WoW Burning Crusade

You shouldn't talk badly about something unless you have a certain knowledge about it, right? Thus, I played World of Warcraft again for a while. In the end, I quit for the same reasons as some time ago – just with 10 levels more than before. Here's the story to it.

The plan was to level up a character for already existing battleground twinks (see previous post) to be able to farm the required ressources and get easy access to gold (daily quests) and ressources (especially dust, essences and shards for enchanting). I leveled up my melee shaman, Wûtz. And I was eager to get to know the new Burning Crusade content.

Well, I liked the design of the new dungeon bosses. After a few times however, you know the fights and strategies – and if at all, you only go there again to get a specific item. I liked the daily quests, but not due to their design but rather because it was a nice place to find alliance players to gank err... fight against. I liked the introduction of a token-based loot-table: you get tokens for killing bosses and may exchange them for ph4t l00t at a vendor. However for my playstyle there were actually only very few items I really needed: a totem, a trinket, and a cloak. For all other equipment slots, better gear could be obtained elsewhere and in a more fun way (which is PvP). The token system is a positive side effect to regular dungeon crawls. Concerning dungeon crawls: there is a heroic mode for every BC instance, where all mobs are lv70 and deal more damage / have more hp and sometimes even one or two other spells. Which sadly leads to the consequence that you need a certain group setup with a lot of crowd control to finish an instance in heroic mode. If you can't CC like me, you'll sometimes have a hard time to find a group...

Each new dungeon is linked to a specific fraction. The concept: continue killing monsters within the fraction's dungeons to get access to cool items and crafting recipes – or even to get acces to the heroic mode instances. In short: I haven't used a single item accessible through the fraction vendors and farming reputation for recipes or head/shoulder enchants very quickly gets annoying. Especially when you'd like to push your crafting skill but HAVE to farm fraction X to gain access to new recipes. After skill-level 350ish or so, you can only skill up by finding random world drop recipes (unlikely) or buy them in the auction house (expensive) or grind reputation (annoying over time). New fraction content: failed.

PvP introduced another battleground, Eye of the Storm, and the Arenas. Eye of the Storm is a mixture of the Warsong Gulch and the Arathi Basin. Basic strategy: capture three of four towers to get a regular point income, then go get the flag. Not a lot of difference to the other battlegrounds: mostly zerg-fests with uncooperative players – unless you brought a few friends with you.

The rather interesting BC addition I was eager to get to know was the Arena system. And that's where the hamster wheel begins again. When you found a team, your initial rating is 1500. If you want to get above that number, all team members need a minimum amount of resilience which can be found on PvP items. If you get into an arena with almost no resilience on, you are cannon fodder and in a clear competitive disadvantage to PvP-equipped players. You wanna get above 1500? Go farm the PvP arena season 1 set and the vindicator items which can be bought for honor points at PvP vendors. That hamsterwheel restarts at a rating of 1750. You wanna get above 1750? Get you ass kicked between 1650 to 1750 for 1-2 months to get your season (max) set, then try again. Oh and don't forget to farm gold in between to be able to afford the blue gems to socket your items with. Oh and don't even try to get above 1750 as a melee shaman in a 2on2 or 3on3 team – you'll spend most of your time within arenas watching you die without being able to do anything at all due to continuous crowd control. New PvP content: failed.

What made me quit playing WoW? Realizing I'd have to get my ass kicked for roughly two months to be competitive in PvP Arena again. And realizing I'd need to either farm 2,000 gold for my epic flight mount by grinding or or by completing quests to get the gold reward. No, thank you.

A new wave of Warhammer Online beta keys for Europe is approaching...