WoW 3: The Search for Grind

Due to WAR having some downtime yesterday, I fired up WoW to check out version 3.0 (Thanks Mythic?). I only have 1 character at level 70, pretty sad huh. He is a Protection Warrior who lives to tank. I also play as a tank in normal Pve and PvP, so it is a painful life.

He is decked out in a mixture of Kara gear and Badge rewards, so not great, but not too shabby. Was mostly raiding when I left WoW due to time constraints. In the end though, the repetition of raids just was not fun.

So my thoughts on version 3.0:

• The UI. The UI is just plain better than WAR and in 3.0 they have made more improvements. WAR has a lot of potential with things like the layout editor, but it has not been realized yet. I really wish they had it in a better state at launch.
• Calendar. WoW finally included a calendar in their UI. It is available to everyone, not just those in guilds. It includes game wide events on it, like the Darkmoon Faire and looks very nice. Again it beats WAR's Guild calander. Even those not in guilds should get one, this should be a standard feature.
• Currency and Pets. Things like Badges, Battlegound Marks, Mounts and vanity pets no longer take up inventory space. They have a nice tab where they are listed. They can also still be used in a hotbar. Looks very nice and should be standard fare now.
• Achievements. The achievement system is very similar to the Xbox 360 system rather than WAR. It is nice they tried to apply any that you would have earned in the past automatically. The sad part is, I got more achievements from a short time PvP'ing in WoW than I have in WAR. I am really disappointed the the RvR side of the Tome of Knowledge.
• Statistics. Again WoW trumps WAR. They included a statistics tab which tracks a a large amount of things. For Example, the highest you ever reached in any stat, amount of consumables used, loot stats, a load of combat stats and much more. Why isn't this in WAR? By the way, I have completed 964 quests in WoW.
• New Skills. The warrior has several interesting new skills on the Protection side, like Shockwave. It seems like they did make an effort to make them better for soloing and in PvP. Whether or not it works remains to be seen.
• Inscription. No experience with.
  
• Exotic Hunter Pets. These may not be new with 3.0, but they are neat. I always thought the fact that a hunter could go train most creatures in the world to use as pets as a great gameplay aspect.
  

So those are all well and good, but how did it play? I picked my new talents and went to the battlemaster. Thanks WAR, as I tried to queue up every battleground... which doesn't work the same ;) How did it go?

I don't know. I was pretty much lost and confused. Everyone seemed to be moving pretty fast and doing tons of damage. I could barely keep up with what was going on. My Prot Warrior was certainly ineffective, even against rogues. That could just be my lack of knowledge. It just seemed huge amounts of damage were being done all over the place. I did not have a very good time.

Conclusion? WoW is looking good, but I will not be going back anytime soon. There is nothing for me there. I can't raid anymore and PvP is pointless, so why play?

Posted in: WoW