Returning to WoW after 12+ months. Possible/worth it?

[Nasukkin]

I had to take a year off of WoW due to massive changes at my job and in my personal life about a year ago. Come February, I will have the time and ability to start playing again.

In the past, since the beginning of 2009 up until early 2016, I was a raider. Was raiding Hard-modes in Ulduar, then Heroics when that came out, then Mythics since the end of MoP when it was renamed. Raiding was the only reason why I played WoW. Would raid between 9 and 20 hours every week (depending on the team).

Now, however, I've been off for a year and I'm wary that a new expansion has come out many months ago. I know next-to-nothing about this current expansion but I've heard things about stuff like Legendary Upgrades and Artifact leveling. How important are these, and what's the grind like? Is it feasible to grind it out over the course of a couple weeks (gold is not an issue, praise be to sofware engineer salaries )? Months? Is it impossible to catch up to a mythic-raiding level at this point? Should I just wait for the next expansion?

Again, personal time won't be an issue. Just trying to figure out how screwed I am for missing out on nearly a year of gameplay.

And on a semi-related note, how is gold inflation? I wasn't rich but I had a few hundred thousand gold when I had to stop playing... Is that chump-change nowadays? (US Realms)

Danke.

[Moozart]

Nope, move along, nothing to see here

[Morgaith]

I would probably wait until the next expansion due to how badly the legendaries, the general RNG and the "balance" of the classes are at the moment.

[Eazy]

Come back when they fix some things in 7.2, otherwise - don't even try.

[Vargur]

You can take your time, play a month and see how you like it.

[TheFirstOnes]

Come back bro. Don't let the guys above tell you down.

Just play the game, see if you like it or not, and win. That's all. You do what you want to do. Don't let anyone else tell you about what's good/bad for ya.

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You can take your time, play a month and see how you like it.

You beat me too it.

[Deleted]

Honestly its not worth it if u are into hardcore raiding or anything competitive pve pretty sure, the grind is huge and at the moment at least i don't think there's any systems announced for forseeable future that will really allow you to be competitive.

If you started now, getting to normal or even heroic raid ilvl gear wouldn't be that hard, but you would have to wait possibly over 32 days to catch up on artifact knowledge levels(with some fast math-thats after you ding max level and after patch 7.1.5 comes which could be mid january).

Also you would need at least 1 or 2 good legendarys for your spec, and with intense gaming people have been able to get one random legendary per month(you will likely get the first as you ding 110 though), but note that with even 4 legendarys many people still don't have an actual good one, some are really trash while some others OP-totally rng if/when u get one good-also they nerf abit OP ones and buff shit ones in patch 7.1.5 but still not much changes grind wise.

All in all i'd say for competitive pve you are about maybe 3 months behind but thing is, you might never be able to close the gap this expansion.

[hulkgor]

Wow at most replies.

Legion is the best WoW has been in a long time. PvE is amazing, Mythic+s are probably the best feature ever implemented in WoW, raid content is interesting (bit underwhelming in difficulty if you're into mythic, but a new raid opens up in 2-3 weeks), and it has a lot to keep you occupied.

Some argue it's grindy, well, it is, but people have complained for YEARS that there was nothing to do outside of raids... now there is... and they whine either way

Also, as a solo player there's a lot to keep you interested with each class order hall campaign, artifact weapons, etc... with awesome stuff coming up on 7.2. Also, we're going to frickin ARGUS (Eredar\Draenei planet) on 7.3, so hop on.

And there are load of catchup mechanisms coming up to ease your entrance, dont fret about it. Expansion has only been out 4 months... you haven't missed much considering the average lifespan of an expansion.

[clevin]

God people are whiny. Legion's fine. Like any expansion it has its issues, but I think it's worth coming back and seeing how you like it. Leveling is decent to good, the 5 mans are mostly fun and well done as are the raids. By time you get bored it's likely 7.2 will be close and by then you'll have enough experience to know if you want to stick around.

[Baconeggcheese]

@Nasukkin Depends on your goals, how much time you intend to put into it, and luck, no different than any other xpac.

Knowledge level is going to gate you from making meaningful gains early on, but as your knowledge level increases it becomes trivial to catch up artifact power. Legendaries are an RNG lottery, but everyone is dealing with that. People who have poured insane hours into the game have been screwed by the system while others who have put in no time at all have hit the jackpot. It just is what it is, if you're a valuable player to your guild it won't matter though, again like any other xpac.

