The Agony of Anticipation

This is something that I can personally attest to. Waiting for the details when it's near expansion time can be absolutely agonizing. And yet, wait we must - there's simply no alternative. No amount of speculation, simming based on tantalizing glimpses, or twitter bombardment will force those details from Blizzard before they're ready.

Those details Celestalon is talking about are item squish related in this case, but it's not even remotely the only thing we're waiting for details on now. People (myself included) are desperate for details on a host of issues (button bloat, new raids, the lore/storyline) that we're simply not being told yet, and I know how maddening it can be. It gets worse after events like last week's press trip, because interviews and articles begin tantalizing us with tidbits of information. We see bits and pieces, but in these pre-beta days we can't see the whole picture.

I remember during the end of the Wrath of the Lich King's cycle, waiting for details on Cataclysm, and seeing everyone in my guild speculating on every last thing. The worgen models, the new raids, where would the final raid even be, you name it and we speculated on it. Speculation is fun, it's natural when there's a dearth of info, but it's not something you can hold Blizzard to. Often I see people surprised and upset when an expansion ends up not being what they expected, even if Blizzard never once promised them the thing they built up in their anticipation.

The item squish is one such factor - I see people looking at the stats we've seen so far in short videos and trying to work out what those numbers mean, what the numbers on their character back at BlizzCon mean, how squished the squish actually is and whether or not it's squished enough. But we know that more is changing than just itemization - health now comes from stamina alone. There are a lot of moving parts to the changes coming in Warlords of Draenor and often, our speculation doesn't take those changes into account, because we don't know all of them.

We know that some abilities will be gone, but we don't know which ones, and we don't know which ones are gone vs. gone from some specs vs. folded into other abilities. We know we're going to Draenor, but we don't know all of the story yet (and won't for quite some time) so when someone posts a plot spoiler, all that does is give us one piece of a puzzle when the rest are still in the box. Is that a tower? It could be a tower, or maybe a battlement... only later do we find out the puzzle wasn't even a castle in the first place, and you were imagining archers mounted on an elekk's nose.

This isn't me telling you not to speculate. I'd be both a hypocrite and a mooncalf if I believed it was even possible - I know I'm spending hours of my time speculating about World of Warcraft, especially as we approach the expansion. Knowing that there's news out there, and that it could drop at any moment fuels my speculative nature, and I don't expect you to be any less curious. But it comes down to managing your expectations and realizing we don't know what we're going to find out until we find out. I'm still floored at Ion Hazzikostas' mentioning of a world boss three to four times bigger than a gronn, but I can sit and dream about what it will be like all day and that doesn't mean when it does come out that I'm justified to be upset that I can't climb its back and plant a flag. Yes, in its back, don't be perverse.