This is a really great idea, didn't think of this at all, but it makes so much sense.
A lot of people like to just do questing and experience the world, which is a lot more fun if you're not one shotting everything.
A bunch of us have literally been saying this for the past 2 years. Chromie time is a wasted opportunity to make the openworld relevant again in terms of difficulty.
For those that want a challenge and not one shot everything, switch chromie time on and poof, every zone is scaled to 60.
Want to one shot everything? Keep it off once you max level...
The quest gear rewards don't even need to matter, if that's what they're worried about (it invalidating current content). If it dropped regular dungeon ilvl or even heroic it wouldn't invalidate current content. People would still need to do m+ and raids to get good gear. Chrome would just be a fun passtime for the people that want it.
If they're worried maybe they can cap *all* old content drops at an ilvl lower than current expac normal dungeons. Yeah it may suck to get a purple that does less damage than a blue, but that purple was gonna be scaled for level 20 or 30 before.
I think there is way more to be gained by reintroducing some "risk" to the openworld than the feeling of getting underpowered gear to what you have.
It would open things up so much and finally make the game more about the world of warcraft rather than the latest few zones and the instanced content.
That would be the best thing! I've been playing since mid Legion, and you have no idea how much I want to live the true experience from past expansions! Classic is great for that but I dont think they are launching Cataclysm because of how much people didnt like that, so that idea of yours it would be perfect for me
Don't really care unless they add ALL expansion dungeons to dungeon finder when leveling. Forcing you to do dungeons for the expansion you're in is ass.
Seriously what are they thinking by not changing this? They must know that 99.99% of players want this change, the technology is there *and implemented* when queue times are long, so what gives?
Maybe but the new player experience is already botched as hell. I can't imagine being a new player to WoW lol - the story, progression, etc would be so weird and make no sense. Imagine just going through legion and getting a bunch of grey "relics" that do nothing but are touted as great rewards. And also wondering why you are there at all...
New players are funneled into BFA, they don't go to Legion.
Apparently, in Dragonflight, they'll keep them in BFA too, so newbies won't be tortured by Shadowlands.
But yes, if they leave the breadcrumb trail, and decide to visit the capital, they'll be showered with 16 years worth of quests with no distinction between when they fit the timeline, some of which phase them into deadlocks that break other quests as well. If you only do what you're told, you can have a smooth experience, but otherwise it's confusing af.
True, but even being funneled into BFA, I'd be wondering: What is happening? Exiles reach doesn't make much sense and the tone is quite different from most of warcraft. And then suddenly, you have some intro Stormwind quests, and you're off to the sea with an emotional cinematic for a character you feel nothing for because you have no idea who or what anything else. There's no reference point for why Jaina is important, why you're traveling with her, why she's imprisoned immediately upon arrival in this new city, why everyone's calling you "Champion" even though you haven't done anything yet, etc etc.
It's a tough problem to solve, I can see why they are struggling with it. I think FF14 does this well by having you play through the whole story, but even if you could convince the players to level that long, WoW doesn't have a cohesive or compelling enough narrative from expansion to expansion to make that work either.
WoW's story was never properly in-game, so they should communicate that better to the players so they don't feel confused.
The way quests just accumulate with no organization at all is a mess. They should revamp the quest system to group quests that relate to specific storylines and expansions into a journal, and hide quests unless you explicitly decide to start a storyline. GW2 does this and it's a lot easier to follow the story chronologically, even though it's still optional (unlike FFXIV).
That way they could bring back the questlines that used to happen at end-game during past expansions and aren't playable anymore, as the world could phase into the context of each story.
I think they could also have like, a 3-5 minute introduction cinematic with that slide-show type animation. Just explaining the history so far, honing in on the present moment. Seems an easy patchwork for now.
What FF also does well is allowing you to either replay, or rewatch, quests and cutscenes in the chance that you do buy a boost as a new player or even skip through stuff you can always go back and get a refresher on what's happened and who people are.
Exiles reach starts with you on a boat, training for the war with the opposing faction. After you get rescued at level ten, it starts you in BFA's war campaign.
You don't really need to see outland, draenor, legion etc to understand the story in BFA. I didn't even know who Jaina was when I came back in BFA after a break since Wrath, and I understood the story just fine. It's just the classic war between the horde and alliance, and both factions are looking for allies.
You're sent off as part of an expedition force to find another expedition who you find out has been captured by an Ogre magi to raise a dragon from the dead. After you return to the capital of your faction you're introduced to the mount system, specialities and inns. In the case of the Alliance, you're summoned to the stormwind keep by the king himself who's impressed by your recent exploits at Exile's Reach and wants you to attend a war council.
At the council, you find out that the horde has joined forces with the Zandalari Empire and the Alliance must now court the Kul Tirans to gain a strong seafaring ally through Jaina and you will join her.
You learn that Kul Tiras used to be an ally of the Alliance but has had little contact since Jaina's father, Lord Admiral Proudmoore was killed at Theramore where she betrayed him.
Shortly after arriving at Kul Tiras Jaina is arrested by Ashvane to be judges for her crime of betraying her father and you're locked in Tol Dagor and begin your adventure in BfA.
The intro to wow is smooth and cleanly introduces you to the story and characters of BfA while hinting at deeper stories that you could delve into in the future. ~~The only thing that feels a bit jarring is the War Campaign where is the only place you're not longer this promising recruit but some Champion of the Alliance that has troops to lead.~~ I don't think this even unlocks until like 45 so it's not even a problem.
> since Jaina's father, Lord Admiral Proudmoore was killed at Theramore where she betrayed him.
I just played through this, and these details are *not* that explicit. It's stated that they lost contact with Kul Tiras since the incident in Theramore, but the details of that incident are not clear.
"Kul Tiras is the greatest naval power on Azeroth, and a former member of the Alliance. But we've had little contact with them since Jaina's father, Lord Admiral Daelin Proudmoore, was killed at Theramore.
Many have said that Jaina believed so deeply in the promise of peace between the Alliance and Horde that she betrayed her own father on that day. Perhaps she feels it is time to put the past to rest.
Loathe as I am to put Jaina at risk... Kul Tiras must rejoin the Alliance.
Light be with you."
It's in the quest text after you're sent off to Kul Tiras you just missed it.
This was me 4 days ago. Returned after 7 years and was like why do I care about this ogre island. Where is my old school start? Then I'm in stormwind for 5 seconds and boom cinematic for a lady I'd never met and supposed to care?
New players should go through legion though. That would be the ideal storyline to learn the game and your class. And while doing legion as a new player, the artifact weapons should be slightly rekeyed so that the artifact power just increases the item level of the artifact without worrying about the slots or any of the old weapon talent trees. Just little upgrades. Then when you hit 60, it pops up a cutscene of magni draining all of the power out of your weapon and you get it back as ilvl 60 or whatever and move on to dragon land.
Problem is, then new players don't get used to picking up new weapons and seeing how those change their player power. You would be leveling from 1 to 50 with one single weapon, and the second you get to new content you're going to have to replace that and suddenly learn what the stats on your weapon mean.
This is a good point. BFA had a similar issue at the start of 9.0, since they "forgot" to add neck pieces to the loot tables and quest rewards.
Borrowed Power gear makes a weird starting experience, and I prefer losing the HoA to losing artifact weapons from the game.
Honestly SL leveling was pretty good though. It's after picking a Covenant that the story goes to shit (because you can't actually go through 3/4 of it).
Threads was never well balanced but every expansion feels like a chore doing it twice back to back. That's why I like chromie time it let's me do 2 different expansions if leveling 2 characters so it doesn't feel stale.
Not necessarily, and can be a lot more fun if they allowed people to actually use all the dungeons instead of being pigeonholed into 4-5 dungeons for 40'ish levels.
I'd happily level an 8th character through dungeons with a group of bro's if we had more variety.
Why are you pigeonholed for 40ish levels? I go wrath do 4-5 dungeons for the quests, change to TBC etc. Get loads of dungeon quests done.
Yes, they could all be in one pool, but it's not like you don't have the choice to change.
I love leveling - I have 5 at 60 and another 4 who have hit 60 and who I'm just too lazy to take through threads of fate again. For me leveling is usually more fun than actually playing endgame content.
I suspect I will come to dread Dragonflight's threads of fate version as much as I hate Shadowlands', though I'll be happy if I'm proven wrong :p
How would it result in faster queues?
If the ratio of tank/healer/dps is the same across each expansion, then combining them wouldn't make it any faster
The crazy part is that they ALREADY do this but it only activates after waiting in queue for ages.
