I'm feeling like WoW's a bit of a deadzone right now. There just doesn't seem much point in doing anything. And its not just because of the usual summer slump. Its the expansion.
My main, a 70 pally, has been almost at a standstill since I got into the beta. Blizzard promised another gear reset, and sure enough, I found I have barely made 71 before my welfare epics were being replaced. What does this mean? Well, it means for one thing there's no point spending any more honour points on a gladiator's shield. Its going to be replaced soon after the expansion releases by a green. That just leaves me with more than 20k honour and a bunch of tokens burning a hole in my pocket.
And there's not much point raiding either. Sure, I could grind Kara a while to gear up for Gruul and Magtheridon. But now we know WotLK is just a couple of month's away, it seems unlikely I'll get sufficiently geared up in time to make a difference. I saw someone ask in chat the other day why noone wanted to do heroics. The answer was badges of justice will be effectively worthless by the end of the year.
I think Blizzard makes a major slip up here by not allowing players to switch off XP gain. If they allowed it, we would be able to keep some toons at 70, keep running heroics, keep gearing up, and have a stab at seeing some the TBC endgame content we otherwise never will. I understand why they set thigns the way they do - progress is important because it keeps players buying expansions, a major windfall of cash. But just as TBC made much of Azeroth worthless, so WotLK will make Outland something like the Coventry of WoW - somewhere you sometimes have to go through on your way to somewhere mroe interesting, but not somewhere you really want to live.
The game experience may still be great. I know for a fact Northrend offers more inspiring and entertaining sights and experiences. But it seems such a shame to cheapen so much of what the developers put out previously - to relegate all the hard work put into Coilfang, Auchindoun, and Hellfire to places you might go to once to finish a quest or farm to gear your 69 twink.
Its almost as if the term 'expansion pack' is actually quite inappropriate. Its more like a cheap sequel - WotLK will not make WoW a bigger better game as much as it will just replace the things we do already with more colourful versions. Instances, levelling, crafting - all will be much the same but with different skins. Azeroth and Outland won't be more fun - they will be obsolete and we will all decamp to Northrend.
If only Blizzard found a way of keeping the WoW/TBC factions relevant - make dungeons or quests in Northrend give rewards from the Aldor or Scryers or Netherwing.
In the meantime, there's not much to do in the World of Warcraft. I need a few thou rep to get a War Hiipogryph and a few to get Exalted with the Skyguard. Maybe I'll log in an hour a day to do Netherwing Dailies when I have the other mounts.
MMORPG.com writes:
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