I've been playing..... *coughWoWcoughhackwheeze*


Aaaaaand it's not bad.


Well, it's not bad now that I'm level 80+

Levels 15-80 were mostly forgettable quest-leveling-repetitive bullshit that Blizzard oh-so-obviously just wanted to rush me through (my Monk has a daily quest that gives me 50% exp bonus for an hour! Also I can fly across the ground and have a 1.5min recast insta-kill ability! SO DIFFICULT!). Honestly it wasn't until I recently started hitting the mid-Cataclysm areas and quests that I really started paying attention to the story - that is the game actually made the story decent and not something I had to read to enjoy. I'm really liking the desert area. "LOOKIT ME! I'M A MANATAUR!"

There's not much real difficulty, yet, anyway.

Crafting is a joke. And from what I can tell, Blizzard's attempts at revitalizing their crafting is also pretty much a joke (get cooking from 1-300 in a matter of hours! WHOOPEE!).

Apart from that, I do enjoy being healer. And there's something to be said about being able to kick the snot out of giant tyranosaurs, flying freely over floating rocks in an endless void, and growing supersize to knock a giant octopus in the teeth. Blizzard knows how to fine-tune classes in such a way that is actually moderately enjoyable. And the zany-ness of it is something only their world can get away with.


Going from FFXIV 1.0 to WoW was pretty jarring. I almost gave up on it due to boredom for the first 10 or so levels. I'm hoping that the 2.0 ARR Beta will show that SE doesn't aim to merely copy WoW and throw in Chocobos. Alpha at least showed that they care about quests enough to make them palatable (my analogy for the majority of WoW's quests is sugar-coated hamster turds).

I look forward to seeing what SE can do with their breadth of expertise in lore, visuals, and difficulty.