Five Reasons Why You Need to Play World of Warcraft

By Lauren Alexander

With Battle for Azeroth right around the corner, we thought it best to share with our fine readers why they should dust off their old armor and weapons and jump back into Azeroth, or jump in for the first time, in preparation for the expansion launch in August! With so many new generations of gamers who have been exposed to various other MMORPGs, it is understandable why they haven’t yet had the chance to play World of Warcraft. On the other hand, there are also many veteran players who put down the magic in order to free up their time for other games or life in general. Here are five reasons why you should pick up your faction banner in one hand and a weapon in the other and dive on in!

 

No One Way to Play the Game

The Legion expansion is coming to a close and it has done amazing things for players wanting to play the game their own way. All zones now have a level range in which they scale to so you can pick and choose where you go. Players can level through questing, dungeons, PvP battlegrounds, gathering, or even pet battles!

If you’re looking for a break from the adventurer life, getting into RP is a great option. With addons such as Total RP 3, available for easy download through the Twitch app, you can create a fully personalized profile for your character and see the profiles of other players on your server! The fact that WoW has been around for years has meant that they have added so much to the game that it will take you quite some time to exhaust all of their goodies. Especially mount hunting!

The Wealth of Lore

If Blizzard is known for one thing, it is making fantastic worlds and characters. Whether it is in the distant future involving space faring warships like in Starcraft, or a world that Diablo himself seeks to destroy with a legion of demons, every Blizzard game has amazing storytelling. World of Warcraft is no exception in the slightest as the base story involves the world of Azeroth being threatened by overwhelming forces that require the help of the world’s greatest champions, including you.

World of Warcraft has built on the amazing foundations of the ever loved Warcraft real-time strategy series, and its most popular incarnation, Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne. Players in WoW get to fight alongside and against many of the great and powerful lore figures of these games. Blizzard also has a series of novels that offer players an amazing look into the deep depths of the games’ lore. I personally recommend Arthas: Rise of the Lich King and Rise of the Horde. I can not even begin to explain just how much you’ll appreciate the world that Blizzard has created after getting to walk through the same old battlefields you read about or engage with the offspring of that major hero you fought beside in Warcraft.

If you are a veteran player and haven’t played Legion, you need to come back. Everything that we have fought for over the years has all come to a head from the Burning Legion to the Alliance and Horde returning to war. You will lose your mind over the various cut scenes and raid encounters.

Accommodating the Grown Gamer

One of the biggest complaints about World of Warcraft, or any MMO really, is the time investment required. These notions were not false either: back in the days of Burning Crusade, WoW’s first expansion, you needed to invest hours and hours a night in order to make any real progress and see any content beyond dungeons, but those days are in the past. Blizzard understands who their player base is and how life has changed with children, work, school, and more.

You can now play WoW and jump straight into the newest content with character boosts granted with purchase of the latest expansion. You always are left with the option to level naturally from level one to max if you choose to and the experience will not be devastating. Over the years, they have revamped a majority of their old content to entertain modern gamers. As stated earlier, they now allow you to level wherever you’d like. Every zone scales to meet a wide level range so that if you love an area you can drown yourself there or ditch the land for another if you get bored. All the while you get such a rich experience with lore and quests!

They have a wealth of options to help you not only level but also to gear your main character. If you want to get to raid ready as soon as possible, you can jump into the improved Looking for Group tools to experience the latest raids and dungeons for gear and practice. Dungeons and raids both have a variety of difficulty settings including normal, heroic, and mythic. Raids offer the Looking for Raid queue that provides players an easy way to get into content and see the raids they may have otherwise missed. For those truly seeking a challenge, a new addition in Legion was the Mythic+ dungeon system. It provides a way for players to ramp up the difficulty of dungeons exponentially, and provides great rewards to players able to complete them. Each week players who have completed a mythic+ dungeon will receive a chest with loot based on the highest level of mythic+ that character completed for the week. This loot can scale up to be equivalent to mythic raiding gear, all for the minimal investment of running a 5-man dungeon.

Challenging Game Play

If violence is your jam and you want to see just what your limits are as a gamer, then Blizzard has your back. As we mentioned before, in the realm of PvE there are mythic+ dungeons that get harder with each and every victory and offers better and better gear. Based on the level of the key, the monsters inside a dungeon will not only have increased health and damage, but there are a wide array of “affixes” that modify them in wildly different ways. These affixes include things such as the monsters creating explosive orbs that you must quickly kill or it deals heavy damage to your entire group, or a nasty debuff that hurts the healer’s ability to heal their tank the longer the fight goes on. No matter your role, be it tank, damage dealer, or healer, these affixes provide variety and difficulty to dungeons in new and exciting ways. It keeps dungeons that would otherwise become stale and boring constantly changing and refreshing.

Raids involve 10-30 players gathering together to tackle difficult content in the same categories of normal, heroic, and mythic. Though normal and heroic are no walk in the park, they are more attainable with enough focus and dedicated players. These difficulties also offer flexibility so friends are easily accommodated, with scaling tech allowing them to be run by anywhere from 10 to 30 people. However, if you do miss the days of old where you needed to spend multiple hours every night in order to make an inch of progress in overwhelmingly difficult content, then mythic raids are your answer. These raids have a fixed size of 20 players and offer the most challenging content, introducing difficult mechanics not seen in the previous difficulty settings. As a reward, you get access to exclusive sets of gear, titles, and mounts for your accomplishments!

For PvP enthusiasts, they offer rated battlegrounds, rated arena matches, and open world PvP areas. In Battle for Azeroth, world PvP will become a toggle that any player can turn on while inside a capital city. With this option enabled, they will be placed into the world along with other players who have chosen to opt in to the bloodbath. Players will see increased rewards while this setting is enabled to make the risk worthwhile. After all, the foundation of Warcraft is orcs vs humans, the Horde vs the Alliance! Battle for honor and glory!

Community

Ask anyone what they love about World of Warcraft and they’ll more than likely mention the cherished friends they have made while gaming. Guilds are groups of gamers focused on helping one another accomplish a goal of some sort whether it is PvP, PvE, or RP. They are filled with players who want nothing more than to help out and have fun. These bonds can grow so strong that they extend further than just the game and come into the real world with Blizzcon.

Blizzcon is Blizzard’s annual convention that celebrates the games and fans alike. Many folks who enjoy WoW also jump into the realm of cosplay to bring their favorite characters to life. Our very own Schrei205 is one such person! The woman not only finds the time to lead our raids but also creates works of wearable art from Jandice Barov to Warrior Tier 8! It is a priceless aspect that many other games don’t quite offer.

If you are looking to get back into the game or get started, the official Geek Lyfe guild is called Emerald Templars, and we are located on the US Wyrmrest Accord RP server on the Horde side! Hit us up on Discord as well any time you want to chat, or want to know anything more about World of Warcraft!

 

I hope you enjoyed our five reasons why you need to play World of Warcraft! Do you already play WoW? Have you played in the past? What is your favorite memory? Share with us in the comments!