Just wanted to air some thoughts about my experience with WoW: Forever. Specifically about my level pathing to 20 and the outsized influence of dungeon exp. In a nutshell, when I roll a new character it goes like this:
- Open world quest to 13 by doing my starter zone
- Do all RFC quests, I turn them in and go from 13 to 15.
- I go straight to the Ruins of Lordaeron and pick up all of the quests I can.
- After RoL, I am now level 18.
- I do WC with Leaders of the Fang and the 1st part of Glowing Shard and very easily hit 20 with quests left incomplete while I wait for the level cap to be raised.
I’ve found that once I hit level 13, I pretty much entirely stop doing open world quests except as needed for dungeon quest chains. I COULD go run all over the barrens doing various quests and loop back to turn them all in 40 minutes later for 700 - 1000 xp each and some green items to vendor, or I could go run a dungeon and get multiple quests worth 4000 - 7000 xp (or more) done in roughly 30 minutes, go up 2-3 levels, and get some blue gear upgrades.
Ruins of Lordaeron especially is just insane for this and makes a good example. If you walk in, find the Crest of Lordaeron, and walk out that quest is worth over 8000 experience by itself. Since I went in at 15 I couldn’t get one of the quests and I had to do a second run for the blue gloves from the spider, but all in all I got: blue boots, blue pants, a blue staff, blue gloves, blue bracers, a blue ring, and I went from 15 to 18. I filled about half my slots with blue upgrades. First run we had a new tank who wanted to kill everything so it was about 40 minutes, and the second run we had a really experienced tank who knew shortcuts so it was probably about 20 minutes. All of that, or I could’ve done the Centaur Leaders quest chain and Stolen Silver in the Barrens for like 4k xp and the bounty hunter ring. It’s just incomparable.
It does make for a smooth and very streamlined leveling experience being able to dungeon hop and just blast through levels, though I do think it undermines the spirit of the game and some of the new systems. We have these new quests and these touched up zones, but it doesn’t seem like it’s really worth engaging with them from an efficiency standpoint beyond what’s strictly necessary. I could choose to open world quest anyway and ignore the dungeons, but that would almost certainly take at least 50% longer for me to hit 20 that way. I like the new camping system, but not being able to camp in dungeons or even right outside usually has kept me from engaging with it regularly after level 13. I’ve never had a dungeon group set up a campfire before going in either.
Maybe it’ll be less efficient when the level cap raises or when the game releases, who knows. For now though I’ve leveled two characters to level 20 and this has been my experience and perception of things. Leveling pace for me has been about 50% faster than OG classic WoW overall, which I don’t think is bad really. I think that open world quests could be made more rewarding so that they’re more competitive with dungeons for experience; If I have to run almost to the other end of the zone to do something or fight other players for quest drops it should give me more than two bars of xp.
14 Likes
I don’t see how this pans out for HC when it releases. Leveling seems to be so much less a part of the game, and for the vast majority of the HC community, leveling is the majority of HC.
I think they went a bit overboard with adding new XP sources. There were only a few dry spots per-faction that could have benefit from touch up, but they just came in with the XP firehose and added 1k quests throughout the game.
This combined with significantly increased player power is a recipe for problems, IMO. We haven’t even seen how the legacy system impacts this on top of all that.
4 Likes
I think the changes are good and I believe the intended way to level will not be necessarily to dungeon hop around. You follow the story of your race and the natural progression of the zones you would go through. You do relevant dungeons along the way.
and since the majority of the XP is on the dungeon quests there is no reason you can’t go back at a higher level and run a group through them to do the quests.
1 Like
I agree - just got done doing RFC dungeon (and all quests) - I started at level 14 - I’m now almost level 16 (I got 1 level and about 80% of another level) - most of the experience was from the 5 quests in the dungeon.
