The best laid plans fall before the might of the overlooked detail

I had it all figured out.

I was mere hundreds of experience away from level 100. I had to make it count and I had the means to do it: N.U.K.U.L.A.R. Target Painter. What could possibly go wrong?

I rode out of Telaari Station in Nagrand and found the nearest rare. I got line of sight and painted the area. Not the target itself; the AoE is pretty big.

Ten seconds later the area was covered in ash. A windroc was dead. My skin was charred. And that was it. Redclaw the Feral still lived.

It turns out that this is not a ground-penetrating weapon. It explodes on impact, blowing up everything outside the cave and leaving him entirely unharmed.

I returned to my garrison and resolved to find another rare, outdoors, with no pesky layer of invincible terrain to save it. While I was there I checked on my completed follower missions, and hit 100.

Insta-Level would be a terrible waste

Jessica Cook asks, "which class will you insta-level?"
My response: None, because it's pointless.

Leveling a class takes a certain amount of dedication. It takes time. Less time than it used to, but 1-90 isn't a trivial investment. Not to be confused with I-90 which is currently undergoing a lot of investment. Similarly, gearing a class takes a certain amount of dedication. Less than it used to, but spending time in the Timeless Isle and running a few tiers of LFR aren't trivial investments.

As I see it, if I'm not going to have enough fun to level a class to 90, then I'm probably not going to develop it much at 90. In short, I'm going to be doing some short-term funsies playing. I can do that at level 15 just as much as at 90. I can run instances, BGs, do some crafting and fishing, and generally do a lot of what a max level character would do. If it's just to try out a class, then again, why not do that as I level up? You can get a decent feel for a class once you pick a specialization and leveling to that point is trivial.

You may have spotted the flaw in my logic here. No, it's not the subjectivity of my experience and perceptions.

Something useless cannot be wasted. If I can find no productive use for the insta-level, why not use it for something pointless? Why not snap my fingers for a max level... uh. Class. I lose nothing by it except the ability to use it for what I just used it for. If the insta-level is only useful to me for making a useless alt and I make a useless alt, then mission accomplished.

I just don't know which useless alt I'd make.

Perhaps someone else would find it useful for joining friends without burning vast sums of money on a server/race change. Suggestion for Blizzard: I would buy a server transfer if it included a race change, hint hint. Joining friends could justify the investment of time in leveling, but why not jump up and join them sooner? Of course by that logic, why not have recruit-a-friend give the new player matching gear? It's clear to me that friendship destroys all rules and standards. Friendship does not give meaning, but instead removes it and leaves nothing but nihilistic anarchy. That is why I don't like the insta-level.

Revolution 9

For years, the zero has reigned supreme over WoW. 60, 70, 80, 90, all part of Club Zero. 85 snuck in, but that was the worst expansion in WoW, so that somehow supports my point if you squint a lot. All the raids were tied to the zeros. Starting at 60, you hit a zero and you got a raid. Without that zero you got nothing but hints and suggestions of something to come.

Shintar raised a good point the other day:

Oh, and I really wish they'd make the Shattrath cooking and fishing dailies available at level sixty. That "must be level seventy" restriction is very out of touch with the way the game works now, only giving people access to something that is effectively leveling content just as they are leaving for the next expansion.

The zeros used to be the cap. You stayed at them and therefore they were the ideal place for content you spent a lot of time in: dailies, raids, reputation. But these days the zeros aren't the highest, but the lowest. 60 isn't the big number after 59, but the smallest number in the 60s.

By the 8s or 9s players might be sick of an expansion. They were probably cherry-picking the best zones and have run out, unless they really like old content. Or with the odd leveling curves they've finally finished a second zone and need just a little tiny bit of a third, and then they'll run off partway in and spend a day trying to not fill up their quest logs before they finally dump the old zone in frustration.

Why not lower the raid requirements to the 9s? It's not like the old days when special abilities arrived at the 0s or new ranks every 2 levels. Odds are you won't even get a new talent point with those only appearing every 15 levels. With the raid requirements lowered and the already-functioning cross-realm raid-formation tool players could easily do a few raids during their last level before starting a new expansion. Players who want to raid at that level would see more players, of slightly lower power, but more than offset by significantly faster queues.

Monk: First Impressions

Jab: Pull out your staff for one attack, then spend time with your hands behind your back to put it away.

 "You are an honorable opponent" - Said to the guy who walked up and, without any warning or indication, whacks them with it, while they are unarmed.

That said, I like the area.  It's rather peaceful and beautiful.  It fits with the theme.  While it is light-hearted, it is not unrelentingly silly, as the goblin area was.

You may be wondering, "Kung Fu Panda?"  Yes, but it is not a ridiculous joke or an endless stream of movie references.

This sounds like something a goblin would say:

They breed faster than we can kill them!  I have the perfect solution for such a situation: kill them faster!

This is from the same panda who is shouting at the ground in an attempt to wake the earth spirit.  And kicking it.  He sounds angry. Maybe the sha are all his fault.

MoP: First Impressions

I don't like the login music.  It fills my ears with whining hurt.

The second quest sends me to the airship, which is not marked on the map unless you pick Azshara.

After that things were generally uphill.  I was still mixed up by my new everything and did not remember inquisition.  I'm also unsure of why I am notified of Art of War procs (resets exorcism) when the cooldown isn't up anyway.  That just confused me.  On one hand, it is nice to be able to get inquisition up quickly, but generating holy power from strong sneezes is tricky to deal with.  It was smart of them to have the pool of five; I don't think it would have been much fun with only three slots to store it, too much would get wasted.

