I recently finished levelling a character in Pandaria with Chromie time on, and I have to say it felt a bit like playing through insufficiently tested content. Here are the reasons why:
As early as Jade Forest, you get quests to do scenarios, then when you try to queue for them you get an error, “You do not meet the requirements for the chosen dungeons”. No information is provided in the quests about what those requirements might be. It turns out you can queue for them at level 50, but then all of the enemies in the scenario are level 35 and the difficulty is trivial. There seems to be no way to do Pandaria scenarios as level-appropriate content.
While levelling through all the zones, you collect hundreds of “Lesser Charm of Good Fortune.” The description for which says they are for “the eventual conversion into Warforged Seals, which allow players to risk a coin to receive a bonus reward from raid encounters.” So eventually you meet an NPC who can convert these into Warforged Seals for you, and it would be reasonable to assume that this is all the Lesser Charms are good for, so you would naturally convert them all on the spot. You then discover that you can’t have more than 20 Warforged Seals, and all of the hundreds of Lesser Charms you converted beyond that were completely lost with no warning. Later, you might try some of the raids, and realize that Lesser Charms of Good Fortune can also be converted into Elder Charms of Good Fortune or Mogu Runes of Fate, which give bonus rolls in different raids than do Warforged Seals. Too bad you already ditched them all for Warforged Seals. That info really needs to be in the tooltip.
If you’re new to the game, or simply want to, you might pick up the Pandaria version of a crafting profession in order to help keep your gear up-to-date, only to find that the first gear you learn to make requires level 32 and has terrible stats for the level, being only item level 37. You could use the Relic of the Past items to craft level-appropriate gear with decent stats, but there are two problems with this: first, the gear you get is only decent at level 15, 25, 35, 45, or 55, so if you’re feeling underpowered and want to craft a gear upgrade at, say, level 23 or 43, your profession won’t help you with a single slot; second, you can’t even use a Relic of the Past until you have 40 profession skill. Why should a level 15 player have to craft 40 pieces of unusable junk that requires level 32+ before they can craft anything for themselves?
You may encounter quests that require flying before you hit level 30 and gain the ability to fly. I don’t remember the first one I encountered. Maybe the Tillers dailies at Half Hill?
There are vendors who sell some good gear that requires level 35 and costs Marks of Honor. I bought the Prideful Gladiator’s Decapitator for my ret paladin because it was a clear weapon upgrade. Unfortunately, upon equipping it, I found that the effect “Equip: Increases your Strength by 124” doesn’t work. I submitted a ticket to a GM about it and the response was basically, “I found a comment on wowhead stating that you can now buy these for Marks of Honor in order to collect their appearances. That must mean these are just cosmetic now.” Great. If that’s true, it should say “cosmetic” on it and have no stats, or “Legacy item: Equip effect is inactive.”
On the Timeless Isle, you get Timeless gear: epic-quality tokens you can send to your alts to create epic gear for them. These tokens can’t be used until level 35, which is fine (arguably, it would make sense if they couldn’t be used until level 60), but then they create item level 39 gear. Heirlooms at level 35 are item level 97, so 39 is downright terrible.
To be fair, lots of other expansions are like that. Too much content to really go through. Chromie Time as was described [in not those specific words] by the GM of the game was really the best band aid they had at the time for it.
Main thing I find odd is the notion that someone would read the tooltip on the Lesser Charms of Good Fortune to learn what they’re for and then not read the tooltip on the Warforged Seals to see the “Total cap: x/20.”
That said, I do think we’re overdue to turn all of the reroll tokens from every expansion they appear in into a single currency. Screw the caps, just let people dump the various expansion currencies to acquire them and use them wherever. Not like whether someone’s able to roll on 1 or 20 legacy bosses will ever matter in a meaningful way.
Yea fair critique on the Pandaria levelling experience. It’s unfortunately basically the same for other expansions.
The impression I get from the way Chromie time is setup is - enjoy your expansion but you can’t jump into the extras (post content) until you’re past the level at which they give a benefit.
That’s all an artifact of trying to force a former end game leveling experience into a low level leveling experience with only minimal algorithmic adjustments to things like item levels and mob levels. Chromie Time was at best a bandaid to the leveling problem caused by too many xpacs and the level squish. So you end up with stuff like the Senario queues not working because iirc they were disabled at the start of WoD. It’s easier to set the minimum level to something higher than you can achieve than to make the system reliability function.
To make any of the xpacs really work in Chromie Time they would have to go in by hand and update how all the systems functioned. Basically rebuilding a good chunk of the back end. That would take a lot of time and money and even then there would still likely be problems when you add in scaling etc.
