From yesterday's post:
4. Looking for Dungeon: Randomizer. The best thing for leveling since sliced bread. Actually, using the dungeon finder tool will get you leveled up a whole lot faster than doing quests. And its no effort trying to get a group together. Just queue, and eventually you're in. While waiting, you can do quests.
Random dungeons also give you extra experience and a bag which yield blue quality items that you can use to round out your gear. Instance only drops cuffs and robe? fear not! my awesome Satchel of Goods will give me gloves and belt. yep, awesomeness.
5. Heirloom Gear is purchasable by all 80s and can be sent to Alts. Not only are Heirlooms gear pretty cool and sometimes offer stats that are superior to what you'll find in dungeons, the shoulders and chest piece give extra experience. that’s 10% extra from the shoulders, and +10% extra from the Chest/Robe. Total is 20%. Who can complain? And since you're probably never going to switch out the gear, your enchants will stay on the item for a good while. I mean where it matters most (level 1-60 anyway).
I just wanted to continue today about leveling today as compared to leveling two years ago. as you know, I've already gone through several of the changes that make leveling easier (less exp required, lowered level requirement for mounts) and those do have a significant impact on leveling both at level 20 and at level 60. But what I think is probably the biggest boost to leveling has got to be the next two changes that I will be discussing: LFD and Heirlooms.
Although we are able to do dungeons in our own server with random people we find in our level range, blizzard has added a nice little feature that allows us to queue up for dungeons and party with people from various servers. The great thing about this is that there is no effort on our part to attempt to form any parties and entering dungeons requires a wait time. heck, you even get zoomed to the instance.
the old dungeon system had people sign up for various dungeons and wait. if someone was willing enough to form the group, they would look at the signup list and find several (usually DPS) waiting for a group and would ask them if they would want to join the group. The usual slowdown involed finding a healer or a tank. of course, sometimes it would take too long to find a healer or a tank, or both, and one or both DPS would drop from the group. This caused the party leader to have to find more dps as well. Now this system worked somewhat, but it does fall to a lot of abuse and prone to fail.
Oftentimes, myself included, I would have my own criterias for inviting people to join my own group. when I used to play as a druid healer, I would make sure there are no other druids in the party, since I would like to eliminate any competition for certain drops. As a dk, I made sure I was the only dk. heck, I try not to include warriors or paladins as well since they would roll on plate gear against me. I would also make sure I have two ranged DPS and one Melee dps. I would always pick a ranged over a melee. I would pick mages and warlocks over hunters because the chances of getting good dps from mages and warlocks are far better than for huntards. I would always pick a shaman to join. always. but the picking is slim because at any given time, there's always a page and a half of deathknights waiting for an invite. there may be a few rogues too, but that's because their class is often missunderstood (they're not great AoE specialists, so their dps may be lower usually).
Regarding LFD
Now, with the "Looking for Dungeon" or LFD tool, there is no need to profile. Blizz already did that already. Notice how every group has a good mix of people. Two ranged, one melee, and usually there are no duplicates unless it’s they're playing two roles (ie. two warriors, one dps, one tank. or two shamans, one dps, one heal). I have been in parties where I guess blizz couldn’t find anything better and left us with five, yes FIVE paladins. hey, we rocked the instance. You'll hardly see a group with two locks, two mages, two rogues, or two of anything.
Not only has the LFD tool taken cared of the whole profiling and selection of characters for you, it also has a bigger population base for these things. being that each battlegroup (or cluster of servers) is about 10 to 15 servers big, there's plenty of people to match up with. sometimes you'll get people from your own server in these random groups, but most of the time, you'll see people from different servers. Not only does this help people in low population servers find groups fast, it also gives classes that are in low demand (ie dps) a chance to party as well. although there's 3 dps per group, there seem to be an overabundance of dps in the gaming world. I've played dps and I have to tell you, it really does feel like a double edged sword.
