Private servers are wrong on every single account when it comes to the game. I have been on multiple pservers. And literally every single one is wrong on how much a class does in terms of dmg, mana regen, health, boss dmg, boss armour, etc. While still fun to play on, they are just not like the actual game.
One major factor that’s off is mob spawning.
If you’re talking about difficulty alone, warriors and rogues are near the bottom (rogues less so because of stunlocks).
All the other classes either have heals or strong enough control methods to make it easier.
Now if you want to talk about speed, it’s a whole nother issue. Speed-wise, feral druids, hunters, and warlocks are the best. Mages, and priests are less so because of the constant need to replenish mana. warriors and rogues can both kill things fairly fast and just bandage when they need more HP but that won’t be a constant issue.
Hunters and Warlock are cake to level. Warlocks can fear juggle and tank with Void Walker. Just dot everything up and it dies.
Priests and Paladins are not hard to level, but they are insanely slow.
Druids have mobility, but anything other than resto is useless. Most Druids just leveled up resto because it actually did something. Druids are really neat and fast, but still suffer really low damage.
Mages are difficult early on due to lack of skills, but once they level they become stronger and get more tools for mobility.
Shaman are really decent for leveling because they have a lot of mobility. Astral Recall, water walking, reincarnate, etc really help out the leveling experience. The only issue is that a majority of their damage either relies on strict mana or windfury Procs. SO your either drinking a lot or waiting.
Warrior is hard. Warriors not only have a lot of downtime, but fighting anything above your level is extremely difficult. You’ll need to spend a lot of time upgrading your weapons, unless you want to stay gimped.
Which is kind of unrealistic for most people since you will have competition. Yeah being the first person in a zone will make mages crush but I think this thread is more about average leveling rather than ‘leaderboard’ runs.
Also another thing that boosts up Rogues and Ferals on private servers is fronstabbing/frontshredding.
Essentially you can get inside the hitbox of the mob and spam strafe back and forth and for a couple milliseconds the mob will ‘turn’ its back to you and you can backstab/shred.
I tested it on the wow classic beta and it didn’t work.
In hindsight, it appears that the hardest classes to level tend to benefit more at the endgame. Due to how gear scaled for the classes, Warrior seemed to have it the hardest. Any melee had obvious disadvantages compared to ranged classes.
That’s my two coppers.
Paladins can be overrun as well. The damage output is meh while leveling, so if you get a couple of mobs on you that are dwindling your health faster than theirs, then all you can do is DS / BoP and run away. You can only do that every 5 minutes. You could argue that Warriors could avoid death by running away as well, and that they have an easier time of doing it with Hamstring / Piercing Howl, since neither have a CD.
The biggest problem with Paladin leveling, aside from meh damage before AoE farming in the 50’s, is they have no means to range pull non-undead mobs. This can land a lot of players into a bad pull situation. Hence why engineering is often recommended for Paladins.
Paladin and Priest are also considered slower levelers for their own reasons.
Priests have some of the fastest leveling speeds actually. Improved wand damage with strong dots is really efficient. You can just keep killing mobs without having to drink for a long time. Very consistent.
Priests have virtually zero downtime with spirit gear and spirit tap.
Shadow Priest was really, really easy. It’s the only class I got to 60 in Vanilla because I had a lot of fun with it, and it just flowed really well. The thing with Vanilla is that it wasn’t necessarily hard, it just took a long time to do things. Shadow Priest could grind fairly quickly once it got going.
Without a doubt Hunter from 1-10 till you get your pet.
That is pretty heavily nerfed by how powerful Raptor Strike is 1-10 though isn’t it?
Paladins might be slow. It’s not true that you’ll never die… I died all the time (though I was on a PvP server…) Casters and enemies that can heal will be your bane.
The other annoying thing is that you’ll likely level ret. Most groups will ask you to heal, and a few will ask you to tank. Healing is boring as hell, especially if you’re not speced for it. Tanking low level dungeons is really challenging… You really need consecration in order to have a chance at keeping agro on packs of mobs without taking forever to get sufficient threat on them.
All that being said, I had a blast leveling my paladin, and I’m looking forward to doing it all over when classic hits this Summer!
Wow is not and has never been hard to level…
In vanilla especially while leveling you have stupidly simple rotations, so no class is really harder than another. However some are more time consuming to level. Typically the speed to 60 by class goes as follows
Usually its based on downtime reduction. Biggest sources of downtime are regen and travel time. One of the reasons druid is so fast is travel form at 20 significantly reducing travel time.
Hard in the sense it isn’t breezing through everything like it is now. WoW was originally designed to be easier, but today it is far easier than it was back then to level. Leveling a hunter and then trying to level a warrior is an awful experience.
Its faster now, but I would argue that its harder to level now in that actually playing your class requires significantly more skill, and if you play well there is more opportunities to improve your leveling speed.
I mean for a number of classes in vanilla your optimal leveling rotation was dominated by auto attacks or wanding. Where as in retail even taking the simplest builds in retail have you performing some kind of variable rotation at nearly all times.
Early Paladin always did, and still remains, completely frustrating to me because they have no filler. You literally fire off your abilities then wait for cooldowns to come up while you white swing one or two times.
Rogue to some extend is also like that but it feels far less “wait”-ish.
Yeah I have level’d a Warrior and Rogue to 60 and Rogue was harder for me. The dependence on Duel Wield means you miss as much as a Fury Leveling Warrior except you have leather gear. That’s pretty tough. The only plus on this is that you can stealth out if things get rough, but thats not exactly killing anything and isn’t really speeding up your leveling. I give Warriors the edge personally, especially with how many Blue 2H weapons there are early on, not to mention the Class quest you can do at 30 (or maybe even lower) to get by far the greatest 2H in the game at that point.
Hunter, warlock, mage, druid, and then priest distant 5th because of spirit tap when it comes to difficulty/speed.
Rogue is probably 6th, then paladin/shaman, warrior at the rear.
Some people might argue the order and it depends on what is available and how many people are playing. That should be roughly about right though.
You can get to level 120 far, far easier pressing two buttons than you could in vanilla. The reason the optimal rotation when leveling was primarily auto attacks/wanding (halfway through the mob’s HP anyway) was for regenerating mana. That wasn’t the case for Rogues (obviously), but with Hunters, Warlocks, Priests (who did a lot of damage with wands), and Shaman you didn’t really need to keep doing more damage with spells since you had DoTs and other damage effects to finish mobs off.
The rotation in modern WoW rarely changes and you’re lacking a lot of tools when leveling. Most of it breaks down to spamming one or two abilities for a large chunk of the leveling, or just pressing a button when it’s off cooldown. There’s no resource management, no worry about dying, all it is is the grind - there’s no fun.
The problem with Warriors is that there’s no on demand rage ability until Slam, prior to that you have Heroic Strike which eats a huge amount of rage as you don’t gain any from the next auto attack plus the actual cost of the ability, and Rend, which scales very poorly and is a weak bleed. Until Slam, they don’t have anything to spend rage on (and often don’t have much rage anyway), and until MS they don’t have an instant attack that does a lot of damage.
Rogues have max energy at the start for bursty damage and on demand damage with a flat power level on Eviscerate, and can leave combat with a decent chunk of energy for the next mob too (or get a tick or two while going towards the next mob). While dual wielding sucks, they’re not as reliant on white attacks, and they get a bonus to hit chance early in the leveling tree and Riposte is super good too.