Oh man …
So we had Vanilla, with an amazing leveling experience. Then TBC came with a…great leveling experience from 60-70. No amazing but … great.
And then here comes the King. Wotlk. Amazing leveling experience from 70-80 with memorable zones, sound tracks, etc.
…and now Cataclysm. Oh man! What a utterly disappointed leveling experience I have. The Vashj’ir gets boring very fast. Like … really fast. I’m ok to do few/several quests underwater, but man, where were they thinking?!
I understand now why Cataclysm is catalogued as a meh/decent expansion. The leveling experience alone is like 2 out of 10 and I hope it gets better from 83 to 85.
Hopefully, the end game is where this expansion shines.
I told myself that i’ll be playing it as much as I am having fun so… I hope for at least 2 months, in the end game, if not, well … 2 more expansions left until the almighty king expansion ( beside Wotlk ) will release : Legion .
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Dunno I actually enjoyed that Zone. Felt Unique compared to even the Zones in Wrath which started to honestly bore me a bit the second time around. Seahorse mount we get relatively fast made most issues with Water almost irrelevant and the story was surprisingly ok. Getting to the end felt good to me. A conclusion to a small arc that Wrath zones generally lacked in my opinion.
6 Likes
Cata leveling was fairly painless. Can’t say the same about vanilla leveling, or TBC, or Wrath. If you want to grind in the Naga cave for hours on end there’s always era.
Vashjir is the best leveling zone in wow, but if you don’t enjoy it, just go do Hyjal instead.
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Apart from a few awkward quests (the one with the boat ride to Abyssal Depths in particular. Took me 3 attempts and a google search to figure it out), Vashj’ir is the zone I enjoyed the most this far. It’s very unique. You just have to get used to the proximity feeling off, but if you can do that it’s smooth sailing (pun intended).
Nah levelling in cata was fun, the biggest downside was the bottlenecking quests and a few bugged ones that stopped you progressing further into the zone, outside of that I preferred it over wrath.
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Try doing that as a Holy Paladin 
I just got to Uldum on the same path you took.
I just cant have gear in my bags and swapping it all over for dungeons. My brain is fried and cant handle it so i just gnashed my teeth and Excorcism cast my enemies to pulp.
Its taken a long time
That’s why I offspec Ret. And yes I swap my gear around when I get the dungeon assignment. Sadly Holy can’t do quests well enough.
Ive done 'em and ive learned my lesson. Never again. It could be the worst spec ever to level in, holy pala 
Looking forward to making a DPS next week!
Vashjir? yeah boring extremely quick, but Hyjal? Deepholm? Uldum? Twilight? Way better than any wotlk zone, including icecrown (maybe especially icecrown) or any TBC zone.
Saying 2/10 leveling experience when the only optional zone is bad… idk.
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Berny personal ratings:
Classic 1-60: 10/10
TBC 60-70: 8/10
Wotlk 70-80: 1/10
Cata 80-85: 6/10
Hyjal was amazing.
Cataclysm levelling is fast, zones are fine aside from a few offender quests that cause massive bottlenecks if only a few players are doing it. They fixed one of them in Deepholm with the stone boon thing.
I think Cata levelling is decent aside from those buggy or badly designed quests, but in 2010 they weren’t considering the game would be re-released 14 years later on a megaserver with 10x the players and it was a massive failure for Blizzard to not address spawn timers and item cooldowns. We actually have nerfed XP requirements right now, so the levelling is super fast.
Vash’ir is a nice zone to level alone, with no other players around (goodluck with that). Uldum is a great zone, one of the best.
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Leveling is absolutely terrible!
The zones are nice… but with only monofaction servers you never run into another factions member. There is no thrill in the open world of maybe getting ganked or engaging in wpvp… this isn’t World of Warcraft. People don’t talk to each other AT ALL… I’m always the only person saying hello or bye in any dungeon.
It’s a sad experience tbh… feels like playing a boring single player game
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real ratings:
Classic 1-60: -1/10
TBC 60-70: 1/10
Wotlk 70-80: 2/10
Cata 80-85: 2/10
lvling is a chore, thats why you can pay to skip it.
that said, 2/10 is pritty much as high as it gets.
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Quests are too linear in EVERY zone.
Its frankly boring as hell and offers no replayablilty value
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Not looking for trills to be fair. Although keveling could be faster if I could kill couple of those thieving Alliance players rushing into the room and Killin the mob I waited for to respawn.
Cata leveling is good if u avoid vasjír and i bet anyone who says vanilla was a amazing leveling experience got boosted so hard that
This zone has more immersion than any of the Hyjal or Twilight Highlands. It has storyline to tell that doesn’t require all lore stars like Elven demigods and heroes like Malfurion, or Classic game enemies like Ragnaros or baron Geddon behind enemy minions to keep you interested in leveling. It developers new lore characters like captain Taylor, who has his are in Cata, MoP and sadly cut short in WoD. The sence that despite the effort survivors of expedition gets beaten simply because Naga has numerical advantage to replace the losses and barely escapes total defeat is always there and only succeeding to contact Aliiance gets em the reinforcements to get their goals tells about better lore writing than the whole BfA.
Yet who reads quest these days…
Lich King the immortal demigods of the Scourge gets beaten every like a naive child of some nobility who never saw battle in his life, but was put in command thanks to his daddy riches. All his failures are excused as he seemed to have mastetplan to lure best of the best and then one shot them, so he could turn them into undead super champions, yet underestimate power of the light and gets oneshotted like a noob. Decent, but not great storytelling if you sacrafice whole expansion for one moment in the last boss encounter.
It is portrait this way because Wrath babies went from being carried in easy heroics be ICC geared people (that lasted almost a year in original) to unable to finish instance because LFD couldn’t get em either balanced nor motivated either overgeared group at the start when Blizzard gave players TBC like harder heroics as forums asked.
Later on harder heroic raids pushed casuals further away and they started to leave en masse untill Blizzard gave up and made and abomination called LFR. It gave em temporary boost of subscriber numbers, but created hype wave generation of most layed back players, who didn’t wanted to learn their class of boss mechanics, yet felt entitled to get lore, story and loot served to them for no effort. This was Activision gamble to increase number of suscribers and now Microsoft going even further killing MMO aspect with even more casual and solo player content with introduction of story mode difficulty. SWOTOR has been there and where is it now? The game would never be good solo experience yet would loose much of long term playerbase because they would clear minimal difficulty quick and forget about game till next update or expansion.
Wait what? Vanilla is all about leveling actually. The end game is meh.
…and I hate boosting.
I call this conspiracy theory. Legion would like to have a word with you. Dungeons and Zones in early days of Legion were pretty hard.
If you believe an expansion is “meh” because players couldn’t complete ( in a decent matter of time ) , dungeons or quests , you are very wrong.
I am now 84 and a half and I am leveling in Twilight Highlands. Better , but not great.
Like I said, hopefully the End Game is there, else I don’t really find myself playing this expansion for more then few months…as opposite to Wotlk where I leveled 6 chars to 80 and some to 40-50s and played Phase 1 and Phase 2 pretty hardcore.
For me it is the other way around
I dislike everything below cata when it comes to lvling 
for me wow was always the dungeons raids and discord talks or Team speak
I really don’t care about some killing mobs for 340xp