Yeah, those invasions were a cool new mechanic and it was actually valuable for everyone, not just those looking to catch up quick. I’m not sure why Blizzard didn’t do something similar since they’ve been good at taking what works and just doing it again and again.
They even re-used the system for about a year after Legion’s launch. There are still invasions of various Legion zones every 6 hours.
I think I levelled 5 or 6 alts doing it. I took my hunter and demon hunter through the Legion content, but I’d rather do something like the invasions for the rest than take them all through Legion.
WoW is doomed to be shit.
This is the tone of a mounting rebellion that is currently going on:
Here’s the problem regarding leveling via dungeons:
Trash takes 3-4 times longer to kill than it did before the changes in 7.3.5, even with a premade party of characters geared with heirlooms and best in slot leveling enchants. Tanks can no longer pull more than 4-5 mobs or they’ll just die, no healer can spam heal to save them.
Bosses take too much time to kill compared to current-content bosses from mythic dungeons. Spending 2-4 minutes per boss feels bad. Spending 30-60 minutes in a dungeon feels even worse.
I don’t think the squish nor scaling is the problem, 8.0.1 feels more or less the same as 7.3.5. The problem dates back to 7.3.5 changes when mobs health was increased 3-4 times, but back then there weren’t many players complaining about it.
So, players are complaining because in a dungeon they cannot mass-pull more than 5 monsters at the same time, and that killing a boss in 2 minutes is way too much.
That’s the ultimate problem about game design: you can always perfect the game, but you arrive at the point where you can’t do anything, because it’s the people that are broken.
The ideal game for these people is cookie clicker. They won’t be satisfied until everything conforms.
To be fair, Blizzard has come out today(?) and mentioned that the squish did in fact unbalance leveling more than was intended, and they do acknowledge that the 60-80 grind is 15% higher than that of other level brackets (and not intentional). I agree that the people are broken, but right this very second, so is the game to an extent.
The rat pushing the buzzer to administer more cocaine, is always going to complain the cocaine isn’t being doled out fast enough.
Maybe they should go run rifts in diablo.
I’ve just leveled from 74 to 75 in like 10 minutes walking around doing quests with zero rush and zero heirlooms.
So, the game is still WAY too fast to even compare to how this content was designed and released.
There’s no way to fix this. There’s a real, unfixable chasm between players who want an alt to max level in three hours and those like me who want to actually play the game as it was designed to be played.
The solution would be to give players options, but this isn’t something that Blizzard is going to do. They don’t want to devalue the effort that goes into taking a character to max level, so they aren’t going to give those players a good option to level faster. They know that doing so they make it all pointless.
But at the same time the only solution is to compromise between two positions that just CAN’T go together.
The leveling pace is STILL shit compared to the content itself. You still cannot follow the story of a zone through the normal questing.
7.3.5 threw a bone. It’s still not enough, and this is enraging the loud portion of players who are leveling their 99th alt and that don’t want to PLAY the game. They are looking at the clock, not the screen. They are clicking on the quests as they see them, they don’t read them.
There’s just no way to fix this because the two rational fixes demand that Blizzard take a stand. Either they decide that a max level character takes that effort that makes the game meaningful, or they accept that a solution doesn’t exist and give players what they want, and just let those who want to skip all the old content a way to do so.
Not at all true. Up both the power and XP bonus of heirloom gear. Problem solved.
Sure you can. Just stop caring if you outlevel the content.
Anyway, Blizzard should just allow power-levelling like they do in Diablo. Join up with a max level character while they run a trivial (to them) dungeon, and level up to near-cap in 10 minutes.
Problem solved…of course, that doesn’t sell $25 levelling tokens.
Yes, that’s the part about offering options.
What’s unfixable is finding the same solution for everyone, and that’s what Blizzard wants.
They don’t want to devalue those high level characters. They want this process to be meaningful, so that you are invested in your character. So they have reasons not to give those options.
But this is the stance of those players:
Remember that we’ve been in a post-Cataclysm world for some time, and many players have seen as much of the old world as they care to. Until the old quests are replaced with things that are actually interesting (as opposed to simple “kill and collect” quests), and the rewards actually live up to their namesake, and the old zone graphics are updated to something more appropriate with today’s MMO standards, no amount of slogging through “Potato Land” feels worth the added effort imposed by the 7.3.5/8.0.1 changes.
They just don’t want any of it.
And what I don’t understand is why these guys NEED ANOTHER alt. What the HELL are they doing with all these alts if they don’t even care leveling them? What’s even the point?
I cannot even imagine. You have what, 40 alts? And you’re going to raid and gear them up with all 40 of them? It just doesn’t make any sense.
If you’ve already seen ALL the content and don’t want any of it, WHY would you make ANOTHER alt in the first place?!?
It’s as if players asked From to skip leveling in Dark Souls, because they want to make more alts, but don’t want to also play the game.
We went from “Super-easy, super-fast leveling” to “Super-hard, super-slow leveling”, or as some might call it “high effort - low reward”. Doesn’t feel great, does it?
He really did write that. WoW is “super-hard”.
Not that hard to understand. Some players want to raid and do endgame content with multiple classes for a variety of reasons. 11 classes with perhaps some alliance and horde duplicates is plenty of reason to want levelling to be quick.
Personally I stuck to one class for over a decade, partly because I was already bored of quest levelling back in 2006, and raids were the only interesting content.
A lot of it is this. I like the BGs but the BGs are best at max level, so I like to get there.
