alt levelling wish-list

[nicarlitos 13]

I thought I had enough alts…turns out I was wrong.

 

Having recently levelled a warrior to 90, I've now decided I must have a brewmaster.

 

Of course, its a bit of a grind. I think gearing up once at 90 isn't too bad and is part of the game, but getting there is soooo slooooow.

 

Here's my alt levelling wish-list!

 

1) Riding skill account bound……I HATE flying so damn slowly and I don't have the gold to waste

2) Let me fly in Pandaria….I've got 4 lvl 90 alts. I've seen this content. Please let me fly

3) Don't make me relearn all flight master routes. I've already got them on 4 other toons.

4) All classes should have a similar perk to monks to get a levelling boost

5) more XP in dungeon quests

 

Anyone else got any other requests?

(other than a free boost to 90 :P )

[Omaric 246]

FYI, this is the general forums for Hearthstone.  :D

[Peelyon 416]

zomg I did some moderating ;)

 

FYI, this is the general forums for Hearthstone. 

 

:P

[Omaric 246]

Yay!  I can only moderate the Warlock forums unfortunately.

[Archimage 98]

1-3) Blizzard is very reluctant to make more things account-bound, takes away uniqueness in your characters. Besides, who doesn't like progress? The moment you buy your master riding skills you should feel a small "woop woop" celebration. I would like a Commendation that reduces the cost of these skills. 

 

4) Totally agree with you here. One thing about the monk's Enlightenment quest is that it allows monk players understand what certain spells are for.

 

5) With each expansion, Blizzard reduces the amount of exp required to level up. Gives about the similar effect.

 

In regards to the grind of Secondary Professions, Blizzard has allowed us to Fish in Pandaria without a required skill level. Also the Tillers allow us to level up our Cooking from 1-525 very easily.

[Fouton 266]

This reminds me of a good post I saw recently on forums, which Alkraen pointed out for me.

 

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/11040694273

[Fouton 266]

His points bring up exactly what I wanted fixed with leveling.

 

His edit is exactly what I agree with, WoW does need a level squish. Right now there are 90 levels to make your way to endgame content, 60 of which came from the initial game, 10 from each of the following 2 expansions, and 5 from each of the remaining 2 expansions. This at least shows that Blizzard is learning. They're making less levels, longer content in those levels, and more gear progression in those levels. However you still have to grind 112,314,000 XP to hit the cap. That is an insanely high number, especially when you remember that 400 xp was level 1 to 2. Squishing the game into smaller levels while squishing the experience game in the exact same manner would feel much more achievable, levels would mean something, but it wouldn't fix much on its own.

 

WoW's grind to 90 without Recruit a Friend is terrible. I went around asking people the time it took them to level from 1-90 during MoP, no time spent on other level caps. Here's the answers I got:

 

Warlock: 1-90 in full BoAs. 98+ hours /played spent leveling.

Monk: 1-90 in full BoAs. ~60 hours /played

Monk: 1-90 in full BoAs with RaF. ~30 hours /played

Monk: 1-90 in full BoAs. ~92 hours /played

Warrior 1-90 in UNKNOWN. ~104 hours /played

Druid: 1-90 in full BoAs. ~84 hours /played

Paladin: 1-90 in full BoAs. ~92 hours /played

(Note: Monk times are wonky based on their usage of their own 300% buff)

 

Obviously this is just a small sample, theres people reporting that they went 1-90 in under 2 days /played with just BoAs, but the casuals of the world will never pull numbers like that. This grind is extremely long, almost as long as I'd put into any other game, but would it ever come close to the entertainment? Absolutely not.

 

Doomsaki wrote:

1). A bit too easy?

 

Questing used to have a certain level of difficulty associated with it. It is all gone. I used to have to watch out for roaming patrols of 2-3 mobs or avoid a bad pull otherwise I would die.

Now I can literally 2 shot mobs. It doesn't feel like a challenge, it doesn't feel dangerous, it doesn't even feel meaningful. I'm not an "adventurer" anymore, I am a demigod that melts packs of multiple mobs by pressing 2 or 3 buttons. It puts me to sleep.