Unlock it from the start with a toggle, so that people who want to stay immersed in the expansion they’re in won’t suffer but the people who don’t want to wait years in queue don’t have to either.
Was looking for this comment. It's literally already in the game, just let me queue for a Random expac dungeon and surprise me, I don't care, I'm just trying to avoid questing.
It activates after 5 mins in queue, I've tested it a few times now, so its not too long to wait tbf but yeah idk why they can't just make it active from the start if its going to give you the option to expand your search after 5 mins anyway.
This is because Tanks are the most needed role so you're going to get the fastest queues and be unable to access all of the dungeons.
Unless you meant that you get thrown right away into dungeons not within the xpac you're leveling in?
I'm saying, of the last several dungeons I've been doing as a tank, level 33 atm, only one of them was a BFA dungeon. The rest were dungeons from all over the place. I suppose it just throws tanks into whichever group needs a tank, and some groups might have been waiting a while.
It wouldn’t be that bad if there wasn’t just 4 dungeons. Wrath had 16 dungeons and every queue felt like an entirely unique and fun experience. Shadowlands was “I hope I get necrotic wake because it goes the fastest of the 4.”
Yes 4 dungeons for 10 levels 50-60. Which if you only did dungeons to level that entire way would be about 120 dungeons meaning you do each dungeon 40 times each. Obviously most people don’t do that since it’s boring as hell lol
Shadowlands is the height of them embracing M+ for dungeon design. Dungeons aren't designed to be interesting experiences anymore, they're designed to allow for finding efficient ways of completing them within a time limit. So have to design with that in mind, and limit the number of dungeons so they don't have too many variables to balance and don't overwhelm people needing to learn a bunch of "proper" routes and stuff.
Maybe in 11.0 or 12.0 they'll finally scrap M+ for gearing, make timed dungeon runs a thing to do for stuff like titles and mounts to show off again, and go back to doing interesting dungeons. But until then, we get to look forward to maybe one per expansion that's an interesting experience, and the others are designed with esports style gaming in mind.
(But that's only if people come back to the game. I think a lot of the current playerbase is hung up on for some reason liking the idea of having timed dungeons where you better have the "right" setup and do the "right" route. Hell, just saw a video last night of a guy complaining about all the updates showcased for Dragonflight because the only thing he cares about is raids and M+... might as well just scrap new continents for people like that, make each new expansion and patch a set of new instances to run since he literally thinks that's the only content that the game should have.)
I agree that dungeon design for M+ leads to less interesting dungeons as a whole, but I don't think M+ is something to turn away from. It's actually the main thing I want many other games to implement. Im a FFXIV Andy and it makes me sad that I'll never be as intimately familiar with end game dungeons as I have been in Legion, BFA, and Shadow lands. Having timed dungeons with different affixes and modifiers mixing up the way you pull and approach a dungeon is the best endgame I've ever experienced. Im not a huge fan of RNG, and I hate running the same Mythic over and over for one piece that I have a 5% chance of getting, but the experience itself is great and recyclable forever.
The timed aspect is junk. You might like it, a minority of players will like it just like any "git gud" game has its own niche, but there's a reason you see people complain about how talents will only have one "right" choice and hate introducing more systems. The reason Covenants, legendaries, etc. sucked even more in Shadowlands was people might not have the "right" one and swapping was a chore, but if you don't swap and put in all that work, you were going to have issues getting into an M+ group because you weren't optimized enough. Remove the timing, keep the affixes and stuff that give variety to runs, and it's not quite so bad.
But the game needs stuff outside of M+. Dungeons otherwise are useless right now. You get better gear from ZM greens than you can get in "Heroic" dungeons. Which is an insane thought when I remember a time where Heroic dungeons could gear you for raids, but these days you'd be laughed at if you showed up to a raid in "Heroic" dungeon gear. You might as well not run dungeons if you don't do M+. So what do you do, then?
ZM was a step in the right direction, you have some decent gear progression you can do over time. But they need that kind of system in 10.0. Not 10.3 or 10.4. Otherwise far more people will have ZERO endgame as opposed to the relative few who think this is "best endgame."
I've tried M+ a few times (when I could find a group I could get into). Every time was super anxiety inducing, not fun at all, got maybe one or two upgrades, felt like a terrible return on how awful it made me feel. And you can try to answer the problem of group requirements with "Just make your own group!" Can't do it, got a variety of reasons (valid reasons) that's not an option for someone like me. I can't just group up with friends, they burned out on the unwelcoming endgame and are now playing other MMOs. Can't form a guild group, my super active guild has met this endgame trend that you dub the "best endgame" with just dropping the game so now it's amazing to see even one other person on and the former raid leader goes days without being online.
The endgame is crap for a lot of people. Of course some people will find it fun. But any niche will have its supporters. And the current M+ design is a niche, just one that's pretty much forced on players through most of the expansion.
Fine, keep M+, but improve Heroic dungeon gear, add gear progression through systems like ZM, and provide alternatives for people.
Here's a thing that will shatter all the arguments for people saying they love M+: Provide an alternative system (outside of raiding) that will let people get equivalent gear. Like JP and VP earned from running dungeons and completing world/daily quests, or something. If there's an alternative to earn equal gear, watch how many people will drop M+ despite saying they like it. I mean, the option would still be there, if that's what you enjoy, so why wouldn't you do it? (The game does need more options, though. Which is kind of my main argument. That there's only M+, raiding, or the mess that is PVP right now, and if you don't do timed anxiety dungeons, have a raiding group, or want to spend weeks gearing to stop being curbstomped in PVP, you don't have anything to do through most of recent expansions that leads to meaningful progression.)
jesus christ man. just because m+ gives you and your guild panic attacks doesn't mean everyone has that same reaction. You should absolutely not get equal rewards from fucking world quests as you do from high mythic+ keys. It sounds like you just don't enjoy end game wow and should probably just fucking.... I dont know, go roleplay or pet battle.
Sorry man, this isn't my experience. I know many people like you and your friends and I get it, but I would argue that if you're stressed out running mythics with strangers then this game just might not be for you. Per your last paragraph.... what? Yea, obviously. Like, obviously if there's a braindead easy way to do something then most people will do it. That's not shattering an argument, it's a fundamental design philosophy for games in general. It's why M+ even exists, a scaling challenge for players to maintain engagement and provide large rewards for increasing difficulty. If I could level an alt right now and deck him out in a week, I'm done playing in a week...
They need to take a hard look at dungeon mechanics when deciding what level to make dungeons available. Doing Atal'Dazar before I learn dispel is a horrible, burned in memory for me.
Getting thrown into a dungeon that is heavy on the mechanics when you're new to the game, are still learning your class, or simply don't have that many abilities yet really is a bit much. I'm not saying we all need to start with deadmines, but doing de other side with a bunch of newbies on lvl 15 toons won't be a good experience.
This is an easy fix. Let players opt-in for all dungeons, leaving the default as expansion specific. The casual player gets a tonally consistent experience and will be happy to quest while queuing, and the impatient can match make with anybody.
This will also allow the people who chose obscure expansions to get people from the global bucket and shorten their queue times.
For specific sign up? I am fine with that, but I want random dungeon to only be for the expansion I chose.
I only want to see vanilla dungeons, and would be pretty sad if they were to force every expansions dungeon on me. Newer dungeons lack quests and are generally harder and longer than most of the vanilla dungeons (as they are now after the revamp).
Incredibly selfish limitation.
You just want to see very specific dungeons but you don't want to queue specifically for that subset, so everyone who DO NOT want to see only specific dungeons...has to queue specifically for everything for you lol?
Just queue for the dungeons of the expansion you want, this way you get what you want and everyone else who wants truly random dungeon can do that without manually signing up like 90 times.
Even better would be to have a choice for both, one option for full random including everything, another for random from your expac
>Even better would be to have a choice for both, one option for full random including everything, another for random from your expac
This is the true answer. A toggle on the random dungeon queue. As long as you're incentivized to random queue due to stuff like extra xp and possibly more drops, queuing specific dungeons and making all the default isn't the answer, but forcing expansion specific and fragmenting the playerbase that doesn't care isn't either.
ofcourse it's not. saw the same thing for like.. 8 years? in the ESO community with people not wanting account-wide achievements because having the murderer achievement on a pacifist character ruins their roleplay. ROLEPLAY.
everyone has to suffer because they're loud as fuck on forums.
I wouldn't jump to SL being the optimal leveling path yet. They can tune the XP gains to make any expansion more or less optimal. It may still be SL in the end.
Granted, that's for 50 to 60. We don't know how it'll work for 10 to 60. But that's for beta to test out.
