There have been many threads lately about leveling to 60 taking much longer in Classic. I intend to take my sweet time with leveling alts in Classic, but I’m still curious about the differences in leveling speeds.
What factors made character leveling on Vanilla or Classic go so slowly compared to current WoW? Was it that quests gave less XP? Did mob kills give less XP? Did the old levels just require a whole lot more XP than they currently do?
Yes, but also it was more of a challenge to kills mobs. Most classes could only handle 1v1 of their own level and then several will have a little rest after 2-3kills. It also meant that you had to always be careful about how many you pull. If you pulled 2-3 at once it could mean a death and then when you get back the mobs are re-spawning and you rez with half health and die again…
I am so pumped for classic.
I wasn’t slow. It was just right.
But seriously, mobs took time to kill. Travel took time. Those two alone had a big impact.
Omg look at them type…
The amount of XP needed to level in vanilla is much higher than it used to be. Throughout WoW’s life the amount of XP needed to level has been cut several times.
Add on to that, a lot of classes had to eat/drink after each mob because mana/health regen was a lot slower back then. It wasn’t until Halfway through TBC that mana regen was tweaked to be a lot faster.
Less XP per quest, less XP per mob, no XP bonus for doing a dungeon, no XP in battlegrounds. Mobs on average were harder and you did less damage.
Overall difficulty. When a quest says Elite next to the name, it means you need a group. If it says Dungeon next to the name, you need a group. If it is says Group next to the name, you need a group.
I’m sensing a theme here…
You couldn’t faceroll a rabbit in vanilla. Little buggers could bite!
Downtime and drop rates on quest items are probably your two biggest factors.
For downtime, you have drinking/eating between fights. Corpse runs. As well as general traveling around. Quest hubs don’t load you up with 6 quests that you complete all in 1 spot and return to turn-in and get more. Rather, you’d often pick up 6 to take you to 6 different parts of the zone to complete each and follow them through their respective chains.
The hubs themselves gave out quests of varying levels and difficulty - often you’d travel between zones and do quests from each rather than all from one. If you clear out just a single zone like The Barrens, you’ll find that you run out of quests of your appropriate level and have no other means to level other than kill mobs. (Because the other zones you neglected now offer gray/green quests worth much less)
The drop rates were also quite low. Places like STV were designed to keep you around for a few days and some of the quests are intended to be completed over that time (the troll tusks/necklaces/ears/pages/etc).
Ok, what I’m hearing so far is:
It was a more challenging game in that: mobs hit harder, you do less damage, way more travel time, no quest indicators you had to read the quests for clues and locations, not a lot of guides to walk you through everything, no LFG. I think the main one too was server reputations, if you were a dick, known ninja looter, or just an a$$ clown, people would not group with you which limits your ability to be as efficient as possible and bars you from a lot of content/progression/etc.
I would also get distracted by trying different zones, getting into huge open world PvP battles and just socializing with everyone on your server. Would spend hours talking to other adventurers or ganking other faction players. Hours spent waiting for raid groups, farming materials. Nothing is given in Classic, it is earned.
Lower base damage on spells, and more dependence on gear.
Higher mob stats relative to your own.
Hit chance making it really difficult to fight things above your level.
More XP required to reach max level.
Less XP from quests.
Less XP from mobs.
No BoAs.
Spell ranks requiring you to go train at a major city.
Fewer graveyards.
Several things, killing things was a little slower, you needed more exp to level, travel was slower and there also weren’t trainers everywhere. When something like going to the trainer every few levels can easily take hours just for that it’s slower.
Whole mess of factors:
Questing isn’t entirely “on rails” like it is on live… People lose time simply not knowing how to efficiently chain together objectives
Questing in vanilla had a lot of “bottlenecks”. There’s a quest in the barrens where you need to kill a named centaur… You spawn him by killing un-named centaur nearby. It’s not uncommon to see people spending 20+ minutes kill centaur between spawns, and THEN having the spawn ninjad by some random…
Another one is some quest for basilisks north of Grom Gol in STV, just before the Raptor/Panther/Tiger hills… You need something like 10 drops, but there’s only 8 total mobs, and they take ~5minutes to respawn. Literally a single person bottlenecks this quest
There’s a ton of “world travel” quests, particularly in your late 20s-30s… This was a time when traveling in general, took a fairly ludicrous amount of time… For example, I saw a group posting about doing Shadowfang Keep, while in Org, and boarding a flightpath to Sun Rock Retreat, in Stonetalon Mountains. I had to fly all the way to SRR, then fly back to Org, then run to the zepplin tower (which I missed), wait for the zepplin for 5 minutes, then run from the UC zepplin to the UC flightpath, then fly to the Silverpine “town”, then from there run to the zone in. Total time investment was ~53minutes. You can burn a TON of time, just inefficiently moving between locations chasing certain objectives. Things like the shaman water totem quest, for example, can easily chunk out a few hours of your life just running around.
Killing for efficiency =/= killing for output like on live. Resources are limited, and most people suck at managing them in a vanilla world.
Multi-pulls are much more rare
Overall experience required to level, as counted by mobs to kill was much higher.
Leveling addons, are significantly less guided.
That’s just some of things I can think of, off the top of my head… and I’m sure there’s other things I’m still not thinking to mention. It’s basically just a whole ton of reasons that leveling back then took a bunch longer than leveling today does.
I’m pretty much in agreement on almost everything that has been said. Honestly, it was a longer experience due to the many factors involved. I won’t bother reposting them, there’s plenty of lists at this point. Leveling took a substantial amount of time. Someone playing 5 hours daily could take 2-3 months with efficient leveling strategies. Longer if they didn’t know exactly where to go or what to do. Level professions, you just added tens of hours…
That will be me then. I have never played the Vanilla zones/questlines, so I will have no idea what I will be doing there. Looking it all up in a guide before release just feels kinda cheaty.
Yeah, you should do it the hard what the first time. It prolongs the journey, but feels much more epic and fulfilling when you get there.
What made it slow?
Simple. The amount of XP required to level was very high relative to XP sources.
Add to this you are walking until 40.. it adds up.
Mobs are not more difficult. They hit harder. If you are one on one, you shouldn’t normally have any issue though.
The major difference between BFA’s crap leveling and Vanilla, even though Vanilla is much slower? Mob scaling.
In BFA, it doesn’t matter what you do.. every mob, every single flipping time, it’s the same time-to-kill… the same non threatening battle, the same bland rotation… over and over and over and over and over and over.
In Vanilla? If you want, you can down a mob within a few seconds, but you’d exhaust a lot of your mana. If you want to conserve mana? It will take about the same time as BFA. But… you have that choice. If you want to only fight mobs 3-4 levels lower than you.. you’ll have an even easier/faster time at the expense of XP. But… again it’s your choice.
BFA forces you to do exactly, and only, one thing without even the tease of something new… or exciting… or hints of a RPG game.
In the end? Vanilla leveling is slow and long, but… at least you won’t want to pull your hair out due to the inundated tedium ad flipping nauseum.
Everyone brought up great points here that I won’t bother repeating, but I will say that at the time vanilla was current (2004-2006) levelling didn’t feel slow to me. It just was what it was and you dealt with it as quickly or as slowly as you liked. Now we can compare it to recent expansions and think, “Holy hellz, it took FOREVER to level in vanilla,” but like I said, back in the day it just felt right. And this coming from a guy who mained a warrior as his first toon.
Straight up felt like every spot in the game where quests sent you to kill things had 15 guys closely packed together so you had to map the place out to only kill the guys you needed without pulling extra and risk dying so you spent more time strategizing than actually killing mobs