Is WoW too easy?

Well no, given that it's still WTFBBQPWNing Warhammer, Everquest and City of Heroes. But Gerald Veloria argues that recent changes to the game have gone too far. Chief among them? The heirloom system which allows you to deed shiny legacy items to your other toons coming up on the server:

At level six my character had more than triple the health of a normal rogue of his level, and dealt more than four times the damage, not counting when the fiery enchant on his sword would go off. Just for fun, I dueled some level 11 and 12 characters who were going at it in Brill, and it wasn't even close. I was killing characters twice my level in seconds, while barely getting scratched. No need to stealth. Just walk up to them and Sinister Strike until they're dead.

Any challenge that I may have encountered while leveling this Rogue through the starting areas was completely taken out of the equation. I don't even bother with stealth anymore, instead focusing on the delicious ham sandwich I'm eating as I cruise through the levels. The effect is most assuredly more dramatic at the lower levels, since I have those higher-level enchants working in my favor, but from what I've seen, the gear all scales rather nicely until level 80.

Lawl. I would have loved to see that duel.

I think the problem isn't that WoW is easy, but that leveling is ultimately irrellevant in the game. In WoW, the endgame is the game. There really is no incentive to go see Stratholme or Sunken Temple, except to get some XP for you Refer-A-Friend toons. By the way, if you already have a toon who's 80, and you aren't using RAF to level your next one, you're insane.

Anyway, the point is that all the good stuff, all the consequential stuff is at the end. Not to take it back, but in the days of Pools of Radiance, I enjoyed going through the slums of Phlan. But in WoW, the game really is at the end. That's where you do arenas. That's where you rack up honor. That's where you do Strand (the best of the battlegrounds). That's where you get those lovely Naxx purples. Leveling in the game just doesn't have much consequence, or bearing on the end.

One thing that might help is having gear that scaled with you as you went up, that was only available at certain (lower) levels. The great thing about a spell like. say, magic missle was that it was always a great spell--from level 1 on.