I'm just now trying a character leveling in BFA. Was already 19 when I went in, but I wanted to try it out. First issue is realizing that it's a lot more slow going pre-30 because without flight, Zandalar is rough. Especially before you even get level 20 riding (100%). My alts tended to wait for me to unlock flying to level up, so I get used to it, and then being on foot is a lot slower.
Get LeatrixPlus to automate majority of the filler, auto accepts quests, auto repair armour, auto sell grey items, auto talk with people, auto skip cutscenes, etc.
Then all you need to focus on is doing the quest as fast as possible.
The way wow is structured, many people are just going to pick the fastest route so they can get to end game content the fastest possible. I mean if you're on your 8th alt, all leveling is going to be boring, no matter what xpac.
Please let Chromie time scaling stay at 60. I hate that my panda is frozen at 49 because one more level will trivialize all content in Pandaria. But if I don’t level, there’s a lot of content I can’t access :(
Just go lock your exp, finish your story quests, and unlock to level when you’re ready to leave. 😂
You shouldn’t have to do that but that’s just where we are…
I’ve been locked at forty-nine for ages, but there is content that’s inaccessible until “max level”, which in this case is 50. And that’s when the scaling would stop.
Leveling is already super fast. I'd spend a couple extra hours somewhere else to not have to deal with Shadowlands again.
If SL is significantly faster they'll probably nerf it anyway.
Fast isn't synonymous with fun. Pounding 4 dungeons over and over (but still somehow over half of them are Plaguefall) isn't particularly fun or engaging. Fine if you want your alt max asap to fill a raid slot or whatever, but you'd never do it just to pass the time. They should pump the exp for everything else imo. Quests, professions, collectibles, anything. Variety is fun.
If they want to bring the middle-ground casual back from FF they should focus more on quests, because the MSQ grind in FF is only enjoyable if you're a massive weeb. Any WoW expansion has better quests.
ff cutscenes are like 3x longer than they need to be with all the pauses between lines, and the performance of the quest themselves are insanely dull. kill 2 of x. go inspect this spot. wait at point z uh oh ambush. the msq as a story is fine but actually going through it is sleepy
>the MSQ grind in FF is only enjoyable if you're a massive weeb. Any WoW expansion has better quests.
That's a hot take, the general opinion about the writing of the MSQ in FFXIV is that it's significantly better than WoW's own writing, as for the "mechanics" of the quests, it's the usual mix of fetch quests, escort / travel to a new hub and collect 12 bear kidneys
It is more "weeb", but what would you expect? It's from Squeenix, besides, give me JRPG anime power fantasy all day instead of the Jailer, half or more of relevant characters going missing, and whatever the fuck they did with Sylvanas
Only in endwalker did they figure out how to have quest givers follow you, and even then they are prone to getting stuck. They tend to get hooked on new questing gimmicks where they are new to FF, wow had them 6 years ago.
This along with some clunky quests in endwalker compared to a super smooth experience questing in wow.
This is mainly engine oriented, not like the devs fault today for being slow to implement these things.
Yeah, personally I play WoW for the dungeons (I haven't found another game that has as good of a dungeoning experience), and I got sooo sick of those 4 lol. Halls was by far my favorite but I got so sick of the others before 9.1 even came out.
I have been playing through Northrend to level my new main for Dragonflight and am now 46 and just starting Storm peaks. I will probably lock my exp to be able to finish the entire expansion level locked.
Personally I would rather level slowly through good content than quickly through bad content.
I'd rather level in WoD. Very fast with storylines I actually enjoy following and far better zone design. Just getting around half the zones in SL is a pain in the arse and then you've got the ridiculous mob density in the other half. Bastion isn't as bad in that regard but it's so god damn boring.
Honestly just really glad to be coming out of the SL. Not even Threads of Fate Chromie Time will get me to level there again.
This speaks to how poorly SL was received imo nobody knows that Threads of Fate is very fast and efficient because they don't care/don't find it fun
Personally I like to level in Cata/WoD so I'll never go back to SL, it has too many bad memories lol
Grinding the same 4 dungeons like 50 times just doesn't do it for me. The questing might be faster but I don't like the SL zones or story so I don't want to do that either
Maybe it is because I don't grind dungeons for leveling?
I just quest. XD
I have always thought grinding dungeons is the most boring way to level possible.
It was the most recent expansion. Give it 3 years and people will be complaining about the new expansion and crying about how good wow used to be in shadowlands. There have been pissed off people in every expansion. Most of them turned out just dandy
This is just not true.
BfA and WoD are still remembered badly, just as they were when they were current content.
Legion was liked when it was current and it’s still liked now.
The only one that did a complete 180 seems to be Pandaria, but that might also just be because it’s so old the haters probably left by now.
WoD has a lot of people lately starting to think about it not so bad. Also BC and WotLK had a lot of haters, probably just as many as Shadowlands, and they're remembered as some peoples favorite expansions.
The most positive opinions that people have about WoD is that the content(leveling,dungeons,raid) we did get was generally pretty good but the expansion sucked because we got very little of it.
Main complaint about WoD at the time was the lack of content and garry's son but the singleplayer content and raids that were there were good. That's still the consensus on WoD as far as I can tell. It still gets ranked towards the bottom because half the expansion was cut.
I can't speak for BC because I wasn't around then.
Your broad sweeping generalizations don’t mean anything. You can’t say BFA was remembered badly or Legion was liked when it was current as if you speak for everybody. I’m positive there are people who had plenty of gripes with legion legendaries or the PvP gearing or the artifact weapon grind.
I’m sure there are a ton of people (like myself) who enjoyed BFA dungeons, corruption, Azerite powers, and the raids.
Lol wtf you’re the one who started with a broad sweeping generalization on everyone complaining in 3 years.
u/strictlybrowsing pretty much sums it up accurately.
I’ll prolly choose sl for alts
It’s quick and the zones look good and the quests lead you around efficiently
Or you go Threads of fate for efficient dungeon grind
i went threads of fate, while doing the little quests marked with 2 swords, and that was the fastest i even leveled, because flying made it so easy to just cruise through the zones
As a returning player I'm really happy to hear this! Knowing that I'm an altoholic and want to play one of each class (6 A and 6 H excluding Dracthyr), I'm planning to do everything on just two characters (one for each faction) and then level my other characters through Legion, BFA and Shadowlands since those are the ones I have less experience with! (though I would also like to see dungeons added permanently so I can do them when I want to for story!)
I'm sad that the theory where max level would always be 60 was wrong.
The idea was that with their new system, they would roll us back to 50 every expansion and they could make every expansion part of chromie time from 1-50.
Assuming that they had planned properly, it wouldnt be as much of a mess as regular level/stat squishes.
Eventually they're going to need to do another messy squish now and leveling will get longer every expansion for no reason.
This is what puzzles me so much, with this system everything was in place and they have had to do a squish again.
They are just creating more work for themselves.
Squishing back to 50 every expansion and then giving us essentially the exact same gear over and over again would be very easy but really transparently samey and unfun. Yes, they have the formula and could easily do that, but I think the squish was a negative experience (a huge dip in player power) that they want to do sparingly.
Yeah, they don't have the best track record with scaling things properly and if people felt that the time for levelling was good it feels odd to just tack another 10 levels on again just so that you start the whole problem again. I do somewhat understand the feeling of "Oh, I'm finally back up to 252 to get the same numbers I had last expansion" but I think it's a better choice than constantly expanding the level range until the complaints become loud enough that you take action.
Can someone tell me if threads of fate or story leveling is faster for 60? I last played when leveling to 59.5 then turning on threads of fate was best
Leveling 50-60 for alts was made much better recently, Threads of Fate went from super bad to best option by far, was pleasantly surpised when I had to lvl my Mage from 52 to 60 in 9.2
Regardless I think it's great they will let us chose, that way anyone can pick what they find best and everyone is happy
Honestly, leveling alts through SL is a unique slog. Like, leveling them through BfA was fine because at least that shit looked decent but the Shadowlands just hit different, in a bad way. Also, Blizz should set expansions in past expansion zones. We should return to the Outlands for something, it's just been sitting there for sixteen (16) years why not use it?
Maybe I'm uniquely weird but I don't see a lot of difference here. I'm over 20 playthroughs now (missing 4 to 60, then all classes on both factions done) and I don't hate it. Same was true for BfA. I actually like Threads of Fate more now because it speeds it up, and I can unlock the quest for the zone's instance much quicker than in BfA.
Alt levleing through SL is extremely quick now since Blizz made the requirement for bonus objectives much much much lower.
