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This game might as well marry you, BECAUSE IT'LL DRAIN THE LIFE RIGHT OUT OF YOU 8)
There's not much burning, and it isn't really a crusade, but you know me, I don't like to complain.
The expansion for World of Warcraft adds basically a new smaller planet to have adventures on, along with raising the level cap from 60 to 70, and adds new skills and dungeons and talent bloo bloos and shit. And new bugs, balance issues, and angry angry players.
Until Left 4 Dead or the Warhammer 40,000 MMO comes out, WOW will continue to be the best multiplayer coop game available (based on playtime and depth, otherwise something like I dunno Gears of War might be better, mathematically). That would be kind of sad, but the expansion actually does add good positive things to it besides more "gather 20 really rare random drop items off of dead enemies" fetch quests. Although there is still plenty of that, it's an MMO after all. Fetch quests are like the crate of MMOs. It's like the fetch quest designer shows up at work in his stained Trigun shirt, sits down at his little station there, sharpens a pencil, then throws up his hands and says "Well, I can't think of anything!" And then you're killing 10 guys one at a time to get a single quest item to drop, and then keep doing it for 9 more. And the game will still make a fag of you just for playing it (hence our guild name, Team Snowglobe, a reference to the fine quality motion picture Falling Down starring Fredrick Forrest).
However, there are things that are actually original in this new expansion, along with many fixes for the old game that were long overdue.
Good Things (WHERE HAVE THEY GONE DOO DOO DOODLDOO):
Where the previous World of Warcraft left off with just a bunch of gay raid instances being the only way to get cool stuff or even do anything at all period, the expansion not only adds new shit to do in the new planet of Outland (HOW MANY PEOPLE RACKED THEIR BRAIN TO COME UP WITH THAT AMAZING "LORE" NAME?) but basically as soon as you go through the Dark Portal (located in the previously worthless country of Blasted Lands) and go into Hellfire Peninsula, they give you adventures to go on to report to this and this dude and start your run of quests which gives you gear 2 or 3 times better than the shit you're going in with. Some of these rewards are even better than the fuckin shit you'd get from the raids, and the quests aren't even hard and most are better than the actual quest shit they give you at level 55 and up in the normal game. You can go into the portal at level 58 so you don't have to wait for the last 2 gay levels. You even get more experience and sweet sweet monay from the new quests than the ones on the old planet. So all of the raid instances are now obsolete and bilzrad is telling the raiding people that they have wasted their time all along, working for 10 hours a day, every day, every week, every month, for about a year, to get gear that's basically matched by the really really easy shit they throw at you right at the beginning of the expansion, HAW HAW HAW. Not having to raid to get good gear at level 60 justifies playing at level 60, unlike the previous game where there really was no justification (see my old WOW review for more about that).
A patch released a few weeks before the expansion added tons of shit that the game needed a long time ago, like raising the maximum amount of quests you can take from 20 to 25, reducing the amount of times you say "FUCK quest log is full let me find something to dump" and then spending 10 minutes looking through the quests you promised yourself you were going to do anyway when you feel like it, and trying to pick the ones you'll have to remember to pick up later or just forget about. They also finally added floaty numbers for when you take damage, which used to only show up in the combat log (not visible by default) or on your character's portrait which is the most out of the way place to see them all up in the tiny portion of the upper left corner blocking the little picture of your cow's face. They also added floaty text with the damage things for when you get a buff or a debuff, making it very helpful for knowing when you just got in range of a totem, or if YOU ARE THE BOMB RUN INTO THE POISON or some shit, whereas previously the only notification was seeing a buff/debuff icon show up or disappear. These helpful interface additions, like the floaty text (damage floaters) and raid warnings (putting a big warning in the middle of the screen to your party or raid) used to be only available in mods, but now they are integrated into the game itself, which is great and high time. And the raid warning thing is really fun to abuse in a party of your pals while doing instances and shit by putting giant swearing right in the center with a "boing" warning sound effect to go with it, or when you're screaming about cloudsongs or 50 dkp. The only time that's not fun is in a party of newbs, where mostly people will be like DUHHHHHHHHHHHH? Because most people who play WOW are brain dead and have no souls.
