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Next World of Warcraft Expansion: Warlords of Draenor
JestersGrind writes with news that Blizzard has announced the next expansion to World of Warcraft, titled Warlords of Draenor. This expansion raises the level cap to 100 and introduces a new world/continent full of zones: Draenor. They're also introducing 'Garrisons,' player-built bases on Draenor that individual users will be able to customize and upgrade. Your garrison will have followers which you can send on missions, and you'll be able to invite other players over to visit and trade. The expansion will also revamp a number of aging character models. Blizzard is also making it so new and returning players can immediately boost one character to the current level cap (90), so they can immediately jump into the new content.
GW2 doesn't really do the whole "grind" thing - at least not with anything you actually have to do to advance.
Hell, just hop in WvW and murder people. You can level up that way.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Experienced player here (since BC). It's WoW. Do you even really need to ask? The level grind is just one of many. Then you've got the grind to get LFR-ready equipment (right now that's not too bad, you just run around grabbing chests on the new 5.4 area and get free 496 gear). Then you grind LFR until your gear is good enough that people will let you in their flex raids, and then grind flex until etc. Also, there's a legendary questline that you need to grind. There was reputation grinding, and there still is a little, but that's mostly gone. Oh, and there are side grinds if you want to do stuff like max tradeskills or pet battles or whatever, same as always.
1. 5-man content is the bane of all MMOs. It is the singular type of content that forces people to do things in a way that they don't want to do, which is any or all of the following: (a) group with strangers, (b) rely on less competent players for individual progress, (c) waste time waiting for a viable group to form. 5-man content is the reason why many players disregard MMOs completely as a viable genre, whether they realize that as the cause or not.
3. There should never be a way to build your character "wrong". If that's possible, then what it means is that your talent trees are full of cruft, or simply unbalanced in a way that there is only a handful of viable builds when the choices are supposed to be limited only by the available selections. Oversimplification would happen if they simply removed all the minor choices and left you with (for example) three buttons, one for each viable build. That's effectively how it used to work, you had to press 31 buttons in order to generate the 1 build in that tree that everyone else was using. That's just bad design that can only be loved by min-maxers. Same goes for spell downranking, which was one step short of being an exploit. There should be no reason to use an inferior version of a spell. Doing so just means that you screwed up the design somewhere, and again only a min-maxer would look at this and think that using lower-version spells to spam throwaway conditions on opponents was a wonderful way to optimize a build.
You're not up to date on this at all then.
Blizzard acknowledged that their idea of grinding dailies in MoP was a mistake. They removed it. Way too late... but they did remove it.
I agree with you that the lack of 5 man content is a bit disappointing.
As for a one time copy-pasting of talent trees from the EJ website into the game being a meaningful measure of skill is absurd. There are less skills, sure, but you can actually CHOOSE which skill you want since they are all similarly powerful in each tier. Which you choose is a preference which you are not penalized for - and for heroics, it's often a good idea to swap them for various bosses as the optimal skills for each encounter vary.
As for this simpler nonsense - it really has to stop. The game used to be fairly easy. The trick was to find 40 players who did not stand in fire, understood their rotation, and occasionally did something like dispell or stack. That easy mode has long been gone. Current tier bosses are basically undefeatable if everyone in the raid doesn't know in advance know all the mechanics - the transitions, the various debuffs, the kill priority orders, and everything else involved in every phase of the fight. The days of patchwerk are long gone and a single mistake from any player in the raid will often wipe the raid.
The mechanics are so unforgiving that LFR is harder than normal these days because people like you know nothing of the fights and are forced to be carried by the people who do.
The heroic modes are so bloody hard that there are only 64 of some 25,000 guilds (i.e. about 1,100 people of the 7+ million subscribers or 0.015%) beating current content. Even the world first type guilds with all their gear and amazing players can and do wipe on current heroic content (e.g. Dark Animus). As you are someone who has not raided in the last 2 xpacs (for LFR is NOT raiding), I would be obliged if you quit spreading this unfounded BS about things being simpler.