For World of Warcraft, 100 is just the beginning.
Blizzard Entertainment’s massively multiplayer online title aspires to keeping gamers addicted — and playing — long after they reach the maximum character level.
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We’ve created a report card for the game’s major areas to figure that out.
Garrison buildings grade: A
Above: A soldier stops to greet a player character in a Horde garrison.
One clear max-level success in Draenor’s end game (other than the storyline, which we covered in GamesBeat’s original WoD review) is the new garrison system. Garrisons are player-owned towns where you can construct buildings, collect raw materials for tradeskills, defend against sieges, recruit followers to send on missions, and obtain quests for your own characters to complete.
The variety of gameplay options presented by garrison buildings and missions that are fully leveled up are immense. Each comes with its own mechanics and awards players specific bonuses if they continue to interact with the NPCs housed there. Some gamers joke they never leave their garrisons when playing.
Tradeskill buildings offer players the ability to craft materials, even if they don’t hold that particular skill. For example, the enchanting building allows non-enchanters to disenchant their gear, destroying it to create materials or new enchants — a very useful ability.
The building’s abilities rise at the top third level of upgrades, offering players the chance to convert materials into more valuable enchants and materials. Players can obtain the third level building plans when their characters reach the maximum level of 100 and they complete quests related to each building.
At the top level, the tavern awards players daily quests in the game’s 5-player dungeons and the ability to recruit one new follower a week with a specific skill you desire. The max-level barn allows you to trap high-level animals to harvest savage blood, a material used to upgrade high level gear. And so on. Each type of building feels different, and it’s pleasantly difficult to decide which buildings to construct on your limited plots.
It’s a fascinating system and one that absorbs much of the max-level player’s time, to happy effect.
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Followers and follower missions grade: A+
Above: Two followers in a Warlords of Draenor garrison chat with each other in World of Warcraft. Who needs players?
As you quest while leveling, you meet characters in game who will, typically after you’ve completed some storyline with them, volunteer to follow you. Others will come to you via quests or achievements. These NPCs will hang around your garrison; you can assign them to work in your garrison buildings or go on missions to help themselves level up, collect gear for themselves, or collect gear or gold for you.
“Garrison missions are the most addictive feature of the game. They give me gear, they give me loot, they give me [experience points], they give me everything in the game and don’t really require much input,” the player Zarek said. He has a mage and a death knight at level 100. “It’s amazing, even if it feels like a cheap mobile app sometimes. It’s just nice to be able to play a minigame with good rewards.”
Not being able to fly at level 100 helps to encourage him to stay at the garrison rather than go out to quest or collect tradeskill items, he said. (He’s one of many players who complain that not being able to fly at maximum level, as they have in previous expansions, makes the game less rewarding.)
Your character can use up to 20 followers at a time (25 if you have a top-level barracks building), assigned to various tasks or missions. Followers display their own personalities as they wander your garrison, interacting with each other and with you. They salute and step out of the way as you pass, shout funny things at you, or hold conversations with each other. You’ll wander by and catch one fishing or another casting a spell on one of your buildings.
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Above: This follower mission awarded the player with armor from the Highmaul raid dungeon.
If you assign all available followers not working in garrison buildings to missions, you’ll probably have up to a dozen of those quests underway at any given time.
Whether your followers succeed depends on what their abilities are, what gear you’ve equipped them in, their level, who they’re paired with, how long the mission lasts, where it takes place, and a host of other factors. You match up the strengths of your followers against the weaknesses of the enemies they face in the missions, and some of their traits work more powerfully when combined with the right follower partners.
The result is a highly addictive minigame that combines the appeal of a strengths-vs.-weaknesses Pokemon-like battle system with questing and something resembling a Hearthstone-style card game in strategy and combinations. It is easily the best part of the new expansion, a heap of fun, and it would be a welcome addition to Warcraft’s mobile app. (Hint, hint.)
Tradeskills grade: D
Above: My paladin there is not an enchanter. But thanks to her garrison’s Enchanting Study building, she can do all but the highest-level enchants without the skill, using an NPC.
For every terrific thing introduced in the tradeskill-related garrison buildings, it seems tradeskills themselves were gutted an equal amount.
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In previous expansions, Warcraft trade skills awarded bonuses or special items to the characters who held them. Blacksmiths might make the very best armor only for themselves, or have the ability to put sockets on their own gear that could hold gems with extra stats on them. Enchanters could enchant their rings to add extra stats, something that players with other skills couldn’t do. And so on.
But other than selling items for gold — or saving the gold you might spend on other people’s crafted items — players will find little reason to hold a trade skill.
Each crafting type was given an item in Warlords that could only be made once a day, supplemented by an additional number made in the player’s garrison building. Alchemists, for example, can make an alchemical catalyst once a day, with a yield of up to ten items at a time. The alchemy hut in the garrison can make an additional amount, depending on the player’s skill and whether a follower is assigned to work there.
Above: At the Forge building, my paladin surveys the recipes she can buy. All items they make can be resold.