So LFD makes it easy for people to find groups to dungeon with. It takes care of the low population server problem, especially running low level instances and it takes care of the DPS abundance problem on all servers. but what it does best is this. it gives you the sense of a true "one night stand", or "no strings attached" feeling when you zone in. don’t like the tank? vote to kick. you'll never see him again so who cares? don’t like the dps doing crap damage? vote to kick. don’t like the whole group? drop party. are you vocal? voice your opinion that the tank sucks. no one will bug you after the party because they're not on your server and most people wouldn’t care to make an alt on your server just to harass you. you go into a dungeon, beat on things, roll on loot and get out. that’s it. thank people and leave. that’s basically everything that goes on. problem is, what happens when you actually find people you do like to party with because they're actually really good or fun to play with? well we're all SOL.
In any case, since LFD makes it so easy and almost painless to run dungeons at low levels now, I see a little less requests in trade chat to boost others. Boosting is this. when I low level asks a very high level (usually a level 80) to go to a dungeon with them and kill everything for them. this is often compensated with gold or by returning the favor at a later time. Low level characters are actually "playing" through their dungeons and actually contributing during the dungeons. This does promote learning in some ways. although most of the time I do see blizzard and rain of fire spams, I still see people doing well and learning to play their class. sometimes different specs and spells are applied during the dungeon to test out how viable one spell is over another. I see lower level paladins use Lay on Hands way more often now (and I do believe they should all know where their cooldown spells are anyway), but this is due to the tank running ahead and pulling large groups while the healer is trying to drink. lessons are learned this way and I find that its much better that these lessons are learned at level 30 than at level 80.
Overall, LFD has helped many who would otherwise be questing all day to run a few dungeons, thereby learning how to perform in groups and using some spells that they would probably never use in solo play. this will lead to better performance overall in later dungeons and even raids. although most dungeons will not punish those who "stand in bad" they will at least have developed some of the tools necessary to play in end game content. Leveling is sped up, people are learning to play together, and the monotony of leveling has been reduced. what more can you ask for with LFD? oh yea, a buddy list that crosses servers. yea.
And last of all, Heirloom Gear.
The mention of Heirloom gear will be shorter than LFD since there isnt much to say about it except that, whether they are the pvp variety or the pve variety, they're both viable for pve content as their stats will benefit the bearer. resilience is just a bonus. The easiest to attain would be those gotten from stone keeper shards, or pvp heirlooms. although they might not have all of the pve stats, it does offer a better alternative than some of the quest or instance gear you might find while leveling up.
Whats most important about the gear is not that they offer better stats so that you can quest/instance easier, but that two pieces (shoulders and chest) offer a 10% bonus to your experience gained. This means a mob who would offer only 100 exp will give the wearer 120 exp. 10 more if he wore the shoulders, and 10 more if he also wore the chest… totaling 20 more exp.
as you can see, not only are you geared well as you level up, you're also getting buckets of extra experience points to go with it. What's else? you're passing up on shoulder and chest upgrades that you'd normally "need" on. instead, passing the items to alts who do not have great stuff. This helps everyone level, I guess. but oftentimes I think that perhaps it helps us level way too fast and the end result is a person who only knows marginally how to play his class at 80 and will have to learn the rest when he does play more after level 80.
My Point
Ever since the change to experience points was given, I wanted to understand the path blizzard was taking and what their plans might have been at the time. I figured this much, that old content, although not necessarily bad content, is outdated content. meaning, although the stories, lore, and whatnot are fine, the execution of telling those stories through quests need improvement. at level 60, we see less and less of those "gather odd mats from all over the universe, one at a time" quests to more of the "go to dude in the field, he'll have 10 quests for you, when you're done, I'll show you to another dude in another field" type questing. this makes things much easier to deal with.
not only do things make sense, traveling to get to your quest destination/objective requires less walking and more doing. take, for instance, the warlock pet quests. the simplest is the voidwalker. however, the felhound requires several trips to various places and back again. same with the succubus. oh how annoying. there's also the shaman water totem quest. omg. did I mention this before? yes I did. annoying as fuck. in outland, everything somehow made more sense. I see whats going on in the environment around me and and not asked to go to three different continents in order to solve a problem that's right in front of me. you guys rock!! now someone fix the druid flight form quest… please? oh yea, its trainable now. nevermind.
