I made an attempt to take my hunter for a bit of leveling. Almost immediately, I gave up after getting my hunter to the nearby town in the first area. I felt overwhelmed knowing full well the long grind that could take a few days just to finish up the area. I’ve felt that way since the start of the expansion. I’ve occasionally logged on but in discovering no one on, I simply would log back out.
When patch 5.1 was released, I decided to give it a spin. I tried a few of the new dailies but ended up getting pissed off and just dropped the two I didn’t bother completing. Once again I’ve been pondering cancelling my subscription since I barely get any enjoyment out of the current expansion.
Someone on the forums posted that the end game essentially has become dailies. I feel that the whole game has become far too focused around questing and it’s slowly draining the life from me.
I’m trying to analyze my experience in Cataclysm compared with the current expansion and why that expansion was sadly more fun (despite hating most of it). I think the main thing was that I started from scratch for the most part in leveling up to 85. The revamped Vanilla zones provided a fair amount of content and none of it was that difficult. I was able to create an optimized map of quests and ways to level to 85. By the time 80-85 rolled around, I knew quite well what to do.
More importantly, 80-85 didn’t feel that long. You could do that in a period of a week. But I think the bigger thing was that psychologically it felt as if there were fewer quests. Perhaps the flying in Azeroth feature made questing feel faster whereas you’re forced to deal with stupid mobs and trudge through zones each time you try to level a new toon to 90. Also, you had a quest counter for the achievement so you could mark your progress. For myself, having that counter allowed me to push myself harder once I got towards finishing the achievement.
Right now, leveling feels like a chore with no benefit. Outside of 90, there isn’t much to look forward to between 85-90 since the old talent tree was replaced. I really think that the people who took over World of Warcraft have no idea what leveling means in an RPG. However, as it stands leveling is centered around questing. And there are just far too many quests.
I really feel that the design of Mist of Pandera has been quite awful from the start. Outside of having this huge world, tons of quests and a new race, the expansion itself feels like nothing. There’s no real goal in the game at the moment. I know part of that was intentional by Blizzard. All it feels like is that they dumped a bunch of random stuff together and called it an expansion.
Part of the quest design was to provide more lore. But if you run through it numerous times, you’re really not going to care. People only care about hitting that level 90 mark because that’s where the “real game starts.” And as I mentioned, the leveling part really has no meaning by this point. The restructured so-called talent system was just a lazy copy of what Diablo 3 provided. But I think it further diminishes a lot of what the original game had set out when it developed the talent point system.
Going back to the quest part, my real problem is that there’s just too many meaningless quests. And when you hit 90, you get more meaningless quests that you must repeat daily (don’t get me started with those who say you aren’t forced to; those people can jump off a cliff). Blizzard thought they encountered a problem when people supposedly “ate the content up too quickly” in Cataclysm. It wasn’t a problem. The problem was that they re-did the Vanilla content and left little left for the rest of the expansion.
For myself, I would prefer the game to not have tons of quests but just make the quests more meaningful. I think the game should evolve away from the kill/collect/talk to x type of play. That still has a place but not to the gratuitous level it’s at now. A lot of other games usually would make killing experience more valuable and focus on a few key quests. Look at Diablo 3 where they’ve implemented a miniature questing system. However, that system isn’t overwhelming nor as boring as the one in World of Warcraft. Also, that questing system contributes towards the storyline of the game.
My main issue with the game is that it feels real pointless and that it shouldn’t center the leveling process around questing. I think they’ve been attempting to enforce that as opposed to dungeon grinding. However, the key difference between dungeon grinding and questing is that LFG provides a semi-social aspect. Sure, not every PUG is great, but I think attempting to keep up with others helps move instances along. Questing can be entirely solo but if you’re remaining friends aren’t online, then it can be a horrible drag.
CRZ ought to have provided a better, more social experience. But I haven’t seen this with regards to the higher level content.