Is WOTLK anything like Vanilla in terms of leveling experience

WOLK feels very different from TBC and Vanilla. In those games people quest with each other and interact while questing and leveling. It feels more roleplay like and immersive

I’m mostly asking this cause I’m curious is this how the scene is for new players? I just got into WOTLK cause I only really play hardcore and vanilla but my friend wanted to play WOTLK so I started leveling.

It just feels so dead and lifeless compared to Vanilla… no new guilds have messaged in trade chats looking to build up a community. In vanilla you have to look for people to help you with quests cause its hard to solo them. I know phase 4 is right around the corner and that’s why there is a 50% XP boost and you just blast through it super fast, the issue is that no one seems to be running dungeons cause questing is better…

Am I just on a bad server? I’m on benediction… I know right around the corner they’re going to introduce just queueing up for dungeons and ditching LFG completely. I hope classic+ comes around soon.

Has it always been this way?

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By chance, are you playing Horde? Benediction is 99% Alliance

That said, people are burned out both from the current phase and the leveling experience as a whole. It’ll be a tough time to find more than maybe a couple other players in an entire zone even on a populated faction. Hopefully the next phase will revitalize things a bit, especially with the addition of RDF

No, I’m playing alliance, I can understand how people are burnt out. Vanilla era got a huge influx in players due to hardcore, just even on the non hard core realms. It feels soo nice to have everyone leveling, and talking and the open world is alive and thriving. Maybe I just came to WOTLK too late…

I don’t think WotLK is that different. The thing is that people have been leveling through old-school Azeroth since 2019. I personally have leveled like 10 toons to max level, and I’ve seen and done everything, at least on Horde side. I know the questlines. I know the stories. I know the zones. And my main focus is end-game raiding. So if I’m leveling another toon, I’m trying to get that toon into ICC before it’s too late.

Once we’ve been in Phase 4 for a while, I think you’ll see a change. People will be less focused on racing to max level, and might feel like they have time to mess around on an alt. I personally would like to level a few Alliance toons, as I haven’t played Alliance in years.

They couldn’t be more different.

Positives:
Crusade nerfed XP 11-60 and nerfed elite quests to normal so you can solo them. This is good because the old world is dead. RDF should have been on this list but crusade didn’t get it and wrath still doesn’t have it until P4. Crusade/wrath also made every talent page good, where as in classic, most were junk.

Negatives:
Everything else. Heirlooms, XP buffs, boosts, refusing to put in RDF until P4 of wrath. They also horribly mismanaged the realm populations, a disgrace that continues to this day. It is sad that RDF, something that needed to be put in day 1 of crusade, isn’t put in until P4 of wrath, the tail end of the project, as far as most of us are concerned.

yea theres a charm with classic leveling that does kinda get stripped away by the time wrath came around. Reducing the EXP needed to level up, better talent options, the nerfing of group quests means you really aren’t at a disadvantage just going at it alone. And while im leveling my 9/10th toons right now and its nice to have these changes, the bit of hardcore i played with an actual lively world was far more endearing.

you might be onto something with people being burnt out aswell, we’re like 4 years into classic at this point and people just arent as interested in leveling new characters, the handful of leveling guilds i saw advertised around the start of the expac going into phase 2 have mostly vanished even though im on a larger server now.

guess it really is what it is

What new players?

If you have to force players to play on balanced realms then maybe they’re not exactly as wanted as you might think.
Maybe they transferred because absolutely nobody cares about the population being balanced in any way and even less people care about world pvp or whatever other irrelevant garbage.

You’re late to the party, basically.

What you describe was about the first month or two of Wrath [Classic]. Now we’re all on our 5th or 6th alt and just want to ‘get done’. So that means using things like RestedXP to turbo through the levels.

Once RDF comes along, we’ll be sitting in Dalaran queueing to 80. Which really isn’t a bad thing once you’ve done the ‘quest to 80’ route.

As for guilds. Well, Classic has always been extremely heavy on the Raid Scene. So it’s unlikely you’ll see new guilds due to no one wanting to leave the established guilds and risk ‘not downing bosses’; you’ll just see players shuffle between the established guilds.

