What expansion made leveling content faceroll?

[Deleted]

But according to this guy:


That didn't exist.

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It wasn't "hard either" and truth be told it was little [not getting banned] like you, bitching about "how hard it was" that the game changed at all. Seriously, go bark up some other tree. You're wrong. End of story.

I never said it was hard, the gameplay and AI was basic but you did have to be careful and aware of your surroundings. It was however certainly hard enough for Blizzard to feel the need to nerf it. Now why would they do that if everyone was running around like you pulling loads of mobs while scratching their arse?

[A dot Ham]

I never said it was hard, the gameplay and AI was basic but you did have to be careful and aware of your surroundings. It was however certainly hard enough for Blizzard to feel the need to nerf it. Now why would they do that if everyone was running around like you pulling loads of mobs while scratching their arse?

Because the strategy has always been end game. It wasn't JUST about making it easier, it was primarily about reducing the time necessary to get to relevant content. Having a new player grind away for months while friends, family, and the rest of the population are out doing the "cool stuff" is a sure fire way to fail. If WoW had never changed, new players would have never hit level cap. Some, as mentioned in this thread... didn't.

Please stop grasping at straws to make it seem you didn't just get destroyed. I've already made these points here and in much more exhaustive detail. I was done with this thread last month... thanks for roping me back into it. I'm not trying to be a dick (it comes naturally) but I really don't feel like talking about it... again. You called me out... I proved you wrong, a simple apology will suffice.

[Stuttering] B-b-b-but... yes I'm sure you'll find some exception to "prove me wrong". Like I said I stopped contributing to this thread last month... just let it die.

[deniter]

Nice videos and all but they are all from 2009 and probably played on some p-server with tuning less than actual Blizzlike. Frost mage and prot pala AoE farming are plausible in good gear, but hunter and warlock won't work that way in classic. There could have been a patch,tho, where some spells and mechanics were buffed too much and for a short while players were able to abuse this.

I remember how at some point hunter pets could main tank lower level dungeons, which was ridiculous. Still remember this slogan "Why we would need a warrior? We've got a pig", when hunter's pet boar did a tank's job just fine. Same is probably true for siphon life as well, although i can't recall that.

[Deleted]

Because the strategy has always been end game. It wasn't JUST about making it easier, it was primarily about reducing the time necessary to get to relevant content. Having a new player grind away for months while friends, family, and the rest of the population are out doing the "cool stuff" is a sure fire way to fail. If WoW had never changed, new players would have never hit level cap. Some, as mentioned in this thread... didn't.

Please stop grasping at straws to make it seem you didn't just get destroyed. I've already made these points here and in much more exhaustive detail. I was done with this thread last month... thanks for roping me back into it. I'm not trying to be a dick (it comes naturally) but I really don't feel like talking about it... again. You called me out... I proved you wrong, a simple apology will suffice.

[Stuttering] B-b-b-but... yes I'm sure you'll find some exception to "prove me wrong". Like I said I stopped contributing to this thread last month... just let it die.

You can make things quicker without making it easier you just have to balance it correctly. By removing all difficulty and challenge they have made it so boring you are allowed to skip it....at a cost of course. Just don't pretend people where going around pulling multiple mobs in their sleep, they weren't. Posting videos proves f all, its like posting a speed run of Cuphead and saying see - it was easy.

[digichi]

When WotLK introduced heirlooms i started levelling wayyyy more alts, and previous low level alts (lvl 30ish) started making their way past 60.

Collected a tonne of heirlooms in cata (almost all of them actually, with all the badges being thrown at players) and i remember twinking a ret pally at 73 for BGs during that time (i miss that kind of unintended content, lol.)

So i'd say somewhere between end Wrath-Cata were things really became lenient and less annoying for levelling alts.

[A dot Ham]

You can make things quicker without making it easier you just have to balance it correctly. By removing all difficulty and challenge they have made it so boring you are allowed to skip it....at a cost of course. Just don't pretend people where going around pulling multiple mobs in their sleep, they weren't. Posting videos proves f all, its like posting a speed run of Cuphead and saying see - it was easy.

No it proves you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Those videos aren't vids of people geared to the teeth pulling shit way outside their level range. They are videos of people farming xp, not yet even level 60. It proves that you could in fact take on more than 1 mob at a time. So I go back to my original statement, if 2+ mobs were difficult for you... you were bad.

Stop bumping this thread every couple of days after it has died. You make claims about vanilla being hard... and it wasn't, it never was. You made fallacious claims about me not playing vanilla because I refuted that you simply could not take on multiple mobs at a time... the multitude of videos proves you wrong. But like most vanilla lovers, even in the fact of contradictory information your delusional rose colored glasses are so strong you simply can't see the truth.

It was a time sink. Period. End of story...

[Arakakao]

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.

FUCK NO! Heirlooms are the only reason leveling an alter can be funny. When you play the same exact zone for the 4th time it gets old pretty quick. Gaining extra xp and easily killing mobs makes it a bit less boring... but only a little.

