What is it?

The World of Warcraft is a 3rd Person, Open World, Massively Multiplayer Online, Role Playing, High Fantasy, Action-Adventure.

What’s good?

Easily one of the best games of all time, More content than one could ever ask out of a game, incredible freedom to pick and choose character race class combos, varied and effective skills and talent builds, beautiful and storied game world, almost endless supply of quests, exceptional loot and level progression mechanics.

What’s bad?

The graphics are a bit dated, the sheer size of the game might be too much for some players, steep learning curve to go from casual to proficient at your class, lower level areas are now fairly empty after several expansions and pay to level services.

World of Warcraft - Full Review

To begin this review I have to be upfront and admit I was a big time World of Warcraft (WoW) junkie. To this day it’s the first and only Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO) I’ve ever played and I played it on and off for nearly a decade. WoW has a bit of something for everyone. It has instanced dungeons, raids, world events, loot grinding, different classes, PVP, PVE, daily quests, weekly quests, tournaments, crafting, auction houses, the whole nine yards. Over the years Blizzard’s done an exemplary job staying in contact with the community and tweaking item stats, class talents, dungeon encounters and loot systems. Anything and everything is constantly being reworked and fine-tuned. Now Blizzard didn’t invent the MMO genre with WoW but they sure fucking rocked it. So much so they dominated it for years.

CLASS ROLES - THREAT, HEALING, DPS AND CROWD CONTROL

In WoW I played a protection warrior. I was sword and board specced and when questing with friends my job was to make sure enemies attacked me instead of them. On the other hand they either healed our group or DPSed the shit out of the bad guys. I didn’t have the flashiest job. I didn’t put out the big number damage. I didn’t even have cool looking skills. My entire role was to pull agro and keep threat on me. For those of you who don’t know, threat was basically a hidden value that each enemy tracked sort of like health points. Instead of ticking down, threat ticked upwards. Every skill be it fireball heal or shield slam that any player used generated threat.

For the most part enemies would attack whoever was highest on the threat meter. That person had the enemy’s agro. The tanks job was to stay on top of the threat meter and to do so we had a number of high threat low damage skills. Essentially if I was doing my job right, everyone else was free to wail on the enemies and never worry about getting hurt or pulling aggro, i.e. having the enemy turn and attack them. This was important because most of the DPS classes wore cloth or leather armor and had low health pools. If they pulled aggro they would likely get one shot by the tougher enemies.

If it weren’t for healers I’d be dead in no time too, even with plate armor. As the tank I was priority one for healing. When I was alive and doing my job I’d usually be the only one who needed healing anyway. Except of course during more involved and difficult encounters. But healers had mana so if the DPS classes weren’t killing enemies fast enough the healer would run out of mana (OOM) meaning I would die, the mobs would have a free for all and we would all die. More commonly referred to as wiping (unless you were a rogue because then you’d vanish saving yourself from the wipe and laughing at the rest of us for complaining about repair fees). Each person had an important role and if somebody fucked the dog the group was going to wipe and never beat the encounter.

There was also support or utility classes. Character classes like the Mage who could dish out massive damage but could also help mitigate difficult encounters by Crowd Controlling (CCing) enemies. For example a mage could sheep certain enemies. They would literally turn a big massive ogre into a tiny little sheep for a specified duration or until somebody inadvertently hit the sheep breaking the spell. And yes, anyone who did that would get routinely mocked and blamed for any ensuing wipe. This helped to lessen the chaos in fights and helped to ensure groups worked together. Support classes also brought some extra benefits like buffs that could increase stats, damage outputs and resistances. Some even had abilities to remove curses or poisons.

SKILLS TO PAY THE BILLS

The gameplay is pretty intense although it might not look it. Each class has dozens of unique skills and in any given encounter you probably use at least ten. Some encounters require more and some less. A typical attack rotation might use 4-5 moves repeated with others only used under specific conditions. Like you’re going to die so you pop your instant full heal which is on a thirty minute cooldown. Or if you are a paladin (which means you’re probably an asshole too) you could bubble hearth. Kidding not all assholes are paladins. Anyway the game’s very involved with a ton of situationally dependent skills so you have to really get to know your class as well as the others to be effective. In the group environments whether it’s instances, raids, or PvP this becomes even more apparent.