There are a few changes to the old game on the old planet, such as a few quests added from new NPCs represented by the new races/factions added to the game, most of them give better gear than you could've gotten from any of the old normal quests. They sort of normalized the reputation gains from quests too, but that's boring; it involves your main race capital town reputations which basically just affects prices of normal goods and things in towns run by Orgigglyamar or Thunder BLURF, such as your Stonards and your Camp Mojaches, and the rep will max out at around lvl 50 from doing the normal quests, as opposed to a year ago where you'd have to cash in about 50,000 runecloth to max it out and no one would care enough to do that. However you only get the benefit from this if you're starting a new character now, and since my cow is from the original WOW and is all old, it missed out on all the reputation bonus equalization whatevers, so I have to pay extra money for ankhs or whatever in fuckin Undershitty.
So after slogging through most of the plain original game (which is still pretty plain and now inappropriately hard compared to the beginning of the expansion which is easy unless you're a warrior then you're probably underpowered), you are almost rewarded when you get to Outland just for playing the normal game stuff. A lot of the quests are easy as fuck, give constant swee gear upgrades, and some are actually really fun and creative. Almost immediately you get a quest that lets you ride a special flight path where you can throw provided bombs that fuckin blast the shit out of some enemy zones and you can see sweet giant numbers flying out of them for like 15,000 damage and shit, which should satisfy any previous player's desire to see the biggest numbers flying around their screens. The game definitely needs more bombing run type quests. ADVENTURES!
|  | | | | ALSO YOU CAN LEARN ABOUT BEAR SPIRITS | |
Because most of your dude's power in the game is based on how good your gear is, upgrading your gear is almost like gaining a level, so almost every new quest you complete in the Hellfire country increases your max health (stam) and max mana and spell crit (int) and defense (armor, agl) and crit chance (agl again!) and fuckin melee powwa (str), with your swee new gears. When you actually gain a level, it gives you like +1 to each of your base stats such as your strength and int and bloo bloo (like +2 to bloo bloo). And spirit, which is worthless (it affects your out of combat health and mana regen, and no one CARES, not even blzrzr because they simply added "5 mana every 5 seconds" to almost all of the new caster gear). The shit they give you throughout the Hellfire Peninsula quests is sort of like gaining a full level or two for each piece of armor. Then there's Hellfire Citadel, which is an instance with a bunch of separate wings you can pick, 2 of them being actually quite easy as soon as you get into the country, and only taking 1 hour straight up, making it easier and faster even than the fuckin level 20 instances and so on. There are a few tricks usually but nothing really complicated as long as you are a competent player. The bosses drop even better gear, and the quests for these instances have rewards which can be shit you'll almost never replace for the rest of the game.
Aside from most of the newer basic instances being pretty short and straightforward, with just the occasional challenging boss, the design of these instances is pretty cool too. They added a lvl 65+ instance in the old world in a place that used to be just a placeholder with nothing in it, where the "dungeon" is a time portal that takes you back to the past to a zone that used to be for level 25 questing stuffs. In the instance is the same old level 25 bears that you can kill in one shot, and then you're disguised as a human for the entire run of the instance, and instead of the usual instance tactics of killing trash mobs and a few bosses, you break into an enemy fort, blow up some internment camps holding orcs (ORCS ARE GOOD GUYS IN THIS TOO? AMAZING) and then break into the enemy castle building and go into the basement to rescue Thrall who's the leader of the orcs and basically the whole horde. Then you bust him out and do a big escort where he chops through a bunch of enemies and then mounts up and rides to Tarren Mill (which becomes a horde town in the normal game, IN THE FUTURE!!!!!) and you kill more guys and then a secret deedly deecret bunch of time changing evil dragons (wow......... dragons) and save history. Meanwhile you can just go right to the alliance town of Southshore (which remains basically the same place in the normal game) and watch looooore characters have a cutscene in the inn or buy drinks and junk from the bartender. You don't even need to be in a party to do this stuff, you could just go to this instance alone. If only molten core was this interesting. Then maybe raiding wouldn't be gay fuckin bullshit.
|  | | | | AAAAAAAAAAAAAA I'M BLACK!!!!!! I'M AFRICAN AMERICAN | |
Bad Things:
Right after you leave Hellfire Peninsula, the gear is all sidegrades (+20 stam +15 str vs +15 stam +20 str), so it's just there to vendor. There's an occasional upgrade from lvl 62 to 70 from quests, and it's still cool to be like "oh shit this is better IN EVERY WAY than my current belt, it has more int and staaaaaaaaaaaaaam and damage and healing and spell crit" and if you can find a chance to SHUT UP!!!!!!!! about it for a second you can actually equip it, and then continue slogging through fetch and kill quests. All the cool "bomb enemy forts from the air" quests dry up and it turns into MMO business as usual.