Gyrocopter attack!  Let's just try the gyrocopter attack again!  I'm out of ideas.  Gyrocopter attack?
(I'm trying to say that I was amused by the gnomes, then I killed them)

It seemed as if the Alliance was set up as the bad guys.  But the commander we kept hunting, he seemed to have the best of intentions, trying to keep the land free of the taint of the Horde.  And then he turned into scary stuff that means he's a bad guy.  That was followed up with more yelling about not bringing a war, which of course the Horde ignored.  I'm curious to see how this turns out.  I don't have high hopes for the presentation, but we'll see.

All in all, it appears to be more of the same, which is exactly what I expected, and hoped for.

Now to fix those addons...

A good group

I've a weird habit of wanting to complete dungeon quests, even in Blackrock Depths where they appear to have gone out of their way to make Heart of the Mountain hard to complete.  Getting enough keys requires pretty much killing every dwarf in lower and upper city and they despawn on zone-out, so no saving up.  That last part is new, and I don't know why Blizzard would add something to make it harder to complete a quest at the same time that they made it easier to get the quest (used to be out in the Burning Steppes).

I managed to do this on my paladin thanks to being a tank and therefore being able to drag the group anywhere I wanted.  Usually just explaining that the quest they all had needed it was enough.  Other times people just had no clue that I was taking them on the grand tour.  Strangely I never had problems with people just in it for the loot bag at the end.  My hunter did it with the help of two friends I was leveling with: a tank and a healer, so again, we could go anywhere we wanted and didn't need anyone else if they all wanted to leave.

My mage was not so lucky.  She has no tank and healer to queue with, so it takes a while just to get in.  First group had a special flower snowflake tank who wanted to rush to the end, acknowledging that he was skipping every quest and almost the entire instance, regardless of what anyone else needed.  Sadly, there is no "report for being a douchebag" option.  The second group was going well enough, with the tank seeming to want to do the quest.  Alas, I could sense trouble.  The two other DPS wanted a speed run.  That made it obvious that "we'll do the quest after the boss" was just a blatant scam.  I tried to explain that even if they weren't being deceptive liars it was still faster to get the keys before the end boss, but no, he was going to charge bravely ahead to no clue where he was going at all.

Finally, finally!  I got a group.  A group that responded to questions regarding a full clear for the keys with affirmations and references to experience points.  Oh, glorious.  Even better, the tank responded to directions, following me, seemingly recognizing that if someone in BRD knows where they are going, you go along with them, lest you find yourself lost in endless tunnels.  It all went marvelously, with so many keys that we had enough to rob the bank without even needing to loop back after the bar.  Normally I find that we need to do some looping to get enough keys, but nope, plenty.  So we robbed the bank and looped back to the main path to the bar.  Things went well, at least until the bar when the tank had to go after a terrible incident with the Dark Keeper.  As these things go, they went downhill, until I was the only one left.

I decided to stick around.  I had a wonderful present after all: an open bank.  Finally, a new group formed.  With a little bit of confusion on their part, we finished off the bar and the Dark Keeper boozing within.  Four people got the heart of the mountain without needing to spend an hour and a half in BRD slaughtering dwarfs, which I suppose could be seen as an unfortunate loss on their part.  Still, I'd seen how tricky it was to get the quest finished, what with people rushing and not reading, so I was very happy to have been able to help out four people like that (plus the previous four).  We move along smoothly, with people again following directions.  At the end I thanked the tank for that and he thanked me for the guiding and everyone else thanked the tank for tanking.  The healer joined me in queueing for Lower Blackrock Spire.

Our tank didn't know the way and told us to say if he was going the wrong way.  I asked if that was our cue to trick him into doing upper spire too.  The healer said yes and the tank went along.  So up we went.  There were some problems regarding the healer forgetting that if we're not 85 we're not invincible and then a DC.  Still, the boss died.  I then invited them to a rousing game of Jump From Upper Spire to Lower Spire and Hope We Don't Die From the Fall.  We all survived the fall and proceeded to replicate our previous orc-killing success with the addition of troll and ogre-killing.  Things were spiffingly great.  At leat until we were afflicted with Sudden Tank Dropping Group Syndrome.  That resulted in a bit of a game of Two Mages Showing Off Their Kiting Skills followed by Klepsacovic Demonstrating His Total Knowledge of Shortcuts in LBRS, which unfortunately descended into a game of Priest Dying from a Misplaced Jump Onto Hard Surfaces and then Lava.  We got a tank, we killed a boss, then another boss, and finally the last boss at the end.

Sometimes things are pretty good.

If zones gave experience

Rather than quests giving experience, zone completion would.  With this model, a zone designated as level 20-25 would take the player from level 20 to level 25, no more or less.  Quests are already grouped into hubs, so give each hub a level, or a level for two hubs, however they need to be divided up to fit the zone leveling.

Obviously mob kills, dungeon quests, and heirlooms are all unaddressed problems.  I'm ignoring them just to focus on the zone leveling idea.

It's been a while, so where's my nostalgia?

Raise your hand if you're nostalgic for vanilla leveling.  Keep it up and if you're nostalgic for BC leveling, raise it (you don't have to raise both).  Same for LK level.  Okay, who doesn't have their hands up?  Duck down and hide if you started in Cataclysm.  In my imagination, in which I get to make this stuff up (I love punditry), everyone has their hands up.  Okay Cataclysm people, you can stand up now.  Everyone hands down.  Now, hands up for Cataclysm leveling nostalgia?

Anyone?

No?

Okay.

