Blizzard brings back the wow

Its been awhile since I've updated and by the title I'm sure you can take a guess at what has been stealing all of my time lately. I managed to pick the game up on launch day and I have to say so far I'm very impressed with what Blizzard has done.

So far I've leveled my pally to 80 and have tried most of the 5 man instances and have done two of them on heroic difficulty. Now the new instances are really great looking and each one has a unique feel to them. They deviate from the one hallway to another especially in the nexus where your given multiple paths so you can easily go through the instance in any fashion you'd like.

The 5man instances are fairly short compared to earlier ones, which isn't a bad thing mind you. Its nice to get a group together and go knock out an instance and then try two more. Whereas in the past, especially if its a pug, you were lucky to get through one instance without people dropping out.

I do think however that the difficulty of these new instances is to easy. I know Blizzard wanted to make the content in this expansion more accessible to a broader audience. But when your able to walk into an instance for the first time and one-shot all the bosses by mostly just zerging them, its a problem. Half the fun of running a new instance is learning the strategy for the bosses and having everyone do their part. There are some unique boss fights in those 5mans but you don't have to pay much attention to them and I think they lose something from that.

I had the chance to try two of the instances on heroic though, one of those was fairly difficulty and we did have to learn exactly what the boss does and what we needed to do to beat them. It made the fights alot more fun, although frustrating sometimes. But it was alot more rewarding when we finally finished the instance, and was rewarded the achievement for it.

Until you get to level 80 your going to be spending most of your time doing quests and this is an area that Blizzard has stepped up and made some major improvements. The flow of quests is nice, you'll get a couple in the starting area and they will lead you to the next area and so on. There are ALOT of quests in Northrend so there are still the usual go here kill X amount of mobs for this shitty green quests. But they have added alot of really fun quests, from controlling giants to harpooning a dragon and fighting it in the air.

One thing that I've always personally missed from mmo's was the story involvement that you get in a traditional rpg. In the previous expansion, and classic wow, it was only in the end game instances that you started to feel like you were more a part of the story and even then it was limited. In Wrath there are a number of quest lines that put you right into the story and make you really feel like your existence in that world actually makes a difference. I especially loved a particular quest line, which I won't go into detail about but you are treated to an awesome cut scene, which is one thing I hope to see more of in the future.

It really looks like Blizzard is on the right track with this expansion, and they have already said that they have a few content patches already done for it. Now if they can do this good of a job on a game that's four years old, I can't wait to see how Diablo III turns out.