The Best WoW Ever

I've started playing WoW four times and I've quit three times. Each time I quit playing there were lots of little, underlying reasons to quit, along with one big reason. The first time I didn't want to raid with my guild anymore. The second time I didn't have time to be a dad and still play the game the way I wanted. The third time -- well, I thought that Warhammer would save the world.

I was thinking of my second departure lately. This was back in the days of The Burning Crusade. I had accepted that I wasn't going to be much of a raider (casual raiding didn't really exist then like it does now) but I had hoped to gear up at least a little by running 5-man dungeons. But I had so much trouble as DPS finding a group. I would spend two or three hours just sitting in whichever chat, looking for a group for an instance the whole time. Some dungeons were run by everybody once and then seemingly forgotten -- or at least never run when I was available.

Dungeons had some other problems (like being too long, or groups being bad) but the availability was the biggest obstacle.

Anyway, that's completely fixed now. I use the LFG tool (don't even need to bother with chat) and even as an undergeared lock I usually get an invite in five or ten minutes. And then (despite the fact that I'm always at the bottom of the dps chart) we almost always zip through the instance in less than an hour (sometimes less than half an hour) without so much as a single wipe.

The reason is the daily heroic quests Blizzard introduced. You can get the highest level tokens in the game by running daily heroic instances, so all the good, well-geared players want to run them everyday. This provides a steady stream of competent group members.

Add in the fact that Blizzard finally fixed their worst loot issues -- the best item drops for everybody, so no ninjas -- and pugging is actually fun. Who'd have guessed that Blizzard would finally make playing with strangers fun?

I have read a few naysayers, upset that the dungeons are so much easier this time around. If that were true I think it would be a small price to pay, but I'm not sure it's totally true. Instances in classic WoW and TBC would have also been easy if groups were composed of people in raiding gear who had done the instance 30 times already. A guy in my group yesterday got the achievement for 2500 dungeon and raid tokens on the first boss. I got the achievement for 50 tokens :)