How are you finding the Radiant Echoes events?

With the August 26 launch date of The War Within right around the corner — The Radiant Echoes pre-expansion event has gone live! Now you can take your newly formed Warbands out and about to fight the notable enemies of World of Warcraft’s past and earn some shiny loot. It’s also the perfect way to get yourself geared up for your first steps in The War Within. 

Sure the raw power that you can come out of this event with is nice — after all, we all like it when the numbers go up. More importantly though, there’s fancy new transmog. And somehow even more importantly still than that, there are some shiny (literally) new radiant battle pets and mounts! Sadly, if you want to collect everything, there’s a lot of grinding in your future.

I’m torn. The event has been a fun trip to zones we don’t spend a lot of time in normally, and brought back some iconic bosses like Hogger and Onyxia to menace us, but the grindy nature of the event has been a real count against it. I especially am not a fan of the drawn-out first week where it’s 90 minutes between event spawns. That will drop to 60 and 30 minutes in the second and third weeks of the event, but why not just start it at 30 minutes? Let the people who want to go hard on it try and collect everything before this limited-time event is over. I know that’s not how I’m going to play the game, but if they want to spend their day traveling around and helping to soothe the nightmares of Azeroth, why not?

It’s also a bit same-y at this point. This is, at least, the third expansion in a row where we’ve rolled around and killed old bosses for loot and currency to fill in the gaps of a set of collectibles. I’d like to see more of a story-driven event alongside the next one if possible. Maybe the new raid Story Difficulty or Delve technology can be used to make that a reality.

How about you? Are the Radiant Echoes lighting you up — or has this event left you dim?