Despite the many gloom and doom articles proclaiming the end of World of Warcraft after Blizzard Entertainment Inc released its most recent subscription numbers, the game remains one of the most popular MMOs on the market and likely is not going anywhere anytime soon. Still, losing nearly half of your subscribers in a span of few months is hardly reassuring, and Blizzard will be hard pressed to prove to fans that the MMO powerhouse is worth returning to.

With the announcement of the game’s sixth expansion, World of Warcraft: Legion, Blizzard managed to spark at least some interest from its jaded fan base, but the studio has more than a few concerns to overcome if it wants to maintain its place at the top of the mountain. That said, some of the details released on the direction of Legion so far sound promising.

More things to do besides raids

In games that have no ending, including MMOs, it is always important to have some kind of goal for players to strive toward, but something like “spend weeks earning this marginally better gear” is not much of an incentive for most people. New gear is always great, but the “gear treadmill” as it is called gets old quick, especially when it forces you to run the same stale raid over and over.

Legion seems to be addressing this issue by giving players more things to do besides raids, both through the introduction of artifact weapons and through a greater focus on 5-man dungeons.

“We feel like we’ve done dungeons a bit of a disservice,” Lead Game Designer Ion Hazzikostas said during the Legion reveal at Gamescom 2015 in Germany. “Dungeons are essential. They are at the heart of what makes the MMO experience awesome.”

He added, “We don’t want dungeons to be something that you just do for a month at the start and then forget once you start doing raids.”

Without going into much detail, Hazzikostas explained that Legion would offer greater incentives for players continue playing through dungeons even at max level. He also promised that Legion would have more dungeons at launch than any other WoW expansion.

No more garrisons

One of the headline features touted for Warlords was the introduction of garrisons, a form of upgradeable player housing that provided access to buildings that generated resources and other items. Players could populate their garrisons with NPC followers that could be recruited through various means in the game world, and those followers could be assigned to buildings or sent on missions.

While this sounds like a fun feature in theory, garrisons quickly became busy work that required players to log in regularly to gather resources and check up on their missions. Many players equated this to doing chores or playing a Facebook game like Farmville, and it is one of the biggest gripes people have about Warlords.

Even worse, high level profession recipes were gated by resources that could only be obtained through tedious garrison management, and players could only earn so many each day. Profession cooldowns are nothing new to WoW, but most of the items that players needed for their crafting recipes were Bind-on-Pickup, meaning they could not be traded or bought on the in-game Auction House.

Instead of garrisons, Legion will have class-specific Order Halls with their unique quests. Also,rather than recruiting dozens of followers who are little more than resource farmers, players will have only a handful of followers that play more direct role in the game.

Enough with the Orcs already

Finally, it is no secret that Blizzard loves its Orcs probably more than any other Warcraft race, and there is a reason that “Lok’tar ogar” tends to sell more bumper stickers and t-shirts than its counterparts from other races. Despite that, however, fans have started to get more than a little sick of the heavy focus on the relatively boring Orcs when there are plenty of more interesting races that haven’t gotten much attention, such as Tauren, Undead, Dwarves, and Trolls…basically any race that doesn’t build its homes out of spikes and rags.

Blizzard promises that Legion will have a wider scope than Warlords, and the elf races in particular will see a much needed boost in prominence in the expansion. The game will also see a return of fan favorite villain Illidan, who had one of the endgame raid bosses of The Burning Crusade, WoW’s first expansion.

And most importantly, we’re finally rid of Garrosh.

Image courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment