Old Content Insanely Nerfed But Still Level Locked

[Luxeley]

As someone in the opposition of yourself, I've always dps'd in PVP and I am gearing for heals, I strongly agree. I think Blizzard is most definitely going in the wrong direction with less casts on the move and less instant casts. Blizzard is taking the most under-appreciated and difficult role in the game and making it even more thankless and difficult.

Plus, I also agree leveling is simply going through the motions now. Part of it is being stacked with Heirlooms, but part of it is also the rinse and repeat a few too many times.

[bobo333]

i started playing half way through tbc, and a lot of my questing experience was spent corpse running. drinking every 3 mobs and trying to get the pulls right lest i get killed again.
my first alt was a hunter, and i distinctly remember having to use traps in lowbie dungeons to make it easier on the tank

[LongTimeCreeper]

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.

Original and TBC was longer leveling (much more time consuming) but was by no means challenging (save a few quests sprinkled here or there). There is nothing wrong with my statement. If you thought it was challenging, well, that's on you. It wasn't.

As for normal mode dungeons, nope, no challenge either (especially after the release of Wrath). And they were not meant to be. Most people don't want to spend a ton of time leveling. They'd rather get to end game ASAP. And I don't blame them. That's when the game starts

[Vargas]

Leveling has never been hard, neither have leveling dungeons.

People need to put their e-dicks away and quit trying to be impressive; its not working.

[Selah]

It's not just mobs that will be reduced in numbers. It will be everyone and everything, including players. It's not going to make anything easier. For the record, Wrath instances were always insanely easy, even when they were current content. AoE spam and everything is dead.

[MetroStratics]

Its not actually "extremely nerfed" your character is just too powerful. There are plenty of ways you can implement challenges for yourself in this game. Maybe you should consider some of them!

[Doomchicken]

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

None of the leveling dungeons have ever been hard though. :|

[Bigbazz]

It's not just mobs that will be reduced in numbers. It will be everyone and everything, including players. It's not going to make anything easier. For the record, Wrath instances were always insanely easy, even when they were current content. AoE spam and everything is dead.

And yet they were still more difficult than Pandaria instances, less difficult than Cata instances (pre nerf) and TBC instances (pre nerf). AOE Spam and everything is dead even applies to Challenge modes, and they are difficult. The shift in instance play happened when Blizzard made classes much stronger and gave them amazing AOE/Cleave in WOTLK, and the trend has continued. Cata heroics were not hard for the same reason as TBC heroics, most of the TBC heroics were easy and required CC only because your tank would die easily, in addition to losing agro if you didn't.

To make Cata heroics difficult they had to take a completely different approach to TBC, because tanks now had amazing AOE tanking (compared to 0 in TBC) and way more survival utility (basically zero in TBC). WOTLK heroics were no less difficult than previous, the classes were a lot stronger though. Pandaria has hit an all-time low in dungeon difficulty, much more than WOTLK ever did.

[Gwiez]

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.

When I first started playing, I had no idea what I was doing. I think I did "entangling roots" then wrath until it got to me, then moonfire, then bear form melee, then hope it died before I did. I thought gear with +fire damage would make my hits do fire damage. I made another druid during cata, equipped with heirlooms, and steamrolled through the same content. I'm not even talking about elite mobs that had been made non-elite.

If you want to give yourself a challenge, you could try severely undergearing yourself. I expect they're not going to update low-level quests again. They spent a lot of time on it for cataclysm, and I don't think as many people experienced the new leveling experience as they'd hoped. Quests have always been level locked, to prevent getting carried super fast and to prevent getting gear that's way above your level.

[Barnabas]

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.

You got outvoted by the solo players. Wildstar seems like a game you'd enjoy if you want some challenge while leveling, dungeons etc.

[Nazmina]

Don't know if anyone mentioned this.

But the extreme ease of low level content has nothing to do with a conscious design decision but rather is the result of the player tuning up they do near the end of each expansion as they release the pre patch for the next expansion.

They make numerous changes to class design which may make current bosses harder, to compensate during the tuning pass they let players just be out right stronger than they were before, this cascades down and they used to handle it through base values.

Most low level content is easy right now because the base values of abilities have vastly outpaced the mobs they were originally intended for. You see this alot in BC and WoltK content where say lv 80 woltk mobs still have the 12.6k hp they started with 4 years ago, but numerous class changes have pumped player damage up to one shot that with an instant cast.

Blizzard doesn't seem to really want to go back and re tune old content or low level abilities considering the time investment vs reward of doing so. Instead with free 90 and 90 boost they want to work on making a greater breadth of content for WoD and with leveling rares and TI inspired system hopefully give leveling players a challenge should they seek it.

In the process of removing base damage from abilities and squashing hp and damage perhaps we will see old content become slightly harder due to the loss of the exponential gear jumps between Classic, TBC, Woltk that make the issue more noticeable.

