A wish list for features in 5.2 or beyond

I'm greedy. Oh, not in a monetary sense - I'm notoriously bad at even pretending to care about money - but whenever Blizzard puts out a cool new feature it immediately gets me thinking about other cool new features I'd like to see added to the game. I know, I know, I should be happy with what I have. But since I'm not, here comes a list of features I wish they'd add to World of Warcraft, be it in patch 5.2 or in some future patch.

All of these are based purely on my selfish desires, and are in now way promised or even hinted at by Blizzard, so please don't start asking Blizzard why they haven't delivered on any of them. That would be like going to McDonald's and demanding that Bacon Sausage Egg McMuffin (with Canadian Bacon) that I dreamed up when I was 20. Seriously, how has that never actually been a thing? My cardiovascular health dodged a bullet there.

The Revenge for Southshore battleground/World PvP hub

Seriously, how is it this hasn't happened yet? It seems like a natural to me. While the World PvP might be a bit too disruptive to leveling characters (relatively easily fixed with a phasing change, but it might be better to just make it a battleground up front) the actual idea seems simple enough - Alliance landing craft disgorge a massive force on the beaches south of the ruined Southshore and begin their push north. As players, we either defend Tarren Mill, or take part in the drive for revenge northward. Victory is achieved by claiming a series of important strategic points and then taking the other faction's starting zone and successfully destroying it. Perhaps it's just nostalgia for all the times we ran into Tarren Mill back in the day only to discover we couldn't really do anything, but I'd love to finally set it on fire.
A portable transmogrification vendor

I have a mount with a reforger and a vendor and that's pretty awesome. Engineers can make portable mailboxes, repair bots, there's even anvils you can drop and go. My wife likes to joke that her hunter is essentially a small moving town at this point. The one thing we lack is a portable option for transmogrification. Is this a necessary feature? Of course not, that would be absurd to even argue. It would be cool, though, and I'm all for cool. As it stands, with my reforger handy, I have at times been able to slap a piece of gear on right after getting it, and with a transmog option I could assuage that voice in my head that keeps insisting that I should keep the replaced item on until I can mog it to match my current gear.

Of course, in order for this to work, we'd also need a portable personal bank/void storage guy. I'm okay with this. Would I use this to change my look during raids? Yes, I probably would. I know I have a problem.

More void storage

I won't bother to justify this. I need more void storage. Give me tabs or whatever, I'll pay whatever ridiculous in game gold sum you force me to pay, just please let me have more space. My weapon and armor collection is getting ludicrously out of hand. And yes, I do need every single one of those two handed swords, even the ones I never mog to at all.

More Caverns of Time

I know Nozdormu has lost his Aspect of Time superpowers, but that doesn't mean the Caverns of Time went anywhere, and we know that we still have the threat of the Infinite Dragonflight, since by definition those guys exist in a different time frame. Heck, with the Bronzes potentially folding up shop, that just leaves us with the responsibility to ensure the timeline isn't hijacked.

The WoW TCG has the interesting Timewalkers concept; I say it's time that WoW makes them a faction in game, gives us a bunch of daily quests involving going to various timeways and ensuring that our timeline comes to pass, and lets us become Timewalkers charged with the defense of existence.

And yes, I want to get to see classic moments from Warcraft in the game. I want to get to go back to the sacking of Stormwind, the betrayal of Gul'dan and the Tomb of Sargeras, even the Troll Wars. There's a ton of awesome stuff in the past for players to go mucking about trying to save. We could even have entire Battlegrounds set in the past, or even the future! That's not even counting stuff like the rebellion against the mogu or the last Pandaren emperor Shaohao's creation of the Mists. Okay, so I'm a total mark for the CoT concept.

Scaling content

One of the things I really admire about the design for challenge modes is that the gear level is adjusted down to keep them challenging - you can't just gear up and blow through them. They can get easier because you grow familiar with them and learn short cuts and strategies, but not just because you came back with ilevel 500+ gear and blow them up.

I want to see this tech used more and in new ways. There are a lot of dungeons in the game right now that would be cool to revisit. Imagine if your random dungeon queue could have every single dungeon in the game in it, and either the monsters and bosses scaled up to you, or you scaled down to them. You could use a variation of the scenario reward box to ensure that players could gear up for future content while running scaled dungeons (one of the reasons I usually run three or four scenarios in a day is just to see if the loot box gives me another epic) and the older drops could still be rewarding for transmog.

I'd also like to see some form of mentoring make it into WoW. For ease of use, I'd prefer something that could be used to bootstrap a lower level character up to a similar power level as the higher level mentor (I could easily imagine some form of scenario tech being used here as well, so that the lower level character is brought into scenarios alongside their mentor) but one that lowered the ilevel on the higher level character's gear could work too.

Randomly generated content

As cool as instanced content is, it's predictable - once you've run a raid or dungeon enough times, you know it. Some games, like the Diablo series, use randomly generated maps to compensate for this to some degree - the mobs and bosses are usually the same, but the path to them is randomly generated and you don't know exactly where or when you'll encounter them.

I don't think we should replace dungeons as we know them with nothing but random maps, but I do think the occasional random dungeon crawl could be fun. You could even use the scenario tech (again I fall back to scenarios, they're definitely some of my favorite content right now) and have one or two new scenarios a content patch that were random dungeon crawls with possibilities for big cool looking rewards.

That's probably enough out of me. What about you? What would you like to see?

Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.
Tags: caverns-of-time, features-wanted, mists-of-pandaria, patch-.2, transmog, transmogrification, void-storage, wish-list

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Lore, Mists of Pandaria

View the original article here