'Warlords of Draenor' Fun

Its finally arrived. The opening day of Blizzcon. Its an event that has been two years in the making. I expect a lot of announcements, even in the opening ceremony.

We all know that they are preparing to announce the next WoW expansion. Its been speculated that a recent trademark 'Warlords of Draenor' is the subtitle of the expansion.

While there have been some very speculative unconfirmed leaks concerning the backstory, nothing is really known. This gives us a chance to speculate and speculate we shall!

Let's start with Draenor. What is it? It is the original name of the world we now know as Outland. After Ner'zhul blew up the world in his nefarious plan, the name was changed to Outland to imply that it was a wasteland.

So if the next expansion will take place on Draenor, that implies that it would take place in the Warcraft 1 or 2 era.

So if the expansion takes place in the Warcraft 1 or Warcraft 2 era, how will we get there? That implies that we will travel back in time or there will be a parallel universe where Draenor was never destroyed.

What would be the purpose and role of the player in a parallel universe? Any changes wouldn't impact our original world. So what's the point?

Since a parallel universes does not appear to make sense, it can be determined that 'Warlords of Draenor' will be a time travel expansion where the player goes back in time to old Draenor.

How we go, why we go and all those fun elements, I'll leave that to Blizzard.

Since we are only a few hours away at this point; we are some quick hit things I want to see.

• Any final expansion boss but Garrosh
• Classic Warcraft characters as NPCs or raid bosses
• Redesigned Vengeance so its more equitable to all tanks.
• Redesigned Valor and rewards system
• Classic Raid Scaling
• Redesigned LFR so it the atmosphere is not as toxic
• Polish pass on Talents and Glyphs to fix some of the existing problems.

1 Month till Blizzcon!

With one month till Blizzcon, we will soon learn about the future of the Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft and Hearthstone franchises. They always announce some unexpected products or services and I expect this year to be no different.

But in the meantime, its going to be fun to speculate and speculate we will!!

Just from basic guessing, they are going to announce the World of Warcraft expansion, go in-depth about Reaper of Souls (and maybe even dole out some beta information), announce a Hearthstone release date, and changes to the WCS system. I don't expect them to announce or discuss Legacy of the Void or Titan until next year.

We know for sure that they are going to talk about the future of World of Warcraft and the new lands that we will get to explore as players.

While I am looking forward to the story, lore and all of the information about the new questlines, etc I think that Mists of Pandaria made significant design changes to WoW that will be need to be revisited in the next expansion. Some of these were across the board, some of them are class specific and some of them are even narrower.

Over the course of the next month, I hope to express my thoughts on these subjects and the areas of improvement that I believe exist for the next expansion.

First up will be a Mists of Pandaria - Post Mortem. Here I'll review how Mists of Pandaria moved the ball forward, where it was stagnant and where it took a step backwards. Be on look out for that in the next week.

Protection Paladins and Sacred Shield

I know this doesn't have to do with Death Knights and I will post some general thoughts on the new expansion and Death Knights soon but I wanted to start with Protection Paladins and Sacred Shield.


For those who don't play a Paladin, here is what it does: 

Protects the target with a shield of Holy Light for 30 sec, which increases the critical chance of your Word of Glory on the target by 30%.  The shield also absorbs (1 + 0.366 * holy spell power) damage when the target takes damage, but no more than once every 6 sec.

Can be active only on one target at a time.

Based on the current talent configuration for Protection Paladins, Sacred Shield has to change if Blizzard wants to introduce meaningful choices for this particular spec.

I've only tanked a couple Temple of the Jade Serpent runs so far but I feel this for the following reasons.

1) I feel like I have to take it. It costs very little mana, its increases the effectiveness of WoG (which is pretty weak now without the overheal shield) and it adds some damage absorb. Compared to Selfless Healer or Eternal Flame, both of which are very nice and useful in their own rights, I don't feel they are that useful for Prot. Take Eternal Flame for example; I won't spend 1 Holy Power on that over Shield, and I definitely won't use it over WoG (front loaded heal vs hot.)

(I could see myself taking Selfless Healer in 2 Tank situations but I think those individual cases will be rare.)

2) Then because I feel like I have to pick it, I feel like I have to keep it up 100% of the time, simply because I can. It feels very maintenancey. Tanks are already asked to do a lot, I don't think they should be asked to maintain this type of ability, like you could ask a DPS to do.

They would have to do one of two things for me not to take Sacred Shield in 95% of cases:

1) Change Sacred Shield.

-or-

2) Buff Eternal Flame/Selfless Healer so they are just as appealing.

Since buffing the Eternal and Selfless could cause balance problems for the other specs, I suspect they'll change Sacred Shield and be done with it.

They can add a cooldown, add a meaningful resource cost or add an absorb cap. They have to do something before it effectively becomes a Protection Paladin staple.