This Isn't the Outlands - World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor Review

Post by Eorl @ 03:51pm 19/01/15 | 15 Comments

Nostalgia is the key to success when it comes to the MMO genre, and behemoth title World of Warcraft knows it best. With their fifth expansion launching in early November last year, the entire premise was based on nostalgia, a premise that worked extremely well according to the expansion's response on launch.

After an extensive break from the 'World' of Warcraft (my last proper expansion was Wrath of the Lich King), it was time to pick up my sword and take a look at just what makes Warlords of Draenor a different experience to past expansions. Not only are we seeing large leaps in stat squishing, player model revamps and better dungeon design, but Draenor also employs a range of new experiences that borrow from the heavy RTS background of Warcraft including the exciting player-driven Garrison system.

If you've been wondering just what Draenor is all about, well look no further as I take a step back into the virtual world of Blizzard's MMO and find that it isn't just nostalgia that this expansion capitalises on.

Check out the full review for my thoughts of World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor.

world of warcraft: warlords of draenor blizzard mmorpg review

Latest Comments

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Jeffro
Posted 05:11pm 19/1/15

Played through the beta 90-100 but haven't touched my toons on live yet despite buying the expansions on two accounts. Sure I will get round to playing at least my rogue main sooner or later though. Preferably when all the hype has died down and I have the levelling zones to myself.

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TicMan
Posted 05:11pm 19/1/15

Link no workie

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Eorl
Posted 05:20pm 19/1/15

Should be working now tic, cheers. HTML is hard.

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Reverend Evil�
Posted 05:26pm 19/1/15

I've had fun. At first I wasn't real happy with the trades, and I'm still not. Garrison's have sucked the soul out of WoW I think for better or for worse.

There is good and bad but I think Blizzard have swinged the axe too far one way and have forgotten about the other side.

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Enska
Posted 05:33pm 19/1/15

I t's not really possible to have the zones to yourself with the connected realms jeffro, you'll usually find a fair bit of activity wherever you go from 90-100. The hype has mostly dropped off but obviously there's a bazillion alts going through the process now.

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Enska
Posted 05:37pm 19/1/15

I prefer the garrisons over having to sit in org/ warspear to get my banking, auctions etc done. It's way more peaceful and that poof riding around annoying people on his Ashes is nowhere to be seen

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Khel
Posted 05:39pm 19/1/15

Yeah, I'm really enjoying it so far. Ashran seems like a massively failed experiment though.

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Jeffro
Posted 05:45pm 19/1/15

I t's not really possible to have the zones to yourself with the connected realms jeffro, you'll usually find a fair bit of activity wherever you go from 90-100. The hype has mostly dropped off but obviously there's a bazillion alts going through the process now.

Yea guess I'm just use to the small communities we had before faction/realm transfers and everyone had 100s of alts. Think they want to bring the 'mmo' feel back into the game though.

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Enska
Posted 06:22pm 19/1/15

WoW pvp in general has always been pretty s***. there were times where Blizz had the classes balanced pretty well for it but all that went out the window with the big overhauls to talents and s*** back in cata.

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Rukh
Posted 07:15pm 19/1/15

Not that I raid with them anymore (I'm just a casual in the guild now) but my guild has certainly shown the advantages of local oceanic servers compared to the 10 years of having to play on American servers...

My guild, Ascension, is currently the #1 "US" guild and 5th in the world in PvE. While their rise to #1 (or #5) wasn't only attributable to oceanic servers (they put in an insane amount of preparation and hours raiding too just like other top guilds) it definitely played a large role in it.

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Eorl
Posted 09:41am 20/1/15

The oceanic servers have definitely changed the playing field, not just in the actual game itself but also in terms of how Oceanic players approach the MMO genre. Why bother playing WildStar, ESO or any others when they suffer the dreaded 200ms+ while WoW has a nice 40ms ping?

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Khel
Posted 10:54am 20/1/15

Yeah, I've already been spoilt by the local servers. Sometimes I've noticed, the Garrison instance must get spawned on a US server instead of a local server (maybe its a load balancing thing?) so I have a 200 - 250ms ping while in my garrison, and it feels soooooooooo laggy now. Hard to think a few months ago that was the ping I was playing with full time.

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Enska
Posted 05:59pm 20/1/15

I still get a random us server for raids sometimes and lfg. Its s*** but I guess years of practice at it means I don't often notice until I start spamming cd's on bosses.

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carson
Posted 07:37am 21/1/15

I disagree and feel the dungeon design is poor. Some of them are terrible. To be honest, I miss the older dungeon designs were you had to interact with more things when doing them. Now you just walk through and kill s***.

However, I really enjoyed the story and some of the characters. The music is fantastic and probably the best thing. I enjoy garrisons and feel the ability to get mats in your garrison without the skills makes it easier to have fun professions and not farming ones.

It's a good expansion, probably the best since WOTLK. It's far easier to gear up and participate in end game content, which is good imo.

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Khel
Posted 11:35am 21/1/15

I don't think the dungeon designs themselves are really any better or worse than MoP, but theres definitely some much cooler bosses in them.

Honorable mention does go to Grimrail Depot though, cos fighting on the back of a train as its travelling is a pretty cool idea for a dungeon.

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