Gracie has thoughts

SPOILERS AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T DONE BROKEN SHORE YET The Legion invasions have officially started in WoW, and have been surprisingly fun! I fully expected to barely be able to log in last night, but somehow there were no server crashes and no DDoS issues, only smooth demon hunting as far as the eye could see. First thing I did was hop on my forsaken priest, my character with the most history and achievements, and set off to do the broken shore quest. I knew what was coming, story-wise, but was excited to see how it played out. I was expecting a solo scenario, and was a little surprised and worried to see I ended up in a group of 20 people. Luckily everyone was just excited and nobody was a jerk, and the way things were constructed I felt completely free to watch the cutscenes when they arrived. I liked that there were both a horde and an alliance group doing the scenario at the same time, and the way the combat with the end boss went with friendly banter between the factions. At the end, I was a bit disappointed that Vol’jin got mortally wounded in such a mundane way, while Varian got to have his epic heroic moment before exploding. After watching the later cutscene it was clear that it happened that way so that Vol’jin could make it back to Org and choose the new warchief himself instead of letting the Horde fall into chaos without a clear succession. Then I got to fangirl out for a while, seeing Sylvanas take up the mantle of warchief. For all her faults as a character I still can’t help but love her. I hope she gets the chance to do a good job, and that this isn’t the setup for making her a raid boss down the road. I liked her rallying cry to avenge Vol’jin, and just seeing all the horde races mingling together and cheering in a unified way instead of each being off in their own racial divisions. Once the juicy story goodness was finished, I set myself on a mission to do the legion invasions. The new tech here is incredibly sweet. Zoning into an area with an active invasion smoothly put me into an instance with plenty of other people, and usually at or near the very beginning of the event. Only once or twice did I arrive at the start of phase 2, and usually that was because I had zoned in while on a flight path and it took a minute for me to arrive and land in town. I even tried out the scaling tech on my baby mage, and at level 60 the demons were all level 60-61 for me and I had no problem helping to take them down. Honestly this was the highlight of the night for me, because I think it is huge for the game going forward. I can’t wait to quest through the broken isles with this tech in place, and I hope that they go back and apply it to all the old zones too. It would make leveling an alt a completely new experience, and revitalize so much old content. Between a few characters I managed to get most of what I wanted from the event already, and I’m kind of relieved. I got the pet, a warglaive for my future demon hunter, and 2 of the 4 sets of cosmetic gear. I even managed to get the last zone I needed for the achievement this morning before I ran to work. That means I can focus on the invasions just for the characters that could use gear upgrades, and maybe try to get some of the weapons for transmog. It isn’t much of a grind and that means hopefully I won’t burn myself out before Legion even gets here at the end of the month. If this is what Legion is going to be like, then I can’t wait!

I’ve been leveling my baby mage through Felwood, because I haven’t done the quests there since Cataclysm. It turns out that it was incredibly timely. There’s a short series of quests where you find a demon hunter, and get to re-live Illidan’s past, from his fight with Arthas, to using the skull of Gul’dan, to all of the frowny faces Malfurion made at him. The images are a bit blurred, unfortunately, since the whole thing took place in a sort of emerald dream or fel bubble, but it was incredibly cool. I wish I had done this back in the day, because I didn’t know Illidan’s story very well until recently.

Alright, we’ve had a bit of time to adjust to the giant pile of changes introduced in WoW’s pre-expansion patch, time to figure out how to feel about it. I’m finally ready to look past the strange newness and shocking lack of buttons on my bars. Time to share some thoughts!

Transmog

This was the first order of business for me when the patch launched. I spent essentially 2 full days of my normal playtime just going through all my characters and unlocking appearances. For some folks this would be a simple matter of logging in to each alt and then getting on with life, but some of us with fashion mania had bags and banks and entire guild banks full of greens and various salvaged items that needed to be equipped to learn each appearance. I am very very happy that this is over now. I’ve gone through and made new outfits for about half of my characters now, and looking forward to working my way through the rest of them.

Unlocking transmog across all characters, and clearing out all that bank space has been amazing. I still have major complaints about this system, though. The requirement that you have to be able to equip the item and it has to be the highest armor your class can wear is infuriating. I have a very small amount of sympathy for folks who think a mage wearing plate is immersion breaking, but in a game with so much nonsense and so many silly pop culture references I don’t really think that argument holds much water. Let me wear whatever I want. At a minimum let me learn any appearances I find, no matter what armor class, so I don’t have to rerun old dungeons and raids on 11 different classes every week. Finally, having the transmog window available any time is pretty nice, but it feels useless and annoying since I still have to go find the ethereals to actually change anything.

Options and Addons

Speaking of tracking down the ethereals, let me tell you how much I hate that they moved the option to hide helm and cloak from your interface options to the transmog vendor. I hate it a lot. It seems like such a small thing, but it directly affects how I relate to my character. Also, under the old system I could just set that option and forget it. Under the new system, every time I get a new hat or cloak I have to go transmog it again. On the flip side, I do love that you can hide shoulders now too. Just please let me set this as an option, or let me change my transmog from the collections window instead of having to track down a vendor or buy a silly expensive mount.

There are of course other changes that don’t relate to fashion. The new graphics look nice overall. The longer draw distance is pretty sweet. I am, however, firmly in the camp that is unhappy about the changes to max camera distance, but since I am not worried about hardcore raiding anymore and it doesn’t make me feel nauseous I’m trying not to get too worked up. This seems in line with the overall design approach of this patch, which seems to be all about removing choices and streamlining everything into a perfectly smooth, featureless shape that still vaguely resembles World of Warcraft. Sometimes the effect is pleasing, but sometimes I end up in a frothy rage because things like bag sorting options have been removed from the interface and relegated to the dominion of addons. I am having trouble wrapping my head around how you can remove features and call something an upgrade.

Bottom line: the shiny new stuff is pretty great, but the annoyances are still annoying after a few weeks. Here’s hoping I eventually adjust. I want to go into Legion excited about the new story and content, not still sore over things broken and taken away.