Image
  • Writing
    • Andy Gavin: Author
    • About my Novels & Writing
    • All Writing Posts
    • The Darkening Dream
      • Buy the Book Online
      • Sample Chapters
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Untimed
      • Buy Untimed Online
      • Book Trailer
      • Sample Chapters
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Scrivener – Writer’s Word Processor
    • iPad for Writers
    • Naughty Dark Contest
  • Books
    • Book Review Index
    • Favorite Fantasy Novels
    • Andy Gavin: Author
    • The Darkening Dream
      • Buy the Book Online
      • Sample Chapters
      • Short Story: Harvard Divinity
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Untimed
      • About the Book
      • Buy Untimed Online
      • Book Trailer
      • Sample Chapters
      • Reviews
      • Info for Reviewers
      • Press Coverage
      • Awards
      • Cast of Characters
    • Naughty Dark Contest
  • Games
    • My Video Game Career
    • Post Archive by Series
    • All Games Posts Inline
    • Making Crash Bandicoot
    • Crash 15th Anniversary Memories
    • World of Warcraft Endgames
    • Getting a Job Designing Video Games
    • Getting a Job Programming Video Games
    • Naughty Dark Contest
  • Movies
    • Movie Review Index
  • Television
    • TV Review Index
    • Buffy the Vampire Slayer
    • A Game of Thrones
  • Food
    • Food Review Index
    • Foodie Club
    • Hedonists
    • LA Sushi Index
    • Chinese Food Index
    • LA Peking Duck Guide
    • Eating Italy
    • Eating France
    • Eating Spain
    • Eating Türkiye
    • Eating Dutch
    • Eating Croatia
    • Eating Vietnam
    • Eating Australia
    • Eating Israel
    • Ultimate Pizza
    • ThanksGavin
    • Margarita Mix
    • Foodie Photography
    • Burgundy Vintage Chart
  • Other
    • All Posts, Magazine Style
    • Archive of all Posts
    • Fiction
    • Technology
    • History
    • Anything Else
  • Gallery
  • Bio
  • About
    • About me
    • About my Writing
    • About my Video Games
    • Ask Me Anything
  • Contact

Archive for Massive Multiplayer Online

WOW Endgames – Burning Crusade

Nov07
The Burning Crusade box

The original cover

…continued from my coverage of the WOW Vanilla endgame.

In January of 2007, Blizzard launched The Burning Crusade, the first of four expansions to World of Warcraft and completely overhauled the endgame. In the race from level 60 to 70, any advantage gained by level 60 raiders was quickly swamped out.

Vanilla introduced the core World of Warcraft gameplay: questing, dungeons, pvp, and raids, but The Burning Crusade (BC) began a long process of inventing and refining new mechanics that doled out rewards for these activities. Most innovations were introduced during the BC and Lich King periods, and the newest two expansions (Cataclysm and Pandaria) have mostly tuned those mechanics. BC represented a lot of innovation, beginning one way (closer to Vanilla) and ending another.

It’s all about the numbers

BC saw radical changes with regard to party size. Ignoring UBRS, Vanilla finished up with a 5, 20, 40 scheme. This meant that dungeons were 5 man, smaller raids 20 man, and big raids 40. BC dropped the odd “big dungeons” (like UBRS) and moved to 5, 10, 25. Dungeons didn’t change, but the small raids moved to 10 man and the big raids to 25. Unlike today, each raid was designed for one size. At launch, there a single “intro raid”: Karazhan and four “big” raids. Two were 1-2 boss raids (Gruul’s Lair and Magtheridon) and two were bigger progression instances (Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep). 40 man groups persisted vestigially for ad hoc and battleground PVP.

The intent of the shrinking group was to make it easier for guilds to get a raid together. With 10 man, this was successful. 10 man raids had enough people for two tank mechanics and specialized roles, but were easy to recruit and coordinate. I’m not sure the 40 to 25 shift was as productive. 25 man raids were only moderately easier to organize than 40 and certainly felt less epic. On the other hand, Vanilla 40 mans allowed single players to screw up and slip through the cracks. In BC 25 mans, everyone counted.

Questing

BC shipped with 7 big new zones, a new capital city, two new races, and a ton of quests. By the time I hit level 70, I still had two full zones left. However, like Vanilla, the motivation to finish wasn’t extremely high. You got gold and a few decent blues, but it was a lot of work, and there were numerous annoying 5 man quests. The main reason to finish was to open up the complex network of key chains required to raid (more on this later).

