World Of Warcraft

I'm attached to my Warcraft characters and I'd like to get into Cataclysm, but I'm finding that difficult.

One of my main motivations for WoW has always been the vanity pets. But Blizzard seems to be taking a different approach to the small pets now. For example, there are more pets you can buy with cash, but not only does that cost money, it's not as satisfying as working for the pet. I didn't mind countless hours killing mobs, camping rare spawns or doing repetitive dailies, because I liked the reward and it felt like I'd accomplished something. And speaking of accomplishments, they've steadfastly refused to add a 100 pet acheivement. Why not? People have been screaming and begging for one, why not just add a title or something and make people happy? Also, I don't like the new guild rewards system, and some of the rewards are pets. To get anything I'd have to leave my own little guild I run for friends, and join a mega guild. It feels like Blizzard is trying to force the customers to play a certain way, rather than work towards accommodating casual players more. It's like they're trying to get rid of us! I haven't tried archeology yet, but from what I've heard it doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

I play a lot of toons, and learning new spells and rotations for all of the classes is daunting. Of course this is true of any big change with the classes. Blizzyboo suggested the new Stormwind cooking and fishing dailies, as a way to get my lower toons leveling without having to learn all their spells all at once. It's nice they have low level dailies now, and I've done that some, but it's not making me excited to log into WoW. It's boring, and there's so much running around for my lower levels without flying mounts, it bothers my arthritis and such if I try to do the quests with several characters on the same day. It's something I don't mind so much when I'm working for a vanity pet, but not for this (and if Stormwind is bad I'm guessing Orgrimmar is worse!) And what I've seen of the new questing areas doesn't motivate me. The quests are the same ol' same ol' kill some of them, collect some of that. And now they have phased areas and mini movies, both things I don't like.

Plus there are a few random things, not necessarily that I'd criticize Blizzard, but still annoying in terms of my personal experience with the game. My only interest in a new character for Cata--I was really only interested in making a worgen shaman, but it turns out worgen can't be shaman (goblins got that class, I guess they're more earthy, LOL). And my red hyena hunter pet turned into a mastif dog! I guess there is one low level red hyena I can get to replace him, but only one, it's a rare spawn. And I need a name for a mastif, LOL (the name of my hyena just isn't fitting for him!)

The news stories say Cataclysm has been the most successful expansion in terms of sales, but it seemed like the servers were never as crowded as they were when Lich King launched (I'm going by what Thomas has said, since I wasn't trying to play right then). So I wonder if people weren't that interested once they had a look?

I eventually got into Cataclysm and found things I like about it. WoW really has more content than ever for casual players. More achievements, more vanity pets, more mounts, they've expanded and changed the Darkmoon faire, they seem to be adding more to holidays each time they come around. Archeology is a new secondary profession that can get you some cute stuff. You get xp from archeology, herbalism and mining now, one reason leveling goes faster. There's a dungeon finder that can put you into a random dungeon group, so you can run a dungeon any time without having to gather the people yourself (and they use people from multiple servers so you get a group fairly quickly). I don't play dungeons a lot, but I am somewhat comfortable running them with a couple of my characters at this point. Of course the random dungeon groups can be chaos, but if you come into it with a sense of humor, it's cool. In a recent patch they even added a raid finder (not that I'd try it myself, just sayin').