I’ve been playing for a little over a month now from a slightly different perspective. When I left the game about 16 months ago, I wasn’t by any definition hardcore, but I was leading a raid group that’s done pretty well progression-wise, and definitely a good bit, rushing through reps and whatever content was trickled out. Not to mention having a few alts in the stable that I played as well.
I’ve come back now, content to play at a much slower pace, without feeling the need to do anything in particular beyond maybe one or two goals, and then doing whatever else I’ve enjoyed. The goal I have right now is the same as the one when I started…get to 90 and get LFR ready before 5.2 comes out.
I hit 90 two weeks ago without any major effort. The MoP quests were mainly the same old quest types that we’ve seen over the years. The majority of the quests all fall into the same three categories: Kill X, Gather Y, and Kill X To Gather Y. There were some non-standards sprinkled in from time to time, but WoW has pretty much always had those.
The story so far (I’ve only finished up through most of Townlong Steppes) is not earth-shatteringly good, but it generally is consistent, and seems appropriate. I did find that I liked the story/progression in Valley of the Four Winds a lot more for some reason, perhaps because it’s a little different from the standard “this area is under attack, help us!” theme with all the farmland stuff. I also enjoyed the quests with Chen as he and his niece traveled around.
I am beginning to wonder if MMO questing can break out of the three main staples I mentioned before. It certainly seems other games can disguise it better, but at the core, almost all of them seem to fall into those categories. On the other hand, I’m not sure what it is exactly we’re expecting to do in MMOs that wouldn’t fit in those.
Anyway, after I hit 90 I haven’t felt compelled to rush out and grind any reputations. I have been working on Tillers (almost to exalted), mainly because I enjoy the farming so far. I certainly don’t feel the need to complete every daily, every day, simply because Blizzard removed the daily quest cap. If I have time, I might hop over to one of the other factions, but I do it because I want to, not out of any need to fill every bar on my character pane as quickly as possible.
The closest thing to rushing that I’ve done is trying to get to 460 iLvl so I can get into LFR. Not so much because I need to run LFR ASAP, but because I got close to it pretty quickly thanks to friends who crafted stuff for me, and some lucky drops in the scenarios and instances (I’ve only run a handful of either).
Once I get to 460, I’ll probably still run heroics from time-to-time, mainly because I find them fun with friends. Again, I don’t care about maxxing out valor/justice points or getting everything BiS for the level of raiding I plan to do. I’ve also enjoyed the few scenarios I’ve run, so I’m sure I’ll do them every now and then as well.
There also doesn’t seem to be that much end game content.
I really don’t see this as true, but we obviously play at very different levels. I definitely felt this way about Cataclysm, but now there’s the farming (which is really the precursor to the long-awaited player housing), pet battles (which I haven’t messed with), scenarios, and a world boss or two which get killed regularly. And of course there’s the usual staples of raiding, PvP, reps, dailies, achievements, etc.
In terms of raiding content, if anything I think I’ve seen my friends complain that there’s almost too much, as they’re not even finished with normal modes on the current raid tier, and 5.2 is now (likely) releasing in two weeks.
As for the character/talent stuff…I actually like the system that’s currently in place a little more than the old talent trees. In the old system, I might make a very few minor choices, but mostly it was just a matter of going to wowpopular.com or ElitistJerks and copying something someone who spent way too much time with a spreadsheet decided was the best general distribution of points. I did look at a few guides when trying to pick talents/glyphs for my warlock, but in the end I chose the ones that I felt were best, and for the most part I wasn’t concerned about making a terribly wrong choice that was going to gimp my dps. I really do feel that, in trying to give the players choices, they were successful. I certainly don’t miss dropping 5 points into talents that existed solely to bump my dps or survivability (as a tank).
In the end, I’m having fun playing at a much slower pace. Is it radically different than WoW pre-MoP? Well, there’s definitely more things to do than Cataclysm, and there are some other subtle changes, but at it’s core, the game is the same old WoW we all know…it’s a gear treadmill. It’s really just a question of how fast you set the speed.
