5361

The thing you have to realize is that WoW is basically 2 completely separate games. World of Leveling is a slightly-multiplayer roleplaying game where you are gently whisked along throughout the beautiful world of Azeroth, helping people and killing scary monsters. WoL is extremely easy.

The second game is World of Instances, and it starts at level 85 (with little optional previews before that). You can’t start WoI until you beat WoL. WoI consists of sitting around in towns in the massively multiplayer chat room “Stormwind” or “Orgrimar”, while waiting to whisk off to a 5, 10, or 25 person dungeon. The skills for WoI are only vaguely related to WoL. In WoI, you can select a wide variety of difficulties, from not too tricky (level 85 normal dungeons), all the way up to quite challenging (bleeding edge hard mode raiding).

Unfortunately for Ned, you can’t skip over WoL for WoI, and a number of structures are in place such that your first time through it is the slowest. That’s good if you like it, but obviously bad if you don’t. Blizzard has provided one slight loophole here in the form of the triple-XP Refer-A-Friend (that’s what I did when I got into WoW), but it requires having a patient friend who is willing to level all the way to 60 with you. Unfortunately for bmanula, challenge is reserved exclusively for WoL, for all but the least skilled players.

5362

My comments so far have failed to mention one of my key beliefs: quests labeled ‘group quests’ for 2 or 3 mostly never actually require groups in the first place. they just require a little more thought and execution to complete solo. quests marked as 4 or 5 are with few exceptions possible to complete with 2. So the difficulty was never that high to begin with. And that seemed fine to me. That is my background for complaining about it being made too easy. Your claim that they have now struck a reasonable balance from 1-60 seems hard to defend. Have you ever come close to death when soloing 1-60 cata quests? Under 50%? Is it well balanced if there is not even a possibility of death?

5363

If you love actual group quests, be sure to do Dragonblight, in Northrend. DB for some reason has a ton of quests that actually require a group. I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of the real group quests in the entire game are in that zone. It is frustrating if you are solo, because almost nobody bothers to go through all of the quest chains to open all of the group quests up, so you can never find anybody to do them with.

5364

It probably depends on server population, but yeah there’s a lot of group quests in dragon blight and again Icecrown. There are a couple in Grizzly Hills (including an arena*), and the arena Zul’Drak. I haven’t gotten through the Basin yet again.

When I went through Dragonblight as a warlock, I could solo all of the three person quests… 5 person required a group (though usually only one other). As a hunter I had a bit more problems with the 3 person quests, though I could still do some of them.

*at least for horde.

5365

The amusement park analogy is an apt one and almost literal in the new starting zones! I first got that feeling on the quest that introduced you to the Caverns of Time. The whole place felt like a fantasy Epcot Center.

5366

Nicely said.

And one of Blizzard’s goals for future development, is to create sustainable model for both distinct game types that can co-exist in parallel. In the meanwhile, as players, we have to work with what we have.

5367

Nope, but I’m in heirloom gear so I’m one shotting mobs the same level as me.

I don’t really want 1-60 to be a challenge to be honest. Fun? yes. Interesting? yes. Quick and painless? even better. There’s still 25 levels to go from 60 until I can start running with everyone else so I don’t really want to spend huge amounts of time fighting the content. If it was challenging then I’d give it one go, maybe two then skip it because it makes more sense to collect 25 foozles easily than to spend half and hour getting squashed by a mob.

5368

I did all the DB quests solo except that 5 man Wanted quest with the big dude near Naxx on my paladin and most on my lock too. Rogue proved difficult as there were many mobs that couldn’t be stunned. I admit that I hate when blizzard takes away key abilities to arbitrarily make something more difficult than it otherwise should be. Its not about something being really hard, its about needing to use most of my abilities to get through it.

The arena quests were good in Wrath and TBC. One problem I have with 5 man quests is that many people don’t seem interested unless there is a full group, but as Mordrak says, you usually don’t need more than one or two more.

5369

And that is a perfectly legitimate way to play and I admit to having speed leveled on occasion too (frost aoe grind from 20ish all the way to 64). But having a few hard quests that you just decide to skip doesn’t affect you at all. you move on at the cost of a few silver worth of repairs and 5 minutes time. or you see it is a group quest and just skip it from the outset.

5370

you could also just litter the world with elite mobs that aren’t part of the storyline quests too then if you want to sideline in challenging mobs/bosses you’ve got them too.

AndrewM’s point about how WoW is currently structured is pretty much spot on and it’s a situation that broadly I’m fine with, but I do get where you’re coming from too. While I have pretty much just blasted through everything as quickly as I could, there have been several zones where I’ve cleared all the quests because unlike the first time around I was actually engaged in the story line and not being able to complete those areas because halfway through this storyline there’s an elite boss that requires a 5 man group to clear when I haven’t seen another player in the zone is a bit of drag. I suppose you could equally argue that I could just beg a guildie to come squash it for me but again that just seems to be a pointless obstacle in what’s now essentially the single player part of the game. I’m sure there’s a sensible compromise lurking there somewhere and again it’s kind of why I lean (possibly missing some blindingly obvious reason why it shouldn’t be so) to thinking that if you just had one level you’d mitigate a lot of the problems of 90% of the game world being completely deserted because it offers nothing to people 3-4+ levels above what the content is aimed for.