[Gandrake]

I assume you have heirlooms

Heirlooms have nothing to do with being capable of dropping 5k WoGs at level 76.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-alHOxy1eE

[DaFuzZ7]

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?

That is like throwing a kid who cant swim into a pool and say "Swim, damn you!"
You have to remember, you were new at one point too.

[Didacticus Syntacticus]

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.

Something that happened in the past couple of years is that the number of new players solo queuing for leveling dungeons went from "well over half the players you encountered in low level instances" to "zero."

So now when you go into low-level instances there are 4 other people who have been playing the game for years geared out in heirlooms, and not a drop of new blood in sight.

[mercychan]

The issue is not heirlooms. The issue is stat scaling between expansions.

[Seegtease]

Most people don't want to spend a ton of time leveling. They'd rather get to end game ASAP. And I don't blame them. That's when the game starts

Which is a sad note. Why have levels at all? If the only thing that matters is max level, why have anything not max level?

Of course it's this mentality that drove me away from MMORPGs anyway. I like to play games for the journey, the adventure. End game is where it gets boring, repetitive, and more grindy. Is the idea of fun simply running the same raid every week? There's no exciting exploration and the growth is only through gear. I mean, this mentality has always been there, but at least in Vanilla leveling was challenging. It was epic - you had to really watch your back out in zones and it was really fun to overcome challenges. There's no challenge in the game anymore aside from heroics, which is like, the most boring aspect.

I guess I just come from a D&D mentality where there is no endgame - you journey, you find epic loot as you go, and you get stronger. You enjoy storylines and you overcome hurdles at all levels. You don't say "I'm only a level 10 fighter" you say "I'm a level 10 fighter and there are new challenges to overcome."

Every level in a game should be worth playing. New adventures should be available with each level, and they should be fun, challenging, and worth doing.

Having 90 levels where 89 of them are pointless is just bad design.

[Deleted]

Which is a sad note. Why have levels at all? If the only thing that matters is max level, why have anything not max level?

Of course it's this mentality that drove me away from MMORPGs anyway. I like to play games for the journey, the adventure. End game is where it gets boring, repetitive, and more grindy. Is the idea of fun simply running the same raid every week? There's no exciting exploration and the growth is only through gear. I mean, this mentality has always been there, but at least in Vanilla leveling was challenging. It was epic - you had to really watch your back out in zones and it was really fun to overcome challenges. There's no challenge in the game anymore aside from heroics, which is like, the most boring aspect.

I guess I just come from a D&D mentality where there is no endgame - you journey, you find epic loot as you go, and you get stronger. You enjoy storylines and you overcome hurdles at all levels. You don't say "I'm only a level 10 fighter" you say "I'm a level 10 fighter and there are new challenges to overcome."

Every level in a game should be worth playing. New adventures should be available with each level, and they should be fun, challenging, and worth doing.

Having 90 levels where 89 of them are pointless is just bad design.

But hey. thats Blizzard now days. I just dont get how ppl are like WOW IS SO GOOOOD GAME NOW. You can fucking buy lvl 90 char and then blindfolded see the content trough Que up system. Dont forget you can loot the EPIC items from the fucking ground. How is wow come to this point? How blizzard let things go this SHITTY. Game should be CHALLENGING and it should go harder and harder and harder the further you go. But no. Fuckit. lets make this game kindergarten easy and so boring that you dont have to do anything for your goals.
Sorry about this rant but im so sick of this all fanboyism how they cant see how fuckdup this game is and how Blizzard can fuck up this hard a game that we used to love.

[Didacticus Syntacticus]

But hey. thats Blizzard now days. I just dont get how ppl are like WOW IS SO GOOOOD GAME NOW. You can fucking buy lvl 90 char and then blindfolded see the content trough Que up system. Dont forget you can loot the EPIC items from the fucking ground. How is wow come to this point? How blizzard let things go this SHITTY. Game should be CHALLENGING and it should go harder and harder and harder the further you go. But no. Fuckit. lets make this game kindergarten easy and so boring that you dont have to do anything for your goals.
Sorry about this rant but im so sick of this all fanboyism how they cant see how fuckdup this game is and how Blizzard can fuck up this hard a game that we used to love.

By "we" I think you are referring to a smaller group of people than the majority of players.

[Seegtease]

By "we" I think you are referring to a smaller group of people than the majority of players.

Of course we are, because Blizzard is (and always technically has) catering to the largest audience to maximize profits. Other MMOs follow suit, because nobody wants to make a game that is challenging all the way through, because it doesn't sell as well. Just leaves people who like the challenge with nothing to play, sadly.

[Raugnaut]

The old content hasn't been nerfed- the various classes have been significantly buffed since the release of the older content. Thats why Heralds is so easy- Algalon, while he did get nerfed, didn't get nerfed to the point that you could faceroll him. The classes have all been buffed since WotLK, to the point that all classes preform much better then they did during older expansions