I’m leveling a couple of alliance characters now and the pace is ok. I feel like I get to do a lot of the content. I could even slow it down by picking dungeons to run instead of doing the bonus option where I have no control over what dungeons I get placed in.
Anyway, isn’t a vanilla server on the way? That should have slower leveling for those who want it.
I’m not playing WoW anymore, but developers too often don’t draw a line in the sand and say “This is the game we’ve made.” and leave it at that. It sounds like they did make it harder than intended, but not by that much.
Yeah, WoW Classic is still in development, and apparently they currently have a working internal build.
I just don’t understand what is taking them so long with the classic servers stuff. There are so many private server communities running various builds of vanilla and BC WoW, with thousands of players, it doesn’t seem that the hosting/backend can be that difficult. I know they want to work heavily on the polish of the game, but damn, put that crap in early access, and I will pay 10 bucks a month to sub to it.
I like nu-WoW, but something about the old slow leveling, and grinding feels so good to me. Each level is a huge improvement (new spells, talent point) and even though the leveling process is a bit of a grind, it is great to just put on and listen to podcasts through.
I leveled so many alts in Vanilla WOW back in the day, I can’t possibly imagine going through that again. The same old zones and quest lines. Ugh. No.
Nostalgia is great and all, but this is one game I don’t need to revisit. If I ever do go back to WOW (seriously doubt it) it wouldn’t be to relive those Vanilla days.
I’m even more contrary to “classic” servers than I am about everything else.
I believe in mmorpgs as a class of games that grow and evolve.
In fact, my ideal WoW direction would have to build a squad of developers that, without any fixed deadline, just go through every zone, in an endless cycle, analyze and target all the content and tweak and overhaul all the parts that don’t work well. And for every patch, you update the game with what this team has done in the time available. Just a small team of designers, writers, artists and programmers that systematically polish all the content, without ever stopping. Make it even two teams that constantly review each other, or swap constantly the people in the team to have a fresh take every time.
The problem of vanilla is that it’s just vanilla. The leveling pace of a game shouldn’t be decided by trying to find some magic formula: it’s the content that decides how the leveling goes.
So, every expansion should be tuned against itself. If I play WotLK then I should be able to play it at the pace that it was originally designed to be, or an adjustment based on observation.
This is the classic principle: leveling up is consequence of playing a game, NOT THE POINT. WoW was revolutionary because it replaced grinding monsters with questing.
Now people are bored of the quest, and grind monsters.
What I don’t get is that if you are such a veteran player to have seen ALL the content, then you should have already plenty enough “alts” to do whatever you want at the endgame.
Is really raiding with 11+ alts something that a large portion of the playerbase is doing? I find that baffling that this might be statistically relevant. I find raiding an exhausting activity with all the maintenance it requires. Doing it with 11 alts just sound like a NIGHTMARE.
With all the free bumps to max level with every expansion, and all the time that people had to level an army of alts, you still don’t have enough?
I absolutely understand “altitis”. But it makes sense when people want to make alts TO PLAY THE GAME. Whereas here people want just to make alts, repeatedly and without end, while also skipping the game.
And I don’t understand why because I don’t think “altitis” goes well with the mechanics of raiding and PvP. These are specific and demanding activities. Takes a whole lot of time and dedication. You want to invest in a character, not constantly swap and reset. It’s counter intuitive.
So, I assume, if you love just raiding and PvP to the point you want to erase every other form of PvE, why to do that wouldn’t you focus on one, two or an handful of characters?
It can be quite difficult, especially since they don’t have a working codebase from that far back to just roll back to. Standards for a fan server/service are a lot different than a commercial offering, for better or worse.
I don’t raid. I typically get a new expansion and level 2-3 alts to cap and then play BGs and get some of those rewards. Basically, once level-capped I will then pursue gear I can get through 5-mans and BG rewards. That’s simply alternative leveling. That’s how I play until I get bored and unsub.
This time around I got sucked in via a free weekend. I decided to play Alliance and the experience was different enough that I resubbed and have been leveling two alts. I’m on the fence about getting the new expansion. I feel no urgency. There’s no special leveling event this time, is there? Last expansion there was that demon invasion that made it easy to level characters.
Oh, and another thing.
I suppose statistically now most of everyone is looking forward to the expansion. You have this majority of players who come back to play the new expansion for 2-3 months, then leave.
Is the expansion now so light in content that you really need 5+ (or 20) alts to go through it multiple times? Even if it’s just 20 hours, for 5 alts that’s already 100 hours.
If you have like 10 alts sitting at the level cap waiting for this expansion. And you want to play JUST the NEW content and nothing else. WHY WOULD YOU MAKE an eleventh alt and then complain leveling takes too long? Aren’t 10 alts at the level cap ENOUGH to move through the new expansion (and then all the raiding and whatever)?
This is exactly what I mean.
If you play 2-3 alts, you have them constantly at whatever the level cap is at that time. An expansion lands, so you now have to level those alts through it.
You NEVER have to see old content. Because you have plenty to do by moving the alts you have already, though the content that is new (and that is going to feel stale after you go through it three times in a short time span).
This time around I got sucked in via a free weekend. I decided to play Alliance and the experience was different enough that I resubbed and have been leveling two alts. I’m on the fence about getting the new expansion. I feel no urgency.
And yes, that means you want to play that old content.
But the new expansion already has the free level up. So you have ALL your alts waiting for the expansion, plus another.
So, all alts + 1, already with the need to go through brand new content.
Why would you complain that you’re forced to go through old content? You’re not forced, you supposedly have already an army of alts waiting at the level cap and never looking back.