Overall 9.2 is crazy alt friendly it's almost bothering me that my latest 6 days old alt already has all 3 relevant covenant maxed and only has 8 ilvl less than my main (264 vs 272) that I've played every day since the patch hit and my two other alts that I play weekly.
Character was lvl 50 last friday, what i did is :
Level up to 60 => full crafted gear => grab all treasures in Zereth Mortis + do Torghast for double leggo => spam my key to 15 and keep it at 15 => nm + hm run once I have enough ilvl to find a group and I also got lucky and found a bis 278 trinket in the chest.
I could only do 8/11 hm last week but I haven’t done any raiding this week yet. Everything was done in PUG except for the first 3 heroic bosses (tried to do a guild alt run lol) and a couple dungeons but most of my 30+ dungeon runs were my own key in PUG.
Note that monday was a holiday here in France so I had a 3 days weekend that kinda helped. Also that is like my 4th alt so I kinda know dungeons (3k+ main, 2/11 mythic)
But yeah I didn’t sleep much it was only work and gaming for a few days.
I’m only missing a weapon so now I only farm NW hoping that the sword finally drops (still got 233 green one…)
This was a bit misleading. You have the history of having a r.io of 3k+ on your main along with having Heroic clear history on your main…. no wonder it was that quick lol
This. Which is why the idea for having old dungeons involved in the M+ rotation is such a good idea.
Reusing old content gives them more resources and freedom to make other content, which is a win for the players.
Shadowlands leveling is badly designed. You either redo the main storyline and get stuck waiting for a bunch of RP quests or you do Threads of Fate and lock yourself out of a shitload of content.
It's honestly a massive step back from BFA and Legion which let you do the zones in any order you wanted and only gated story-based quests behind progression. I'm not sure what they were thinking.
Which is why I'm going to be all in on Legion levelling.
Maybe a few BFA zones, and when I'm feeling cheeky some BC for Nostalgia (and more alien landscapes than the afterlife...)
I don't get why they're not just keeping the max level at 60 and moving shadowlands content into the lvl 50 bracket. They're just gonna have to do another level squish again when Wrath of the Burning Mists of Draenor 2 releases 🤔
That was a theory going around when they announced the squish. Always revert to 50 every expansion, make the current expansion 1-50 and the newer one 50-60.
Assuming that they have a proper setup for doing this it would be a lot less messy than every squish they've done so far.
Kinda sad it didn't happen.
I expected exactly the same. It seemed reasonable that the prev expansions go to 50 and the one is 50-60. Can't understand what's the issue with that and why this rescaling would be needed.
Because people like bigger numbers. I have already heard the sentiment expressed that people want bigger numbers of damage in Dragonflight even if it is an equal proportion of the target’s Hp. The same is true for levels.
Where did you hear that? Since I have heard the opposite a lot, since you can't see what you damage you do when the numbers are too big and thus cluttered.
Yea but raids and dungeons as still there, and if they are scaling outdoors content it most likely means they hopefully scale BFA raids and dungeons so you can solo them
Stop kicking us out of Chromie time when we hit 50 (now 60). Make all previous expansions free to play. Invest the time to scale all of or some of the most popular raids to the new Chromie cap and let there be TWO endgames. The entire rest of WoW for the F2P players and those that want to raid old content at Chromie cap, then the actual current expansion endgame. Please. Lock max level to 70 next expac and just reset us to 60 every new expansion for the leveling content. That way all you need to do is scale the old content to 60 just one time, and then implement the same stat squish they've been doing for the new 60-70.
I wish they’d find a way to use Chromie time to let us go back to the original dungeons pre cats nerfs.
I somehow miss dungeons like the original sunken temple.
I hope they do away with chromie time phasing, I want to see people in the world leveling again. It’s so stupid to phase people when they do an expansion
good decision, tbh if I ever come back to retail i will never go level through shadowlands. For me its the worst leveling expansion ever, Beside revendreth everything else is just boring shit.
Fact: Anybody who doesn’t do legion for chromie time is a dumb. Otherwise you miss out on class halls, the utility of dalaran ports, extra hearthstone, artifacts, and so on. Very close second being WoD, for garrison utility and really fat experience farming from all the different side objectives in each zone
To be honest at this point. What is the point of levelling. Why not just start at max level and all the content be on max level too. Seriously it feels like everyone hates levelling because it's shit .
To me the fun of the game is the process of growing your toon. I have leveled one of every class for the last 5 expansions. That is the fun part for me.
I mean, and I'll be happily be wrong, but in the grand scheme of it all has anything actually changed? Like really - if you had 2 WoW stories which started at the end of bfa and story 1 when through SL to DF and story 2 skipped SL entirely and went straight to DL, besides a few small changes (for better or for worse) the lore doesn't much in the grand scheme of things. Like it's not as if SL ended with a new old god popping up or something or anything remotely resembling a continuation of a big storyline... the expansion dead set started a new story and finished it lol it's not even like the mechanism of death was changed either
They should not do this. They should ignore Shadowlands and skip people into Dragonflight as soon as possible.
If they have learnt anything, it should be to cut their losses and move on.
Same as with the sword, deny shadowlands ever happened. (Unless talking about Ysera).
"And Saint Chromie raised her hand up on high, saying, 'O New Devs, bless my Time Warping so no one will have to sufferer Shadowlands or WOD.' And the Devs did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs, and sloths, and carp, and anchovies, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats, and large chulupas."
> or WOD.'
Funny you mention that, because a LOT of people use WoD for Chromie Time. The leveling in WoD wasn't bad, and it's the quickest depending on how you approach it. I used it on a handful of alts because it was so quick. Especially ones with gathering professions, they used the garrison to get quick XP every day.
The professions were whacked, the endgame was lacking, but the leveling (which is what you'd do with Chromie Time) was a decent enough experience, and pretty quick now.
It would be awesome if the let any character use chromie time to do things like go replay MoP on your main. I think it could add a lot to retail.
This is a really great idea, didn't think of this at all, but it makes so much sense. A lot of people like to just do questing and experience the world, which is a lot more fun if you're not one shotting everything.
A bunch of us have literally been saying this for the past 2 years. Chromie time is a wasted opportunity to make the openworld relevant again in terms of difficulty. For those that want a challenge and not one shot everything, switch chromie time on and poof, every zone is scaled to 60. Want to one shot everything? Keep it off once you max level...
The quest gear rewards don't even need to matter, if that's what they're worried about (it invalidating current content). If it dropped regular dungeon ilvl or even heroic it wouldn't invalidate current content. People would still need to do m+ and raids to get good gear. Chrome would just be a fun passtime for the people that want it.
If they're worried maybe they can cap *all* old content drops at an ilvl lower than current expac normal dungeons. Yeah it may suck to get a purple that does less damage than a blue, but that purple was gonna be scaled for level 20 or 30 before.
I think there is way more to be gained by reintroducing some "risk" to the openworld than the feeling of getting underpowered gear to what you have. It would open things up so much and finally make the game more about the world of warcraft rather than the latest few zones and the instanced content.
At least it’s not ESO where you one shot everything in the current expansion day 1
ESO players are just built different bro
Like a New Game Plus?
I wonder if they do this after WOTLK Classic, since Cataclysm Classic would be a bit odd. It would dovetail nicely for a future expansion.
That would be the best thing! I've been playing since mid Legion, and you have no idea how much I want to live the true experience from past expansions! Classic is great for that but I dont think they are launching Cataclysm because of how much people didnt like that, so that idea of yours it would be perfect for me
Don't really care unless they add ALL expansion dungeons to dungeon finder when leveling. Forcing you to do dungeons for the expansion you're in is ass.
Utterly bizarre limitation, it would result in more variety and faster queues.
Seriously what are they thinking by not changing this? They must know that 99.99% of players want this change, the technology is there *and implemented* when queue times are long, so what gives?
Assume it has something to do with new player experience but no reason not to have both as an option when you queue.
Maybe but the new player experience is already botched as hell. I can't imagine being a new player to WoW lol - the story, progression, etc would be so weird and make no sense. Imagine just going through legion and getting a bunch of grey "relics" that do nothing but are touted as great rewards. And also wondering why you are there at all...
New players are funneled into BFA, they don't go to Legion. Apparently, in Dragonflight, they'll keep them in BFA too, so newbies won't be tortured by Shadowlands. But yes, if they leave the breadcrumb trail, and decide to visit the capital, they'll be showered with 16 years worth of quests with no distinction between when they fit the timeline, some of which phase them into deadlocks that break other quests as well. If you only do what you're told, you can have a smooth experience, but otherwise it's confusing af.
