Blizzard put a great deal of work, effort and time into gear, professions and items between levels 1-59. Was leveling originally meant to take a lot longer when Blizzard was developing the game?
So the players would have the gear and items for a long time before replacing them.
I have not seen anything where they nerfed leveling before well they did after Hmm WoTLK?
Having played since nilla about 2-3 months after release I do not recall it being easy go of it, Now I worked full time then and played with a friend after 5 till about 10 daily, and weekends and holidays and it took me Hmmm 4-5 months to get my first toon to 60. (warrior and this was first mmo I played and the guild I was in was all hunters and a loc, and one shammy⌠best of times and a lot of fun dyings too)
Youâre still going to take a long time to level, especially if youâre doing it without a set guide/patch.
Gear in vanilla lasted a LONG time relative to modern iterations of the game. you may wear the same nicly itemized gloves from 30 to 55 or something before finally getting a small upgrade then use that well into raiding until you finally got another upgrade.
to your original question I am sure they tweaked leveling time but when the average player took 10-12 days /played to do 1-60 that was a long time. sure speed runners got it down to like 4.5 days but really most people took much longer, figuring 4 hours a day a casual but dedicated player would take ~60 days IRL to level. Current retail I have leveled my Kil tiran hunter 1-110 in around 1 day 10 hours /played and I am sure many are much faster than me.
First nerf to leveling came in BC with patch 2.3 (ZulâAman).
Thank you for the correction ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
Indeed it was. With every expansion, blizzard stupidly reduced the amount of XP required to get you from 1 -> max, meaning that the older content got faster and faster. This was on top of regular class/talent buffs over the years. This was a horrible decision and helped ruin the game. They basically wanted to rush players to max as fast as possible, then also make that easy enough for to complete it before they replace it with the next content. They had a âfull speed aheadâ mentality, with zero respect to the original game or older content they were rapidly paving over. Rather than just host each version of the game so you could play at your own pace; they opted to make everything fast/dumb/easy so youâd get through it at their pace.
But this constant speeding up dug a hole for themselves by making the game too fast for them to design new content for. So now players plow the whole game in a few weeks then have to wait months for new content. This didnât use to be a problem because it took many months to get through raid tiers. Back then, they had plenty of time before players exhausted the content at hand. Now they canât possibly design it fast enough to keep up.
You say 1-max but 1-10 was untouched for most of the games life if not all of it xp wise.
What someone levelled to 60 during vanilla in 4.5 days /played? Why havenât i heard of this before? Thatâs insanely fast!
I think when they were developing and designing gear they intended leveling to take a lot longer so people would get a lot more use out of it.
I was off a bit it was 4 days 20 hours /played
from Joanaâs website (the guy who does a vanilla leveling guide and add-on):
All video links are linked to my 1-60 speedrun that was done back in 2006 on the official Blizzard vanilla WoW realm Jubeiâthos (patch 1.9.2). The video is known as the only fully recorded 1-60 speedrun of vanilla WoW and the fastest known time done in 4 days 20 hours played time and first level 60 on the realm.
An example of this would be for casters, or in my case in going priest in classic, the wand reward from BFD, lasts around 25 levels, thatâs how good it is.
Itâs the same way for a lot of the blue rewards, they just last a very long time. Melee can get the 2H spear from alterac valley quest at 51 I believe and that thing lasts until like UBRS. Same with arcanite reaper.
This is in the Classic forum, so Iâll assume you meant Vanilla.
It took me 3 months on my first character to level to 60. In Classic, I think itâll be about the same for most people approaching the game for the first time or playing casually.
The game is much stingier with gear. Youâll be thrilled when you finally put on a pair of white shoulders. You wonât get trinkets at all for a really long time (like, level 40+). Blues last a long time given how rare they are and how slowly you level and worth going out of your way for to acquire. Purples come from raiding, and raiding is an exclusive activity that mere mortals can only aspire to (or at least, thatâs how it was in Vanilla, I expect raiding participation to be a lot higher this time around but still not something a majority of players regularly do).
Basically, everything you earned in Vanilla was meant to (and for the most part did) feel like accomplishment. You quested for 2 days in Desolace and finally leveled up - that talent point feels good. You scrimped and saved every silver you could for a week so you could afford your 40% ground mount - that feels good. You ran a dungeon and got some blue gear that was miles better than you were wearing - that feels good and hopefully you made some friends while you were doing it. You get the idea.
Modern WoW is much more accessible, but at the cost of any of the things youâre doing feeling like an accomplishment.
Well, yes. Thatâs a silly question. There was a ton of development going into the game before it launched and undoubtedly leveling changed numerous times along with it.
Although whether or not items were supposed to âlast longerâ, seems like a question without an answer. Unless someone comes in and says otherwise, we donât know the end game they had in mind during the earlier stages of development.
I donât think it was supposed to be âtoo longâ considering weâve heard devs talk about how testers would ignore quests at first which were supposed to be experience boosters and provide fun gameplay. The original game, at the time, was still one of the most casual MMOs you could play.
Only a Kid focused MMO like ToonTown could even claim to be more casual minded.
People who work full time jobs and have families and other responsibilities will take months to reach level 60.
More or less every patch was a nerf to leveling, adding more quests more quest rewards, budding quest rewards or itemising changing talent trees around the early editions of vanilla wow had a difficulty challenge very unlike 1.12⌠thatâs why a lot of people have a disconnect with it and think âwait wasnât it harder than thisâ?
Early vanilla you would buy vendor white items due to scarcity of upgrades available.
Yeah, i know Paul and the time he did it in.
4d20h is much closer to 5 days than 4.5
On topic: levelling was indirectly nerfed though class buffs/regen rates etc. IE if you do more DPS/recover health and mana faster then levelling is faster
yes but the point I was making is 4d 20h is a much closer to 4.5 days than the average 10+ days. sorry I didnât have the exact time handy at the moment I was replying.
No.
They underestimated how many quests would be needed and didnât have enough, or were simply out of time to add many of them in before release.
In early vanilla, several zones (such as silithus) were pretty barren of quests.
It takes many first-time players about 10-15 days /played to hit 60, which is like 240-360 hours. I wouldnât call that âshortâ by any means and probably is about the length, if not longer, than many single player games.