Returning to Quel'Thalas: Is Midnight the Expansion We’ve Been Waiting For?

Today is a new patch day in World of Warcraft: Midnight, and it seems like a good day to talk about the state of the expansion and its first season so far.

While people are diving deep into mythic raids and high-level mythic keys, a lot of people are not even bothered, and the amount of content Blizzard created for people who are not interested in this type of endgame is astonishing. It’s been for a few years now that Blizzard has kept trying to give everyone content they would enjoy and focus on without removing the advantage gap between players who are doing harder PvE content than others. And so it’s the same in the Midnight expansion. In this expansion, it seems like Blizzard is really addressing the issues and trying their best to keep everyone happy.

Still, not everything is perfect and many things are still not good, but it’s good to see that they are trying. With delves, hunts, reputations, world quests, and weekly events, people can get a lot of decent items and entertainment without doing any mythic keys or raids. And that’s great. Meanwhile, for people who are pushing keys and raids, it may be really frustrating that the class or specialization they like is at the bottom of the ranking for their role. But this season feels more refreshing than the last one as many classes and specs shift from bad to decent, and there are now not many classes that are really that bad that nobody will play them in endgame content. And that just shows that Blizzard is trying to address the feedback and make more people happy.

Usually, season metas get "locked in" and hardly ever move. It is good to see that some classes that were not in the top 10 can make it to the top 10 finally. While some are again underperforming and proving that there are certain specializations that they simply don’t know how to make work in mythic keys.

For me personally, what I would like to see is Blizzard giving us max-level questing in old zones and storylines. I think there is so much fun we could have if doing old content wasn’t so boring since mobs are dying just by looking in your direction. Playing a game of this size, this lore, and that many amazing places left in old content is crazy. I think it’s about time that we get the opportunity to go back and do old questing without playing an alt. And even if playing an alt, there is no way you will not get over the level for a zone you want to do if you want to do Loremaster and see all the quests. So that’s a bummer.

With the visuals they did in Eversong Forest, it sparked a question about the possibility to do that kind of rework on old continents and content and make the whole game more up to date. Even though some changes went too far and lost some of its original charm, no one can deny that it looks so much better than it used to.

The state of PvP in this expansion, in my opinion, isn’t as good as I would like it to be. Very often dps just seems too much, and while normally I used to play a lot of PvP—more than PvE actually—this season I just don’t feel that spark. I don’t know really why, but somehow it feels like Blizzard is caring about PvP even less than usual. And let’s be real: PvP in this game has been neglected for years.

To sum it up: while there are still things I would like to see changed and introduced in Midnight, it seems like this expansion is going in the right direction. The first season so far is very successful and servers are being overcrowded again; even queues returned on some servers last night, for example. But if Blizzard is really going to address what people are asking for, I think it’s about time that people start posting more ideas on their servers or talk more about how they would like this game to look like.