I came back for the nostalgia. No I don’t play classic. I mean back in WoD I came back after 10 years missed when TBC was out for the nostalgia. The part of my childhood that was robbed from me because I couldn’t afford it. And since I’ve been back I’ve defended retail, and I’ve backed it up. I tried classic but didn’t really like it, however I’ve been an avid supporter of retail since I’ve been back. However I just can’t sensibly support the boredom this game brings after you’ve beaten the hardest challenges.
Now that I’m an adult and I could afford it I… I can’t do this anymore. It’s messed up how Blizzard removes content from the game, and what the community has become. How can the community be so complacent with Raiding having four difficulties, and not only that, but one of the modes being comparably easier than a normal dungeon.
I kinda liked the Classic revamp idea, but the problem with classic is that the majority of people who play it aren’t actively doing it to support retail, they are doing it to somehow invoke a message to Blizzard that it was good, when in fact it wasn’t.
Across the many years I’ve spent switching from MMO to MMO, while not playing WoW, I stumbled into only one that I have deemed the best MMO to date, that has been actually much harder than Classic and that is Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO).
I know what you’re thinking: How can a 15 year old game be the best? Well I’ll tell you. The first thing is that the Adventure comes first above everything. With LOTRO you experience endless maps, with epic travel times, Maps even that include places where you can actually get lost even with the Mini Map at your side. Every quest isn’t just an ordinary kill x of y or collect z, it’s all unique as you read each of the quests and what the NPCs want you to do for them.
Each map has an active story in it and you actually feel the struggle and danger as you progress deeper into Middle Earth, and the World is so huge and open I don’t think anyone can travel through all of it in a day. There’s aflavor to questing in that game that I can’t explain about it.
Apart from the adventure the challenge is also up there along with it. There is no way you can get by without having some sort of crafting into your character. You have to work along with your Kinship (guild) to create armor, trinkets, and weapons, and not only that there’s specific sets of armor unique for your class that you can create.
You also go along with the story now, you get to experience all the moments described in the book such as the fall of Numenor, and All the lands surrounding Rohan, Gondor, and even Mordor!
I went back to wow for a time, and when I came back for one day to experience WoW I was so dead inside after realizing that my T3 season 1 BFA Helmet wouldn’t drop from a warfront. The game as a whole feels unrewarding.
LOTRO is a step up once you reach the Mines of Moria. The game becomes increasingly harder and that’s the beauty of the challenge. You build your armor all throughout, you improve your character, and you get rewarded points for doing deeds that you can use to trade for things in the store. Granted the store isn’t a Pay to Win one, most of the items on it are boosts for exp and cosmetics.
I wish I could explain the vastness of LOTRO and save people from this MMO. I’ll do it by describing an example of one of my adventures. In the Lone Lands East of Bree there was a sudden uprising that took place in the fortress of the Eglain. When a fortress fell the free peoples that were fleeing were entrapped by the webs of vicious huge spiders that worked along the Goblins that overtook the fortress. As the adventurer you have to break into the fortress, kill the leader and burn the remains of the victims who fell in the valley while fleeing who got caught in the spiders webs.
I broke into the fortress, but found myself surrounded by a mass of goblins, after fighting them underneath the bridge you could peer into the spiders crawling in the valley, so I took out my bow to attempt to kite one of them to me, noting that these spiders were 2 levels higher than me and elite, I accidentally lost my footing and fell in to the valley. 3 of the spiders came at me and thanks to the armor I made for myself and the weapons my kinship helped create for me I was able to kill them. I proceeded to look for an exit from the valley and burned the bodies of the fallen as I went along.
When I reached the exit point leading into the fortress I had to fight through hoardes of goblins and eventually kill their leader, and ruthlessly fight my way out of the fortress too. And damn did it feel great. I loved it. and I think anyone who tries it will too. The dungeons are even harder than the open world stuff because the dungeons have traps in them and different bosses have unique mechanics that prevent you form just hacking away at them like you do in WoW.
And now is the best time to play because they introduced Legendary servers that give you that true LOTRO experience. Essentially you replay all 5 expansions, except you can do the legacy content like you can in Classic WoW. And after 4 months, a new expansion is released. It’s been fun and I haven’t looked back. If you decide to try the game I hope you have an awesome experience as I have.
Maybe in the future if wow finds a better way to make legacy raids and content work, maybe I’ll come back, I don’t know.
Then go play something else lol. FFXIV has some really good story lines, and if you are a hardcore player the savages are really brutal. You get marks on the floor to tell you whats up but its still pretty difficult to master your class.
