Friend and I, after a long break decided to "try" the game again to see how things are. We decided to start over again and experience the content. The lack of quest content is disturbing. All those large maps and essentially little to no quest content in them. What used to take hours to complete an area, now takes minutes. The quests seem to be designed and written by someone with ADD. A few of the quests leave you scratching your head as the quest tracker points to the wrong location, but quest text has no real information to work from (because apparently the quest markers are supposed to take care of it) and so you end up dumbly wandering around till you complete it.
The difficulty of the game is a joke. You can't die solo, it is retarded. Now we did die some in Deadmines, but we started duoing it at 15 and I noticed that the design of the dungeons is essentially "groups" where everyone AoE's things down as CC is pointless, no strategy, no thought, just have the DPS/HPS to win quickly. I watched in dismay doing some quests as elite mobs were mowed over as if they were some wilderness animal which created problems for people to actually use the elite mob for its intended quest goal. This left people running around in circles waiting for it to respawn again so they could capture it only to have some random passerby speed roll it on the way to another quest.
Leveling speed seems to destroy any sense of accomplishment. Each level comes so fast, that there is no joy in the "ding" sound as it is just a common monotonous occurrence in the background.
The development system... I mean... I am in shock. It is like they modeled it after some preschool toys. It looks more like an action/arcade Super Mario Brothers system than anything resembling its former self. You are pigeon holed into focuses, no freedom to experiment and no real depth. Just click door number 1, 2, 3 and you too can be like everyone else!
Combat is even faster than it was when we left (which is saying a lot). Fights end so quickly that it really doesn't matter what your class is and what spells/skills you are using, it is all the same... just smash, boom, loot and off to the next. It is hilarious because any attempt they have made to give mobs various abilities and functions are completely pointless. Mob has heal, but it dies 9/10 times before it can even heal. Nothing matters, nothing has meaning or purpose.
You would think the game would have failed a long time ago due to this, but apparently those feeding the beast can't seem to connect the dots as to why they are miserable. In general chat, you hear people complaining about how they are bored, how they have all of their server slots maxed with capped characters all the while others offering suggestions to alleviate such boredom by starting on a new server to cap out all the slots there.
I am completely surprised as I didn't think this game could streamline much more than it already had when I left. It seriously is just an action game with power ups now.
What is amazing is that I have read some people commenting on this in the WoW forums to which they are attacked in swarms by zombies who appear to attack anything that does not worship at the feet of the game. I honestly don't think the people playing the game today could even survive in vanilla WoW. I think they would be swarming the forums complaining about how the game was too hard, too much effort, and took too much time out of their apparently "extremely" busy lives.