Braving Looking For Raid

I was feeling very ambivalent about whether I should even bother to give the MoP raid finder a try or not. On the one hand there was a certain appeal to the idea of "seeing the content" in some fashion, plus we had actually acquired a couple of quests that straight-up told us to go and do certain raids (such as the legendary quest line). In terms of gear, LFR also seemed to offer a smoother progression curve than continuing to grind things on the Timeless Isle in hopes of getting a suitable loot drop. On the other hand I remembered that the few times I did the Dragon Soul LFR back in Cata felt very disjointed and unsatisfying, and from everything I'd heard, the types of people you meet in the raid finder could be very unpleasant these days (to put it mildly).

In the end it was probably this post by the Ancient Gaming Noob that tipped the scales in favour in the end, as he describes his experience as going into LFR more or less completely blind and having no problems whatsoever, presumably because by this point in the expansion, a critical mass of players could do the fights in their sleep and a couple of clueless newbies don't really make a difference either way.

So my pet tank and I decided to queue up for Mogu'shan Vaults on Saturday afternoon, the first option on the LFR drop-down list, me as healer and him as dps for a change. (I had urged him to not queue as tank at least during our first time, as I was worried about that role making him a target for abuse if things went wrong, especially since neither of us knew anything about the fights.) We had to wait about twenty minutes, as there seemed to be a dps shortage - of all things! This pattern continued throughout most of the afternoon: always enough tanks and healers, never enough dps. Still, we ended up completing both halves of Mogu'shan Vaults in the end, as well as the entirety of Heart of Fear. It was a very smooth experience with no wipes, but with the queue times for each wing the whole thing still ended up feeling quite long.

When we first zoned into Mogu'shan Vaults, I was surprised to see a lot of people actually bothering to say "hi" in chat. While there wasn't a lot of talk throughout the rest of our runs, the atmosphere felt pretty relaxed and laid back. It was obvious that we weren't the only ones new to LFR, but as anticipated there were also more than enough players who knew what they were doing and they didn't seem to mind carrying a bit of extra weight. In the first half of Mogu'shan Vaults for example we had a shaman who got locked out and died during the second boss, and while he received a res afterwards, he didn't accept it, presumably because he was AFK by that point. Nobody said anything or even bothered to initiate a vote kick though; he just stayed there, dead, until the group had killed the last boss and disbanded.

There wasn't much talk of tactics, but what little there was felt good-natured and us noobs were happy to follow anyone who was willing to lead. The only time I saw people getting cross was during Blade Lord Ta'yak, when the whole group had to run across the room dodging tornadoes, and a hunter insisted on having Aspect of the Pack on, causing everyone to be permanently dazed and making it nearly impossible to move as we were supposed to. Still, I've seen insults a lot worse than "huntard" in my time.

I suppose it was easy to be agreeable since we never wiped. Personally I just died twice, once on the trash to Gara'jal the Spiritbinder, where I got caught by surprise by the first set of bombs, and a second time on the aforementioned Blade Lord, when he cast Unseen Strike on me and I instinctively ran away from the group when I actually should have stacked up to survive.

Running these two raids in LFR also provided both me and Pet Tank with the biggest loot rush since our first day on the Timeless Isle. Based on the many rants I'd seen from people about how they keep getting nothing but bags of gold, I thought that the item drop rate would be atrocious, but in reality we got an item pretty much from every other boss, sometimes two if we used a bonus roll. They weren't always useful (I got three near-identical cloaks for example), but there was enough good stuff in there that it definitely felt worthwhile.

All in all, I was ready for things to go horribly wrong, but not only did that not happen, I actually had fun. No, the healing itself wasn't very engaging (mostly just a lot of spamming AoE heals), but it was interesting to go in blind and to learn new boss mechanics on the fly. Everyone acted civil. And the raids themselves were... okay I guess? Heart of Fear seemed like a bit of an unpleasant place with the impaled yet still squirming bug people at the entrance and all the annoyingly squeaky-voiced bosses, but other than that it was alright.

