Okay, let me try to top the patreon story. I ran a guild back in Vanilla and TBC with my real life buds. We were only doing Karazhan, so very close-knit group, and doing larger raids with an alliance of other guilds. We recruited a husband (priest) / wife (mage) combo. He was in the US Air Force stationed in England, she worked in some healthcare-adjacent field. They were cool and they quickly became officers. We recruited a new main tank, he was from Canada, and had JUST turned 18. By pure coincidence, his sister went to the same college as me, so we actually met a few times, very quickly after he joined. On one of these visits, he tells me he has been spending a bunch of time with the mage in Vent. I thought it was a little weird, but we only have like 15 members, so who else is he going to play with? Come home and check the guild forums, members are asking why the priest officer left the guild. I ask the mage, his wife. She gets me on vent and confesses the whole thing in tears. Apparently she took a trip to visit family back in Colorado, and in that time, our tank had flown down FROM CANADA so they could hook up. Apparently there were multiple other hook ups in a short time, like a month, where they went similarly out of their way. The details are blurry because it was nearly 20 years ago, but I think there was at least one trip from England to Canada. I saw him the next night and asked "what the hell, dude?" And his response was something to the effect of "Yeah it was pretty fun I guess. Can you blame me?" Anyway I went back to my dorm, immediately disbanded the guild, and moved to the larger guild we were running with to do 25 man content. No time for that shit
Can confirm the Tribonious stuff is very real. Moon Guard guild. The office core was a rotating roster of people. In total it was maybe 6-10. She was flown out to see some of them. It was honestly some of the craziest drama, but not the worst we saw in that guild.
Why would you level a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th of a class you already have? - Farming collectibles. More characters = more chances at (let's say) getting Invincible. - Crafting. There are some stuff that can only be crafted once a day, or have limited charges that reset daily/weekly, like alchemy transmutations (Dracothyst, Pyrium bars) or skinning special reagents (Obsidian Cobraskin). More characters = more chances. - Likes to level up + only likes playing warriors. - Soup! More characters = more chances at flavor pockets = more gold. - Raw Gold farming. More characters = more gold from world quests and such. - People who transfer realms but don't want to pay for it just level more toons on the destination realm. - Playing opposite factions.
For the alt thing: I do follow a few people that have a lot of alts, multiple classes over different races and for them theese characters arent just a race/class/spec combination you play, these are characters, personalitys, storys that they create. They share mogs, screenshots, farm mounts, mogs and pets and stuff and I enjoy following them to see the side of WoW many of us maybe forgot. They show me how beautiful and fascinating this whole world still is and always was but we dont pay attention to it because we are focused on grinding, raiding, timing keys or doing pvp and theese people just walk through this world and be like "its really nice here"
The best questing I've had in an MMO had to be SWTOR because it is voice acted and depending on the class your playing special options can happen when your responding to the NPC. Another one would be GW2 - the quest in the game are hearts in each map you have to complete but they are so many random events that can happen while questing that makes it a lot of fun.
I feel like yall should have Harldan on the poddyc. He has a bunch of insight into the whole questing dynamic, he does speed running in retail, and keeps up to date in SOD. But also gets CE every tier and could really balance yall out and bring in some different perspective.
For me the biggest difference in leveling in classic (not sod) is that you are actually a lot stronger if you use your entire toolkit. Like every class has niche things it can do to be more efficient at killing stuff. But as soon as you hit max level and go raiding, you just throw all of this out and just spam 1 button for the most part. In retail it's different. You can use 1 button for leveling and then you have to use your entire toolkit when you're doing endgame content
Well if you pull 2 mobs at a time you can kill them with "1 button", because it's easier than classic, but you can definitely use your whole toolkit while leveling on retail. And experienced players do that and they level more efficiently.
@@tommy4862 ye i agree with you. especially since i like leveling through rdf on retail and whenever i can tank, i go giga mdi pulls :D but the difference is, that unless you really giga pull, its never really dangerous in retail, whereas in classic you can die much easier
For the patreon question: I was in a guild in cataclysm where a girl was sleeping with/hopping around relationships with multiple people in the guild. Hearing about it constantly was super annoying. Turns out she would have people in our guild pay her a ton of gold and mats for the right to say they had met her irl and they were dating. Then she would break up with them and move on to the next dude. These dudes were so jaded that they didn’t realize the next dude in her scheme was falling for the same thing. I always thought it was fishy but I was about 16 at the time and didn’t think much about it. People got wise to it and she finally dropped the tea. Told the guild in our forums what was going on. Gquit. Swapped realms and names and made off like a bandit. Still not entirely sure how I feel about. Was a pretty messed up situation but I can’t help but find it kinda funny.
Retail leveling is PURELY cosmetic. They could very easily just raise base stats at the start of the expansion and just make a required story line before you can do the endgame content. We’ve been so conditioned to need to “level up” that we’ve gaslit ourselves into thinking we actually want to level. You don’t want to level, you just want to get to the end. Even if you want to do leveling quests, you just want to do the quests. The level is irrelevant
This a really good take - Levelling has almost become completely immaterial. An approach as you mentioned above would also help with the NPE - rather than doing chromie content and hitting 60 and getting kicked out of Legion levelling before youve finished the second zone, using the story as the driver instead of levels would help to make more coherent experiences as you essentially remove the arbitrary restrictions and focus solely on the expac. Throw in some meaningful rewards for completing these stories and youve solved wows "disjointed experience" imho. Edit - Secondary point, your power is much more tied to gear, a fresh 70 with lower than season 1 content gear is so unbelievably far behind the power curve that the gearing process is basically levelling by proxy, so youre essentially getting double dipped. its not a case of "I hit 70 now i can play the game", its a case of "I hit 70, now the real grind begins".
This is a good take. I can't even we're all having this discussion. Lol. Leveling sucks. Why do we need it? Why is it important? It's a means to an end. I mean, why does it have to be important? Nothing good is happening during the leveling process. It's not important. To answer their question, the best leveling experience for me was OG Tera. It was simple questing. It was fast and easy. It's just such a wild take for me thinking people want longer and harder leveling processes. Like. I don't understand it. We have had nearly 20+ years of hard, grindy MMOs. Why does it have to continue to be this way?
The number is cosmetic but I do enjoy that 2 nights of idk what it is but it’s a nostalgic wave of fun watching the ~50-60 bnet friends I’ve made over the years come back and bust out an old familiar game. They’d come back regardless but I think leveling is a much better representation of “how much you’ve finished” than knowing which chapters of the quest are done
I'd suggest Xaryu as a guest to talk about SoD. He's probably the most 'approachable' Classic streamer and knows a lot about retail as well so it wouldn't be a totally one-sided conversation. On MMOs in general; I actually think Ashes of Creation is probably the closest thing we have now to an exciting new MMO. Its biggest problem is that they're not a huge team with big funding behind them and they are being very ambitious, which is leading to an extremely long development where anything could go badly. On the upside their updates look good and it seems to be making steady progress. It'll come down to whether or not there's enough actual game to play after they've figured out their weather and season systems.
So I have a level locked 59 blood DK that I am taking through all of the expansions in chromie time. Why? 2 reasons, 1)Rewards are better in Chromie time than normal levelling, and I am mildly greedy. 2)The content is "Challenging" not difficult, but it isn't a oneshot city if I was going back as a max level. Like because back in the day I shared the account with my mom, when I was in middle school, I never got to really do dungeons, or raids due to the time limits of sharing an account with someone who did. Would I like to do modern raids? Yea, but like... I don't imagine being able to break through that gate at this point.
Man Dorki talking about joining random trade chat guilds and cesspool guilds before streaming is crazy. He needs to watch a drama time. I would personally love an undercover m+ guild type thing, where they join random trade chat guilds and do some keys or something.
So on the topic of leveling, I can weigh in with a common POV of players who do enjoy leveling repeatedly - Players who like to level multiple characters usually pay no attention to or give very little importance to max level content. Think of it this way - Usually when you or I level, as retail players accustomed to the endgame season to season gameplay, we want leveling to be over quick because one of our primary driving factors is to want to experience current end-game content within the current season itself. But for those other players, they do NOT have that need/want to succumb to the FOMO of the WoW modern seasonal gameplay. And when you take the motivation to get on the seasonal gameplay train off the table, suddenly, you don't feel the "pace" of leveling as much, if at all. Instead, you're just doing stuff on those new characters, and occasionally watching your level go up, and new abilities unlock in an organic manner for you to try out. One gameplay style I've heard of from such players, and the main reason they level multiple of the same class, is that they pick a different talent setup each time, which completely changes their experience of the journey. As streamers and hardcore players in general, I can see why you guys weren't naturally able to stumble onto this explanation behind the motivation for people liking and wanting to do leveling. Unfortunately, we're all victims of the Seasonal gameplay FOMO that wow has been training us to feel and be part of for so many years now. The game has gone this direction in terms of training player psychology since Legion. This wasn't the case when Wrath and to some extent Cata were current content, because all the content they released in new patches, were still relevant in the final patch of both those expansions for all players, so it was hard to have FOMO. You could do it all at your own pace and still experience what everyone else experienced. Now though, if you miss out on let's say S2 of DF, you're going to be at a great disadvantage for S3, starting with the item level bloat you need to keep up with from season to season. I really wish you guys revisit Wrath and Cata once, and just explore the difference of feel of Item Level change from Tier to Tier, and compare it to modern WoW, and how it affects player psychology, and blizzard's design choices.
There needs to be a leveling mode that ties to the story. For instance every 10 levels you change xpac but in those 10 levels you do a campaign of visiting main npcs and downing dungeon/raid bosses from that xpac on mega easy difficulty just so you get the jist of what went down.