With their stated goals of adding more dungeons to the game, I could definitely see a situation where players rarely, if ever, have to quest in the open world and can pretty much level 13-60 from dungeons only. This is against the spirit of classic and while you can certainly get a good amount of experience from dungeons in vanilla, you still need to mix and match with questing (unless you’re being boosted, of course, but that is an entirely seperate issue)
Dungeon quest experience probably needs to be nerfed by about 50%
2 Likes
Having an increased reward for grouping up with others and tackling a challenge doesn’t seem like a bad thing, the offset is they lowered the XP grinding in dungeons, so if you go through the trouble of doing all the quests , you get rewarded, if you skip the quests, you get no xp reward whatsoever. It is a nice change to making you want to actually spend time getting all the quests before doing a dungeon. Before it was almost worth skipping a lot of quests because the dungeon xp was just faster.
3 Likes
Yall understand they nerfed normal dungeon xp right? It all balances out in the end.
2 Likes
This is incorrect - even with the extra experience for mobs from dungeons in Classic, you are never getting almost 2 levels just from completing the dungeons and the quests - its about 1 level for doing everything (dungeon and quests) in vanilla.
2 Likes
I’m gonna say it.
The leveling structure is like Retail where you do a bunch of quests to unlock the dungeon quests which are your major exp gains.
It goes against the spirit of classic and should be changed.
An elite mob in a dungeon when you’re in a full group should give at minimum 80% of what a normal mob you kill outside of a dungeon gives. And dungeon quests should just give double the normal amount of a normal quest.
5 Likes
Is the leveling speed closer to retail or closer to classic?
Non dungeon quests are classic like. Dungeon quests reward similar to retail.
Need to nerf the Dungeon quest XP and up the kill xp in dungeons.
No reason soloing mobs outside of dungeons should give more exp than killing mobs in a dungeon with real people.
They say they want to build social interactions but lowering XP gain in dungeons to a point it’s basically non existent is going against that idea.
1 Like
Good to hear it! Being in a crowded overworld waiting for respawns is garbage
I see the two comments were edited, so I’m Just saying that people are getting to 20 in 10-20 hours played in Forever. In 20 hours on retail, you can easily level from 1 to 90 and be geared enough for LFR. As such, it’s closer to classic than retail but probably less than classic. And that’s fine, the extra quests per zone means less travel time, which bores us all anyway. Instead of waiting for a zep/boat to scoop 10 more quests, there are 30 more in your zone.
I think the XP is as high as it is because these are one time non-repeatable quests and they nerfed the actual XP you get inside the dungeon itself. So they’re boosts, but there’s no reason to go back to that dungeon again except for more gear after that.
Which is a problem.
If you’re leveling and really want an upgrade from a dungeon you’re going to run into the problem eventually where there just aren’t people to run it with.
Leveling dungeons need an incentive for going through more than once and a blue level 20 item ain’t gonna keep people going through them.
Leveling dungeons need to reward xp from kills. Like I can’t imagine running all of wailing caverns multiple times in hopes of the level 19 bow when the only other reward if I don’t get the bow is maybe half a bar of exp.
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So wait let me get this right, everyone is complaining dungeon xp from kills is too low so you can’t level through dungeons to 60. Yet you can do every dungeon quest 14-60 now and almost exclusively level that way. So you are…leveling in dungeons to 60 still ? That’s what everyone was begging to have back and it’s already there! nice!
And on a serious note, who is making you do every single dungeon and every single quest on every single character? There are more different WAYS to take your journey now than there were before ever in Classic, just becasue one way seems like it’s too ‘quick’ for you, doesn’t mean you do not have other means to have your journey.
2 Likes
Well, presumably you would really only need that gear closer to/at max level, and other people would also want to go get that gear with you.
Very very close to classic. Leveling in retail is ridiculous lol.
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Think it’s also worth having some foresight - while dungeon boosting may not be the same, dungeon boosting still may occur with summon alts to every instance and a high level to quickly complete the instance quests so players gain a quick level or two in a short period of time with no effort.
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They nerfed XP in dungeons so the quest XP is buffed.
Feels good I like it.
2 Likes
This!
This doesn’t solve boosting at all if a high level runs you through to complete all the quests (since the quests are what give the majority of the experience anyways)