Downtime Thoughts

Downtime Thoughts

We will be off on a three week auto trek to visit relatives on the far east coast this week. The Wild family will be on their own as both accounts will be suspended until we return. I thought about keeping an account open, but that would only encourage me to attempt a WoW upgrade on Mom's computer to check Auction House prices instead of spending time with my real life family. If I'm going to be on the computer at all, it will be to work on the book, not World of Warcraft.

That said, I am already thinking about the next expansion, Warlords of Draenor (WoD), which I went into exhaustive detail on in the last post. The new expansion is still a ways away. How far away is it? Well, predicting release dates is a dark, arcane art in WOW-land, but that hasn't stopped practitioners from trying.

Did you know that the current expansion, Mists of Pandaria (MoP), was released in September 2012? It's over a year old now, and it's really starting to feel it's age. After reading the tea leaves, the earliest, most wildly optimistic date for the release of WoD is around April 2014. I give that date a zero chance. Maybe that will be when they release the Beta, but even that sounds a bit unrealistic. The most depressing release date is around October 2014. They will lose a lot of subscribers to other games (ie, the next Diablo expansion) if it takes that long.

There will almost certainly be WoD pre-expansion patches to try and keep us interested. One such possible patch involves the Dark Portal in the Blasted Lands that is used to enter Outland which, of course, is a piece of Draenor. The war with Draenor will come from that portal, so be prepared to pitch your battle tents in the Blasted Lands as the expansion nears.

Here's another tip about Blizz's plans for WoD. At Blizzcon they announced that there will not be an MoP patch 5.5 (MoP is currently running patch 5.4). Instead, all their effort is going into the WoD release. That could mean an earlier supposed release in June 2014. However, my prediction is that Beta will begin in June, not the release. My release prediction? WoD will go live on Tuesday, 5 August, 2014.

The Wild Family has their own prediction to make. The first family member to be "boosted" to level 90 in WoD will be . . .  drum roll please . . . level 27 paladin Jocelyn. The paladin class is the only healing class that hasn't reached at least level 85. My tentative plan is to make Jocey my main in WoD. On the Alliance side, another paladin, Javajoo (level 63), may get the nod for the second boost. That would give the Wild Family two level 90 paladins, one Horde and one Alliance. Of course, I have an enormous amount of time to change my mind . . .