Ngl I wouldn't mind that. Like you could choose "Free Mode" where it's like it is now or "Story Catch-up Mode" where it took you through the big plot points of the xpacs and you ended on the waking shore ready to level in DF
Honestly, that's what I thought Chromie Time would be like when it was originally announced, you are just taken through each zone hitting the main events, talking the main guys, doing the dungeons once, and then maybe going through a solo instanced version of the raids or main raid, kind of wish that was an option tbh, I would much prefer that over the current Chromie Time.
For the leveling experience they could implement a button like warmode that slows down leveling. A lot of new players start to play with friends and I've had friends that couldn't even make it through the sped up version let alone if it was longer. A toggleable feature could let the people that want a leveling experience still have that. If its toggleable it can let people just enjoy certain zones and then swap back to max out their character faster once done with the parts they enjoy. Plus if there are certain zones or level gaps you don't enjoy you could fast track them then swap back to slow down again.
My favorite leveling experience would be GW2 once the the game "clicked" with me. Once I started thinking about it like Skyrim and not a WoW/FFXIV game, it became really fun because of the amazing open world, more subtle storytelling, and having a lot of your kit early on.
it worked well due to the level scaling and openness to picking what you wanted and where you wanted. Dont like ice zones? thats fine, go to the fire steppies
I like Dorki's idea of giving the player a CHOICE to extend their leveling time to fully enjoy an expansion, combine that with Tali's "Path of the Curator" mode, and I think you've got a new leveling path for on-boarding new players while pleasing veterans.
I'm one of those altoholics with a ton of characters, I really enjoy trying out each class with different races - they feel different because of the animations and their transmog fits differently (not to mention faction differences with story, cities, etc...). Another reason is that I like keeping each character to their own spec, so I have say 1 druid as guardian, 1 druid as resto, 1 as balance, etc... I then swap between them depending on how I feel. I don't necessarily keep them up to speed with gear/ilvl - but that's what catch up mechanics are great for. I tend to main 1 character for world content and 1 for raiding which rotates, since I adapt to classes we lack that season (we usually average 12 to 14 raiders in the guild so it's hard to get a full roster of classes). There's probably a plethora of other reasons I can't think of right now, but the above are the most obvious from my experience.
@ThePoddyC Yo, keep up the good work! I really liked how TERA did leveling before they switched to maintenance mode and gave you guaranteed OP weapon every new dungeon tier that made leveling trivial. Familiar types of kill/gather/find/destroy quests and most regions had a dungeon at the end of their storyline to work up towards. They tried to move away from tab target more into action combat, which allowed you to solo a lot of hard stuff just with proper dodges/blocks and timing. Elites took minutes to kill, but each was a satisfying bossfight to me. As for the Patreon question, the way the guild disbanded happens a lot in EU apparently. Lot of guilds are language preferential, so country specific or a group of countries where you understand each other. ( Scandinavia, GER/AUT, CZE/SVK ) Officers are commonly a friend group from the same region, meeting irl regularly, living few hours apart. Preach has a bit called Drama Time on his channel where people send him these obscure stories with people sleeping around for loot and other benefits, Goldshire ERP stories and other crazy stuff. Highly recommend to anyone looking for something headphones worthy. I know people from a guild where current GM took the guild along with the previous GMs wife ...
1:07:00 If you have good logs you are a great candidate. Most guilds are either getting roster-bossed on tough fights (smolderon thru fyrakk depending on the level of player), or reclearing and the main raiders just cba to show up for it. This is the best time to trial.
Back in wrath, my girlfriend and I were in the same guild. She left me for the main tank, while also using my card for her wow sub. Sucks she didn't change her password, which resulted in both me cancelling it, and deleting her max level alchemy and herbalism. Wow is full of glorious drama.
About Max's question for why level multiple of the same class, I'll give my opinion as someone that does just that. I really enjoy the gearing process, and I loose a lot of interest to play my guy when there is nothing to directly farm for. I also just want to play shaman, its the class I vibe with. So when my guy is capped for m+ loot I like to just fire up a new shaman. The rest of this is just a tangent about retail vs. classic levelling: What I will say about the levelling process in retail, it is dreadfully boring. There is no good alternative to the extremely repetitive questing or dungeon spam. My mind goes to the levelling I did in Season of Discovery, I was sometimes bored for sure, but most of the time I felt challenged and I could push myself to play smarter and better to speed it up or attempt harder quests at lower levels. In retail you don't have this option, you are stuck with what the game gives you and you will enjoy pressing chain lightning to one-shot every mob. When it comes to the levelling process, classic does it way better simply by offering a challenge. And I don't see why retail cant have that option.
I have 48 characters, all 50+. vast majority is a DK. I abused the fact that they started at 55 and when the level squish came in and they started on lvl 10 my premade lvl 55dk-s got to 23 ish and I had to level less. I use these chars to farm mounts (according to the journal I have 841). I used to kill sha of anger with all of them before the droprate increase. got my heavenly onxy serpent after 1601 kills
Everyone keeps saying “sense of progression”, I think that’s true but not it. It’s a sense of adventure and exploration. That’s what made classic so incredible, the scale and exploration on your journey. That’s why I remember MoP leveling fondly, it still had a little sense of that. Now a days leveling is basically a dungeon crawler/point a to point b game mode. I enjoy current leveling just cause I enjoy wow period. But I think there’s a middle ground
So as a Zoomer that played through all 3 Classic expansions so far because I wanted to feel what the game was like before I started, I've got a couple takes on what you all talked about. For the leveling, Classic feels better because you get abilities as you level and talent points are often focused on leveling and not a whole character build. You would often play a different spec for raiding depending on the class. In retail, most of your abilities that make a build are on your tree (either class or spec) and your character doesn't feel the same progression, it just feels incomplete until max level pretty much. In Classic you're forced to change which abilities you use depending on rank and talents you get, which makes the leveling progression feel more coherent. For questing more specifically, I love WotLK leveling because it fixed a lot of areas in Vanilla zones that just didn't have quests for exp dead zones. The TBC and Wrath leveling zones were also some of the more memorable and fun zones to quest through.
True story back in TBC- we had a married couple in the guild. We get a guild forum post dropped on us (long before discord) that the husband caught the wife in a hotel room with one of our other members that flew up, they confirmed it. The husband asked the guild to kick them but he was dps and the other two were healers, so the guy who lost his wife ended up getting gkicked to boot.
Ok, so this definitely happened to a lesser degree to my guild in Nyalotha. The Guild Leader's husband was the main tank, and he cheated on her with the Off-tank / officer, which lead to the guild disbanding before we could get cutting edge. But that was just two people, not a train of officers. Also shout out to Dratnos for keeping you guys relatable by mentioning the guild recruitment discord. It is the actual best place to find a cutting edge / mid mythic guild.
For the leveling stuff a friend of mine recommended they make the first character you take thru a new xpac taking a bit longer but then unlocking and xp gain for alts and i think i can get behind that idea
Leveling has felt meaningless since the started scaling, it makes you weaker when you level so it doesn’t feel good until ur max level and can get stronger
Best leveling** for me would be hands down FF14 due to the fantastic story in HW and the ShB-Endwalker arc, that stuff is something that'll be in my memory forever, swtor comes as a 2nd. **which kind of has less to do with the leveling gameplay itself to be fair, some later trials are fun but it's really just about the light novel like story.
Hey, I was in Tribonius' guild in Castle Nathria, and was part of the guild when him, and the GM/RL being ousted. He was yeeted because they were being racist/problematic, and the rest of the guild wasnt vibing with it. I raided with them from Castle Nathria, until 10.1 in Dragonflight. The guild went from a frat bro enviroment, to a much more supporting and accepting enviroment for our lgbt, and poc members. He just kind of lied with what was going on, and sounds still salty about it.
As someone with more than 1 of some classes, I level extra characters for a few reasons. I feel like certain specs fit certain races more thematically. Like, thematically Lightforged Draenei make cool looking Holy Priests, but would be really weird as Shadow. That also goes into the point of leveling each Allied Race to unlock their heritage armor. You'll inevitably end up with an extra class or more. Sometimes I forget how to play a class/spec and will just mess around on a low level character to slowly remember how to play little by little. I like having specific transmogs for certain specs and giving my characters some level of personality. I play on Moon Guard and don't actively RP but I like drafting characters to play akin to DnD characters.
The difference with FFXIV is that all the jobs are played on one character, so while it's required to play through on a character, you don't then have to replay through the story to level other jobs in that game. Not only that, but your lower level jobs also level faster until they catch up to whatever your highest level job is. WoW leveling pretty much just makes you play through the same experience the first time as it does the 30th time. You can literally Dungeon grind your way to 60 and then do whatever the fastest thing is to get to 70. You can do that on every character. Roulettes in FFXIV feel much more fun to do for leveling alternate jobs than just grinding dungeons. You have trials, dungeons, story content,etc. You can also go around and do fates or random side quests. The amount of ways you can level in FFXIV is just much better than in WoW. WoW really should have a similar story required mode for your initial character. They would have to put together a coherent storyline that goes through all the expansions, but at least people could understand what's going on in the story as a new player. Right now most new players have no idea what the story is and just watch videos online.
I once logged into my guild during Cata to find 80% of the guild had left overnight. Turns out the tank and GM had been sending explicit messages and photos to our 15 year old Paladin. Their mum found out and phoned the police
How about: What if we revolutionize the entire leveling experience? Picture this: Instead of the conventional 'leveling number' system, we completely remove the numbers. Instead we embark on epic 3-5 hours questlines tailored to each class, guided by our "mentors" who unveil new abilities and spells specific to the expansion. Alongside these quests, there are intriguing side missions designed to unlock non-combat spells and skills. We make every quests in the world not mandatory and steeped in rich lore, offering epic adventures that reward us with coveted treasures like transmogrification items, pets, unique transport options or flight paths, unique mountifications, ... And to crown it all, upon completing these legendary questlines, we earn prestigious rewards such as unique mounts, faction-specific transmog sets or maybe even new character customization options. In this vision, power is derived not from a mere numerical level, but through the acquisition of powerful gear only
The problem with leveling in retail is that you don't have to turn on your brain. You're on autopilot, cruising easy mode through hours upon hours of brain-numbingly trivial content. Classic leveling isn't _difficult_ per say, but it's at least possible to make mistakes. You need to actively engage with the game during leveling, and doing so feels rewarding.
