World of Warcraft: Midnight has some of Blizzard's most controversial changes yet, but playing the alpha still has me hopeful it'll figure them out in the next few months

World of Warcraft's upcoming Midnight expansion recently went into its first alpha phases of testing, and Blizzard has chosen to give an unprecedented number of players access to a dramatically early phase of development.

That's not surprising, as the company is enacting one of the most significant shakedowns of the player experience ever implemented in the venerable MMO: the proposed pruning of nearly all popular player mods used during combat.

As a knock-on effect, Blizzard is simplifying nearly every character's class and specialization, since mods will no longer be able to smooth over those rough edges or keep track of tricky spell interactions. It's a bold move, one that appears to equal the game's new housing feature as the biggest source of conversation about the expansion.

If done well, it might shake off the shackles of 20 years of accumulated complexity and open the door to new players joining WoW. Done poorly, it'll remove the depth from the game and lead to boring, repetitive combat.

I took the alpha for an in-depth spin in its first phase, which ended this week. I played the two dungeons and three delves currently available, tested out housing, gave the new demon hunter class' devourer specialization a try, monkeyed with professions a bit, and visited the new Arcantina community hub.

It is very, very early days. But Midnight is shaping up to be a solid, respectable expansion that might just achieve its goals. Questing and storylines are fine so far, though the first phase of the alpha only went to level 83 and had no cutscenes. I'll focus on the three major features of the expansion: the revamped classes, housing and the new devourer demon hunter specialization.

Your class, only less of it

It's too early to judge Blizzard's promised in-game UI replacements for the features players like most in their soon-to-be-retired combat mods. (They'll be ready for prime time in a later phase of the alpha.) Instead, I spent a good amount of time playing different classes and encounters to see what the net effects of all that skinnying down of character abilities has been.

The philosophy, as Blizzard developers have told me in interviews, is to cut those class spells and features that were basic maintenance or too complex to track without extensive modifications: buffs that had to be routinely maintained, for example, or spell interactions that didn't make logical sense but resulted in the highest damage or healing.

The results in this early stage are mixed. Those classes that were the simplest to begin with have changed the least. Hunter gameplay is nearly the same as it was. But it's hard to imagine playing a feral druid without managing Bloodtalons, or an arcane mage without managing, well, everything. (I spent two hours once practicing on target dummies with an arcane mage early in The War Within expansion, and barely mastered the opening salvo of spells.)

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and so many talents are yet to be implemented or fixed that it's hard to make a final call on the actual impact. The good news is that for most specs, it feels headed in the right direction. Nearly all need a button or two added in, but most of the bloat was correctly targeted, with a few noticeable exceptions.

I keenly felt the lack of my usual add-ons and WeakAuras in dungeons, which made evaluating that gameplay difficult. We'll know more about how this plays out with a full suite of tools later in the alpha.

Welcome home to Midnight

Housing is clearly the gem in Midnight's crown: Even with the limited number of housing items available in the alpha, I've been frolicking with the ability to design my own abode and see what others have done. The tools are terrific, even in this early stage, and incredibly flexible.

Is that candelabra a coat rack? Up to you based on the size. Or is it a tree, with the candelabra forming the base and a fluffy top made from a resized patch of grass? Your call! Maybe it's spikes growing up from where you buried it in your floor, or hanging upside-down from your ceiling like a stalactite pendant light. You can resize, rotate, flip and overlap items to your heart's content, leaving them floating them in the air, placed wherever you want, or snapped to a helpful grid. With 20-plus years of Warcraft items to eventually choose from and a wide variety of ways to transform, combine, and place them, housing is almost definitely going to be the collector's dream.

I'm a touch worried about time-gating on this important feature—things like how many items you can have at once are locked behind a Neighborhood Favor reputation-style system. Collecting items already takes time, and iterating using an ever-larger collection is going to keep people engaged, so these additional delays may add a sour note to an otherwise open, deep and incredibly entertaining system.

Devourer demon hunters are demon runners

I had planned to play the new devourer demon hunter specialization for most of my time in the alpha. This new hybrid spellcaster/melee combo dealer is only the second mid-range class in the game. Its visuals are frankly stunning; the dark purple, void-powered, dramatic animations of so many of its abilities made devourer exciting for me to pick up and play.

Devourer demon hunters carve off cool voidy-looking souls (think the evil Xal'atath's shoulder orbs) with the Consume ability, which also generates their Fury resource. You can pick them up by traveling over them or by taking a big swing with Reap. Souls fuel their Void Metamorphosis transformation, which allows you to cast the giant damaging void meteor of Collapsing Star. You can then spend Fury on Void Ray, which is devourer's version of the other spec's Eyebeam (but much cooler, since it's a torrent of void energy). Blizzard posted a nice blog entry if you'd like to see videos of the spell animations—the visual effects are awesome.

Unfortunately, as happy as I was to get my hands on it, I was just as grateful to put it down again. The spec loses the leech and self-healing built into the other two types of demon hunters, so despite a good complement of damage reduction abilities and a one-minute cooldown that heals some (but never all) of the damage you've taken, it feels incredibly squishy. A single additional monster or two was enough to make my character fall over.

Most ranged classes without self-heals have terrific crowd control (CC) abilities, so they can stop mobs from reaching them. Unfortunately, that isn't true with devourer, particularly with the short range of its spells. While it does have some CC, it feels like it either needs some better slows or stops (which could make it overpowered in some content) or, more likely, to just have self-healing from Souls put back into its kit, perhaps at a lesser rate than other demon hunter specs.

As far as the combat rotation, it's still early and very janky to play. It was far too easy to lose your stack of split-off souls before reaching the "explode for damage" stage. Melee combos felt terrific, but were far too infrequent, and brought you into range for mobs to smack you, which you then couldn't fully recover from.

As with all things in the alpha, there is still time for Blizzard to supply what's missing and polish up what isn't, so I'm reserving final judgment on devourers. The specialization, and the expansion as a whole, have great potential, even at this early stage. But there is a lot remaining to do before Midnight—and the clock is ticking.