WoW: 59-70 in 8 days

I keep playing Warcraft. It's stayed fun but still feels kind of grindy. The good change is there's multiple things to grind on: quests, random dungeons, battlegrounds. Get bored of one and do another.

One big drag is the levelling curve. Level 61 takes almost twice the XP as level 60, and level 71 takes almost twice the XP as level 70. The quest experience goes up accordingly; Burning Crusade quests give a lot more XP than classic, and Wrath gives more than BC. You can even game it, doing level 70 quests when you're 68 and flying through those two levels. Dungeon and battleground XP doesn't scale as much though. And ultimately you hit a big slowdown. Of course the journey is the reward, but it's hard not to feel a rush.

Economics are really weird in the new fast levelling game. With all the heirloom stuff my priest hit level 65 before he'd gotten the "looted 100g" achievement. Meantime, of course, he'd spent thousands of gold on training, professions, the occasional bit of gear. And there's a few big ticket items: 1000g for dual spec, 1000g for Northrend flying, 5000g for fast flying. It would have been very frustrating if I didn't have the gold and heirloom items lying around from previous characters.

Now I'm looking to level 80 and wondering if there's a way I can play the endgame casually. I wouldn't mind seeing the 3.2 and 3.3 dungeons before Cataclysm drops. I've never seen ICC or the newer 5 mans. But sadly the way to prep for those is to run a bunch of mindless random heroics first, I may get bored before I can get that done.

I started playing WoW because I had some frustrating free time on my hands. No interesting new games, was in limbo with the pilot training, and wanted something simple and mindless fun. But now I've got the pilot license, there's an interesting new game on order, and I've got some other projects warming up on the back burner. WoW works well as a time-filler, but I wouldn't want it for an avocation again.

Comments

[Ishark]

Honestly I think that the "leveling game" is the biggest problem of WoW at this time. It forces people to go through a long grind (70-80 doing dungeons) or boring solo-quests (70-80 doing quests) for nothing (skills learned are almost completely irrelevant for endgame, equipement will be dumped ASAP). Since people are already required to run heroics to stuff for raids (something which, luckly, goes VERY fast), they could just dump the entire leveling part and allow an optional "training" quest series for people wanting to have an introduction to the class they want to play. I have people I'd like to introduce to the game who will never join simply because it would take them a couple of months of irrelevant play just to be able to play together with us, participating in some small raid.

[Nelson]

I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's a shame we all see the 70-80 leveling thing as "boring solo quests". Blizzard puts a lot of effort into that content, and for many casual Warcraft players the leveling quest game is Warcraft. But unlike other MMOs, Warcraft's endgame is so good and social that folks like us are in a hurry to get there.

[Mike J]

Have you checked out DDO? I left WoW several months ago because I was tired of raiding. DDO has a very different way for building characters and it is free to play now. If you don't like it, don't play it. You should give it a try.

[Nelson]

I did try DDO briefly, the first few levels of free content, solo. It seemed pretty good and I like that they're doing something different. Definitely more story-telling in focus, less "kill 10 rats" and more "investigate the mystery of the kobold cave". Something about the game just didn't work for me, though.

Honestly, what I like best about Warcraft is the combat mechanics. The gameplay design, the spells and talents and procs, are so well designed. It's just a lot of fun to play with the interactions of things. I've yet to see another MMO that was as interesting.

[Ishark]

Yes, Blizzard put a lot of content in the 70-80 range, some of the quest lines are really good and tell a story (even if often the steps are a bit too much kill-10-rats). The problem is that WoW is designed with endgame in mind, and most players are at the level cap. Since I mostly like group play, finding people to group with is infinitely easier at 80, so "rushing" to 80 is almost a requirement. Another problem is that the content is interesting when you level your first character, I'm at my 4th reroll so I don't even bother reading the quest texts..... maybe "level to 80 once, speedleveling on alts" would be a good addition.

I have tried DDO as well, and I still occasionally play it. But it just doesn't have the depth and vastness of WoW. I like theorycrafting, analyzing logs, customizing my interface, complex action sequences, something I have found nowhere else. Also, while DDO dungeons are nice (and many) they all look very very similar one to another......