Old Azeroth in Burning Crusade

I had four Alliance characters at level 60 by the end of Classic. With all of them having reached 70 and me finding myself increasingly running out of interesting short-term goals to pursue on them, the time had come to look at levelling some more alts from scratch (or close to it).

Spending time in "the old world" again has been kind of nice - I hadn't even realised how much I missed it. I do love Outland, but there's something special about many of those original zones as well.

I read a YouTube comment the other day in which the author said something along the lines of (and I'm paraphrasing heavily) that Classic made them realise that what they loved the most about Burning Crusade was actually levelling through the old world while having Outland to look forward to. This really resonated with me.

Back in the day, I wasn't someone who jumped through the Dark Portal on day one - I did have an Alliance character at level sixty, but I wasn't in any particular rush. I also levelled a Draenei mage with a group of friends, and started over on Horde side to join a guild there. At the time, it was all one large game to me, and I didn't feel the separation between the base game and the expansion that strongly. My levelling buddies and I would get some quest rewards in Hellfire Peninsula and then go back to Blackrock Depths anyway just to finally be able to beat the Emperor.

This feels very different in Classic. My priest hit level 58 the other day and everyone seemed to be flabbergasted that I wasn't running off to Hellfire Peninsula instantly. However, she had so much profession catch-up left to do, and so many dungeons she never even set foot in! I'm not saying I'll stick to old world content until I've done every last thing, but I don't see anything wrong with pursuing a few more goals in Azeroth before moving on. I'll still get to spend more than enough time in Outland later.

Sadly, spending more time on my lower-level alts has highlighted how everything feels ever so slightly "off" already. This isn't the levelling experience that I remember from original Burning Crusade... because in those early days the old world was still largely unchanged - things like the big levelling nerf and removal of most outdoor elites weren't implemented until later, but in Classic Burning Crusade, they've been there from the start.

And these were changes that were largely praised as good things. There were always people who complained that the levelling in Vanilla was badly balanced, with whole stretches of levelling "where you had to grind mobs because there weren't any quests to do" - but thanks to these changes, no more! The issue for me was, I never remember having that problem to begin with, so the "solution" just threw things out of whack for me instead.

It took me until now, levelling my alts in Classic BC, to realise that this is because levelling in Vanilla/Classic was actually really well balanced - but it was balanced around the idea that you would want to take part in all aspects of the game: do quests, run dungeons and skill up professions. And since that's what I did, things (mostly) worked out pretty well for me - the dungeons would plug any "holes" in the levelling curve where there weren't that many solo quests available, and the materials I grabbed on the way would be about enough to keep up with my professions without too much additional effort required (in most cases anyway).

The Burning Crusade XP nerf on the other hand rebalanced the game around just levelling solo via quests and doing nothing else... which means that things like dungeons fall by the wayside, and professions require additional grinding or heavy investment in the auction house to be kept up to par. I've been feeling the loss of dungeons particularly hard though, because while I do enjoy running them, I also like questing, and by the time I've managed to pick up all the dungeon quests I'm already almost out of the instance's level range, leading to me ultimately being funnelled into just skipping most of them.

But even on the occasions when I have tried to form a group, it's a time-consuming process that often results in people giving up before ever getting anywhere. Even if you do succeed in getting through a dungeon it might not be in the form of getting a proper party together but rather some kind soul giving you a free boost because they feel sorry for you after seeing you spam LFG for an hour. Nethergarde Keep isn't the kind of dystopia where everybody just buys and sells boosts the way people describe it on Reddit, but I've seen for myself that it can be discouraging to spend what feels like way too much time on forming a proper group simply because the rebalanced gameplay makes levelling dungeons not really worthwhile in the same way they were in Classic.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this. I guess it just shows that the seeds of WoW messing up its own levelling experience were planted much earlier than I thought. Because at first glance it sounds so sensible: just reduce the XP required for each level, it still takes long enough to get to level cap! Make more mobs non-elites, so people can just do everything solo when there are fewer levellers around! But it all has knock-on effects, so that people group less because you made the group content less rewarding, engage with fewer aspects of the game because they just breeze past them while levelling, and it all snowballs from there.