I would LOVE to have an option (key here, give people the choice) to reduce my XP gain while leveling by a factor of 5/10. I prefer leveling in retail over classic because I think class design is far superior in retail, but I personally find it too fast at times because I want to play through multiple storylines (or even just a full expansion) before hitting cap. Maybe I’m a psycho, but I’ve leveled multiple WW’s because I like the spec + want to experience different stories with it. For reference, 3k on 3 different classes (rsham, ww, prot pally) and AOTC on 2, so not a mega casual. I just love this game in almost all its facets and wish I could extend the leveling process more to enjoy the stories blizzard have crafted over the years.
The debate on levelling is not the solution to make the game more accessible and friendly to new players. The problem right now is that the game never teaches you anything about how to get good at the videogame. Blizzard had a good first attempt with Exile's reach but it teaches you very little. I've introduced the game to a few friends during dragonflight and it's obvious that way too few things are explained to the player, and explained properly. Raid is never introduced, M+ is never introduced, dungeon is sort of never introduced despite follower donations existing and the tiny dungeon in exile's reach. It goes on and on and on. The only thing the game does is tell you where to go to continue the quests, that's literally it. The game needs to teach you how to tackle endgame content, how to heal in dungeon, in raid, same for tanks and DPS. And outdoor content needs to become reasonably challenging. Being able to do packs of 6 effortlessly with no gear on your own makes outdoor content never fun which also makes levelling really boring. Also levelling should let you go through low level content forever if you want to. Either through down scaling your level manually or just manually getting out of low level scaling when it happens. Right now you're catapulted into dragonflight super fast and you can't even go through old content with a decent level of immersion. Let me go through low level quests for dozens of hours without one shotting monsters if I want to. It's like you would play a mario game but anytime you complete a level you can't do it again without being invincible, super fast and flying at all time
I think they could bring back attunements and force people to complete certain mythic challenges (like in MoP) to qualify for higher content. Or maybe just add filters to the LFG tool so people can opt to exclude those without those achievements. The problem with the MoP challenges was that they were pretty basic. But combining that with the idea for more mage tower / brawler's guild type content, I could see actual fun challenges being created that could be used to help teach people advanced techniques and guaruntee that your "gold tier dps" understands how to kick and stun properly.
I don't know about levelling or levelling speed - but there has to be a way for new players to fully experience expansion storylines and actually understand what has been going on. In FXXIV you experience each expansions story pretty fully, meanwhile in WoW you quest through the first patch of BFA and then are dropped into Dragonflight. I got a friend into WoW and he had no idea what happened to Jainas mum, or Flynn, or with Kul Tiras, or any of the plotines of BFAs start, because you just hit 60 and then Chromie takes you out. There has to be some form of 'story mode' or something, for new players who want to experience the Legion or Shadowlands etc plot in a compact and chronological way. Also Follower Dungeons is an idea that can expand this, you should be able to do Waycrest Manor or any Dungeon in your expansions story, with followers and not queue for 40 minutes to find out what happens next in this optional questline. Previous expansions are literally years worth of story and content, and most of it may never be experienced by new players, this is such a missed opportunity.
The recruitment discord is pretty good, it definitely has the biggest number of guilds of all the places I’ve checked. Take some time to craft a good message to both guilds that *should* take you (LF your class, are 3-7/9M rn) but also guilds that *might* take you (on tindral or fyrakk but need your class, less prog but don’t need your class) and ask for a trial so you can show them what’s up
I feel like the obvious answer about the patreon question guild is there were group of friends first and then they created a guild together. That's how they are close to each other geographically and they are all officers.
I would actually enjoy leveling in retail more if they cared more about making more interesting quests rather than a grocery list and as long as my alts could do a sped up version. First character in a new xpac I would be totally fine with a much longer leveling experience.
Levelling in retail just feels like a way to sell boosts at this point. When you have everything scaled to your level and nothing is challenging its kinda pointless. I also feel similar about the campaign - to me most of the shadowlands and dragonflight campaigns were not particularly interesting but I had to slog through them if I wanted to play endgame. They should rethink the way the levelling / story exposition works in WoW or just give everyone that wants to skip it a free level boost / campaign skip. If they keep mandatory campaigns, at they very least they should tie levelling with the campaign beats so you are always max level by the time you finish it.
The worst feeling now for people like me that didn’t get to play legion or MoP or whatever expansion people might be intrested in the story is you go to chormie you select your timelime and get to max level half way or not even half way throgh the story and chromie kicks you out of chromie time. An easy to fix to that is to give you an item that works like a toggle that absorbs xp considering that in chromie time everything is scaled to your level that will allow you to complete the story even if you make no “progresion” on your level
WoD leveling was basically get all the xp buffs you can (there was a potion for a big boost, plus heirlooms gave an xp boost back then), complete bonus objectives and collect a bunch of treasures. If you set up beforehand, you could ding in less than 90 mins.
P1 was the best largely because of the novelty, but a significant part was that players were largely concentrated in the 1-25 areas. The idea of SOD actually worked there. In P3, there isn't much functional difference from regular 1--60 Classic. The world is huge, players are spread out, the content of Vanilla isn't designed for attrition. Things dry up in the early levels and it makes the experience a lot less fun. That problem leads to issues bringing in new players or alts. Incursions are doing great for the 40-50 players, but it's dead AF for below that. I don't know what Blizz is cooking, but they need to make changes that make things like leveling, runes, and content function better when the herd of players shifts away. Simple EXP boosts aren't enough for that.
So incursions... on release you could make upwards of 800g, they nerfed the gold gains but not the rep and XP gains. I did it the next day on 3 characters. 40-50 in 4-6 hours, 250g+ and Honored Rep. Now they nerfed the XP gains. The economy is inflated in current phase from the giant influx of gold. You can continue to make 50g+ an hour running the same pickup quest route over and over. People aren't happy, and understandably so. In terms of the bosses, they were over tuned for the start, only 1 boss got a 56% health nerf, the rest were 20% ish. Aside from people actually parsing high (>80%) in their non-sunken temple pre-bis, the bosses were not killable. The raid has a "PuG check" 2nd boss in rather than 2/3 into the raid like the previous 2 raids. So people aren't thrilled about Sunken Temple. Some of the bosses are more inline with retail dungeon mechanics, but theyre not crazy complicated like a mythic or even heroic raid boss in retail. There is also a seperate bit of drama with class and racial balancing. People playing human feel cheated that Blizzard is giving everyone a flat +5 weaponskill of their choice, which is really human's pve edge having 2 weaponskill bonuses. a couple of raid bosses have "shaman mechanics" where it would take 2 different classes from alliance to counter the same boss. It just seems to be oversights by the SoD team. And of course, SoD is experimental, and i wouldn't be surprised to see a Rune like system in appear in retail WoW reviving some old talents.
1:00:30 tbh tanking during early prog feels about as good as getting cheated on with your best friend. Dude had to endure tanking council and a divorce, what a hero
The biggest issue is that leveling is just a race at this point from 1-70.....Everyone you do a dungeon with is racing to the end; who are on alts using heirlooms with enchants trivializing anything because they want to level their characters faster. There are 0-1 new players in these groups that one novice can't experience/learn anything since all he is doing is running to catch up to the pack and not be left behind... It's a pain in the ass for newer players to learn anything while leveling because everyone they are playing with are just leveling alts and going fast plain and simple. There isn't enough of an influx of new players into the game that all these novices can play with who will go at a similar pace and learn as they go up in level... While I understand this is a touchy subject for a lot of wow players just have the game be free to play up until like level 60 and to play/continue they pay the sub and buy expac. They can limit the f2p players on how much gold they can have like 1000 gold and not allow them to use the auction house or trade/send gold and mats (unless its their character). This way more people will be willing to try the game out to an extent, people will be able to play with other newer players, the open world in old zones won't be as empty and people can learn at a solid pace and if they continue with the game they will have a better understanding of it.
Y'all need to check out GW2 systems: * 10 abilities on skill bar * Flying mounts have the "dragonflight" dynamic flight feel. * Hearts (Quests) and events
I'd recommend Savix and Xaryu together for a healthy examination of SoD and Retail- the overall state of the Warcraft MMO space- specifically because they round out the experience really well. I think that you could interview one or the other, but together it'd make for a particularly remarkable episode. Savix is the guy who championed the Soloqueue dream, that Blizzard took too long (a decade) to implement, that eventually became Solo Shuffle. He also was talking about a PvP game mode LIKE (but not specifically) Plunderstorm - where there is no barrier to entry and came down to skill rather than protracted use of button bloat, and specifically discussed it as the PvP community moved away from the Retail game for the last 5 years. Xaryu, like Savix, has continued to be an exceptional competitive player and host/narrator for PvX content, but continues to do so in both Classic and Retail content, recently expanded his family and between he and Savix they now represent where many WoW players are within their own lives.
Devolore would be a great guest for a SoD/etxra blizzard game mode focused podcast. Dudes obviously knowledgeable about all version of the game but hes been playing alot of sod and speak frequently and retrospectively about the choices blizzard is making for SoD/In general
In regards to leveling in retail. Let's say The War Within comes out and you hop in on your first character. You show up in the new zone as a level 70, I think you should struggle against the mobs. 70-79 should be a small stat increase each time and then at 80, you get a big boost to bring it to how it currently feels. Then when you go in on an alt, you would have the option to pick the current power curve or the slower version. I think this would be the best way and would appeal to both crowds. Just my opinion
Funny thing is Final Fantasy 11 is also a sub based MMO and they've been trying to kill it for years but fans keep insisting they keep it up and going. As for FFXIV, I can completely understand not liking the story, especially in ARR. HW and on is different and even has different VAs but the devs are aware that trying to get new people to play 200+ hours of story to even get to the current expansion is an issue. So they are looking at have an option to just start at the next expansion because it's the start of a new story/saga. However I also kind of agree with Max, even though my favorite expansion is Shadowbringers there is a scene where the character say something along the lines of "Time to do chores for the village until they trust us." Not even hiding the fact that you're just doing busy work.
