This. I'm in this situation where I did skip VoA and although I missed out on some augs and such, I don't feel like I missed out on much. Now with RoF, I purchased two expacs for the price of one and have access to T1 RoF gear to boost me up in VoA if I so choose. I may go back to VoA for an aug or some trinket, but I already ignored it for a year, ignoring it going forward won't be that difficult.
The point of RoF is to give people what they think they wanted. Loot dropping like a pinata with no effort. 2100 gear from trash. lol. Names that fall over dead with the ease of trash mobs ( outside of a tricky few....Fear Tainted Tentacle, I am looking at you ). No locked zones. No progression to really worry about.
The problem with language progression in VoA wasn't really the armor (you could spend plat instead of gaining language to make t4 armor) or spells (only a few classes affected), but eligibility for quests. It seemed I was always forming a group with guildies intending to go do some t3 or t4 quests that we hadn't finished yet, except 1-2 people in the group turned out not to have enough language to be able to take the quests. Sometimes they'd come along and help kill stuff without getting task credit, and sometimes we'd go back and try to catch them up instead. Neither solution was satisfying.
After struggling in VOA to gear up, I will welcome an easier expansion. Maybe it is my PST play times but, there are never enough ppl to engage names in VOA. When there are, the named are extremely difficult. I believe this started in T2 in which you would think you could gear up within the expansion and progress gear wise through it. This just was not the case. I will say on the rare occasion that a full group was made that the names were easier. However, I would say that happened maybe five or six times. It appears by the comments on the forums that RoF was tuned to groups less than six players which is what I almost always encounter. I thank the developers for that design and looks like I will buy the Xpac tonight and get my feet wet.
You will not be thanking them for the design after the end of the month when even the most causal of people run out of things to do beside pursuing checkmarks like for killing the 1000th rat.
I really like RoF. The quests and missions I've done so far are good and fun. I think the tuning for the zones is overall well done. There are some challenging missions (hello The Queens Decree) There is xp to go back and redo missions/group tasks for friends/pu groups. I've also had some fun train experiences, Overseer Grydone - pulling him to the zoneline and he calls adds from 3 levels below , managing to fort and deftdance/ae mez thru the adds and still get him down. Fun fun VoA to me is a chore. RoF is fun.
