More Retail Levelling

With my hopes for and interest in Classic at an all-time low, I've been spending more time in retail, including on new alts, even if that has meant finding more random low-levels to delete so as to not run up against the account-wide character cap.

Levelling in post-level squish WoW remains kind of weird to me because it just goes so fast. I generally consider it a good thing to have options while levelling, but when you have over a hundred zones to choose from as quest destinations and then end up hitting level 50 and the "Shadowlands wall" after completing only two or three of those zones (slightly more if you limit yourself to the old world, where zones are smaller), it just feels weird and at least to me, kind of unsatisfying. Maybe I'm too much of a completionist - but being max-level, with most of the game's content already behind me without ever having touched it feels a bit bad. Sure, nothing's stopping me from going back and doing all those grey quests to pass the time later on, but it just feels badly balanced somehow.

Even funnier, as little quest content as you need to do to level to 50, if you ever set foot into a dungeon, questing will suddenly manage to feel slow in comparison, because a random dungeon can net you a level in about fifteen minutes. The mob killing and available dungeon quests give some XP, but the XP reward for simply choosing the random option in the dungeon finder easily doubles your overall gain, which is what makes it so fast.

Dungeons also have the advantage of having a decent chance of rewarding you with a piece of gear or two each run. When sticking to questing, I've found it a bit of a struggle to keep my gear up-to-date, which is extremely ironic considering that "not enough useful quest rewards" was one of those old world problems that the Cataclysm revamp was supposed to fix - and did fix at the time, but considering how quickly completing quests advances you towards the level cap now, only getting a green every fourth or fifth quest just isn't good enough anymore. My new rogue in particular really struggled with this, as she's dagger spec and for some reason most quests would insist on awarding me maces - if they rewarded a weapon at all. I think it took until her thirties until she finally replaced her dagger from Gilneas.

My husband and I also decided to take our panda duo to level 60. While we're not finished with Draenor, we're overlevelled for the content either way and can keep coming back to it at a later time as and when we feel like working on it. The Threads of Fate option had Torghast added to it in a recent patch, something I was quite excited about, considering that the hubby and I had rather enjoyed doing Torghast together on our other characters, but the experience was a bit lacklustre. The XP rewards from it drop off rather sharply as you go up in levels, but more importantly it still doesn't reward any gear even while levelling, which means that you can only do it as an occasional side activity but otherwise have to continue focusing on regular Shadowlands content for levelling, so as not to get too underpowered from scaling as your level goes up but your gear doesn't.

It just seems bizarre to me how on any given character, 99% of levelling content up to level 50 goes unused now, but then at 50 the game funnels you into doing the same Shadowlands levelling content you've already done several times before, struggling to present it in slightly different ways so as not to drive people crazy from the repetition. If only there was a really obvious solution to that, such as letting you level all the way to 60 in any content...