A couple dozen very-limited high end items in each profession use these cooldowns. They are the only things restricted to trade skill holders to make, and they can almost all be sold to others.
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This is the first expansion where every crafted item is available to everyone at the beginning, with no additional items opening up due to skill. Raising your skill level only awards you additional daily-cooldown items when you craft them.
Almost all of the day-to-day recipes are available to those that hold the garrison buildings for a profession, regardless of whether they have the trade skill or not. So you can visit someone else’s garrison and buy or craft all but the most-valuable items in game.
Those most-valuable items are sellable, so you’ll find them by the dozens in the auction house. Don’t like the character-boosting statistics on the items you buy? The item to reroll those stats is also for sale. Most are outclassed by sellable raid dungeon drops.
A few vestiges of the old crafting system remain. A few fun items still require Engineering to wear, though less-powerful versions are available to everyone. Statistics-boosting flask buffs still lasts twice as long for alchemists as they do for anyone else, but it’s a minor bonus and certainly not enough to make up for the fact that they can’t craft raid-dungeon-level items like the other professions.
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Above: My reagent bank, full of unused materials.
It all creates little incentive to raise or practice tradeskills, and that’s a shame, considering how robust the system had become. My characters are sitting on more mining ore and herbs than they know what to do with, waiting on the daily cool downs to be able to craft something new. A recent change to alchemy potions (to require just herbs instead of meat or fish) has my fisherman sitting idle.
I used to adore tradeskills. Now, those slightly obsessive tendencies are focused on garrison missions instead.
General raids grade: C+. Higher-level raids grade: A-
Above: Imperator Mar’gok, the final boss in the Highmaul raid dungeon, after a truly bad day.
The Highmaul large-group raid dungeon opened December 2, and the best guilds of players in the world have cleared it on the toughest difficulty already. The rest of us are still slogging through, at a pace that feels quick, but still right in line to be ready for the next big dungeon (Blackrock Foundry) when it opens in February.
The bosses inside are fun, and some of the tactics they use are both entertaining and challenging at the right difficulty level. It’s a fun dungeon, with just enough little enemies between each of the bosses to keep the short travel time interesting. You can learn more about each Highmaul boss in our dungeon preview, but overall, players are responding well to the design.
As of this week, all bosses are now available on the game’s easiest “looking for raid” (LFR) difficulty, which matches random players together to complete the dungeon.
Normal and heroic difficulty now allow people to compose pre made, flexibly sized groups of 10-30 to tackle harder versions of the bosses. And the toughest Mythic difficulty, which the guild Paragon cleared last week, is still the realm of the hardcore few and their 20-man groups.
“Having flexibility has really changed the face of raiding,” end-game player Deborah Broome said on Facebook. “Now we take people on Sunday that couldn’t make it on Saturday, so someone that only raids one day has just as much of a chance to get loot. We never had this with 10-man or 25-man [raids] — you were there the whole weekend or you weren’t. It has changed the way we handle loot. It is worth it, because we get to play with people that we normally wouldn’t get to.”
Above: My druid prepares to heal in the LFR-difficulty Kargath Bladefist fight. My group ignores nearly all the mechanics, no one dies, and we down him in seconds.
I’ve done the LFR wings, cleared Highmaul on Normal and Heroic difficulties, and killed the first boss on Mythic difficulty on two level 100 characters. The differences between the difficulty levels of each tier are striking.
Highmaul has a few basic gear checks, but the difficult parts of the dungeon are the tactics the bosses use, which require quick responses from players and good overall coordination from groups to complete.
Because those are precisely the things that tend to suffer on LFR difficulty, tuning those things down has made the raid dungeon extremely easy at that difficulty level. Virtually every boss is killed by players grouping up and tossing as much damage as they can without regard for the raid’s mechanics — a strategy called “zerging it down” after the waves of little Zerg aliens in Starcraft.
“LFR is way too easy,” said Slogger, who plays a level 100 Horde shaman. “Some of the [Highmaul] fights are pretty fun, but I haven’t seen enough of them to say for sure.”
Above: Kargath utters his final line before collapsing.
The result is a dungeon that has zero challenge for the large chunk of Warcraft’s players who do not belong to more-hardcore guilds. If you do belong to a coordinated group, there is a good difficulty shift between Normal to Heroic and Heroic to Mythic to keep guilds at different skill levels and time commitments entertained.
Mythic fights, in particular, add fun mechanics for players to work with. The first fight against Kargath Bladefist, for example, adds the “Roar of the Crowd” buff: Your group does more damage the more it shows its prowess in the ring.
World bosses grade: C
Above: Drov the Ruiner prepares for his inevitable demise.
Level-100 players can group up to kill large bosses that spawn in the countryside. Two are available now: Drov the Ruiner, a giant cyclops-like gronn who lives in a cave, and Tarlna the Ageless, a centaur-like genesaur who lives in a swamp. Both present some challenge to disorganized random groups (which is typically what you’ll find to kill them), but both typically die reasonably quickly, especially because players can run back during the fight from nearby graveyards if they die. A player has a chance of receiving loot from the first one they kill each week.
