Looking Ahead

So we're at the close of Mists of Pandaria.  Personally I'm relieved -- this expansion has done basically nothing for me in terms of making me want to play.  But that's not what this post is about.

No, soon enough (in like a year, probably) we'll be standing in line (or, more likely, prepping a download) for World of Warcraft 6.  Will it be the Maelstrom?  The Twisting Nether?  Something new entirely?  Will we be reaching level 100?  Mr Pinchy does not know!  And I'm not going to speculate, since there are at least hundreds of people out there who are better equipped to do so than me.

Instead, I'd like to take a moment and put together a wish list.  Here are a bunch of things I'd like to see for the next iteration of Warcraft. 

1) A submarine for Engineers

Yeah, this one is at the top of the list.  Why?  Because it's awesome.  I want engineers to be able to build a submarine, BoE like the motorcycle.  It'd be a fast underwater mount capable of carrying a passenger, and I'd also love it if, while you're riding it on the surface, you could fish. :D

2) Worgen paladins and monks

Zero lore reason worgen can't be monks.  I'll give you that making them paladins might be a bit of a stretch, but honestly, it's been long enough since the cataclysm that the first batch of Silver Hand worgen could have made it into the world.

(In fact, I'd argue that this expansion is the time to simply open every class up to every race -- there has been enough intermixing and intermingling between the races over the decade-plus of WoW's in-game life to provide an explanation for why, say, a gnome could be a hunter.  Tauren and Draenei rogues maybe -- maybe -- might be too much, but if a gnome can be a warrior...)

3) Playable Alliance ethereals

Please.

4)  A "Fly" spell for mages

Monks have zen flight.  Mages should have something similar, just because they're mages, though I'd argue that it's totally appropriate to give them full-speed flight like a druid's flight form.

5) More class quests

I miss the class quests from vanilla.  I know they're kind of resource drains, which is why they were axed in the first place, but then you go and give warlocks green fire.  Every class should have some kind of awesome cosmetic like that.  I earned my Polymorph (pig) spell the hard way and it was awesome.  And think of it like this: by having class-specific quests, you're encouraging people to play alts.

I'd sooner have class-specific quests than yet another rep grind.  Thanks.

6) More "story" zones like EPL

I'll grant you, this is blatant favoritism, but EPL is still my favorite zone in the game.  I imagine it takes a lot of extra work to put something like that together, but if you could include one or two such zones in the leveling areas, that'd be super.

7) All classes able to tank (and heal, I guess)

This one's a biggie, yeah, but I provided some ideas as to how this could be done, at least for tanks.  As far as heals go, yeah, it seems weird that a warrior could be a healer, but if TOR can make it work then I'm sure your dev team can come up with something.

And finally, the big kahuna...

8) Multiclassing

One of the things that constantly digs at me is there is no one class that I feel is "perfect."  Every single class in the game is missing something, and introducing the ability to multiclass (on a limited basis) would solve that particular problem.

What I'm suggesting is not "I have 50 levels in paladin and 50 levels in mage" or anything like that.  That'd be awful.  No, I'm thinking something more along the lines of the way D&D 4th edition handles it (and let me assure you, this is the only time I will ever admit that 4th ed had a good idea): you trade out one or two of your character's abilities for an ability from a different class.

It'd probably be best to limit this to one class, and perhaps only a handful of abilities.  For example, the one major thing I feel that my monk is missing is stealth.  So I give up his, I dunno, spinning fire blossom and maybe something else I never use and in exchange I get stealth.  Maybe give up a couple other things and grab Pick Pockets and now I have a perfect character and no more angst about who to focus on.

This might cause all kinds of trouble with balance.  So I'd say limit it to one or two abilities from a single other class, and it might also be worthwhile to say that if you want a damaging ability, you have to exchange it for a different damaging ability.  Alternatively: have the whole thing turn on the Talent system -- you can give up one talent of any level to steal an ability from another class that's available to that class at a level equal to the level of the talent you gave up. 

So that's about all I can think of as far as expansion-agnostic requests go.  I'd love to say something like "make Northrend relevant again" because hey, Wrath is still my favorite expansion ever, but that'd depend very heavily on what you have in mind for the actual expansion.  Everything I suggested above should be able to be slotted in no matter what's coming, so hopefully you all will give me some consideration ^_^

And, if anyone from the dev team happens to be reading, thank you.  Thank you for making such an amazing game.  Thank you for giving me so many good memories.  Here's to many more years of World of Warcraft. /salute