I'm seriously considering getting back into WoW... help?

[JillianCorvus]

haha, I dunno, my fiance plays FFXI and the XIV beta a lot but honestly those games bore me to tears. They're so pretty, but soooo dull to me, and I've been feeling that MMO itch. Not that World of Warcraft is really much better, but I actually had fun playing it. It's been years though, I don't think I've reactivated my account since after Cataclysm first came out. I still can't quite get past those pandas though. I seriously thought that expansion was a joke when it was first announced.

Does anyone on here play? Is it worth getting back into? I liked the cataclysm changes, honestly, it was a neat way to handle things. I've never been a big end-game or PVP person, so I'm mostly looking for commentary on general play.

Thanks in advance!
-J.

[Aiden]

Mist of Panderia is amazing, the lore, the world, the story.

I know some people rage over the pandas, but I just don't understand why they hate that idea but accept the space goats from space angle.

Panderia was well made an even if you only play it for the story, it is well worth it.

I don't play consistently, but I return for the patches as I watch what is going on with The Black Prince, (the son of Deathwing).

[Chris Brady]

MoP is pretty good, despite the Pandaren, however, at the end of the day, it's still WoW.  If you're OK with that, jump back in you probably won't regret it.  I'm having fun.

[JillianCorvus]

Glad to hear it was well-done at least. I don't really have anything against the pandas, although it seemed kind of weird to suddenly throw kung-fu-pandas in. The space goats were a bit odd but at least the orcs had already set a precedent for aliens in the world, and until the pandas it had seemed like WoW had really been making an effort in designing all of their races and animal species to be at least a bit different from their real-world counterparts, so suddenly "and here's some talking pandas" just seemed... contrived? Like more of a play to current trends than an honest effort to add a new species. Makes plenty of sense from a marketing standpoint though, and it IS Blizzard. So I guess I can let that go, lol.

Thats about how I play - get really into it for a few months to a year, then drop it for a year or two, then pick it back up again. I think I'm giving my poor fiance an honest ethical dilemma on this. She's such a die-hard FF fan, and now she's like "wait... if you play WoW... am /I/ going to have to play WoW? Like... would I want to? I might." Poor dear xDD I'd join her on FF if it didn't literally make me sleepy to play. It seems like they're improving XIV a lot, but it still is just bland-looking to me. Although at least now you can do more than jut kill monsters to gain XP (which was definitely something that put me off XI yeears ago when I tried playing. I mean, WoW's tendency to do the "you climbed a hill! Have 100XP!" thing is a bit silly too).

[Naiah]

Pandaria as a continent is really beautiful. And super hard. Good god the leveling drained my soul, I swear. You can buy all green lvl 85 gear in one of the first villages, but even that makes it hard to kill mobs, as usual, though just felt it was way harder this time around. Still think its odd my ret pally kills way slower at lvl 90 than my lvl 85 druid did and my druid is now 90 and still killing faster. When you reach 90 you will contemplate killing yourself, as good god there are SO many dailies. To get the good gear you need exalted with certain factions and that is only gained (right now) with dailies. Dont really recall that many "fun" quests like there was in Cataclysm, it all just seemed a bit grindy, you know, kill 20 of these, collect 50 of those and save 10 of these.

They threw in Farmville, Pokemon, cross account achievements and scenarios. I just cant be bothered doing raids (not even the Looking for raid) and dungeons/scenarios, so I am just messing around with the pet battles (pokemon). I am a big collector so its fun getting them all and finding the rares Though ok, I am about ready to scream at lvling more of them, it is very mindnumbingly tedious

[TheGlyphstone]

And if you're worried the introduction of the Pandaren (sure, they were originally an April Fool's joke, but people have been begging for them for years) is any sign it's become a Lighter and Softer WoW, think again. The...4th? quest I did as an Alliance character involved committing blatant war crimes, and you only have to play a little bit into the new continent to discover the place isn't Kung Fu Pandaland, but more like Kung Fu Panda as re-written by a collaboration between Stephen King and HP Lovecraft. Life sucks to be a Pandaren, especially now with everyone coming in and wrecking their little paradise.