[Eapoe]

I'd have to say vanilla made it faceroll. I'm sorry, but grinding 1 mob at a time isn't hard, it's just time consuming. So tired of people acting like fighting mobs in the world was the equivalent of going up against a raid boss every time.
Am I saying it wasn't time consuming or harder/easier than today? No, I'm not. I'm saying it just took longer and once you know how to play your class/spec, what is so hard about it?

[Akka]

Heirlooms slowly made it easier but I think it was the item squish that really screwed up the balance.

The content had become faceroll loooong before the squish.

Heirlooms made it easier certainly during WotLK. But remember at first they were pretty limited.

Heirlooms weren't the main reason why leveling devolved into a boring faceroll. The power creep of players through the change of basic mechanism was.

[Aphrel]

Leveling got easier for every expansion. But was still kinda slow and steady in wotlk.
Cata is what really "broke" it in my opinion, mop was about the same as cata.
Then Wod and now legion has been another step in the easier and faster direction with all quests being designed with group questing in mid, making it a real blitz to level in a 5mangrp.

[Akka]

Leveling got easier for every expansion. But was still kinda slow and steady in wotlk.

Only when compared to the downright caricatural state of what happened later. It was MASSIVELY easier than during Vanilla, to the point of feeling like a cheap ersatz (I actually lost interest in leveling alt because of this, while I was an altholic before, so it's not an exageration, it was something I acutely felt at the time).

[Ranger General Vader]

WOTLK had the best overall leveling experience in my opinion. It was still slow enough without heirlooms, heirlooms were still very few and took much longer to acquire, even with heirlooms it still wasn't ridiculously fast leveling but just enough to ease the burden of alts, and quest makers weren't added in until 3.2 when a majority of players had at least 1 capped character.

On a more qualitative point instead of a quantitative, I also enjoyed the leveling experience the most in Wrath because of the story, lore, and unmatched zones they created. They didn't have stupid pathfinder and even gated some of the coolest zones behind flying (or at very least making it very difficult to progress without flying). But then 12 year olds starting complaining about gold because they never understood money management. And if they really want to complain about the gold sink there were much less nuclear options instead of time gated bs (make the tome a one time purchase for the account?)

Regardless post pathfinder for me has left a sour taste in my mouth with leveling. For me part of the enjoyment of leveling is seeing huge scale environments, feeling small compared to them, and exploring them by FLYING to see it all.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Heirlooms weren't the main reason why leveling devolved into a boring faceroll. The power creep of players through the change of basic mechanism was.

This is one of those times when you take one line out of a whole post.. and turn it into your soap box.. kind of makes you look like a dumb ass. I mean I went on to say that as well. GG though. We agree.

[Army Dreamer]

Heirlooms did it, in WotLK.

[Akibaboy]

The talent reworks from WotLK built a lot more power into classes at all levels without the world really responding to it, but the mobs weren't really nerfed in a substantial way.

Cata broke old world hard - I was killing mobs in 2-3 hits, rolled a new Hunter and Aimed Shot would kill a target outright. The quests and zones posed no resistance and were often grey to you half way through. https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/2957536220 here's a post from months after Cata's launch describing this.

Things only got worse when the talent trees died and all those powers were baked into the specs outright.

[Schizoide]

Leveling in vanilla was easy and fast. You could hit 60 with around 10 days /played. I came from Everquest where it commonly took 60 days /played to hit the max level of 50. You could start leveling in the winter and not be done until it was getting cold again.

That said, the last character I leveled up from 1 was back in WOTLK and that was pretty fast. I got my monk to 80 through RAF.

I think the real question here is when leveling became so easy that you commonly 1 or 2-shot mobs. That's probably around MoP, if I had to guess.

[OniHouse]

The Burning Crusade

[SirBeef]

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.

Well that depends on what the OP means by cakewalk. I never found leveling hard even in Vanilla. It was just tedious. I solo leveled from 1-60 even soloed some elite 3 player quests(those were pretty easy as a holy pally). the only time I grouped up was for dungeons, PvP, and raiding. Coming from EQ, leveling has always been a cakewalk to me.

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The Burning Crusade

Outside of removing elites, which let's face it, were not a problem unless you sought them out, what changes were made to make leveling easier? I thought the XP changes came in WotLK forward.

[Deleted]

Wow's combat is really very simple, there is no skill based dodge, parry or avoid so being bad or otherwise has nothing to do with it. What with the damage being done the constant spell interrupts as well as miss and spell resists - You pull 3 mobs of equal or higher level you are almost certainly dead.

This statement alone proves you don't know what you are talking about or have selected memory because thats what cc was for....

[Akka]

This is one of those times when you take one line out of a whole post.. and turn it into your soap box.. kind of makes you look like a dumb ass. I mean I went on to say that as well. GG though. We agree.

Hu, no. You spoke mostly about heirlooms in your post and said they were the main reason, when my point is specifically that they aren't the root cause (though we do agree that they made the whole "looking for upgrade" totally irrelevant).
Also, pointless agressivity much ?