Fairly on-topic rant:
[hide]Blah, I was a raider back in vanilla and a beta/raider in TBC, but after that I just had it with the game really. WoW sort of died for me when TBC was even announced, because it was right when Naxxramas was first introduced so all the guilds on your server that weren't farming the damn thing lost the will to try. I played a night elf drood on EU-shadowmoon, which was fun because there were only 3 raiding moonkins on the entire server, one of which was myself. I fondly remember the mage group ;). Shadowmeld was sort of useful if only for the fact that it boosted our base stealth level so that we could go save a wiped raid with rebirth when trapped by respawns. Nature resist only helped in AQ 40, and the amount of people who got to go there? Not enough. Had to hate the Twin emps - C'Thun mob groups.
Then the expansions roll in and they generally ruined the fun somehow. This one in particular looks pretty cool, if only for the fact that I was an utter lore freak. What with the rumours of Malfurion and Azshara coming back, it does make me grin a little. I probably shouldn't get too hopeful considering they put Malygos up as a boss. What's next? Kill Ysera because she's become corrupt in the dream? Blah. As for a revamped Azeroth? Yes please.
Flying mounts in Azeroth means no more wall jumping/walking to get into areas the developers couldn't be arsed to deal with at that point. It'll expose any and all flaws that they don't manage to gloss over. Stuff like going to Hyjal and then jumping off (back then Noggenfogger wasn't useless and you could fly all the way over Felwood and Darkshore straight into the sea), among others…Well it would finally make bans for going to cool places history. I lucked out and never got one, but getting into all those hidden places was like a challenge in itself. People would ask you how the hell you managed to reach stuff like that and you would just grin. I've got very little of the screenshots I took back then though since I sort of deleted them as they became redundant, though for some reason I still have the screenshots of when Varian Wrynn used to be in Arcaz...
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Blizzard just decided to be killjoys and make most of those things impossible with walls and terrain changes though.[/hide]
TLDR? It looks cool, and Azeroth needs the action back, because frankly it's dead. Why go there with Northrend and Outlands to prat about in? But what happens to players who don't buy this expansion? Well I'm gonna hazard a guess at two possibilities: Instanced revamp, or base revamp for all clients. The latter would make a hell of an annoying patch though…
(Is the removal of stuff like +AP, +SP, +Def and other stats like that on gear true? Because going back to just Str, Stm, Int, Spr and Agi seems a big step in the wrong direction. Hooray for cookie-cutter classes again! I can hear the forums crying out already ¬_¬).