To whom it may concern, and at this point I am very aware that it may be no one...

I would like to talk briefly on the subject of expansions in MMORPGs. I have not been privy to a successful expansion except for The Burning Crusade, but I have seen a few crash and burn. Ultima Online died during an expansion, except for a handful of loyal supporters. I didn't play it much myself, but I was told by my brother who was a pretty loyal fan to ShadowBane, that it's expansion lost much of its player-base. In many of the WoW boards, people talk about Galaxies and how its expansion is why they are playing WoW now.

Many more examples, I'm sure, however I will have to say that thus far, the Burning Crusade was immensely enjoyable. I remember watching a druid video called End of Dreams 2. In fact, give me a moment while I turn it on and get nostalgic. It starts playing a slow, sad sounding, song with text fading into view with statements such as "druid is broken", "cannot dps or tank", "druid is a healer, l2p and respec". Any long-time druid will tell you about playing something other than a healer as a druid.

I know, for myself, that I was feral since level 40 until level 70 (about 2.5 years). I never once respec'd over to restoration, and consequently I never did Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Onyxia, etc. Reason being, I didn't want to be told how to play, and many wouldn't accept anything but a healer in their raid. This was and still is completely fine with me because, as I have said numerous times, I do what I want, and that is PvP, not PvE.

After the sad music plays, it goes into faster house music and remixes of other songs that are pretty upbeat. I remember watching this during TBC's beta period and thinking how awesome it was going to be to finally get some new stuff in feral, how feral would finally be a force to be reckoned with. Am I let down, now that I'm resto and have been 70 for a good long while? No, I'm not.

In all honesty, TBC was horribly fun grinding. I've done the 60-70 grind twice now, and I'm about to do it a third time. The zones kept you moving along quickly without stagnating, and the first time entering a zone is amazing. I can remember the exact feeling I had at 4 A.M. release day when I hit 62 and entered Zangarmarsh with my new ability: Maim. Holy moly, this was a game I had never played before (not having my rogue at this time)... Maim was a breath of fresh air, I can tell you. Also, you went into this marsh area and you REALLY felt the presence of the marsh. Everything had a damp feel to it, the sounds were muffled and dark, which made the dampness all the more palpable. You didn't know what was over the next hill, or on the other side of that lake, etc. It was a really fun feeling that was different.

I can only say that currently, I'm not salivating for WotLK as much as I was for TBC. This is probably mainly due to the lack of information provided at the time this is written. However, I'm also a little underwhelmed by the idea of the Death Knight class. It seems that Blizz should probably balance the classes there are currently rather than adding another. Additionally, before TBC was released, it felt like the feral game-play was unfinished, as if abilities were missing or omitted, etc. When TBC finally dropped, it seemed like those abilities were added, and the feeling of gratitude for finally implementing all those features was unexplainable by us, and not understandable by anyone else.

For the release of WotLK, there haven't been any announcements concerning druid play-styles or additional abilities or anything, but I can't think of anything really missing from the druid class. It will be hard for the Blizz devs to give me anything that I don't think we already have without completely overpowering the druid class, in my view.

Only time will tell... I suppose I'm not prepared after all...