…WoW’s latest expansion, Cataclysm, only raised the level cap by 5 levels, in addition to the other content it added. Was Blizzard right to make this call?

My answer:

Yes.

Given the nature of the expansion and Blizzard’s current philosophy regarding characters and how we spend time in-game, I believe their decision to make the level cap 85 instead of 90 was unequivocally the right one.

At Fun In Games, Naithin points out that “each level felt about right in terms of the content it consumed”, and I agree wholeheartedly. Getting from 80 to 81 felt about as long as it should have – and keep in mind, here, that I’m saying this having just leveled my Death Knight from 73 to 82. I know that the XP curve from 71 to 80 was just dramatically reduced, but even so, 80-81 didn’t feel like a brick wall the way 70-71 (or 60-61, back at the beginning of Burning Crusade) did.

80-81 felt right, and honestly, if we’d had the same amount of content but twice as many levels, we would have felt like they were just throwing levels at us – or, if they increased the XP required per level, like we were hitting that brick wall. (84-85 already requires nearly ten million XP!)

The amount of content is important, too, because when people are considering how short they feel the top-level game is, they’re forgetting that the top-level game isn’t the entirety of the expansion. In fact, truth be told, the new content for 81-85 is in the minority of the new content added for Cataclysm. We have two new races, with associated starting zones; moreover, the entire face of the old world has changed, with new layouts, new quests, and new storylines.

In other words, this is not just an expansion for characters 80-85. This is, primarily, an expansion for characters 1-85. Blizzard has made it clear – between the new races, the shallower leveling curve, the newly-redone zones and quests, Recruit-A-Friend, and certain perks like getting mounts at level 20 – that they actively want us to be leveling alts. If we focus only on the benefits to our level-capped characters, we are no longer playing the game Blizzard wants its players to play.

The bottom line: Cataclysm offers plenty of 80-85 content and provides it at the right pace, and Blizzard’s intent is that we get to 85 and then roll a new character. So yes: five levels are enough.

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Post tags: Blog, Cataclysm, Leveling, Shared Topic

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I’ve been back in World of Warcraft for a few weeks now, but for some reason I’m just not feeling my high-level characters. I can’t get the hang of being a priest again, and I don’t actually play my death knight any more (and wasn’t much good when I did play), so I’ve been looking for other things to do while I get the hang of the game again.

At a friend’s suggestion, nearly all of my alts have Herbalism and Skinning as their primary professions, on the theory that if I’m just leveling, there’s no real point in spending time leveling a production profession when I could be making money with the herbs and skins that I run across. So when I started leveling my rogue, true to form, I picked Herbalism and Skinning, planning to mail the materials I gathered to a bank alt each time I headed back to town.

But I noticed something odd when I started gathering herbs – I was getting experience for gathering! I’m sure this was in a patch note that I missed, but I was particularly started to discover it. The fact that I could get XP from herbs (and mining, I assumed, but apparently not skinning) really stuck in my head, and between that and the fact that I play mostly on an RP server, therein was born a project.

Meet Nashoda

Nashoda is a night elf druid and, in-character, a pacifist. She has struck a creature only once (I wasn’t paying enough attention and a boar walked in front of the herb I was trying to collect). She has no kills to her name, and no quests completed. (Well, one quest: I have the Wrath collector’s edition, and picking up the Frosty pet from that has a quest associated with it for some reason.) Instead, she has Herbalism and Mining, and she’s leveled exclusively through gathering professions and exploration.

And as of about an hour ago, she’s level 20.

I chose a night elf druid both for the roleplaying aspects – it’s easier for me to envision a pacifist druid than any other class – and for the gameplay aspects. As a druid, I have access to healing spells (for when creatures attack me while I’m traveling or gathering), travel form, and – in cat form – the ability to stealth; as a night elf, I have an increased chance to dodge and Shadowmeld, which now drops combat if I’m not in a group, and both of those are excellent for dealing with creature attacks. Herbalism gives me Lifebloom, adding to my healing repertoire, and Mining gives me Toughness, another defense mechanism. Nashoda has trained no offensive abilities (except Wrath, which all druids start with) and carries a “walking staff” (for the Stamina/Intellect bonus).

