5301

Part of it is that there’s a lot of places you can go to level up until you hit 80. So while any one specific character may have a bit of the “on rails” experience in a zone, there’s no reason you have to go back to that zone and do it again with your next guy (yeah, I’m aware that this isn’t completely true, and that for some levels you’re pretty much stuck doing the same quests, e.g., Hellfire Peninsula -> Zangarmarsh, and I would bet most level 73-75 toons were in Dragonblight). But for example, I leveled a toon starting after the Shattering, and I leveled him from 1 to 60 entirely on the Eastern Kingdom continent, figuring I would leave Kalimdor to some other character in some future time.

5302

Outlands isn’t that bad nowadays, with all the XP reductions. If you hate HFP, stay in Azeroth until 60, then you can do a handful of opening quests in HFP (to get some basic gear) and head off to elsewhere. If you love HFP, you can do the whole zone and you end up at some ridiculous level like 64. You only have to do about 2.5 zones in Outlands, so it is quite flexible.

5303

The way the rep rewards are set up for some of the factions you need to quest for a while in the zones to unlock them. Therazane comes to mind since you pretty much have to do the entire chain in deepholm to unlock the shoulder enchants.

5304

Plus, you get 150% fly speed from the off. Which is absolutely huge.

5305

Between guild xp bonus, heirlooms (including cloak), battleground XP, gathering xp (I dual gathered), my alts practically flew to 85. Didn’t help the burnout though.

5306

Wanting to see the new 1-60 stuff in the expansion, I leveled a hunter from scratch, and found the leveling curve insanely fast. Here was my path:

58-60: Searing Gorge (I didn’t want to hit Outland without flight)
60-65: Hellfire Peninsula (+ a few HFC dungeons)
65-67: Ring of Blood event and Blade’s Edge
67-68: Netherstorm
68-72: Borean Tundra (+ some LFD runs through Nexus / UK)
72-77: Dragonblight (+ a few more dungeons)
77-78: Sholszar (Nesingwary quests)
78-80: Storm Peaks

If you’ve got some heirlooms and you throw in a few dungeons here and there, you just fly through the levels.

5307

Yeah, as a few people have mentioned earlier, the pace of the 1-60 leveling seems almost broken unless you don’t mind outleveling every zone you visit. Duoing with Creole Ned, with our mid-40s characters we have so far never been able to finish an entire zone’s worth of quests without them turning green and having our characters already too high in level for the next zone. And this is playing characters with no heirlooms and no guild XP bonuses.

It’s also pretty much impossible not to outpace your gathering skills and end up not being able to pick/skin/mine things in the next zone. You can of course pause questing and just gather, but you get so much XP from the gathering itself, it doesn’t help the problem at all.

5308

I don’t see the problem with it. With heirlooms and a reasonably active guild levelling is almost enjoyable. There’ve been a few zones where I’ve done everything in them just because i was engaged in the story and wanted to see the conclusion of it and bugger the XP going green or even grey on a couple of occasions.

Likewise at 85. What’s the problem with still having x zones outstanding? I like it, it gives me flexibility on how I play the game compared to <85 where pretty much everything I do has to be focused on hitting 85. If the quests are good I’ll finish the zone for the fun of it ( and the rep/gold).

I do kind of agree that having a hub giving 2-3 quests at a time does feel mire restrictive than the old give you 20 quests but make you walk across the zone 3-4 times while doing them but I also kind of like it.

1-60 is amazing, 60-80 I’m not really looking forward to but should be quick, 80-85 will be a bit boring as ive done all the zones on my main and I know I have to do all of Deepholm and therazone dailies again.

5309

Different strokes for different folks. I find 1-60 to be a hollow shell of what it used to be. There used to be actual challenges to face along the way, if you chose to face them. Now there is just a never ending XP pinata dangled in front of you.

For example, a friend and I are duoing through the PLs at the moment and got to the last quest in one of the Andorhal chains and got the quest to kill Araj. Araj was once a fearsome foe for a 2 man leveling team, surrounded by hordes of undead which had to be carefully pulled and cleared all while keeping an eye out for any meddlesome <insert opposite faction here>. Now he has 2k health and died before my stun opener wore off.

