The most recent news of Wrath of the Lich King has assuaged some of my fears, answered some lingering questions and even provided some points to ponder. And while the news that WotLK hit the coveted “alpha build” is great for sure, as it means the release date approaches closer and closer to the typical Blizzard “It’ll release when it’s ready,” there remains little to be heard about any gameplay changes WotLK will bring to the board.

The latest, and probably last, patch released for The Burning Crusade brought the following: lots of daily quests, lots of gold, phased quest lines which require server-wide cooperation to complete, and, my favorite thing, the concept of being rewarded with a semi-unique namesake in the fourth Phase of the Sunwell quests.

If this patch is a preview of future things to come in Wrath, I think the collective Warcraft community is in for good things. Continue reading to see what improvements/releases could make Wrath that much more excellent.

Choices, choices, choices

To see an easy implementation in WotLK, one has to go back to Shattrath and look at the two factions that reside, the Aldor and Scryer; the first two factions Blizzard introduced where, as you gain rep with one, you lose with the other — forcing players to pick between the two. This choice alone provided players with an option to ‘diversify’ their character of sorts; no longer was every melee character farming for the same thing; they had a chance to pick and choose between the two factions as to which suited them.

Blizzard should continue along the faction-choice line, if not implementing one major faction choice as seen in Burning Crusade, but possibly exploring the option of creating several smaller (read: minor) factions in which players can choose from.

It’s all in the name

Those realms that have hit Phase 4 in Quel’Danas have the option to spend 1,000 gold to earn themselves a namesake: “…of the Shattered Sun.” While many players are simply writing off this namesake as it simply requires a monetary input for the namesake output, it’s the namesake that I will focus on.

“…of the Shattered Sun” joins the other namesakes, “Hand of A’dal” and “Champion of the Naaru.” These ’sakes provide more diversification to a player, as well as, in at least two-out-of-the-three cases, a chance to showcase pretty serious accomplishments (I should also make mention to the namesakes provided for Arena participants who do extremely well in the seasons). In Wrath, Blizzard should include more of these namesakes, as they give a much better reward than gear.

If you couple the namesakes with the ideas of competitive factions I wrote above, an interesting idea comes to mind — what if the reward for achieving the rank of exalted would provide one with a difficult questline that would, as a result, provide the player with a reward of a specific namesake (Blizzard could even implement a namesake that is specific to each class).

If Blizzard wanted to get really creative with the ideas of namesakes, they could make it so that each rep level you achieve, you get a better name — akin to the Karazhan ring quest that exists currently.

A cure for Azerothian unemployment

Blizzard also should look into creating some new secondary professions, as well. In this vein, I’m talking about the creation of “hair styling.” Why hair styling? Because it gives Blizzard the chance to implement new hair styles without having to implement them at the character-creation level. This prevents any issues with legacy characters not having access to the styles.

Hair patterns would, of course, follow in the natural order of all plans — common, uncommon, rare, epic and even legendary. These patterns would be scattered about instances, world raid bosses and so on. There would be hair dyes as well to supplement and some of the rarer colors would be scattered in the same way. In fact, if there was much support for hair styling profession, Blizzard could even make it a primary profession.

And yes, this would be the legendary pattern. Seriously.

Awesome.

You have some thoughts that are better than mine? Think you can help improve my ideas? Leave me some comments; I read ‘em all!