I’ve got part III of my Windows 8 series pretty much buttoned up, but figured I’d get this in before I get to my final thoughts on the OS.
Today I logged into World of Warcraft after a long while, and had to download all of the updated tools and the pre-patch for the upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion set to drop in just a couple weeks. Having played since WoW original recipe, I’ve spent a sick number of hours in the realms of Azeroth – enough that I’m a little frightened to see the “/played” stat that the game provides for all of its players. Through that time there was one very real statistic that all players would agree to – and that’s the gear grind. It takes countless hours to level up a character to max and at that point go through the motions to get the gear to allow seeing end-game content. Cataclysm made that a little easier in one of its later patches with the Raid Finder feature, but the main idea stays the same:
With all the time it takes to equip those delicious epic items, which may add up to days, at least a couple of them can be replaced after 5-10 quests in the next expansion’s starting zone. And the trend looks like it’s going to hold – straight through level 100 when the time comes.
Welcome to Pandaria, kids.