Leveling is no longer a game, it is a glorified choose your own adventure.

5310

The real challenge is now to tag named quest mobs first.

Advice for rogues: Killing Spree (stay in stealth, press “TAB” all the time and then press Killing Spree when the mob is in target).
It will let you tag every mob regardless what aoe shit any other class is making at the spawn zone because it’s insant massive damage and will overwrite a one tick whatever small thing from anyone else on the mob aggro table…

5311

The level of threat you have on a mob isn’t relevant to tagging is it? Unless it’s been changed very recently, a mob is tagged once someone lands an ability on it.

5312

For Cat-level quest mobs (ex. Glop, Tol Barad targets), they usually give credit for the kill to any player on the threat table at the time it dies. It seems a reasonable way to handle the questing bottleneck.

5313

They changed those two yes but the normal dailies in TB (not the ones you only get when your faction is holding TB) are tag only unless they changed that as well in 4.0.6 (I’m not playing since then so I don’t know).

Concerning tag:
I think a mob spawning in the DK red shit or pally yellow thing or shammy totems or druid’s whatever aoe that is now should be tagged by them instantly.
Yet with Killing Spree I always get the kill regardless how many aoe is active when the mob spawns.
Sure I’m fast but I still need to react when it spawns causing “input lag”.
I think I shouldn’t win this “race” but I always do.

5314

Consecration (and probably Death and Decay) is kind of a DoT. It only applies damage periodically in ticks, so if you have decent reactions you should be able to Killing Spree first, before it applies any damage. The main advantage of Consecrate is that it eliminates lag and your reactions from the equation. At one point, DoTs didn’t tag mobs, but I think they changed that, so any source of damage will tag, except maybe pets.

5315

Yeah while we all bitched and moaned and spent time LFM Araj, the pussification of the game definitely took some of the excitment out of it. At the end of the day it is all old content and past its time. The memories were great, but its time to move on.

5316

Maybe you did. That was the ‘chose’ part. It was certainly possible to play the game as a leveling pinata back in the day too. But we always two manned world elite quests. if we couldn’t do it then we came back when we were higher level/better geared. Araj was definitely one of the tougher ones, but there were dozens of good quests like this at one point that weren’t as difficult as Araj but still provided a challenge.

The problem is that it is not old content. It was redone for Cata. It is supposed to be new and exciting. And they certainly fixed a lot of the annoying parts of the vanilla game. But they threw out the baby with the bathwater, IMO.

I certainly agree that it is time to move on, unfortunately it will have to be to another game. Leveling is what we enjoyed, we never cared much for the endgame beyond the BGs.

5317

2-man levelling is not exactly the norm, is it?

5318

It does seem pretty clear that the endgame, or at least the level 80+ areas are the focus. There’s enough of a challenge in the Cata zones, but everywhere else is still pretty much a ghostland so I don’t mind not ending up getting stuck trying to persuade people to come and basically swat the guy I can’t.

I’ve never done more than a zone here or there with other people so the removal of a lot of the single player roadblocks to the quests is fine by me.

I guess ultimately they’re never going to be able to please everyone and I do think it’s an inherent problem with the levelling system generally making that treadmill a multiplayer experience is very difficult, you only have to be a couple of levels above what the content is aimed at to remove any of the challenge that is supposed to be there.

It’s also still a ghostland outside the cata zones once you leave stormwind and in that respect I won’t be that sorry to reach level 80 and feel that I’m actually in a world with other people in it again.

5319

It would be nice if they could pool low level zones across servers, so things aren’t totally dead. I can imagine there are many technical and design issues why it wouldn’t work, but the contrast between leveling to 80 and being in a city is really weird. Especially if you aren’t in a guild. You step into Stormwind from running around in Red Ridge and it is like you’ve gone into a totally different game.

5320

Nowhere did I argue that is the norm. I was just commenting that my experience of the 1-60 content was different than the one expressed. The same argument could be made for soloing as I have made for duoing, however. Soloing Fozruk and his followers in Arathi with a same level rogue was one of the highlights of my WoW career. Now he is alone and he can’t even take me under 90% health when I am his level.