in group play. I've needed the warm-up. my ii main characters are a Paladin and a Warlock, and both have changed and then fundamentally I experience like I'm playing an entirely unlike game, not the evolved or super-powered version of the character I signed off with dorsum in 2012.

But I'm going to stick with it, for at least a piffling while. MMOs have a bad rap as timesucking titles with 10-20 hour per-week requirements. WoW seems to have sanded off many of its rough edges in that regard, and while this is far from a total overview of its changes and new options, hopefully it gets the point across. But MMOs are likewise made up of people and many of the friends I made in WoW have stayed friends, fifty-fifty though I haven't tanked a raid in virtually 5 years.

So what would I say, to returning players or potential new ones? For meliorate or worse, the new World of Warcraft isn't like the one I left in 2012. I'chiliad nonetheless figuring out if that'south a good thing or not. Learning to play the game should be easier thanks to the vast talent simplification and it's never been easier to find a group of people to play with. I'll be heading into Legion to see what I can find — and there's plenty of the one-time magic to brand me cautiously optimistic.

Am I wishing for a legacy server? In some means, I am. I can even sympathize a scrap more for people who desire to get back to the classic game, even if I'd vastly prefer a TBC or WotLK server.

Feature and commodity images past Nyn