I tried to get some old friends and new friends to try WoW and they quit before they even reached a few dozen levels. They were bored out of their minds.

 

The fondest memory I have of leveling is when I spent 1 whole YEAR at level 26, farming herbs for Resto in Duskwood. There were terrifying elites that would 1 shot me, there were a cluster of undead monsters that could disease me for up to 10 minutes, and each fight took about 10-20 seconds to succeed. If I fought something above my level, it was doable, but I would need to use all my abilities, kite and kill the mob. It was a tough battle, and there was no easy kill if the area I was in had mobs in many directions. Things would run away in fear and bring in more mobs than I could handle, or reduce my stats, fear me into mobs, or simply just put up a good fight.

 

These are things that the game needs to have re-introduced. No class should have an ability that hits for a mob's health bar without having a huge cooldown. Dungeons shouldn't be pull 2 rooms of creatures and watch as 1 AoE does 70% of the entire group's damage, all while the healer DPSs cuz the tank isn't even taking damage.

 

Blizzard needs to balance lower level abilities again, make monsters not pushovers, bring back roaming elites, rares, stealth mobs, and traps. All these would make the leveling experience feel as if there is risk. However adding all this on it's own would cause the process to take even longer, so the system needs to be shortened. How would they shorten it? The answer is in the solution to fixing the linear system.

 

Doomsaki wrote:

2). The content is too linear.

 

Back in vanilla there used to be quest hubs where you could pick a bunch of random quests or your choosing and complete at your leisure. Now we have a system that is gated behind do everything here and then go there and do everything there. There is almost no deviation from that, and the streamlining of it appears very noticeable. To the player, one can tell that the game is obviously holding your hand. It feels now that the lore and quests are built around the game's systems rather than having a game built around a rich treasure trove of lore and setting. It feels like a museum with a bunch of staff saying go to exhibit A and do the hands on activities and then go to exhibit B and do all the pop-culture related quests instead of letting players go out and explore on their own.

 

This is a very annoying part of the game. It used to be "Okay well I don't need to go to Guard Thomas and do the Eastvale Logging Camp section of Elwynn, because I did Fargodeep, and can move towards the Westwood Garrison, finish off Elwynn and head into Westfall. Now the quests (when you're not using BoAs) have you running around the world and collecting every quest you can find to move to the next zone. Sure you can skip a few, and cancel all the quests you have when you reach the next zone, but you still feel like you're doing everything you can and working towards Loremaster while you're at it.

 

When I started leveling my new Dwarf Paladin on Argent Dawn, I read the quests I received, and determined their importance and solved the problems in that order. Some people would be abandoned in their troubles (or would have been, but I needed all the quests just to get the XP to leave the Dun Morogh). I would have loved to be able to go "Sorry, but your stolen rams problem isn't nearly as big of a deal compared to the miners trapped in that Trogg filled cave. Good luck."

 

What Blizzard needs to do for this is make levels go by much faster, say cut the xp required per level by half once you have left your starting zone and the first zone after that. Elwynn can stay as it is, which may bug me a tiny bit, but further zones such as Westfall, Redridge, and the rest, will all have a new set up where you can choose to visit any 3 of 6 quest hubs in the zone and complete them before you move on. Choose the direction you want to go, who you want to help, pick quests you think are actually important. Blizzard could even have the option where you can leave Elwynn into Redridge to continue your path in that direction, or head into Westfall and Westfall can work you straight into Duskwood. Options. We need options.

 

Doomsaki wrote:

3). The pacing is bad.

 

Returning to WoW, I had no heirlooms. Still, I found myself out-leveling all the quests in a zone before I could complete them. A zone typically has around half a dozen quest hubs (or a series of linear exhibits rather). After the first two hubs, I'm already out-lvled for the zone. Whats even worse is the leveling pace of dungeons. They can just be power grinded at an alarming rate. As I leveled, I only saw a small number of zones in azeroth (never saw the revamped 1k needles, desolace, swamp of sorrows, feralas, silithus, ungoro, arathi highlands, STV, azshara, winterspring, etc) because after a few dungeons I would have gained so much xp that it seems absolutely unnecessary to even bother with questing.

