After starting with the incursions like everyone else I really quickly lost interest. SoD to me was mostly: Experiencing Vanilla again, with a new twist, and especially faster leveling that was not completely braindead and too quick like in Retail, but… just a nice leisurely pace.
Incursions were 100% the “ignore the way, get to max level and so endgame” and in this case, even if the endgame is just a single raid. I’ve not logged in for days, just did a bit of duoing to get to 50 (not me, I’m 43, or 44, I don’t even know) and it’s been kinda miserable.
Maybe I’ll get back to it but I kinda let the sweaty nerds on Reddit get to me this time “You’d have to basically been offline since launch to not be 50 already” – that was on like day 5. Yeah, no. I had played for a few hours but did not minmax doing just incursions in a group of 5 or do 40 runs of Zul’Gurub. I usually don’t really care how easy or hard other people judge the content I am doing, but in this case it was not even fun and I objectively didn’t do it the correct way, because I was neither fast nor was I having fun.
Bit of a letdown though. Yes, high engagement as everyone races to 50, but for the game is done for. Why play out in the open world if the majority of people managed to skip the leveling with a broken system? I’m writing it like this because in every expansion there will be a handful of people who manage to get to max level in the first night, or first 48h – that’s fine. But not 50%.
Yeah, I do have to wonder what Blizz meant by “Discovery” in SoD. What they appeared to mean in Phase 1 certainly doesn’t hold true in Phases 2 and 3. Leveling and exploring has given way to the go-go-go mentality of pushing hard and fast and ignoring the best aspects of Classic Era in favor of the new shinies, which are already mapped out by Wowhead. Where’s the discovery?
Yep, exactly. I mean in my case I skipped P1 and only started in P2, so the Discovery part was still real, but that doesn’t change anything. For P1 players it was more of the same, just with more Runes and some new quests etc. But it was still close enough, just the incursions are so weirdly tailored to minmaxers.