I would love if they brought someone like Hazel on. SSSSSOOOOOOOO much of the things they didn't know about leveling, having tons of alts for collecting, etc she does. And that's exactly why she has a large and great community. She taps into that part of the community that more "hardcore" wow cintent creators usually neglect.
WoD was peak leveling. It's still the fastest expansion to level alts through. Treasures, garrison table, rares, bonus objectives made experience plentiful. The zone abilities were also very cool, and the leveling story was objectively a banger. They just didn't deliver much end game content.
I’ve got around 40 max level characters because during shadowlands I got really into gold making. So I’ve got characters whose job is just to camp rares or run raids or do profession shuffles.
I've never played it to endgame cuz at the time I was super casual, but leveling through swtor was super fun for me. I can't really say exactly what they did right, but it was great
In terms of the patreon question. I was much in the same boat where I haven't been in a guild at all for the past 2-3 expansions. Mostly did M+ and leading pug Heroic clears. I didn't even do any logs or anything and had some exp long time ago doing mythic raid prog and CE in Emerald Nightmare. But it's a stepping stone where you look for a guild that is doing mythic, even lightly. And then seeing where you stand motivation wise and the guilds potential and then climb higher if you want.
1:06:21 I derped around the fringe CE level (world 1500 / US 600ish) for nearly 3.5 years, just now moved up to a us200 (world 600ish) guild. I really cannot overstate how useful it is to just know your damage rotation for every scenario inside and out. Get a GCD history weakaura, record yourself doing the best damage you can for 5 mins, watch it back, find mistakes, rinse/repeat. Do that enough and you will be slamming 90s+ in heroic pugs, and you will have a sufficient knowledge base on which to learn how to do mythic mechanics while hitting the boss.
I don’t think making leveling in retail wow slower would make sense, but i did enjoy leveling in hardcore wow and miss games like Everquest where leveling was the main content in the game for a lot of people. it was open, dangerous (lose experience and level when dying) and you were strongly encouraged to group up. would be nice for a modern MMO to take that approach.
As a professional leveler (altoholic) let me give you my thoughts on that. One word - dopamine. Running 8 dungeons and getting one piece of gear can feel bad, like a lot of time for little reward. Every DING you get gives you a noise, some shiny lights, a new talent, maybe a new ability, and a little bit of strength (usually). I sometimes think the thought of leveling from 1-40 is more satisfying than running 5 M+ dungeons, with 4 leavers and 1 not timed lol.
Content scaling for leveling needs to go. I understand why they did it (level any way you want!), but in the end it's not the best way to go about doing it. MMO leveling has always been about "out leveling" an area. Diablo 4 doing it was so sad and it was the thing I feared the most when they talked about it being "open world".
I think the leveling discussion misses the entire appeal of classic leveling. It’s not that it’s a challenge to kill the mobs that makes it interesting, it’s about the time spent in the world as your character. You grow an attachment to your character and the world around you because you get to experience it for so long, and you will see familiar faces along the way. It really is the journey and not the destination, whether that destination be max level or even the xp you get from completing a quest. From a CE raider who fell in love with hardcore classic.
I don't think leveling needs to take long, but it does need to be long enough to complete the story of a place/xpac. Cromie time gone, you go whereever either do the entire story in one place or a bit of your favourite quests here and there. And then next time when you pick another class to level, you go somewhere else. And this is just a bit of a hot take, but I think the current xpac should be one of the places you choose, not something that comes afterwards. As long as there is an introduction quest to the city and key things like dragonriding, let people chose and stick with one place until max lvl.
I feel like Sardarco would be a great inclusion for a SoD section, if you could get him thats another question. I think Xaryu would also be interesting, however he doesn't really keep entirely up to date with SoD from a more hardcore perspective.
Phase 3 of SoD was definitely rushed, the nightmare incursions weren't tested very much, most quests were bugged and quest items were bugged, the numbers were entirely to high, and the thing that pissed people off the most about that whole situation was how blizzard handled it, they nerfed the gold from it but didn't roll back any gold from people who were able to take advantage of it, so if you weren't able to take advantage of it, then you got royal screwed. The raid was also way overtuned as was said in the video, and most of the gear that drops from the raid isn't even an upgrade over the gear from Gnomer, at best, its a side grade aside from a select few weapons, a ring, and tier. Also, the runes this phase are extremely lackluster and boring, some are pretty powerful, but they just provide passive bonuses that you don't notice hardly at all and some specs didn't even get runes to further their gameplay so some of those specs are just stagnating and becoming dead in the water. One rune is so bad, it still hasn't been found yet as of 4/10 because no one is even looking for it, its not worth the time or effort to find because it will never be used in any situation.
@19:42 In the past I had 2-3 of my class so I could raid with different teams while still playing the same class without worrying about lockouts. Today tho... no idea why.
If you could farm your pre bis while leveling and it actually mattered instead of all gear sucking until max level I think that would be a positive thing for retail
Re best leveling expansion - agree with dorki. Wod was the best leveling expansion. The zone designs were great and were made for no flying so unlike bfa, legion or sl, there weren’t any annoying traversal issues. Also spires of arak was cool af
Just an observational advice about ffxiv, don't listen to the story simps, if you aren't jelling with the story from the get go, skip to Shadowbringers, maybe watch a synopsis of everything you skipped like a footnote video or something. I only have one friend that made it from beginning to end in FFXIV, I have plenty that dropped and never came back. But I never had anyone drop after skipping to Shadowbringers.
Honestly, with how they staggered content in Dragonflight and there wasn't much to do for 2 weeks, I think a longer first leveling experience would be good but it has to be a fun/interesting experience. Of course after that make it so alts can go 50-75% faster.
Great discussion as always! I have a few thoughts. I find it very interesting whenever we discuss making classic more like retail or retail more like classic because one of the most powerful things Blizzard has done in the last few years is giving us both versions of the game. With this separation, they should never feel inclined to make both games more similar, but should instead gain confidence to dig deeper into what makes each version more unique. Classic is about the journey. It should continue to be about slower progressions, more exploration, and more "stopping to smell the roses" types of activities. Adding runes to discover was a great example of this in SOD. Retail is fast-paced and about progression at end game. I think there is a world where no level between expansions could happen and have players happy, especially if it means all of those resources that would have been devoted to leveling experience go to making more end-game content (dungeons, raid, items, boss, mounts, etc.) Thanks for the great episode!
I was in a similar situation to the Patreon question. Had a guild in WOTLK disband due to the GM having an E-relationship with a girl who was an officer. The girls husband was in the military and found out, shit hit the fan and it fell apart.
As someone who spent a lot of time in SWTOR's endgame I def give it a huge recommend is you want to play it casually today. The games jank af and the class balancing is horrendous don't get me wrong (and has probably the worst system optimization of any MMO out there), but there's some really incredible boss fights to do if you want to blind prog. Even compared to my experiences with FFXIV endgame nothing has yet to top doing the Gods from the Machine raid blind and on content, 4 of the 5 bosses are absolute bangers. And one kinda nice thing nowadays is that every expac raid is scaled up to max level, so you can go back and do raids that came out in 2013 and experience them roughly as they were when they came out.
I’ve been playing and keeping up with SoD. Getting to a level where you can reenter Searing Gorge and Burning Steppes feels so much more intense than any feeling I got in the SL or DF zones as I was leveling. Even though I did those zones back in BC, the refreshing intensity felt special.
killing open world mobs feels infinitely worse in retail compared to classic, and its specifically because they scale with you. if i get raid gear or even really good dungeon gear i want to be able to launch Troggs into orbit not have a mok'gora everytime i pull something
They should reset everyone back to level one in a new expansion and make you level 1-60 in a slightly faster classic way. You would only do this once, then every ALT after have an option for a XP buff or not.
i clicked specifically for fronks stellar editing and unmatched work ethic
Based
is this Fronk’s burner account?
Guys, he’s gonna get a big head
Same
Fronk weak 💪
Either Xaryu or Savix would be sick guests for a SoD episode
Xaryu for sure.
or peekaboo
Xaryu 🎉
Came here to comment Xaryu myself. Perfect guest to talk SoD but from someone with a good understanding and perspective of retail too.
100% Xaryu, got me into wow streams and fitness in the first place
we demand a dorki solo bonus podcast
do you know how boring for dorki that would be.
precisely @@gamerunknown9472
@@gamerunknown9472
Dude is a streamer, he can yap for an hour
Okay, let me try to top the patreon story.
I ran a guild back in Vanilla and TBC with my real life buds. We were only doing Karazhan, so very close-knit group, and doing larger raids with an alliance of other guilds. We recruited a husband (priest) / wife (mage) combo. He was in the US Air Force stationed in England, she worked in some healthcare-adjacent field. They were cool and they quickly became officers.
We recruited a new main tank, he was from Canada, and had JUST turned 18. By pure coincidence, his sister went to the same college as me, so we actually met a few times, very quickly after he joined.
On one of these visits, he tells me he has been spending a bunch of time with the mage in Vent. I thought it was a little weird, but we only have like 15 members, so who else is he going to play with?
Come home and check the guild forums, members are asking why the priest officer left the guild. I ask the mage, his wife. She gets me on vent and confesses the whole thing in tears.