I started in vanilla, played pretty much non-stop through the start of Cataclysm.  Looking back, and playing through again, I had fun going through the content again.  I'd even look forward to it.  This wasn't a "I want to get out of the current content", but looking ahead to what was coming.  As Azeroth wrapped up and I ran BRD, I still looked forward to Hellfire Peninsula and Nagrand.  In Nagrand I looked forward to Grizzly Hills and Storm Peaks (I'm cherry-picking my favorites).  But now that my paladin is on the verge of Grizzly Hills, I am thinking ahead to Cataclysm and neither Mount Hyjal nor Vash'jir hold much appeal to me.  Twilight Highlands sounds nice, but that's not for a while, particularly given the 90% experience nerf for previous expansions, so no sticking around Icecrown a bit longer.

I don't know why Cataclysm has not created this sense of nostalgia or fondness for what is to come.  I could try to blame it on my lack of love for the Cataclysm end-game with its heavy emphasis on randoms and dailies.  But that was the case in LK too and I look forward to the LK zones.  Perhaps it is the limited selection, with Cataclysm adding only 5 zones while Northrend contains 8 (I'm not counting Crystalsong or Wintergrasp).  This means less repetition.  Outland has 7 zones, so perhaps it fits.  But LK and Cata both have a pair of starting zones while Outland has only 1, so there doesn't seem to be much of a link between choice of starting area and nostalgia.

Maybe it's the linear nature of the Cataclysm zones.  That makes it feel more like watching a movie a second time than playing a game a second time.  Different classes will play much differently, making the play different as well.  I'll go with that.

Dear fellow protection paladins,

I'm leveling another protection paladin.  Early in the day there seems to be a DPS shortage (or maybe it's something with the healers), so I end up in randoms as DPS rather than as a tank.  As a result, I have found myself in several groups with you tanking.  I have been disappointed.

You keep dropping consecration early.  And in the wrong spot.  This makes no sense.  It's not something which follows you.  Where you put it, it stays.  So put it in a useful place, such as in the middle of a pack, rather than where you were standing when you pulled.

Speaking of pulling, throw avenger's shield at casters.  It silences them and bring them close so all the AoEs can hit them.  That also means that you have aggro on them, so they aren't standing off to the side zapping the healer.

You don't have to always use seal of insight.  Especially when DPS are getting aggro because you're so bad.

As for all you retribution paladins, why?  You're above 30, so you can get two specs.  I understand that healing is terrifying (not sarcasm), but why not tank?  Throw on a shield and you are now geared as a tank, since it's not as if avoidance stats become common until much later, and aren't needed until much later anyway.  You can do it!  I have a friend who just started playing and managed to teach her to tank on a druid.  A druid!  Now there's a tricky tanking class, what with not every single ability being an AoE for massive damage.  If some newb can pick up druid tanking (not an expert, but did get a compliment once) in a few days, surely you can do it too.  Just pretend it's DPS and replace crusader strike with hammer of the righteous and you're about halfway there.  It's like I said, tanks are DPS who gave up on aggro management.  Oh, but please do drop consecrate in the right place.  I'm sick of healers getting pissed on.


Finally, why are you such assholes?  I get that tanks are awesome and all, but seriously?  I'll grant that my sample size is small, but I don't want to deal with the assholes rewuired to get a larger sample size.  So with that in mind, one group has the tank ignoring suggestions and then pulling as awkwardly as possible, complete with random pauses in movement and what appeared to be keyboard turning, and then topping it all off with a boss pull that wiped the group and then blaming the healer.  I decided to save us the trouble and just tank the last boss, since we had to kick him after he logged off without dropping group.  After that we had the healer who forgot water, so then everyone had to make up the 99.9999999% of the time useless habit of not auto-looting, the failure of which resulted in the rogue being called a retard.  I pointed out the absurdity of that being the sole qualification for being a retard, resulting in me being called a noob and claims that I was "carried", whatever the hell that means at level 49.

Tanks, we have a heavy burden.  We are the front of the group, the first thing the enemies see, so let's put on a good face.  Set a good pace.  Set a good mood.  As the sniper says: "Be polite, be efficient, have a plan to kill everyone you meet."

Learning to be a Death Knight, at level 1

Is anyone tired of having their DK's leveling narrated by Batman?  It's a great set of quests, but perhaps it has gotten repetitive, particularly given the highly-linear, scripted nature of it.  Beside that, given the small changes that have taken place since Wrath of the Lich King came out, there is justification for a new source of death knights.


That source?  Take your pick.  Warriors or paladins could have a corruption chain which converts them.  Warlocks could take a liking to inch-thick steel.  Alternatively, they could start at level 1.

Like any other class, the death knight would start off as a little nothing nobody.  But they'd learn something else.  Something darker.  Gone would be the scripted DK creation/rebellion sequence.  Instead, they'd play in the same level 1 world as everyone else.

Surely the Knights of the Ebon Blade could feel a similar pressure as the Forsaken, pressure to ensure their survival, both for their own interest as individuals in need of allies and as an organization that doesn't want to see the return of the Scourge.  However, while the Forsaken need abominations and corpses to increase their numbers, Death Knights can be converted, willingly.  The weak would desire such power, though only the strong would survive it.

This could even be beneficial to the player population overall.  Death knights wouldn't be hit with so many ability so quickly, then having barely learned their class (if that), shoved right into the middle of the leveling curve filled with players who expect people to have half a clue.  The outside impression could be improved as well, removing the "you started at level 55" or "you're lazy" element.


