Old Content Insanely Nerfed But Still Level Locked

[Binko]

I'm bored with all my level 90 characters. Also they are all healers and I'm concerned about what Blizzard is doing in WoD with healers and healing. So I decided to level a hunter for something to do and to have a pure DPS backup in case healing stops being fun in WoD.

I enjoy seeing the old zones again. I even enjoy some of the questing. But I simply can't understand the rationale for nerfing the content so insanely. Everything dies in one shot and there is never any sense of risk or danger at all.

Dungeon bosses die in 10 seconds even with a fairly weak group. Here's an example of how extreme things are nerfed: doing the Nexus at 71 and the healer DCed just before a boss fight. We go ahead and kill the boss without a healer without any difficulty. The tank was an appropriate level warrior so no huge self-healing.

I don't get it. What's the thinking behind making it so extremely easy mode? And the worst part is that everything is so tightly level locked. You can't go to a higher zone to try to get something more challenging to do because it won't give you any quests at all unless you are precisely the level of the zone.

I wouldn't mind the nerfed difficulty if I could move to a zone where things are harder, but I can't.

[wych]

Blizzard wanted to cater to everybody, so they decided to make everything PvE related that isn't heroic raiding an easy faceroll unfortunately

[Ampere]

I assume you have heirlooms and are very familiar with the game?

They balance leveling stuff so that new players without good gear are still able to succeed. Just like how normal mode raids are way too easy for top guilds, doesn't mean the difficulty is wrong.

Sounds like you want "heroic questing". It could be a neat idea.

[Melsiren]

Blizzard wanted to cater to everybody, so they decided to make everything PvE related that isn't heroic raiding an easy faceroll unfortunately

Which is a real shame, some of the remade bosses look like they might have some interesting mechanics you never see.

[LongTimeCreeper]

Normal nexus (or any normal wrath dungeon) was not difficult, even when current content. Add to that new skills/spells and heirlooms and the fact everyone knows what to do there... Leveling was never meant to be challenging

[foxHeart]

Pretty sure Blizzard has said they limit what content people can do at certain levels because they don't want low levels finding ways to exploit high level content for XP.

[Deleted]

They balance leveling stuff so that new players without good gear are still able to succeed.

And this is the problem, isn't it? If new players doesn't have an incentive to learn their class abilities and gear priority, why bother learning?

[Deleted]

It's not the difficulty that the OP is referring to, it's the fact that there's no alternative. No option to do something harder, like we used to have pre-Cata. I think even the instances are gated now in the same way quests are. (at least the panda ones...try entering those when you're below the level of the quests inside)

Downright pathetic tbh, there's no reason why they shouldn't let us go off the beaten path and do stuff that's harder...after all the kiddies will stay on the path because of all the big flashing signs known as breadcrumbs.

[quote]

Pretty sure Blizzard has said they limit what content people can do at certain levels because they don't want low levels finding ways to exploit high level content for XP.

And this is the same Blizz that provides a billion different ways to speed up lvling?

There's other ways to solve exploiting in any case (like capping the XP gains on a mob or quest relative to your level...so eg. if you were more than 5 levels below it you'd get the same XP as if you were exactly 5 below it) but nooo, let's just take the laziest option and stop people from having fun.

[Binko]

I assume you have heirlooms and are very familiar with the game?

They balance leveling stuff so that new players without good gear are still able to succeed. Just like how normal mode raids are way too easy for top guilds, doesn't mean the difficulty is wrong.

Sounds like you want "heroic questing". It could be a neat idea.

I do have heirloom armor tho not a weapon. But the heirlooms are no better than same level dungeon blues you can pick up along the way.

It's just so jarring to get to a mob that is the end of a quest chain extra tough guy and he drops dead to one bullet.

"Heroic Questing" does sound like a cool idea. But what I really need is the ability to play the level of content that suits me. If I'm 71 and it's super easy then just let me go do the level 75 quests or whatever level feels right to me.

Out of the players I see leveling more than 90% seem like experienced players leveling alts. Yet Bliz is so intent on hand-holding the rare noob that they have the content nerfed and locked down to an extreme level.

[Deleted]

Blizzard wanted to cater to the worthless and lazy but noisy retards, so they decided to make everything PvE related that isn't heroic raiding an easy faceroll unfortunately

Fixed. And that's also the reason why we got stuff like MoP in the first place.

Moderator note: Knock it off with characterizing people in this way and 'fixing' quotes. [ML]

[MoanaLisa]

Low-level questing has become a morass of problems: set it right for people in heirlooms and new players would struggle. Set it right for new players (which is what I think they've done) and it's too easy for anyone that's been in the game for a while or has heirlooms. I don't know that it's worth the effort to solve it and I think that's one of the contributing things to start-at-ninety characters.