Apparently she took a trip to visit family back in Colorado, and in that time, our tank had flown down FROM CANADA so they could hook up. Apparently there were multiple other hook ups in a short time, like a month, where they went similarly out of their way. The details are blurry because it was nearly 20 years ago, but I think there was at least one trip from England to Canada. I saw him the next night and asked "what the hell, dude?" And his response was something to the effect of "Yeah it was pretty fun I guess. Can you blame me?"
Anyway I went back to my dorm, immediately disbanded the guild, and moved to the larger guild we were running with to do 25 man content. No time for that shit
Can confirm the Tribonious stuff is very real. Moon Guard guild. The office core was a rotating roster of people. In total it was maybe 6-10. She was flown out to see some of them. It was honestly some of the craziest drama, but not the worst we saw in that guild.
There's an entire memoir that goes along with it as well. It name drops but it is like 20 pages long explaining exactly what happened.
How can it be NOT the worst? What kind of crazytown happened there? :D
Max actually procced Raszageth talk after only 3 minutes xdd
Why would you level a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th of a class you already have?
- Farming collectibles. More characters = more chances at (let's say) getting Invincible.
- Crafting. There are some stuff that can only be crafted once a day, or have limited charges that reset daily/weekly, like alchemy transmutations (Dracothyst, Pyrium bars) or skinning special reagents (Obsidian Cobraskin). More characters = more chances.
- Likes to level up + only likes playing warriors.
- Soup! More characters = more chances at flavor pockets = more gold.
- Raw Gold farming. More characters = more gold from world quests and such.
- People who transfer realms but don't want to pay for it just level more toons on the destination realm.
- Playing opposite factions.
For the alt thing: I do follow a few people that have a lot of alts, multiple classes over different races and for them theese characters arent just a race/class/spec combination you play, these are characters, personalitys, storys that they create. They share mogs, screenshots, farm mounts, mogs and pets and stuff and I enjoy following them to see the side of WoW many of us maybe forgot. They show me how beautiful and fascinating this whole world still is and always was but we dont pay attention to it because we are focused on grinding, raiding, timing keys or doing pvp and theese people just walk through this world and be like "its really nice here"
The best questing I've had in an MMO had to be SWTOR because it is voice acted and depending on the class your playing special options can happen when your responding to the NPC. Another one would be GW2 - the quest in the game are hearts in each map you have to complete but they are so many random events that can happen while questing that makes it a lot of fun.
Agree. SWTOR is easily the best questing experience I've had in any MMO.
came to the comments to say this
Very fucking based, I've literally said that million times about SWTOR and replies always been 'aaaanyway'
You absolutely should try out FF14 if you liked swtor leveling.
I feel like yall should have Harldan on the poddyc. He has a bunch of insight into the whole questing dynamic, he does speed running in retail, and keeps up to date in SOD. But also gets CE every tier and could really balance yall out and bring in some different perspective.
Yes he would be a great guest :D
Yeah love his vids, get him on for sure
100% agree he makes such great and insightful videos
yah +1 harldan. Guy is the goat and deserves more recognition. He has like all the records for speed leveling in retail wow.
For me the biggest difference in leveling in classic (not sod) is that you are actually a lot stronger if you use your entire toolkit. Like every class has niche things it can do to be more efficient at killing stuff.
But as soon as you hit max level and go raiding, you just throw all of this out and just spam 1 button for the most part.
In retail it's different. You can use 1 button for leveling and then you have to use your entire toolkit when you're doing endgame content
never thought about it that way, but thats actually so true
Well if you pull 2 mobs at a time you can kill them with "1 button", because it's easier than classic, but you can definitely use your whole toolkit while leveling on retail. And experienced players do that and they level more efficiently.
@@tommy4862 ye i agree with you. especially since i like leveling through rdf on retail and whenever i can tank, i go giga mdi pulls :D but the difference is, that unless you really giga pull, its never really dangerous in retail, whereas in classic you can die much easier
This is actually so true
For the patreon question: I was in a guild in cataclysm where a girl was sleeping with/hopping around relationships with multiple people in the guild. Hearing about it constantly was super annoying. Turns out she would have people in our guild pay her a ton of gold and mats for the right to say they had met her irl and they were dating. Then she would break up with them and move on to the next dude. These dudes were so jaded that they didn’t realize the next dude in her scheme was falling for the same thing. I always thought it was fishy but I was about 16 at the time and didn’t think much about it. People got wise to it and she finally dropped the tea. Told the guild in our forums what was going on. Gquit. Swapped realms and names and made off like a bandit. Still not entirely sure how I feel about. Was a pretty messed up situation but I can’t help but find it kinda funny.
That is crazy.
Retail leveling is PURELY cosmetic. They could very easily just raise base stats at the start of the expansion and just make a required story line before you can do the endgame content. We’ve been so conditioned to need to “level up” that we’ve gaslit ourselves into thinking we actually want to level. You don’t want to level, you just want to get to the end. Even if you want to do leveling quests, you just want to do the quests. The level is irrelevant
This.
i honestly like leveling in retail.
It's super casual and laidback. I like how fast it is, and I like visiting the old world.
This a really good take - Levelling has almost become completely immaterial. An approach as you mentioned above would also help with the NPE - rather than doing chromie content and hitting 60 and getting kicked out of Legion levelling before youve finished the second zone, using the story as the driver instead of levels would help to make more coherent experiences as you essentially remove the arbitrary restrictions and focus solely on the expac. Throw in some meaningful rewards for completing these stories and youve solved wows "disjointed experience" imho.
Edit - Secondary point, your power is much more tied to gear, a fresh 70 with lower than season 1 content gear is so unbelievably far behind the power curve that the gearing process is basically levelling by proxy, so youre essentially getting double dipped. its not a case of "I hit 70 now i can play the game", its a case of "I hit 70, now the real grind begins".
This is a good take.
I can't even we're all having this discussion. Lol.
Leveling sucks. Why do we need it? Why is it important? It's a means to an end. I mean, why does it have to be important? Nothing good is happening during the leveling process. It's not important.
To answer their question, the best leveling experience for me was OG Tera. It was simple questing. It was fast and easy.
It's just such a wild take for me thinking people want longer and harder leveling processes. Like. I don't understand it.
We have had nearly 20+ years of hard, grindy MMOs. Why does it have to continue to be this way?
The number is cosmetic but I do enjoy that 2 nights of idk what it is but it’s a nostalgic wave of fun watching the ~50-60 bnet friends I’ve made over the years come back and bust out an old familiar game. They’d come back regardless but I think leveling is a much better representation of “how much you’ve finished” than knowing which chapters of the quest are done
Hazel would be a cool casual player perspective to have on the pod she has like 100 characters at max to farm mounts lol
I'd suggest Xaryu as a guest to talk about SoD. He's probably the most 'approachable' Classic streamer and knows a lot about retail as well so it wouldn't be a totally one-sided conversation.
On MMOs in general; I actually think Ashes of Creation is probably the closest thing we have now to an exciting new MMO. Its biggest problem is that they're not a huge team with big funding behind them and they are being very ambitious, which is leading to an extremely long development where anything could go badly. On the upside their updates look good and it seems to be making steady progress. It'll come down to whether or not there's enough actual game to play after they've figured out their weather and season systems.
So I have a level locked 59 blood DK that I am taking through all of the expansions in chromie time. Why? 2 reasons, 1)Rewards are better in Chromie time than normal levelling, and I am mildly greedy. 2)The content is "Challenging" not difficult, but it isn't a oneshot city if I was going back as a max level. Like because back in the day I shared the account with my mom, when I was in middle school, I never got to really do dungeons, or raids due to the time limits of sharing an account with someone who did. Would I like to do modern raids? Yea, but like... I don't imagine being able to break through that gate at this point.
Man Dorki talking about joining random trade chat guilds and cesspool guilds before streaming is crazy. He needs to watch a drama time. I would personally love an undercover m+ guild type thing, where they join random trade chat guilds and do some keys or something.
So on the topic of leveling, I can weigh in with a common POV of players who do enjoy leveling repeatedly - Players who like to level multiple characters usually pay no attention to or give very little importance to max level content.
Think of it this way - Usually when you or I level, as retail players accustomed to the endgame season to season gameplay, we want leveling to be over quick because one of our primary driving factors is to want to experience current end-game content within the current season itself. But for those other players, they do NOT have that need/want to succumb to the FOMO of the WoW modern seasonal gameplay.
And when you take the motivation to get on the seasonal gameplay train off the table, suddenly, you don't feel the "pace" of leveling as much, if at all. Instead, you're just doing stuff on those new characters, and occasionally watching your level go up, and new abilities unlock in an organic manner for you to try out. One gameplay style I've heard of from such players, and the main reason they level multiple of the same class, is that they pick a different talent setup each time, which completely changes their experience of the journey.
As streamers and hardcore players in general, I can see why you guys weren't naturally able to stumble onto this explanation behind the motivation for people liking and wanting to do leveling. Unfortunately, we're all victims of the Seasonal gameplay FOMO that wow has been training us to feel and be part of for so many years now. The game has gone this direction in terms of training player psychology since Legion. This wasn't the case when Wrath and to some extent Cata were current content, because all the content they released in new patches, were still relevant in the final patch of both those expansions for all players, so it was hard to have FOMO. You could do it all at your own pace and still experience what everyone else experienced. Now though, if you miss out on let's say S2 of DF, you're going to be at a great disadvantage for S3, starting with the item level bloat you need to keep up with from season to season.
I really wish you guys revisit Wrath and Cata once, and just explore the difference of feel of Item Level change from Tier to Tier, and compare it to modern WoW, and how it affects player psychology, and blizzard's design choices.
There needs to be a leveling mode that ties to the story. For instance every 10 levels you change xpac but in those 10 levels you do a campaign of visiting main npcs and downing dungeon/raid bosses from that xpac on mega easy difficulty just so you get the jist of what went down.
