Quote Originally Posted by Rufalus View Post
I'm ok with the classes and flow of battle. To me the problem is the whole framework around it. The first expansion was exciting because it had some new concepts and we didn't know at the time that every expansion thereafter would be a copy.

Here's some examples of repetition to an absolute fault. Before you even play an expansion, you know for sure it has (1) six field zones and two big boss fates with tokens, (2) a dungeon every 2 levels with the same corridor design, (3) three trials with two extremes at launch, one gives accessories the other gives weapons, (4) hundreds of sidequests that mostly give nothing, some give HQ crafted leveling gear in-between the levels of dungeon gear.

A lot more examples could be made but you get the point of how they push new content through an old cookie-cutter template to an extreme degree. That decade of déjà vu was a big chunk of my life. I would hope that, some day, they try anything new. Offer up surprises to all players regardless of how long we've been around. Not just narrative surprises but actual game design choices.
The repetitive framework is something that's consistently bugged me because when they're having to shape the stories around that framework it can start to rob it of unpredictability by extension.

IE, literally no one is going to take the fake "raid complete" message at the end of O11 seriously because you know there has to be four fights per tier in the "modern" raid structure introduced in HW.