I remember that one of the things I hated about doing Dragon Soul in LFR was how it kept putting me into runs in progress and due to the nature of the instance the whole thing just felt terrible disjointed, what with going from Wyrmrest through random portals to parachuting from an airship to crashing into the Maelstrom. I suppose we got lucky this time around in that the system put us into fresh runs every time, but I think that even if we had missed a boss or two, it wouldn't have felt as bad as it did back in Dragon Soul because both Mogu'shan Vaults and Heart of Fear are a lot more self-contained.

We'll see whether we'll manage to hang in there for long enough to get geared up for Siege of Orgrimmar.

Scratching My Head About Scenarios

Scenarios are another one of those features that have been new in Mists of Pandaria and thus new to me. I haven't done all of them yet, but I think I've seen enough of them (plus a couple of heroic ones actually) to be able to form an opinion. Generally speaking, most of them seem to be pretty fun the first time around - for the sheer novelty value if nothing else - and then become dull as dishwater once you start repeating them. I've been trying to put my finger on why that is.

I think one of the major issues I have with them is that they just feel a bit... clunky. In terms of gameplay, scenarios seem to fall halfway between a regular quest and a dungeon, but it seems to me that the aspects they chose to incorporate from both sides don't really go well together. Like many quests, scenarios seem to like telling a story, but unless you just happened to find the intro quest to that specific scenario out in the world, you'll be dumped smack in the middle of things with no explanation of where you are, what's going on, or why you're doing what you're doing. In a dungeon, not knowing the background usually isn't as much of an issue, since they all share the overall "theme" of clearing an area of bad guys and defeating a big bad or two, plus the dungeon quests tend to at least give you a brief summary of the most key points. In a scenario you got that little box to track progress and that's it.

To add to the confusion, many scenarios seem to like to make things "interesting" by requiring lots of special actions from you and your character, such as collecting supplies, planting explosives, firing cannons, swinging from ropes etc. They are always marked quite clearly and big red text in the middle of the screen usually tells you what to do, but still... let's just say that expecting people to figure out new game mechanics while being thrown into a typical "rush rush" style WoW pug was not the smartest idea Blizzard's ever had.

On top of that, scenarios seem to be extremely unrewarding, which makes repeating them feel like a waste of time. If you queue for a random, you do get a small reward for that, but if you do a specific scenario you get absolutely nothing for it, nada (unless you count the satisfaction of actually getting the one you had a quest for). The bosses drop nothing, and you won't even get a couple of silver off the trash. I don't know why that is; it's a small thing but it really leaves me feeling disappointed after every scenario completion.

The sad thing is, for all these flaws I could see scenarios make for an interesting addition to the levelling game, just to do something slightly different from questing or running dungeons all the time. Just getting XP for each one would already make doing them a lot more worthwhile. But no, Blizzard restricted all of them to max level, where players will have a dozen other things to do that are more fun, more rewarding or both at the same time. It just strikes me as a lot of wasted potential.

Enjoying Archaeology Changes

Since the last post was a bit of a rant, I thought I'd follow it up with writing about something that I've quite liked in MoP: the changes they've made to archaeology. I really like them.

That's the short version.

The long version is this: I've always liked archaeology. When I made a post about my five favourite Cataclysm additions, archaeology was one of them. (Though looking back, the profession dailies in the capital cities really should have been on that list as well as I absolutely looove them, but eh, I digress.) In one of my posts about levelling this newest set of characters I mentioned that I initially tried to keep up with archaeology as we levelled, but quickly found it to be too much of a hassle as it kept sending me away from where we actually wanted to quest.

I eventually picked it up again when I got swift flight, and I've also been dabbling around on a lowbie alt that I'm trying to level mostly through archaeology. (In short, it's slow and never getting any gear is sad, but the XP from dig sites is great once you actually get to one.)