Every class has certain strengths and skills to compliment those strengths. But every class also has weaknesses. Not only that, each class has three skill trees in which you invest skill points and specialize (spec) your role. For example as mentioned above I was protection specced sometimes referred to as sword and board. I carried a one handed weapon and a shield and my damage output was garbage. On the other hand my damage mitigation was the best of the best. I could take a beating and still keep on going. Soloing with my class sucked. Sure I could survive for a good long while but every simple trash mob fight was a chore as my damage per second (DPS) was so low. People always used to ask why I didn’t just re-spec and take a more offensive build. And the answer was simple.

I never played WoW to roam around clubbing boars and wolves in the bushes. Seriously solo questing was just something I had to do when friends weren’t online. Whenever three or more of us were on we’d be off in dungeons going after that phat loot. And because I was specced for group play as a tank we crushed most of the content. I had several alternative characters (alts) which I used to DPS or heal when I was sick of tanking. Without a doubt having to do group content with people who are using solo builds versus group builds is terrible. Tanks who can’t hold aggro, healers who go OOM because they are DPS specced and Utility classes that have pissed away most of their good buff or CC abilities to do more DPS. It’s a night and day difference.

In WoW you’ve always had the ability to re-spec your characters but in vanilla it was costly. Not to mention the price kept going up each time you did it. As such, I just never bothered, except maybe towards the end of each expansion. Then I would grind for high end PvP loot. Years later after a couple of expansions Blizzard made it much easier to re-spec. You could create two specs and swap between them for no cost. It made it a lot better for someone like me who loved to run dungeons and raids but spent a lot of time solo questing also. But in vanilla WoW this was a problem and it made people like me who hated gold farming have to make a tough decision. Solo spec or group spec? What trade-offs were I willing to accept?

SHOW ME THAT PHAT LOOT

WoW was the first real loot game I played. As above it was my first MMO but it wasn’t my first Role Playing Game (RPG) I had played other RPG style games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior as far back as my Nintendo NES days. While those games had loot, I never farmed for specific items. Most games have some sort of loot progression, even FPS games. You start off with say a pistol then you get a rifle then a grenade launcher or whatever. But again you just get what you are given and move along. Now WoW on the other hand is a loot game. You specifically go after certain loot drops. It’s pretty much the biggest motivator for why people keep playing aside from experiencing new content.

But let’s be real when you are on your 50th Molten Core run you are not there for the fun or experience. You are there for phat loot. If not directly at least indirectly by helping guild mates who will in turn help you somewhere else to get yours. In most loot games I know of, there is a color coded system to the items. Games like Borderlands, Diablo 3, the Division, Destiny are all loot games and all follow a similar coloring markup. Green items are common, blue are rare, purple are legendary, orange are exquisite. The names of each category differ but the idea is the same. It’s a better class of item even if it’s the same item level. An orange level 50 item is substantially better than a green level 50 one and might even be better than a level 55 green item.

The ultimate goal is to deck your character out in all the phat loot you can. Everyone wants the best gear. Now what that is, is always up for debate. Each class has multiple gear sets and each set is tailored around a specific class role or spec. For example I could get a set of armor that boosts my damage output if I want to be a DPS warrior. Being a tank I always went for the gear sets that boosted my damage mitigation and survivability. Now gear sets also had bonus stats for having multiple pieces of the set. Sometimes these bonus stats were so good you would find yourself wearing that set for a long time before finding an upgrade. Sometimes having a set last for a long time was a blessing sometimes it was a curse.