Rather than delete the current death knight quests, they would be a class quest chain, starting at level 55.  They would be optional, though I expect that the gear rewards would be a strong draw.  Rather than being directly about breaking away from the Lich King, they would instead be set as a series of challenges, to confront the past history of their class and those who wield such power.  In this form, it could be broken into multiple quest sections, so that players would not need to complete them all at once.  Contrast this with the current quests which essentially imprison the death knight until they are entirely completed.


Would you want to level a death knight from level 1?

I shoot an arrow in the air and where it lands I know where. (a knee)

I've said it before about Oblivion and I'm saying it again about Skyrim (but more): I like wandering around.

There are, of course, the quests.  I do those.  I like the sense of direction they give.  But I don't get teleported to the quest hub.  I can fast travel to somewhere near the quest location, but after that, I have some travel to do.  So I travel.  Sometimes in the direct direction.  Sometimes toward the dragon shrine that popped up as being somewhat nearby.  Sometimes in circles as I chase down the dragon that clearly wants to fight me but keeps landing somewhere else to fight bears.  Poor thing doesn't know what it wants.

I wander and as I wander, I wander across.  I wander across caves and castles and within the caves and castles I may fight bears and bandits, though not usually in the same place.  These bears and bandits are not a burdensome challenge nor a fount of bountiful loot, but I get to hit people in the face with my shield and that is enough.

That's the nice thing about the leveling system: it levels with you.  I level up and thanks to that I can do cool new things such as block magic damage with my shield.  The NPCs follow with.  So I get stronger and so do they and I do it a little bit faster.  Fire mages still hurt and a pair can often kill me.  Cleansing the Shrine of Meridia was difficult (not a fire mage, but a tricky one anyway), but turning into a werewolf helped, except the time I took a full blast right out the door.

This creates an excellent hybrid system in which I can either follow some rails for a Developer-Approved quest line or I can wander off into the world.  If I want to just engage in some violence, I can wander off and find it.  If the possibilities overwhelm me, I can follow the quest arrows.

A too-strict leveling system doesn't allow for this.  If I am level 50 and the area is level 10, there will be nothing to gain from it.  Loot will be too weak, quest rewards too small, and enemies so trivial as to be like gnats, but without the high miss rate when swatting at gnats.  Under an excessively strict system you move in the Developer-Approved areas and leave them when they tell you to.  This is needed in some cases where zones are chronologically linear, that is, that the story in zone B comes after the story zone A and assumes you've done certain things in zone A.  In that case, making zone A level 15 and zone B level 20 is an easy way to ensure that I do the story in the order that makes sense.  That's fine.  It is not without cost.

There is a way around it, to keep the zones all parallel in time, but maintaining grand narratives.  One way is to make the isolated content, the instances or dungeons, longer and able to run stories on their own.  Another is to make the stories old, make them bits and pieces that we discover, and in that way, can always make sense.  Maybe we find the ending first and wonder how it happened.  Or we find the beginning first and wonder how it ended.  Maybe we find the middle and we have this strange tension of not knowing how it began or how it ends.  That drives us to complete the story, but does not mandate any particular order or direction, while still perhaps pointing us to places we'd want to go.

Now if you'll excuse me, that castle looks a bit suspicious...

The Five Level Problems: Forcing Content

Changes rarely have single effects.  One little thing, such as the way we count levels, can ripple through a game causing changes far beyond the level cap.

Previously I complained that the expansions had a leveling cutoff: once you reached the cap for that expansion, xp dropped by 90% for the mobs in the area.  It seemed pointless to just cut out content.  Besides, there was already the gear issue: new expansions give much better gear, so there is already a carrot to bring people to the new content, making a stick seemingly redundant.  The gearing was also a stick, since the Cataclysm instances all have ilevel restrictions so that to get in you need to run the new zones anyway.

The problem, as was pointed out by a commenter, was that without the xp depreciation it would be faster to level to 85 using Northrend mobs than the newer and tougher Cataclysm enemies.  I'll leave aside "so what?" as a counter-argument and just run with the assumption that speed-leveling to 85 must happen in the Cataclysm zones.  Here is where we get to one of the Five Level Problems.  With a wider range of levels we'd naturally see a drop-off in the experience from Northrend mobs, which would eventually become grey and not long before that, green.  This would leave a short distance where perhaps Northrend mobs are better, but not far, and attempting to jump ahead with them would leave the player undergeared from lack of quests and instances, slowing them before long (though a player with a great deal of ICC gear would be near the level of Cataclysm gear, so maybe that's not true, at least not for a long time).  At the least, adding ten levels rather than five would reduce the relative speed of Northrend racing (and give more time to switch out ICC gear).
 

 As we level up and get better gear, mobs level up and get stronger, so once we're in an expansion's gear, until we start running heroics, we're going to stay somewhat on par with mobs.  They get stronger as fast as we do.  With five levels that means we get stronger faster, and so do they.  The result is that small differences in level are more significant.  With ten levels, the small differences are diluted, so if you're off by a few levels you're not going to get rolled over, just suffer a worse attack table.  For players this means more choice.  Sick of Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord?  Jump ahead to Dragonblight and it's not the end of the world.  Back in Burning Crusade some players would skip straight to Zangarmarsh as a way to bypass the crowded Hellfire Peninsula.  For leveling in Azeroth this gives a little more flexibility.  In all cases, the level requirements to pick up quests don't help, locking out zone quests which are still possible for the player.  The quest locking, extended to entire zones, was made worse with only five levels.  There is the second Five Level Problem: if a level is even more significant, then whatever justification is used for the level requirement becomes stronger, so have more gates on content then we would otherwise.

Before I wrap this up, I want to leave a comment for commenters: I know some of you don't like gating or gearing or leveling.  Those are all internally-generated opinions which are not caused by the five or ten levels added by an expansion.  So please, don't comment about how gates are stupid and why can't we all just do the content we want to the instant we get the thought.