It's quite amazing how quickly you advance the profession now compared to how it used to be. I'll always remember the way it was at Cataclysm launch, with each dig site only consisting of three digs, and each one only giving you three or four archaeology fragments. I know they increased the number of fragments relatively early on, but it's still nothing compared to now, where each site consists of six digs, with each of them routinely wielding seven to nine fragments. In practice that means that nearly every dig site allows you to create another artefact now.

Even bigger however is the fact that digging never stops giving skill-ups. Remember when that used to stop at 75 skill, and your only way to progress any further was through solving artefacts? Yeah, getting six guaranteed skill-ups per dig site makes a huuuge difference.

To be honest, I never understood the logic behind digging going grey so quickly. I considered it just as much a part of the process as the solving itself. It's as if mining suddenly stopped giving skill-ups completely at one point and your only way of progressing any further was through smelting. I would've understood it if they had done something similar to the way mining works, so that you needed to dig in an area appropriate for your skill level to get skill-ups or something, but everything going grey at 75 just never made sense to me. Blizzard changing that made me really happy.

So with every act of digging giving a skill-up and artefact fragments rolling in at about six times the speed they used to, those skill levels just fly by. I remember circling around a group of conveniently re-spawning dig sites in the Eastern Kingdoms, thinking that I'd just do "a couple more" before stopping for the day, just to find that I was nearly ready for Northrend before I'd even started digging in Outland. Considering that I remember longing for Outland, because skilling up was so slow and I was desperate for a change of pace, that was quite surprising.

I was ready to dig in Pandaria in no time, and that's where I discovered some more pleasant surprises. One of the few remaining annoyances with old world archaeology is the size of some dig sites. Some of them are so huge that - even with fast flying - it feels like a drag to be sent back and forth between their opposing ends. Compared to that, all the dig sites in Pandaria are positively tiny. You literally just have to take a couple of steps to the left or the right between digs, at the most. This makes them very quick to complete. Every now and then a Sha remnant will pop out of the ground too, attack you and drop some extra fragments to spice things up.

In the Seat of Knowledge, there are also some NPCs that give you a daily archaeology quest to do, usually asking you to solve a single artefact, sometimes to just hand them some fragments. And then comes the real kicker: common Pandaria artefacts can be recycled instead of vendored. Brann Bronzebeard is about again, and he'll trade you a boxed up Pandaria artefact for a crate of fragments from any other type. No more flying up and down Kalimdor in the hopes of eventually getting a tol'vir dig site - just keep working on those Pandaland dig sites and trade the results for tol'vir fragments. While the exchange rate means that you effectively trade a whole artefact for one dig's worth of fragments, it's just so much more convenient than doing it the old way that I can't see anyone going back once they've unlocked this feature.

I suppose it's a bit of a shame that they've effectively made one of archaeology's main features - an incentive to go back and see the world - redundant, as you're better off just doing all your archaeology business in Pandaria as soon as you're able. But they've certainly made the profession a lot less of a hassle in pretty much every respect.

Why I Think MoP Character Levelling Is Terrible

For the most part I've been pretty pleasantly surprised by this expansion... but there is one thing I've found to be absolutely atrocious, and that's the way characters level up and acquire new abilities in MoP.

Initially I was going to title this post "why I think the MoP talents are terrible", but to be honest the talents themselves aren't the issue. Only getting a talent point every fifteen levels is supremely boring, mind you, and even when you get one there is no guarantee that the associated talent tier won't be boring or pointless as well. "Yes, please! Let me choose one of three crowd control abilities which I'll never use (unless I PvP) since this game made crowd control redundant two expansions ago!" But that's not the issue. I can live with boring. (And some of them are useful/interesting.)

No, my problem lies with how, in association with the new talent system, they changed the way you acquire new abilities in general. I can only imagine how obtuse the whole system must be to a genuinely new player, because even as someone who played the game for over five years and just returned after a leave of absence I found it quite confusing and irritating.