Loot for the most part was found by killing bosses in dungeons and raids. There were other ways of earning gear through tokens, points or even buying it from the in-game auction house. But at the end of the day killing bosses was the staple route. It was simple but effective. Every dungeon had a number of sub bosses and then a main boss. Each of those bosses had its own loot table, or list of items it could drop. Now only 2-3 items would normally drop per boss kill, at random, from a loot table of 15-20 items. So essentially you could kill the same boss a dozen times and still not see a specific item drop. This is the essence of why people “farm” dungeons. It’s to get that specific item or items they want for their gear set.

And why you may ask does anyone care. Well that’s easy. The higher end dungeons and raids have a sharp difficulty level increase and they require people to not only be skilled at their class roles but also have the best pre-raid gear available to stand a chance. In later expansions they actually put in a hardcoded threshold for group finding. If you didn’t meet a minimum gearscore you couldn’t even queue for a group. And with each new content expansion the cycle continued. Every expansion would increase the level cap so your old epic gear would eventually be replaced by higher level common and rare loot forcing you to dungeon farm all over again. And each successive raid would add a new tier of raid gear for high end players to fawn over. Phat loot doesn’t stay phat loot for ever.

PvP THE MOUSECLICKERS GRAVEYARD

So far I’ve focused on the Player vs Environment (PvE) aspects of WoW. Like me fighting a pack of wild mountain goats solo on the road to Iron Forge. Or me tanking a dungeon with my friends healing and DPSing away. Player vs Player (PvP) on the other hand is when you no longer fight against computer controlled opponents but instead fight other players. In vanilla wow you had two main options; world PvP or Battlegrounds. World PvP was simple and just meant go out and kill opposing players anywhere in the world. Battlegrounds on the other hand were specific zones created just for combat and would have various objectives. Warsong Gulch was capture the flag, Arathi Basin was zone defense and Alterac Valley was a massive battle to destroy the opposing teams stronghold.

Now when it comes to world PvP I can say without hesitation it was the bane of my existence for quite some time. Most world PvP came in the form of ganking, yet another WoWism. It means when you are out doing a simple quest let’s say killing sheep for wool or some other equally mind numbing fetch quest and someone comes and jacks you up. These fetch quests sometimes are so crazy like collect 20 gorilla hairs or something.But the drop rate is like 1% so you end up killing hundreds upon hundreds of gorillas. And depending on their respawn rate it could take a long time. To make things quicker a lot of people chain pull the enemies (mobs) and use area of effect (AoE) skills to kill them en masse. This is a gankers wet dream.

These lowlifes revel in the chance to enrage people. If they see someone chain pulling mobs they just love to fuck with them. A couple of quick ranged shots to drop your health then just watch the mobs finish you off. How demoralizing. And when you’re mobbed up like that there’s not even a fighting chance. Worst thing is when the asshole doesn’t leave afterwards and instead waits for you to respawn so he can torment you and kill you a couple more times. When you resurrect you don’t have full health so it’s not hard. Sometimes they’ll corpse camp you until you just log out or suffer the humility or resurrecting at the graveyard which breaks half your gear and costs you a lot of gold to repair. Not to mention it gives you resurrection sickness that weakens you for an extended time.

Luckily for most Blizzard has PvE servers where that sort of player griefing is much less commonplace. In order to world PvP you have to enable a flag or attack someone which automatically sets the flag so everyone else can now attack and kill you. It’s a much more laid back experience but after being on a PvP server for seven years when I finally switched it was kind of boring. Sure I finished quests quicker but there was something exhilarating about random world PvP even if it frustrated me. And with the addition of dual speccing it was a bit better when someone jumped me since I wasn’t wearing my tanking gear and shield slamming mobs I was two shotting them with my mortal strike build. Specs make a huge difference to your PvP and PvE success.

Unlike world PvP when you join a Battleground you are joining specifically to wreck some face. So no more bitching and whining about gankers. Here there be blood and heartache. In any regular match the teams are a ragtag bunch of people who do whatever they feel like and it’s sort of chaotic and full of surprises. I had the chance for a while to run some team matches where a friend of mine was working on getting his High Warlord title with some of the best players on our server. From time to time they’d have an empty slot and invite me along. Bear in mind I was nowhere near the best of the best, I’d probably barely meet the standards for average.

