5321

If there is at least a challenge when you are the content appropriate level then people have a choice to do it then or come back when they overpower it. Now that choice is gone. Anyone who can turn on auto-attack can win every single equal level fight I have seen so far in the new zones.

I agree that if you provide a challenge then someone will always complain that it is too hard. That is my essential problem with the direction of WoW: they have chosen to cater completely to the demographic which complains about difficulty rather than seek a balance between the two. At least in leveling. From this thread and others it sounds like this is not so true for Cata Heroics, so perhaps I’ll give that a try.

But that also seems like a bizarre way to build a game. Hand holding new characters for the first 5 days played (or whatever) and then throwing them to wolves?

5322

Let’s not forget the Alliance quest line that ended in killing “Nathanos Blightcaller” (62 elite with 2 elite hounds that added) or “The Battle of Darrowshire” back in vanilla.
Blightcaller required a decent raid of people + a support group to kill Horde that might interfer (as the fight flagged yourself PVP).
Darrowshire was a really tough fight with waves of attackers. A bit like Horde mode in FPS today.

5323

Blightcaller was essentially a world raid boss. So sure, no chance to two man or solo him or the various world dragons, Lord Kazzak, etc. And that is just fine (and yet another fun feature I miss). Everyone doesn’t have to be capable of beating everything. If something is too difficult for your chosen style of play then you can just accept it and move on to something else. Besides, ‘Oh no, I have to form a group’ seems like an odd complaint in an MMO.

5324

It’s a perfectly valid complaint about levelling in an MMO where the majority of the population are max level, and where the rest are spread very thinly across 84 levels.

I don’t remember anyone ever doing Blightcaller on our old server.

5325

Exactly, not complaining about having to form a group, but if I ask anyone in guild to help, a level 85 is going to come on over and one shot whatever it is I’m having difficulty with. Asking anyone else means basically talking to myself, I’ve seen maybe 10 other characters at a similar level to me since leaving the starting zone.

On that basis, does it matter whether I can knock it down at level 60 or have to come back at level 65 and just overgear/outlevel it?

5326

Why not just allow people to create characters at level 85 if none of it matters? They will all get there anyway if they keep pressing ‘1’. It’s not like there is any shortage of content to fall back on if you run into something you just can’t do alone.

Maybe this all belongs in the ‘Unpopular Opinions’ thread, but I play games primarily for the challenge and satisfaction of overcoming the challenge. If I can’t beat it at level 60 then I come back at 61, 62, 63, etc, until I beat it or until I accept defeat. There was usually a point at which it was possible to beat a particular quest with well optimized play and some good luck, but where you still could not face roll it. That is the point I like to find. I don’t mind all the easier quests being mixed in too. But not having the difficulty go up, ever, from 1-60 seems silly.

5327

Welcome to Cata - expansion of silliness. You can solo anything now.

5328

Good question. I’d be in favor of this change. The run-up to 80, at this point, is essentially filler and busywork. I’m enjoying my time on my low level alts, but I’m enjoying them as a purely single player experience (Warlock) or only running instances with a group of friends (Warrior). I expect that the Warlock, at least, is going to get a lot less fun once I hit 60 and move on to Outlands, where the new progress model hasn’t been implemented as far as I know.

5329

Because the challenge starts at 80? Hit the cata zones in quest greens and blues and it’s not a walkover compared to hitting it in heroic or raid gear from wrath.

You could always not upgrade your gear, run around at level 30 in level 10 gear to make it more challenging perhaps. Me, I’m happy whizzing through it in my heirloom stuff one shotting anything I crit and enjoying the storylines, I don’t want to spend 3 months getting to level 60 again another month getting to 70, a few weeks to 80 and then doing the cata stuff at normal pace again.

I get that some people like the <85 stuff but I just don’t get the complaints when you’ve got the choice of how easy you want to make it, Want to zoom alts through, buy the heirloom stuff. If you just want to enjoy the quests, what does it matter if you outlevel the zone, it doesn’t stop you doing the quests and as above, just don’t upgrade your gear if you want the mobs to be more challenging, what’s the problem?

