Warlords of Draenor (p2)

I find some measure of familiarity and truth in this comic.

It's nice to see the familiar faces of the guild in WoW, and it's nice to do things with them or even just "talk shop" on-channel. Even within the relatively small guild, people are moving at different paces. I don't really see signs of a raiding group anytime soon. And generally, I'm fine with that.

The "endgame" feels strange to me compared to previous expansions. Oh, there's still "do X to get gear good enough to do Y." But... some things that mattered don't anymore. I think I ran a single normal-mode dungeon, and was geared for heroics pretty quickly. I've run a few heroics (primarily those required by the legendary ring quest), but there's no mechanical incentive to do them again. It used to be a way to earn currency for gear, but now even randoming just gives bonus gold, and I've already outgrown all but a couple possible drops. There's one recurring/randomized daily quest, but no clusters of quests to do for reputation. That's a lot of "do this" the game is lacking this expansion.

On the other hand, gathering followers and sending them on missions can take up a decent amount of time through the day if allowed. And that can be mechanically rewarding - I've got several pieces of post-heroic gear from follower missions alone. And I do find it reasonably entertaining to do so. Though when I send everyone off on missions for several hours, I have at least a moment of sitting there and wondering what else I "should" be doing in the game.

Heroics have proven pretty tough at this point. That's probably a combination of gear level and inexperience. But without any real incentive to keep running them, I wonder if the latter will change much. That said, I have not been overly frustrated or unhappy with any of the runs made with guildmates, even when we failed on Grimrail. I got to try out LFR of the first raid over the weekend. The first two wings had three bosses each and while I didn't always understand everything going on, I felt I was able to contribute and the raid never hit a snag. The final wing, though, has one very complicated, phased boss fight that I saw wipe us two or three times, causing a rotating out of several people, including both tanks, before we were successful. That might be a little too tightly tuned for LFR groups at present, maybe.

Story-wise, I'm still wondering what we're supposed to be doing. By the end of Nagrand, Garrosh is dead. Kairoz has been dead. We beat back the imminent invasion in the intro zone. Khadgar seems tunnel-visioned on taking down Gul'dan. Now we're just fighting the Iron Horde for... reasons? Amusingly enough, this is even their homeworld - even the local draenei we're helping were refugees from another world. Who are the real "bad guys" here?