and man oh man its such a better experience leveling in retail. it get so annoying running out of mana half way into a single creature and having to auto attack for the rest. the sense of progression is just far more fluid.
i give mad props to the wow team for making leveling fun and fluid in retail.
Feral leveling is probably your best bet if you’re playing classic. Minimal downtime.
I havent looked at Classic but have memories of running dungeons to get a wand for my Mage so I could level by AOE’ing mobs and then wanding to finish them off.
Ahh the good old days.
I suspect I’d hate it if I went back so will hang on to my memoriea.
Oh and printing a levelling guide because the zones were terribly organised.
But the dungeons were awesome fun and took effort, but gave great enjoyment on completion. Now people run them and hate them but just want to do them to get the XP.
Blizzard may have scerwed up alot of things leveling in retail but it’s undeniable how they’ve improved the QoL.
Go level a melee on classic, it’s literal torture.
“DODGE PARRY MISS DODGE BLOCK DODGE PARRY oops your heroic strike got parried again LOL”
If they took the classic wow experience and integrated it into the retail engine (obviously with some work to smooth things over) that’d be the ultimate leveling experience.
It’s apples and oranges. It feels better at first, but then you quickly realize that it matters much less.
Especially in MMOs where economy of effort is so important.
Level 10 in classic is probably worth about the same as having a level 30-40 in retail.
You forgot the part where you run 30 ft away to bandage yourself while fighting too.
I had the unfortunate idea to fish in classic.
Fish got away
Fish got away
Caught a fish
Fish got away
Fish got away
Fish got away
It’s more like it depends on the person. Some people enjoy the slow, tedious, grindy nature of lvling in classic. I enjoyed it when I was a kid and didn’t have to do much other than school and school work. Since I have a job and life… Yeahh no lol I personally don’t want to sit there watching my character miss, need to regen mana, and such.
100% agreed mate. Leveling in classic still needs so much work to be any where near as enjoyable as retail. Season of Dis should’ve made more changes.
I’ve leveled through numerous expansions and I can honestly say SL and DF are my favorite to level through.
You want a genuine leveling experience? Unequip all of your heirlooms, use only what you get from quests, and avoid WoD like the plague. You’ll actually have to use your cooldowns and you might get the added benefit of turning off the go-go-go mentality to absorb the world a bit.
At least until DF and you realize you’re back in current day retail…
It’s like playing in unmodded Morrowind vs Extended.
Kind of an odd take.
I’ll definitely agree that the vanilla / Classic experience starts to drag at level 25 to 30. But to that point it’s probably the best leveling and learning experience there’s been.
Very well balanced struggle to get gear and money to buy spells. Grey upgrade? Awesome. Six slot bag? The gods must be smiling on me.
And since you had to chose what spells to buy first you got them slowly and you really learned everything. You looked ahead and planned what to get.
Retail is: Here’s how to use a sword - Level 10 - Hail champion you must save the world again.
yea, druid is very very mana starved in classic… spirit helps but druids drain mana fast. getting to lvl 20 and unlocking cat will be your best bet if you want more fluid
Here is the thing a lot of people don’t tell you about classic.
WE asked for the changes over the years away from classic, we moved us forward so we can actually not auto attack for 5min as a mage.
I skipped vanilla as I did not like how they were treating hybrids (read the forums and was just like “yikes”) and only joined in TBC after some friends got me to try it. Then they quit mostly prior to wrath and I hated it and unsubbed until my friend told me about the dungeon finder and I was like “oh look maybe I can do more than one instance now.”
Because up until then I’d done like one sunken temple and one wailing caverns and maybe one shadowfang keep over the entire 70 levels of a character. When I capped in TBC everyone was on heroic 5 mans and I needed normal 5 mans, and my gear was so bad (wearing completely random quest greens and robe of arugal at 70 because nothing else dropped) that I couldn’t get a group to save my life.
And the few times I did, yeesh, it was awkward.
My brother made some comment recently to the effect that “leveling is fast in retail.”
Yes.
If I really try I can have a character capped and in catchup gear in like a week. I can’t play that much currently, but I really just don’t see a point to leveling slower. I got a classic wrath character into the 70s, there was no dungeon finder and no one was doing any leveling dungeons, and the 2+ hours of hard grinding regular quests so thereby needing like 12 hours of soulkilling quest turn ins, made me never actually reach 80.
They released the dungeon finder but by then I just didn’t even care.
I might do cata but it’s because I want to do hours of twilight again. I never had enough friends to really do more than mess around in the game prior to good queue content.
Being able to queue literally saved my sub, I was never going to become some social guildhead, I was just going to haul bear butts for weak xp until it took so long to do anything that it was better to reroll (often around the 30s I’d reroll, didn’t cap a character until like the fifth try).
Or, failing that, just quit playing until the situation improved. And it did improve, which is why I can’t see a point to going back to before it improved. The game is so much more solo friendly now that there is absolutely no upside of going back there for my type of play.
yeah i think a few easy changes would have been reducing the chances that enemies can resist/dodge/parry/block. its not like they needed to get rid of them, but reduce how often it happens.
like just give us a smoother experience
This is the correct take. I still love old mmos and play this sometimes. But we are older now 
, life comes at you fast. I did play some wotlk and got to ulduar but yeah, I prefer retail rn. 
this is pretty much it right here.
i spent like an hour this morning walking from durotar to thunderbluff for the shaman dual wield rune. only to realize the mobs i had to kill were all around level 9-10 and i was 5. welp thats not going to work. just wasted the little time i have to play just walking
In your opinion. I love classic leveling far more than retail.
The thing about retail for leveling is you get to play your spec pretty much right at the lv 10 when you get to choose.
Vanilla/Era often you really don’t get to until mids lv 30s or so. Ele Shaman for example. You are still beating mobs with your stick up thru your 20s.