Gear and the Value of Time in World of Warcraft

I’ve got part III of my Windows 8 series pretty much buttoned up, but figured I’d get this in before I get to my final thoughts on the OS.

Today I logged into World of Warcraft after a long while, and had to download all of the updated tools and the pre-patch for the upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion set to drop in just a couple weeks.  Having played since WoW original recipe, I’ve spent a sick number of hours in the realms of Azeroth – enough that I’m a little frightened to see the “/played” stat that the game provides for all of its players.  Through that time there was one very real statistic that all players would agree to – and that’s the gear grind.  It takes countless hours to level up a character to max and at that point go through the motions to get the gear to allow seeing end-game content.  Cataclysm made that a little easier in one of its later patches with the Raid Finder feature, but the main idea stays the same:

With all the time it takes to equip those delicious epic items, which may add up to days, at least a couple of them can be replaced after 5-10 quests in the next expansion’s starting zone.  And the trend looks like it’s going to hold – straight through level 100 when the time comes.

Welcome to Pandaria, kids.

Tushar Nene
Staff Writer
@tusharnene