Gathering artifact power is meant to be an expansion long process, we currently have a cap of 54 points (which is a substantial grind that you get through in little bits whenever you have time) and they're already talking about adding more levels in the not so distant future. This basically replaced valor, except you can continue to get more for however much time you put into the game. There's pretty hefty diminishing returns on that though, thanks to knowledge and how quickly the cost scales.

Basically it'll be a bit slow to start, but after a few weeks you can easily be within striking distance of other players depending on how much time and energy you put into playing the game. That is the difference between this xpac and prior xpacs, you can't just spend USD to buy your way through the game. You can still buy carries and gear from what or what have you, but you'll still need to actually play the game to be competitive with others.

[shonist]

Come back bro. Don't let the guys above tell you down.

Just play the game, see if you like it or not, and win. That's all. You do what you want to do. Don't let anyone else tell you about what's good/bad for ya.

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You beat me too it.

Take this ppl advice. the xpac is great and you will have a lot fun !

[Malkiah]

this is basically how the game has broken down for the last two expansions with regards to how raiders have responded and flooded the forums with posts:
WoD: "there's not enough to do! all gear is the same! this is the worst expansion ever! i'm quitting!"
legion: "there's too much to do! all gear too different! this is the worst expansion ever! i'm quitting!"

here are the two prominent aspects of the game that you can't brute force currently:
1. Artifact Power - which is basically just leveling up your weapon. you can't rush the Knowledge clicks that increase your AP gains, but if you're smart about how you utilize the resources available to you it won't be difficult to have your primary weapon at 3 traits and chugging along nicely within a month.

2. legendaries, which are total random drops. depending on the class and spec you play there might (or might not) be a legendary that changes up your rotation a bit, and this may or may not have a moderate impact on your DPS output... but, all the epeen swinging dorps around here are going to act like not having what icy-veins says is your BIS legendary means you are completely worthless and should kill yourself IRL.

if you can manage to play the game and progress your character and not prolapse your vagina having a shit fit over the fact you may not have a max level weapon and 4 of the BiS legendaries you can wear within 8 seconds of hitting 110, then legion is actually decently fun and has an awful lot to do.
worst case, just treat AP and legendaries like that weapon you want that isn't dropping or the trinket that would totally change up your rotation but the damn boss never drops it... you know, like how once upon a time a thing wouldn't drop for months but everyone didn't act like that meant the universe as we knew it was over.

[Temp name]

If your goal is top-end mythic raiding: You're going to have a hard time. It won't be impossible, but it will take a while. Gearing is easy and can be done fairly quickly, especially if you have a guild willing to help. But the grind to get your artifact weapon leveled will be quite annoying (It will be a lot easier in 7.1.5 though, since you can get up to Artifact Knowledge 15 instantly). Not to mention that it'll take a considerable amount of time to get the research to allow you to equip 2 legendaries, which depending on your class is quite huge.

If you're up for that challenge though, go for it.

If your goal is beneath mythic raiding: Just do whatever. There's a bunch of things you can do that are all viable

[Deleted]

And just how much M+ do you think he'll be able to grind if he starts today? He'll get his key boosted 2-3 times a week and that's all.

880 is where the option of getting into M+ grinding starts, it's gonna take a while.

InB4: 880 is ez from WQ & I was carried to M+ at 825 so can you!

[Sylvaeres]

I had to take a year off of WoW due to massive changes at my job and in my personal life about a year ago. Come February, I will have the time and ability to start playing again.

In the past, since the beginning of 2009 up until early 2016, I was a raider. Was raiding Hard-modes in Ulduar, then Heroics when that came out, then Mythics since the end of MoP when it was renamed. Raiding was the only reason why I played WoW. Would raid between 9 and 20 hours every week (depending on the team).

Now, however, I've been off for a year and I'm wary that a new expansion has come out many months ago. I know next-to-nothing about this current expansion but I've heard things about stuff like Legendary Upgrades and Artifact leveling. How important are these, and what's the grind like? Is it feasible to grind it out over the course of a couple weeks (gold is not an issue, praise be to sofware engineer salaries )? Months? Is it impossible to catch up to a mythic-raiding level at this point? Should I just wait for the next expansion?

Again, personal time won't be an issue. Just trying to figure out how screwed I am for missing out on nearly a year of gameplay.

And on a semi-related note, how is gold inflation? I wasn't rich but I had a few hundred thousand gold when I had to stop playing... Is that chump-change nowadays? (US Realms)

Danke.

