I just did the nathanos/tyrande instance of darkshore…
My feedback:
The quest bugged for me. I was playing on a marksman hunter with a pet out. I killed tyrande’s minions before they came onto fight really, and subsequently the valkyr never triggered, and I had to redo the mission. It took me 30 minutes.
Then, I went to do bgs for 3 hours. During this time, I was exposed to the full horror of bgs, and resolved to stop playing my spriest in bgs because its so god awfully unbalanced. Then, I spent another few hours in arathi highlands, and some more time doing wpvp with my guild. YAY!
However, if you look at darkshore that blizzard created, you can tell they put some love into it. No flying (of course we can’t have that) No pvp… (this is an expansion that was supposed to be based on pvp) and of course boring as heck. But what grinds my gears is that they spent what looks like hundreds of man hours of dev work to be wasted on a piece of story that will be forgotten in 6 months.
You know what won’t be forgotten? Thoughtful class mechanic design. New battlegrounds. New questing zones with autoscaling mobs, and a focus on pvp. What my bone to pick with Ion Hazzikostas is that he is mismanaging developer time. He is taking the MMO out of MMORPG. RPG is great, if you do it right. You want to see wow done right? Look at Wotlk. That was the pinnacle of wow storytelling. Now, the cinematics are nice, don’t get me wrong. However they are unnecessary fluff when compared with the deeper bones that are missing from wow. It feels like wow was meant to be a dragon, but now it has no bones, its a sad flopped over snek with fancy scale design.
ION! Stop devoting 80% of the developer time to stuff that players won’t even spend 20% of their time doing. Start fixing the core mechanics, like pvp balance, talent design, talent layouts and what it means to be a specific class. Until you fix those, you will forever have floppy snek wow instead angry battle dragon wow.
PS: Hire a classical literature storyteller to write the basic scripts of your stories. If nathanos had died, that would have set up sylvanas/tyrande to be an epic showdown. Also, why the hell is malfurion alive he should have died. And don’t be afraid to george rr martin it! look at how game of thrones has gone!