Off-Topic General Discussion - Page 3772

Disclaimer: I quit during Cataclysm so I can't compare anything to Mists.

Questing is a heck of a lot better than Cataclysm. It's nowhere near as linear and there's far less "HEY LOOK, LOOK ISN'T THIS EPIC" and a lot more actual interesting story. There's still a whiff of "let's throw big name lore characters at you so you'll be impressed" but it isn't remotely as juvenile or horribly overt as Cataclysm. You'll also hit the level cap and still have zones left to do even if you don't have a ton of rest, so that's a huge improvement as well.

Garrisons are extremely fun and essentially replace daily quests. Instead of flying to a location and doing a rote task for the 20000th time, you send your followers out to collect gold, resources, items etc. Meanwhile you can do whatever it is you actually want to do (dungeons, pet battles, PvP, whatever). There's some min-maxing involved here (consider Salvage Yard mandatory). The only downside is that without daily quests there isn't much in the way of content if you just want to putz around for a bit rather than do anything involved.

There is one actual daily quest (non-dungeon) but it doesn't take more than half an hour to do and you get sent to a wide variety of areas for it so it stays pretty fresh.

The number one best feature outside of Garrisons is Flex Raiding. You no longer have to have exactly 10 or 25 people to raid, but can do Normal/Heroic with any number in between (Mythic is the new super-hardcore difficulty for the insane). That hunter fall asleep at his keyboard again? No problem just boot him and keep going. 17 people online? Who cares you can all go. It removes one of the biggest stresses of raiding.

The biggest problem with the expansion right now are professions. They've done a few things to dramatically improve them, but at the same time they also goofed up a few things. Profession perks that affect your DPS/Healing/Tanking are gone, and if you want to swap professions you no longer need old world materials/recipes to level. It's great except that most professions are very limited in usefulness. If you don't need to craft yourself gear Blacksmithing/Leatherworking/Tailoring are useless, Jewelcrafting is bleh because right now there's very little socketed gear, and flasks/glyphs are so cheap that Alchemy and Inscription are pretty pointless. Pretty much the only professions worth having are Enchanting for practical purposes, and Engineering for the lulz. Even Mining/Herbalism are pretty useless because you get so many herbs/ores from your Garrison.

So at the moment there are a few bumps, but overall it's a lot of fun.