Well, don’t forget you can (these days) download WoW and play to level 20 (which will NOT take long) for free. That may scratch the itch!
Otherwise, yes, buying the recent expansion (there are tiers, most of the higher ones including extra pets, mounts and cosmetics which you don’t generally -need-) will unlock all the content, and you can play either/both retail (current) and classic in flavors, which IIRC is on Cata currently.
I’ll PM you a recruit a friend link if you want to use it.
Heh. I believe I made it to level 15 my first day of playing Vanilla back in 2006 or so. Then the grind sets in. The battle cry of the murlocs still haunt my nightmares.
Grgggglll Mrggggglll Brggglll!!!
Bad @Jas09 - no Bear Basted Boar Steak for you!
I’ll just mention here that, if you like MMORPGs but don’t like toxic groups, that the community on City of Heroes is still overwhelmingly positive.
Can’t say for WoW, but in FFXIV whenever I see that I assume it’s one of two things. Either somebody getting in-game currency as a real money transaction (RMT is theoretically banned, as is botting, not that either ever goes away) or somebody using the market board as a very weird way to deal with inventory limitations.
To be honest, I’m slightly tired of MMORPGs, but play them to be social with distant friends. I’m also a fan of COH - I played briefly in Beta (on my friend’s account, they were in the Beta proper) and ended up playing until about 6 months before COV came out. A few of us talk about going back to the game from time to time, but it is a game of it’s time, with joys and warts, and it never gets off the ground. We spent years cycling from one MMO to another (I have a rule about not playing more than one at a time due to the money/time sink) - From COH, to WoW, to Rift (miss that one as a living, improving game!), to Star Wars The Old Republic, and finally back to WoW.
Honestly, I wish more games allowed you to complete content with smaller groups than the now-traditional 5+. WoW seems to be heading that way with the Follower Dungeons and the upcoming “Story Mode” raid(s?). Especially since in most of the games I listed, there are/were instances designed to “cap off” a zone or section’s storylines. Normalizing gear for group content, would likely also be a good idea, as far too often, you’ll have huge discrepancies between the players in various LF groups which feeds the toxicity.
For WoW this is probably a non-issue. These days getting insanely large storage isn’t much of an issue. Common reagents stack to 1000 per slot, bags are huge, and bank storage includes a dedicated reagent bag and many, many slots (all of which cost in-game gold mind you). And that’s not counting the newest feature, Warband banks, where you can buy (at quite the price!) a huge amount of shared storage that applies across all your characters server wide. Or start a vanity guild and buy guild storage, or, the last refuge, banking/auction house alts.
There’s even the (now obsolete, and maybe purged?) void storage which was a pay-to-deposit/remove bank on an item-by-item basis. And with transmogrification (appearance items) now being kept in server-wide storage, you don’t need to keep old gear for your favorite appearances either. Same for pets/mounts, they’re not items anymore, so don’t take up space.
Further, depending on the item and the time it’s on the AH for (max of 48 hours in modern Wow) you pay a deposit, which can get quite pricey -each- time the item is put up again. It would be cheaper to mail gear to yourself and alts to juggle considering the low cost to mail and the 30 days to pick up duration, although there is a cap on how much mail you can have in-box at any one time.
Sounds like a similar concept as the “Battle of the Undercity” storyline from WotLK, where your Horde character got to team up with Thrall and Sylvanas to liberate the Undercity from the traitorous alchemists who’d declared war on the Scourge and the living.
Last time I checked they had removed that from the game, which is a shame because it was fun and made great use of the micro-instancing they’d just rolled out with that expansion.
There have been quite a few story-driven pieces like that since, some designed to be done by a single player, some requiring a raid-lite element where it’d que until you had 10+ people. But if it works properly it’ll make my wife happy - she avoids most instanced content with non-known individuals like the plague. She’ll do PUG (Pick up groups) for open world content including some world bosses, but not stuck with the same 5-25 people for 30+ minutes.