The new dailies are very much pvp flavoured, even if you don't have to flag, or even join in any pvp style play, you do still feel very much that you're fighting horde.
The areas are as gorgeously made as the rest of Pandaria, and the boats are quite real. The daily zone that I went through really did give me the idea as if a battle was fought.
So if the dailies are ok, and there is no pvp, and the art is gorgeous once again, what then is this post about?
Well....I miss the hero aspect.
I wrote a post on wanting to be the hero as a healer and now I don't even feel like a hero with the dailies anymore. In fact this entire expansion doesn't feel as if the players get to be the hero. It feels as if we're all soldiers, playing our little parts, but nobody stands out.
Then again, on the other side nobody stands out either. The other side also has soldiers to beat, but no grand evil. And I think that this is where the problem is for me. There is no big baddie so far.
No common enemy to hate, no the enemy is splintered. Of course there is still Garrosh, who can die in a fire for all I care. And Varian...who can...well not much better (I know they're trying to make him more likeable, he's still an arrogant prick).
But there is no common purpose in the world at the moment. The world is divided, everybody fights their own little battle and that's that.
Now I'm no big lore monkey or anything, but even I felt the threat of Illidan during Burning Crusade. And when we finally beat him...god that felt good. In fact, I am currently doing quests with my monk and it still feels good.
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| You are not prepared! |
And then in wrath there was Arthas. The Lich King was everywhere and Blizzard had made damn sure that everybody would be pestered by him at some point. Quests, dungeons, various raids...we all knew what we were fighting for.
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| Muradin's dwarves? Doesn't anyone stay dead anymore? |
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| I SHALL TEAR THIS WORLD APART! |
When Deathwing was defeated there were...pandas?
Huh...yeah, ok, I love the pandas. In fact, I levelled the monk as a panda, shortly went human, but missed the panda so much that she's back to being cuddle and gorgeous. But we cannot really go fight the pandas much.
Well, we can, if they join the other faction we can, but that's not a big baddie. Who then?
The Sha?
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| Sha of Happiness |
I guess we'll just have to wait and see, and hope that this all turns into something badass still.
And otherwise I will just keep on hoping that both Garrosh and Varian tragically find their end or something.
{◕ ◡ ◕}
I can't wait until the end of this expansion when both horde and alliance unite to storm Orgrimmar and kill Garrosh. I have been wanting to kill him for years. I am glad I will finally get the chance.
ReplyDeleteI'm cautiously optimistic about my ability to care about the Sha. Surely an evil of our own creation can be worth fighting. Maybe it's even better than Deathwing, who just never had much immediacy to me, as if he were just hanging out waiting to be killed while taking the title of Vaguely Evil while everything else did all the work. He burned stuff, but never when we were around (a trailer almost as bad as MoP), unless we were afk and he was flying by.
ReplyDeleteHaha, yeah...stood in the fire. I got that achievemnent twice while afk indeed.
ReplyDeleteThe Sha though, they're so faceless. I know they come from our own emotions supposedly, but I've never had them pop up when I felt particularly vicious towards one boss or the other.
That could maybe help though, have Sha pop up randomly when you're fighting, or fleeing.
My problem is that the current storylines feel so one-sided with the constant Horde atrocities. Yes, I know they want to set the mood for the Garrosh raid, but one of the big things they kept stressing in the beginning of MoP was that it WOULDN'T be so black & white with Horde Evil and Alliance Good on the shores on Pandaland; that BOTH sides would be at fault with their own hatred and biases.
ReplyDeleteBut after the opening debacle at Jade Forest, it seems the onus is more against the Horde overall rather that just Garrosh and his specific crew and the Alliance gets to have their hands clean. You yet to see Admiral Taylor or Admiral Rogers (or Metzen's second favorite Gary Stu Varian) succumb to their hatred and kill first ask questions never. That's got to SUCK for a Horde player (who doesn't play &/revel as a warmonger bloody-handed jingoist in AND out of game -- those do sadly exist). That their player faction is the one who has to perform all the atrocities and the other side gets to cry out in (self)righteous innocence.
I never beat or even saw Illidan outside of the trailer, so TBC felt like thwarting a lot of local problems. Oh yeah, and being an errand boy for Ogres and the Netherwing so I could save up the 5000g to fly at an acceptable speed. As a WCIII player, Illidan was still the coward who escaped to Outland to avoid being punished for failure. He was cowering in that far corner of Shadowmoon Valley I wouldn't have seen if I had leveled to 70 in Netherstorm, right?
ReplyDeleteArthas certainly was the big baddie. And he had a lot of influence all over the game. That much was clear. Not as many "mandatory" dailies. But more "optional" 10 man/heroic/normal runs. And lots and lots (and lots) of dungeon runs.
In Cataclysm, the baddie was in your face. As in close enough to burn your face off, in your f ace. But you didn't have to face him if you wanted good gear. Just slap on a tabard, and run dungeons for a few days straight. Poof! You'd look as heroic as if you killed him all by yourself. I hope you didn't want any of the new crafting patterns in Firelands though. Time to feel heroic grinding weeks of dailies.
So we've done the mostly absent but menacing (read: cowardly) "baddie", we done the in our face baddie, then the burn your face off baddie. So I can understand your frustration that this expansion feels like a let down if you can't see the baddie.
But you can. He's in the trailer. He's in the opening cinematics. He's destroyed the Jade Serpent's dream of ascension or whatever you call it. Unleashed the Mantid swarm prematurely, and in the worst way. I'm sure you have guessed where I'm going with this. And yes it sounds lame, but in this expansion WE are the baddie. More specifically it's our WARCRAFT. Its what the game was about when it came out. Nobody bought World of Warcraft to defeat C'thun or Kel'thuzad (especially since so few did it). It was to pick a side, and wage a war (even if we really didn't do that very much).
The Sha is the embodiment of that war. And like in previous expansions there are many actors trying to do the "right" thing without complete agreement about what that right thing is. Anduin Wrynn at odds with this father. Bain and Vol'jin at odds with Garrosh. And us running around the game mopping up the messes our nations have caused, while gaining the trust of Wrathion, the Golden Lotus, the Shado-Pan and August Celestials to gain as many allies as possible. We don't know where things are going, and we aren't going to stop this war by asking nicely, but we have no choice but to do our best, and see where the game leads us.