I’ve spent most of my time in Elwynn Forest; Teldrassil doesn’t have any ore, and Elwynn is open enough that it’s easy to make circles around it. At very early levels, I stuck mostly to the mountains around the edges – there are fewer creatures there to avoid, and quite a few earthroot and copper nodes to level on – but as Nashoda’s grown, I’ve moved farther into the forest proper. Part of me feels like I ought to be moving on to other zones, but the way XP from gathering works, peacebloom, silverleaf, and copper ore still offer enough XP per gather, and Elwynn’s nodes are so dense, that it’s actually still more efficient for me to make my rounds around Elwynn Forest. (The extra XP from higher-level herbs and ore is outweighed by the fact that in the zones I can get to, there aren’t as many of them; my XP per hour is still higher from the lower-level herbs and ore.)

The Future

I’m not sure how long I’m going to continue playing Nashoda, but I’d like to see if I can make it to 85 without killing a single creature or completing a single quest. It’ll take a while – right now I’m averaging roughly a level every hour and a half, and if that keeps up I’ll have about five and a half days /played when I hit 85 – but I like the implications. (I may also go for the Explorer achievement, since I’ll be doing a lot of circles around a lot of zones…)

(And if anyone from Blizzard is reading, “the Pacifist” as a title would be a nice Christmas present. ;)

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comments here, to find me on Twitter as @etherjammer, or to find me in-game as Nashoda of Moon Guard-A. :)

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Post tags: Achievements, Druid, Leveling, Nashoda

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In no particular order:

• Even though dungeons become available at level 15, tanks don’t get most of their good threat-generating abilities until later than that. If your tank is level 20 or below, she probably won’t be able to hold more than a few mobs at once, and will have difficulty pulling mobs off multiple people.
• Along the same lines: focused fire is your friend. Yes, AOE is awesome and boosts you up the DPS charts like single-target spells never will. But if you’re AOEing mobs, you’re competing with the tank on the threat meter for all of those mobs. And see above: low-level tanks don’t always have the AOE threat abilities that they will at higher levels, so you’re far more likely to peel a mob off the tank if the tank’s under level 20 or so.
• Your healer needs mana. Mana regeneration in heroic-level instances is so high that yes, it’s possible to blow through an entire instance without stopping to drink. In low-level instances, though, healers are often starved for mana – especially if they haven’t been running instances constantly and aren’t entirely in blues. The default party interface shows you your partymates’ mana levels. (If you have a custom interface that doesn’t show them, get rid of it or mod it so it does.) Pay attention to those levels. Don’t pull the boss when the healer’s at 25% mana, or you’ll end up with a dead group and an angry healer.
• Sometimes people want to do all the bosses. That’s okay. It means more XP for you. If you’re XP-locked, it means more chances at loot for you. Don’t whine about not going straight to Amennar the Coldbringer; you’ll get there eventually. Pouting and dropping group – or doing nothing and getting votekicked – and getting the deserter debuff would probably take as much time as just doing the damn bosses anyway.
• Nobody really cares how much DPS you’re doing as long as you’re taking the mobs and bosses down. Put your Recount back in your pants.
• Complaining that a member of the group really sucks is more likely to get you votekicked than them. Just saying.
• Remember that itemization kind of sucks pre-70. Yes, you really wanted that cloth caster belt for your warlock. But there isn’t anything better in leather for the shaman healer at that level, and she wanted it too. Just because there’s a “better” armor class that a character can wear doesn’t mean that the “lesser” armor class doesn’t have the better gear for her.
• You’re not expected to know the ins and outs of everybody’s class, but don’t assume that everybody has the same abilities as they would at 80. People asking the level 35 priest “lol if u shadow den y no shadowform”*: this means you.
• The Satchel of Helpful Goods that you get at the end of the instance does its best to adhere to your ideal armor class, but other than that, it’s not very good at giving you useful gear. We’ve been doing the Dungeon Finder for 20 levels now. We know the Satchel gear kind of sucks.

* Direct quote. From someone whose main was a “rading shadow preist”. Someone asked for an Armory link and he dropped group.

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Post tags: Groups, Instances, Leveling

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