Is it worth coming back

Now there is a "new player experience" update on beta, so soon the game might be more recommendable. But I don't think your concerns were resolved. The game still is, and I think always will be, a grindfest. I really recommend trying the new update tho. You might find something new that you like on the game, be it a class rework or buildmaking ^^ give it 2 hours of your time and decide for yourself 

Since You entered this forum and posted your message, You will come back anyway Today the beta server 1.81 will open, so maybe check it out, satisfy your curiosity and judge it for yourself. Dunno what was it like last time You were in game.. for me, the most shocking after come back was discovering that all profs are held by all characters, so You don't have to change to your gatherer then crafter etc. Also: go inside bag and take daily quest from one-eye-guy, doing dungeon on it's level.

There have been some good updates. If you don't mind grinding and enjoy buildmaking I'd say give it a go.

It's much better than some years back.

sadly, wakfu is still in an unrewarding state. i hope that waven inspires some change on this front.

Thanks for the replies. How do I access the beta? Im on steam if that matters.

I want to be like everyone else and tell you that you'll like the game, but considering the points you brought up are still existent in the current state of the game I simply cannot do it in good faith. 

Wakfu is a gear treadmill in it's current state, the current game loop is farm gear, crush gear, farm gear, crush gear over and over again hoping to get the correct rune slots on your items for your various level brackets as you continue to climb the stasis leaderboards and obtain end of month rewards to help you do the process again and again. 

If this sounds like something you'd have fun doing then welcome back! 

With the server merge the market is a lot more active and if you have the kamas you can circumvent a lot of the gear grind by just buying multiple copies of items that you need already crafted. 

And to stop myself from being purely negative, there are 3 man dungeons now that you can aim to do with your group of heroes, these can be a decent source of kamas to help build up your sets and work on tackling higher difficulty of content. As well as Rifts which in my opinion are one of the best recent additions to the game, they make solo leveling A LOT easier not to mention A LOT more enjoyable. 

I'm like you, the dopamine rush of that 2% drop is gone now that I know I'll have to drop that 2% item another 5 - 6 maybe more times to continue crushing it into itself over and over. It ruins a lot of the "fun" involved in dropping an item that you need when you realize just how much work is going to have to be put in before its even usable. But if you can stomach all of this and give the game a chance there is still a lot to love.

As someone who recently came back from a 3-year hiatus (I left when Badgeroxxors and Dor'Mor were the newest patch) and remembers that patch you're mentioning, the game is probably going to be super different. Is it in a better state? Big time YES, but with a caveat: you may want to multibox so you don't have to depend on anyone. I used to be a mono-account with only my Sram as my character, but now I dual box and have 6 characters (Sram is still my main). The only time I can say I've had more fun than now was when the game initially launched and everyone was racing to lv100 with massive PKs happening everywhere and everyone minting their own kamas.

Crafting exp was increased tremendously, but as a tradeoff required crafting levels now are up to lv150 (it can get up to lv170 if you grind hard, but there are no recipes past lv150). One cool thing is that you can now officially "hire" crafters through in-game mechanics to craft your item for you, and your items never have to leave your item menu, so it kind of makes professions a non-issue... Unless you want to gather the materials yourself for other reasons, such as opening the Moon Island towers or fighting the Thirster in Pandalucia.

With Heroes, each account can have up to 3 characters on the same window (2 accounts means you have a full team of 6). The experience boost still applies: second highest character gets x2 exp, and any lower leveled characters get x3 exp. Easy to level up alts and catch them up to your main, but you still have to pay for two boosters.

Enemies and bosses drop gear again, and pretty much every drop an enemy has is important in some way. Thing is that they never drop the yellow rarity items, it's always orange or green, so you'll be forced to buy or craft.

Quick travel is back, so you get to use dragoturkeys again. There's less of them than before though, so expect to run from place to place anyway, but maps are smaller than ever before so you shouldn't have to worry too much (nothing even remotely close to Sufokia pre-revamp, THAT was a brutal nightmare).

Shushus are probably the same as far as the first two go, but there's like 7 now (5 are lv216+) and an Ultimate Buss was added (lv216+). The first two's exp is also not something I care about either, since farming area challenges is far faster and easier exp.

I think my most pleasant surprise was how Moon Island all of a sudden doesn't feel inaccessible anymore. It used to be that ONLY ranged characters and tanks had a place there, but now I could participate just fine in everything it offered with my Sram.

Rune farming is a thing, sure, but unless you're lv216+ and struggling, you won't be worrying about that. Just buy whatever is in the marketboard, rune your characters for resistance so you can survive in the dungeons, and have fun.

There's a brand new 1 character (1c) server announced to be coming out this year. As someone who has played this game since beta 2010, I quit last year due to multi-character gameplay ruining the game. For me, the only chance this game has to be good again is the new 1c server.