I don't know why Blizzard only added five levels.  I'm sure Google could give me some statements from them, but I'm not sure that would actually explain anything.  The fewer levels are consistent with the ever-stronger push to the level cap and away from leveling.  This push is much more insistent, as rather than being an heirloom that you can avoid or excessive quest xp that you can grey out and ignore, having only five levels shoves players right into the level cap.  But, maybe it's not so bad, since after all, so far all these "five level problems" are all leveling problems, not part of the "real game."

The Five Levels Problems: Introduction

I kept thinking about how Cataclysm has only five levels.  Was it a good thing?  Bad?  I was leaning towards bad as I kept finding problems and changes that needed to be made to compensate for only having the five levels.  So I decided to really look into it.  I pulled up wowhead and began filtering and running the numbers on the gear between and within expansions to see if I could find something.  I was pretty sure it was there, a problem which would link in to several others.  All of it coming back to the core issue of only having five levels.

Let me assure you, it's a great post.  At least I think so.  I have some good, solid points, some analysis, data to go with it all.

There's one small problem: do absolute changes matter more or less than percentage changes?  50 is more than 25, but 50 more than 200 is less than 25 over 50 (25% vs. 50%).  Absolute terms point in one direction.  Percentage in another.  The argument might be stronger for the percentage, which would seem to go in the opposite direction of my conclusion.  Or does it?

If that made no sense, here's the general idea: there is always inflation between and within expansions: we level up and gear up and before long the gear from the last expansion is obsolete.  Given the goal of the gear reset, Blizzard tries to make it obsolete quickly, so the gear of a previous expansion is pretty much gone by the first new zone.  Then they have to inflate to get rid of that gear too.  The result is that you get some inflation from the start of the expansion to the cap (before instances and raids).  In BC and LK this was 40-50%.  In contrast, in Cataclysm it was around 22%, or roughly half.  Aha!  Half the change for half the levels, a brilliant way to fix inflation and we'd see about the same growth of character power.

However, in absolute terms, Cataclysm was higher, 61 vs. 57, suggesting that Cataclysm was working off the hugely inflated ilevels created by the many tiers and modes of LK.  From this perspective, the half-count of levels weren't any help at all, an accounting trick to paper over the problems created by runaway inflation in LK.  Reducing the leveling gear inflation by reducing the levels would help to reduce the inflation over the expansion as a whole, or give greater room for raid gear inflation.  I've not looked at which of this is the game.

They say there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.  I don't know why someone would lump the science of uncertain results with the art of certain falsehood, but maybe that person was just a liar who didn't like pie charts.

So what's the symbology there?

I log onto my shaman to test far sight. First thing I did was to go find the elevator to go learn flying. That caused me to discover Orgrimmar (something I've already done that the game says I haven't), and gain 8 xp, which made me hit level 80 (and I didn't even have to use a scroll of resurrection). Cata leveling is way too fast.



In related news, my gear was an indecipherable mess.

Levels are an abstraction, but the layer they cover is real-ish

Apparently Cynwise has a blog. Go figure. Anyone, the meercat makes this ridiculous statement.

What is to stop a young Tauren brave from wearing the mighty gear of his elders? Get your head out of WoW for a moment – what is to stop him from putting on the physical garb which conveys these great bonuses? What prevents him, exactly, from picking up an epic mace dropped by Deathwing himself and smashing opponents around him? Okay, let’s say the mace isn’t from Deathwing. Why not a level 60 mace? Or a level 35? How does that work, exactly?

Because a level one character has not yet developed the mental of physical strength to bear such items. These examples aren't just higher quality. They are magical. Magic does weird things. We know this. Magic can tear a person apart. It can drive them insane. It can unmake existence itself, on varying scales. Keep that in mind when you ask why a level one cannot wear a level 60 helm.

On one level, it may be a game mechanic, not a "lollevelupnub" mechanic, but a "we're not going to let you equip gear which will make your character instantly die" mechanic. There used to be an item that did that. It was an item for a fedex quest, but, but it could be equipped. It killed you if you were unworthy. You were unworthy. The item can no longer be equipped. On a side note, I think it would be great if players could equip higher level gear, with ever-increasing chances to cause serious harm to themselves.

Going deeper, we could see how it would be physically impossible to equip the item. A 'good' item might not let you equip it to protect you. Or to protect itself, because it's not generally a good idea to give powerful magical artifacts to people who don't have the ability to wield them, let along protect them from evil. Alternatively, a 'evil' item might not let you equip it because you're weak and unworthy. You are beneath it and may only ruin its evil plans.

Sadly, WoW never bothers to explain this to players. No NPCs, no quests, no cutscenes, or books are there to tell us that trying to use items that we cannot can have dire consequences. Oh sure, there are some hints here and there. The red text suggests danger. The reactions of group members when your hunter rolls need on everything are a sort of community warning. Yep, we're not angry at the hunter, we're worried for him, like when an infant finds your rusty nail collection. While you are upset that they might damage your precious collection, you're more worried about them harming themselves. Babies are such noobs.

It's about time Blizzard fixed this oversight. I don't expect a detailed explanation of exactly how magical items can kill us, I'm not a nerd or anything, but just explain a little why the item text is red.

