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The adventure continues as I work my way through World of Warcraft’s class stories. With three down, demon hunter and paladin are the next ones up.

The demons within:

I was not impressed by the demon hunter class story.

There’s not a lot I can point to be as being especially crumby about it. It’s there, it exists, and it works, but there’s nothing particularly special or memorable about it.

A lot of it boils down to the characters, I think. Being a new class, demon hunters don’t have the luxury of bringing back a lot of well-known faces. Pretty much everyone is new, and a class campaign just isn’t long or in-depth enough to flesh them out. So I just didn’t much care about any of them. Kor’vas is a notable exception, but she didn’t get enough attention. Actually all her best moments are outside the demon hunter campaign, in Azsuna and Harbingers.

And again, it’s just a very by the numbers experience. It works, but it has no flavour.

The one thing that’s interesting about the demon hunter story is that it actually features a story choice with real consequences. This has never happened in World of Warcraft before. Even if you do get choices, they never have consequences. Not until now.

I doubt we’ll ever see WoW start offering regular story choices like SW:TOR, but it is an intriguing precedent to set.

I’m still mixed on how the class plays. Vengeance feels fine, but it doesn’t have a lot of unique character. I’m torn on havoc. It felt very mindless at first, but I’ve had a surprising amount of trouble mastering it, so maybe it’s not really that easy.

It is shockingly squishy. I didn’t think Blizzard still did glass cannon specs like this. In theory I like the idea of more challenge in WoW, but there isn’t really any way to overcome Havoc’s squishiness with good play (save pulling less, I suppose). It’s just a lot of slow healing up between fights.

The fix for this is to take Demonic as your 110 talent. It makes a huge difference, to the point where it feels mandatory for playing solo (and usually nothing is mandatory solo). In general Demonic makes the spec feel much, much better by making demon form a core feature of the spec rather than a cooldown to be carefully saved. It should be baseline, if you ask me.

The other main thing I like about havoc is also a talent, Demonic Appetite. This causes your main finisher to spawn lesser soul fragments, and all soul fragments to give you a sizable amount of fury. The end result is you spend the fight watching the battlefield and trying to gobble up fragments as they spawn, while also monitoring your positioning so you don’t leave melee range.

It forces you to focus on the game world, not just your action bars, and think about your positioning in a way no other class does. It’s a very unique and interesting playstyle. Again, it should be baseline.

Overall, I suppose the spec is growing on me. Finding a good outfit helped, too. I’m getting used to the character.

Ride of the righteous:

I liked the paladin class story a lot better than the demon hunter’s, but it’s still not perfect.

It captures the feeling of the class well. There’s a lot of big speeches, protecting the innocent, and smiting the wicked. Blizzard has always had a real passion for paladins as a concept — Metzen mained a human paladin, as I recall — and it shows.

I also liked the characters. The cast even includes that rarest of unicorns, a Draenei who feels like a real person.

And it needs to be said that the artifact quests are outstanding. I have several classes left to go, but I have a very hard time believing any will top paladins on the artifact front. Every single one is amazing. You should roll a paladin just to do their artifact quests — I’m not kidding.

But as with many of these, it starts to fall apart at the ending.

It’s not even a bad ending. It’s a very fun and epic ending, more so than any of the class stories I’ve yet played. But it’s the ending to the priest story, not the paladin story.

Now, I haven’t done the priest campaign yet, but I have to assume they get roughly the same ending and this is just a case of reused content (if not, it’s even weirder).

And it does make perfect sense for the priest and paladin stories to be intertwined. Defending priests is kind of why paladins exist in the first place, after all. And again, it’s an enjoyable ending. But I can’t help but feel I was robbed of a real paladin story.

Also, what in the actual hell is the deal with the glowing Dreadlord? Like, what? Just… what? That demands an explanation, but none is given.

So it’s another story that’s decent on the whole, but could be better.

What’s really surprised me is how much fun I’m having playing a protection paladin in Legion. Historically, my paladin has been a healer first, and I thought I’d switch to retribution as a main spec in Legion because of Ashbringer, but I’ve ended up playing prot far more than anything else.

I’ve played protection off and on for as long as I’ve had the paladin, but it never quite clicked, and I thought the loss of holy power as a secondary resource would make matters worse (it’s certainly killed holy for me). But I’m having a blast.

I think it’s some combination of the changes made by active mitigation and the talent that lets Hammer of the Righteous have no cooldown. The rotation just flows now.

Aside from that, no other spec I’ve played this expansion feels so much like the archetypical tank. I don’t think I’ve died once while playing prot in Legion, be it in a dungeon or the open world. You’re just indestructible. It doesn’t matter if your damage is a little low while questing because you can just pull half the zone and wear them all down at once. It’s actually better to do that because you get more procs of Avenger’s Shield, which is your main source of damage.

On top of that, you also bring some pretty nice off-healing in a group setting. The other day I had a DPS who kept standing in the fire, and the healer was occupied with keeping everyone else alive, but I was able to keep them up until the end of the fight with Lay on Hands and Hand of the Protector.

Prot still has crap mobility, which I’m not fond of, but the abundance of ranged attacks helps compensate for that. And otherwise it plays wonderfully.

Blizzard’s commitment to “class fantasy” in Legion has been hit and miss, but they nailed it for prot pallies. You want to feel like an unshakeable bastion of righteousness? This is your spec.

