My relationship with WoW has always been extremely on-again/off-again. Truly dedicated readers may remember my post proclaiming my love for Puzzle Pirates over World of Warcraft from quite far back. My relationship with Puzzle Pirates has become quite the same. I still love it and think it's a marvelous game for pretty much all the reasons I listed in the afore-mentioned post, but I just don't get around to playing it much, anymore. These days, it's usually because WoW has got its hooks back into me, largely due to the lure of playing a fluffy red panda girl in the upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion. I am so very, very shallow and easy to please, sometimes.
That said, if someone were to ask me what I'd really be looking for in another WoW (as a Female Casual Gamer, nobody will ever ask, which is why I'm currently writing this out), the thing that I'd really love to see, which would get me even past the Futurama Fry Shut Up and Take My Money Phase (which, for anyone wondering, looks a little like this:
)
is a very simple thing.
I don't give a crap about new endgame dungeons, or new PvP scenarios, or a new level cap or new races or new classes or any of that. The thing that I'd most like to see right now is a new leveling zone for 60-70 (or even 60-80).
Seriously, fellow WoW players - wouldn't it be like a fucking dream to have the option to not schlepp your ass through ugly-ass Hellfire Peninsula and the rest of Outland for 8-10 levels before you can move on to Northrend? I've only managed to get 3 characters through Outland and into the frozen north in all the time I've been on-again/off-again playing. I currently have a level 61 paladin, and leveling her feels like work. I have a 51 mage and a 48 rogue that I'm just dreading leveling up any more, because that would mean taking them through the same goddamn quests I've done 3 or 4 times already. Sure, once you get through Hellfire Peninsula (or as my 12-year-old brain likes to call it, Hellfire Penis-la-la), you can go to Zangarmarsh or Terrokar Forest, and from there to Nagrand (which, I'll admit, is the one zone in Outland which I do kind of enjoy) or elsewhere.
I know it would probably be difficult as fuck having to fit a few new zones in, given the current crafting materials, patterns, and recipes for the specific 60-70 levels, all while making it work within the elaborate Lore of Azeroth to boot. When Deathwing came to town, he ripped the world apart, which gave the players different quests, and remarkably changed zones to explore (another admission - I thoroughly enjoy some of the revamped Cataclysm zones and will probably take most of my new characters through them - I'm looking at you, Thousand Needles), but at least we still had copper ore, wool cloth, medium leather, and earthroot to go with all the lingering old-world crafting recipes and such. But how do you add a whole new set of zones when you've got crafting materials like Fel Ore and Netherweave Cloth, and still stick within the Lore? So yeah, I get that it'd be a huge pain in the ass and is even less likely than the odds of me being any kind of a quality member of a raid team.
But Thrall's Balls, it sure would be nice.
