At this point, I have finished the Warlords of Draenor expansion, in that I have completed the story and hit level 70. I ended up doing a small bit of story in the Spires of Arak zone and then heading to Nagrand, which had been my favorite zone of The Burning Crusade. This wrapped up the expansion’s story as we fought against ogres and more Iron Horde, and eventually had Thrall face off with Garrosh in a pretty epic cinematic. If there’s one thing Blizzard can consistently deliver on, it is fantastic looking cutscenes.
Having finished, I’d like to take this time to look back at what I enjoyed, what fell flat, and overall give my thoughts on the expansion as someone playing through it in 2025, some 11 years after initial release.
Before I dive in, I want to stress that this is not intended to be a review of Warlords of Draenor. I am replaying these expansions well after their initial release, and many of the things that may have been problems on release have been rendered obsolete by the passage of time. Endgame is irrelevant at this point. Dungeon and raid difficulty, gear grind, and things of that nature become a non-issue when playing with Chromie Time. Since this is just a leveling route leading up to the current expansion, there’s no need to take part in endgame activities. So, all of that said:
Garrisons! I love my little camp, and I fully intend to keep returning to this periodically to continue building it up. By the end of my playthrough, all of my buildings are level 2, and level 3 seems to be locked behind doing a certain amount of work orders so as to be able to purchase the plans. We even got docks and our own navy!
This unlocked a whole separate mission table, so now in addition to sending out followers to level and bring back supplies we can also send ships out. A good portion of this appears to be gear tokens, which are fairly useless at this point, but I did get a pet from one as well.
The Stables were probably my favorite building so far, since they let me trap and tame numerous animals, and then, over the course of repeated dailies, turn them into mounts. I’ll always take more mounts.
In that vein, I will say the addition of flying to all zones without needing to train a flying skill does seem to have rendered ground mounts fairly useless outside of collecting. Outside of a few specific zones that do not allow flying, I can’t really think of an instance where I would summon a ground mount now unless I just really liked the look of it in town. Just a thought as a returner.
The story was…fine? I enjoyed the start: running pell-mell through Tanaan Jungle to destroy the Dark Portal and escape the Iron Horde, then fighting with the Frostwolf Clan to claim a foothold in Frostfire Ridge.. Gorgrond was an enjoyable zone to look at, and honestly the zones as a whole were very pretty and enjoyable to run around in, but the story quests seemed fairly bare-bones from here on out. I honestly lost track of Garrosh and Grommash during this portion of the story. Shattrath was right there in Talador, but the only story quest that sent me in was to fight off a few demons at the docks? Running a few dungeons and raids later solo I came across Grommash being tortured in Hellfire Citadel, and was more than a little lost as to how the Orc that threatened us prior was now chained up and being tortured by Gul’dan.
Maybe I missed some things, or this was explained in more context in dungeon quests along the way, but overall I would say the story left something to be desired. Fun to play through to see what happened to Garrosh after his stint as Warchief, and I am curious what the Alliance side looks like, but this story is not one I would rate highly compared to something like Wrath of the Lich King.
Leveling in general was an enjoyable experience, and I could see picking WoD again on another character to explore some of the zones more and see more of the random side quests. Since I was trying to see the most of the individual zones and story without over-leveling, I ended up avoiding most side quests and all the little world quests that kept popping up. I do not particularly remember these being a thing during Mists of Pandaria, and it is neat that WoW finally adopted the world quests/FATE system that Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV have had.
Crafting was an odd one for me. As far as I remember, from launch up to Mists of Pandaria, crafting and gathering was a fairly straightforward process in which you mined ore, picked herbs, or skinned animals, then used those materials to craft certain items by clicking a button to craft once you had all the requisite materials. With Warlords of Draenor this seems to have changed somewhat, and a good portion of the crafting process involves turning in materials at your Garrison to complete Work Orders. Completing the Work Orders will allow you to gather other reagents for crafting. The crafting itself requires gathering books you can turn in to purchase recipes. The trainers themselves have nothing to teach you aside from the initial Warlords of Draenor crafting skill. Honestly, this setup has yet to click for me, and feels like a change for the sake of change. I’m very curious if this continued on through the next expansions, but as is, I did not spend much time leveling my professions in WoD due to a lack of enjoyment.
I have thoroughly enjoyed this return to WoW, and at this point am about a month into playing again and enjoying every second. This blog has helped immensely as it gives me a sense of focus and a reason to explore the game outside of it just feeling like an obligation. While I am sure that sounds bad, I feel like MMO players will understand hitting the point with a game where it begins to feel that you are logging in each day not because you really enjoy it, but because it has become habit or you fear missing out on dailies and so on. Something I may explore a bit in a separate series.
From here, Legion Remix is coming up, and I am excited to see the expansion that everyone seems to rate so highly. I really hope Blizzard carried on with the Garrison system, and that I will have another chance to carve out a little space to call my own. In the meantime, I plan to keep doing dailies from my Garrison to collect mounts and tinker around with running some old content to get mounts I may have missed over the years.
Next time: You Are Not Prepared (Diving Into the Legion Remix)
Grizzlebeard Plays 