[WoW] 2.3 Levelling changes - some details released

[DeusEx]

Originally Posted by Shabado

It's probably worth giving Blizzard some slack with the whole leveling from 30-40, 40-50 or 50-60, whichever you hate most, because the ranges are obviously designed around you spending a decent chunk of your time in instances, which there is little to no point doing now.

QFT, I made a healthy chunk of the XP needed in the 30-50 range in instances (SM alone took me from 30 to 35 in a weekend), and the vast majority of the XP 50 to 60 levels. In fact I have hardly quested in the 50 to 60 range.

Of course this was on a priest during the release zerg. My rogue alt later on was much more painful to level.

[Zehn - Vhex]

I would give my left testicle if they just moved that fucking Troll for the Arathor quests to right outside the fucking castle. Nobody does those quests not because they're elite, but because you have a 10 minute run inbetween each step.

I purposefully don't touch Arathi until level 40 now just because doing that shit without a mount is retarded.

And the 'hidden' pirate cove? Please dear god why on fuck faces Earth would you have me run out to Booty Bay and then back just for one more quest?

I mean -fuck- man. Questing in the old world sucks most not because of the shitty rewards and often even shittier objectives...but just all the pointless running back and forth you have to do. If a quest is meant to make you explore (like the 'riddles' questline, or the "get 4 types of ale" quest, etc...etc...) then fine. But when you're asked to run between two different zones you've been to a dozen times...fuck.

Hopefully that new Dustwallow Marsh quest hub will be close enough to Tabetha's cabin to not make those half dozen quests out there a complete pain in the ass to do.

Here's some other suggestions to 're-vitalize' low level content...

1) Make use of the 'heroic' flag for pre-tbc dungeons. Non heroic the dungeons are designed around 2-3 people. Heroic is meant for a full group of 5. I know a literal fuckton of people who duo in WoW. The number of people who form full groups though? Not impressive. Fuck, they should do the same in TBC as far as I'm concerned.

2) As others have suggested, 60% mount at 20, 80% at 40. This is such a no brainer at this point.

3) -Every- dungeon should have about 12 quests linked to it, minimum. 90% of people only do dungeons for the quests and the faction associated with them. Razorfen Downs is a pretty kickass zone. I doubt most people even know it -exists-. Same with blackfathom depths for that matter.

And don't pull a Sunken Temple either for that matter. Any dungeon that has you go to ratchet, the hinterlands, tanaris, un'goro and badlands just to get all the quests makes me want to tear my own fucking eyes out.

4) Hopefully they revamp the tradeskill gear as well. It's retarded that for most of the tskills, by the time you can make any specific item, you've already outleveled it.

Here are some other areas in serious need or revamping:

Azshara
Badlands
Alterac Mountains
Blasted Lands
Swamp of Sorrows
Burning Steppes
Searing Gorge

Pretty much every level 30-45 zone that isn't STV or Tanaris really.

[Makata]

Don't know about 160% at level 20. I still remember getting my first mount at about 45 by the time I finally had the money, and cheetah was decent until then. I was so happy that day. Level 20 seems like it's kind of cheating the experience a little. It would also heavily marginalize the strengths of shamans, hunters, and druids at the lower levels for pvp; I don't take lightly the fact I can escape anyone < 40 right now and most people at 40 too.

I think a little more reasonable might be to having a 25% mount at 15, 40% mount at 25, 80% mount at 50, and 125% mount (req 150 still) at 70.

[Nanaki Ikanan]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Here are some other areas in serious need or revamping:

Azshara
Badlands
Alterac Mountains
Blasted Lands
Swamp of Sorrows
Burning Steppes
Searing Gorge

Pretty much every level 30-45 zone that isn't STV or Tanaris really.

Searing Gorge is actually pretty good for quests, I think it's set up rather nicely. Burning Steppes isn't too bad either.

But the rest of those, yeah, definitely need to be looked at. Alterac Mountains is like, 90% unused it seems like, so much more potential there. Maybe put a quest hub and revamp the syndicate area and put in a bunch more quests and bosses? Ogre area is decent, but it's really big and a lot of unused space.

