What expansion made leveling content faceroll?

[Lochton]

I would say at the end of the Burning Crusade tying into Wrath of the Lich King, about there. There were some faceroll moments in classic too, though but was a little more challeneged.

[Flarelaine]

I feel like every time they did a rework of a spec, the relative power of a lower level character went up more than the content itself. I can't think of a singular point where it coalesced into what we have now, but heirlooms and the easy gearing up through dungeon finder really compound that increased base strength.

Heirlooms are theoretically as powerful as level-appropriate blues. Player power went up way, way more than that. Just the other day, while leveleing an alt, I had to heal a tank with a health pool of over 14,000 at level 45-ish. To put in into context, we went into T6 raids (Black Temple) with health pools around 10,000.

[urasim]

BC was fast if you played the right class and if you didn't have anyone to compete with. BC was much faster than the start of classic that's for sure. Wrath was faster than both.

Nothing beats Wrath in terms of dumbing the game down and making it easy. For instance... I leveled to 80 first few days(lots of people did it on day one) and cleared the "hardest" wrath heroic(halls of lightning) within 30 minutes of getting there. It was a joke. We didn't even need a tank... Just steamrolled it. Got all the achievements because we were so fast with fresh 80s. LOL! Comparing BC and wrath... BC heroics was like Issac Newton re-inventing calculus, whereas wrath was like Issac Newton taking a second graders math test.

[Heathy]

Obviously its been much faster to do 10 levels than 59, but the game has never really made it impossible to level up. Its always been faceroll if you know where the quests are.

I preferred the quest hubs of tbc, rather than the sparse nature of questing during classic, its why i've mentioned before i preferred chaining groups together and gun farming exp from dungeon elites rather than trekking large distances for a quest or two.

I think its just that once you've levelled to 60 all the subsequent times follow a very similar path or you just naturally know where you can go to reach certain break points. I always thought getting to 60 was like a tutorial, which is why i didn't really mind having to learn spell ranks, because it kinda introduced you to your abilities as you levelled and didn't overwhelm you with all of them from the start. by 60 you had ample opportunity to press all your buttons and have a basic idea of your full potential.

that full potential was always going to be easier to learn through subsequent expansions that although changed classes, didn't changed them in massively profound ways that you would have needed a massive levelling tutorial to learn what they can do again. just enough change to be interesting, not enough change for them to be fundamentally different.

[Deleted]

Heirlooms are theoretically as powerful as level-appropriate blues. Player power went up way, way more than that. Just the other day, while leveleing an alt, I had to heal a tank with a health pool of over 14,000 at level 45-ish. To put in into context, we went into T6 raids (Black Temple) with health pools around 10,000.

Fully enchanted, level appropriate blues, mind you. But yeah, I levelled a warrior in WoD without any heirlooms at all, and even that was one shotting mobs by 20.

[deniter]

It was the infamous patch 2.3 that started the ruination of the game but the actual faceroll gameplay didn't start until Cataclysm pre-patch, although they made some experiment a bit earlier releasing Mudsprocket quest hub in Dustwallow Marsh with lots of 'click an object on the ground and kill 5 dragon whelps while doing so' -type of quests.

[Daedius]

Once you had a full heirloom set, in WotLK.

[Deleted]

The biggest leap in terms of leveling difficulty was the stat squish of WoD. It made low level enemies way undertuned, especially their health pools. Since then you can two/three-shot everything even without heirlooms.

[Deleted]

Cataclysm definitely, but it kinda started at the end of WOTLK, but Cata was definitely the final stroke. I understand leveling having to be bit faster so people can catch up at a reasonable amount of time, but I don't agree with people being able to hit level cap in less than a week without even playing that much. Also the LFD and how it affected leveling when you stopped needing to even discover the dungeons before you queue, just no. You take away the need for exploration entirely, when you can just sit in a city and click a button to join a new random dungeon.

