This thread is meant both as feedback to Blizzard and as a discussion starter to all of you about how you find the leveling experience when shared with others.
A friend and I returned to WoW recently and decided to level new characters in preparation for Dragonflight. We both started in Mulgore as tauren. They chose balance druid while I chose beast mastery hunter. We quested through the zone, rode the zeppelin to Orgrimmar, spoke with Chromie, and selected Cataclysm for our timewalking. Neither of us have heirlooms.
First of all, the journey was over before it really began. We played through Northern Barrens, Southern Barrens, Dustwallow Marsh, and Thousand Needles. Reached level fifty by completing the three Thunderdome quests in Tanaris. We ran Ragefire Chasm, Wailing Caverns, Razorfen Kraul, and Razorfen Downs one time each to finish off zone stories by utilizing the dungeon finder. Came across about a dozen rare enemies and killed them. The friend gained some extra experience from herbalism but not a great deal since we didn’t go out of our way to find herbs. I went with skinning so no extra experience from that.
The enemies were fairly easy with two of us tackling them but at least we still had to do at least one basic rotation per fight. It’s just a shame that now with Chromie time forcibly cancelled we will only get to continue our characters’ adventures and experience the rest of the game by obliterating enemies that pose no threat to us. All those stories of strife and bravery lose their edge when every great threat is just low level trash you can steamroll and your greatest obstacle is not falling asleep.
The second issue is that the multiplayer part of this leveling journey felt buggy and badly designed. Most quests didn’t share progression despite friend and I being in a party and right next to each other. We also discovered a possibly unintended glitch that if we clicked on an interactable object (both quest objects and old world treasure chests that are normally only lootable by one person) at the same time then both of us would receive our own separate loot from it - whether that loot was a quest item or treasure. In a sense we were effectively duplicating treasure chest loot.
We had to be on voice and loot everything at the same time on a count of three to be able to progress with quests at the same rate as the alternative was interacting with quest objects separately then awkwardly waiting around for respawns since there were often not enough objects for multiple people. Quest items that came from looting enemies we killed were also not counting for both of us and the drops were uneven with one of us always two or three needed items short while the other got all their drops despite killing and looting the same enemies. Sometimes not even simple “kill X amount of Z type enemy” quests would be shared despite only requiring kill credit.
We have also, in the past, leveled together in Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands and experienced all these issues plus an additional one: one of us would frequently miss out on NPC dialogue. Depending on who accepted a quest or ran into a dialogue-triggering zone a second quicker, the other person in the party would simply see no chat bubble and no chat text from the NPCs thus missing out on story beats. Both of us ended up walking away from those two expansion launches confused and disappointed and dropped the game for a while each time because we felt like we got a jumbled, inferior experience.
We have been discussing that we might have to play Dragonflight as two non-friends would. Not in a party and not trying to stay synced up with our progression. Basically, treating the leveling experience as a single player game because playing together in a group seems to be a worse experience than being a lone wolf. Which is a shame.