 

This can easily be solved by adjusting the zones so that if you're not in BoAs, you might find yourself needing to do 4 hubs instead of 3, and if you're in BoAs, 2 hubs instead of 3. Just a bit of tweaking would bring them to a nice adjustment. I personally don't see this as an issue so much, because if you don't have to do every hub, then you can complain that pacing is bad, but if you fix the pacing so that you need every quest, suddenly you feel like it's all linear. Either way this issue isn't a big one for me, so I don't have much to say on the matter. Elwynn, however, does do a good job of this by offering you a "head to Westfall!" quest based on your level in the central hub that you always pass by, so perhaps having a shared hub quest that sends you to the next zone when you reach the right level would be an efficient way of fixing this.

 

Doomsaki wrote:

4). Low level PvP.... OH THE HORROR!

 

A lot of people seem to be dismissive of low pvp as being a waste of time to balance. I beg to differ. From the perspective of a new player, this seems like a horribly broken game. It leaves a bad impression and quite frankly drives people to quit (My friends who tried WoW attest to this anecdotally).

 

Bgs are filled with certain classes as certain tiers of levels 2 or 3 shotting other people. For example Priest penance at lvl 11 to 19 is absolutely broken, Prot warrs shielding slamming people in 1 hit etc. Low level healers are also borked. It takes half a team to kill a healer and quite frankly the bg comes down to whomever has the most healers. Oftentimes its so bad with healing that no one ever dies. There is a perpetual stalemate on AB nodes and the WSG mid-field because of so much healing. It isn't very fun and it isn't a good venue for teaching people how to play their class when the balance is so broken. Don't even get me started on heirlooms vs non-heirlooms. The power-gap is far worse than twinking back in the old days. Oh how sorry I feel for the new guy who doesn't have a set of heirlooms in bgs.

 

A thousand times yes. There's hardly even reason for me to complain about this because he spells it out so correctly. I hate joining BGs to find that every single one is 50% rogues, healers, or tanks, with the rest being undergeared players complaining that everyones so good. They shouldn't have to complain so much, BoAs should not be the best gear at each level so that twinks can exist again, and gap from BoA to slightly old greens/blues shouldn't be the worst thing in the world. If blizzard put BoAs into a nice middle where a level 25 BoA can be beaten by a level 25 Blue, but at level 27 or so the BoA takes the lead again, then you wouldn't feel so absolutely destructive in every BG you run. This would also help balance your dps, and make questing not a giant 1shot quest like 1. A bit too easy. The balancing from the earlier problem would also fix BG balancing much more, and allow for you to have well matched PvP battles that can attract a large crowd of angry nerds that want nothing more than make their opponent bleed with anger.

 

I love leveling through BGs, but there's hardly any value in it anymore, you need perfect BoAs to compete, you only win when your team outgears/levels theirs. Maybe a solution to the BoAs part would actually make BoAs scale up by bracket, not by level, so that the level 29s don't wipe the floors with the level 25s, etc. Their gear would be similar and the difference in their power would simply be what spells they've obtained, how good their nonBoAs are, and how well they play their class. Lowbie PvP needs to become a thing again. Blizzard was making money by keeping people interested in Twinking. Now Twinking is just get BoAs and beat up dem noobs.

 

On a side note, world PvP has lost its value in many places, where the world PvP has just become strange things you'd never know about, like a billion level 90s randomly fighting at the Dark Portal, the occasional city raid that doesn't receive too much attention (unless youre Renos), the current zones while playing on a PvP server, or factions starting a war for a world boss tag.

 

PvP needs to bring back some value, though this isn't too much of a low level aspect, but it also needs to protect the low level players when it exists. This brings up the final point.

 

Doomsaki wrote:

5). Flying makes ganking atrocious.