On class stories:

That makes five class stories down now, and I’m feeling a bit mixed on this whole endeavour.

Artifact quests remain a delight, but the truth is I’ve yet to be truly impressed by any of the class stories. Most of them have interesting moments, and they’re rarely bad, but none of them have truly blown me away. That makes me wonder if it’s still worth trying to do them all.

On the other hand, it’s also turning out to be a lot less work than I expected. Leveling in Legion was pretty quick to begin with, and with the addition of invasions and heirlooms that scale to 110, it’s a breeze. Once you get to max level, it only takes a couple days of light play (at most) to finish a class story.

So it’s not exactly costing me much to keep finishing them, either. This is nowhere near the grind I thought it would be, and how often do you get to say that where WoW is concerned?

I have often said I have far too much franchise loyalty for my own good.

Case in point.

I think my feelings on The Secret World’s reboot as Legends are known by now. Nonetheless, I can’t say with absolute certainty that I’m never going to play it. I have eight characters in SW:TOR now, after all. No one could have predicted that.

And if I ever play it, I’ll want my loot from TSW. And if I do, I’ll need to link my account now, because there’s a time limit on that.

In theory, all you have to do is click a button on the account page, but I’m paranoid, so I wanted to actually log into the game and make sure it all transferred. Which meant actually playing the game, as you don’t get delivered items until you finish the tutorial and make it to Agartha.

I bring you now the tale of that ill-fated excursion.

I agonized greatly over which character to attempt to recreate. This is one of the biggest things turning me off Legends to begin with. I don’t have enough character slots to bring them all over (which is ridiculous; I paid for the damn things), and I hate the idea of having to choose between them.

In the end, for reasons I have trouble articulating even to myself, I picked Dorothy the Templar as my ambassador to this new/old world.

Things didn’t get off to a great start. The new character creation is just awful. TSW already had fairly limited options for a modern MMO, and Legends has greatly reduced your choices. You can no longer customize facial features individually. You can only pick a face and then choose from a variety of randomized variations of it. I can’t imagine how anyone thought this was a good idea.

Also, why is everything blinking all the time?!?! Aaaaaghhh.

To be fair, I like the new hair. It’s mostly the same styles, but they’re now higher rez, and there are more and better colour choices. There’s actually a nice green now. I almost made Kamala instead for that reason, but I couldn’t come up with a face that looked at all like her.

Not that I got Dorothy entirely right, either. She wound up in this weird uncanny valley scenario where she almost looked like the character I know… but not quite.

The new tutorial has gotten some criticism, but I actually kind of like it. It’s atmospheric, and it has some interesting hints about the greater lore. It also feels pretty remedial at times, but a lengthy, hand-holding tutorial is exactly what the old game needed. Really that’s the only big change it needed. I think this will be good for new players.

This is then followed by the original tutorials in Tokyo and the faction HQ (each slightly redone), and I did start to get impatient after a while, but I think that’s mainly because I’m a veteran who knew what to expect. Again, I think a new player would probably find it a lot more palatable.

I didn’t experience enough of the new gameplay to form any clear conclusions. It all seemed as insultingly easy as I’d feared (most enemies died in literally one shot), but that is the tutorial. Maybe things are different once you get out into the world.

A part of me died when I saw the “class selection” section in character creation, and the new skill trees are definitely simplified, but after studying them a bit, they didn’t seem quite as brainless as I’d expected. There are still far more abilities than you can equip at a time, so it seems deck-building is not entirely dead.

I still hate the idea of having to unlock additional weapons beyond your base class, though.

From the looks of it, shotguns are now a true tanking weapon. I really like that. I always wanted to tank with a shotgun as my main weapon.

I’m curious if any other weapons have changed roles, but I didn’t notice any at a glance way to see the roles of various weapons.

The new combat animations don’t seem to have quite as much energy or flair as they used to, at least where firearms are concerned, and there’s now this awkward animation whenever your character stops running. It looks absolutely terrible. I don’t know what they were thinking.

The game world itself doesn’t seem much changed. Temple Hall is still full of cats — I wasn’t sure if that would carry over. I thought maybe they’d run the competition again or just ignore it all.

One thing hasn’t changed: Agartha is still weird as hell.

Eventually, I finished the tutorials and made it to Agartha, at which point my cosmetics unlocked. I didn’t go through it all with a fine-toothed comb, but it does seem the large majority of stuff did carry over, including my Panoptic Core.

Deck uniforms are one thing that didn’t carry over, though, so I was not able to put Dorothy in her traditional Puritan outfit. But I did see some people in Agartha with deck outfits, so they must still be in the game somehow. Bizarrely, they no longer seem to be tied to faction. I saw someone in a Templar uniform that had Illuminati colours. It was very jarring.

Unfortunately, upon entering Agartha I also began to suffer from nearly constant disconnects and crashes that made it unplayable. After nearly an hour of relogging, rebooting, and tinkering with game settings, I was unable to solve the problem. I thought maybe if I could make it out of Agartha things might improve, but I was crashing so much even that proved a bridge too far.

At this point, my already thin patience with the reboot reached its end. I ragequit and uninstalled.

I’m still not going to say I’ll never play Legends, but it’s certainly not something that greatly interests me right now. I still see no good reason why we needed to lose our characters and all our progression, and the fact the game is literally unplayable for me right now isn’t improving matters.

Superior Realities

Category Archives: Games

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Secret World Legends: I Hate Myself

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