World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor (WoD) will be released at the end of this year (no fixed date has been given yet), and Blizzard has a very interesting offer to tempt players back to the game: anyone who pre-orders WoD will get the ability to boost any character they have to level 90. Some may call this form of leveling cheating or “paying to win”, but Blizzard has been offering level boosts on their game shop for quite some time now. The boost on the game shop costs US$60… which is the exact same price as buying WoD.
I don’t know about you, but getting a free level-90 just for purchasing the expansion early sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. But wait, it gets better. If you boost a character that is at least level 60 or above, that character’s primary professions will also be boosted to skill-level 600.
Anyone who has played WoW should know the major pain-in-the-ass process of leveling up your professions, especially the crafting ones. You either waste a lot of gold buying mats, or you waste a lot of time farming those ingredients yourself. I know of many players that will be taking advantage of this boost just to level up the harder professions like Engineering or Blacksmithing.
The full details of the level 90 boost are as follows, taken from Blizzard’s Battle.net FAQ page:
Q: What do I get with my character boost?
When you boost a character to level 90, whether it’s a newly created level-1 character or an existing character with some experience under their belt, you’ll receive the following:
– 150 gold
– 4 Embersilk (22-slot) bags
– A stack of 20 food items
– Full set of spec-appropriate Item Level 483 gear
– If a boosted character was already level 60 or above, their existing Primary Professions and First Aid are bumped up to level 600, as mentioned above
– A faction-specific flying mount—a traditional Wind Rider for Horde or Gryphon for Alliance
– Artisan flying—that’s one rank below max flight speed
– Northrend, Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms, and Pandaria regional flying skills trained
One major change that will be introduced in WoD is the removal of realm-first achievements. Because you know, realm-firsts are something that the majority of us normal human beings will never be able to obtain. It also encourages hardcore players to rush through the content, which doesn’t sound very fun. Blizzard wants us to have fun, people.
WoD will also introduce, for the first time, purchasable player houses called garrisons. Houses are not a novel concept in MMOs, it has existed since Ultima Online. But it is something that has never appeared in WoW, and was a highly requested feature by fans. Blizzard has listened and are making garrisons something worth wasting your endgame money on: you can recruit NPC followers to your garrison and tell them to do NPC-like stuff such as resource gathering. You can even assign followers to go on raids, and return several days later with their loot, which you can then use for yourself. Yup, offline raiding and farming, available after you purchase a house.
There are a lot more changes for WoD, but these were the ones which I felt were most significant. If you want to find out more, you can check out YouTube user TradeChat’s video below, where she summarises every major and minor change that has been revealed for WoD so far:
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