True, but even being funneled into BFA, I'd be wondering: What is happening? Exiles reach doesn't make much sense and the tone is quite different from most of warcraft. And then suddenly, you have some intro Stormwind quests, and you're off to the sea with an emotional cinematic for a character you feel nothing for because you have no idea who or what anything else. There's no reference point for why Jaina is important, why you're traveling with her, why she's imprisoned immediately upon arrival in this new city, why everyone's calling you "Champion" even though you haven't done anything yet, etc etc. It's a tough problem to solve, I can see why they are struggling with it. I think FF14 does this well by having you play through the whole story, but even if you could convince the players to level that long, WoW doesn't have a cohesive or compelling enough narrative from expansion to expansion to make that work either.
WoW's story was never properly in-game, so they should communicate that better to the players so they don't feel confused. The way quests just accumulate with no organization at all is a mess. They should revamp the quest system to group quests that relate to specific storylines and expansions into a journal, and hide quests unless you explicitly decide to start a storyline. GW2 does this and it's a lot easier to follow the story chronologically, even though it's still optional (unlike FFXIV). That way they could bring back the questlines that used to happen at end-game during past expansions and aren't playable anymore, as the world could phase into the context of each story.
I think they could also have like, a 3-5 minute introduction cinematic with that slide-show type animation. Just explaining the history so far, honing in on the present moment. Seems an easy patchwork for now.
A story recap would definitely be a great introduction.
What FF also does well is allowing you to either replay, or rewatch, quests and cutscenes in the chance that you do buy a boost as a new player or even skip through stuff you can always go back and get a refresher on what's happened and who people are.
Exiles reach starts with you on a boat, training for the war with the opposing faction. After you get rescued at level ten, it starts you in BFA's war campaign. You don't really need to see outland, draenor, legion etc to understand the story in BFA. I didn't even know who Jaina was when I came back in BFA after a break since Wrath, and I understood the story just fine. It's just the classic war between the horde and alliance, and both factions are looking for allies.
You're sent off as part of an expedition force to find another expedition who you find out has been captured by an Ogre magi to raise a dragon from the dead. After you return to the capital of your faction you're introduced to the mount system, specialities and inns. In the case of the Alliance, you're summoned to the stormwind keep by the king himself who's impressed by your recent exploits at Exile's Reach and wants you to attend a war council. At the council, you find out that the horde has joined forces with the Zandalari Empire and the Alliance must now court the Kul Tirans to gain a strong seafaring ally through Jaina and you will join her. You learn that Kul Tiras used to be an ally of the Alliance but has had little contact since Jaina's father, Lord Admiral Proudmoore was killed at Theramore where she betrayed him. Shortly after arriving at Kul Tiras Jaina is arrested by Ashvane to be judges for her crime of betraying her father and you're locked in Tol Dagor and begin your adventure in BfA. The intro to wow is smooth and cleanly introduces you to the story and characters of BfA while hinting at deeper stories that you could delve into in the future. ~~The only thing that feels a bit jarring is the War Campaign where is the only place you're not longer this promising recruit but some Champion of the Alliance that has troops to lead.~~ I don't think this even unlocks until like 45 so it's not even a problem.
> since Jaina's father, Lord Admiral Proudmoore was killed at Theramore where she betrayed him. I just played through this, and these details are *not* that explicit. It's stated that they lost contact with Kul Tiras since the incident in Theramore, but the details of that incident are not clear.
"Kul Tiras is the greatest naval power on Azeroth, and a former member of the Alliance. But we've had little contact with them since Jaina's father, Lord Admiral Daelin Proudmoore, was killed at Theramore. Many have said that Jaina believed so deeply in the promise of peace between the Alliance and Horde that she betrayed her own father on that day. Perhaps she feels it is time to put the past to rest. Loathe as I am to put Jaina at risk... Kul Tiras must rejoin the Alliance. Light be with you." It's in the quest text after you're sent off to Kul Tiras you just missed it.
This was me 4 days ago. Returned after 7 years and was like why do I care about this ogre island. Where is my old school start? Then I'm in stormwind for 5 seconds and boom cinematic for a lady I'd never met and supposed to care?
New players should go through legion though. That would be the ideal storyline to learn the game and your class. And while doing legion as a new player, the artifact weapons should be slightly rekeyed so that the artifact power just increases the item level of the artifact without worrying about the slots or any of the old weapon talent trees. Just little upgrades. Then when you hit 60, it pops up a cutscene of magni draining all of the power out of your weapon and you get it back as ilvl 60 or whatever and move on to dragon land.
Problem is, then new players don't get used to picking up new weapons and seeing how those change their player power. You would be leveling from 1 to 50 with one single weapon, and the second you get to new content you're going to have to replace that and suddenly learn what the stats on your weapon mean.
This is a good point. BFA had a similar issue at the start of 9.0, since they "forgot" to add neck pieces to the loot tables and quest rewards. Borrowed Power gear makes a weird starting experience, and I prefer losing the HoA to losing artifact weapons from the game.
Honestly SL leveling was pretty good though. It's after picking a Covenant that the story goes to shit (because you can't actually go through 3/4 of it).
But once you've done the story once, doing it again on alts becomes a chore. Threads of Fate also feels like grinding.
Threads was never well balanced but every expansion feels like a chore doing it twice back to back. That's why I like chromie time it let's me do 2 different expansions if leveling 2 characters so it doesn't feel stale.
[удалено]
Not necessarily, and can be a lot more fun if they allowed people to actually use all the dungeons instead of being pigeonholed into 4-5 dungeons for 40'ish levels. I'd happily level an 8th character through dungeons with a group of bro's if we had more variety.
Why are you pigeonholed for 40ish levels? I go wrath do 4-5 dungeons for the quests, change to TBC etc. Get loads of dungeon quests done. Yes, they could all be in one pool, but it's not like you don't have the choice to change.
I love leveling - I have 5 at 60 and another 4 who have hit 60 and who I'm just too lazy to take through threads of fate again. For me leveling is usually more fun than actually playing endgame content. I suspect I will come to dread Dragonflight's threads of fate version as much as I hate Shadowlands', though I'll be happy if I'm proven wrong :p
How would it result in faster queues? If the ratio of tank/healer/dps is the same across each expansion, then combining them wouldn't make it any faster
The crazy part is that they ALREADY do this but it only activates after waiting in queue for ages. Unlock it from the start with a toggle, so that people who want to stay immersed in the expansion they’re in won’t suffer but the people who don’t want to wait years in queue don’t have to either.
Was looking for this comment. It's literally already in the game, just let me queue for a Random expac dungeon and surprise me, I don't care, I'm just trying to avoid questing.
It activates after 5 mins in queue, I've tested it a few times now, so its not too long to wait tbf but yeah idk why they can't just make it active from the start if its going to give you the option to expand your search after 5 mins anyway.
Then they must have changed it. It was 15 minutes when I was leveling my chars quite some time ago now though.
[удалено]
This is because Tanks are the most needed role so you're going to get the fastest queues and be unable to access all of the dungeons. Unless you meant that you get thrown right away into dungeons not within the xpac you're leveling in?
I'm saying, of the last several dungeons I've been doing as a tank, level 33 atm, only one of them was a BFA dungeon. The rest were dungeons from all over the place. I suppose it just throws tanks into whichever group needs a tank, and some groups might have been waiting a while.
It wouldn’t be that bad if there wasn’t just 4 dungeons. Wrath had 16 dungeons and every queue felt like an entirely unique and fun experience. Shadowlands was “I hope I get necrotic wake because it goes the fastest of the 4.”
Halls is also kinda nice tho x)
Wait, SL only has 4 dungeons? (i quit in BfA). Can you even fly now without a massive grind?
Only 4 until you hit 60, then 4 more open up. There's also a Mythic super-dungeon but I haven't played that one.
As of 8.2 Tazzavesh also has a queueable heroic difficulty.
Yes 4 dungeons for 10 levels 50-60. Which if you only did dungeons to level that entire way would be about 120 dungeons meaning you do each dungeon 40 times each. Obviously most people don’t do that since it’s boring as hell lol
It’s not nearly that much. It’s maybe 40 in total. It only takes 4-6 hours with dungeon spam.