I agree that it's too easy and boring. On the other hand, difficult and exciting would take longer and I'm not interested in that either after being through it at least a dozen times over the years. Maybe something like leveling anywhere and having stuff scale to your level (a little like Adventure Mode in Diablo III) would be the answer but I don't know if that's what Blizzard really wants to do or even if it would be worth doing after all this time.

[Deleted]

"Heroic Questing" does sound like a cool idea. But what I really need is the ability to play the level of content that suits me. If I'm 71 and it's super easy then just let me go do the level 75 quests or whatever level feels right to me.

That's what we used to have until Cata...zones would span 10 levels (sometimes 15) and all the quests were available from about 10 levels below them. And if XP gains were capped (like in my post above) there wouldn't be any exploits from doing that today.

[wych]

Low-level questing has become a morass of problems: set it right for people in heirlooms and new players would struggle. Set it right for new players (which is what I think they've done) and it's too easy for anyone that's been in the game for a while or has heirlooms. I don't know that it's worth the effort to solve it and I think that's one of the contributing things to start-at-ninety characters.

I agree that it's too easy and boring. On the other hand, difficult and exciting would take longer and I'm not interested in that either after being through it at least a dozen times over the years. Maybe something like leveling anywhere and having stuff scale to your level (a little like Adventure Mode in Diablo III) would be the answer but I don't know if that's what Blizzard really wants to do or even if it would be worth doing after all this time.

Is it set right for new players though? There's literally 0 challenge from 1 to max level, apart from a few random roaming rares in MoP. I know new players don't have heirlooms or perfect rotations/builds but I think an armless man may be able to do the current leveling without dying.

There's no difficulty curve, there's no "learning", it's just a flat level of difficulty from level 1 to level 90.


I can only imagine how much worse my experience of early WoW would have been if instances and low level zones were like they are today. There's no "epic" possible when a 5 man is just walked through

[sargior]

I think its fine. Its tuned for new people and thats how it should be. You farmed heroic dungeons for 500 justice points per 15 min for those heirlooms to make it easier for alts.

Also you are leveling a hunter. I just did that 3 weeks ago and they are one of the most op and fastest levelers..

[Izalla]

I would love if they made it so you could accept quests well enough above your level that they show up as red in your quest log, go into a zone that is higher than your level and be able to collect the quests early (within reason, no level 70 quests at level 50 obviously). You could just have the tutorial that new players get warn them when they accept a quest that is marked as out of their level range and let them know they should wait until they are stronger to attempt it. Didn't take me long as a noob to realise that the red named quests were much harder than the yellow and green named ones, plus if I remember correctly Quest Helper also listed the appropriate level next to them. Blizz could do that as well.

Also beats having to stay in a zone till everything is grey just so you can finish the entire thing in order to skip another zone you don't like that would otherwise take 5 levels to get through.

[Bigbazz]

They didn't make it easier, they made the classes stronger. Much, much stronger. They made TBC instances easier at the end of TBC, all of them had a blanket 30% nerf, but that was during the TBC expansion.


Nothing really got easier, classes just got much much stronger. Low levels these days are doing as much/more dps than full BIS lvl70's did in TBC. In addition to monsterous dps for the level, these classes have self healing and great survival, higher than normal avoidance and damage reduction available, healers have stronger heals with minimal mana issues and even good dps of their own.

The reason everything is so easy is simply because the classes were weak in old expansions, really weak compared to now.

[MoanaLisa]

There's no difficulty curve, there's no "learning", it's just a flat level of difficulty from level 1 to level 90.

I've never seen anyone make a solid case for learning how to play at end game through questing.

Low level dungeons made up of random players that include new players aren't really going to be learning experiences for those new players either if they're difficult. I'm quite certain the primary thing they would learn would be what being on the receiving end of the kick system feels like. That's not educational at all.

It's not that I disagree with you. I'd like to see the game do more teaching during leveling. Making stuff harder isn't the answer.

[Venziir]

That's what we used to have until Cata...zones would span 10 levels (sometimes 15) and all the quests were available from about 10 levels below them. And if XP gains were capped (like in my post above) there wouldn't be any exploits from doing that today.

... What? This is... What?!

[Mormolyce]

I would like quest and dungeon content to be more challenging, unfortunately we're outvoted by the legions of players who just want to rush to max level ASAP.

Cata dungeons are actually still fairly challenging I find.

[ringpriest]

Normal nexus (or any normal wrath dungeon) was not difficult, even when current content. Add to that new skills/spells and heirlooms and the fact everyone knows what to do there... Leveling was never meant to be challenging

You're wrong. Leveling in vanilla and BC (before the first xp leveling nerf, and even afterwards) was a long and challenging process. Sure, it was easier and faster if you knew what you were doing, but still an order of magnitude more difficult than current "leveling" which is about as challenging as Doom in god-mode.