Add some danger back to the leveling experience!

#1 - July 25, 2012, 1:03 a.m.

Hi everyone. I’m a player who used to play pretty heavily during vanilla and who have recently come back to World of Warcraft.

To get back into the game, me and my friend decided we would level up new characters to see all this new amazing content Cataclysm brought in.

I must say, Blizzard has done an amazing job with the leveling experience. The revamped content is great, the zones are so much smoother, classes have better skills to level with, and things generally don’t feel as “clunky” as they used to in vanilla.

There is however one thing I really miss, and that’s some danger during the leveling experience. Vanilla absolutely had its faults, I stopped leveling more than one character out of sheer frustration (old Westfall anyone?), and sometimes the leveling experience was downright hazardous, like pulling certain camps would be tricky as several mobs would often aggro and swarm you, but this also made it exciting and kept you awake.

My friend and I have been leveling for quite some time now and not once have we been close to dying yet, mobs are placed far apart so that we only ever have to pull one at a time unless we go out of your way to pull more.

We were also disappointed to see that all elites have been removed from the world. Elite quests were fun and exciting, and if you were really bold you could have a go at soloing them, which made for a great challenge.

Why have Blizzard removed these aspects of leveling? It feels like playing Diablo 3 through normal mode, if that makes any sense to some of you, you have to make an effort to die and that dumbs it down a little.

So bottom line is, the new leveling experience is a great improvement, but how about adding a bit of danger? Anyone here remember the Sons of Arugal in Silverpine forest? Level 25 elites placed in a level 10-15 leveling zone. You had to avoid those bastards, and if you were careless you’d run into them and get torn apart which added a huge sense of danger to the zone, which was already very creepy.

There's nothing wrong in killing players from time to time while they are leveling. Dying all the time is frustrating, but getting your !@# handed to you while questing can force you to wake up and actually make an effort to improve your gameplay.

And for the record, we're not using heirlooms, so let's not even begin discussing that =)

Edit; After reading several pages of this thread, I’d like to include this bit as some have a tendency to simplify things. I am not saying I want things back to how they used to be in vanilla, quite the contrary; I enjoy most of the changes that have been made. I just wish the difficulty wasn’t scaled down to such an extreme degree. I’m fine with not being torn apart by elite mobs at every corner I pass, I just want to be challenged a little every now and then, and I'm sure even the average casual player would agree that the current state of leveling is a little too easy.

I'm very puzzled to see that those who have a tendency to do this the most are actually the blue posters in this thread. They seem to answer my arguments with arguments like "Vanilla was so terrible, you were torn apart by mobs, you had long corpse-runs, you had to get groups for everything, surely you don't want the game to be like that again?"

No of course I don’t, but can’t we have something in between?

Takralus

Community

#26 - July 25, 2012, 11:09 a.m.

Having also levelled through vanillla, I'm familiar with the 'dangerous' experiences mentioned by the OP. Due to several things such as the sprinkling of elite mobs throughout zones, loot and quest rewards that weren't really that good for anyone (Hmm, a cloth item with strength and intellect, but hey, it's an upgrade for my warrior so I'll equip it!), and of course something we all face when new to a game — the great unknown — it did seem a lot more challenging.

But in reality, all I ever did with those elites was to give them a very wide berth. If I had a quest that involved killing them, most of the time it would sit and rot in my quest log until it went grey because it required more people to help, people that were busy off having their own adventures. I personally don't miss those quests taking up space in my log, and I'm also kinda glad that if I accidentally stumble into an area that used to be inhabited with elites, it no longer means a long time-wasting trip through black and white land to reclaim my broken corpse. I can't speak for everyone, but I don't think dying is much fun and I try to avoid it at all costs.

If you'd like to try levelling with an extra element of challenge, firstly you should go solo, it's not really surprising you find it easy with a friend. Secondly, if you want danger, roll on a PvP server. If you have a real death wish, pick a realm where the opposing faction has a higher ratio. Next up, try levelling in zones aimed at higher levels. It'll significantly raise the chance you'll take on more than you can handle. Lastly an obvious one: No heirlooms.

Takralus

Community

#29 - July 25, 2012, 11:19 a.m.

25/07/2012 12:14Posted by Kitsuné
This is true. If the mobs just had a bigger hp pool could create the illusion of difficulty. I find killing mobs in three seconds a bit boring personally.

Would taking 10 seconds instead to kill each mob give you a better game experience while levelling? Considering how many mobs you have to get through for some quests, that could get really grindy :S

Takralus

Community

#40 - July 25, 2012, 11:48 a.m.

What really can get annoying is how fast you get through with a zone, specially with heirlooms. And I know what you're gonna say "take your heirlooms off then!", but the problem isn't the rate at which I level.. After like 5 lvl 85s I don't really feel like wasting months and months to level a new alt, yet if zones could be available for a few more levels....

I like to see the areas, the quest lines and follow a new story, yet it gets a bit disheartening to keep going when all your quests are green or gray and you can one shot every single mob along the way.