Questing in general was a lot better organized. The basic principle of smaller quest hubs located near their objectives was established. There were few long postal quests like in Vanilla. Dungeon quests remained interwoven with long zone based quest chains. This usually meant, like Vanilla, that during leveling you had not opened up the proper chains for many dungeons. Often these lengthy chains that wound in and out of the many dungeons had to be completed at 70.

The Black Gate

The gateway between Outland and Azeroth

Split Reputation

Reputation in BC moved from the sidelines to front and center. Each dungeon group had one (or two) associated new reps and each rep gained a more meaningful vendor. The rewards, pathetic in Vanilla, became merely okay, and in the case of a few later reps actually good. Several of the reps gated the acquisition of vital items and buffs. The specifics varied by class and spec, but generally it was necessary to run most reputations to revered, particularly since entry into the new heroic difficulty dungeons also required revered reputation with each dungeon’s specific rep (more on that later). Reputation was earned in two ways: by running dungeons specific to the reputation or by grinding annoying drops.

In BC, reaching honored was generally trivial, revered a modest effort, and exalted painful but perhaps 10 times easier than the excruciating final march found in Vanilla. The original design found in Vanilla and early BC was that not only did the amount of rep needed for each rank double, but the ways you could earn it diminished. Midway in BC Blizzard reversed the latter and opened up increasing earning potential at higher levels. A tremendous improvement.

Important to all classes were two new city reputations (Scryer and Aldor). Blizzard experimented with providing the player with a choice between two similar reps. Both gated important buffs and resistance gear. Any serious raider needed to reach exalted and that required killing thousands of specific mobs to collect rep drops (or you could buy them on the auction house). Since this was the last time the designers tried this “choice of rep”, I can assume it was a failure. It added color, but ultimately was a lot of developer work for what didn’t amount to much variety.

Normal Dungeons

Dungeons remained a major source of loot and were necessary to armor yourself in dungeon blues for entry raiding. Blizzard shortened up the dungeons — slightly. Nothing in BC was as big and as long as the gigantic Blackrock dungeons. Still, some of them were still quite long, like Shadow Labs. Normal dungeons were difficult in questing gear and some dungeons like Shattered Halls, Shadow Labs, and Black Morass had high wipe rates. They required careful crowd control and care. There was more need for players to understand the boss mechanics than in Vanilla. A few dungeons proved unpopular and were infrequently run.

But they were, for the most part, challenging and fun.

Keymasters wanted

When BC shipped, instance attunement was famously complex. Every raid, heroic dungeon, and the more difficult normal dungeons all had separate and involved key requirements that wound their way through previous content. Some of this content was quite difficult and unpopular and basically made it so that only players in well organized guilds could easily complete the chains. In these guilds, players were willing to run otherwise pointless dungeons and raids merely to help others finish their keys. Without this, gathering a pickup group for difficult content could be extremely frustrating.

Later in BC, the designers removed the key requirements. Most people seemed to feel this was an entirely good thing and Blizzard never again gated instances with much in the way of achievement based requirements (although the current ilevel gating could be considered a dumbed down form of key). However, I miss the key quests. True, the ones in BC were often too long and too difficult, particularly the Naruu and A’dal chains, but they gave you long term goals and filtered out less capable players.

I my opinion, the Karazhan (intro raid) key chain was perfect. It required running several normal dungeons but could easily be accomplished in a day or two. The Naruu chain, where you had to defeat Mag (an unpopular 25 man boss) and several brutal heroic dungeons was another matter entirely.

Burning Crusade Raid Atunement

Vanilla and BC key requirements

Kara is King

It was never clear if Blizzard intended players geared from normal dungeons to move straight to heroic dungeons or the intro 10 man raid, Karazhan. In practice, Kara was much more appealing. It offered vastly better rewards and was much less frustrating.

Karazhan is also my favorite instance in all WOW — and I reached exalted with the Violet Eye (Kara’s rep) on three characters.

Kara was a big place. It had 12 bosses (some optional) and a post corn roast buttload of trash. It was also incredibly cool with a fantastic score and ghostly gothic atmosphere. The bosses each had distinct and memorable mechanics. The complex encounter design that had been born in Vanilla‘s Naxx was repurposed in a more approachable manner. There were actually even more than 12 bosses because the opera event was really 3, one chosen at random each week, same in the Servant’s Quarters (even if it’s rewards were so lame that no one ran it).

For loot, Kara contained something for everyone. Its gear was a step up from the dungeon blues and better than the early heroic and badge epics (see below). It held the tokens for the tier gloves and helm and dropped matched gear for every slot and every spec in the game. At two epics per boss, it dropped upwards of 20 items per run for 10 players. A lot of loot. By late autumn of 2007 Kara was a juicy plumb of a loot piñata for new 70s.

