Live

It's been roughly two weeks since I've updated this thing, but my schedule as a whole has remained largely the same. I've been playing a lot of video games. In fact, it's safe to say I'm playing more than before. This month is pretty crazy as far as new game releases go. On the 13th (only a few days after my last update), the new World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor came out. I decided to give it a try despite my skepticism. I liked Mists of Pandaria but I wasn't sure about what I'd heard about his new expansion. Many abilities have been pruned and rotations and playstyles have been simplified.

I shouldn't have worried. Warlords of Draenor is fantastic and breathes life into a game that has become somewhat stagnant. I can't say that I've experienced the breadth of content the expansion has to offer, but because I've hit level 100, I can say I've definitely played enough of it to give a fair impression. The vast majority of my play time thus far has been on my blood elf paladin, Radelle. I've spent more time on her than any other character, by my estimation. It might be a close race with some of my old Alliance characters because I can recall many all-day heroic dungeon fests on my human priest, Isara. I really miss that class and I'm wondering if I maybe should have used my free level 90 boost on my troll priest instead of druid--but it's too late to worry about that now.

As a whole, many of the new zones (some of which are remixes on old Outlands zones from the classic Burning Crusade expansion) are beautiful to look at and feature tons of solid quests and content to explore. Each zone is positively littered with treasures in out-of-the-way places. Because it is not yet possible to fly in the new Draenor zones, many of these treasures require some level of creativity to acquire--as well as the use of such novelty items as the Goblin Hang Glider. These treasures generally reward you with gold, garrison resources (more on that later) and ultimately, satisfaction.

Exploration is generally very heavily rewarded in Warlords of Draenor. In addition to the aforementioned treasures, each zone features a large number of unique and powerful boss mobs not directly tied to any of the area's quests. These bosses serve as interesting optional objectives and reward players with unique item drops. Many of them will require assistance from other players, but many classes will have few issues with soloing them. Other optional objectives feature in every zone and can only be completed once. These objectives boast impressive experience and gold rewards at the expense of usually being quite time consuming.

The most satisfying and notable feature introduced in Warlords of Draenor is, for my money, the garrison. Each player gains access to their own instanced base of operations during one of the game's early quests that can be customized and upgraded to the player's liking. Soon, a variety of followers obtained by various means will come streaming into this base. These followers can be assigned to garrison buildings and/or sent on missions to acquire gold, experience, and other rewards. Each follower has specific abilities and traits that serve a variety of different purposes and counter different threats. A follower with the Heroic Leap ability counters the Danger Zones threat, for instance, and will be much more likely to succeed on a mission in which this is a factor. Before followers are dispatched, you are given a percentage likelihood of success. I rarely send them off if it's below 90% because I don't want to waste my hard-earned garrison resources.

Overall, I feel Warlords of Draenor is a tremendously successful expansion and I'm looking forward to playing it regularly in the months to come. I'm already cutting my teeth on some of the endgame dungeons and I'm pleasantly surprised at their difficulty! I'm sure I'd be playing the game nonstop if not for the fact that November has been an absolutely insane month for new releases. Just two days ago I purchased the new Super Smash Bros for Wii U and Pokemon Alpha Sapphire. Two days from now I'll be purchasing Persona Q for 3DS. There'll be more on those to come, but for now I'm going to have to get back to it!