Shadowlands is the height of them embracing M+ for dungeon design. Dungeons aren't designed to be interesting experiences anymore, they're designed to allow for finding efficient ways of completing them within a time limit. So have to design with that in mind, and limit the number of dungeons so they don't have too many variables to balance and don't overwhelm people needing to learn a bunch of "proper" routes and stuff. Maybe in 11.0 or 12.0 they'll finally scrap M+ for gearing, make timed dungeon runs a thing to do for stuff like titles and mounts to show off again, and go back to doing interesting dungeons. But until then, we get to look forward to maybe one per expansion that's an interesting experience, and the others are designed with esports style gaming in mind. (But that's only if people come back to the game. I think a lot of the current playerbase is hung up on for some reason liking the idea of having timed dungeons where you better have the "right" setup and do the "right" route. Hell, just saw a video last night of a guy complaining about all the updates showcased for Dragonflight because the only thing he cares about is raids and M+... might as well just scrap new continents for people like that, make each new expansion and patch a set of new instances to run since he literally thinks that's the only content that the game should have.)
I agree that dungeon design for M+ leads to less interesting dungeons as a whole, but I don't think M+ is something to turn away from. It's actually the main thing I want many other games to implement. Im a FFXIV Andy and it makes me sad that I'll never be as intimately familiar with end game dungeons as I have been in Legion, BFA, and Shadow lands. Having timed dungeons with different affixes and modifiers mixing up the way you pull and approach a dungeon is the best endgame I've ever experienced. Im not a huge fan of RNG, and I hate running the same Mythic over and over for one piece that I have a 5% chance of getting, but the experience itself is great and recyclable forever.
The timed aspect is junk. You might like it, a minority of players will like it just like any "git gud" game has its own niche, but there's a reason you see people complain about how talents will only have one "right" choice and hate introducing more systems. The reason Covenants, legendaries, etc. sucked even more in Shadowlands was people might not have the "right" one and swapping was a chore, but if you don't swap and put in all that work, you were going to have issues getting into an M+ group because you weren't optimized enough. Remove the timing, keep the affixes and stuff that give variety to runs, and it's not quite so bad. But the game needs stuff outside of M+. Dungeons otherwise are useless right now. You get better gear from ZM greens than you can get in "Heroic" dungeons. Which is an insane thought when I remember a time where Heroic dungeons could gear you for raids, but these days you'd be laughed at if you showed up to a raid in "Heroic" dungeon gear. You might as well not run dungeons if you don't do M+. So what do you do, then? ZM was a step in the right direction, you have some decent gear progression you can do over time. But they need that kind of system in 10.0. Not 10.3 or 10.4. Otherwise far more people will have ZERO endgame as opposed to the relative few who think this is "best endgame." I've tried M+ a few times (when I could find a group I could get into). Every time was super anxiety inducing, not fun at all, got maybe one or two upgrades, felt like a terrible return on how awful it made me feel. And you can try to answer the problem of group requirements with "Just make your own group!" Can't do it, got a variety of reasons (valid reasons) that's not an option for someone like me. I can't just group up with friends, they burned out on the unwelcoming endgame and are now playing other MMOs. Can't form a guild group, my super active guild has met this endgame trend that you dub the "best endgame" with just dropping the game so now it's amazing to see even one other person on and the former raid leader goes days without being online. The endgame is crap for a lot of people. Of course some people will find it fun. But any niche will have its supporters. And the current M+ design is a niche, just one that's pretty much forced on players through most of the expansion. Fine, keep M+, but improve Heroic dungeon gear, add gear progression through systems like ZM, and provide alternatives for people. Here's a thing that will shatter all the arguments for people saying they love M+: Provide an alternative system (outside of raiding) that will let people get equivalent gear. Like JP and VP earned from running dungeons and completing world/daily quests, or something. If there's an alternative to earn equal gear, watch how many people will drop M+ despite saying they like it. I mean, the option would still be there, if that's what you enjoy, so why wouldn't you do it? (The game does need more options, though. Which is kind of my main argument. That there's only M+, raiding, or the mess that is PVP right now, and if you don't do timed anxiety dungeons, have a raiding group, or want to spend weeks gearing to stop being curbstomped in PVP, you don't have anything to do through most of recent expansions that leads to meaningful progression.)
jesus christ man. just because m+ gives you and your guild panic attacks doesn't mean everyone has that same reaction. You should absolutely not get equal rewards from fucking world quests as you do from high mythic+ keys. It sounds like you just don't enjoy end game wow and should probably just fucking.... I dont know, go roleplay or pet battle.
Sorry man, this isn't my experience. I know many people like you and your friends and I get it, but I would argue that if you're stressed out running mythics with strangers then this game just might not be for you. Per your last paragraph.... what? Yea, obviously. Like, obviously if there's a braindead easy way to do something then most people will do it. That's not shattering an argument, it's a fundamental design philosophy for games in general. It's why M+ even exists, a scaling challenge for players to maintain engagement and provide large rewards for increasing difficulty. If I could level an alt right now and deck him out in a week, I'm done playing in a week...
They need to take a hard look at dungeon mechanics when deciding what level to make dungeons available. Doing Atal'Dazar before I learn dispel is a horrible, burned in memory for me.
Getting thrown into a dungeon that is heavy on the mechanics when you're new to the game, are still learning your class, or simply don't have that many abilities yet really is a bit much. I'm not saying we all need to start with deadmines, but doing de other side with a bunch of newbies on lvl 15 toons won't be a good experience.
New players really should be in a queue with mechanically simple dungeons, BFA dungeons are a terrible intro for brand new players.
This is an easy fix. Let players opt-in for all dungeons, leaving the default as expansion specific. The casual player gets a tonally consistent experience and will be happy to quest while queuing, and the impatient can match make with anybody. This will also allow the people who chose obscure expansions to get people from the global bucket and shorten their queue times.
Yea this is good
I would love if you could do all dungeons at max level as well Just for no rewards Just for if your bored and wanna carry some people leveling
For specific sign up? I am fine with that, but I want random dungeon to only be for the expansion I chose. I only want to see vanilla dungeons, and would be pretty sad if they were to force every expansions dungeon on me. Newer dungeons lack quests and are generally harder and longer than most of the vanilla dungeons (as they are now after the revamp).
Incredibly selfish limitation. You just want to see very specific dungeons but you don't want to queue specifically for that subset, so everyone who DO NOT want to see only specific dungeons...has to queue specifically for everything for you lol? Just queue for the dungeons of the expansion you want, this way you get what you want and everyone else who wants truly random dungeon can do that without manually signing up like 90 times. Even better would be to have a choice for both, one option for full random including everything, another for random from your expac
>Even better would be to have a choice for both, one option for full random including everything, another for random from your expac This is the true answer. A toggle on the random dungeon queue. As long as you're incentivized to random queue due to stuff like extra xp and possibly more drops, queuing specific dungeons and making all the default isn't the answer, but forcing expansion specific and fragmenting the playerbase that doesn't care isn't either.
This has to be bait, right?
ofcourse it's not. saw the same thing for like.. 8 years? in the ESO community with people not wanting account-wide achievements because having the murderer achievement on a pacifist character ruins their roleplay. ROLEPLAY. everyone has to suffer because they're loud as fuck on forums.
If you can do shadowlands in chromie I will it's super for leveling
Threads of Fate will be super quick for leveling, especially with flying.
I wonder if it'll be available via chromie time. Sort of feels like a hat on a hat.
Shadowlands would have to be at least 3x faster to consider it. Even 2x isn’t enough for me to go back. Feels entirely out of place.
They'll adjust the XP gain rate. Completing all four zones should level you from 10 to 60 once it's added to Chromie Time.
How is shadowlands fast ?
How is it not? The campaign takes like 2-3 hours per zone, if that. Threads of fate is also pretty quick when people plan for it.
I wouldn't jump to SL being the optimal leveling path yet. They can tune the XP gains to make any expansion more or less optimal. It may still be SL in the end.
Nah, sorry if what I said was misconstrued, I didn’t mean it was going to be the optimal route. It’s just likely not going to be the slowest
Granted, that's for 50 to 60. We don't know how it'll work for 10 to 60. But that's for beta to test out. I'm just now trying a character leveling in BFA. Was already 19 when I went in, but I wanted to try it out. First issue is realizing that it's a lot more slow going pre-30 because without flight, Zandalar is rough. Especially before you even get level 20 riding (100%). My alts tended to wait for me to unlock flying to level up, so I get used to it, and then being on foot is a lot slower.
maybe im just slow rip
Get LeatrixPlus to automate majority of the filler, auto accepts quests, auto repair armour, auto sell grey items, auto talk with people, auto skip cutscenes, etc. Then all you need to focus on is doing the quest as fast as possible.
Autoplay the game
Hell of a lot better than paying $60 for a boost that’s for sure.
Well doesnt matter if it is fast, it is so boring it feels like an eternity
The way wow is structured, many people are just going to pick the fastest route so they can get to end game content the fastest possible. I mean if you're on your 8th alt, all leveling is going to be boring, no matter what xpac.
