As far as MMOs go, my attitude has long been one of enjoying the journey above all else. I've never really been able to relate to people who just want to get to "the end"/level cap/whatever and complain that everything along the way is boring and takes too long... until I played Classic Mists of Pandaria I guess.
It's not even that the quests are bad or anything. As I wrote last year while evaluating MoP Remix, aside from some specific plot threads, they were pretty decent overall. However, Remix is kind of the problem. I "just" did all of this content about a year ago, in an environment where everything was significantly sped up, it was easy to travel around with full flying enabled from the start, and killing mobs was a breeze. Re-doing the same quests while ground-bound and taking ten times longer to kill anything doesn't feel nostalgic to me right now, it just feels tedious.
I've been trying to "ease the pain" by picking and choosing my quest hubs so that I could focus on the ones I liked best, but it's still just so. Slow. At level 86 I pushed forward to the Valley of the Four Winds and did the majority of the quests there since I remembered quite liking them (plus there were a lot of animals to skin for my leatherworking), but since then it's been nothing but a drag.
I started running random dungeons on the side but they don't actually give that much XP - which I suppose is a good thing in some ways, as I noticed that people actually kill all the bosses and let others complete their quests, seeing how those things actually contribute significantly to your XP gains. (This is a contrast to retail, where people will skip absolutely everything just to get to the end as soon as possible and get the completion reward.)
In general, those dungeons were a bit of a weird experience initially, since my brain doesn't quite know whether to file them under Classic or retail. The way people tend to pull entire rooms in one go is certainly more retail-like, but then I was actually kind of surprised when I got my first pop-up to roll for loot, since I had expected everything to be personal loot already. I even had the option to roll need on items I couldn't even use, so I was briefly startled that I actually had to pay proper attention to which button to press. That's not meant to be a complaint; it just goes to illustrate that my brain seems to have different "modes" for Classic and retail, and MoP doesn't really fit either one at the moment.
I'm currently about halfway through level 88 and it feels like I still have an eternity to go. I did actually go ahead and do the quest to open the Vale of Eternal Blossoms early, but I soon ran into a "you're not seasoned enough to help us yet, come back later" wall, so I'll save that for another post.
On the plus side, after my initial reservations about MoP gameplay changes, such as the loss of my melee weapon or the new talents, the way hunter plays has actually turned out to be pretty fun, though I'd say the rotation is starting to veer into slightly too many buttons for my liking (Cata seemed close to perfect, while now there are pretty much always one or two that I forget to press regularly). However, the fact that they actually gave hunters full non-combat stealth with Camouflage in this expansion is wild to me and super handy for many quests (though it's also so alien that I sometimes still forget that I have it).
Also, the farm! The farm and professions were not part of Remix, so I've been enjoying growing a few vegetables every day and working on my cooking again. It's just a shame that you can't unlock the full farm plot until max-level, adding yet another item to taunt me from the finish line if only I could get there sooner. I just need to knuckle down and grind out those last one and a half levels over a weekend some time, but WoW has just never felt slower to me.
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