But in the beginning, it was too hard, and the loot a little too weak. Early groups moving into Kara soon after launch experienced a serious shock. Kara wasn’t exactly a gear check. You could do it in blues, but beyond the first boss, it required that you understand the mechanics. For raiders forced in the hellfires of Blackwing Lair, AQ40, and Naxx, it was a cakewalk. For normal players, used to tank and spank, it was a serious challenge. Over several months, Blizzard nerfed the bosses, trimmed back the exhausting trash, buffed the loot, and players learned the encounters.

The 10 man “entry raid” concept was so successful that mid expansion Blizzard added a second one, the troll themed Zul’Aman.

karazhan

The wizard Medivh’s spooky abode

Tier Tokens

BC introduced the concept of the tier token (actually AQ40 and Naxx had experimented in this direction, but that was only for the 1%). In Vanilla, bosses dropped a particular tier item, like Ony and the Tier 2 helm, and they dropped them for a specific class. This barely worked with 40 players, but in 10 man raids it would have been a total failure. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing a bunch of druid helms when there isn’t even a druid in the party!

So we got the token, which could be exchanged for a specific piece of gear, say the Tier 4 helm. Usually three classes shared a token, so say priests, warlocks, and paladins. This meant it was likely someone could use it. The token could be converted to any spec’s gear, say holy, prot, or ret for paladins.

Heroics and badges

Far less successful, were the heroics. The idea itself was brilliant. Since leveling dungeons don’t get a lot of mileage, provide two tunings of each BC dungeon: normal and heroic. The heroic was intended to be level 70 exclusive and quite difficult. In practice, the heroics were VERY hard, required revered reputation, and provided sub-par rewards. However, it’s worth noting that their badge system was to evolve into one of the cornerstones of WOW endgame progression.

Heroics dropped mostly blue gear. Only the final boss would drop an epic, and there were very few of these, covering only a fraction of the gear slots and specs. The epics were also lame, barely (and sometimes not) better than the blues. The bosses also dropped “badges” that could be redeemed for epic gear. Again, brilliant idea, poor tuning. Heroic runs earned 3-6 badges. Gear cost 40-80. The gear was the same lame ilevel as the end boss heroic gear, and there weren’t very many items.

Heroics were also very hard. Some, like Shadow Labs or Shattered Halls were REALLY long or really hard. They were hard to recruit for and even harder to run. In the early days, before the badge gear was expanded, they weren’t worth it.

PVP was the new black

I’m a PVE player. I never cared that much about PVP itself. But during the first year of BC the easiest way to gear your PVE character was to PVP. Before the removal of the Tier 6 key requirements, you could get post Kara gear only from the 25 man Tier 5 raids. These were pretty hard and even in a raiding guild it was several weeks between items. The summer 2007 PVP set was competitive with T5 and the fall one better. Half of it could be bought for honor, the other half for arena points.

And honor came from battlegrounds. So you played them. And played them. And played them some more. This was easy, predictable, and boring. I used to PVP on the laptop while watching TV. You wanted to grind for 5-10 hours a week. Basically, I consider this a design failure. It got me into battlegrounds, and for a while I cared, but eventually I’d just run AV endlessly, barely paying attention.

Even losers win

During the 2007 seasons, arena was the secret sauce and 3 vs 3 the sweet spot. A casual 3 vs 3 team could spend an hour a week, lose half its matches, and still earn enough arena points to buy amazing gear every other week. This was the best time investment to gear ratio in the entire game by an order of magnitude. Eventually, Blizzard caught on and required fairly high ratings to buy the best pieces. Still, it paid to arena to get the others. With Lich King, they changed the gear balance to make PVP gear fairly useless in PVE, but for a while, it was a solid progression option.

New Daily Hubs

During the course of the expansion, Blizzard introduced a number of ideas to add endgame content and mitigate the varied time investment of the player base. As I discussed in my Vanilla article, difficulty and time investment were used as the gateway to many rewards. It turned out, you could do the same thing for quests that you did for raid gear: limit them by real time as opposed to time investment.

And so the daily was born: A quest that you can do once per day. Dailies allow grinds to be limited by real time instead of time invested. If you can only earn reputation by completing 5 daily quests worth a total of 1000 points, you can only earn 1000 a day. One of the first uses of the daily concept was the “daily dungeon.” Here, one random dungeon was chosen each day. Running it rewarded extra badges. This actually solved two problems. Besides gating badge earning, it concentrated player energy on that specific instance for the day and made it easier to find a group.

