Tomorrow is going to be kind of amazing, and here's why

I'm pretty excited about tomorrow's patch.

You know the last time that I said those words? Five or six years ago -- I can't remember. It's been a long time since a patch in WoW has gotten me to want to log in and find out what's happening. In patch 5.4 Blizzard is delivering something that we haven't yet seen, and that's a patch without the major spoiler known to people outside Blizzard HQ.

I mentioned on Twitter last week that on Tuesday we're going to find out answers to a few things:

1. What happens to Garrosh? Is he really going to die? WoW has been known to play fast ones on us before. People either like to be pretend dead or come back from it as a Zombie Kael'thas. Is Garrosh's fate really death or does someone, or something, else have a plan more sinister?

2. Who is the next leader of the Horde? We're either going to find out tomorrow, or we're going to find out in the next patch (comments from Blizzard designers have been mixed). Either way the landscape is going to change drastically.

3. What will the Horde think of the Alliance after the regime change? Will the Alliance be greeted as liberators, or has the Alliance just thrust themselves into the middle of a brewing civil war? We already have some inkling to this answer, but I'll bet a paycheck the cinematic is going to tell us a helluva lot.

And that's the other part of this story ... the cinematic. No one has seen it. We know it's out there, but it's encrypted in the data files and locked tight away. Someone has the key to this, and when they unlock it, it's going to be big.

Now besides the lore questions that are going to help determine the future of the face of Azeroth more dynamically than any event prior (we knew what was going to happen with the cataclysm -- everything was changed; here we don't know what's going to happen), we also have a host of other changes to the game that are going to make me revive my army of alts and get them to 90. A few of them are going to get geared up -- it's been about 4 years since I geared out my rogue, I think it's time to pick him up again.

Finally, and it's crazy that this is the last point of mine and not the first, this is the last part of the Mists of Pandaria story. After 5.4 MoP is essentially done. All those proclaiming WoW's move to panda land can go take a seat, because the story is over. But take a moment and think about that -- the story is over less than a year after it started. The entire expansion in a year? That's some insane turn around in content creation and patching. Even if you're not excited about patch 5.4, you should be thrilled that WoW is moving ahead at warp speed nearly nine years after it was released.

I'm not really an unabashed WoW fanboy. This game has its flaws. But as someone who writes about the events in WoW for a living, I hope you'll join me in being just a wee bit piqued about the changes to the game tomorrow. It's been a long time since I've wanted a patch to drop like this, and I hope you'll join me tomorrow. It's gonna be fun.