With the Australian launch of World of Warcraft’s sixth expansion hours away, Azeroth is not in great shape. Heroes are dead, leadership is faltering, and our only hope for salvation lies in a set of artifacts no one’s seen for thousands of years. This is fine.
Me versus Gul’dan. I like those odds.
First, the non-spoilery bits. The Legion expansion pack brings massive changes to many World of Warcraft classes, introduces the Demon Hunter hero class, artifact weapons that grow with their wielders, class clubhouses (not what they call them) and the Broken Isles, where players will earn levels 101 through 110, will open for business.
The crux of the story here is the Burning Legion has returned, their way paved by orc Warlock Gul’dan, brought forward in time following the events of the previous expansion, Let’s See What Happens When We Screw With Time Uh-Oh We’re Fucked. Azeroth finds itself on the brink of an invasion even larger than the War of the Ancients, which for those of you uninitiated, was very big.
Now for the spoilers. Do not read on if you’ve not at least participated in World of Warcraft’s big pre-Legion events, or you just don’t give a damn.
These odds are a bit worse.
We are so screwed you guys.
The pre-Legion festivities kicked off with a special event which saw the Horde and Alliance storming the Broken Isles, seeking to nip the whole demon invasion thing in the bud. It did not go well. In fact, it went really, really bad.
First Tirion Fordring, one of Azeroth’s greatest heroes, gets brutally killed by a massive demon while the combined forces of the Horde and Alliance can only look on in horror. Then the main assault begins, which looks something like this from the Alliance side.
We’re so dead.
Just about every demon ever shows up to take on both the Alliance and Horde. Horde forces, led by Warchief Vol’jin and Sylvanas Windrunner, the undead queen, back up the Alliance assault. Or they’re supposed to, until Vol’jin is mortally wounded. Sylvanas orders a withdraw, leaving the Alliance high and dry, which certain completely irrational mages with bad hair (Jaina Proudmoore) take as a betrayal.
The Alliance forces flee, led by Stormwind’s King Varian Wrynn and Gilneas’ King Greymane order a retreat. Varian, one of the coolest figures in World of Warcraft lore, stays behind to buy some time by being completely murdered by Gul’dan.
Now we’ve got Sylvanas as Horde Warchief, at least until she dies (again) and is replaced, since the Horde goes through Warchiefs like candy. Stormwind is now ruled by Varian’s son, King Anduin, the same whiny kid we chased all over Pandaria two expansions ago.
This is just the beginning.
Meanwhile, the Archmage Khadgar has discovered the location of four mighty relics, the Pillars of Creation, which could be our only hope of repelling the Legion invasion. Their location has been tracked to the Broken Isles, the same place we just saw three of Azeroth’s greatest heroes bite the big one. Great! Let’s teleport the entire city of Dalaran over there for some reason and get to work!
I suppose this being a game Blizzard wants to continue for years to come, we’ll probably win, but wouldn’t it be awesome if we didn’t? Just one day there’s a huge battle, we screw it up, and the servers switch off forever. Pretend that’s what’s at stake, and the next ten levels are going to be pretty exciting.
World of Warcraft: Legion launches in Australia at 5:00 PM Sydney time, 3:00 PM in Perth and 7:00 PM for our New Zealand cousins.
Comments
25 responses to “World Of Warcraft: Legion Launches Tonight, And Azeroth Is Screwed”
Sigh… First expansion where I won’t be taking my main in first. Blizzard hates Warlocks.
Not that they don’t smack us every expansion with complete overhauls usually for the worse.
Dwarven prot pally goes in first on his goat… I mean ram.
What’s the deal with them currently? I don’t play one myself, but in BGs since the pre-patch they’ve seemed like unkillable wet blankets.
Demo locks are incredibly powerful, I’m not sure what mypetmonkey’s complaint is.
I only play Affliction but they’re rejigged everything we now have to stack Unstable Affliction (its also a hard cast and chews a shard and the stack is dispelable), shard generation is awful RNG, DoTs are weaker than DK’s and Boomkins and have long ramp up, Dots don’t spread like unholy DKs or Fire Mages… It’s just not as fun for end result. No snare, interrupt, stun, escape, or fight-reset.
I’ve played him since BC. Just not feeling it.