But I had tanked some high end dungeons for their alts. They knew I had team speak and I followed instructions. More importantly I was a heavily geared protection warrior so I was good for standing by flags to stop rogues form stealing them. Rogues couldn’t kill me very quickly, I could get out of their sap, and if they did get the flag, I could hamstring them to slow them down and call out which way the flag was being taken. This allowed the better players on the team to smash the rogue and recapture the flag. Basically I was just an alarm system. It worked for them and it worked for me. I earned some phat loot I would not have otherwise gotten. These guys were so well known that in a lot of matches the other team quit out and we won by default.

The Burning Crusade expansion brought a third type of PvP, Arenas. It’s probably the most popular. It’s essentially 2v2, 3v3 or 5v5 team deathmatch battles. It’s ranked with seasons and awards and all kinds of fanfare around it. I dabbled in arenas a bit but ultimately avoided them as best I could. You see after all is said and done, I’m a mouseclicker. Yeah that’s right I said it. I am too stupid to keybind and macro everything up like most people. So that delay I suffer from mouseclicking the action bar is massive against players. I’m always a second off the mark and in a competitive arena I get my ass handed to me. It’s why I only ever played co-op in Warcraft 3 and Starcraft. I can’t micro worth shit. But none of that mattered outside of Arenas and I had great times.

INSTANCES AND PHASING, CENTER OF YOUR OWN WORLD

Enough about PvP. So earlier I had mentioned dungeons and raids for grinding and farming for phat loot. Now just a note about those things, they are what is known as instanced zones. Being an MMO, the WoW world is wide open. And everyone playing on the same server if they showed up at a particular place on the map would all see each other. And they could all try and kill each other. The resulting chaos would probably melt my computer. I went on a couple city raids where you’d get a raid group together or two and invade a capital city of the other faction. Not only would you have to deal with all the enemy players but also all of the city guard NPC’s. The strain on my computer was immense. I probably only got one frame a minute at times.

So clearly they have to do something about everyone running dungeons all day long. We don’t want to have a lineup of a hundred groups waiting to kill a boss. That would be dumb. So they instanced these zones. When you enter a particular dungeon you are locked to your specific instance. Only the people you invite in can join you or see your copy of the dungeon. Anyone not in your group who walks in to a dungeon entrance with you will go to their own instance or copy of the dungeon. Not only does this just make good design sense from a gameplay perspective but its better technically too. Instances are smaller more streamlined areas of the game so you get much better computer performance in them. Always having a low end computer this was a huge bonus for me.

Phasing was something that came out years later. It might have been Wrath of the Lich King where it first came to prominence. You had to do a series of quests to unlock access to some content in an end level zone. As you completed the questline, areas of the map began to change. Like a town or an outpost would appear that hadn’t been there before. Now what was interesting was under the hood the game knew what phase you were in. So if I was on phase 3 and my friend was on phase 2 I couldn’t see him in my game world until we left the area affected by phase 3. For example if in phase 3 I helped build a city he couldn’t see it as he hadn’t built it in his world yet.

I think phasing was a phenomenal and really overlooked feature by most. It was all so seamlessly integrated that aside from a few times realizing you couldn’t see each other in specific areas you never even realized it happened. I found it really allowed Blizzard to drive better and more engrossing storylines. These storylines allowed the developers to leave a lasting mark on the game world around you. It just really helped push that immersive quality of a game.

THE LORE, THE MYSTERY, THE SPECTACLE

Blizzard’s World building is a veritable tour de force. From the very first moments in vanilla WoW they sell you on it. The sounds the sights the quests. The starting zones are fabulous. Each character you create will be assigned to a specific starting area based on your chosen race. And for the first dozen or so levels you will spend in these initial zones absorbing the rich history and cultural nuances of that race. It’s not until later when you hit your first contested area where you really start to interact with other character races. It’s a clever design decision and it really works. After a few days of questing in your home areas you finally set off on a larger adventure.