What they really need to do is build an entirely new low level leveling experience. They already made a good start with Exiles Reach, they just need to continue the story from there, going through all the old world leveling zones instead of just booting you off to BfA/Dragonflight/Chromie. But that would also take a lot of time and money.
Honestly, from the way they talked about the Workd Soul Saga being the end of a chapter in the game, I suspect their plan is to make the end of The Last Titan be a hard cut-off point for the story and essentially start a whole new story, complete with a new leveling experience right from level 1.
WoW is such a victim of the EQ design philosophy of stacking expansions on top of each other. At some point it’ll be such a cluttered mess I can imagine they’d decide to start over. Kind of feel like this is where we’re headed after the Saga.
Expansions in the past are just old forgettable experiences and design philosophies that were interesting only in the moment for me. Not surprised they barely get any attention. It’s not really anything like playing through a single player games DLC as mmo’s are designed differently to keep you playing and for the social appeal.
With how many zones there are in the game and how large the world of warcraft is, even spending just 1 level per zone still wouldn’t let players see everything because you’re dinging within 5 quests for most of the leveling process. Even being limited to a single expansion, you still run out of levels before you run out of quests to complete. More time would be spent traveling around than actually playing if the leveling process tried to incorporate more of the world into it.
I agree with the notion that leveling’s kind of become a throwaway concept to Blizzard, but that also means I don’t really think they’d be able to do anything to ‘revamp’ it even if they wanted to, because of the changes they’ve already made.
Oh no not redoing the leveling in Azeroth as it is. I’d imagine they mean something like Outlands would occur and change the face of the planet after some event occured. Either that or we end up on a whole new world with a whole new leveling experience.
This way the only way to experience old WoW would be through Classic WoW repeats. The engine and the base game would be drastically overhauled and brought up more to current tech.
Chromie Time and scaling are just two facets of the utter mess they’ve turned the game into, all in the name of “level your way and/or with friends!” nonsense that virtually no one actually engages with because most players are long timers who go for the path of least resistance - that is, leveling alts solo in BFA, the default. It isn’t 2004 anymore.
You wouldn’t need every zone or all the existing quests. Just a few flavor quests in 4 to six zones for each faction. Travel the old world dealing with small problems with the crew from ER so a new player gets a feel of what WoW is. Cata Chromie time would still exist if you wanted the full in depth experience.
My apologies, you did say ‘all of the old world leveling zones’ which is technically all of them; WoW didn’t really have any zones intended only for max-level players until MoP, aside from the Isle of Quel’Danas in BC.
But I guess what you’re really asking for is essentially what Chromie Time already is, except being ‘updated’ every expansion to include bits of all of them instead of just one. But wouldn’t that just get more and more truncated over time as more and more expansions get added to it, eventually making it feel like what led to the overall level squish and introduction of Chromie Time in the first place?
If it were up to me I wouldn’t add anything from any of the xpacs. Like you said there are a lot of Vanilla zones. Just add another zone with more quests to bring it up to the new max level.
Example of what I’m thinking:
You are Alliance you get off of Exile’s Reach at lvl 10, do the tour of the city with the Gnome and instead of heading off to BfA you meet Capt Garrick at the front gate. There’s been some Gnoll problems in Elwyn.
10-20 is Elwyn dealing with some Gnolls and Murlocs and learning about Human society.
20-30 The Capt gets word that you are needed in Loc Modan, Ice Trolls are mounting an attack on Kharanos so you head there and fight them off learning about Dwarves and Gnomes along the way.
30-40 Sends you to Darkshore. The Elements are still restless and are hampering the building of a new Worgen settlement and a newly rebuilt Auberdine has a Naga problem and you learn about the Nelves and Worgen.
40-50 You head to Azuremyst and Bloodmyst to help the Draenei finish cleaning up any demon corruption learning about the Dreanei
50-60 brings you back to Westfall where the Pandaren are getting the Elements settled down finally while building a new home on the coast and helping the Humans revitalize the farmland. And we learn about the Pandaren.
60-70 Duskwood A serge of undead pour of of Ravenhill and the fight is lead by a contingent of Lightforged and Void Elves, we help save the day and the threat to Stormwind while learning more about the various allied races.
at 70 we get called up to go on the mission to start TWW.
When TWW is done, you cut in a new zone, say Stranglethorn that goes 70-80 and at 80 you go into Midnight content and TWW gets added to Chromie time for those who want to experience it and so on from there. Always extending the new player leveling experience with a different old Vanilla zone with new story and then having them move on to the current xpac.