Monday, November 19, 2007

Do you like the non-raid TBC endgame?

I split this discussion off from my WoW journal. But when I was looking around what to do with my level 70 warrior, given that I don't have the time to dedicate myself for serious raiding any more, I was surprised on how many options there are. In fact the level 70 non-raid endgame from The Burning Crusade appears to offer far more variety and fun than the level 60 non-raid endgame did. There are more level 70 dungeons you can visit, especially if you count heroics as separate option. There are more factions you can gain reputation with, and in many cases gathering reputation has somewhat improved from how it was at level 60; you can already gain a good amount of reputation by doing fun stuff like dungeons or quests, without having to repeatedly kill the same monster over and over. There are more level 70 quests, and now some of them are repeatable on a daily basis. There are even more and better PvP options than before patch 1.13, allowing casual players to get some decent rewards for PvP without playing it 16 hours per day.

On the other hand the eternal problem of World of Warcraft is that "a lot to do" is not the same as "endless content". I basically stopped playing WoW in mid-April when LotRO came out, even if I only cancelled the account in July. So I'm 7 months behind everybody else, and still have a lot to do. But some of the guys in my pen & paper roleplaying group are complaining that they are already exalted with every single faction in Outlands. And of course they visited all the zones and instances far more often than I did and find them less exciting now. On the extreme casual end my wife never reached the endgame at all. She leveled a rogue to 68, then got distracted and is now playing a level 40ish druid, and is basically not using any TBC content at all.

I wonder in how far daily quests will improve the non-raid TBC endgame, and whether that could be a good model for things to come in the level 80 non-raid endgame. Especially the cooking quest, where you don't get the same thing to do every day, or the dungeon and PvP quests that send you to a different place every day, seem promising for this sort of content. I imagine doing the same bomb run every day gets old quite soon. But how does a WotLK endgame with dozens of different daily quests, all changing every day, sound to you? And how do you like the non-raid part of the current TBC endgame?

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