5330

I have to disagree, it’s a cakewalk even in quest greens. The only remotely challenging thing I’ve run across in Cata zones are when the spawn rates are broken. This is with an arcane mage and a fury warrior.

5331

As for being able to start a character at level 85, I’ve been saying I’d be quite happy with that since I got my first char to level 60 in vanilla.

Death Knights were a reasonable halfway house I suppose, but just making the initial level grind less of grind has actually been quite good fun so I know were in disagreement, but I think they’ve hit a reasonable balance.

It was enough of a challenge to me, but then I don’t want the single player element of WoW to be that challenging, I still view it as an obstacle to the getting to the multiplayer part of WoW that I actually enjoy that they “only” went with 5 levels in Cata was a huge relief to me. Sure, you ultimately still have to run all the zones to unlock the dailies and grind the rep, but it’s far more enjoyable when you can intersperse that with playing the game with your mates too.

5332

That reminds me that just for yucks, some guildmates and I tried to take on some of the 25-man BC content with just three people, at level 85. Things actually seemed okay DPS and heal-wise, it just all falls apart when you start getting hit with fears and mezzes and there’s nobody to take up the slack.

5333

I’ve always been of the opinion that once you have a level-capped toon they should let you start new toons at 55 or so, e.g., like DKs.

If that seems too much than maybe make it one freebie 55 toon for every level-capped toon you have on a server.

Although with as fast as leveling 1-60 is now it’s not nearly as big an issue.

5334

The problem with this (and this was something DAoC ran into, they had a system where you got a level 20 of any char as long as you had a level 50) is that it completely kills the game for new people, there’s nobody to group with in dungeons.

5335

I’d agree for the most part, but I’ve had a few wonky encounters. Most or all of these may be attributable to me being stupid, but off the top of my head:

[ol]
[li]The guy that isn’t Cthulu whose brain you’re supposed to take in the Abyssal Depths killed me twice because the cloud of smoke and farts that my Shadow Priest is normally standing in was difficult to distinguish from the ring of black fire, so I didn’t know I was…floating?..in it.[/li][li]I died multiple times trying to do the chained up cat man quest in Uldum because I didn’t intuit that I was only supposed to grab one of the adds at a time (first death), or that I was supposed to get the big flying bugger in the last wave before the other guy (one death and one quest failure).[/li][li]I died a couple of times in the snake pit at the end of that quest chain because I assumed that the way I was supposed to win the fight was by convincing the gigantic boss to run over the crocodile eggs, but all they really did was slow him down.[/li][/ol]

All the rest of the content has been pretty well piss easy (well, except for that Go Get the Ancient Weapons quest in Uldum where I landed on the totally empty ground and like seventy billion dudes materialized out of nowhere and promptly beat me into a fine paste before the dudes you can whistle for could pull aggro), so I assume that these are just odd tuning issues. Oh, and the Ragnaros not-really-a-raid fight took forever because it was just me and some Mage and it wasn’t long before we lost all of the NPCs and had to whittle down the boss with our own comparatively crappy abilities (and I was chronically out of mana for the entire experience), but that’s just not very smart quest design on Blizzard’s part, and I assume they’ll eventually fix that in a patch.

5336

And there would be nobody to pick mageroyal for me to mill.

5337

Are there actually new players still coming into WoW? I guess there must be some somewhere, but ignoring the dungeons you’d be hard pushed if you were dropped in lakeshire to know that you were playing a multiplayer game at all.

Unless you start a human, even once you get to the capital cities you could be forgiven for thinking you’re playing a single player game. Ironforge and Darnassus are dead on our server.

I haven’t tried the LFD tool <85 so maybe the instance queues are packed cross server, but I’m not seeing that letting people start level 85 alts would deprive new players of company.

5338

Remember how Blizzard said that they were supposed to be getting rid of the clown outfits?

Well, this is what my mage looks like after getting a drop from heroic Deadmines:

5339

That’s certainly what Blizzard are aiming for, which is why they completely remade 1-60 and didn’t just add in a /level command.

5340

Yeah there are, that’s one of the reasons Blizzard redesigned the old zones, was to make it a better experience for new players.

You may not have new players on your server as much, because Blizzard has the “recommended” server list that pops up for new players.