Players should see content, all of it

And that means seeing more than just the most recent raid. This was, in my opinion, one of the top ten gigantic screw-ups of the Lich King expansion. This model of "players seeing content" was poorly implemented, resulting in the opposite, with any new players being catapulted over older content and right into the latest raid. Maybe players missing Naxxramas 2.0 wasn't much of a loss, but missing Ulduar and a couple one-off dragon fights, particularly the one where we kill the Aspect of Magic, seems like a bigger problem. That wasn't entirely new. Ever since BC came out, older raid content has been leapfrogged entirely. Maybe there wasn't a good solution to that, so let's say it's not actually a problem. In fact, let's say that the new rolling raid model is shiny and leave it alone.

How would you like to gain 10% experience? No no, this isn't a new piece of heirloom gear. Instead, it's the complete opposite. Stick around in Azeroth at 60 or Outland at 70, maybe Northrend at 80, though I've not tried that yet. Watch your experience. Notice how you can go from 1200 per kill to... 120. 120? Huh? I know mob xp drops a little when you level, but a 90% drop seems a little bit extreme. That's just Blizzard telling you to get the fuck out. It doesn't matter if you're trying to finish a quest chain, get out, now. Go to the next expansion. And don't you dare hang around there either!

Maybe I'm reading it wrong. Maybe they're actually trying to be nice. Maybe they're saying "please, go ahead and finish up, we'll give you some experience for it, but we don't want to push you up so high that you can't enjoy the next zone." The mess of a leveling curve suggests that they do not have "let players finish content" as their goal.

This makes no sense to me. Why would you try to push players out of content, particularly content which the player has not finished?

A relaxing day of fighting demons before I went to Outland to fight more demons

Desolace started out great and then went rapidly downhill. Felwood, well it also started out great. It went uphill from there.

The two ends of the zone are unchanged: enter, kill insane furbolgs, and then wander off wondering what was the point of that reputation you kept gaining. They took the old Timbermaw quests and tweaked them a little, made them funner and funnier.

The zone then sent me on a gradual crawl north, during which I would kill demons, and then get sent somewhere else to kill more demons. It had a real demon-killing theme to it. I liked that. It made it seems like there was an actual mission to the zone, rather than just randomly being sent on pointless, tangential tasks. "Kill a rat! Now kill a warlock! Kill a warlock rat! Now go gather some rat feathers!"

This isn't due to a radical remaking of the zone. It originally dealt a lot with the legacy of demonic corruption. But it did it better, with small improvements such as not putting the only FP in the far north, or if you were Horde you had it easy and it was only halfway up the very long, narrow zone. I particularly enjoyed the quests where I was sent to kill a demon hunter, which took an expected turn, which as you probably guessed, was to not kill him, but instead listen to him explain how the druids were being idiots. He had a point. Illidan was also featured, typically arrogant, impulsive, power-hungry, and not all that much of a betrayer.

There were a variety of small, heart-warming quest chains. I got to help a new protector tree grow, worked with a sickeningly sugary dryad, got tricked by some mischievous furbolg youngungs, and in the most heart-warming quest of all, a worgen sent me to kill various goblins.

Along the way I ran Ful'Farrak a bunch of times, not because I like the place all that much, but because I'd gotten one of the swords, and if I got the other I'd have an epic. ZOMG EPIC! Eventually I got it, after convincing the hunter who rolled need on it that he had indeed rolled need on it.

I wasn't quite at level 54 for Silithus, so I helped a dwarf kill more forbolgs and then realized that seeing the new Blasted Lands would probably be more fun than another tour around Silithus. And off I went. It started off strangely, with a few quests to remind me that the Horde is being led by a warmongering jackass, then I killed some worgen ghosts whose ships had crashed. But finally I got to something good: Fighting demons.

At first I was slightly annoyed. It looked as if the quest chain for Rakh'likh (epic quest back in vanilla, perhaps too epic) was just another "let's slightly redo a quest that players did in vanilla, ignoring the fact that players have already dealt with this major threat." But it was a little fuzzy about exactly what was going on and what had happened before. However it made it clear that three of the bad guys I'd killed as part of the chain were still dead. Okay, that was a good start. Reading the wiki, he survived my attack back in vanilla, which given that demons tend to come back anyway, is plausible. The quest chain takes place in the aftermath, with the demon hunter having gone to to the job himself, and getting wrecked in the process. I won't spoil it, but let's just say it made me wonder about the means used to achieve the ends, and the ending was pretty interesting. I'm guessing in another decade when The Bulldozers Move Around the Zones expansion comes, we'll see another followup to it.

Perhaps the best part was that finishing this quest is was put me at level 60. So now I can go fight more demons.

There is other content in the zone, but I didn't feel like sticking around. As a tangent I'd helped the murlocs and that was fun.

I don't think the leveling curve is as screwed up now. I was thrown off it by many runs of Scholomance and Zul'Farrak, as well as multiple full clears of BRD. That last one is probably what threw me off, because I think I got a couple levels in the process. That place is huge...

Class Zones

The nice thing about Desolace was the initially high numbers of demons. And then more demons. As a paladin, that was great. Exorcism was very powerful and it just generally made sense for a paladin to fight demons. I've since moved on to Feralas, with the level gap there being filled by a lot of Scholomance runs. The Scholomance runs reminded me of the joy of holy wrath stunning a big crowd of enemies. Again in Felwood, though I've only just started in there, I'm having the privilege of being a paladin fighting demons.

I also learned that Felwood has been cruelly designed to prevent miners from completing quests, as approximately every 15 yards there is a mithril vein, causing miners to wander far, far away from their quest areas until finally the bears get angry, and more importantly, level up.

I don't think it would be a very good idea to design a zone exclusively for a particular class, but designing zones with certain classes in mind could be a great deal of fun. Blizzard rejected class-specific quests, excluding rogue legendary weapons, because they were only useful 'once'. So that's out. But tuning zones for particular classes, to make their abilities more tactically useful and to fit with the general lore and motivations of a class, that would allow players a sense of the unique nature of their classes.

