Been there, done that.

Now, to be perfectly honest?

If a game mentions ‘PvE Raiding’ as an endgame feature? I simply don’t buy the game.

If it’s F2P I might try it out, but PvE raiding and a nugget are incompatible at endgame. It’s quite simply, something I never want to be involved in again.

Now it looks as if I may not be the only one.

I wonder if companies realise that they can actually market that as a feature (no endgame PvE raiding), rather than a flaw?

I do think that the end of an expansion is the sort of time when people will be evaluating how they want to play in the next one, and whether they do want to make a raiding commitment for the next couple of years.

More power to those who enjoy PvP, quests, or achievements, but they aren’t for me and as such even if I could commit to a regular raid schedule its still not really worth it.

But ask yourself what they haven’t done. Why there aren’t any more world bosses or event type raid events that would be PUG friendly.

WoW is stuck with raiding, I am afraid, but this is also a reason why some people (me) do not see a reason to play WoW ever again if this is the sole form of max level content.

Choice: All dailies now give “Emblems” instead of the multitude of tokens for this and that. So if you do this or that kind of pvp, a nebula exploration or do the feature episode dailies is up to you. There is no reputation grind that requires you to do one more than the other, and emblems are universal.

Randomness: B’Tran and other Nebulas are totally random missions. You never know what you get.

The story arc dailies are not that random – but there is variation. Sometimes you come when a Breen Fleet bombards a mining facility. Sometimes you come after they destroyed it. Sometimes you come before they arrive and get asked for help in another way.

Then those missions usually have extra or bonus objectives you can do or not – like transporting some ore from the Kelvani Belt to the “Outpost 3″ system.
Based on your performance in another mission you get some very good consumable items, the more the better you performed i.e. how many deuterium tanks you saved (its not too hard to save them all, actually…)

Some missions have puzzles, but even if you fail them simply something else happens. Some missions are rather limited in the variation, others are miracles and some even have hidden easter eggs and random special drops.

The more complex dailies are interestingly all space based. Seems the STO team somehow prefers the space part of the game like the majority of the players.

You can do the missions all alone – but they make you want to have more people around. More ships, more loot, more special drops and all that. It is rumored that you have a higher chance with more players in team to spawn the rare Breen Capital Ships that can drop rare loot (blue gear) and got some nasty special abilities. Based on difficulty level they can be tough, some players could not destroy them at all.

The new feature episode concept is a really cool idea, you get a new somewhat spiced up mission every week that is part of a larger story arc. I did not like the Halloween episode for example, but I really enjoyed the latest one, which played a lot like the DS9 episode where Sisko travelled back in time to Deepspace K7 and met Kirk, Klingons and Tribbles.

This said, the game is still very special and has its flaws. I find it somewhat ironic that the crafting system is not nearly as complex or fun as tribble breeding. There seems to be no week without a new tribble you can breed from the combo of various exotic foods and certain tribble subspecies.

The fact is that more people are raiding now than ever have, and that trend will continue as Cataclysm brings more people back and new people in. The accessibility that bore all of you so much is the thing that allows MORE people, not less, to play in the raiding game.

I simply reject the idea that because I’m feeling bored of the content that has been here too long and my time has shifted to my new baby, that somehow WoW has changed to match my personal view of the game. It continues on without me.

Having said that, I don’t particularly wish I could be the former raider that I was, but I don’t lament the fact that I can hop on for the first time in weeks last sunday and kill everyone in icc10 up to Arthas. In a pug no less.

They have removed the requirement that previously existed where raiding required a long term commitment. This doesn’t mean they removed raiding, they just removed one of the biggest obstacles to it. Sorry if that bores you.

Play a different game.