Well, as you might have noticed, I’ve been having too much fun playing WoW to update my blog…
Since last Thursday, the 9th, I’m a proud level 85:
Since then, I’ve been doing instances (normal and heroic), trying to get my gear raid-ready… Also been levelling professions (already a maxed out alchemist, and almost maxed out tailor)…
This was a great expansion for the game, in my opinion… it had a bit of everything… Blizzard took the formula they started developing in Wrath of the Lich King and squeezed even more fun out of it… quests with cutscenes (ingame, of course), an easier system to learn but harder to master, and more immersiveness… And that’s the keyword in this last expansion: immersion…
What they’ve done is to give the player a sense of urgency (which actually doesn’t exist, you can take how long you want to finish quests), through good storytelling/writing, they made you belong in the world and actually feel you’re making a difference, even with 100000 people around you doing the exact same thing! This is very great achievement for a MMORPG, one that’s extremely hard to pull off…
Lots of people say that the game is more geared to casual players, but that’s wrong… it might have been partially true in WotLK, but Blizzard certainly didn’t go that route… while the game has become more accessible (which is different from casual), with a big quest helper, marked quests on the map, etc, the dungeon difficulty (particularly the heroics) has been cranked up to the extreme… while in WotLK, even from the start you could just AoE all enemies in sight and still survive, Cataclysm demands players to use they’re classes’ abilities to the maximum, having to resort to crowd-control (which I haven’t used since The Burning Crusade, to be honest) and other less-used skills and spells…
The game has become more tactic in nature, demanding players to adjust from fight to fight, which in my opinion is better, less-casual.
The game still is a lot of fun for newcommers (the Worgen and Goblin zones seem to be ace, as the Gnome and Troll), but demands more of the more dedicated players, giving much less than WotLK for free, demanding effort to actually get good gear… Finally, epics are really epics, not just some stuff you pickup in any instance in the game…
Now, it’s back to work… those monsters aren’t going to kill themselves! 🙂