There's no journey there and when you start repeatedly doing same dungeons at certain level ranges, there's just very few unique experiences and memories there. On my BC and Vanilla characters I remember entering zones for the first time, where I struggled and where I ran into people of the opposite faction for the first time. Leveling turns into a chore when there are no memorable experiences tied to it.

[Akka]

I quit in WotLK pre-patch

You answered your question.
Leveling was already made faster and easier in the 2.2 or 2.3 patch, but comparatively not very much. WotLK made the characters MUCH more powerful and leveling MUCH faster (plus the whole heirloom thing which increased again considerably the power of our characters).
I remember it well, because it's from then on I lost interest in leveling lots of alt (it didn't felt like an accomplishment anymore).

Notice though that it was still MUCH longer and, well, "less easy" than it is now. Each expansion made our character more powerful, and accelerated leveling. So the first "big break" was WotLK pre-patch, but it didn't end up there, and I'd even say that the faceroll experience of WotLK is STILL closer to Vanilla experience than it is to Legion (which is more indicative of how much they butchered leveling than how "close" WotLK is from Vanilla).

[Narveid]

Pretty much every expansion did. And Blizzard never went back to re-scale leveling mobs health and power level. So ... Yeah.

[Akka]

This trend continued in every expansion, combined with all classes gaining extended tool kits and stronger itemisation which further pushed the game in the direction of allowing almost any class to 3 shot mobs until level 100.

Make that "one-shot" and remove the "almost".
Unless you're talking "naked char", in which case it's two- or three-shot.
I wish I was exagerating, but I'm not.

Heirlooms greatly exacerbate the issue and honestly at this point I wish they'd get rid of them completely. They take out a huge and important part of the reward loop that makes games like these feel worthwhile to play and players are just far too strong with them in all aspects of the game.

Heirlooms are ridiculously powerful, but honestly they're just adding to the overkill, they aren't creating the problem.
I leveled a char in Legion, from scratch. I never used heirloom, and I was still one-shotting mobs left and right. I even played naked for a time during Cata, and I was still facerolling whole groups.
Heirlooms aren't the culprit. The massive excess of power of our character is.
And I mean MASSIVE

[kraid]

Cataclysm for sure, I started during wotlk and took me 1 month to get to 80, I did a lot noobie things (not buying higher rank of skills until lvl 40) but it took a lot, but when cataclysm dropped I did a leveling marathon of almost 2 days and got to max level with little to no trouble.

[Deleted]

It started back in BC, however I'm ok with that, you can't expect new players to spend half a year leveling, they feel excluded and will leave the game pretty fast.
The real hit was the introduction of XP heirlooms in during wrath.

Nope they would level up and feel good when they hit lvl 70. They would not quiit.

[Growel]

To the OP: To me it was in WotLK. That's when heirloom gear was introduced. Heirloom items are typically as good as blues, but scale with your level. And then provide experience boosts on top of that.

Leveling 1 to 80 now is even faster yet, but that's when I remember it getting pretty darned easy to level, and heirloom gear was probably the biggest impact.

[Chaelexi]

BC did. 2.3 was when they non-elited almost every outdoor elite mob. Like the caves outside BFD, the maze outside RFD, the part of the temple outside the instance portal of ST, and of course Jintha'alor.

That was does to stop the tap leveling that was happening before.

[Laqweeta]

It's going to be Cataclysm

BC nerfed EXP needed and so did WotLK, that's it.

Cataclysm completely reworked leveling content, held your hand through the whole thing, and gave you overpowered af abilities at level 10. Hitting level 10 as any class in Cataclysm solidified the "2-shot"

[Elim Garak]

Leveling content was always faceroll, I had to level on +5 level mobs in vanilla to have any challenge.

[cparle87]

That was does to stop the tap leveling that was happening before.

I'm going to assume that 'does' was supposed to be a 'done.' Mind explaining what 'tap levelling' is? Some lowbie forms a group with a high level, taps a mob, and lets the high level obliterate it?

[daem]

I always felt like TBC's overall gear power creep and leveling pace was the best out of the whole game, personally.

I'll forever agree with this, BC was the game's peak in balance and progression. I miss it terribly :\