Be careful what you wish for. It was City of Heroes' "sidekick" feature that killed the game for me. I was happily levelling my lvl 17 blaster, mostly enjoying the content and the ride, when I joined my buddy's main lvl 45 brawler as a sidekick, and saw what the lvl 40 content looked like. I realized that it wasn't really all that different than what I was doing now (only more difficult), and I realized I didn't want to grind the same content for 30 more levels, and quit a couple of weeks thereafter.

Not saying WoW is that lackluster in regards to their levelling content. Just whenever I see a game's endgame like that, I typically lose interest.

Posted by: bowler on October 14, 2006 09:31 PM

Having raided for well over a year now, starting with Molten Core, through BWL, AQ40, and Naxx, I can comment on how blizard have grown as developers.

The first 40 man raid, Molten Core (MC), was fairly boring. It had encounters that required heavy decursing (spamming a key to remove poisons, etc.), the whole dungeon had a lot of trash, and most boss fights were tank n' spank (requiring a few warriors to tank, healers to spam heals, dps to just spam their buttons). Overall, the dungeon isn't fun after the dozen or so times.

BWL and AQ were improvments to this. BWL required more warrior taunting to ensure proper aggro (meaning, the monster/mob keeps hitting the warrior, and not the softer dps classes), and AQ had a few encounters that required players to pay attention to where they were standing, and move around in order to avoid damage.

Naxx, while its difficulty will prevent most from venturing into it before the expansion is out (in January) has by far some of the best encounters in the game. The amount of trash has been reduced to approximately 15-20 minutes per boss (vs. MC's 30-45 minutes), the itemization is very flexible (utilizing a token system, where instead of a specific armor piece dropping that only one class can use, an item drops that is usable for 2-3 classes and can be turned in for a piece of armor). The boss encounters are varied, dynamic and fun. Most are much shorter than previous bosses (~5 minutes vs. 10-15 minutes) but they require much more skill from each individual player.

For example, Heigan is a boss who teleports onto a platform (spewing out a poison cloud around him that deals a lot of damage), and forces the whole raid (all 40 members) to run from safe spot to safe spot as poison fumes shoot through cracks in the floor (in a predictable pattern).

For people (level 60s) that aren't able to gear themselves up for naxx, the new 5 man dungeons in the expansion are following these ideas of varied and dynamic encounters. So for players who haven't been able to spend hours at a time in the 40 man raids, the new 5 man dungeons, and smaller 10 and 25 man raids will hold much better encounters, dungeons, and boss fights than what the game originally started out with.

So hang in there jane! It's my opinion that WoW has improved over the two years that it's been out, so there is a lot of fun, new, different content once you hit the higher levels.

Posted by: darkInertia on November 6, 2006 01:03 PM