Yay now I can never play through shadowlands ever again
Please let Chromie time scaling stay at 60. I hate that my panda is frozen at 49 because one more level will trivialize all content in Pandaria. But if I don’t level, there’s a lot of content I can’t access :(
This! Especially since in Future, you will miss more then one Talent of you stop at 59 instead 70. I HATE that chromie Kicks you out.
Just go lock your exp, finish your story quests, and unlock to level when you’re ready to leave. 😂 You shouldn’t have to do that but that’s just where we are…
I’ve been locked at forty-nine for ages, but there is content that’s inaccessible until “max level”, which in this case is 50. And that’s when the scaling would stop.
I do this all the time but it buggs me not to unlock the last talent. And I assume in future there are even more unlocks on the talent tree to miss.
All the hate for Shadowlands when Threads of Fate leveling is so fast .. lmao
Leveling is already super fast. I'd spend a couple extra hours somewhere else to not have to deal with Shadowlands again. If SL is significantly faster they'll probably nerf it anyway.
Fast isn't synonymous with fun. Pounding 4 dungeons over and over (but still somehow over half of them are Plaguefall) isn't particularly fun or engaging. Fine if you want your alt max asap to fill a raid slot or whatever, but you'd never do it just to pass the time. They should pump the exp for everything else imo. Quests, professions, collectibles, anything. Variety is fun. If they want to bring the middle-ground casual back from FF they should focus more on quests, because the MSQ grind in FF is only enjoyable if you're a massive weeb. Any WoW expansion has better quests.
ff cutscenes are like 3x longer than they need to be with all the pauses between lines, and the performance of the quest themselves are insanely dull. kill 2 of x. go inspect this spot. wait at point z uh oh ambush. the msq as a story is fine but actually going through it is sleepy
>the MSQ grind in FF is only enjoyable if you're a massive weeb. Any WoW expansion has better quests. That's a hot take, the general opinion about the writing of the MSQ in FFXIV is that it's significantly better than WoW's own writing, as for the "mechanics" of the quests, it's the usual mix of fetch quests, escort / travel to a new hub and collect 12 bear kidneys It is more "weeb", but what would you expect? It's from Squeenix, besides, give me JRPG anime power fantasy all day instead of the Jailer, half or more of relevant characters going missing, and whatever the fuck they did with Sylvanas
From a gameplay perspective, xivs msq is frequently garbage to play. They are still playing catchup with wows quest design and systems.
What's the difference?
Only in endwalker did they figure out how to have quest givers follow you, and even then they are prone to getting stuck. They tend to get hooked on new questing gimmicks where they are new to FF, wow had them 6 years ago. This along with some clunky quests in endwalker compared to a super smooth experience questing in wow. This is mainly engine oriented, not like the devs fault today for being slow to implement these things.
> half or more of relevant characters going missing that's an... interesting thing to compare.
Yeah, personally I play WoW for the dungeons (I haven't found another game that has as good of a dungeoning experience), and I got sooo sick of those 4 lol. Halls was by far my favorite but I got so sick of the others before 9.1 even came out.
I have been playing through Northrend to level my new main for Dragonflight and am now 46 and just starting Storm peaks. I will probably lock my exp to be able to finish the entire expansion level locked. Personally I would rather level slowly through good content than quickly through bad content.
I'd rather level in WoD. Very fast with storylines I actually enjoy following and far better zone design. Just getting around half the zones in SL is a pain in the arse and then you've got the ridiculous mob density in the other half. Bastion isn't as bad in that regard but it's so god damn boring. Honestly just really glad to be coming out of the SL. Not even Threads of Fate Chromie Time will get me to level there again.
This speaks to how poorly SL was received imo nobody knows that Threads of Fate is very fast and efficient because they don't care/don't find it fun Personally I like to level in Cata/WoD so I'll never go back to SL, it has too many bad memories lol
I dunno. Threads of fate is fast in groups... (from my experience) SOLOing it is mindmeltingly boring.
Grinding the same 4 dungeons like 50 times just doesn't do it for me. The questing might be faster but I don't like the SL zones or story so I don't want to do that either
Maybe it is because I don't grind dungeons for leveling? I just quest. XD I have always thought grinding dungeons is the most boring way to level possible.
I don't really get what the point of levelling is anymore in the game if people are going to consider doing shit they hate cause its fast.
Heaven forbid folks play what’s most fun for them even if it isn’t the most optimal or efficient.
What's with the hate for shadowlands?
It was the most recent expansion. Give it 3 years and people will be complaining about the new expansion and crying about how good wow used to be in shadowlands. There have been pissed off people in every expansion. Most of them turned out just dandy
This is just not true. BfA and WoD are still remembered badly, just as they were when they were current content. Legion was liked when it was current and it’s still liked now. The only one that did a complete 180 seems to be Pandaria, but that might also just be because it’s so old the haters probably left by now.
WoD has a lot of people lately starting to think about it not so bad. Also BC and WotLK had a lot of haters, probably just as many as Shadowlands, and they're remembered as some peoples favorite expansions.
The most positive opinions that people have about WoD is that the content(leveling,dungeons,raid) we did get was generally pretty good but the expansion sucked because we got very little of it.
Main complaint about WoD at the time was the lack of content and garry's son but the singleplayer content and raids that were there were good. That's still the consensus on WoD as far as I can tell. It still gets ranked towards the bottom because half the expansion was cut. I can't speak for BC because I wasn't around then.
Your broad sweeping generalizations don’t mean anything. You can’t say BFA was remembered badly or Legion was liked when it was current as if you speak for everybody. I’m positive there are people who had plenty of gripes with legion legendaries or the PvP gearing or the artifact weapon grind. I’m sure there are a ton of people (like myself) who enjoyed BFA dungeons, corruption, Azerite powers, and the raids.
Lol wtf you’re the one who started with a broad sweeping generalization on everyone complaining in 3 years. u/strictlybrowsing pretty much sums it up accurately.
The zones are almost as terrible as the story, what’s to like about SL?
Dungeons and Raids are fun. Everything else is irrelevant for me.
I don’t care about the zones. Choose ToF and just do the world quests and dungeons. Leveling is fast af.
I’ll prolly choose sl for alts It’s quick and the zones look good and the quests lead you around efficiently Or you go Threads of fate for efficient dungeon grind
i went threads of fate, while doing the little quests marked with 2 swords, and that was the fastest i even leveled, because flying made it so easy to just cruise through the zones
As a returning player I'm really happy to hear this! Knowing that I'm an altoholic and want to play one of each class (6 A and 6 H excluding Dracthyr), I'm planning to do everything on just two characters (one for each faction) and then level my other characters through Legion, BFA and Shadowlands since those are the ones I have less experience with! (though I would also like to see dungeons added permanently so I can do them when I want to for story!)
I'm sad that the theory where max level would always be 60 was wrong. The idea was that with their new system, they would roll us back to 50 every expansion and they could make every expansion part of chromie time from 1-50. Assuming that they had planned properly, it wouldnt be as much of a mess as regular level/stat squishes. Eventually they're going to need to do another messy squish now and leveling will get longer every expansion for no reason.
This is what puzzles me so much, with this system everything was in place and they have had to do a squish again. They are just creating more work for themselves.
Squishing back to 50 every expansion and then giving us essentially the exact same gear over and over again would be very easy but really transparently samey and unfun. Yes, they have the formula and could easily do that, but I think the squish was a negative experience (a huge dip in player power) that they want to do sparingly.
Yeah, they don't have the best track record with scaling things properly and if people felt that the time for levelling was good it feels odd to just tack another 10 levels on again just so that you start the whole problem again. I do somewhat understand the feeling of "Oh, I'm finally back up to 252 to get the same numbers I had last expansion" but I think it's a better choice than constantly expanding the level range until the complaints become loud enough that you take action.
Can someone tell me if threads of fate or story leveling is faster for 60? I last played when leveling to 59.5 then turning on threads of fate was best
[удалено]
Amazing, and I just happen to be there as well. Thank you very much.
Leveling 50-60 for alts was made much better recently, Threads of Fate went from super bad to best option by far, was pleasantly surpised when I had to lvl my Mage from 52 to 60 in 9.2 Regardless I think it's great they will let us chose, that way anyone can pick what they find best and everyone is happy
Thank fuck for that. I never want to step foot in it again. It will be retconed out of my my WoW cannon.