I remember my first character was a Night Elf. I spent the first few days questing in pristine elven forests with the effervescent glows and soft chimes echoing through the air. The music was ethereal and everyone seemed to be wise and spiritual. My first big adventure had me travel to Iron Forge. It was an insanely long distance to travel. I had to board a boat and travel across the sea to Menethil Harbor in the Wetlands. It was a higher level than I was but I wanted to go quest with friends who weren’t night elves. It was dangerous and I ran from a lot of big scary mobs and got ganked a few times along the way. Eventually I made it to the mountain pass to Loch Modan.

This was the first time I had seen dwarven architecture in the game. It was awe inspiring. Intricate giant stone work so unlike the green and lush minimalist forest dwellings I had come from. When I got to Loch Modan I saw nothing but low level dwarves running around questing. I was the only night elf for miles. It was really weird. Even a few of the dwarven players ran over to say hi to the strange elf. It’s weird how quickly you get absorbed in your own tiny little area of the game that something so trivial is such a big thing. From Loch Modan I travelled into the snowy hills of Dun Morogh. First time in game I saw snow so that was pretty cool and the flora and fauna were also all so different.

By the time I got to Iron Forge I was just hooked on wanting to explore everything else that was out there. The game world is absolutely massive. I don’t know how to compare it to let’s say GTA 5 but it seems so much larger. Maybe it isn’t and it’s just the way it’s laid out. Or maybe it’s because you spent most of the time on foot. Either way, to this day I am still in awe of the size and scope of what Blizzard released on day one. It really is monumental. As the game went on I explored every possible area I could. I’ve played every class in the game and every race in the game to some extent. I earned an achievement for exploring everything and one for finishing every single quest in the game.

One of the most memorable places from vanilla Wow for me would be Blackrock Mountain. One day I was running around the Burning Steppes zone when I saw this huge stone ramp leading to a giant carved door into a mountain. Inside I found a massive open chasm. Lava was at the bottom of the chasm and there was a central building that looked to be suspended over the lava with giant chains. Again being curious I jumped up on the chains and wandered down. At this time I was completely alone. Not a soul in the area and it was a huge area.

Eventually I realized I was heading towards a dungeon entrance that was way too high level for me so I decided to head out. There were actually a few dungeons that started here and a raid so over the course of my time in WoW I would return to Blackrock Mounatin countless times. I have fought and died in that mountain more times than I can count. But this first time I had it all to myself. This epic quality, this immensity to the world and the way none of it is pushed on you makes the game that much more special. Everything felt like exploring. Everywhere I went I didn’t care if a million people had been there before me. It always felt like I had just discovered it.

Midway through the level progression you realize there isn’t necessarily a main story. Not in any traditional sense. There are just lots of stories in a storied land and you get to pick the ones you want to follow. Long quest chains lead you from one end of the world to the other. Intricate questlines will have you run through several dungeons to gather components to unlock new and even more dangerous adventures. The world building and story permeates everywhere and it is amazing. Each of the expansions had a more singular focus. Like Wrath of the Lich King was about Arthas the Lich King and your quest to kill him. Similarly Cataclysm was about the ancient dragon Deathwing who was setting the world on fire. But in vanilla WoW it was an open book.

FINAL THOUGHTS

There are moments and places from WoW that I will never forget. Experiences that will forever taint every other game I play. It remains the biggest influencer on how I rate my gaming experiences. So many of the expectations I have for games are born from those experiences. It remains the single biggest piece of me as a gamer even though I have long quit playing. If this were 2005 I would tell everyone to run out and buy a copy as it is the greatest game of all time. But alas it’s 2017. The game has evolved but it’s also passed its prime. Maybe they need to take a page from Destiny and make a World of Warcraft 2. Or maybe traditional MMO’s have lost their luster and it’s time for something new. Either way I would still rank World of Warcraft as one of the greatest and most influential games of all time.