Ngl I wouldn't mind that. Like you could choose "Free Mode" where it's like it is now or "Story Catch-up Mode" where it took you through the big plot points of the xpacs and you ended on the waking shore ready to level in DF
Honestly, that's what I thought Chromie Time would be like when it was originally announced, you are just taken through each zone hitting the main events, talking the main guys, doing the dungeons once, and then maybe going through a solo instanced version of the raids or main raid, kind of wish that was an option tbh, I would much prefer that over the current Chromie Time.
For the leveling experience they could implement a button like warmode that slows down leveling. A lot of new players start to play with friends and I've had friends that couldn't even make it through the sped up version let alone if it was longer. A toggleable feature could let the people that want a leveling experience still have that. If its toggleable it can let people just enjoy certain zones and then swap back to max out their character faster once done with the parts they enjoy. Plus if there are certain zones or level gaps you don't enjoy you could fast track them then swap back to slow down again.
My favorite leveling experience would be GW2 once the the game "clicked" with me. Once I started thinking about it like Skyrim and not a WoW/FFXIV game, it became really fun because of the amazing open world, more subtle storytelling, and having a lot of your kit early on.
it worked well due to the level scaling and openness to picking what you wanted and where you wanted. Dont like ice zones? thats fine, go to the fire steppies
I like Dorki's idea of giving the player a CHOICE to extend their leveling time to fully enjoy an expansion, combine that with Tali's "Path of the Curator" mode, and I think you've got a new leveling path for on-boarding new players while pleasing veterans.
I'm one of those altoholics with a ton of characters, I really enjoy trying out each class with different races - they feel different because of the animations and their transmog fits differently (not to mention faction differences with story, cities, etc...).
Another reason is that I like keeping each character to their own spec, so I have say 1 druid as guardian, 1 druid as resto, 1 as balance, etc... I then swap between them depending on how I feel. I don't necessarily keep them up to speed with gear/ilvl - but that's what catch up mechanics are great for. I tend to main 1 character for world content and 1 for raiding which rotates, since I adapt to classes we lack that season (we usually average 12 to 14 raiders in the guild so it's hard to get a full roster of classes).
There's probably a plethora of other reasons I can't think of right now, but the above are the most obvious from my experience.
@ThePoddyC
Yo, keep up the good work!
I really liked how TERA did leveling before they switched to maintenance mode and gave you guaranteed OP weapon every new dungeon tier that made leveling trivial. Familiar types of kill/gather/find/destroy quests and most regions had a dungeon at the end of their storyline to work up towards. They tried to move away from tab target more into action combat, which allowed you to solo a lot of hard stuff just with proper dodges/blocks and timing. Elites took minutes to kill, but each was a satisfying bossfight to me.
As for the Patreon question, the way the guild disbanded happens a lot in EU apparently. Lot of guilds are language preferential, so country specific or a group of countries where you understand each other. ( Scandinavia, GER/AUT, CZE/SVK ) Officers are commonly a friend group from the same region, meeting irl regularly, living few hours apart. Preach has a bit called Drama Time on his channel where people send him these obscure stories with people sleeping around for loot and other benefits, Goldshire ERP stories and other crazy stuff. Highly recommend to anyone looking for something headphones worthy. I know people from a guild where current GM took the guild along with the previous GMs wife ...
1:07:00 If you have good logs you are a great candidate.
Most guilds are either getting roster-bossed on tough fights (smolderon thru fyrakk depending on the level of player), or reclearing and the main raiders just cba to show up for it. This is the best time to trial.
Finally, Dorki IRL
Xaryu would be the perfect guest for a SoD episode
Back in wrath, my girlfriend and I were in the same guild. She left me for the main tank, while also using my card for her wow sub. Sucks she didn't change her password, which resulted in both me cancelling it, and deleting her max level alchemy and herbalism. Wow is full of glorious drama.
If you want a MMO that does questing well and is all about the journey, there isn't any better example than OSRS. That is THE MMO for the journey.
About Max's question for why level multiple of the same class, I'll give my opinion as someone that does just that. I really enjoy the gearing process, and I loose a lot of interest to play my guy when there is nothing to directly farm for. I also just want to play shaman, its the class I vibe with. So when my guy is capped for m+ loot I like to just fire up a new shaman.
The rest of this is just a tangent about retail vs. classic levelling:
What I will say about the levelling process in retail, it is dreadfully boring. There is no good alternative to the extremely repetitive questing or dungeon spam. My mind goes to the levelling I did in Season of Discovery, I was sometimes bored for sure, but most of the time I felt challenged and I could push myself to play smarter and better to speed it up or attempt harder quests at lower levels. In retail you don't have this option, you are stuck with what the game gives you and you will enjoy pressing chain lightning to one-shot every mob.
When it comes to the levelling process, classic does it way better simply by offering a challenge. And I don't see why retail cant have that option.
I have 48 characters, all 50+. vast majority is a DK. I abused the fact that they started at 55 and when the level squish came in and they started on lvl 10 my premade lvl 55dk-s got to 23 ish and I had to level less. I use these chars to farm mounts (according to the journal I have 841). I used to kill sha of anger with all of them before the droprate increase. got my heavenly onxy serpent after 1601 kills
Everyone keeps saying “sense of progression”, I think that’s true but not it. It’s a sense of adventure and exploration. That’s what made classic so incredible, the scale and exploration on your journey. That’s why I remember MoP leveling fondly, it still had a little sense of that. Now a days leveling is basically a dungeon crawler/point a to point b game mode. I enjoy current leveling just cause I enjoy wow period. But I think there’s a middle ground
So as a Zoomer that played through all 3 Classic expansions so far because I wanted to feel what the game was like before I started, I've got a couple takes on what you all talked about.
For the leveling, Classic feels better because you get abilities as you level and talent points are often focused on leveling and not a whole character build. You would often play a different spec for raiding depending on the class. In retail, most of your abilities that make a build are on your tree (either class or spec) and your character doesn't feel the same progression, it just feels incomplete until max level pretty much. In Classic you're forced to change which abilities you use depending on rank and talents you get, which makes the leveling progression feel more coherent.
For questing more specifically, I love WotLK leveling because it fixed a lot of areas in Vanilla zones that just didn't have quests for exp dead zones. The TBC and Wrath leveling zones were also some of the more memorable and fun zones to quest through.
True story back in TBC- we had a married couple in the guild. We get a guild forum post dropped on us (long before discord) that the husband caught the wife in a hotel room with one of our other members that flew up, they confirmed it. The husband asked the guild to kick them but he was dps and the other two were healers, so the guy who lost his wife ended up getting gkicked to boot.
Ok, so this definitely happened to a lesser degree to my guild in Nyalotha. The Guild Leader's husband was the main tank, and he cheated on her with the Off-tank / officer, which lead to the guild disbanding before we could get cutting edge.
But that was just two people, not a train of officers.
Also shout out to Dratnos for keeping you guys relatable by mentioning the guild recruitment discord. It is the actual best place to find a cutting edge / mid mythic guild.
For the leveling stuff a friend of mine recommended they make the first character you take thru a new xpac taking a bit longer but then unlocking and xp gain for alts and i think i can get behind that idea
Leveling has felt meaningless since the started scaling, it makes you weaker when you level so it doesn’t feel good until ur max level and can get stronger
Best leveling** for me would be hands down FF14 due to the fantastic story in HW and the ShB-Endwalker arc, that stuff is something that'll be in my memory forever, swtor comes as a 2nd.
**which kind of has less to do with the leveling gameplay itself to be fair, some later trials are fun but it's really just about the light novel like story.
Hey, I was in Tribonius' guild in Castle Nathria, and was part of the guild when him, and the GM/RL being ousted.
He was yeeted because they were being racist/problematic, and the rest of the guild wasnt vibing with it.
I raided with them from Castle Nathria, until 10.1 in Dragonflight. The guild went from a frat bro enviroment, to a much more supporting and accepting enviroment for our lgbt, and poc members.
He just kind of lied with what was going on, and sounds still salty about it.
As someone with more than 1 of some classes, I level extra characters for a few reasons.
I feel like certain specs fit certain races more thematically. Like, thematically Lightforged Draenei make cool looking Holy Priests, but would be really weird as Shadow. That also goes into the point of leveling each Allied Race to unlock their heritage armor. You'll inevitably end up with an extra class or more.
Sometimes I forget how to play a class/spec and will just mess around on a low level character to slowly remember how to play little by little.
I like having specific transmogs for certain specs and giving my characters some level of personality. I play on Moon Guard and don't actively RP but I like drafting characters to play akin to DnD characters.
The difference with FFXIV is that all the jobs are played on one character, so while it's required to play through on a character, you don't then have to replay through the story to level other jobs in that game. Not only that, but your lower level jobs also level faster until they catch up to whatever your highest level job is. WoW leveling pretty much just makes you play through the same experience the first time as it does the 30th time. You can literally Dungeon grind your way to 60 and then do whatever the fastest thing is to get to 70. You can do that on every character. Roulettes in FFXIV feel much more fun to do for leveling alternate jobs than just grinding dungeons. You have trials, dungeons, story content,etc. You can also go around and do fates or random side quests. The amount of ways you can level in FFXIV is just much better than in WoW.
WoW really should have a similar story required mode for your initial character. They would have to put together a coherent storyline that goes through all the expansions, but at least people could understand what's going on in the story as a new player. Right now most new players have no idea what the story is and just watch videos online.
I once logged into my guild during Cata to find 80% of the guild had left overnight. Turns out the tank and GM had been sending explicit messages and photos to our 15 year old Paladin. Their mum found out and phoned the police
How about:
What if we revolutionize the entire leveling experience? Picture this: Instead of the conventional 'leveling number' system, we completely remove the numbers. Instead we embark on epic 3-5 hours questlines tailored to each class, guided by our "mentors" who unveil new abilities and spells specific to the expansion. Alongside these quests, there are intriguing side missions designed to unlock non-combat spells and skills.
