I have been playing WoW “casually” for a few months now and by casually i mean 1 hour per working days and 6-8 hours in the weekends. For an MMO that kind of time investment should never be enough to accomplish anything, but this is not the story with WoW. For some reason Warlords of Draenor reminded me more of a facebook game where daily participation rewards you and not the actual time invested. Just by doing a 10min daily chore you could net hundreds of thousand of Gold per month, enough to buy anything you want in the game by virtually doing nothing to earn it. While this is a dream come true for casuals, if you actually decide to invest real time into the game there’s, well, nothing to do besides raiding and that has a weekly lockout.

So my point is, if i play less than 20 hours per week an MMO and find that after a few months i got nothing left to do then that’s just bad design. I can’t even begin to imagine what it is like for people playing 60-80 hours per week. So whats left to do besides raiding? alt-ing of course, but even that is kinda pointless. The way the game is heading it has become an uber chore to handle alts, while financially rewarding it’s just not fun clicking through 100 menus everyday to generate gold.

Now Patch 6.2 was the last chance Blizzard had to rectify the WoD fiasco, unfortunately it made the problem even worse. From pointless daily Apexis Grinds to more facebook style mini games full with tediousness and unfun rewards. It just seems pointless to play at the moment. The only worthwhile content is the new Hellfire Citadel raid, everything else is just meh at best.

It is funny that the 2 best features of this patch are recycled old content (Timewalking Dungeons) and an UI improvement (Adventurer Guide).

Timewalking dungeons let you participate via the Dungeon Finder in old dungeons that automatically scale your gear to the appropriate level and offer decent loot for newcomers. Unfortunately this can only happen during Weekend bonus events and the obtainable loot is nothing fantastic, moreover the difficulty is abit off, from very easy you can get one-shotted out of the blue. With some tweaking this can become a thing for future WoW Expansions.

The Adventurer Guide is what it sounds like, a guide telling you what content is available for your level/gear.

For the rest it has a new Apexis Grind Map called Tanaan Jungle, a new Raid which is decent considering the shittiness of everything else and the atrocious Naval Missions which add to the extreme boredom of daily choring. Oh and PvP, forget about it, the new PvP gear is just “broken”.

Lastly let’s not forget the new Legendary Ring Upgrade super grind that makes you want to spill your guts and eat them up again. You need to get some “books” that randomly drop off Hellfire Citadel raid bosses, and you need 33. So at best you need to kill 33 bosses which will take a minimum of 3 weeks. A realistic scenario would be 1 and a half months just for the final ring upgrade. Dont even think about making an alt, unless you are prepared for some very boring Raid grindin’.

All in all 6.2 is not as bad as it sounds, but it is as insignificant as it can get, in the end it doesn’t change much, and what it changes just isnt enough to salvage the situation, not by a longshot.

It seems that WoW is currently in the process of re-inventing itself, the game has nothing to do with the WoW of old but that is not necessarily a bad thing. One can only hope that with feedback gathered Blizzard will give us a better expansion next time.