For reference, let's look at the way things used to work. There were only two things to consider while levelling up: your class abilities and your talents/specialisation. To learn new class abilities, you would visit a trainer in a city. You would see a list of what you could train since you levelled up and had time to familiarise yourself with each new ability, decide where to place it on your bars etc.

Talent points could be spent anywhere at your leisure, but there was a handy tree so you could always see how your spec would progress over time. So if you put your points into the restoration tree for example, you could easily see how each talent improved your healing in some way, with the lower tiers generally being less important and then leading synergetically into the higher tiers. ("This makes my cast-time heals faster. This gives me a new healing spell. Then this next tier adds an additional effect to the healing spell." etc.)

In Mists of Pandaria, trainers have become redundant. You automatically gain new abilities in the field, complete with a little announcement about what you just learned, and if there is room on your main action bar, a new button will appear there. So far, so good. If there isn't any room, well... tough luck. Have fun looking through the entirety of your alphabetically sorted spellbook to see whether you can find something new. While the spells you haven't learned yet are sorted by level so that it's easy to see what's coming up next, there doesn't seem to be a way to easily see what you just learned after the fact if you missed the little announcement popping up.

And oh, are those announcements easy to miss. After all it's not unusual that you'll level up mid-combat, or even in the middle of a dungeon. So every time that happens, you have to sift through your whole spellbook again to find the one ability that's new. Except sometimes there isn't even anything, since you often don't get anything while levelling up in MoP, so after a while you stop bothering every time.

I remember healing a Cataclysm dungeon while levelling up and thinking: "Man, there is a lot of AoE damage going around here, I wish I had an AoE heal to deal with it. When do I get Wild Growth anyway?" As it turns out, I already had it, had had it for quite a few levels in fact. But as per the above, I had completely missed it. The only reason I found it at all was that I knew of its existence in advance and was expecting to get it. It was also only the other week, after about three weeks of being max-level, that I looked into my spellbook to find an ability called Genesis. When did I get that? What is it? Who knows.

Which brings me to the issue of specialisations in general. Decoupled from the talent tree interface, they've been left in this awkward space where they are different from generic class abilities, but don't get any space to explain themselves beyond the generic flavour text when you first pick your spec. So the tab on my spellbook that says "feral" contains both general druid and feral only abilities mixed together. While the ones limited to my current spec do have little text underneath that says "feral" for example, it's still a lot harder to keep track of what's what when it's all jumbled into one big list. You don't get any sense of progression, of how it all goes together. And the first time you respec, you'll probably be surprised by all the abilities that vanish, because you kinda thought they were part of your class kit, not your spec's.

I feel exhausted and confused again just re-reading this. While I had fun with the levelling content, the process of keeping up with my character's ability growth has been a royal pain in the butt. I really struggled with the fact that I had no agency whatsoever in training or choosing her abilities as she levelled up; they were just dumped on my head at random intervals with no explanation, whether it was welcome at the time or not. Even now, two months after returning to WoW, I feel vaguely uncomfortable and estranged from the character - and that's coming from someone who levelled multiple druids before!

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the glyph system. Do I even need to mention that by the time you get your first glyph slot, you won't even have ninety percent of the abilities that the various glyphs pertain to? I seem to recall leaving mine empty for quite a while simply because I wasn't given any even remotely useful options at the time.

It's just a massive headache.

Speculating About Insta-90s

It's been confirmed that Warlords of Draenor will come with a free boost to level ninety for a single character - in fact, you'll get it even before the expansion actually comes out, as long as you pre-purchase. It's also pretty much a given by now that at some point afterwards, level ninety characters will become available for purchase as an out-of-game service, similar to server transfers and race changes.

Both Liore and Wilhelm have spent some time pondering this week which class they'd like to insta-level this way. I did a bit of thinking about it too, but the end result was pretty much that it's a moot question for me. It's kind of funny actually: before resubscribing in December, the idea of a free boost to ninety with Warlords of Draenor sounded great. I pretty much shared Nils' mindset: "let me skip the silly panda expansion, thanks". Now that I've actually played MoP though, I think that pandas aren't so bad, and I wouldn't mind levelling another character through Pandaria. And I don't inherently prefer endgame play to levelling, so it seems pointless to skip half the fun.