Azshara. Fuck Azshara. Place is worthless. Needs so much more done to it to make it worthwhile. Especially for Alliance, but even as Horde it pretty much sucks. Such a cool looking and well designed zone too, and it's pretty much empty of anything cool or fun to do.

Badlands for Horde wasn't too bad if I remember right, but as Alliance it's pretty awful. Maybe an alliance quest hub there? Or a neutral hub with a lot more quests? And do something about uldaman, place is useless, and has a lot of potential if it gets a good revamp. Hell, revamp it to level 70, give people something to do.

Blasted Lands needs a serious quest-hub somewhere.

Swamp of Sorrows has quite a bit to do really. All the draenei/broken quests, quite a few horde quests in their town, I think it's pretty good as is. But a quest hub OUTSIDE of Sunken Temple would be nice, instead of running all over the entire planet.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Any zone with <10 quests total for either faction I call a loss. Takes me 20 minutes to do the thorium brotherhood quests (useless faction now, thanks!) and then there's the whole lighting the watchtowers quest which is rather fun but again, wicked quick. Oh, and the fucking outhouse quest with it's "RUN ALL THE FUCK OVER THE WORLD FOR 3k XP!" awesomeness. For searing gorge that is.

Burning Steppes might be different for the Alliance, but there's, what, 6 quests out there for the Horde? And even then they're mostly just done so you can get the BRD/UBRS quests.

I think the biggest issue I have with badlands/searing gorge is it's such a fucking pain in the ass to run all the way there, -especially- as Horde.

Swamp of Sorrows is another 'way out of the fucking way' zones that take too much effort to get to. By the time you've finsihed STV you're probably more likely headed to Tanaris and Feralas, and by the time you've finished those you've outleveled SoS.

Speaking of which, here's another hope I have...the following 3 questlines need to be made completely fucking awesome.

1) The Fallen Hero of the Horde questline is the only reason too head out to SoS/Azshara and everywhere else it sends you. Consdering how actually difficult the last boss of this quest line is (OH FUCK OH GOD HE KNOCKED ME OFF THE LEDGE OH FUCK OH GOD)...the reward should be a 20 slot bag and the Shard of Afrasa should be made into an epic trinket with a variable effect (depending on class) that has a right-click effect of porting you to the base of the Dark Portal.

2) Linken's quest. The boomerang reward should have it's cooldown lowered to 30 seconds and be a 2 second incapacitate. Code it to not work in Arena's and/or just be 'unreliable' against >lvl 60 targets. The sword should lead to a legendary quest line in WOTLK or some shit for a supercharged version that shoots swirling fairy magic at enemies. Paladin/mage/warlock legendary of course.

3) Finally, the Battle of Darrowshire quest. After completing the questline you get a "Honorary Knight of the Silver Hand" title. The teacup you get is now unlimited charges and shares it's cooldown with mana/health pots.

All 3 of those questlines made me happy in my pants the first time, but other then the Spirit of Aquementus v 1.0 which got nerfed to shit, the rewards were all ass and made the entire series pointless. Considering how absolutely hard #1 and 3 were to actually do (So much so that there was an actual petition to have the Battle of Darrowshire quest made into a raid quest), it's silly that they were never worth doing.

[Kodylan]

Azshara

This zone is in dire need of a revamp of all the ones listed. It's pretty much pointless to go to. I think I visited it all of four times even at level 60 when Azuregos was a viable raid target. Since then? Not once.

Badlands

This area could use some kind of quest hub for Alliance and the Horde hub could use more quests. There are a *lot* of mobs in this zone, yet the quests are scattered all over the place, and not many of them really overlap with each other.

Alterac Mountains

This zone is fairly small, but it really does not a couple more quests for both Horde and Alliance. I won't go as far as saying it needs a hub, since it's rather small and Southshore/Tarren Mill are both relatively close, but it does need more quest content.

Blasted Lands

Remove those elites from where Kazzak used to spawn and introduce an outdoor world pvp area there like Lake Wintergrasp in Northrend. Put in daily quests there that reward xp for completing them in the mid 40s to low 50s.