But as said...it's beautiful art, an entertaining storyline, but in the end it's still the same juggernaut Skinner's Box WoW has always been.

EDIT: It's not really FarmVille. More accurate to say they built-in a miniature Harvest Moon. You never interact with other players in the farming mini-zone, only NPCs.

[Naiah]

Felt like farmville to me, plow, sow and harvest after x amount of time (every morning at 3 am).

[TheGlyphstone]

That's why I said it's more like Harvest Moon. Farmville is on a rolling timer - you're forced to monitor it and harvest crops after a set number of hours - every minute a crop lies unharvested is wasted time that you could spend growing a new plant, and you make progress by finding friends to start playing to get you more crops/credits/time, tied into the social-network element of Facebook.

The Tillers Farm is an entirely solo sidequest - it's actually impossible to interact with other players in it because your crop patch is instanced, and it's almost completely fire-and-forget with the 24-hour window of planting/harvesting. You get rewards for doing quests for NPCs, and the storyline has a lot of parallels to Harvest Moon as well.

[Aiden]

I know some people have a HUGE issue with the daily quest, but Blizzard did not intend for everyone to do EVERY SINGLE daily, EVERY SINGLE day.

Did some people do them? Yes, and those and the people who had limited time were the ones to complain about it.

Luckily, blizzard is starting to learn how to pace itself.

I understand why they made those slow rep grinds, to pace the content out. It isn't right for people to BLAZE through content then go whine there is "nothing to do, I quit, f u blizzard".

When 4.1 came out, I enjoyed and thought the pace of the conquest storyline was well thought out and with the addition of the rep bonuses once you hit rev once, it makes lvling up those past reps really easy.

[Naiah]

@Glyph: I have only seen FarmVille, so just thought of that when doing the farming

@Aiden: I do understand slow, I can live with slow, I mean I did the Insane title when it was really insane, before they made it easier. My issue with all the dailies is that I dont do dungoens or raids and holy f**k it is hard for my ret pally to kill mobs, it makes it soooo excrutiating, especially as what I need to do them a little better, is the rep I am grinding to get the gear.

[BlightRaptor]

Not be the party pooper, but I unsubbed after my 6 month renewal finally ended. I was one of the panda haters. Why? I don't like them, plain and simple, and an entire expansion that revolved around them just wasn't interesting to me, even as a furry. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and tried out the starting zone. If I'm perfectly honest, they really missed the chance to make the decision of choosing a faction interesting. Instead it's like "oh you're all done! pick a side!"

The talent and glyph changes were nice for endgame, but made leveling a new alt kind of... blah. I was surprised how much I missed pumping a point into a tree each level. The overall tone of the expansion is light, silly, and comical. There is an entire section of the landing area on Pandaria devoted to poop jokes. Then when you get to the Blizz version of the Himalayas, there's another poop quest. For me immersion is important and the cons outweighed the pros for story. The presence of Sunwalkers getting involved was the high point in my opinion.

Perhaps most importantly, my friends also lost interest in the game and I've noticed a nose dive in terms of etiquette within the general population of the game. WoW is definitely not meant to be a 1 player experience. For the love of everything, play it with friends. Not PuGs. Friends.

Slightly off topic. Take a look at some other recent MMOs. They've all got something a little different going for them. Smaller populations, but then again WoW's success has always been considered an anomaly.

[TheGlyphstone]

Heck, Blizzard loves its poop jokes and poop quests. That's been constant since Burning Crusade, if not earlier.

[BlightRaptor]

Yeah I remember those too. Even the ogre camps that had poop scattered around. I think the joke that made me say "enough is enough!" was the MacGruber reference in the new Hillsbrad. A spoof of a spoof!?

[TheGlyphstone]

I think it's just Blizzard making fun of themselves at this point. Or else someone on the dev team has a scat fetish.


I'd also disagree with the assertion that the overall tone is light and silly and comical. There are comical elements and quests, definitely, but that's hardly new - since Vanilla, you knew almost guaranteed that if a Gnome was handing you a quest, it would involve comic relief in some fashion.

