Ever since World of Warcraft Classic Season of Discovery launched on Nov. 30, I’ve been glued to my PC playing the game, experimenting with builds, figuring out the economy, and finding the best gear for my Shaman. I’m having a blast, but Season of Discovery could have been even better.
Before you get ready to attack me in my Twitter DMs, let me state my case. First and foremost, Blizzard Entertainment did an amazing job with Season of Discovery. It’s exactly what the devs promised—it made me fall in love with the game once again. Now, I can go out into the wide world of Azeroth, into the same old familiar places, and find a new face or quest waiting for me. It’s the same old game we love, but with a spicy twist.
But the more time I spend playing Season of Discovery, the more features I’d like to change.
For starters, the big PvP event in phase one, the Battle for Ashenvale, is focused too much on PvE instead of PvP. Essentially, you need to defeat lieutenants and generals to win the battle. While you need to defeat players of opposing faction to fill up the percentage at the top of your screen to start the event, you don’t really interact with your enemies after that. All you do is rush lieutenants and generals to finish the event as soon as possible for quick Warsong reputation. If you try to hunt Alliance or Horde players, you’re griefing your faction. So, I’d be happy if Blizzard adds flag carrying, objective captures, or any similar PvP event that turns Ashenvale into a full-blown battlefield.
Another issue I often bump into is layering. This is a special feature in WoW Classic that divides realms into separate layers. While you can easily hop between layers by being invited to group on a different layer, it’s frustratingly common to get stuck in one layer while your party is in another. Just the other day, we had a similar issue. While we were raiding Blackfathom Deeps, one of our DPS had to leave. We didn’t panic, and just swapped them with another DPS, thinking it would be quick and easy to summon the newcomer with a Warlock in our party. But, it didn’t go as planned. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t get the Warlock and two additional players in the same layer outside the instance. So, we spent 20 minutes waiting for the newcomer to arrive. This is just one example of a common problem. I’ve also seen instances where players suddenly get shifted into a new layer. So, this isn’t only a Season of Discovery issue, but a WoW Classic issue.
While I love the idea of revisiting old dungeons as raids and PvPing, endgame content feels a bit lacking. When you reach level 25, you don’t have that many options left—gear up, clear Blackfathom Deeps, PvP, and farm gold. This list of errands might seem like a lot, but if you really sink your teeth in, you’ll quickly realize you can play through all the content in a week or two. So, it would be amazing if we had additional raids we could complete, more unique puzzles to solve, and more unique discoveries to uncover across the world. After two weeks of playing, I’m already contemplating creating an alt. Even though this means that Season of Discovery is very alt-friendly, I want more out of the endgame.
I know it’s too late for this change now, as the level 25 cap is already set in stone, but I’d be over the moon if Blizzard increased the cap to 30. Not only would this automatically mean more content, with dungeons like Scarlet Monastery and Razorfen Kraul, but it would also make the gear cutoff a bit cleaner. Most high-quality gear from dungeons can’t be obtained before level 30, and it could even diminish the rising power creep of Blackfathom Deeps loot. On top of that, plenty of classes are missing core parts of their kit. For example, Shamans don’t even have Windfury Totem, and Warriors don’t have Intercept. Simply put, our lives would have been way easier if the cutoff was level 30.
Season of Discovery is being polished and updated regularly with hotfixes, and fans should expect the game to continue evolving until it’s time for phase two. Hopefully, my words will echo beyond the readers of Dot Esports, and we’ll get the changes we deserve.