For paladins it's pretty obvious: demons and undead. Other classes are trickier. Hunters could have a beast-intensive zone, perhaps with some special use for traps. Priests could have a zone filled entirely with companion quests, all the companions using the standard AI of moving slowly except when pulling unneccessarily large groups of unnecessary mobs, while crying for help. Warlocks could have demons everywhere, particularly elite demons, turning it into a giant playground for them, much like Dire Maul East was, once upon a time. The rogue area would be filled with enemies in constant combat, too powerful at full health, but always beating each other down to the point that a quick cheap shot-eviscerate would kill them, and tuned to give xp balanced for the three minute cooldown on vanish.

This might mean the zone ends up easier for that particular class. So be it. As long as the rest of the game is of normal difficulty, which hopefully would not mean trivial, then having an easier zone creates a contrast, making it stand out for that class. Once again, I want to reiterate the notion that these zones are not class-exclusive, merely tuned and written with those classes in mind. They should still be fun and interesting to other classes, just more so for their particular class.

Creating entire zones would be excessive, and risks becoming far too repetitive. Limit it to particular areas, such as introductions and endings of zones. These would also make ideal locations for any class-based quests, should Blizzard decide that they were actually a lot of fun. Just yesterday I found myself arguing with someone about whether warlocks or paladins had the better mount quest. I, of course, said warlocks, because everything warlocks did was awesome, whereas paladins were just a bunch of dress-wearing sissies, with the exception of da bootiful FHPs who know what I be sayin', mon. Don't ask if ya don't know.

Musing a bit more on this, perhaps starting zones could be class zones. Death knights, regardless of faction and race, share a starting area. The story makes this work out, in addition to clever use of phasing. Expanding that concept, other classes could have a common starting area. Warriors could use a gladiatorial theme for their beginning, a story which could work for either faction and any race. Others are trickier, since, for example, priests couldn't simply have a generic priestly trial, because they don't all follow the same gods, so some amount of customization would be required. That's something I'd try to avoid.

Speaking of avoiding, the reason this could work is that it avoids the old class quest problem, which was partially that each faction, and sometimes even each race, could find itself with a particular class quest, meaning a lot of work which will rarely be seen. In contrast, if all races share a class zone, then one zone covers one-tenth of all possible characters, much like the race-specific zones. So players overall would use these zones a lot more, increasing the value of them. But at the same time, individual players may find themselves repeating starting content less, since while you might have many characters of the same race, you're less likely to have many characters of the same class. My account has a lot of trolls and humans, and on the Alliance I have almost entirely humans, but in contrast, I have a variety of classes.

Making starting areas based on class rather than race isn't likely to have any negative impacts on character perception. Ever since everyone got fear ward, have we really thought much about what race we are from day to day? Oh sure, at the starting screen we're debating the various blue shades possible to pick between a nelf and draenei, but once made, the class is what matters more. So play to that strength, developers, and design starting zones that emphasize what really matters: class.

Outland should last as long as Vanilla leveling

So should 70-80 in Northrend, and 80-85 in Azeroth 2.0, and whatever MoP does too.

But wait, wouldn't that mean that going from level 1 to level MoP would take months? years? That's a very long grind!

That's why there is the second part of this idea, the part that I intentionally hold by in order to cause confused outrage, much like when you tell someone, "you're pretty... UGLY!" And then they punch you because that's stupid.

Rather than explain all the details, which I worked out and are excessively long and dull, let's go with this: You can level from 80-82 in Vash'jir or Mount Hyjal. You can level from 70-80 following a path starting in Howling Fjord or Borean Tundra and ending in Icecrown or Storm Peaks. There are multiple paths, of similar difficulty, time, and at least theoretically, fun (Vash'jir was a terrible, terrible place). My suggestion is to do the same, using Azeroth, Outland, and Northrend as the equal-but-different leveling paths. Behind th3e scenes there would be a few mechanical tweaks which would allow players to, if they wished, stop leveling at 60, 70, or 80. In effect, the level 'cap' is 60 and than all of those zones are tuned to give a proper amount of experience along the journey from 1-60.

Here's a diagram which might help. Or I wasted a lot of time.


Notice how if you don't want to do Desolace you can instead do Grizzly Hills. Or if Icecrown isn't really you favorite place, you can run BRD a thousand times.

I don't know how raids would fit into this. Or gear. Maybe the level one noob gear could become green-quality heirlooms that update every ten levels, so they are always pretty awful, but you won't be running around naked if you go from Grizzly Hills to Nagrand and find yourself unable to wear your gear, or alternatively, going from Nagrand to Grizzly Hills won't leave you ten levels behind on gear. In the world this might not be too big of a problem, but I think instance groups might complain.

The real point is that I think it would be a good idea to add a mechanic or some set of changes which allow players to jump to the expansion they want and level at a reasonable pace, completing quest chains and instances, without jumping off or falling under the leveling curve. And I made a chart!

Desolace 2.0: At least the old one didn't have quests

Yea yea, exaggeration, the original Desolace had quests, but not many, and it was pretty easy to tell that it wasn't a great zone. Then came the Cataclysm and Blizzard was faced with the challenge of making what may have been the most disliked zone into something that would not cause a sudden drop in subscriber numbers when people reached level 30.

They failed.

Desolace appears to have been carefully designed to be terrible. A bad quest can happen now and then, and some zones are more fun than others, but I Desolace appears to have been planned. There are just far too many absurdly stupid and bad elements.