Swamp of Sorrows

Mostly agreeing with Nanaki here, although Sunken Temple doesn't need a hub right outside of it. That said, the broken camp for alliance and Stonard for horde would be perfect hub locations for the ST quests.

Burning Steppes

I never really liked this zone as alliance. There are a decent number of quests here, but hardly any of them overlap. There's also no quest involving the Altar here, which makes little sense.

Searing Gorge

This zone is honestly fine, other than it maybe needing one other quest dealing with the elementals, and one dealing with the crystalline spiders. The rest of it is fairly decent because of the TB quest hub.

---

My zones:

Arathi badly needs better quest hub placement. The alliance hub seems cool at first since you're in the middle, until you realize the quests have you bouncing around Arathi like a ping pong ball. I didn't actually do the zone on my horde warlock, but I can't imagine it's any better since horde are off in the corner.

Felwood. Hands down some of the *worst* quest hub placement in the game for alliance. I haven't done the zone as horde yet so I can't comment, but for alliance you run the length of the entire fucking zone for several quest chains. Absurd, even on a mount. The horde encampment should be revamped to be a Cenarion Circle camp for both factions, same as the southern and northern camps, and that be an intro for working on CC rep instead of having to grind the shit out of it in Silithus.

Hinterlands. Again, can't comment for horde, but it's completely and utterly pointless to go to for alliance. I would just assume grind my way through levels than deal with that shithole of a zone; the number of quests here for alliance are pathetic and have you running across the entire map, much like Felwood.

[Kodylan]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

1) The Fallen Hero of the Horde questline is the only reason too head out to SoS/Azshara and everywhere else it sends you. Consdering how actually difficult the last boss of this quest line is (OH FUCK OH GOD HE KNOCKED ME OFF THE LEDGE OH FUCK OH GOD)...the reward should be a 20 slot bag and the Shard of Afrasa should be made into an epic trinket with a variable effect (depending on class) that has a right-click effect of porting you to the base of the Dark Portal.

That trinket should definitely at least be blue. It boggled my mind to see that reward come from such a long, involved, lore-filled and difficult quest. It's easy to tell it was created before they realized difficult quests should have great rewards. Shit, look at the trinket from Hellfire for doing 3 non-elite quests right next to each other and then killing an elite.

[Tolanin]

biggest problem is its just pointless to do most of the 50-60 stuff now.. there were so many fun and interesting quests there in that range in term of the wow storyline and now 99 percent of people skip them because they are group/instance quests with rewards that while in some cases decent at release because the upgrades were harder to get just arent worth the hassle when you can hit outlands and upgrade right away.

I for one hope they go back and do heroic versions of the undead dungeons for wotlk, by the time it comes out most of the people playing wow wont even remember scholomance anymore which is a real tragedy for such an amazing zone.

fallen hero of the horde is prolly the longest quest chain ive ever done in wow and i bet most people have never even heard of it... on the same token you have all the silithus sceptre questlines that were awesome and now everyone misses out on that lore unless for some reason they find broodlords head hiding in a box somehow.

[Campa]

Originally Posted by Goliath

Lol, you will be 60 by the time this patch is released if you play more than 10 minutes a day. Patch 2.2 wasn't nearly as complicated as 2.3 and it took months. You're unfortunately sol, cancel your subscription and go back later is what I'd reccomend.

Uh rewriting the sound engine >>>>>>.....>>>> anything in 2.3

They were shooting for 2.3 on PTR this week but the cluster fuck that is and continues to be 2.2 pushed that back with 2.2.3 getting priority.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Hinterlands is ~okay~ for the Horde. The Jintha'Alor quest line should prove interesting if it's made non-elite. I'd rather they just turn that into a test bed for an 'outdoor' dungeon zone and just add more elite quests for it, complete with meeting stone. It has some pretty nice rewards though.

The only problem is, again, there's a half dozen quests for it that require you to run the fuck all over to get, plus it's way out of the way.