Burning Crusade had a theme of adventure - a new world had opened up, and while the Horde definitely got the better end of the story development, it was still an expansion of both factions travelling to Outlands to kick ass, take names, and conquer. We were on the offensive.

Wrath was, in contrast, was themed by desperation/impending disaster. The Lich King was back from his coffee break and ready to kill everyone, forcing a haphazard and hasty rush to Northrend to stop him. Still offensively-minded, but with a gloomy tinge.

Cataclysm was all about rebuilding after its titular event, change and adaptation. It shook up everything in game and out, and dealing with all the changes to the world were almost as important as stopping Deathwing and his Nefarious Evil Schemes (TM).

Now Pandaria - it's not comedy, it's tragedy. The lighthearted and silly elements are important because of how they highlight the consequences of what we're doing. Both factions are back on the offensive, but against each other, the happy panda men are caught in the middle, and we're on the verge of causing another apocalypse in the process of burning this island paradise into miserable slag. It's not nearly as upfront about its doom-and-gloom as Wrath or Cataclysm were, but it only takes a little digging to find the darkness in MoP.

[Moraline]

I agree with Blight. I broke down and resubbed after friends asked me to rejoin. I didn't make it through a month.

I absolutely loathed the Panda's and everything to do with their stupid turtle island. The bad jokes are incessant and the daily quest grind was beyond ridiculous. It was worse then all of their past rep grinding.

Then there was pokemon and farmville. Farmville? Forget it - not interested in it at all. Pokemon? While on the surface it seemed novel and fun, it quickly turned all of my fun pet collecting into a grind.

I've got nothing good to say about MoP.

I think I'll just keep tinkering around in other MMO's. I'm headed to the Elder Scrolls Online Beta next.

[SinXAzgard21]

Everyone can accept the space goats but not the panda's.  Don't get me wrong, I no longer play WoW nor support Blizzard after an issue with billing.  But the expansion wasn't that bad.  I play Tera's f2p model and enjoy it. 

[Moraline]

Everyone can accept the space goats but not the panda's.  Don't get me wrong, I no longer play WoW nor support Blizzard after an issue with billing.  But the expansion wasn't that bad.  I play Tera's f2p model and enjoy it.

The space goats didn't have an entire freakin' expansion based on them. Why the hell did Blizz have to dedicate a whole expansion to one lousy overly silly race that lives on a turtle. It was just too much.

[Aiden]

Well the wandering Isle and Panderia are two separate things.

You can't be mad when Blizzard only has one new land mass, there is only so much they can do to their current world before the option to go to a whole new one comes up.

WoTLK was the same thing, EVERYONE to Northrend!

[Sel Nar]

Long and short of it, in my opinion (as a Staunch Lover of the Warcraft RTS games, and a Loather of WoW), WoW is the dead horse of the MMO genre, and Blizzard is beating the last few pennies it can out of the festering corpse.

Mechcanically, WoW is OLD. The only MMOs in its age bracket with any population numbers are Lineage 2 and Guild Wars, and both of those games, for a variety of reasons, look better than their similar-aged cousin, but tend to play in roughly the same way, with limited mobility and relatively clunky interface.

Honestly, if you want your MMO fix, I'd suggest Star Trek Online, Tera, The Secret World, or Guild Wars 2, in part because you're not paying 180$ a year just to be allowed to keep playing. But that's my two bits.

[SinXAzgard21]

Honestly, if you want your MMO fix, I'd suggest Star Trek Online, Tera, The Secret World, or Guild Wars 2, in part because you're not paying 180$ a year just to be allowed to keep playing. But that's my two bits.

This I agree with... Minus Guild Wars 2.

[TheGlyphstone]

Long and short of it, in my opinion (as a Staunch Lover of the Warcraft RTS games, and a Loather of WoW), WoW is the dead horse of the MMO genre, and Blizzard is beating the last few pennies it can out of the festering corpse.

Mechcanically, WoW is OLD. The only MMOs in its age bracket with any population numbers are Lineage 2 and Guild Wars, and both of those games, for a variety of reasons, look better than their similar-aged cousin, but tend to play in roughly the same way, with limited mobility and relatively clunky interface.

