I've seen a fair amount of talk about Classic Wrath's Joyous Journeys XP buff, but of course retail does this kind of thing even more often - I've just never really cared about it, seeing how levelling in retail is ridiculously fast nowadays anyway. It only came to my attention this time around when I logged into my Worgen rogue on a whim, started doing a couple of quests and gained two levels in less than ten minutes, which seemed abnormally fast even by modern retail standards. When I looked it up, I learned that the "Winds of Sanctuary" buff had in fact already been active for a week and was meant to last until the 11th of July.
One of those lower level alts was the aforementioned Worgen rogue - I actually posted about it on the blog when I created her last year. After leaving Gilneas, she'd quested through Thousand Needles and Feralas before opting for Cataclysm Chromie Time and making her way through Mount Hyjal. I think I got about halfway through the zone back then, maybe two thirds, before I lost interest. She was the character I was playing when I became aware of the XP buff, and ultimately all it took to level her from the high thirties to 60 was doing a few more quests in Hyjal and visiting a few Midsummer Festival fires. In the end I didn't even finish Hyjal... I basically just did that section where you pretend to be a Twilight cultist and that was enough to get me there most of the way.
I mentioned it before, but lack of gear upgrades while speeding through the levels is a real problem if you're questing, as you get weaker and weaker relative to the constantly scaling mobs and after a while even killing a single normal mob can become a life-or-death battle. At some point I picked up a quest that turned out to be the Heritage Armour chain for Worgen and it was an absolute wipe fest. I was honestly pretty proud of myself for completing it successfully despite of that; it was just incredibly hard while wearing gear meant for levels 20-30 (I think) at 50+.
The other low-level character that got a good chunk of levelling done was the human hunter I originally created during Cataclysm. I'd picked her up at some point after returning to retail and levelled her up to the low thirties by questing through Westfall and Stranglethorn, but it hadn't been super satisfying. I decided to use Chromie Time to go to Northrend a do a bit of questing there, but again, thanks to the buff I didn't even complete all of Borean Tundra before hitting 60 and getting ejected again.
I will say that Blizzard has made one nice change here in that they at least give you a bit more warning... I always thought the one-minute timer that starts counting down the moment you hit 60 (or previously 50) was stupid, because what are the odds that you'll be able to finish what you wanted to do in 60 seconds? Now at least you get a quest pop-up at 59 that tells you that you're needed in the present and that you should finish up your business in the past "soon". That way you at least know it's coming and have a bit more time to finish things up before you get teleported back to Stormwind.
It seems to me that at this point, if you do want to enjoy more of the older, lower-level content that retail WoW has to offer, your best bet is to simply level to cap and then go back afterwards. Sure, combat will be boring/non-existent as you'll just one-shot everything, but if you have goals like wanting to see the story, working on a profession or maxing out a reputation, trying to do any of these things "naturally" during the extremely truncated levelling experience is just a futile endeavour anyway.
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It's funny, for me an xp boost in Wow is a signal to get some characters leveled, but in Swtor its something I tend to avoid. I guess I prefer the journey in the latter over the journey in the former. And I've done that both enough that neither are exactly minty fresh experiences.
ReplyDeleteI've done enough leveling over the years in Wow that I've invested in most of the heirloom gear and the heirloom learn-some-flightpaths toys. While the heirloom gear isn't all upgraded most is good enough for me to get where I want to be.
You know, heirlooms are something I haven't really thought about since original Wrath of the Lich King. Back then I purchased and used a few, but soon found the experience of using them unsatisfying (both because levelling was too fast already anyway and because I wanted to actually be able to use gear upgrades).
DeleteThinking of them in this context certainly makes me look at them in a new light - they might be the only way to not become completely underpowered while levelling nowadays. 😐
Heirlooms are generally good, but at times when Blizzard has adjusted levels and gear they have been mediocre. People then complain (unsurprisingly ;)) about that and Blizzard will soon tune them back up to be equivalent of a blue item for the level.
DeleteCharacters that got squished often needed the heirlooms because Blizzard would squish gear to match a character's level, but not squish the item level of the gear at the source so badly. To explain, I have a character level-locked to help out with getting the Herald of the Titans achievement in Ulduar. When she got squished down to level 30 all of her gear got squished to item level 35. However, all the gear that drops in Ulduar for her is item level 103 - 105. It's a mess. For her I would need to regear her if I was going to help out again, but for any other character leveling it is just easier to throw away most of their existing gear and equip heirlooms. :sigh:
Oh, I also think Blizzard expects people to be running dungeons on a regular basis as the loot bag you get is usually a decent blue item (though it is a crapshoot if you get an item you can use). Lower level questing feels more like an ignored feature only left in for completionists. :double sigh:
Just curious; if you hit L59 can you go to an NPC and disable leveling just like in Wrath Classic? That would solve the problem of being yanked back into the "present" while questing was still unresolved.
ReplyDeleteYes, you can! I've heard of people using it to finish questing in Chromie Time too. I just tend to forget that option exists because personally I'm not that dedicated to staying in an old expansion at all costs.
DeleteYour last paragraph highlights something I've been thinking for years. I'm no kind of completionist so I've always been totally comfortable with dropping quests in the middle and not finishing up zones or storylines. It's extremely rare in any MMORPG that the story is compelling enough I want to find out what happens, anyway. It's more like having the radio droning on in the background as I do something else.
ReplyDeleteThat's meant I've always found the idea that people feel somehow short-changed by not being able to complete all the quests in a zone or finish a questline difficult to empathize with but the idea that somehow it also has to be done before the mobs stop giving xp and/or become trivial to kill utterly confounds me. I mean, surely you're either following the storyline and/or ticking all the completionist boxes *or* you're trying to level. It may be nice when the two co-incide, but they really have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Does the storyline somehow read better if the obstacles are harder to push through or if you get a reward for doing it? Surely, if the point is to hear the story or fill out checklist, the less of a fight the mobs put up, the better?
Personally, if I do find an interesting questline in an MMORPG I hugely prefer to run through it when the mobs are trivial. I've done more long questlines and enjoyed them that way than I ever did when I had to do it at level. I'm not sure (Been so long now since I played) how the level-scaling in WoW works, so maybe the mobs are still annoyingly tough even after you stop getting xp from them. That would be annoying. Other than that, though. the whole "Must finish zone before it goes grey" thing makes no sense to me at all.
I've become more of a completionist over time I think, but I've always had an aversion to not finishing things, both in games and in real life. That doesn't necessarily mean completing every single quest, but at least reaching what feels like a natural stopping point for me personally. I've always hated abandoning quests, and I've never liked Blizzard's increased prescriptivism putting more and more limitations on what's "worth" doing.
DeleteYou say "surely you're either following the storyline and/or ticking all the completionist boxes *or* you're trying to level" but my answer to that is simply no, my expectation is being able to do both. It's how it was when Vanilla WoW introduced me to MMOs - there was so much to explore and see, so much levelling to do, and they always went hand-in-hand. Quests would help me level, and a desire for more XP would urge me to find more quests; it was very synergetic.
It's only over time that those two things have become increasingly divorced from each other, in the case of WoW with Blizzard becoming more and more insistent that players should only be doing the newest expansion/patch content to gain any kind of reward. Having a game that's focused on gaining levels/power and having a huge world full of content, yet making it so that those things are completely separate from each other, forcing people to engage with only one or the other, is a huge design failure in my eyes.