Step one: Go to Desolace.

Well alright! Now we're talking. Hero's Board says go, so off I fly to the northern-most place: Nigel's Point. Maybe I should have ridden, because of course the starting quest isn't there, silly! So I ride over a little bit to get the first quest: a breadcrumb to Nigel's Point.

Step two: Butter him up.

You know what time it is? That's right, demon-fighting time. Now, paladin, you're going to get a quest to go down there and tear a path of destruction through a whole lot of demons. It was pretty awesome. So no complaints there.

Step three: Kill naga so you can make a naga suit so you can talk to a naga to learn why you should talk to an elemental who you were going to end up talking to anyway because he was already fighting the naga and then without actually assisting in the fight, tell him how to kill the naga leader.

Get rewarded for contributing absolutely nothing. I guess it's practice for LFR.

Step four: Hey look, green stuff!

Some trees and flowers grew here, so obviously, we need you to start wiping out the local wildlife, to restore the balance that was never there in the first place. Note that this came from druids, not Hemingway. Somehow I missed the quest to go help a Tauren who isn't slaughtering wildlife, but more on him later.

Step five: You're really good at not doing anything, so we're going to give you another chance to show off your skills, by riding a centaur.

When I first got the quest I was confused about the "you get to fight alongside us"; what were they going to do, kill me if I attacked a demon too? Then I figured out that I ride one. Okay. Then I told it what to do, with most of the buttons seeming to do nothing, which I think was because they were only for the last fight and they figured they'd give a preview of all the abilities we'd not use by giving us buttons that didn't work. To fully comprehend the utter pointlessness of my presence in these battles, note that not only could I not use any of my abilities, but my auras were disabled. I know that's just how vehicles work, but it really did get the point across that I, as a character or player, was entirely redundant. And why the hell are centaur, which as best as I can tell are the logical evolution of Gengis Khan's Mongolian hordes, incapable of attacking while moving? That was one, among many, of the reasons that the Mongolians were badasses who conquered of everywhere that wasn't separated by an ocean. Imagine if they'd had dolphins to ride! But no, the WoW equivalent are just lame brutes who get their asses kicked by a minor demonic invasion, despite apparently being fully capable of fighting back, if only they had someone else sitting on their backs ordering them around.

Step six: Bird nets are like dinner plates for hyenas, right?

Finally, I meet a tauren who seems to have a way to save the wildlife that doesn't involve killing it. Apparently every other druid learned about ecology from the same people who taught us how to keep villagers from turning Communist. He has a great idea: Take these eggs that he somehow got and give them to birds. He doesn't explain where he got the eggs, but I'm picturing him fighting off an angry mother bird to get them. I have the job of placing them in nests. How nice! Except for a few problems. First off, these aren't their eggs. While altruism does exist in nature, infanticide also exists, and is pretty common, particularly when the parents are nowhere to be found. Even worse, these 'nests' are just piles of sticks on the ground. But I figured, fine, I'll stick the egg there and a mother will come get it, hopefully before one of the many large reptiles wandering around eats it. I hadn't fully read the quest. Yea, turns out the tauren anticipated this, so my job was to fight off basilisks and hyenas until a swoop came to get it. Because we know nothing attracts birds like the loud sounds of violence. Finally there is this mystery: Where are these eggs being taken, if not to nests, which are probably also just piles of sticks on the ground, and if they are not and are actually safe, why am I not putting them there in the first place? And where the hell did he get all these eggs to hand out to violent strangers?

I'm not sure how I automatically (magically?) knew that the stuff laying around was element 116, but as a general rule of thumb, it's a bad idea to pick of pieces of smouldering, highly-radioactive elements. That's what they did at Chernobyl and the biobots didn't turn out well. And of course the best thing to do with this stuff is to give it to a goblin who is out here for no apparent reason, because goblins are known for their environmental records. To prove the point, he asked me to engage in some mass slaughter.

But it gets better!

That's it. Yea, that's all of it. I find a weird rock that may be interfering with the rejuvenation of the area and all I do about it is sell Ununhexium to a goblin, kill a few dozen wildlife so he can sell armor and poison to the Horde (note that this is a draenei paladin), and nothing else. "Please, Draenei. Scour these lands and discover the source of the desert's stubbornness. " "And then be sure to not tell me about it."

Step Seven: If you're not using the map quest tracker to point your mount at the correct place, we think you are a stupid monkey who needs to be punished by being sent after a stealthed quest mob for which the quest text gives absolutely no detail about his location, so have fun riding in circles in frustration before giving up and finally, slowly, every so slowly, creeping toward the quest dot until you reach the range of stealth detection.

Step seven actually came sooner, but it wasn't until later in the stupid quests that I was annoyed enough to write this, and by then the stupidity of that last point had gotten overshadowed slightly by other quests.

Desolace was never a great place, but it appears to me that in their effort to revamp it, they managed to make it even worse.

On a brighter note, the one random group I did that caused me to outlevel the zone was a pretty good experience. No one died or did anything exceptionally stupid. After we killed the ridiculously short two-boss orange-side Maraudon, we continued on a little further, with no one dropping, until we killed the satyr boss on purple side. I'm not sure how they decided on that arbitrary stopping point, but it at least seemed a little better than silently dropping the second the second boss died.

So there we have it, if I'd had to pick one single reason I left WoW last year, it was LFD, and now that seems to be the single best feature. What the hell? Come to think of it, the quest structure still bugs me, guild leveling is simultaneously alienating and restricting, and ever since BC, PvP has become more and more inaccessible to new players, so I guess an improvement in one feature would make it stand out pretty well.