Originally Posted by
probert
In Vanilla, I had 1 character and barely dabbled with alts -- there was so much to do, the leveling process was long (having a l60 was an accomplishment in itself), and dungeon runs were substantial investments in time...BRD took 4-6 visits to complete entirely, you'd run strat and scholo and dire maul numerous times to buidl your tier 0.5 sets... Molten Core runs happened nightly, and were puggable quite often.TBC raised the bar, more stuff to do, more valid specs for end game (e.g. more than 1 tank class), heroics 5 mans and attunements. I never cleared SSC or TK (let alone BT or Sunwell), but raiding was always fun and there was so many bosses and content to see. By the end of TBC I had 2 characters I played, and that was more than enough.Wrath started out strong -- heroics, 3 starting raids with gradually increasing difficutly, lots of factions to level. Then Ulduar! Amazing instance. Too short as the end-game as I recall (only 5 months) and it hit just before summer which also was disappointing from a retention perspective. Some point after Ulduar things started to slide... ToC was free loot, and the badge incrementalism soon made heroic 5 mans irrelevant in terms of difficulty; the gear was so much better than Ulduar so no one ran Ulduar anymore. ICC was 'ok' although fairly repetitive and lasted way too long (1 year). Content became so easy that I ended the expansion with 6 x 85s, all tier 9+ geared. I chased achievements for the last 6 months and ended somewhere around 9000. Cataclysm repeated all the mistakes of Wrath, and made them worse. The Valor cap/justice cap method reduced the reason to logon; each raid tier progressed the badge gear further which exaccerbated the gear incrementalism of Wrath. What's worse, they tried to tier the dungeons -- with recycled content! -- so that people only ran the same 2 troll dungeons over and over... ugh. Its almost as if Blizzard *wanted* their audience to burn out. Lore wise, Cataclysm is just flat... not a fan of the refreshed 1-60 content from what i've seen (especially hrode side), and 80-85 is a 20 hour experience tops. Homogenizing 10 and 25 man raid loot means 25 mans rarely happen now. The Firelands dailies are the worse of all the dailies i've seen so far -- worse than Orgrila, worse than Netherwing, worse than Quel Danas or even ToC. Class mechanics are more proc based, more gimicks (e.g. holy power) added with no benefit, tanks are homogenized and they've arleady backed away from the threat mechanic they tried to bring back.In general, WoW is still WoW... its just less interesting, easier and less challenging, and almost entirely raid focused. If you raid, then the end game is still probably enough to keep you playing. PvP, questing/lore, pve wise? Its got about 30-60 days worth of content tops.