Anyway, my point was that the execution of low level content needed an upgrade. instead of changing the quests so that we don’t have to travel everywhere, gather odd materials, or do several unrelated dungeons, we're given many tools to allow us to skip some of these boring content. HOWEVER, some class specific spells and items cannot be skipped like shaman totems, warlock minions, or warrior stance. So there, blizz offered a solution to their very poor initial questing and leveling design. of course, this was great when the level limit was 60, but now that the level limits have increased to 70 and then to 80, and soon to be 85, it would only assume that leveling from 1-60 be changed. the content is dull, drab and boring. the landscape consists of 50% desert. if you include the barrens, I can list all the deserts: barrens, thousand needles, tanaris, silithus, burning steppes, searing gorge, blasted lands, desolace and that dam place where uldaman is. some zones where its just as desert-like: westfall, redridge mountains, stonetalon, and maybe even the plaguelands. arathi basin is like a desert, but green. dun morogh and winterspring is like a desert, but white. All of these zones need a makeover. all of the quests require a change. and frankly, most of us are sick of doing the same quest for the 10th time on the 10th character.
So with all these changes to leveling, it actually has given the player quite a few options on leveling. we do not have to deal with looking at undeads in WPL to level up. we don’t have to deal with running through the barrens to level up. we don’t have to enjoy ganklethorn vale like we did before. its completely optional! and we learn to do instances along the way. we actually learn to do that stuff! neat!!
This leads to phasing out content. it means that the low level "story" is no longer important. MMOs are always changing; it is the nature of the beast. so when I see changes like this, I feel that there's often something coming. but I do realize that maybe its already been announced and I just needed to connect one and one together to make two. its all to ready us for cataclysm. I see the lower level content and I don’t like it. blizz sees our desires and gives us options to level through it easier, faster, and with as little pain as possible. and then blizz decides to make 1-60 just as engaging and up-to-date as outland and northrend. how? by wiping everything out…. come cata, of course.
The other idea is that blizz wants us to play together at 60-80. out comes the death knight at 55 (funny how all of azeroth gets skipped? hardly) and he takes the forefront of this idea. almost everyone makes a dk and plays outland and northrend content together. at 60 and up, it becomes a lot harder to "boost" anyone through content. and with the LFD tool, everyone can easily find groups to join so that they can actually participate in the group.
The game today is not Azeroth. It is Outland. It is Northrend. It is NOT azeroth. sadly, azeroth is just a barren place to farm herbs and minerals. levelers do not want to level through it, well most of it anyway. levelers want to play with all their friends as well. and what best place to play with their friends than at 80? at 80 there's a whole slew of things to do together. dungeons, rep grinds, profession mastering, pvp and raids. why 80? because they cant level further. of course, gear desparity may be present, but at least we're all level 80.
right now, my girlfriend is four levels ahead of me in levels. what this means is that there's very few instances we can do together. I'll have to catch up. she's currently doing SM:Cathedral and im still going through Library. Cathedral is red to me while its yellow to her. she wouldn’t want to queue for grave yard, and I wouldn’t want to queue for cath, so we're stuck with library and armory. see how that limits us? at 80, there's no real "limit" unless you want to consider gear. but even at a high gear level, doing lower level content like heroics or naxx do yield useful items, so the geared do have encouragement to run with less geared people.
This is like killing several birds with five stones. Though im sure there's more stones. These are just the main ones I can think of. Others include RAF and Exp in BGs. RAF are special cases and EXP from BGs cater to only certain individuals. Although BGs are great, leveling speed pales in comparison to dungeons.
So yea. Killing birds. with stones. er… with rockets. yea. that’s better.
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