 

Back in vanilla, I always supported ganking, did ganking, and received ganks while leveling. As I lvled my first toon back in the day, I learned to avoid roads and to always watch my back. I learned how to escape gankers by hiding in bushes, swimming in lakes to dismount them, and running into caves to try and lose them in the twists and turns. It was like a game of cat and mouse and you won if you got away--a great insult to the would be ganker. Now the scales have tipped too far in favor of the ganker. He can just swoop in and kill you before u can even react. There is no chance to spot him coming at you like before. There is no escaping him after he has ganked you either. You can't hide or try to res behind that nearby hill because he can move so fast and check every nook and cranny in an instant. I never lvled on a high pop server but I can only imagine how bad it would be.

 

I can imagine this is a big problem on PvP servers where people don't want to be slaughtered endlessly just because one player wants to make the other miserable. Yes you've signed up for a PvP server, but this isn't exactly respectful playing. Bringing back Dishonorable Kills would be quite the effective way to help fix this, but it also needs to be re-introduced in a method that won't allow low level players the option to troll high level players. You can't make a 90 player get a -5% stats debuff for killing a lowbie or you will see lowbies all over world events to fuck up other teams. In my opinion the loss needs to be enough to stop a level 90 from trolling level 1s, even if it allows level 1s to troll 90s, mainly because less people will want to make a level 1, repeatedly die, just to cost a level 90 some of their honor.

 

At the same time, a level 90 won't care about killing a level 1 if the cost to their honor was just 10, since a lot of these trolls just don't care anyways. It's a difficult battle, in the end trolls will be trolls, and there's no easy fix to this problem. The solution to this problem escapes me, I honestly don't know how to fix this in a way that won't get abused in some other way, so I can't really write a solution of my own, but I have outlined the general rule on how it needs to be implemented. A level 90 needs to be penalized for trolling the level 1, the level 1 needs to not be able to troll the 90 in a way easy enough that people will make level 1s just to fuck level 90s. The penalty to the level 90 can't be something that gives the person who kills the 90 extra rewards, or people will farm the reward by letting a level 1 die to a friend, and then killing their friend for the reward. It's a very difficult situation, and honestly I believe this one is just something lowbies will have to deal with. You won't get the fun of epic ganking anymore, but at the same time, you should try to find a community with more respect if that is what you're looking for.

[Peelyon 416]

Alts are always a tough thing IMO.  If you make it too easy it becomes almost pointless to level and tbh I would prefer just an "instant 90" button by the time the last full raiding tier comes out.

 

Sadly the way the game is structured now you don't actually "learn" much playing your class in the levelling process.  It is so different to end game that it becomes a bit of a pointless grind.

 

i think you should have to pay for flying still - as gold really isn't hard to come by (the questing pays for it easily) but something similar to the northrend flying  at this stage of the expansion seems reasonable.

 

If you can already fly then flight paths aren't really that important (or you can easily obtain them yourself if you like to fly on a griffon and afk etc).  But if they wouldn't implement the flying then that seems reasonable also.

[Fouton 266]

Fixed mah post.

[nicarlitos 13]

FYI, this is the general forums for Hearthstone. 

thanks mate :)

[nicarlitos 13]

Finally got the monk to lvl 90.....fortunately pet battles came to my rescue. That was pretty much all I did from 89-90. Can easily watch TV/Youtube at the same time. I couldn't face Dread Wastes for a fifth time.

 

I still think that spending gold on fast riding again is a p!ss take. Maybe I play the game wrong, but that's a lot of gold to me...particularly if I want to level professions or buy gear. Its just a quality of life improvement.

 

My first MMO was Guild Wars...I remember being really surprised that in WoW there's no shared bank for all your toons. Took me quite a while to figure out I had to mail gold to my other chars. And forget about cross faction! 

My stance is that my toons are not unique snow flakes....lots of other things have gone BoA (like mounts and pets)...I'd like to see much more going this way. After leveling my warrior, I would happily spend 3k valor to make one of my DK's old weapons BoA!

 

If I was Blizz, I would want everyone to have lots of alts....surely that means people are less likely to burn out and unsubscribe. 

 

How about some rewards for doing it? (other than the quintet achieve!).