I finished the patch content for A Realm Reborn last night which means I can finally move on to Heavensward tonight and the parts of the game people tell you are what you have to suffer through ARR to enjoy.
ARR was... alright actually. It being trimmed down certainly helps, but I think what really got me through it on my 5th(?) attempt at this game was having now 3 or 4 years separation from WoW and the mentality towards MMO progression that ingrained in me. The story still really dragged at some points, I'll admit I still skipped a fair few cutscenes if it was completely boring or just repeating something I already knew for the 3rd time in 20 minutes, but I paid more attention to the story and characters than I had before. When I reached the first roll of the credits I thought "Hey that was pretty alright."
Then ARR keeps going after the credits.
I had been told by multiple sources that this is where ARR really drags, this is where you WILL stop playing, or pay for a boost to skip it because it's soooo bad. You have to do dungeons, right? You have to do dungeons AGAIN. WHAAAAT? And on an OCE Datacenter with low population you'll wait hours just to get a group! It'll take a million years to complete this! Well, turns out people are fucken babies. At first I felt the patch content was neither better nor worse than what came before and that if the credits hadn't rolled I wouldn't have distinguished the two parts, but really the patch content for ARR is a lot better, at least as far as story pacing and character emphasis goes and I ended up really enjoying a lot of it. The queue times for the hard dungeons were... fucking fine actually? At midnight I waited for 8 minutes as a DPS for The Navel [Hard], like oh nooo less than 10 minutes how will I live through this? It's fucking fine. People are fucken babies.
ARR ends on a really great note, they went balls to the wall with making you care about the things that are happening and setting up motivations for what's to come. I agree, a lot of ARR is really rough and I wouldn't argue against even more trimming down honestly, but the flak it gets, especially the patch content of it, is totally overblown.
At this point I'm really looking forward to seeing where Heavensward goes.