I know blizzard made a point somewhere that just making bosses (and players) more and more powerful within the same level structure causes different issues so perhaps it’s the best compromise around at the moment.

5371

Yes and yes.

5372

Casual-minded players die plenty of times. Even my worgen druid has died before level 20 at least once.

5373

Didn’t you die due to too fast respawn rates?
I found the spawn rates in the Worgen start area way off!
Nearly as bad as in Tol Baradin.

5374

I also died in the Worgen start area on the quest where you summon help to kill an elite mob (read: watch as the help kills him for you). After my help left the elite mob respawned almost instantly and killed me. Not exactly what I had in mind.

5375

That would be good enough for me. Make all of those rare spawns into elites, for example, and make them spawn out of the path of any normal adventurer who is following the xp pinata. Maybe make them spawn a little more often and take away the loot. I would happily hunt them all down.

5376

Of course not. WoW had to be the evolutionary step of Everquest.

Basically, WoW took EQ, removed a good chunk of the cockblocks in the base mechanics, made physical DPS interesting to play, and made questing easily accessible and the fastest source of XP. That’s grossly oversimplifying things, of course – the cockblocks they removed could fill pages.

Since then, WoW has developed its own identity. Its main goal became accessibility, which Blizzard has pursued almost exclusively after they wheeled Tigole back into the closet (about mid-BC). That design direction has undoubtedly made players’ “Quality of Life” easier, but it’s had the unfortunate side-effect of trivializing everything except the end game, and also causing Blizzard to lose touch as to what does and doesn’t constitute “fair” difficulty (by far the best example being Cata Heroics and Ghostcrawler delivering his “They’re Supposed to be Hard” speech while some had already been stealth-nerfed and the rest were getting tuned down on the PTR).

In short, if WoW: Cataclysm had released in 2004, we’d probably have two branches of diku evolution: Hardcore, D&D style EQ, and Casual, Diablo-style WoW.

5377

Blizzard continues their annoying habit of moving slowly while saying nothing. My wife frequents the WoW forums and has watched with dismay over the past month as the raiding guild tags have disappeared from long-time, respected restoration shamans. Then today we get this (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2089271114):

We are also applying a hotfix for Purification for the Restoration shaman passive from 10% to 25%. We think that shaman healing per second is not as competitive with other healers and while we hoped to bring down Holy priest and Holy paladins (in particular) in 4.0.6, which we did, shaman still appear to be behind. In this case, it is simply easier to buff Restoration shaman rather than nerf everyone else or rebalance the encounters.

That will be very nice, but it would have been better if they had admitted awareness of the problem before now, especially if it requires a 250% increase in the restoration healing bonus. At least they seem to realize that HPS parity isn’t the extent of the problem, but this is the first I’ve seen them mention that as well.

5378

As I have thought about it more, another thing that led me to quit was the reduction in difficulty. I didn’t think WoW was that hard to begin with, but now it is far too easy. A good example of this is how they now treat the mini-boss quests that end story arcs in leveling areas. Blizzard flirted with two paths on this in Wrath, and I think chose the wrong one to implement in Cataclysm.

On one had, you have the Battle for Undercity quest. Big-name NPCs abound, you get to stomp on lots of enemies in spectacular fights, but you’re not in any danger, and you don’t actually have to participate beyond following Wrynn around. This is just an in-engine cutscene. On about my fourth run through, I paid one of my kids $2 to just follow Wrynn through the fight.

On the other hand, you have the quest to kill Ursoc, the Bear God in Grizzly Hills. Too hard to solo (for most people/classes), so they give you an NPC druid to help. You can pick whether he tanks, heals, or does dps. You have to play your role, and carry out some minor boss fight mechanics by avoiding the slimes, or you are going to fail. Do all of that, and you will succeed.

Unfortunately, Blizzard chose the Undercity-style cutscene quests. Nothing you do in the Ruins of Eldarath with your Goblin squad, or in Andorhal with your death knight buddy, or with your SEAL squad in Vashj’ir makes a bit of difference. This kind of thing is repeated throughout the leveling areas, and once you know the story they are telling you, there’s no gameplay left. What I used to find fun to try with different classes is now the same regardless of what I do, so the fun of leveling alts is gone.

5379

Oh man I hope you’re not doing this wrong. I think you are though.

Never pay your kids in physical money right away. You gotta break it out somehow. In our house the kids earn “stars” for good behavior/video game achievements.

7 stars = $1

It’s kind of like grinding faction rep. But in this case the faction is “parents.” You put an extra layer into the process and it confuses the hell out of things and makes it far easier to get the desired outcomes at a cheaper per kid cost.

If I say that one of the girls can earn 2 stars for emptying the dishwasher they’re suddenly in love with dishes. And I’ve only spent 28.57 cents.

You know what else? They lose stars if they mess up! If they whine or do something we just told them not to do (ex: Don’t let that beam thing stack past 80 on the Corla fight in BD) then they lose stars. And since there’s always some way to screw up a boss battle my expected payout is an average of 9.223 cents per initial star.

See, stars you can take away because it’s a layer between behavior and dollars. You can’t hand your kid $2 bucks and then demand it back later. That’s being a Tauren Giver and you don’t want to do that.

;D

5380

You were supposed to dodge the slimes?

Man death knights are overpowered :)

I agree with you though, that was a really good quest. I missed it the first time through.