I'm not too sure if it's accurate to say that WoW is videogame crack, or maybe the analogy would be better made with junk food, it's cheap, filling, tastes okay, but after a while you get bored of it. I'm not saying that WoW is empty calories - and even if it were, I'm not saying that's a bad thing - and since I've spent 60 days playing it three hours+ per day I can't say that it's devoid of interest, but WoW is a treadmill that I feel broke down for me in the recent expansions. It's also a bit too dense in some ways - maybe ways that only affect me - but here, let me tell you the story of my characters.
First off is Balinberg, the dwarf shaman. When I re-installed WoW after I bought the expansion, the game asked me if I wanted to jump to level 90 with a new character. i declined. It might be just me, but if I haven't been playing a game for a long while, coming back to an already complex character would be too much, also you can pay 60$ to get a brand new level 90 guy! How awesome! You can pay not to play the actual game! I created this shaman guy and went to work. It was quite easy at first and I was pleasantly surprised to be able to do quests without having to wait in line to kill a boss. But then when I tried to make other characters I wasn't as lucky. There was a boss in the orc questline that literally had a line of people waiting to kill it. They should instance everything.
When I got to level 10, I had to select my specialization. I didn't want to play a mage nor a healer, so I took enhancement. I then noticed that some of my stats turned grey. Like intelligence and strength. What's the point with stats that aren't used at all for a class? The only other game I remember doing the same thing is Maple Story, and they more or less fixed it in recent years. I was a bit disappointed by my choice since I had only a very limited number of moves and they had long-ish cooldowns (~8 seconds) so I mashed 1234, then waited to mash it again. It got a bit better - and at level 98 of all things, it got finally okay-ish. The quests are still what you expect from an MMO, kill things, go somewhere, rinse, repeat.
At level 15 I had my first talent to choose. I miss the old skill trees with points to place each level. This new talent at each 15 levels thing isn't fun. The worst thing is that there are also a bunch of levels where you don't get any cool skills for a long time. What's the carrot to make me progress through the game if there's nothing good in sight? I tried to pick the most passive skills and abilities as possible because after a while my toolbars became full of junk. Totems, buffs that last 30 seconds with a 5 minutes cooldown. I'm not a big fan of having all of these things I should be mashing 'before' combats. Taking the time to lay down a shield totem, a healing totem and a fire totem is the same time it takes me to almost kill anything. That's probably because of the global cooldowns - using any skill, with or without a cooldown, triggers a small one on most of your abilities. If I could have picked all passive abilities to complement my playstyle, I would have done so.
You also get a neat 'core abilities' screen that tells you what you 'should' use to play your character 'properly'. It's a bit silly when one of the abilities suggested is passive and when they basically just tell you to use your only abilities that are useful for anything. The game suggested I use maelstorm weapon (free, instant spell cast whenever you get 5 charges) to cast lightning bolts, but I just used it to heal myself, making my downtime between battles very short. The content is all over the place, crafting and gathering at the same time doesn't work - you'll need to gather way more than you can craft, and that meant hefty grinding - and most of all, it's tough to say what the designers intend you to do. You get to a new map that is level 80 to 81, let's say and you have so many quests there that you get well into level 82 and you're not done. Should you leave when you get the level? Should you do all the quests? What's worth it?
At level 90 you get to the actual WoD expansion pack. It took me about a month of playtime to get there. I liked the beginning a whole lot since there was actual story with characters they made you more or less care about and you did things that mattered in a single-player story kind of way. When you're done with that, they drop you at your garrison, the 'big thing' in WoD. It's basically a small town that you control where you can choose what kind of buildings go and what they do. It's a neat thing in concept although everything in WoD is based on timers. Missions you can send followers in take X number of hours. You can craft things only each day, your buildings produce things each X hours, even if you had all the gold in the world to buy all the materials you'd ever need, it would still take you about 20 days to max your crafting skills. The nightmare increases if you have multiple level 90 characters as your garrison is per-character. So you have to do a bunch of stuff on each character then switch, like a facebook game.
The mission and follower system is at least interesting - but it's a bit like a facebook game - you recruit followers from questing around the world, they have abilities and traits that you use to complete missions. Missions require certain abilities and levels, they take time, have a percentage chance of success and they have rewards, being garrison resources - used to buy things or to upgrade your buildings - or gold, experience and items. It's fun, but I wish you could just access your stuff from everywhere in the world. Adventuring in the new maps is fine but suffers from the same content problem as the rest of the higher level content. To make it worse, there are bonus objectives you can complete in some places of the world - kill X things, take Y things - to get even more gold and experience, making you level through that content even faster. There are rare named enemies on the map and they all give a specific piece of gear and some resources. The game treats them as dangerous party-requiring challenges, but I've figured that just using all of my cooldown skills is enough. Easier yet, you get garrison abilities - calling soldiers, shooting cannonballs, riding a shredder - that trivialize these fights. The gear you get from quests and enemies can randomly get upgraded too.
After I got to level 100, the game told me I wasn't ready to run dungeons yet because my item level was too low. I didn't have any incentive to continue playing past level 100. I have all of my skills, I don't like playing with people - or against - so what is there left for me to do. Luckily, my subscription lapsed and I didn't renew it. There seems to be a ton of endgame stuff you can do, doing daily quests to get some better currency, doing dungeons until you can do more dungeons - and then heroic dungeons and challenge dungeons - and upgrading your garrison, followers and gear. Maybe someday I'll get back at it, but right now I'm quite burned out. Oh, and I made PoikHealadin the holy paladin, to heal people in dungeons, that was a grueling experience and it just reinforced how much random people on the internet can be terrible, but to be fair that wasn't WoW's fault at all.
WoW hasn't changed much. It's still comfort food, it's still a game you can play for hours without feeling too bored, but now I'm glad to move on to some other games, at least for a while.
