2.3 Patch Leveling Improvements

[bryant]

In the next WoW patch, the amount of experience required for each level will go down, and the amount of experience you'll get per quest will go up.

Whee!

Edit: between levels 20 and 60.

Comments

[kaitiana.livejournal.com]

Awww, crap. The tedious level grind is part of why I stopped playing WoW, and ended up toying with CoH again. The huge timesink required in the upper levels of WoW. CoH is starting to bore me again, so that may very well tempt me back into the evil goodness that is WoW. Crap.

[bryant]

Hee. CoH lost me to WoW when levels 40-50 were suddenly far more painful to solo than levels 1-40.

[rfrancis]

Really? I find levels 35-40 to be the pits of CoH, and indeed, we recently bailed it again when, lo and behold, our primary hero and villain characters were all around level 37-38. But yes. It's a problem. (On the other hand, getting back $30/month is less of a problem.)

[kaitiana.livejournal.com]

Funny. I just hit 36 with my highest CoH char and that's when my attention suddenly waned. No wonder!!!

[bryant]

Well, this was a couple of years ago. When I hit 40 suddenly there was much more grouping for the main lines of quests, and I'm kind of a story guy so that turned me off.

[rfrancis]

Yeah, the portal missions are kind of a neat storyline but you've got to group bigtime since they're just sick with archvillains. Ah well. I can't say I didn't get my kicks out of CoH, and who knows, we may occasionally fire it up for a month once in a while. I mean, I keep thinking about going back to do some Diablo II. :)

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

Is your icon from...Underground or Underworld or...argh, I can't remember now. But I loved that game. Never played it, but the book itself was really well done.

[rfrancis]

Sadly, no. :) It's much worse:

http://www.ready.gov/america/_downloads/biological.pdf

That's right. It's from the Department of Homeland Security!

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

Ah. The book I was thinking of does a very good job emulating that "government warning graphic" style.

[marith.livejournal.com]

Huh! How come? Because everybody is bored with the lower levels and wants to get to the shiny new goodness of 70 faster?

[bryant]

Mmm. Shiny level 70...

But yeah. Also it maintains the overall leveling time -- if it took X months to get to the top level before the expansion, it now takes X + Y months, and this pushes it back towards X.

I think the time to reach max level is part of the marketing strategy for the game. Changing the max level doesn't mean that people will be happier spending longer reaching it.

[aelfsciene.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that I was less than thrilled to hear the level cap would be going up to 80 with Lich King, so am kinda glad to hear this; 60-80 will still be a grind, but I may get some of my alts up there eventually, this way.

Of course, I have too many alts for my own good (I'm thinking of moving one of my GS girls over to CH, because I don't know that I'll ever catch my poor wee priest up to everyone; I'd like to run with you guys somewhere!), so we'll see where that goes.

[righteousfist.livejournal.com]

Meh. If you ask me, the fact that the grind between 60 and 70 was so slow has led to the return of the same problems the game had before BC. With everyone's face against the glass ceiling, it's only the crazily dedicated that have any chance of being competitive,

[bryant]

Huh. What strikes you as slow? In my experience it's about a one month grind for most classes, with the vast majority of that being questing rather than mindlessly killing mobs.

On the one hand, that's not fast per se. On the other hand, it's very quick compared to most MMORPGs. On the third hand, Blizzard hasn't yet solved the problem of what non-raiders should do when they do hit 70.

I get to be competitive on my server, but I also dedicate three nights a week to raiding, and I'm not nuts enough to think that's an insignificant commitment.

[bryant]

I want to see new content, but getting reliable, solid 25 man groups together in a non-uber raiding guild is not exactly easy.

Prolly the second hardest challenge in raiding, IMHO. There are a lot of people who are happy to do 4-6 nights a week and want to progress hard; setting up one of those groups is supremely doable.

Setting up a three night a week group that is serious about not wasting time on those three nights? Very very hard. I didn't succeed in my attempt to do that.

[bryant]

Yes indeed.

[dcltdw]

It's not 25 good players, it's 24 other people with the same skill as you. There's no sense in me joining SuperUberGuild, because I don't rate.

And now I go off into my own la-la-land, which may or may not be interesting to anyone. :)

It's because of the difficulty of finding N-1 people with my 1, skill, 2, free nights as me, and 3, want to raid as much as me that I'm hoping in WotLK, Blizzard makes two tracks of tiered dungeons: N=25 and N=10.

My dream would be that all bosses drop badges, which gives raiders a baseline of gear. Best-of-slot are then specific boss drops. If you're obsessive about having best-of, then yes, you need to raid everywhere. But if you want a 90% solution, then you can just do 25s or just do 10s or just do 5s.

And yes, if you do a full 25 and a full 10 each week, and a heroic each night, you'll rack of badges stupidly fast, relative to someone who does 1 10 and 1 heroic. I'm okay with that, and I think it'd be okay for the game as well.

Oh, and you'd need tiers of badges, right. So if you have 17/17 of the first tier, then you're ready to try the next tier. You can start with less, and part of the point of boss drops being better is that you gain that extra margin all that faster.

[bryant]

Heh! There's that difference between us again.

I want to raid with the 24 best players I can find. I probably wouldn't raid if I didn't think I was good enough to run with any guild on the server.

My progression goals are very high. I won't get upset if I don't reach them, but they're high.

[dcltdw]

Hmm. Are we discussing the same thing?

