When we last visited my Orc Warrior on this blog I was just about to start the Warlords content, and this week when I have not been poking my head into Destiny I have spent it pushing forward in World of Warcraft. It’s honestly been a shock just how fast leveling went until I hit Legion content. The old world was a confusion slog where I jumped zones each time I saw an exclamation point show up on the adventure guide. This meant I was constantly jumping zones every few levels and most of that journey was a complete blur. When I started Outland I did the majority of Hellfire Plateau then jumped over to Terrokar Forest for a little bit before finishing up the grind in Nagrand. From there I jumped to Northrend and did a good chunk of Borean Tundra before jumping to Grizzly Hills and doing most of it and finally leaping over to Scholazar Basin to finish the run out. From there we entered the Cataclysm zones and did all of the 80-85 grind in Vashj’ir without actually completely finishing that zone. Then came Pandaria and I managed to do the entirety of the 85-90 grind without leaving Jade Forest. From there I went to Draenor where I managed to hit 98 by doing the entirety of Frostfire Ridge and finishing up with just a tiny tiny bit in Spires of Arak.
This is the point where the express elevator has come to a grinding halt and I’ve been confronted with normal speed leveling because all of my heirlooms petered out at 100. I chose to do Stormheim first largely because it is both my favorite and least favorite zone at the same time. All of the Norse themed Vrykul bits are awesome, but all of that faction nonsense is not. It did give me access to another Order Hall champion quickly however so I am down with that. At this point I have finished both the main story arc of the zone and the faction bullshit arc and am likely to move on to the next area. There are a lot of things I have noticed… not the least of which is how ridiculously huge this shield is on my female orc warrior. It is as thought they scaled the shield for the insanely bulky male models and then just called it good enough for the female ones. The second of which is how much more intricate and slower paced the Legion content is compared to Pandaria or Warlords. When I leveled through the content it seemed really quick, but what makes things slog a bit in comparison to what came before is how fragmented the quest hubs quickly become. This might also be an aspect of the map itself feeling so busy with so many world bosses and objectives hidden out there to slow your journey down. I cannot resist wasting a few minutes to find a chest that is nearby or going after a mini boss, and as a result my leveling pace has gone to hell.
At this point I am contemplating investing in a set of Heirlooms which will set me back quite a bit of gold. It isn’t as much about leveling quickly, it is more about not outpacing the gear I am wearing…. and also not looking like I am picking up scraps from the battlefield while I level. I’ve liked making outfits for my character up until this point and then progressing my way through the content without having to care too much about swapping out items. In a perfect world Warcraft would have heirlooms for every slot and I could simply level my alts without ever having to worry about swapping gear out. With the new races coming in I fully expect to be leveling a lot more alts, and in truth investing in plate 110 heirlooms now will probably helm in the long run given that I tend to play plate wearing classes more than any others. I am still really bummed about the direction they are taking with artifact weapons. I would have loved to see them turn them into leveling heirlooms much the way that the items that dropped off Garrosh in Pandaria served this purpose. It would have been a fitting end to a really awesome chapter of the game to be able to then use those weapons to level your alts. Still having a lot of fun but I am also ready for the ride to be over and for my character to get geared up.
With all of the recent talk about the World of Warcraft classic server, I have found myself contemplating a lot of things about the game. We recorded a podcast episode where we basically spent the entire time trying to determine just how vanilla classic would end up being. The other side effect of all of this is that I seem to be playing my horde warrior over on scryers quite a bit more than usual. Now if you were to ask me to rank the current expansions to the game that ranking would look a little something like this…
Notice that number one and number two are the second and third expansion, and that weirdly enough I rank Legion above Vanilla. What you are seeing is that my memory of these expansions and the nostalgia that colors them does not adequately represent the experience of actually playing through them. I’ve recently leveled through the Burning Crusade content in a fashion given that you end up dinging your way out of it long before you actually finish much of it. I did do Hellfire Peninsula in its entirety, the majority of Terrokar and a good chunk of Nagrand. I left the Cataclysm tainted Vanilla lands at 58 and similarly left the Outland at 68 and as a result have spent the last four levels completing pieces of Borean Tundra. The reality I am straddled with is that the zone design of the first two expansions is simply not good. I mean at the time it was released it was world better than anything Vanilla had given us and as a result felt like a breath of fresh air, however when you stack it up against modern zone design from say Legion… it is objectively not as well designed.
What I mean by this is that the quests don’t flow cleanly from hub to hub and instead it forces you to do a lot of travel time back and forth between a hub and its related spokes. All the while I was leveling through Outland and so far in Northrend it feels like I am spending a lot of time needlessly travelling between two destinations and this might have been the initial intent. However after seeing modern quest design it feels like I somehow failed and allowed my quests to get out of sync. If you fight your way through a micro dungeon with quest A you often find that upon turning in you now have another quest requiring you to go back there. It is maddening to have to wade through an army of minions to kill a boss that you were already next to and sometimes even killed while completing the first quest. The other that adds to this feeling of tedium is the mob density and having no real way to get in and out of these destinations without a heavy body count. Thankfully on my warrior racking up a heavy body count is fun, but on other more fiddly classes this causes the leveling experience to grind to a halt. The truth is it will probably have taken me twice as long to level through Outland and Northrend as it will have to push through the next three expansions.
