I can understand finding levelling can be quiet in Retail especially as there are a vast number of expansions people can choose to level through. Many are also sick to death of all that content having seen and done it all before, and will spam dungeons because it’s the lesser of two evils. End game is generally where it’s at.
However I’m confused how you can think that Classic is better. If you level late or you level in the older expansion your experience is like a ghost town. The more modern Classic versions have larger realm capacities than old so that may help a little.
Exactly. That’s why I was saying classic may have more players. Stormwind/ogrimmar is ultra full of players. Valkdrakken feels like a ghost town. Anywhere you go in classic servers there are players, in retail i can’t remember when i met another player in the open world.
People like to say its because of the phasing, but even if that’s true (its not) in the end of the day, all it matters is what you see and interact with, not just statistic numbers.
Because I know that 200 hours in vanilla levelling feels like less of a chore/process than 20 hours of retail.
It’s just… I know how to describe what is happening but to describe how it feels is a little more tricky. But basically it’s this feeling that you’re not exploring anything. You don’t really need to look around, you’re just following the arrow, and in fact taking a look around to see where you are and what it looks like actually punishes you.
Vanilla encourages you to sit down sometimes and just chill out for a bit. Look around, send a message in the gchat - whatever it is. In retail you just have no time. You have no time. It’s just rush rush rush.
Now some of you are going to say “oh that’s just you not taking breaks” but genuinely I’m trying to think about the flow of the gameplay and what it’s doing to my state of mind. It’s like some kind of zen state and as soon as I am forced to break it to avoid exhaustion I become aware of how much time has passed, meaning I think a lot more about time passing.
It is objectively much shorter, but it feels way longer.
I don’t want it to feel consistent. I want it to get progressively harder - because the point is the game is teaching you how to play it and each time it makes it harder you’re likely to learn something new.
But if it’s the same entity that gets harder then I will rightly feel like I got objectively weaker instead. That abomination that gave no trouble is now a threat. Because I gained 5 levels? I mean hello? Who actually enjoys this?
WoW is designed differently. Leveling doesn’t matter. It’s all about the endgame. That is where people are.
FFXIV is a more complete experience. It doesn’t throttle you through the leveling like WoW does and has lots of evergreen content while also having an endgame, though less grindy than WoW’s.
We just have to accept they are different games. The WoW you describe i don’t think ever existed. Maybe in vanilla. You can try a classic server perhaps.
I have a long experience of playing on private wotlk servers with my friend pre classic, we dropped it around 54 level because tbc quests just broke us with it tireness, while df leveling felt just right in terms of pace.
Yeah because in-between of using fly paths there is intense gameplay presented in classic wow, such as approaching and attacking 1-2 mobs while executing super busy rotation of 2 buttons, after ritual of murder comes sitting and eating food because you wasted half or almost all of your hp and mana, and final super intense task will be reaching your questgiver (he’s located on the other corner of the map)
Classic is chores and chores and chores, superficial methods of keeping you in game as longer as possible.
It gets progressively harder? i thought general consensus is that mobs are not dangerous and you oneshot pretty much anyone 1-10 levels, we need more smart scaling.
mob has more hp and stats, he didn’t became stronger compared to you.
Can you become level 64 in vanilla? Is tBC actually vanilla?
Only if you only care about the combat. If you care about more, for example the environments, it’s one of the most varied games ever created.
You’re not paying attention to what I’m saying.
I’m saying the mob becomes stronger relative to you. Not that it is stronger than you. Although it might be, and become even more strong relative to you as well.
There are three scenarios, using arbitrary numbers:
Before level: mob power is 200, your power is 300. You are 50% stronger.
After level: mob power is 240, your power is 310. You are less than 50% stronger.
Before level: mob power is 290, your power is 300. You are 3% stronger.
After level: mob power is 330, your power is 310. You are now weaker than it.
Before level: mob power is 500, your power is 300. You are already weaker.
After level: mob power is 550, your power is 310. You are even weaker than it than you were before.
The expectation, then, is that the gear you gain at that level will close the gap. And here’s the problem: Every mob is the same level as you, so everything is now harder. That makes you objectively weaker instead. You’re no longer seeking out harder enemies to challenge you - instead the exact same boar on the exact same plot of farmland now gives you a bigger challenge.
retail i guess for some reason is not varied in environments. I said that gameplay loop of classic wow (i sometimes call classic wow vanilla) is repetitive and boring, it’s a fact, there are huge amount games that do open world better, but for some reason classic andies are hellbent on making out of classic more than it really is.
Nothing on retail leveling is really challenging, upscaled mob stats just force you to utilize more buttons.
I for one find retail boring an repetitive . Because it is all about end game and you end up in the same 4 zones doing same dailies , running the same dungeons trying to get the same item with 3 item lvls higher . They don’t even give you a new skin of the item , because why bother . If that’s not repetitive I don’t know what is . In fact I level alts for a breath of fresh air just to stop the repetitive ,but that ends in 2 days .
But what you experience is what the "classic andies " describe as “retail mentality” .
In retail leveling is gone . There is no point in doing it , so you chase for lvl 70 as fast as possible .