I've seen people suggest that you could use the boost to level up a class that you previously struggled to level up. In my case that would probably be the warlock. For all the alts that I made over the years, I still only have two warlocks: one is my bank alt on my old Horde server; the other was my very first alt ever, created back in late 2006, and he's only made it to level 44 during the last seven years. The thing is though, I don't think I've ever struggled with the class due to anything inherent to levelling it - 'locks just haven't "clicked" with me. I don't see that changing just because I suddenly have more buttons. So that would be another pointless boost.

I think I'll just save it in case some sort of rare and special opportunity arises where boosting a character to ninety would actually make sense for me. Like, I don't know, a sudden desire to raid with a friend on another server where I don't have any characters. I don't think it's likely to happen, but there you go.

What I find a lot more interesting is the question of how making insta-90s available for purchase will affect the game as a whole. I think from Blizzard's point of view it's going to be a big win, at least in the short term. It's going to be another thing that they can charge big bucks for on top of the subscription (can you really see a boost to ninety for an entirely new character being cheaper than transferring an existing one?), with the only downside being the risk that some people will cancel their subscriptions earlier than they otherwise would've done, purely due to this new feature. And I don't think there will be very many of them. I suspect there will be some players that will "binge" by buying multiple 90s and will thereby burn themselves out more quickly than they otherwise would've done if they had been slowed down by manually having to level each character, but I can't see them making up a significant portion of the player base.

The question of how insta-90s will affect the players is going to be a more difficult one to answer. I suspect that as a tool to get lapsed players to return and jump right into the new content it will be pretty successful - though how well those players will be retained after their first month will depend on how Warlords of Draenor actually plays.

There will also be new players for whom it will be a boon that allows them to jump right to a level where they can play with their friends' already max-level characters. Like the binge buyers, I don't think that this group will be all that sizeable however.

To most long-time players, I think it will be just another thing to spend money on that might give them brief joy, but that isn't really a game-changer in the long run. (I'm thinking of all the people I've known who've server-transferred, faction- and race-changed about half a dozen times by now.) Another character at ninety will sound great in theory, but in practice it will be just another toon to run dailies or raids with, and without having invested any time into levelling, I suspect that many players won't actually feel that attached to those new characters. It reminds me of when SoE announced that they were selling high-level characters for Everquest 2 last October. Several bloggers I read immediately jumped on the bandwagon there too, talking about how they always wanted to have a look at higher-level content in Everquest 2, how they had always been deterred by all that levelling and this was just the thing for them... just to abandon the idea after one or two play sessions.

There will be a dark side to the insta-90s too however: unless Blizzard puts some kind of restriction on who can buy them (which I doubt), people who are completely new to the game will buy them to play with the "cool kids" right away... and they will be terrible. I've seen people say that levelling doesn't teach anything to anybody anymore, and that anyone could pick up a new class at ninety and master it within the hour. That may be true for an experienced player, but for the truly new to the game... nope. I vaguely recall running a Drak'tharon Keep pug back in WOTLK with a paladin who seemed to have absolutely no clue what he was doing, what any of his buttons did, anything at all - and eventually he fessed up that he had just bought the character on ebay (or wherever). That's the kind of gamer we'll all see a lot more of once insta-90s become available for purchase. I'm not saying they'll be ubiquitous, but there'll be enough of them for it to be noticeable, and they'll make the worst players you've seen until now look like superstars in comparison. "You bought that character, didn't you" will become the new insult of choice for anyone who doesn't know how to play.

And randomly assembled groups will be worse than ever.

Dailies, Dailies Everywhere

I saw people refer to MoP as "the expansion of dailies" soon after launch, and with several more content patches added since then, it's only become "worse". We've been running (what seems to me like) an absurd amount of dailies ever since we hit ninety, yet it feels like we've barely scratched the surface of all the different rep grinds.