As games mature their design ethic shifts significantly and we forget what it was actually like to play these games at the time. When it comes to Classic World of Warcraft for Project 99 in Everquest… what we are chasing is a feeling not an actual honest moment in history. I think when players say that they want to play Vanilla again… they want to return to a time when not everything was mapped out quite so clearly and they had a sense of accomplishment and discovery each time they looted a kobold (and the game subsequently froze). This is why World of Warcraft Classic is going to be the challenge it will be. That experience means different thing to different players, and none of the calculations that a game company can make actually take the social component into play. When I think of Vanilla or Burning Crusade or even Wrath, those memories involve very specific sets of individuals that no longer play the game and I might not even have contact with. For Vanilla it was the Late Night Raiders, and Burning Crusade it was No Such Raid and when Wrath launched we were excited to be the Duranub Raiding Company. Three non-guild based raids dominate those feelings and memories and the simple fact that I went through three separate raid groups tells you that there is no way to actually ever join those broken pieces back together again. All of this said I will have characters on the Classic server, and I will see how this experience actually shakes out in the end. I just feel like it is going to be exceedingly difficult to please even a fraction of the player base because we all want something different.
Last week I talked about it feeling like it was the end of the expansion in World of Warcraft, and in part that was due to the way that I am playing the game and focusing on alts. However there is apparently another key way things are starting to feel like the end of the expansion, and that is catch up mechanics. Now yesterday I posted about pushing through and dinging 110 the Legion expansion level cap on my Orc Deathknight. I managed to find a couple of lucky grabs on the auction house including 3 cheap pieces of demonsteel at 835 item level and a cloak at 870 item level. Other than those items however I managed to scrape together what is a reasonable item level to start going and doing stuff… in a single nights time between a combination of world quests, legion invasions, and opening the broken shore. When I first saw the Dauntless items I found them a little underwelming… but that was on my already 890 main character. The fact that you can start picking up 850+ items for 400 nethershards… when I walked into the Broken Shore with roughly 4000 of them… allowed me to really flesh out those missing gear slots. The only negative there is that the rings and trinkets are both “Unique Equipped” which were sadly the two slots I needed the most. Thankfully during the invasion event last night I managed to pick up a second ring at 840, taking my item level to the point where I could apparently start queuing for Looking for Raid.
Now I am not sure what the item level breaks are for the various LFR segments… but I was honestly shocked to find out that I could queue for Nighthold without having done anything in Emerald Nightmare or Trials of Valor. Before heading to bed I did the first part of Nighthold and picked up an 860 necklace and an 860 artifact. So other than a few strategic grabs from the auction house… I managed to pick up everything else I needed to gear a character in a single night. I am now sitting at 846 item level… and will probably finish doing the rest of LFR tonight hoping to pick up a few more pieces. I also need to start running dungeons so that I can complete the Death Knight Order Hall sequence… and during the day today the final missions that I need to run should be finished. I guess while sitting on a higher level character I didn’t notice just how quick the item level ramps up, but while out roaming the world on a brand new character it is extremely noticeable. It definitely seems the end of expansion catch up mechanics are in full effect, as the game attempts to usher you closer and closer to that 900ish item level. I still have yet to get a Legendary, but in truth I have only been trying to two nights now. I also need to research how exactly to get the alternate artifact appearances, because while I am not expecting to go crazy and start farming for them like I did on my Warrior and Paladin… I do however don’t want to miss easy opportunities when they come up.
The other interesting thing I am noticing… is that playing Horde on a server cluster where the Alliance greatly out numbers you… leads to some interesting interactions with other players of the same faction. The two items I got from LFR I was functionally handed by other players who were offering them to me. Also while out in the world on Broken Shore especially… the horde seems to do the same sort of thing that I do in open world zones on my warrior. That is help random players. There are a lot of cases where I was straight getting wrecked and another player ran up and started attacking the same mobs to help me push through them faster. Up to this point I really haven’t had much in the way of communication, so maybe I am just reading intent into their actions where it really isn’t there. Just saying so far it has not been a horrible experience, and at least the public channels are not clogged with madness the way they are Alliance side. I still have a significant problem with the Horde in general… not from a factional standpoint but from the standpoint that “bestial humanoid” is not really the sort of thing that I flock to in games. However Orc seems to be a happy medium for me, and I’ve come to this realization pretty much any time I play one. Every other Horde race and I have significant issues. The Tauren are just too big and feel lumbering and slow. The undead and trolls… I cannot get past the hunched posture… or the tusks… or the missing bits of armor. Bloodelves have the problem of being the most elvish elves ever… and if you have been around my blog for long you know my distaste for all things elf. The goblins in theory are an option…. but they sorta end up being played for comic relief much in the same way that gnomes do that that annoys me. The Horde really missed their opportunity to make a lifetime member of me when they failed to somehow recruit the Dark Iron Dwarves. For the moment however I am largely okay with being a blue green guy with a Mowhawk and Mutton Chops.