In classic you are asked by the game to play at lower levels . There is incentive to get that gear in maradoun or uldaman , because it will server you well into 60 . There incentive to complete quests , because reputation gets diminished when you out level quests . There is incentive to level professions and gather gear at lvl 20 because you have access to almost all your spec and you can twink battlegrounds .
If you enter with retail mentality into classic thinking that leveling is not needed , than yea of course you will think" when will this thing finally end" ,
It is not supposed to end fast . You are supposed to enjoy the game at low levels .
Funny thing is even retail people are bored to death by the repetitiveness , so they wait for new patch with 10 more quests to read (begging for content) , because they just can’t stand it anymore . All because 95% of the world is unused and they sit in Valdraken running circles in front of the ah .
All the while “classic andies” play the same game for 15 years and don’t seem to get bored , without any new patches .
Not mine, for sure. I was talking about vanilla the whole time and you said you didn’t like WotLK’s levelling and I’m just like… ok? Like you’re not talking about what I’m talking about, making completely unrelated replies and mixing up everything in those replies as well even if we ignore the faulty context, and then accusing me of having brain lag? Impressive.
Well it’s 5 zones and the same 8 dungeons and 1 raid on repeat for 6 months so… not really, no. Vanilla came out with over 40 zones and 30 dungeons.
for me retail is cool group progression experience with frequent updates and some depth of skill to your character gameplay, feeling more powerful as you get more powerful items feels good too.
Good try but no, i find the whole leveling experience boring, classes are boring compared to skill expressive retail classes, quests are boring because they require you to walk alot and have rather low drop chances for quest items (especially tbc content, my god it’s bad).
i’ve been assigning to random dungeons in lfg and got good gear for my class just fine, don’t remember their names to be honest, haven’t felt much different from gathering m+ group
damn classic andies are this delusional about retail?
community’s desire for new content is bad, got it.
i thought we are talking about classic wow, vanilla leveling is different beast, i wont ever ever try it because it seems shadow bolt spam rotation is not a joke at all.
I have been levelling in Nagrand with a warlock and comparing retail -v- TBC classic, tbh retail wins.
It was nice being in a guild and chatting, (during TBC) but after Classic many guilds were planning efficient levelling and getting though a massive list of attunements quickly to get to the ‘good stuff’.
In retail (solo) it is chill and I am able to get into all the elite areas (more than once) and get my quests done without begging others to help, or feel pushed to spam difficult dungeons in a never ending treadmill for gear upgrades.
Levelling in Nagrand was quiet but felt immersive, running through the long grass, beating up ogres, feeling tiny near massive clefthoofs or zooming by them on my flying mount.
Switching between ground and air mounts simply for fun and immersion.
Getting Outland engineering slowly levelled and working towards making the bits for a Turbo Flying machine.
(It took way too long to get a flying mount in TBC which badly impacted everything, and I never managed to make the flying machine I wanted).
So no, I don’t want Blizzard to turn back the clock on retail and wreck levelling through older content.
Interesting, because how you feel is quite the opposite to me.
I want it to be hard and take time, that I have to plan a careful route around mobs,
maybe not be able to kill something harder without a plan, join or make my own guild for group content or just meet some like minded players.
I want it to feel like a milestone to have reached level 10.
I want the dungeons to be slower, not rush through.
I want to have class quests and plan ahead and work out how to get that special weapon /item so I can finally go head with what I wanted to do.
I’d love the dungeons to have Dungeon Sets and for them to be the content that are hard but more accessible. I’m happy for the raiding to be for the selected few.
I want to be able to be a master crafter and hunt for that special recipe that only drops in a certain Dungeon by a certain boss.
I don’t want the DPS to have healing spells but be masters in cooking and fishing instead, the Healers not to have high DPS but be NEEDED in the dungeons.
That you have to apply a STRATEGY for your character to get through the game rather than everything being on rails as it is now.
I wonder how many there are left with my view of how how it should be?
This designer team? Are you seriouse? For long years its the players complaining about leveling taking to long. In Shadowlands one top topic was that leveling would take to long, the players wanted it even faster! Players got what they wanted now. It comes from the players that they want as less quests, story and NPC-talk/text as possible. Ofc this has drawbacks.
On the classic servers many players want this buff as perma-activ, every second not at endlvl is a wast of time for them. Enjoying the journey to the endlvl is not a valid possibility in many players eyes.
Dont blame the designers for something that most players wanted and some still want, the newest generation of wow-players want nothing less that starting at endlvl.
How twisted are you in your mind for blaming the designers and devs now???
I think the problem I have is that for these players the game starts with raiding, for me, that don’t do raiding, the other part of the game that was challenging and satisfying have been moved on to raiding and the rest of us have been left without a game that fills this criteria. A game that you could do at your own pace but still retained a challenging environment.
All in all, that means that players like myself that are unable to commit to raiding is left without a satisfying game.
I’ve recognised that and will be moving on. I think I clung to a memory for far to long and I have to face it, that it is just a memory and it’s not coming back. Even the Classics have been infected by the new type of mindset among players and doesn’t compare with the original IMHO.