The main one we've focused on so far have been the Tillers. Now, I'll hand it to Blizzard: these guys are fun. Growing your own little farm is fun, and by extension it's fun to work with the Tillers. Many of the tasks they give you are pretty mundane (getting a gift for someone, returning lost chickens, stomping marmots), but with the addition of personal reputation for several NPCs on top of the global faction reputation, you really feel like you're getting to know all these characters and it actually makes you care. Getting to improve and expand your farm as you get more involved with the Tillers community feels like a great reward and you can hardly wait to hit that next reputation level.

Second on our list have been the Anglers dailies, mainly because we like fishing. We ended up finding their quest hub early on as we kept fishing up some of the special fish that you can give to Nat Pagle as a daily and we couldn't wait to unlock the actual daily quests. If you get a good set they are also really quick to do, something like five minutes for three. Of course, then there are also days when you get asked to fish up eels, which can take fifteen minutes on its own, even if it does have the benefit of giving you an excuse to gather up some random fish.

The third hub that we've been trying to visit daily is Lion's Landing, for Operation: Shieldwall. Mostly we were intrigued by the fact that the map showed a flight path there which doesn't actually appear until you get started on the quest chain, so unlocking that was one incentive to have a look at it. The quests themselves aren't particularly inspiring, but they are nicely grouped up and we're keeping at it in hopes of seeing some worthwhile story advancement soon.

The only downside to the Shieldwall dailies that I've seen so far is that they give you a currency that doesn't go into the currency tab for some reason and thus takes up bag space. Oh, and we fell into the trap of spending some of said currency on those animal traps that start quests, and they ended up being horrible. I didn't think Blizzard even made quests with such atrocious drop rates anymore. And these are a daily? I don't know why anyone would bother.

The August Celestial dailies are something we haven't done every day so far, but we have done them occasionally. We have yet to get sent to help out the tiger, but so far our favourite is probably Niuzao's temple, as you basically do one round around the courtyard killing mobs and clicking on things and you're done.

A friend and ex-guildie also recommended that we go to the Isle of Thunder because it was supposed to be fun. Unfortunately unlocking the dailies there requires a whole chain of solo scenarios, which put quite a damper on our duo play. To be honest I don't get the point of solo scenarios, as I didn't see anything in there that would've made it a problem to do it in a group. It just resulted in an off-putting experience, forcing us to play apart instead of together for over an hour. And when we finally unlocked the dailies, they weren't that great either, making us do a lot of running back and forth through densely populated areas. To be honest, that whole island is just a depressing place, what with all the ruins and the perpetually terrible weather. Who'd want to hang out there for any length of time? We haven't been back since that first day.

We haven't even touched the Golden Lotus, the Shado-pan, the Klaxxi or the Order of the Cloud Serpent yet, and there are probably more that I'm forgetting (or haven't encountered yet). It honestly feels a bit overwhelming. The individual daily hubs we've seen so far are mostly very well designed, with just a small handful of quests that are close together and pretty fun to do, but after doing three or four of these hubs I've honestly had enough of them. In fact, I may already be doing too many dailies as it is, as I can kind of see the shadow of burnout looming in the distance. There is only so much daily-running that I can stomach, even if they are good dailies. Unfortunately alternative endgame activities seem to be kind of limited from what I can tell. I can definitely see where some of the criticisms of this expansion came from and I'm glad that I'm not in a position where I actually "need" any of these reputations for anything.

The Timeless Isle Experience

One of the interesting things about returning to WoW after having missed a whole expansion's worth of patches is that once you hit max level, the amount of things to do seems almost overwhelming. We started dabbling in various dailies right away, but the thing that interested me the most was the Timeless Isle, so that's where we've been spending most of our time at ninety so far.

Basically, from what I'd heard about the Timeless Isle, it sounded like WoW's attempt at copying part of Guild Wars 2's fairly successful model to see how well their own playerbase liked it: No Very few quests to give direction, and hidden treasure chests and strong mobs with shared tagging mechanics everywhere. (Disclaimer: I've never played Guild Wars 2, so this assessment is just based on things I read about the game.)