The spring of 2007 brought a trio of reputation based daily quest hubs. These player time sink centers allowed you to pick up 5-8 quests per day and turn them in for reputation. Things were calibrated so that a 1-2 hour a day investment for 2-3 weeks would bring you to exalted in any one of the hubs. Blizzard didn’t trust the new mechanic and these first hubs were mostly cosmetic. I did the Netherwing chain where you earned a cool flying dragon. The grind was significant but fair. You could do it but it was enough work that you felt you achieved something. The evolving mix of quests was also pretty cool (the bootarang quest is one of WOW’s greatest).

Like the badges, this idea was initially underutilized but destined to become a cornerstone.

Unlocking the Gates

During early BC, my guild endlessly ran Kara and Gruul. Entry into the T5 raids required that the entire guild earn the “Champion of the Naruu” title by killing Magtheridon and running a bunch of heroics. No one liked Mag and our guild was too disorganized to get everyone through the heroics. This effectively kept us artificially “stuck” in T4 gear and unable to progress into T5.

Eventually, Blizzard just dropped the key requirement to Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep (and later to Black Temple and Hyjal). This was a drastic solution, although effective enough. However, in my opinion, the real mistake was the nature and difficulty of the keys, not their existence. Key quests added flavor and excitement to the endgame, but they needed to be doable without a great deal of punishing runs. Merely requiring 10 of 25 in the raid to have killed Gruul for entry into SSC/TK would have been fine.

A similar problem existed with the T6 raids (Black Temple and Hyjal). Their key quest was truly epic. Besides some heroics, you had to collect something from both Vashj and Kael. These bosses, the final ones in both SSC and TK, were serious raid checks. Both encounters were multi-staged and required that everyone in the raid know and execute on their role. While cool encounters, it was very rare that guilds wanted to take down these bosses after getting into T5, as the burden of training new people on them was too high.

Still, earning “Hand of A’dal” (killing both Vashj & Kael), was one of the proudest moments of my WOW career.

illidan stormrage

I used to tank Ilidan on my warlock

ZA and Vanity Wins

In Vanilla, Blizzard introduced plenty of additional content as the endgame progressed, however very little of this helped the more casual player progress their gear level and make any additional progress in the difficult raids. These remained the providence of exclusive raiding guilds. In BC this changed.

First, they introduced ZA, a new 10 man “easier” raid along the Kara model. This offered gear somewhere between the T4 and T5 level. It was easier than T5 and only required 10 people so it helped players and guilds gear to make better progression in T5 and T6. Also, ZA introduced a number of interesting new concepts designed at rewarding better players. The faster you ran it, the more loot dropped. But more importantly, if you ran it really fast, you got a single “Amani War Bear” mount for someone in the group. This became a major status symbol, particularly as Blizzard removed the ability to win the mount when Lich King shipped.

In my opinion, some of the features of ZA paved the way for both the achievements and raiding heroic modes that were to become the hallmark of endgame experimentation in Lich King.

Daily hub and more epic 5 mans

With the final major content push of BC, Blizzard introduced not only a new major raid (Sunwell, the last crazy hard normal raid in WOW history) but a whole island of content. There was a great new 5 man dungeon at both a higher level of difficulty, better design, and with better epic loot. Plus there was a new reputation centered around a quest hub of daily quests. This took the daily concept begun with the more casual hubs and brought it to the next level. The dungeon tied into the same rep and keyed from it, plus the rep vendor actually offered valuable epic upgrades both as normal gear and as profession recipes.

The model of the Isle of Quel’Danas was to set the mould for what was to come. Plus, unlike in Vanilla, this patch offered less hard core raiders a shot at “easier” gear equivalent to T5 and T6. One of the effects of this was to enable progression of guilds (like mine) that didn’t really have the skill to handle Black Temple and Hyjal in pure T5 gear. This ties into one of the most important trends discussed below.

The Isle of Quel'danas

The Isle of Quel’danas

Currency to provide progression (expanding tokens to all raids)

The initial badge system sucked. As I said before, the badges were only earned in annoying heroics and the rewards bit. With the launch of Qel’Danas, this all changed.

Suddenly, you could get badges not just in heroics, and bonuses for daily heroics, but every raid boss dropped a pair, including the ones in ZA and Kara. The already popular Kara became a total badge fest at  23 a week! Even the hardest core raiders pounded it out making it easier for the rest of us. Why? Because the new badge vendor on the Isle sold T6 quality gear. Sure, some at steep prices like 250 badges, but the gear was fantastic. This meant that if you raided, and ran a Kara/ZA, and some heroics, like a daily or the ever popular Heroic Mechanar (because it was the easiest and shortest heroic), you could bank 50-70 badges a week.

