What you want from the new WoW addon – and what you don’t care at all

Housing, talents, less Sylvanas – what do players actually want from World of Warcraft? You answered and here is the result.

The next expansion of World of Warcraft will be presented next week. While all indications are already pointing to “Dragonflight”, the community is seething. What does an expansion have to do for WoW to recover from Shadowlands? Which features are particularly important?

We wanted to know that from you in a survey a few days ago and you took part in it diligently. Almost 1,500 of you voted and were able to select up to 3 points that are of particular relevance to you. We want to briefly touch on the most popular of these features here to show what the community actually wants – and what doesn’t seem so relevant.

More freedom, more account-wide unlocks

With 10% and 423 votes cast, “More account-wide activations” took the absolute top spot.

Account-wide unlocks or the lack of exactly these things are often a major obstacle to switching from one character to another. Anyone who has lost interest in their magician after months and would rather experience the current endgame as a paladin often has to struggle through countless tasks. Grinding up the reputation of factions one more time, playing through the campaign one more time, and developing all the little features that make up the character one more time.

Account-wide activations would ensure that this effort is minimized. Patch 9.2 was already a good step in the right direction. A lot of content here is unlocked for all characters after playing for the first time. Blizzard has to expand that so that the disadvantages become smaller and smaller.

Player Housing: The Unexpectedly Great Wish

The desire for “player housing” already came in second with 9% and a total of 407 votes.

It was somewhat unexpected that “Player Housing” had already landed on number 2 of the wishes. Apparently, the longing for a small home in Azeroth, of which one can say: “This is the place where my character belongs” is much greater than expected. But somehow that’s not surprising – numerous other MMORPGs show how great housing works as a complete “side feature”.

Final Fantasy XIV, WildStar and many other MMORPGs have shown how much love, detail and passion players can put into their own MMO house. Of course, that would also be a blessing for role-players. Maybe that dream will come true soon – and not just in the form of a rather disappointing garrison.

New classes for more variety

Close behind, also with 9% and 396 votes, is the desire for new, playable classes.

Whenever World of Warcraft brought a new class, it was the driving force of the expansion. The death knight in Wrath of the Lich King, the monk in Mists of Pandaria, and the demon hunter in Legion brought all-new playstyles, and even the longest-time WoW fan had something new to do. This was always accompanied by an exciting, new class story, which was limited to one starting area, but was still extremely cool.

PvE Content – Something new, please

A little further down (7%) with 286 votes is the hope that there will be new, fresh PvE content.

While it may be hard for some to accept, at heart World of Warcraft is a PvE game and always has been. The PvE content is in many cases more elaborate than PvP, dungeons and raids usually have a higher participation than battlegrounds. But after almost 17 years, the well-known concepts have lost their way a little.

Although dungeons and raids always have new, interesting boss fights, little has changed in the basic approach. With Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard tried to bring a new feature to PvE with the war fronts – and failed. Many wished that the developers would once again prove their creativity to create something new.

New talents for all classes

In fifth place (6%) with 266 votes is the wish that there will be completely new talent.

Talents are arguably the oldest character customization option in World of Warcraft. Although the talent system has changed drastically over the years, talents are still very important today. Talents almost always bring huge passive effects or completely new spells and abilities that other players would then have to do without. Talents allow you to significantly adjust the playstyle of a class even within a specialization. More of it is always good – that’s why the wish is also quite popular.

Place 5 – 10 – Many small wishes

Places 6 to 10 are in quick succession – they are all quite close together:

• 6th place: Overhaul of the “old world” (6%, 241 votes)
• 7th place: More established PvE content (dungeons, raids) (5%, 225 votes)
• 8th place: Simpler story on Azeroth, without cosmic threats (5%, 225 votes)
• 9th place: Profession overhaul (5%, 222 votes)

What you don’t give a damn about – Newbie Help and Sylvanas

Finally, let’s take a quick look at the options that hardly any of you were interested in. Only a very small fraction of the votes fell on the last 3 points.

Third from last, and therefore quite unpopular, is the desire for a new match feature, such as pacts, Azerite powers or artifact weapons, with 36 votes (1%).

These so-called “borrowed power” systems, i.e. borrowed power that you then give back at the end of an expansion, have a bad reputation. However, this does not seem to be as much of a thorn in the side of many as assumed. As long as a system is well made and has exciting gameplay, many players seem to be able to live with parting with this power again.

Also less drastic than expected is probably the aversion to Sylvanas. Only 1% (35 votes) want the Banshee Queen to no longer appear as an important point.

This also illustrates a fairly well-known phenomenon in the WoW community, namely that of the “loud minority”. If you look in different forums or the comment area on MeinMMO, then you read again and again comments from players who just didn’t feel like playing Sylvanas anymore and wished that she wouldn’t appear anymore from now on. Due to the vehemence of the comments, this seems like a wish from a large part of the community – but at least on MeinMMO it only accounts for just under 1% of the players. So the Banshee Queen is allowed to stay.

On the other hand, innovations for newcomers, such as improved tutorials or a simpler start, seem to have absolutely no relevance. Only 6 votes fell on this point – a vanishingly small proportion, well below the 1% mark. But that’s probably understandable. Anyone who is talking about a new expansion is probably already deep into World of Warcraft and considers help for newcomers to be of secondary importance.

Did you expect this result? Which point surprised you the most?

After all: Tomorrow, April 19, 2022 at 6:00 p.m., Blizzard will reveal the new expansion. Of course we will report about it.