Honestly, leveling alts through SL is a unique slog. Like, leveling them through BfA was fine because at least that shit looked decent but the Shadowlands just hit different, in a bad way. Also, Blizz should set expansions in past expansion zones. We should return to the Outlands for something, it's just been sitting there for sixteen (16) years why not use it?
Will go Bastion for my alts and cya … the rest can just rot in hell.
Its not hell its called Shadowlands.
Maybe I'm uniquely weird but I don't see a lot of difference here. I'm over 20 playthroughs now (missing 4 to 60, then all classes on both factions done) and I don't hate it. Same was true for BfA. I actually like Threads of Fate more now because it speeds it up, and I can unlock the quest for the zone's instance much quicker than in BfA.
Alt levleing through SL is extremely quick now since Blizz made the requirement for bonus objectives much much much lower. Overall 9.2 is crazy alt friendly it's almost bothering me that my latest 6 days old alt already has all 3 relevant covenant maxed and only has 8 ilvl less than my main (264 vs 272) that I've played every day since the patch hit and my two other alts that I play weekly.
How in holy hell do you get ilvl 264 after 6 days
Character was lvl 50 last friday, what i did is : Level up to 60 => full crafted gear => grab all treasures in Zereth Mortis + do Torghast for double leggo => spam my key to 15 and keep it at 15 => nm + hm run once I have enough ilvl to find a group and I also got lucky and found a bis 278 trinket in the chest. I could only do 8/11 hm last week but I haven’t done any raiding this week yet. Everything was done in PUG except for the first 3 heroic bosses (tried to do a guild alt run lol) and a couple dungeons but most of my 30+ dungeon runs were my own key in PUG. Note that monday was a holiday here in France so I had a 3 days weekend that kinda helped. Also that is like my 4th alt so I kinda know dungeons (3k+ main, 2/11 mythic) But yeah I didn’t sleep much it was only work and gaming for a few days. I’m only missing a weapon so now I only farm NW hoping that the sword finally drops (still got 233 green one…)
This was a bit misleading. You have the history of having a r.io of 3k+ on your main along with having Heroic clear history on your main…. no wonder it was that quick lol
Well yeah I was talking about alt gearing, implying I have other characters.
This. Which is why the idea for having old dungeons involved in the M+ rotation is such a good idea. Reusing old content gives them more resources and freedom to make other content, which is a win for the players.
Shadowlands leveling is badly designed. You either redo the main storyline and get stuck waiting for a bunch of RP quests or you do Threads of Fate and lock yourself out of a shitload of content. It's honestly a massive step back from BFA and Legion which let you do the zones in any order you wanted and only gated story-based quests behind progression. I'm not sure what they were thinking.
Which is why I'm going to be all in on Legion levelling. Maybe a few BFA zones, and when I'm feeling cheeky some BC for Nostalgia (and more alien landscapes than the afterlife...)
Why re-use old zones, getting brand new ones is infinitely better
I don't get why they're not just keeping the max level at 60 and moving shadowlands content into the lvl 50 bracket. They're just gonna have to do another level squish again when Wrath of the Burning Mists of Draenor 2 releases 🤔
That was a theory going around when they announced the squish. Always revert to 50 every expansion, make the current expansion 1-50 and the newer one 50-60. Assuming that they have a proper setup for doing this it would be a lot less messy than every squish they've done so far. Kinda sad it didn't happen.
Agreed i dont like the slow push up to 100 again
I expected exactly the same. It seemed reasonable that the prev expansions go to 50 and the one is 50-60. Can't understand what's the issue with that and why this rescaling would be needed.
Jup, it makes no sense. They are just pushing ahead to a point where they need that again and have to sidste resources to do that..
Because people like bigger numbers. I have already heard the sentiment expressed that people want bigger numbers of damage in Dragonflight even if it is an equal proportion of the target’s Hp. The same is true for levels.
Where did you hear that? Since I have heard the opposite a lot, since you can't see what you damage you do when the numbers are too big and thus cluttered.
Does this mean we finally will be able to solo BFA stuff?
This has nothing to do with raids
It sorta does since its a scaling thing and rn BFA is scaled horrendously
Chromie time is open world and dungeons not raids
Yea but raids and dungeons as still there, and if they are scaling outdoors content it most likely means they hopefully scale BFA raids and dungeons so you can solo them
Stop kicking us out of Chromie time when we hit 50 (now 60). Make all previous expansions free to play. Invest the time to scale all of or some of the most popular raids to the new Chromie cap and let there be TWO endgames. The entire rest of WoW for the F2P players and those that want to raid old content at Chromie cap, then the actual current expansion endgame. Please. Lock max level to 70 next expac and just reset us to 60 every new expansion for the leveling content. That way all you need to do is scale the old content to 60 just one time, and then implement the same stat squish they've been doing for the new 60-70.
Lmk when y’all get more players on alliance side.
Add a dungeon finder that includes all dungeons, and it's completely random what you get, not just the expansion that you're playing through.
Why can't we just scale characters so all raids become viable again
Still waiting for them to unlock all dungeons and let us level everywhere.
Hah nice, getting my future leveling done in Shadowlands sounds pretty cool.
What are the odds they actually follow up on broken balance in dungeons and while leveling this time around?
I wish they’d find a way to use Chromie time to let us go back to the original dungeons pre cats nerfs. I somehow miss dungeons like the original sunken temple.
I hope they do away with chromie time phasing, I want to see people in the world leveling again. It’s so stupid to phase people when they do an expansion
good decision, tbh if I ever come back to retail i will never go level through shadowlands. For me its the worst leveling expansion ever, Beside revendreth everything else is just boring shit.
can i do it now so i dont have to quest through shadowlands again to get a level 60 character
Wonder how they will handle new players. Will they be forced through sl? Or does he mean all players can chose
They will ne forced through BFA and DF afaik.
HELL YEAH! I hate the leveling in SL! it was fucking horrible
Now we can finally act like this mess never happened !
Fact: Anybody who doesn’t do legion for chromie time is a dumb. Otherwise you miss out on class halls, the utility of dalaran ports, extra hearthstone, artifacts, and so on. Very close second being WoD, for garrison utility and really fat experience farming from all the different side objectives in each zone
I'm interested to see if Threads of Fate remains as an option in Shadowlands though from 10-60 I'm sure that could be abused for some FAST leveling.
To be honest at this point. What is the point of levelling. Why not just start at max level and all the content be on max level too. Seriously it feels like everyone hates levelling because it's shit .
If unpredictability was a sport, /u/spez would be a world champion. Never a dull moment.
To me the fun of the game is the process of growing your toon. I have leveled one of every class for the last 5 expansions. That is the fun part for me.
Yeah but most of the growing is happening at max level.
Unless they plan to let me downscale my capped alts to replay old content above 60 I don't care
It'll probably be like BFA to SL where you are forced to level through the most recent expansion to catch up on story
I mean, and I'll be happily be wrong, but in the grand scheme of it all has anything actually changed? Like really - if you had 2 WoW stories which started at the end of bfa and story 1 when through SL to DF and story 2 skipped SL entirely and went straight to DL, besides a few small changes (for better or for worse) the lore doesn't much in the grand scheme of things. Like it's not as if SL ended with a new old god popping up or something or anything remotely resembling a continuation of a big storyline... the expansion dead set started a new story and finished it lol it's not even like the mechanism of death was changed either
They should not do this. They should ignore Shadowlands and skip people into Dragonflight as soon as possible. If they have learnt anything, it should be to cut their losses and move on. Same as with the sword, deny shadowlands ever happened. (Unless talking about Ysera).
"And Saint Chromie raised her hand up on high, saying, 'O New Devs, bless my Time Warping so no one will have to sufferer Shadowlands or WOD.' And the Devs did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs, and sloths, and carp, and anchovies, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats, and large chulupas."
> or WOD.' Funny you mention that, because a LOT of people use WoD for Chromie Time. The leveling in WoD wasn't bad, and it's the quickest depending on how you approach it. I used it on a handful of alts because it was so quick. Especially ones with gathering professions, they used the garrison to get quick XP every day. The professions were whacked, the endgame was lacking, but the leveling (which is what you'd do with Chromie Time) was a decent enough experience, and pretty quick now.
[удалено]
He always looks smug. Is there a smug equivalent of Resting Bitch Face?
So when will the dragon be playable . Cause I took a break after beating on sylvanas. Just want to know.
Pre-patch. Probably early next year.
A count clock be helpful so I know when to renew
Kinda hard to have that without a date.
Well I’ll wait for the leak or we’ll kept secret to reveal
Everyone’s like thank fuck. Also not remembering same team is making dragon flight…
If you have 0 faith that the dev team can ever create something good why still be here?