In my last post I went over how I wish that they’d build on the existing lore of the warcraft universe. Particularly, as a personal preference, with the lore surrounding Lordaeron. What can I say I’m an Alliance player but this angle does give Horde action too. In fact it’s ripe for the Alliance/Horde conflict the game is going to try and focus on. However, that was last times post. Today I’m going to talk about game features.

Class Quests
Right now there’s little incentive to roll an alt. I think that’s a real shame particularly given the large amount of development time that went into revamping the 1-60 experience. Once you’ve levelled one character through it, and particularly if you’ve got loremaster on your main, there is zero reason to do it again. Oh you get people like me, that want to try each class, or at a minimum, when I started, just be able to max all professions. Generally though for a large percentage of the playerbase they picked their class because that’s what they want to play, they get it to level cap and then sit there.

One of the big complaints I’ve heard about swtor is that when you get to level cap there’s not much to do. I can’t say that that’s true from personal experience as I haven’t yet got a character to level cap. However, what will keep me playing (and subscribing) is rerolling and playing to cap every single class.

Now, the class quests in swtor are what move you between planets (zones) and form a good chunk of the questing experience. I’m not suggesting in any way that warcraft should do that. However, right now the few ‘class quests’ that are in the game aren’t worthy of that title. They’re go and fetch these materials and we’ll craft this weapon. They don’t add anything to the class, and each class has the same sort of quest at the same sort of level. What’s the point in them really?

There used to be class quests in warcraft though they were either removed with cata or before. I certainly never experienced them. The only class type quest I ever did was to get Redemption as a level 12 paladin. I can understand why they removed it. People didn’t like the delay in training the ability. However, I think that sort of approach is a mistake.

What I think should be introduced is class type quests like Fangs of the Father. Quests that are specific and tailored to class abilities but not restricted to raiders. I don’t think they should be just restricted to endgame either. Right now warcraft is all about the endgame. It’s a race to level as fast as possible to get to the good stuff which means you miss out on 85 levels of good stuff, the first time round anyway. There needs to be more incentives to take your time and enjoy the journey. Class quests would add variety to the levelling experience that is currently once you’ve done it once, you’ve seen it all.

Multi Loot
In swtor mobs when they’re lootable have a beam of light on them which is a different colour depending on the quality of the loot. Now, I’m not suggesting warcraft goes down that loot sparkly corpses are fine by me. However, when you loot one mob in swtor all of the surrounding mobs within an area, which you are eligible to loot, are looted at once. This is such a time saver and I really can’t see a downside to it. Is there a reason why it’s not a good idea? I can’t think of one aside from maybe it speeding up farming. Good for players, bad for the game perhaps. I don’t know this gets my vote though.

Keeping the timeline straight
Ok you’re a fresh level 1 and you’re in the present pretty much. You reach level 58 and you’re heading back to years ago, the exact number of years I can’t find a consensus on, but it’s in the past regardless. Year reach level 68 and you go forward in time, not to the present but to 5 years before the present, to Northrend. You progress through the content and by the time you get to the Fall of the Lich King content lore states that’s three years ago. You then go back to Azeroth and present day. For veteran players this is fine as we can brush aside this nonsensical timeline as just the levelling process. For new players however it’s got to be confusing.

Therefore this is what I suggest. It’s quite simple really it builds on the caverns of time. Now I’m not saying remove the dark portal, remove the ships and have all transport from the caverns of time. No instead maybe have an unlocking quest where you’re sent to the caverns of time and it’s explained that you are to be sent to the past to train. The heroes Azeroth needs today have to be tested on the wars of the past or they’ll never meet the challenges of the future. Hero you are to journey back into the depths of time and fight in the war against Illidan and his demonic legion. Then when you’ve braved all that Outland can throw at you to the frozen north to defeat the fallen prince of Lordaeron, the Lich King.

It can be explained that a time travelling spell has been woven over the current transport links so everything works like it does currently. In fact this ‘fix’ would take very little to implement, just a few extra quests and bam timeline issues fixed.

Small issues
Tabard tab like for mounts and pets, more bank space (void storage still isn’t enough), mail heirlooms cross server. Nothing that hasn’t been said a million times in short. On the whole warcraft is in a great position. The game has been around for over seven years now so it’s had a great deal of time to refine and add more features. That polish clearly shows.