That's a valid point, but it's a side effect of equipping heirlooms.

You admit yourself that you want to level quickly, and that's what heirlooms are for, to give you the desired effect through bonus XP as well as ensuring you always have decent stats for your level. However, quest XP also has to be tuned for players not wearing heirlooms and/or with guilds that don't have the bonus XP perk. For example, if you gain 5 levels in a zone by the time you reached the end of that zone, non-heirloomed players will have gained nowhere near that much, so the level of difficulty has to reflect that.

Takralus

Community

#60 - July 25, 2012, 1:17 p.m.

That's a valid point, but it's a side effect of equipping heirlooms.

You admit yourself that you want to level quickly, and that's what heirlooms are for, to give you the desired effect through bonus XP as well as ensuring you always have decent stats for your level. However, quest XP also has to be tuned for players not wearing heirlooms and/or with guilds that don't have the bonus XP perk. For example, if you gain 5 levels in a zone by the time you reached the end of that zone, non-heirloomed players will have gained nowhere near that much, so the level of difficulty has to reflect that.

I sometimes wonder what the point of bringing up concerns, suggestions and criticism to Blizzard is, when the standard modus operandum from you guys is to reply "It's fine the way it is".

It wasn't always like this, and especially not on the US forums. I'm not sure when it changed.

Why so negative? I don't know why you feel my answer in any way says "It's fine the way it is". A player brought up an aspect of levelling they dislike, and I was trying to explain why it works that way in the hope that this would encourage more discussion, feedback that we can pass on to the developers.

I would prefer a different model for heirloom XP: instead of applying immediately, it goes into a bank, and then you can use that XP bank to grant levels (like I presume the RAF level granting thing works, though I've never done that).

This would mean I'd be able to experience a whole zone before the quests went grey, but I'd then be able to skip the next N levels. Perhaps I might level all the way to 30 and finish the Arathi Highlands properly, and then skip out 5 levels of Hinterlands because I'm bored with that and and head straight into the Western Plaguelands. Or I could save up and skip Outlands entirely =)

I like it!

Takralus

Community

#61 - July 25, 2012, 1:28 p.m.

You seem to be under the nigh permanent illusion that something taking a very long time equals it being difficult and that that's what we're after.

It isn't. We want the content when levelling to be harder, not slower.

And it has nothing to do with us really. We're veterans, and we can do nigh anything you throw at us that would be reasonable to expect in the levelling game.

We want you to make a harder levelling game such that you can ease people into a harder endgame, so that you don't have to spend such a ridiculous amount of time making really easy and boring content at max level because nobody ever figured out how to play on the way up.

As I said earlier, I don't see longer fights against low level mobs as being more challenging at all, just more grindy.

I see and understand what people are saying here, I'm sorry if some of my answers to individual comments are coming across as responses to the issue as a whole.

Takralus

Community

#74 - July 25, 2012, 2:24 p.m.

25/07/2012 15:15Posted by Bluemain
changing things up can keep leveling very interesting, it does for me and i dont have 4 or 5 or even 10 level 85`s. Im just about to finish my 34th

Thanks for your input Bluemain, and omg grats :O

Takralus

Community

#103 - July 25, 2012, 4:39 p.m.

I wouldn't mind levelling being far more interesting than not dieing and just steamrolling 4+ mobs at a time untill Cata zones. As dieing while it may be stressful and un-wanted by a good few of us if we don't have danger in the world well it results in us not understanding if we're doing something wrong and how to over-come what we did wrong, such as being more carful with our pulls or using the correct combination of abilities to overcome those mobs. It also results in what you see in PUG's these days that because they hardly ever died while levelling or in randoms they believe that when a wipe occurs it shouldn't of happened causing them to quit or rage.

http://img593.imageshack.us/img593/6999/wowscrnshot010312115339.jpg
I did that with no heirlooms and by sustaining on self healing talents. Which feels way too easy for me.

Okay, nicely said, thanks :)

Takralus

Community

#128 - July 25, 2012, 11:09 p.m.

25/07/2012 18:10Posted by Xidneb
I read a thread called: "Why I won't play this game no longer", which included 12 points of, why OP didn't like the current state of the game, and the first reaction from the GM was to quote every single point, disclaiming and turning them down.

This thread? http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4940486683?page=1

I responded to the OP's 7 points with a little explanation, some insight into past and upcoming changes and features, and some counter arguments from a personal viewpoint that some players, myself included, think about the topics he mentioned — as is the point of a discussion forum. Nothing was flatly disclaimed or turned down, he wasn't told he was wrong. If you read further into the thread, you'll see we thanked people for their opinions and feedback from both sides of the table.

As always, we do value your thoughts on topics such as this, and we pass on your points to the devs. So, the more constructive and well-presented they are, the easier it is for us to do so. If we comment on a point you have made, it doesn't mean we're discounting that point at all.