03/04/2018 12:38 AMPosted by
Nysem
I think the slower leveling makes alts more valuable and meaningful like they were in the past, but maybe not when most people leveled their alts before this patch
I think that ship has long since sailed. Alts haven't really felt meaningful to me since BC.
Heirlooms and BG XP combined with BG event weekends made leveling through Wrath absurdly quick and vanilla + BC was no longer the slog it used to be following the nerfs to XP requirements for 61-70.Professions were much easier to level and relevant recipes were much more standardized in terms of acquisition. In conjunction with simply having more characters, it was much easier to have all of the professions yourself and every recipe you'd ever care about.Dungeon finder made it so your friend having a tank alt didn't actually help much. It sped up your queue, sure, but the game was going to make sure you got a tank one way or another.Gearing used to take real work, but Wrath blew pug raiding wide open and threw gear at everyone.Basically, alts stopped becoming a very valuable thing to have that you had to invest a lot in and became a small diversion to do whenever you were bored between raid lockouts on your main.
Additionally, I am at 16 capped characters. The leveling changes were not substantial and they're basically just a minor inconvenience that's more annoying less because of the increased time and more because it's another example of Blizzard just trying to micromanage how players approach the game rather than letting them figure out how to have fun themselves. If they wanted to introduce scaling and make leveling take longer, fine, but they should have provided additional options to compensate for players who have thoroughly exhausted the content. For a variety of reasons I won't bother repeating here, leveling has basically been reduced to an introductory prologue before you can access World of Warcraft.
Despite the nerf, I may very well end this expansion with 25+ characters (10 more than my previous record), despite having been unsubbed or not playing for more of it than any previous expansion. This is primarily because alts snowball very hard, so the more alts you have, the easier it is to have even more alts later, and because of Legion Assaults, which are the most ridiculous leveling tool ever put in this game. It's actually less time /played to do those than it was to do the XP pot and bonus objective trick in WoD.
I think I may have missed out on some fast leveling. The last time I legit leveled a toon from fresh to max was in MOP. I say legit since there was the Legion pre-patch where you could level a toon from 1-100 in a couple hours. So, I did get everything to 100 during that. haha
But, back in MOP, the fastest max level I got was 2 days 18 hours /played. The fastest Allied Race I hit max on was my Lightforged Paladin was 2 days 16 hours /played. My Void Elf and Nightborne took over 3 days /played. So, the overall leveling speed felt mostly the same to me. But, better since the zone scaling is absolutely amazing.
A friend of mine said he had hit 110 on his Shaman in like 1 day some odd hours /played without RAF. So, it does appear that at least in early Legion, leveling was very accelerated.
That's not a terrible time if all you did was quest casually and I've seen similar things reported elsewhere, which suggests to me that the thrust of the nerf was aimed at dungeons, which were significantly faster following the addition of bonus objectives. At the same time, it's still slower than what I'd consider to be my casual questing speed, and as I've done many of these zones literally dozens of times, I'm not really interested in spending more time in them than I have to, unless I just happen to be really interested in the quest content per se at the moment. That does happen, and I did things like complete Darkshore with my heirlooms on despite it being gray just to finish the zone and see the story, but in general, I'm just trying to get to end game.
I'm not really a fan of level scaling either. It undermines the entire point of leveling to begin with, to say nothing of the value of doing so. What's the point of leveling to 60 in the first place if all of the mobs leveled right along with me? The only real benefit to me is that it means I'll be able to do 60-80 in Outland, since Wrath has aged worse than any other expansion in terms of quest content. As the bridge between old and new, it has Cataclysm's boring and mindless quest organization and layout paired with vanilla and BC's philosophy that questing should be slow and a real grind.