I am happy with the current state of leveling.

 

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I would never have come back and rolled another toon from scratch if not for Cata and faster levelling. And now i can roll a few more without being bored since my new toon is already 30 and i've only hit a few redone zones.

 

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it depends on if they're using boa gear or not tbh. i recently started a new toon, on a new server, no boa gear. went from 1-68 in about 4 days played. saw some of the new quests (was already in tanaris when the changes happened, so didn't get to see more than 2 "new" zones), and then hit outlands.


started outlands, in h.p. of course, knocked the zone out fairly quickly, and knocked out about 3/4 of zang before i was able to step into northrend. so technically, they won't be seeing much of outlands at all. it's almost as if blizzard doesn't want anyone to remember bc, because we're definately skipping a shitton of the content there, and once cata drops, lk will be in that same boat imo. veteran players will always know the quickest way to level through content that they've done before, just to get to end game.

 

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So far, in Northrend, I've done 68-72 in Borean, 72-74 in Howling and 74-76 in Dragonblight. I'm gonna do 76-77 in Grizzly Hills, 77-78 in Sholozar, 78-79 in Storm Peaks and 79-80 in Icecrown. Just cause. Skipping Zul'drak entirely, because eff that zone. Either way, with the new Xp to level from 70-80 it's pretty much stayed at 1.2mill per level, pretty nice.

 

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I see what you are saying, if you play through all of the quests in every zone you are going to quickly out level the quests, and what fun is it shredding through grey mobs. I don't know a fix for that, can't really make the quests scale to your level.


Shaman might be a little different to as far as power from what I'm seeing in the other posts. There was a point in Outland on my Ele Shaman that I could kill mobs equal to my level by casting flame shock, lava burst. That's it. Until I got out of Zanga and they were giving mobs a bit more XP they couldn't even get to me before they were dead.


If you are honest with yourself though Arc, while questing solo there are no real challenges. It might take you a bit longer to kill a mob your level or a few levels above, but it isn't hard. The only quests that were ever a challenge for me is when I would solo the group quests. I was excited to see a quest intended for 3 people because that gave me a sense of accomplishment to beat.


Questing right now IMO is entertaining to be sure, I'm not sure that it was every really challenging though.

 

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I would tend to agree with Rill. Obviously, Arc's opinion is based on a veteran players view of the game and that's fine. However, I believe WoW grows because more new players come into the game than quit each month (stating the obvious) and the key to WoW's success is refreshing the player base. A very long leveling curve to get to the current raiding scene would be detrimental to attracting new players, especially since WoW has been released in most geographical territories and must now grow organically.

I don't have hard numbers, but I would venture to guess that many of original players from vanilla don't play anymore or play consistently anymore. I'm not predicting the fall of WoW, but I would suggest that Cataclysm will be where WoW peaks and I think Blizzard probably feels the same way. They recently mentioned that they'll probably start talking about their next MMO project by the time the next WoW xpac rolls around in two years.

Having said all that, the new questing content is what got me excited to play again. I also enjoyed the TBC and LK quest content and haven't leveled through those zones in a long time. I thought they were leaps and bounds better than the vanilla content, so I'm not sure that they really need a refresh. I agree that the journey in WoW is the most fun, but I don't want to be journeying forever either, so a quick leveling pace is fine with me.

 

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I would rather get through the early content faster tbh. I have already seen it several times, and I prefer the higher level content anyway. Granted the cataclysm has happened, and I am sure there are lots of new things out there for sure, but would imagine it is quite similar to the old in terms of content.

 

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I recently put 3 or 4 characters through the Outlands leveling experience and found that actually to be EXTREMELY fast. Granted I have not put any characters through the 1-58/60 experience since the 4.0.1 changes to have a comparison but, seriously, I was going from Outlands to Northrend in less than 16 hours /played. Now, of course the characters were tanks and healer classes except for one hunter, and so I liberally used the dungeon finder to get through those groups with the tanks and healer, but I found at those levels as DPS, it was faster/easier to quest than put up with 30 minute queues between LFD groups and the net xp/hour was basically the same.

 

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So I just need to figure out what alt I can stomach through Northrend since Outlands goes so fast again.

Don't know if I can stomach northend a 6th time though, even with 20% xp bonus

 

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Very happy with the state of leveling in the game, lets me do other things other than grind

 

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