As it stands on US Living Flame Alliance, the gold per hour earned doing incursion loops (kills, bosses, etc) far exceeds the gold per hour earned doing anything else at level 50 unless you have a class that can do aoe farms (although I’m not sure if this is even true) or want to flip/play the AH.
It is not just marginally better, it is several, if not an order of magnitude, better than other types of farming. It feels really bad farming for professions, drops, etc when there is this much disparity compared to farming incursions and just buying the mats on the AH.
I’m finding this phase beginning to feel extremely empty, in some part due to a weekly raid instead of every 3 days, but I think in larger part due to incursions essentially cannibalizing other content in the game. I see this sentiment reflected in my guild and what feels like my server at large. Gold farming in this fashion will always be an issue in an mmo, but the server economy should reflect this to some degree. I don’t know if this is in part due to a small selection of items on the AH being a majority of transactions or some other phenomenon induced by the game being in a phase at this specific leveling band, but it does not seem like the prices of mats is reflecting how much more gold people have (which exacerbates the gold per hour disparity).
Incursions are not fun enough or engaging enough to be the sole content for this phase, but by being so much more efficient than other content, it essentially is. This phase probably would (and should?) feel more spread out / empty if incursions were never introduced. I think certain gameplay elements that existed in Phase 1 and 2 like honor / pvp faction rep / stv not really carrying through to this phase is probably another compounding factor. A lot of the end game content we are starting to have access to just takes a long time to make progress on (end game faction rep, 300 profession levels, etc).
I think repeating the same 18 quests from 40-48, and then a new set of 18 quests from 48-50+ is widely different than the spirit of this seasonal server, and classic in general, especially when compared to the last two phases. So, maybe, incursions being the majority content in this phase just isn’t resonating with me in particular because of my opinion on the content in general. Maybe others feel the complete opposite, however, I don’t see them in or out of game. Regardless, the premiere content of the previous phases was not so pervasive in its effect on the rest of the game. The faction rep gained from ashenvale was changed when it was evident it was going to heavily cannibalize WSG. While STV did negatively affect AB rep & honor, which I think was another oversight, it was at least a near direct replacement of content type (wpvp for bg). This is not the case for this phase as the incursion farming results in gold, thereby effecting nearly every aspect of the game.
I don’t have a good solution. Maybe its an issue of horde going to feralas and alliance going to hinterlands, so the dynamic elements found in wpvp interactions is way less than in the previous phases. Maybe making the Nightmare incursions be less repetitive (by having more varied quests and somehow randomly assigning a subset of the quests that would be different for each “loop”) would be a good approach. Or simply reducing the gold rewards by like 50% (or more?) might be sufficient in reducing the negative feeling of being inefficient by doing anything else.
I want to have fun playing wow again, but I don’t think I will while the game is in its current state.
