Gentle Evening Mists of Hippieland

Well, isn't this a joke. =|

The thing I am most curious about is how terrible the rejected ideas were to make this bottom-of-the-barrel concept seem like a good idea.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way I must remind myself that Blizzard does not make bad games and regardless of the story concept, WoW will continue to be an excellent game for the forseeable future, especially now that they are done with that cataclysmic timesink of redesigning Azeroth and can focus more on developing actual game systems.

The new talent system is really well thought-out. The Challenge dungeons sound fucking awesome and I can't wait for an excuse to do more five-man content. The introduction of gear-normalisation [along with smoothing the gear progression from levels one through eighty-five] opens up all kinds of future options to expand gameplay which would otherwise be restricted by level. Going from three to two weapon slots is an extremely overdue change. Resilience is being made into a base stat, and I still hope that Spirit becomes a secondary stat at the same time.

The critter pet battling sounds pretty lame, but if I know me, I'll end up getting into it. >_>

I'll have to hear more about the new class before I pass judgement, but the idea of a melee healer gets me very, very excited. Let's just hope it doesn't become one of those unbalanceable concepts like Death Knight tanking or Discipline healing where they end up homogenising the hell out of it just to stop it from being overpowered. I also like the idea of a melee class without auto-attacks [though this may not end up being final] and disagree that this is really anything unusual. We already have loads of classes that don't use autoattacks and have to press a button for every offensive move. We call them casters.

I still eyetwitch every time I hear Blizzard talking about how a Legendary needs a story to go along with it, considering that when the Rogue daggers were first announced, they also said they had yet to make up a story to go with them.