A dwarven pally is feeling like more of a fit for a demonic invasion.
be glad you’re not a ret paladin.. the overhaul fucked us so hard that we wont be taken for mythic raids or any mythic keystone dungeons above +1
edit: almost 3000 comments in the Beta class feed back thread for Ret Paladins and not a single response from Blizzard. the only class to get over 150 pages of feed back with Havoc Demon hunters comming second with 100 pages
That’s what I play and they seemed fine to me, but I haven’t checked out beta or read anything – do they not scale well at the endgame?
the biggest problem is the mastery being a debuff on the target and not a buff on the player. By the time you’ve build up enough holy power and cast judgement, the trash will either be close to death or dead leaving your Templars Verdicts and Divine Storms to hit like a wet noodle. then theres the fact that the only baseline AOE the spec has is Divine Storm, Concerate needs to buffed to the high heavens to be a worthwile talent. and thats just for pve, in pvp things are even worse
another issue with judgement is that its also the only 30yard ranged attack you have, while having no gap closer. divine steeds cooldown is too long at 45sec and also does not supress nor prevent roots and snares. Mean While warriors have charge on a 20 sec cooldown plus heroic leap and heroic throw. Enchance SHamans have ghost wolf and lightning bolt, all DKS have deathgrip with unholy having pet death grip and deathcoil as well.
I love how Ret was pretty low on the DPS charts, and they nerfed them “to the ground, baby!” once again.
I’m probably going to do the exact opposite. Pally has been my main since early Vanilla, but I’m probably going to level my Warlock first.
My Pally hits like a wet noodle, whereas the Warlock melts the flesh off of anything with just a look. And he just never dies.
Thinking I should ask my wife to log in for me before I get home to beat the queues.
Probably also worth setting up an anti-AFK clicker to leave myself perma-logged in for the next week.
Here’s hoping that Blizzard has learned from previous expansions and fucktupled their capacity, and that players have learned from previous expansions and won’t do idiotic things like complaining that they booked a week off work for an expansion launch then couldn’t even log in.
The actual cause of the issues last time was amazing. It turned out that all the people logging in after years for the WoD hype were all using the wotlk pre-event item “Haunted Memento” that spawned a permanent ghost behind every player with one – the number of ghosts the servers were tracking were crippling.
Edit: I misremembered it as bc instead of wotlk
I don’t really think what you describe OR Sielinth describe was the problem with WoD. Instancing was prolific, there simply wasn’t the capacity. Servers weren’t so much visibly falling over and disconnecting people (although that did happen), they were simply full, because an extra five million players decided to return for the expansion launch.
Plus they learned some important things in the WoD launch about creating ‘dismount zones’ around critical quest NPCs and interactive items. Those changes actually got patched in within a couple days of people trying to click on goblin NPCs being stood on by mammoths.
we also get to choose which zones we want to level up in as well. plus all the artifact quests are instanced. the biggest problem we have to worry about now is the fact that some shitstains have already made public that they intend to DDoS the launch.
I guess time will tell, I’ve hopped in and out of the EU forums and as far as I can see there are so far nothing major reported
there are bound to be minor issues with millions of people trying to log in.
i can see dalaran breaking because you kick off from there… and that’s about it
with level scaling zones you can start in any of the 4 zones so load distribution should be better. should being the operative word, it’s hard to predict human behaviour, maybe everyone will start in high mountain and kill the world server haha
Legion is live in the EU already and apparently launched with no problems so far.
Imagine if someone brought Varian back, but the only way he could survive was if his spirit inhabited an orc body because he died from fel magic.. So the Alliance no have an orc leader. Wow, just imagine.
I was thinking the exact same thing, but the other way around. Thrall becomes human. :O
Just curious how this is a thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRFCXIVpxZY
Without a peep about it on my goto site for games news PARTICULARLY for stuff here in ‘Straylia.
Anyhow, the work day cannot be done soon enough.
I don’t know why but the thing I noticed most about that was the number of shots of peoples mobile phones……
That nice and all but a Warcraft 4 would be cool.
My issue with the WoD launch was the garrison quest could not complete on my server so GMs would do mass completions but you could wait awhile for that.
I think people experiencing capacity problems must have been on the super populated servers like Frostmourne.
see this!?! this is the type of stuff they have to tell us about so we want to buy it, they dont tell you the awesome stuff to make you want to buy it, there last 2 exp wasnt that great, they should really tell us this shit, so we dont miss this stuff, ffs.
I picked a hell of a week to start playing WoW again… Got through all the various invasions, only to end up in mid 60’s range level wise. So I either grind through all the expansions to get to 100, buy Legion and use the 100 boost, or do a combo of both, and get that lvl 66 to 70 and boost a demon hunter. The buy and boost is an option, mostly because I have a bunch of chests from the invasions to gear up quick.
Or just do what I’m likely to anyway, and just fade away from the game. Not sure I want to drop $70 onto the game.