We make every quests in the world not mandatory and steeped in rich lore, offering epic adventures that reward us with coveted treasures like transmogrification items, pets, unique transport options or flight paths, unique mountifications, ... And to crown it all, upon completing these legendary questlines, we earn prestigious rewards such as unique mounts, faction-specific transmog sets or maybe even new character customization options.
In this vision, power is derived not from a mere numerical level, but through the acquisition of powerful gear only
The problem with leveling in retail is that you don't have to turn on your brain. You're on autopilot, cruising easy mode through hours upon hours of brain-numbingly trivial content.
Classic leveling isn't _difficult_ per say, but it's at least possible to make mistakes. You need to actively engage with the game during leveling, and doing so feels rewarding.
I would LOVE to have an option (key here, give people the choice) to reduce my XP gain while leveling by a factor of 5/10. I prefer leveling in retail over classic because I think class design is far superior in retail, but I personally find it too fast at times because I want to play through multiple storylines (or even just a full expansion) before hitting cap. Maybe I’m a psycho, but I’ve leveled multiple WW’s because I like the spec + want to experience different stories with it. For reference, 3k on 3 different classes (rsham, ww, prot pally) and AOTC on 2, so not a mega casual. I just love this game in almost all its facets and wish I could extend the leveling process more to enjoy the stories blizzard have crafted over the years.
The debate on levelling is not the solution to make the game more accessible and friendly to new players.
The problem right now is that the game never teaches you anything about how to get good at the videogame.
Blizzard had a good first attempt with Exile's reach but it teaches you very little. I've introduced the game to a few friends during dragonflight and it's obvious that way too few things are explained to the player, and explained properly. Raid is never introduced, M+ is never introduced, dungeon is sort of never introduced despite follower donations existing and the tiny dungeon in exile's reach. It goes on and on and on.
The only thing the game does is tell you where to go to continue the quests, that's literally it. The game needs to teach you how to tackle endgame content, how to heal in dungeon, in raid, same for tanks and DPS.
And outdoor content needs to become reasonably challenging. Being able to do packs of 6 effortlessly with no gear on your own makes outdoor content never fun which also makes levelling really boring.
Also levelling should let you go through low level content forever if you want to. Either through down scaling your level manually or just manually getting out of low level scaling when it happens. Right now you're catapulted into dragonflight super fast and you can't even go through old content with a decent level of immersion. Let me go through low level quests for dozens of hours without one shotting monsters if I want to.
It's like you would play a mario game but anytime you complete a level you can't do it again without being invincible, super fast and flying at all time
I think they could bring back attunements and force people to complete certain mythic challenges (like in MoP) to qualify for higher content. Or maybe just add filters to the LFG tool so people can opt to exclude those without those achievements. The problem with the MoP challenges was that they were pretty basic.
But combining that with the idea for more mage tower / brawler's guild type content, I could see actual fun challenges being created that could be used to help teach people advanced techniques and guaruntee that your "gold tier dps" understands how to kick and stun properly.
I don't know about levelling or levelling speed - but there has to be a way for new players to fully experience expansion storylines and actually understand what has been going on. In FXXIV you experience each expansions story pretty fully, meanwhile in WoW you quest through the first patch of BFA and then are dropped into Dragonflight. I got a friend into WoW and he had no idea what happened to Jainas mum, or Flynn, or with Kul Tiras, or any of the plotines of BFAs start, because you just hit 60 and then Chromie takes you out. There has to be some form of 'story mode' or something, for new players who want to experience the Legion or Shadowlands etc plot in a compact and chronological way. Also Follower Dungeons is an idea that can expand this, you should be able to do Waycrest Manor or any Dungeon in your expansions story, with followers and not queue for 40 minutes to find out what happens next in this optional questline. Previous expansions are literally years worth of story and content, and most of it may never be experienced by new players, this is such a missed opportunity.
The recruitment discord is pretty good, it definitely has the biggest number of guilds of all the places I’ve checked. Take some time to craft a good message to both guilds that *should* take you (LF your class, are 3-7/9M rn) but also guilds that *might* take you (on tindral or fyrakk but need your class, less prog but don’t need your class) and ask for a trial so you can show them what’s up
I feel like the obvious answer about the patreon question guild is there were group of friends first and then they created a guild together. That's how they are close to each other geographically and they are all officers.
I would actually enjoy leveling in retail more if they cared more about making more interesting quests rather than a grocery list and as long as my alts could do a sped up version. First character in a new xpac I would be totally fine with a much longer leveling experience.
Levelling in retail just feels like a way to sell boosts at this point. When you have everything scaled to your level and nothing is challenging its kinda pointless. I also feel similar about the campaign - to me most of the shadowlands and dragonflight campaigns were not particularly interesting but I had to slog through them if I wanted to play endgame. They should rethink the way the levelling / story exposition works in WoW or just give everyone that wants to skip it a free level boost / campaign skip. If they keep mandatory campaigns, at they very least they should tie levelling with the campaign beats so you are always max level by the time you finish it.
The worst feeling now for people like me that didn’t get to play legion or MoP or whatever expansion people might be intrested in the story is you go to chormie you select your timelime and get to max level half way or not even half way throgh the story and chromie kicks you out of chromie time. An easy to fix to that is to give you an item that works like a toggle that absorbs xp considering that in chromie time everything is scaled to your level that will allow you to complete the story even if you make no “progresion” on your level
WoD leveling was basically get all the xp buffs you can (there was a potion for a big boost, plus heirlooms gave an xp boost back then), complete bonus objectives and collect a bunch of treasures. If you set up beforehand, you could ding in less than 90 mins.
Wow, fantastic job fronk. They really couldn't do this without you.
P1 was the best largely because of the novelty, but a significant part was that players were largely concentrated in the 1-25 areas. The idea of SOD actually worked there. In P3, there isn't much functional difference from regular 1--60 Classic. The world is huge, players are spread out, the content of Vanilla isn't designed for attrition. Things dry up in the early levels and it makes the experience a lot less fun. That problem leads to issues bringing in new players or alts. Incursions are doing great for the 40-50 players, but it's dead AF for below that. I don't know what Blizz is cooking, but they need to make changes that make things like leveling, runes, and content function better when the herd of players shifts away. Simple EXP boosts aren't enough for that.
So incursions... on release you could make upwards of 800g, they nerfed the gold gains but not the rep and XP gains. I did it the next day on 3 characters. 40-50 in 4-6 hours, 250g+ and Honored Rep. Now they nerfed the XP gains. The economy is inflated in current phase from the giant influx of gold. You can continue to make 50g+ an hour running the same pickup quest route over and over. People aren't happy, and understandably so.
In terms of the bosses, they were over tuned for the start, only 1 boss got a 56% health nerf, the rest were 20% ish. Aside from people actually parsing high (>80%) in their non-sunken temple pre-bis, the bosses were not killable. The raid has a "PuG check" 2nd boss in rather than 2/3 into the raid like the previous 2 raids. So people aren't thrilled about Sunken Temple. Some of the bosses are more inline with retail dungeon mechanics, but theyre not crazy complicated like a mythic or even heroic raid boss in retail.
There is also a seperate bit of drama with class and racial balancing. People playing human feel cheated that Blizzard is giving everyone a flat +5 weaponskill of their choice, which is really human's pve edge having 2 weaponskill bonuses. a couple of raid bosses have "shaman mechanics" where it would take 2 different classes from alliance to counter the same boss. It just seems to be oversights by the SoD team.
And of course, SoD is experimental, and i wouldn't be surprised to see a Rune like system in appear in retail WoW reviving some old talents.
1:00:30 tbh tanking during early prog feels about as good as getting cheated on with your best friend. Dude had to endure tanking council and a divorce, what a hero
The biggest issue is that leveling is just a race at this point from 1-70.....Everyone you do a dungeon with is racing to the end; who are on alts using heirlooms with enchants trivializing anything because they want to level their characters faster. There are 0-1 new players in these groups that one novice can't experience/learn anything since all he is doing is running to catch up to the pack and not be left behind... It's a pain in the ass for newer players to learn anything while leveling because everyone they are playing with are just leveling alts and going fast plain and simple. There isn't enough of an influx of new players into the game that all these novices can play with who will go at a similar pace and learn as they go up in level...
While I understand this is a touchy subject for a lot of wow players just have the game be free to play up until like level 60 and to play/continue they pay the sub and buy expac. They can limit the f2p players on how much gold they can have like 1000 gold and not allow them to use the auction house or trade/send gold and mats (unless its their character). This way more people will be willing to try the game out to an extent, people will be able to play with other newer players, the open world in old zones won't be as empty and people can learn at a solid pace and if they continue with the game they will have a better understanding of it.
Savix would be a sick guest to have on, he knows his stuff
Y'all need to check out GW2 systems:
* 10 abilities on skill bar
* Flying mounts have the "dragonflight" dynamic flight feel.
* Hearts (Quests) and events
I'd recommend Savix and Xaryu together for a healthy examination of SoD and Retail- the overall state of the Warcraft MMO space- specifically because they round out the experience really well. I think that you could interview one or the other, but together it'd make for a particularly remarkable episode.
Savix is the guy who championed the Soloqueue dream, that Blizzard took too long (a decade) to implement, that eventually became Solo Shuffle. He also was talking about a PvP game mode LIKE (but not specifically) Plunderstorm - where there is no barrier to entry and came down to skill rather than protracted use of button bloat, and specifically discussed it as the PvP community moved away from the Retail game for the last 5 years.
Xaryu, like Savix, has continued to be an exceptional competitive player and host/narrator for PvX content, but continues to do so in both Classic and Retail content, recently expanded his family and between he and Savix they now represent where many WoW players are within their own lives.