If the quests were worth 8k xp or so instead of 3k it might be worth doing. As is it's maybe a levels worth of xp, level and a half if you go earlier.

Felwood/Winterspring just don't have enough incentive to get you out to those area's either. Winterspring, for the Horde at least, is like, what, 7 quests? Felwood is even worse as it has you running all the fuck over that zone for dick rewards.

One thing I'd like to see is the Cenarion/argent dawn/thorium brotherhod/Furbolg/emerald circle factions made relevant. I mean seriously jack the faction that you get for these up so that if you do all the quests and maybe grind out a few repeatable/dailies for an hour tops, you get access to blue/epic quality buyable loot.

Oh...and either finish the Eranikus quest line or refund my fucking shard you cockfucks.

[Campa]

There is a lot they could do to help the old world, like finishing all the unused areas :P, especially with WotLK & its level increase it would be nice if they added some 60-70 zones in Azeroth that had TBC treatment. Because while I've enjoyed going through TBC this first time, I don't particularly look forward to doing it again with a Death Knight. And god forbid they try to use the TBC factions in any way in WotLK because finding TBC instance runs once WotLK hits is going to be as "fun" as it currently is in Azeroth.

Unless of course 5 DKs can run them :P

[Dunkelheit_vz]

I have 5 level 70s now and 1 lvl 61 and I quit 4 months ago.

With all the new stuff for the lower levels, I am sure that I will come back and get to lvl 70 with all classes.

And I hope that they seriously give us one new slot when the death knight arrives, because I want all classes on lvl 70 (or 80) on one server.

For the revamp of zones:
Doing the old zones repeatedly is tedious, because you have to travel too much. This might be interesting on the first 2 chars, but not on the 5th I can tell you.
I never really understood why they put in more quests on each hub and I looked for more quests and always had the feeling that I did not do all the quests in zones like Azshara, because there is such a big zone and by far not enough to do.

For the epic questlines:
Up the rewards and/or make them soloable. I love the fallen hero questline, gives a lot of exp, too.

[spronk]

You guys haven't leveled in a while imo, I just hit 61 (~9 weeks real time so far) and I can definitely say 50-58 was insanely fast. There are way to many quests really (a good thing) and a smart person can quickly figure out which ones to do and which ones to dump - hint, the ones that have you run like a fucktard around the world aren't worth keeping, except for lore/sentimental/etc reasons, like links boomerang quest.

The biggest bog is from 35-45 or so, and the new dustwallow seems to be a great hub for that. The thing that makes outlands great, and the 1-20 zones, and hopefully the new redesigns, is that you can pickup 5-10 quests at once, bang em all out over a few hours, then turn in for a massive xp gain. If your smart about the old world you can still do that but it takes some pre-planning and decision making on which quests to do and in what order. If they fix stuff up so its more automatic and less "fuck this quest" frustrations, good stuff.

The instances being tweaked is also good, hopefully we'll see more people run them at lower levels. On my server there really is a group always running some lowbie instance, you see lots and lots of alts or rerolls or such running them. Think it just depends server to server.

Whats really interesting is what is driving Blizzard to do all this? There aren't hundreds of thousands of new subs coming in monthly anymore. New markets? Expansion delay so a carrot for people to roll alts? Focusing a lot on casual issues (alts, leveling, guild banks, voip, new dailies, rep gains, etc, ZA) is very good for the future of the game, I wonder if they are rethinking Sunwell as a 10 man instance.

[Simas]

The biggest reason it sucks so much is b/c its all pointless now. Its just a race to outlands where ilevels jump and itemization gets less fucked up.

Blizz fucked up when they offered no reason what so ever to play in vanilla wow after TBC came out. Vanilla wow is shitty quest rewards, running that same long ass road all the way the fuck down STV w/o a mount, travel across the water to the other continent then bring your ass back quests, no instances because you're solo, all the while at a leveling speed thats fast enough to mean no items you get ever mean anything to you while still slow enough to piss you off.

They just need to make up a heritage quest or something that you can do at level 70 that lets you auto level to 58.

[Jabberwhacky]

^ What he said.