Your gold is fine, but you'll have to work to maintain it. As far as getting back into the game, now is the time to do so, as you can catch up fairly quickly with some effort

[WhippWhapp]

Come back bro. Don't let the guys above tell you down.

Just play the game, see if you like it or not, and win. That's all. You do what you want to do. Don't let anyone else tell you about what's good/bad for ya.

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You beat me too it.

This guy is right- I srarted in Oct, and levelled my hunter from 0-110, I am "behind", but still having a blast- just cleared heroic EN last night.

[BiggestNoob]

this is basically how the game has broken down for the last two expansions with regards to how raiders have responded and flooded the forums with posts:
WoD: "there's not enough to do! all gear is the same! this is the worst expansion ever! i'm quitting!"
legion: "there's too much to do! all gear too different! this is the worst expansion ever! i'm quitting!"

Except that's not what people have said about Legion at all. Getting BiS rolled ancient items in D3 = running grifts non-stop. That's not "too much to do." You've done all the content at that point, you're just farming a RNG for perfect rolls. If you want to distill that "game" down, just open up your browser console and type `Math.random()` and do so until it returns a result below 0.0000001, then you win.

BiS legendaries aren't "things to do." It's RNG. Getting gear that's actually well itemized because the raid loot tables don't have them but dungeons do and TF gear is better than mythic raid gear is RNG, it's not "things to do." World quests and AP grind aren't things to do, that's just a really shitty iteration of dailies. You could have "things to do" with this system with a weekly cap on AP, wouldn't need an exponential system like AK, and legendaries could be crafted or targeted and itemization could be fixed with TF's ilvl being lowered from M+ and you'd have fixed all those issues without removing any content at all.

People like to be competitive, be it within their own locale or globally, and to be competitive in a world dictated entirely by RNG means absurd amounts of play. Have you seen how much people who win D3 or PoE ladders play?

People complained in WoD because your garrison literally farmed more than you needed (2-3 people with a few alts could feed an entire raiding guild) meaning spending time in the game was unnecessary outside of doing your weekly/daily stuff. There wasn't anything you could do of value in the game. And then 14 months of HFC. Releasing more content and not having the game trivialized by a fucking Facebook game isn't "zomg this game is shit" it's legitimate criticism. People pay $15 a month to play the game, and asking for more than a Facebook game with a yearly cadence on content is completely reasonable.

Legion isn't the answer to that. There's not more content in Legion. It's just all grinds and RNG. By the way, people were already complaining about RNG in WoD and the grind of legendary rings. People didn't want either of those things, and now we have an expansion that:

1. Has little content.
2. Has more RNG than any other expansion ever.
3. Has more grind than any other expansion ever.

You can see clearly Blizzard's issues of understanding what players are telling them with the prices of consumables during the expansion start. They're 3 times more expensive than they were in WoD and you have to farm rank 3 of a herb that you can only get 1 at a time and you needed 7 for a flask. And the RNG on recipes, lol. This isn't a solution to "garrison sucks because gathering is dead". It's intentionally designed to be grind fodder.

Legion is shit. It's a fractal of bad design. They didn't make a single improvement over the last expansion.

[Deleted]

Definetly worth to get back to!

The people who complain about it are just whiny little kids who don't get what they want so they just complain instead of working towards it...
People were crying for no grind..they give grind and people cry that there is too much grind...Just seriously don't listen to the whiny kids that reply here sometimes and just try it out yourself. It has its flaws, EVERY SINGLE GAME on this planet has a flaw, yes every single freaking one has flaws, some major, some minor, wow has minor flaws, but tell me, what does not have a flaw? Show me any other game that has the playerbase of wow in terms of mmorpg and say that i does not have flaws... If you are gonna complain about RNG legendaries, just don't play legion at all, in fact do play games. Games are ment to have some rng to them to make them more interesting and lead to some nice surprise moments, which legion delivers imo. The only problem is catching up with alts atm but 7.1.5 is fixing that nicely.

[Deleted]

you'll be bored in a couple of months, mate.
lots to do, like people here have said, but its all the bloody same.
its just a grindfest.
people are trying to paint a rosy picture of legion, but once you get into it, its just bloody awful.
even the raids are boring & then you have to unlock instances just to get into a rehash of karazan & no, its not a raid.
just another glorified instance.

[Nfinitii]

No one can tell u if u will enjoy it or not. But if u liked it before u had to quit then I don't c any reason y u wouldn't now. The AP grind will probably be ur biggest gate to getting into mythic raiding but it doesn't sound like that will be an issue for u. Give the game try for urself and gl.