Devolore would be a great guest for a SoD/etxra blizzard game mode focused podcast. Dudes obviously knowledgeable about all version of the game but hes been playing alot of sod and speak frequently and retrospectively about the choices blizzard is making for SoD/In general
In regards to leveling in retail. Let's say The War Within comes out and you hop in on your first character. You show up in the new zone as a level 70, I think you should struggle against the mobs. 70-79 should be a small stat increase each time and then at 80, you get a big boost to bring it to how it currently feels. Then when you go in on an alt, you would have the option to pick the current power curve or the slower version. I think this would be the best way and would appeal to both crowds. Just my opinion
Funny thing is Final Fantasy 11 is also a sub based MMO and they've been trying to kill it for years but fans keep insisting they keep it up and going.
As for FFXIV, I can completely understand not liking the story, especially in ARR. HW and on is different and even has different VAs but the devs are aware that trying to get new people to play 200+ hours of story to even get to the current expansion is an issue. So they are looking at have an option to just start at the next expansion because it's the start of a new story/saga.
However I also kind of agree with Max, even though my favorite expansion is Shadowbringers there is a scene where the character say something along the lines of "Time to do chores for the village until they trust us." Not even hiding the fact that you're just doing busy work.
I would love if they brought someone like Hazel on. SSSSSOOOOOOOO much of the things they didn't know about leveling, having tons of alts for collecting, etc she does. And that's exactly why she has a large and great community. She taps into that part of the community that more "hardcore" wow cintent creators usually neglect.
Xaryu, Savix, or Guzu would be excellent guests for a Season of Discovery episode.
Dorki Nailed it on his SoD commentary, i have been absolutely no lifing it and he explains the situations and issues hella accurately
WoD was peak leveling. It's still the fastest expansion to level alts through. Treasures, garrison table, rares, bonus objectives made experience plentiful. The zone abilities were also very cool, and the leveling story was objectively a banger. They just didn't deliver much end game content.
WoD felt perfect and well designed as for retail. Many things to mix in your leveling process to not make it stale.
Dratnos got stuck in the legitimately worst part of ffxiv... there's no shame in that. It's been streamlined a bit but it's still a giant slog
I’ve got around 40 max level characters because during shadowlands I got really into gold making. So I’ve got characters whose job is just to camp rares or run raids or do profession shuffles.
Best part of questing is being raised in deathknell as an undead rogue
Fun fact my mythic guild that started this tier has 5 of its core raiders living in vegas.
I've never played it to endgame cuz at the time I was super casual, but leveling through swtor was super fun for me. I can't really say exactly what they did right, but it was great
In terms of the patreon question. I was much in the same boat where I haven't been in a guild at all for the past 2-3 expansions. Mostly did M+ and leading pug Heroic clears.
I didn't even do any logs or anything and had some exp long time ago doing mythic raid prog and CE in Emerald Nightmare. But it's a stepping stone where you look for a guild that is doing mythic, even lightly. And then seeing where you stand motivation wise and the guilds potential and then climb higher if you want.
Man, that guild drama is way more interesting than any question posed 🤣🤣
1:06:21 I derped around the fringe CE level (world 1500 / US 600ish) for nearly 3.5 years, just now moved up to a us200 (world 600ish) guild.
I really cannot overstate how useful it is to just know your damage rotation for every scenario inside and out.
Get a GCD history weakaura, record yourself doing the best damage you can for 5 mins, watch it back, find mistakes, rinse/repeat.
Do that enough and you will be slamming 90s+ in heroic pugs, and you will have a sufficient knowledge base on which to learn how to do mythic mechanics while hitting the boss.
I don’t think making leveling in retail wow slower would make sense, but i did enjoy leveling in hardcore wow and miss games like Everquest where leveling was the main content in the game for a lot of people. it was open, dangerous (lose experience and level when dying) and you were strongly encouraged to group up. would be nice for a modern MMO to take that approach.
As a professional leveler (altoholic) let me give you my thoughts on that. One word - dopamine. Running 8 dungeons and getting one piece of gear can feel bad, like a lot of time for little reward. Every DING you get gives you a noise, some shiny lights, a new talent, maybe a new ability, and a little bit of strength (usually). I sometimes think the thought of leveling from 1-40 is more satisfying than running 5 M+ dungeons, with 4 leavers and 1 not timed lol.
You should try to get Taliesin on to talk about his idea of leveling 1-max level
Content scaling for leveling needs to go. I understand why they did it (level any way you want!), but in the end it's not the best way to go about doing it. MMO leveling has always been about "out leveling" an area.
Diablo 4 doing it was so sad and it was the thing I feared the most when they talked about it being "open world".
I think the leveling discussion misses the entire appeal of classic leveling. It’s not that it’s a challenge to kill the mobs that makes it interesting, it’s about the time spent in the world as your character. You grow an attachment to your character and the world around you because you get to experience it for so long, and you will see familiar faces along the way. It really is the journey and not the destination, whether that destination be max level or even the xp you get from completing a quest.
From a CE raider who fell in love with hardcore classic.
SWTOR story was pretty awesome at the time. Particularly with choices. WoW needs it's own version of huttball desperately, that mode was amazing
Oh my good Dorki mentioning Ragnarok made my weel lol
I don't think leveling needs to take long, but it does need to be long enough to complete the story of a place/xpac. Cromie time gone, you go whereever either do the entire story in one place or a bit of your favourite quests here and there. And then next time when you pick another class to level, you go somewhere else. And this is just a bit of a hot take, but I think the current xpac should be one of the places you choose, not something that comes afterwards. As long as there is an introduction quest to the city and key things like dragonriding, let people chose and stick with one place until max lvl.
I feel like Sardarco would be a great inclusion for a SoD section, if you could get him thats another question. I think Xaryu would also be interesting, however he doesn't really keep entirely up to date with SoD from a more hardcore perspective.
Phase 3 of SoD was definitely rushed, the nightmare incursions weren't tested very much, most quests were bugged and quest items were bugged, the numbers were entirely to high, and the thing that pissed people off the most about that whole situation was how blizzard handled it, they nerfed the gold from it but didn't roll back any gold from people who were able to take advantage of it, so if you weren't able to take advantage of it, then you got royal screwed. The raid was also way overtuned as was said in the video, and most of the gear that drops from the raid isn't even an upgrade over the gear from Gnomer, at best, its a side grade aside from a select few weapons, a ring, and tier. Also, the runes this phase are extremely lackluster and boring, some are pretty powerful, but they just provide passive bonuses that you don't notice hardly at all and some specs didn't even get runes to further their gameplay so some of those specs are just stagnating and becoming dead in the water. One rune is so bad, it still hasn't been found yet as of 4/10 because no one is even looking for it, its not worth the time or effort to find because it will never be used in any situation.
@19:42 In the past I had 2-3 of my class so I could raid with different teams while still playing the same class without worrying about lockouts. Today tho... no idea why.
If you could farm your pre bis while leveling and it actually mattered instead of all gear sucking until max level I think that would be a positive thing for retail
One of the worst things is content scaling....you NEED the brutal walls to overcome.....the intimidation etc it HAS to be returned.
Re best leveling expansion - agree with dorki. Wod was the best leveling expansion. The zone designs were great and were made for no flying so unlike bfa, legion or sl, there weren’t any annoying traversal issues. Also spires of arak was cool af
Just an observational advice about ffxiv, don't listen to the story simps, if you aren't jelling with the story from the get go, skip to Shadowbringers, maybe watch a synopsis of everything you skipped like a footnote video or something.
I only have one friend that made it from beginning to end in FFXIV, I have plenty that dropped and never came back. But I never had anyone drop after skipping to Shadowbringers.
Honestly, with how they staggered content in Dragonflight and there wasn't much to do for 2 weeks, I think a longer first leveling experience would be good but it has to be a fun/interesting experience. Of course after that make it so alts can go 50-75% faster.
Great discussion as always! I have a few thoughts.
I find it very interesting whenever we discuss making classic more like retail or retail more like classic because one of the most powerful things Blizzard has done in the last few years is giving us both versions of the game. With this separation, they should never feel inclined to make both games more similar, but should instead gain confidence to dig deeper into what makes each version more unique.
Classic is about the journey. It should continue to be about slower progressions, more exploration, and more "stopping to smell the roses" types of activities. Adding runes to discover was a great example of this in SOD.
Retail is fast-paced and about progression at end game. I think there is a world where no level between expansions could happen and have players happy, especially if it means all of those resources that would have been devoted to leveling experience go to making more end-game content (dungeons, raid, items, boss, mounts, etc.)
Thanks for the great episode!
I was in a similar situation to the Patreon question. Had a guild in WOTLK disband due to the GM having an E-relationship with a girl who was an officer.
The girls husband was in the military and found out, shit hit the fan and it fell apart.
As someone who spent a lot of time in SWTOR's endgame I def give it a huge recommend is you want to play it casually today. The games jank af and the class balancing is horrendous don't get me wrong (and has probably the worst system optimization of any MMO out there), but there's some really incredible boss fights to do if you want to blind prog. Even compared to my experiences with FFXIV endgame nothing has yet to top doing the Gods from the Machine raid blind and on content, 4 of the 5 bosses are absolute bangers. And one kinda nice thing nowadays is that every expac raid is scaled up to max level, so you can go back and do raids that came out in 2013 and experience them roughly as they were when they came out.
I’ve been playing and keeping up with SoD. Getting to a level where you can reenter Searing Gorge and Burning Steppes feels so much more intense than any feeling I got in the SL or DF zones as I was leveling. Even though I did those zones back in BC, the refreshing intensity felt special.
"The wife was sleeping with the entire office team" I don't know man, did you ever consider it's part of their loot council process?
killing open world mobs feels infinitely worse in retail compared to classic, and its specifically because they scale with you. if i get raid gear or even really good dungeon gear i want to be able to launch Troggs into orbit not have a mok'gora everytime i pull something
If you like the “saucier” stories from MMOs, you need to check out Preach’s Drama Time series. Years of stories on there.
They should reset everyone back to level one in a new expansion and make you level 1-60 in a slightly faster classic way. You would only do this once, then every ALT after have an option for a XP buff or not.