Wednesday, September 17, 2008

The Obligatory "The Expansion is Coming" Post

Blizzard recently announced that the Wrath of the Lich King will be released on 11/13/2008. There's a lot to look forward to including but not limited to: Death Knights and a new profession, Inscription.

Inscription will allow you to modify certain spells and abilities through the use of Glyphs. One of the first ones that was announced was the Glyph of the White Bear. This glyph changes your bear form to that of a polar bear.

Whoopie.

Yes. I've been staring at the unpleasant end of a bear for the better part of the last year and a half... With some off and on time before that. But one of the big complaints about druids is that... There's no variation between forms. Some of us have worked very hard to improve our gear or to grind rep and there's no way of showing that. Every single bear looks like every other bear. Alliance. horde. Doesn't matter. My level 58 female night elf druid in blues in greens looks just like my level 70 tauren druid in Arena and badge reward epics.

But now we have the option to get Glyph of the White Bear....

Whoopie.

Now there will be exactly two types of bears running around. Granted, it's a 100% increase over the previous two and a half years that I've been playing but... There are millions of druids out there.

I'm not (necessarily) advocating that Blizzard find a way of displaying gear when druids are in forms. That would be a tremendously difficult task... But I remember back in the day when my Alliance mage was walking around in 7/8 Tier 2. You KNEW where he'd been. You KNEW how much work he'd done. And, if you were a warrior, you KNEW you should start running now (or should have... Some of them _still_ got out their epeens and gave it a shot).

Not so with my druid. He's a fierce tank. He's done some crazy, crazy, impossible things. But he's also done some really, really tedious things. I single pulled mobs in Steam Vault for about 6 hours to get to exalted with Cenarion Expedition to get my Earthwarden. I wear their tabard with pride. It says: "Yeah... I've done the work. If you have me as your tank, you know I'll have one of the top mitigation/threat generation weapons in the game."

But you don't know that most of the time. All you see is bear. And maybe you don't remember that when things go wrong. Maybe you forget that I've got the gear and that you should just take a deep breath because as long as I've got a healer (and sometimes if I don't) we'll get through this.

And to top it all off? They're also introducing barbershops... So that every other character can change their appearance. Sure... I've got a female rogue who has a nose ring I'd like to lose. But I never play her. I only rolled her because I was having such a hard time with them on my mage so I wanted to see what rogues could do. Well, that and open lockboxes... But I'm going to be doing instances again and I'm the tank. I'll be back to the same form I've had for years... Or maybe a polar bear.

Whoopie.

So here's what _I_ would like to see. That mark on the shoulder of bear form... How about that changes to whatever is on the tabard you had equipped when you went into bear form. So... When I'm tanking, maybe you'd see something like this:



It's a simple thing and it would allow druids some more choices for customization beyond brown or white. I'm just sayin'.

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