WoW didn't do any public quests. I really liked that in Warhammer, it was a lot of fun.

AoC's instanced cities had issues, but they had a *very* stable launch, which is the only good thing that can be said about the game. It was very popular at launch and they engineered well for it.

Honestly the only thing that kept me out of Warhammer is that most of my friends play on Macs, and they won't put out a Mac version. Then I started reading that they've fixed the class I played the most (warrior) in WoW and it was all downhill from there. WaR is a great game, but I don't know that they'll have the subscribers long term to generate the capital to do the really cool stuff that WoW has now.

Warhammer also had one of the greatest anti-ganking mechanics I've ever seen. Simple, smooth, and effective. It's a great game, and if you don't like the cartoony feel of WoW and want to play an MMO, Warhammer is a ton of fun.

I guess it depends on what you call "Grinding". For me, grinding is repeatedly killing the same set of mobs over and over in hopes of a random 1% chance drop. I've done grinding in WoW, and it's got it's own rewards (trying to improve your own efficiency) but it's not fun really. The only real grind left in the game is fishing. And that's something I do while I'm chatting with my friends on Ventrilo anyway.

When I run a 45 minute instance 6 times over 2 weeks, I don't think of that as grinding. When I have to kill the same 25 mobs standing outside black temple for 3 hours a day for cash for my epic mount, that's grinding. Pretty much grinding for cash left the game when the daily quests started. Grinding for reputation was still in, but the reputations got less and less important later in Burning Crusade. While reputations are very important in Wrath, they're also very easy to get and there are many varied places to get reputation, so it doesn't feel like a grind. Let me put it this way about reputation: Right now I'm trying to figure out what reputation to work on because none of them offer me any life-or-death upgrades. I think I'm going to work on the one that lets me buy the cool dragon mount. I started working really hard on reputations last Saturday morning. I finished all the regular quests, ran all the daily quests for Ebon Hold and ran 2 different heroic instances and had the faction done at the end of Saturday. That's not a grind. That's a day's play.

Where's the line? For me it's when it quits being fun and starts being tedious. There's enough variation in the game so far that it hasn't happened. The daily quests range from the "go kill 5 of these and 5 of those" to "go enslave a giant abomination, run it into the middle of a big group of bad guys, and blow it up". The quest variety is huge.

I don't really count instances as grinding, because I'm playing with friends, and saying that's a grind is like saying a weekly bridge party is a grind. It's the constant solo activity that really spells out grind for me. And I haven't seen any of that. I can't even think of anything to be gained by killing the same set of 25 mobs over and over again.

Over the last year, I've played Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and Age of Conan.

I really feel sorry for both of them.

The bar's a bit higher now. The sheer variety of quest types now in WoW is just ludicrous. They put in a medevac quest.

Just mull over that a second. A fantasy MMO with a medevac quest. Fly in, pick up people in a siege zone, and fly them out.

And yes, it was awesome.

Quest lines where they basically give you invincible superpowers just so you can see the lore happen. The implementation of phasing really made me feel like I was part of what was going on and I was changing things in the game.

This is such a huge turnaround for Blizzard, who put all of the big lore-presentation bosses at the back of huge hardcore instances for so long. If you quest up through the game, you'll see Arthas, the Lich King, at least 4 times, and each time he's doing *something* that directly impacts *you*.

The shortfalls, however.

Crafting, except for jewelcrafting, is completely borked. Jewelcrafting has a lot of great self-buffs and very powerful things that can only be used by jewelcrafters. Other professions have very little, and my blacksmith has no reason to level over 415 (out of 450) in that skill.

Wintergrasp (the world pvp zone) needs some help. In order to balance the force, if one side is vastly outnumbered they get a stacking buff to their hit points, damage, and healing to compensate. This really means that the alliance on my server are basically fighting 10-man raid boss-level horde in PvP. It's not fun. They really need to fix the factions so we can temporarily swap to the other side or something. The horde is not much of a horde when they're outnumbered 10-1.

Certain class balance issues are still present, but not extreme. Warlocks are still an extremely fussy class to play, as opposed to other classes that rotate abilities or chain chance-on-hit abilities into combos, Warlocks basically stare at a set of timers and recast spells on a non-fixed rotation. Not fun.

All in all, they far exceeded my high expectations, for everything from content quality to quality of service. The servers haven't been perfect, but they also weren't the utter crapfest they were when Burning Crusade launched.

Really? Grind?

Huh.

I've got one level 80 character and I don't remember any grinding. I remember repeating *one* set of daily quests to get a faction, and the rest was doing quests. And while there are some "go kill 10 bears" quests, there are a lot of "take this hippogryph and fly over the besieged town and pick up civilians and bring them back here". Or "here, take this harpoon, go up to this arena that's a thousand feet in the air, and use the harpoon to latch onto another hippogryph, swing up to it, defeat the rider on the hippogryph, and then swing to the next. Oh, and don't fall off it's a long way down."

The depth and breadth of quests and quest types is just amazing. And even the daily quests have a huge variety to them. It's a grind when I have to go kill a thousand mobs. It's not a grind when I have this many choices and I can mix and match them up to keep fresh.

I remember grinding for recipe drops, and those are gone now. There are very few recipes that drop for crafters, and the ones that do aren't necessary nor do they particularly sell well.

I remember grinding for reputation, and that's nearly gone now. I've repeated exactly one set of daily quests, and that's hardly a grind, and I got a really darn cool sword.

I remember grinding for cash way back when, but I finished up level 80 with 2,000 gold earned and sitting in the bank. Sure if I want a mammoth mount I've got some grinding ahead of me, but who has the time for that. My raiding budget is going to be a few hundred gold a week, but raid bosses are dropping huge amounts of money now (140g per boss in Naxxramas, so 14g per peson) which allays a lot of those costs.

Besides expenses (consumables, repairs) all of the stuff that money buys is either cosmetic (new mounts, which have no more speed or abilities than old mounts) or easily replaced by playing the other parts of the game.

They've even made grinding for gear if not an obsolete concept a really flexible one. It's hard to believe in a grind when I can do daily quests, do any of the level 80 instances in either heroic or normal mode, or go do a 10-man raid, or any combination, to get the gear I want.

Yeah, I'm not seeing any grind here really.