Reception seems to have been kind of mixed from what I can tell. Sure, it's popular as the most recent thing "to do", but from what I've read people seem to either love it (for all the easy loot) or hate it (for its lack of direction and feeling pointlessly grindy).

Either way, it seemed like the best way to improve our gear quickly, and as a team of two the fact that mobs were a bit tougher didn't seem to pose a problem. In reality, we still did some dying, especially early on when we didn't know all the various mobs' abilities yet, but it wasn't too bad.

Let me make a list of things I've personally liked about the Timeless Isle so far and a list of things I haven't:

Like:

- The loot rush. I'm a bit hesitant to call gearing up via the Timeless Isle the path of least resistance, considering that some of the mobs put up a lot of resistance, but still... there is loot all over; it doesn't just drop from mobs. You might click on a random sparkle on the ground and come away with another purple piece. The first day you spend on the Timeless Isle as a fresh ninety, you'll come away from the experience with your character having vastly increased in power and it's intoxicating.

- It's busy. After how dead the game felt for most of our levelling up, it's refreshing to see an area that's genuinely busy at all times of day.

- Grouping is encouraged. I'm not a fan of the idea of shared tagging applying to everything, because that just encourages people to hit as many things as possible while hoping that someone else will put the actual work into killing them, but for special mobs I've been in favour of the mechanic for quite a while. It helps that most mobs are actually tough enough that receiving any kind of help is generally welcome.

- Since I score pretty high as an explorer, I quite enjoy the way you can just run around and find random things to click on. The achievement panel provides some direction in terms of listing things to do, but without giving too much away. While I'm sure there are very detailed guides out there for every aspect of the island, there's no real pressure to use them to "keep up" or anything like that.

- Chests are shared! I've blasted Blizzard in the past for making everything that requires picking things up from the ground extremely group-unfriendly, but as it turns out they do have the technology to not make your group mates hate you! When you loot a chest near a party member on the Timeless Isle, it instantly respawns for the other person so they can loot it as well. Of course that won't help you if the druid gets a plate piece from it while the warrior gets leather, but it's the thought that counts...

- I like that the wildlife on the island is of the types that you need to kill lots of for cooking ingredients anyway; it gives the whole process additional purpose.

Dislike:

- Coming down from the loot rush: The loot you get is random. On the first day, when pretty much everything is an upgrade, that doesn't matter and everything you find will seem amazing anyway. But once you've looted your seventh pair of leather shoulders while still sporting greens in most slots, the randomness quickly gets annoying, and after the rush of initial upgrades the whole process starts to feel grindy and unrewarding instead.

- It's too busy sometimes. Rare spawns die within seconds of appearing, and even with respawn timers that seem pretty short, it can be hard to get a hit in even with shared tagging. Chat is full of addon spam about how person X just killed Y mob, which most people won't really care about.

- A lot of deadly mob abilities feel annoyingly gimmicky. It's all about dodging out of the circle or cone on the ground because that's all the rage in the newfangled action MMOs now, so WoW's got to have it too, whether that makes sense within the rest of the game or not. Whatever happened to those things called interrupts? Oh, they don't work on ninety percent of mob abilities, for no real reason.

- As far as grouping goes, there is working together and "working together". The zergs that form against the stronger rares are more of the latter. Sure, you all share the goal of wanting to kill the mob, but other than that it's every man and woman for themselves, meaning that people will make the mobs jump and twitch carelessly, which leads to whole groups of other players getting one-shot by things like conal abilities. In small doses it's kind of funny, but mostly it just makes me long for being part of a proper co-ordinated group where I don't have to worry about other people being more of a danger than a help.

- After a few days I already find myself getting a bit bored of the island. Coming down from the loot rush (see above) has been disappointing, and after that just killing things over and over for rep and coins seems a bit boring, especially since the island isn't actually very large.