My point is that, if there are 24 people who are significantly better players than you, they won't recruit you. Sure, you'll want to play with them, but that won't actually change anything.

That said, it's certainly true that we don't have the same progression goals. I've never been inside Naxx and I've never seen what's past Skeram; I will probably never see the inside of Black Temple. That's all okay by me, although it'd be much more okay by me if there were someplace (my main character, a mage) could be making progress, which is why I'm doing the alt thing again.

To be honest, I keep forgetting that Black Temple exists. I'm not even sure what's inside it. Is that Illidan? That's the SMV dungeon?

[bryant]

Yeah, we probably are. We were talking about the issues of setting up a guild. In that context, I don't worry in the least about recruiting people who're better than I am, because my ego's big enough to believe that I'd be a suitable OT (or perhaps MT) for any guild on the server. :)

[dcltdw]

Aha! Okay, I get it.

Yeah, I totally don't believe I wouldn't get pushed out the door due to low dps performance playing my mage.

...

That sentence should be taken out and shot. But hopefully you see my point, despite the double negative. :)

[touchofwinter.livejournal.com]

Competative how? That's the question. In PvP terms - yeah maybe. But you can always grind that out and earn honor (and I think they are making it easier to do soon, right?). In terms of gear with fellow players, yeah. I see some of this tier 5 and 6 stuff on people with names like "Steakboy" and just let out a heavy sigh.

There is a lot to do once you get to level 70. Almost as much as there is to do before. I'm happy to see this in so much as the older content of the game is really dated compared to the Burning Crusade stuff. The new content is better written, the rewards are better suited and the quests are just more fun. Right now I have a Warlock in Hillsbrad who goes through long grueling quests just to get a pair of cloth gloves with + spirit and + strength on them. Ugh.

[shiffer.livejournal.com]

That's confirmed for next patch? Awesome.

Also rumored (couldn't find a blue notice, but it seems plausible) is that 2.3 is when the new arena season starts. Which means Arena S3 gear will be roughly on-par with T5 for PvE purposes. Words cannot express how much this depresses me.

[bryant]

Yeah, I got nothing to say about that. Although there will be a rating requirement for weapons and (oddly) shoulders.

[michele-blue.livejournal.com]

I just want an engineer flying mount SO BADLY. Helicopter, helicopter!

(the engineer mount is confirmed; I haven't seen anything on the form it will take yet. :) )

[aelfsciene.livejournal.com]

!!! I am suddenly more interested in playing up my crazy belf paladin engineer, who's been stuck at 35 for months.

[solarmus.livejournal.com]

ZOOOOOM...RATATATA TAT...

[kodi]

I've got about 10 alts in between 20 and 40. I love the first 20 levels, and Darkshore is fun now that I know what order to do the quests in so I only have to do 4 or 5 laps. But at that point, the only thing that keeps me going is the mount, and after that I generally lose interest entirely. I've always been baffled that at some point between 30 and 40 it switches from "if you do all the quests for your level on a continent, it will level you and then some" to "why don't you grind out a few levels in SM or something?"

I keep imagining that one of these days, I'll join a guild and get to see this "end game" all the kids are talking about. At least with the patch I stand some chance of seeing 60.

[michele-blue.livejournal.com]

I totally understand. I have three - no, four - characters languishing in the late 30s because the idea of doing the 35-50 zones/levels is just abhorrent. Anything that's going to make that faster is going to thrill me.

Then again, I don't really have any goals in the game that I'm actively pursuing. I'm not earning enough gold for big mounts, I'm not consistent enough in schedule or interest to raid, and...yeah. My goal has basically been "have a bunch of 60s" and to see all the regular quests of the expansion. So there's still stuff to do. Whew.

[shiffer.livejournal.com]

I find 30-40 to be the worse level range. My belflock is stuck at 38 for ages. 40-50 is one of my favorites though - Tanaris, Feralas, and Hinterlands are all beautiful.

Plus, (on my main) that's when we started the Comparative Examination of Troll Archeology and Culture, an RP theme which lasted us well into level 60, which I guess left me fond memories of that range.

[that-cad.livejournal.com]

I wound up in Tanaris just the other day for the first time to get a flight path from Gadgetzan and almost died when I saw that they had not only a Thunderdome but also an NPC named "Christina Turner." DIED.

[michele-blue.livejournal.com]

Tanaris is goofy-cool. :)

And I miss discovery, y'know? Perils of an ongoing game. It's just hard to sustain interest in stuff after doing it at least 10 times.

I think (beyond the obvious social impact of playing with some of my absolute favorite people) that's why I'm enjoying the Horde play with the new guild. Horde still has that new-game smell for me!

[indigo.livejournal.com]

Current goal is to get my interesting (read: not rogue, cause I have a 40 Horde rogue) low-level alts to 20 by alternating rest bonuses, and then sit on 'em and figure out what's the most fun after the horrible tedium of low-level questing is somewhat relieved. My biggest complaint is how bored I get traveling in order to actually do anything - I've logged on low-level alts and then said "Screw this" when I realized I had to get from Ironforge to Auberdine and then run halfway down the zone and make it to a cave in the corner to even begin earning XP. Mounts help this, but I got my druid to 42 and she's been sitting there because I'm too lazy to mount up and ride around STV. Given that this problem won't be eliminated by an XP change, I'd be delusional to expect to suddenly want to level everybody all at once. I'd really like to have another 60+, though.