Even months after the expansion has been released, many many quests and areas are totally bugged the fuck out. There's a quest in the level 64 area that only works one time once per server reset and is bugged for everyone else afterwards. There were some dudes in one of the lvl 70 areas that would take damage until 50% of their health, then just totally break off combat, run away, and reset their health, making the quest involving them totally impossible. There are bugs throughout the game code itself where if an enemy stands on a seam in the ground in the wrong way, it will stop moving and become invincible. Eventually you learn to stop doing any quests that involve "forge camps" where the eeeeeevil burning legion is creating their machines of evil war and they have some portals and shit set up to teleport in dudes to strike at whatever I don't really know or care, but the problem with all of these forge camps is that the stationary cannons there bug out and sometimes will shoot at you forever until you have actually left the country, sometimes you don't even have to get their attention to do it, and sometimes you can see yourself back at a friendly town getting hit by green fireballs for no damage at all. There's another monster bug where you can just start being hit by enemies without even seeing where they are, so the game considers them to be standing right in front of you hitting you with a stick or whatever, but you'll see them as being behind a tree somewhere, and then they don't show up as taking damage but they do but you can't really know that until they die, and if they die without you being where they are showing up in the game you can't loot them WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And a month after this has been happening throughout the game, druids mention that entangling roots isn't working anymore, and every server comes down that day to apply a hotfix to it. And what race can be a druid? Night elves. The conspiracy theory here I'm implying is that any problem in the game that happens to players aside from night elves is ignored, but one that affects night elves directly must be fixed ASAP, because in one of the pointlessly readable books inside Stratholme it says that night elves are very powerful and mysterious and they can't have the precious looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooore of the game ruined by a technical problem in the game's code.
|  | | | | If you made the mistake of playing horde (psh what are you a newb?) then you'll never get to do stuff like this. COULD THAT BE THE LEGENDARY RAZGRIZ I'VE HEARD SO MUCH ABOUT LATELY? | |
Story:
Just more pointless arbitrary "there's an enemy army" stuff with the ridiculous fantasy names with apostrophes and friendly and enemy factions that may or may not be allied with each other or something. There are like 20 new factions in this game, and you have to gain reputation with them (completing quests for them or killing certain enemies will give you rep, also collecting fetch type items that you can cash in with them for rep), and the rep grinding will let you buy neat items with them or if you max out you can do the high difficulty heroic dungeons and shit which sounds more like a pain in the ass than something fun. Then in the capital of Outland there are two factions and you have to pick one to become your main town faction, and when you do shit with them it fucks up your rep with the other place so you can't really go back, although they added a way to try to reverse your rep but it would take a year to fix it no matter what. I hope you can imagine a god who would care, BECAUSE I SURE CAN'T.
New Gay Races!
In the expansion they add two races and I can't imagine anyone giving a shit about them but people were actually speculating about what the alliance race would be. WOULD IT BE CYBORGS? Perhaps they would be draneeidisfd because you see it would fit the lore very fittingly and then bam it did turn out to be the draeni (who cares), which are basically blue guys who for some reason have cow legs like the taurens, and also the males are kind of big like the taurens probably because of all the alliance players who whined about how they didn't have races that were all huge like taurens WE WANT A RACE HUGE LIKE TAURENS NO I WANT IT NOW NOW NOWWWWW.
The one advantage the draeni have is that the chicks are the most ass shakinest hoowars in WOW (beating out night elf and human hookers), and they probably suck a good one ha ha yeah high five. The blood elf belf babez just look all twiggy and weird. And they're elves. Might as well have chocobos and lightsabers in your game too if you're not even going to TRY.
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