World feeling dead…well. Welcome to WoW. The more expansions there are, the less content there is to do.

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There should be more around October 12th when icc and random dungeon finder releases. I just started a character and I’ve been seeing more and more people slowly going through the zones with me. As it get’s closer I’m sure a fair few will come back, idk how many but it should be enough to level with.

It wasn’t very long when Classic Era servers were released, and the player base didn’t seem to mind skipping as much leveling as they could.

That’s more fresh server syndrome than that the experience is that much different. Leveling characters towards the latter half of vanilla classic was also mostly a solo experience. It got a bump when TBC came out because people were rerolling/joining for TBC but quickly became dead again. Same going into wrath.

Hardcore is interesting because it inherently keeps people at a lower leveling and rerolling, we’ll see how long interest lasts in it.

lol ive been doing this the entire time anyway. im either in org, smc, or dal waiting to be summoned or whatever. barely quested and i have two 77s, priest got summoned into wrath her first time lol. i don’t quest i just dungeon crawl. i mean i only want to heal so i guess it’s nbd lol

Some people might, on the other hand with teleports a lot of people particularly dps who will have queues will be mixing questing in with RDF. Which can actually make the world more populated.

The only thing that’s really a “negative” would be the lack of RDF. All that other crap you’ve mentioned is completely optional. You don’t have to buy a boost, use heirlooms hell, you can even turn Joyous Journey’s off.

Everyone knows you can’t go do that. Because the moment you take off to fly to a zone, the queue pops. xD

((This is what happened to me while queueing for BGs; ‘poor mans’ RDF.))

I should also add that the leveling experience is a bit faster than vanilla but overall the same. It really changes in cata, but wrath will feel like a bit faster vanilla experience.

The first launch of Classic (vanilla) had the feeling. Was very nostalgic and lively with people reliving the game. That is gone.

TBC is closer to Wrath, in terms of the leveling experience, imo. Since most of the elites in the world were already removed, and the game is much more heavily focused on end-game content and areas, just like wrath.

I was actually heavily involved in, or ran Dungeon Leveling guilds during WoW Classic and TBC Classic, and enjoyed that style of play, particularly through WoW Classic content, but for Wrath, I personally decided to just focus on 2 mains, and play end-game.

The leveling experience feels watered down, classes are much stronger, mobs are much weaker, there’s more experience, and it’s much less of a leveling journey, and much more of a grind to get to start the game at max-level, or at least that’s how I personally feel about it.

Looking at HC, you see that streamers are streaming leveling content, which isn’t something people have been doing for TBC or Wrath content, and I think that’s pretty telling in and of itself.

For Wrath, on top of all of the “improvements” to leveling, like increased XP, easier to kill mobs, lack of elites in the world, greatly more powerful characters, there are also the so-called QoL “features”: heirlooms, joyous journeys, and soon-to-be introduced Dungeon Finder. This all points to rushing to end game to complain that the content is stale and there’s nothing to do, while raid-logging.

And people say things like, “If you don’t like it, don’t use it.” and “It doesn’t affect you.”


Anyway, I’m sure some people prefer the pace of leveling in Wrath to other expansions, and others will have their own opinions and perspectives that differ from mine.

:woman_shrugging:

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Leveling feels horrible in 1-59 zones. Post cata is wastly supperior. Imho ofc.
The fact that people trying to find the most abusable methods to get trough leveling as fast as possible, like tag respawn killing like crabs in westfall or worgens in duskwood, running only dungeons over and over with aoe classes, aoe farming with mages, only shows that im not alone thinking this.
Tbc leveling feels amazing in comparson(except honor hold high level griefing by pathetic loosers) and i can only imagine northrend will be the same.

I just dont get the apeal of people liking this tortue…an obvious developer atempt to make you waste as much time as possible…with horrible drop rates, respawn times, escort quests and turn ins on the other side of the cosmos.

On retail developers do the same thing…but at the endgame systems.

Cant wait for cata classic release, that was an actual peak for leveling for me. Cata and MoP did it the best. I dont get why people give devs so much poop for cata rewamp when in the actuality they made the old world playable. :person_shrugging:
Imho ofc.