Honestly, if you want your MMO fix, I'd suggest Star Trek Online, Tera, The Secret World, or Guild Wars 2, in part because you're not paying 180$ a year just to be allowed to keep playing. But that's my two bits.

That's hardly fair, considering it's still carrying a massive player base who are for the most part loyal to the Blizzard and WoW brands. Milking money from a dead horse is the state of SWTOR, World of Conan, or WAR, the games that tried subscription and went FTP to stay afloat. WoW is the aging champion prize-fighter; still able to beat up any challenger and bring in big box office receipts, but rapidly approaching the age where it'll be too old to continue whether it's unseated or not. And if it loses the title, even odds as to the new champ being an up-and-coming rival (another game company) or its own hand-picked successor (Blizzard's mysterious Project Titan).


I have heard excellent things about Secret World, though.

[Shjade]

The space goats didn't have an entire freakin' expansion based on them. Why the hell did Blizz have to dedicate a whole expansion to one lousy overly silly race that lives on a turtle. It was just too much.

They kinda did, actually. It was split with the blood elves somewhat, but heading to Outland was very much a Draenei-oriented endeavor.

[BlightRaptor]

I must disagree with the assertion that MoP was a tragedy. Yes it had it has elements that could be considered dark, but those are largely overshadowed by things like whack-a-mole bosses. The delivery of the story was weak in my opinion. I get they were going for a civilization being trapped between two foreign factions was suppose to stir something... but it didn't. It just made me question the logic of everything. Why don't the Pandaren just not join and let the Horde and Alliance kill each other? If I'm suppose to feel sympathy for them, why am I the player character even helping my faction out in conquering this island? The logical thing would be for me to NOT ever go to Pandaria and pick up a "No more war!" sign and start a riot in Stormwind/Orgrimar.

After I hit 90, I tried out some of the other "casual" features of MoP like the Pet Battles and Farming. While Pet Battles weren't really of particular interest to me, they were at least well implemented (and utilize the old WC1 and 2 battle music for us old farts that would actually recognize it.) As for Farmville, I never objected to the idea of implementing something like that. However, their overzealous use of phasing turned me off from going very far with it. Again, for me it was an immersion killer. Your plot of land is... the same as everyone else. Except you can't see them, and they can't see you. Again, since playing with other people is the point of a MMO, I felt like what's the point in working on this little farm if I can't show it off to people in-game? Not to mention going further with it involved dailies and repeatable quests that grant reputation with members within the farm faction... rep within rep (after Firelands I developed a "No Dailies" policy.)

With all the other options out there, now having free-to-play options, a subscription fee for the flow of content that comes out just doesn't seem worth it anymore. By my calculations the updated troll dungeons were a $70 patch!

[Aiden]

If you did the quest, you would learn that Panderia is a mystic land. When the alliance and horde arrived to battle over the land, the Sha's were empowered and eventually broke free.

I thought the Sha quests/story lines were pretty awesome.

[Chris Brady]

The issue with ALL MMOs is the end game.  Because, ironically enough (at least according to a few anecdotal sources, as in I can't find them anymore, and the Carbine Team guys who are working on the Wildstar MMO, which is the one I'm looking forward to, because it promises to be 'fun' in a Jak and Daxter way) there's a lot more people who play solo than they do in groups, according to one dev team (Carbine) it's about 65%.  But none of the MMO devs at the moment cater to us (as I'm a soloist primarily.  I have a hard time trusting random internet strangers, most of the time, they disappoint me), meaning unless we grind, or we raid, repeatedly we often have nothing to do.

However, the problem with WoW is that it's WoW.  It's got 16 year old graphics on an 8 year old, heavily modified engine (seriously the stuff Blizzard has done to it mechanically is AMAZING) which gives more or less the same experience.  Which to some people that's what they want.  In fact, the current patch system they've implemented is them trying to keep the interest going before they dump another expansion pack on us.

And I agree with the Raptor.  As beautifully Chinese their setting is, I find that their 'lazy' and 'drunken' style of 'society' kills much of any urgency and any sense of the epic.  And for God's sake, we're BLOODY 90!  We're demigods, can we please do something worthy of that???