The items Drov and Tarlna can drop for each character class typically consist of one good option and two that are lackluster. For most players, the world bosses are just a weekly slot machine pull for an unexciting epic item. That said, this is the role that world bosses have played for two expansion packs now.
Reputations grade: Incomplete
Factions were a huge part of the Mists of Pandaria expansion in World of Warcraft. How well you raised your reputation with a variety of different NPC groups determined whether you got the best trade skill patterns, the best gear, or even rare mounts or other items.
In Warlords of Draenor, factions still hold some gear, some mounts and pets, and some followers. At the top level, a garrison building (the Trading Post) offers the ability to open two additional factions.
Above: A toy reward from the Laughing Skull Orcs faction makes all characters in the area laugh.
But the gear is not as good as that available elsewhere unless you invest an enormous amount of Apexis crystals, a kind of farmable currency, into upgrading it. Followers and mounts are also costly in terms of both crystals and gold. And raising your reputation with the new factions can require long, tedious, mob-killing grinds.
I suspect reputations will become more important as the game moves along and players have fewer shiny objects to distract them. For now, they feel marginalized and modestly unfinished.
Pet battles grade: B
Above: The garrison Menagerie offers a daily battle against legendary-quality pets like Mr. Terrible and his friends. (Yes, he is a carrot.)
The pet battling system (think Pokemon for Warcraft players) was one of the highlights of the Mists of Pandaria expansion, giving players the opportunity to capture and collect pets and battle trainers, legendary-level wild pets, and each other. A weekly, very difficult tournament awarded points toward highly unusual pets and other prizes.
In this expansion, the system is much the same, minus the tournament. You’ll find new trainers to battle and an assortment of new pets to collect, including some that are awarded as the result of completing a quest, getting an achievement, or killing “rare”-quality enemies in the world (which typically respawn not long after you defeat them).
The Menagerie building in the Garrison offers a daily pet battle, and at the top building level, defeating those enemies can award players new pets from the loot bags they receive.
Other than that, no truly new content or twists are available in Draenor, and Blizzard introduced no equivalent to last expansion’s Celestial Tournament, making Draenor slightly less interesting from an end-game pet battling perspective.
PvP grade: C+
Above: The Horde gateway to the Ashran PvP zone. I’d show you an actual picture, but it’s full — as always — at the moment.
Warlords introduced a huge number of changes into WoW’s PvP game, due mostly to the simplification of the spells and abilities players had at their fingertips. Some of those abilities were barely used by players in PvE, but were still on the toolbar for PvP players.
Players say the end result feels surprisingly like it did in the previous season, in terms of balance between classes. But those abilities that remain can feel capricious.
Hybrid-character off-healing is very strong; traps from hunters that last longer than they’re on cooldown can be frustrating. Max-level arena matches that last longer than five minutes continue to give players a stacking debuff that reduces how much they can heal or absorb, so burst damage classes still have an advantage.
The zone-wide max-level PvP battleground area of Ashran offers a sometimes-rewarding, sometimes-frustrating experience. It can be breathtakingly unbalanced, as Horde or Alliance players run roughshod over each other due to differences in group size, commitment, and composition by class. And queues can sometimes be frustratingly long.
But the mechanics of Ashran’s fights, which include super-powerful bosses on both sides, items that give your individual class a specific buff, and even a racetrack set up like a movable capture the flag, are often entertaining and well-made.
PvP gear is easier to get than ever before, with fewer item restrictions and pieces that scale up in power when you’re in a PvP area. It’s made the grindy part of gearing up much less difficult, which is a boon to more-casual players but frustrating to those who saw top-level PvP gear as status symbols.
Above: A third-level Horde garrison Gladiator’s Sanctum belonging to the character Didlah on the Doomhammer server, complete with an Altar of Bones. He says the Highmaul Coliseum is a fun fight — once.
A top-level Gladiator’s Sanctum building in the garrison grants access to the Highmaul Coliseum gladiator tournament, a max-level free-for-all PvP area with rewards for those who win.
Players complain that some classes of healers who are difficult to kill win these matches by boring their opponents to death. The Coliseum has been buggy, class balance is an issue, and people queuing at the same time can form groups to tromp the competition.
Overall grade: B
Warlords of Draenor offers a solid set of features for most players who reach the end game, and Blizzard has announced new content on its way for those who are starting to look around for something else to do.
While some areas still feel lackluster — especially tradeskills and world bosses — raid dungeons, the core of the PvE end game, feel engaging and appropriately challenging for hardcore players. More-casual gamers may find them less interesting. Players say they like the variety of level-100 content, overall, and most still seem to be logging in frequently.
If PvP content is the most important to you, drop this grade to a B- or C+. This hasn’t been the most enjoyable PvP season thus far, and while changes on the horizon look promising, they’re not in yet.