New best in slot items every two weeks or so. One way or another, the badge system (now the point system) has been a major part of WOW ever since. I’ll discuss later how it evolved over the course of Lich King, where it was to see a lot of experimentation, but Blizzard had hit on something. The badge system meant that running instances where you needed no loot, or were unlucky and got no loot, wasn’t a total waste of time. When you accumulated enough badges, you could buy something you really did need. Regulating the rate of badge acquisition would be a major design challenge, but the concept was brilliant. Vanilla and early BC were filled with a lot of play sessions that left you feeling cheated, hours invested and nothing gained. Badges changed (or at least mitigated) that.

You are not prepared!

It’s worth noting that the final raid, Sunwell Plateau, retained the traditional Vanilla/BC elitist only model. Some regard this as the best raid Blizzard ever produced, but few saw it. Our guild only downed the first two bosses, and we considered ourselves pretty elite to be killing anything in there. It was hard, really f**cking brutally hard, and nothing about the new gearing systems changed that. Meeting the final boss of the expansion, Kil’Jaeden, was something only the most dedicated and skilled could be expected to do.

Archimonde

It took us 6 weeks to vanquish Archimonde

Heading toward normalization

BC began and extended a trend which was to continue through Lich King and Cataclysm: Normalization.

In Vanilla, a lot of differences existed between classes and faction. The Alliance had Paladins and the Horde Shamans. BC took this away and gave both factions the same classes. Because of both PVE balance and largely because of arena, Blizzard worked very hard to normalize the classes and specs. There was a significant effort to make every spec viable. In Vanilla, raiding Druids and Shamans healed. Tanks were all Warriors. BC saw the rise of the Pally and Bear tank. Not only that, it became part of the design to make even healing specs viable in arena and for solo (i.e. daily) play.

In Vanilla/early BC, healing gear was healing only and healing specs couldn’t dps worth a damn. Healers were forced to spec back and forth in order to grind materials or run dailies. Blizzard made a number of incremental moves to change this, first making “plus healing” provide partial damage and then merging “plus spell” and “plus healing” into one stat. The amount of gear was reduced, with a lot of healing and dps gear merged. There was some effort to provide specialized bear tanking gear and other rare specs.

Another aspect of normalization was a decreased emphasis on quests and content that could only be experienced by a few. Blizzard built less and less specific class quests in BC and onward. Still, BC had a few great ones like the Druid flying form quest chain.

Hybrid Vigor

Making most specs viable changed the relative value of the hybrid. In the Vanilla design, hybrids (druids, shamans, paladins) were supposed to be more versatile but a little worse than the dedicated classes. As each spec was brought into parity, the “option” of being healer/dps or healer/tank/dps became more and more valuable. My main has always been a Warlock and we dedicated damage classes became less popular and less likely to be picked for raid.

Conclusion

In many ways, BC was my favorite endgame. It had some problems, particularly at the beginning. The difficult key quests and high degree of raid difficult meant that it “seemed” like there was too little raid content for mediocre guilds like mine (because T5 and beyond wasn’t accessible). The tuning on new systems like heroics and badges wasn’t right at the beginning.

Still, there was a lot to do, and the game felt more epic than ever. Compared to Vanilla, there was vastly more accessible content for the non-raider and the softcore raider alike. Things were generally much more balanced and mature than in Vanilla, if not quite as varied. There was a lot less wasted development effort (some of Vanilla‘s vast dungeons were barely ever played). It was possible for different levels of raiders (and even non-raiders) to make significant progress across the course of the expansion. PVP got some skill based  development (at top arena levels) and only remained “mostly” (as opposed to entirely) a grind.

Burning Crusade introduced, new and untuned, many of the systems that were to lead to the modern endgame. Lich King would more or less finish the job.

This saga continues as we head to the frozen north…

WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria.
or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling.
Latest hot post: Reaper of Souls Analysis!
If you liked this post, follow me at:

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
or the video game post depot
or win Crash & Jak giveaways!

Related posts:

  1. WOW Endgames – Vanilla
  2. Mists of Pandaria Leveling
  3. Diablo 3 – Beta Preview
  4. Expansion of the WOW Factor
By: agavin
Comments (9)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Blizzard Entertainment, Burning Crusade, Games, Massive Multiplayer Online, pt_wow_endgame, Roleplaying, Video Games, World of Warcraft, World Of Warcraft Burning Crusade

WOW Endgames – Vanilla

Oct29

The original boxes

In this detailed post series, I discuss the evolution of the five World of Warcraft endgames from both a player and game design perspective.

Why Endgames – and a bit on leveling

For the most part, leveling a character in Vanilla World of Warcraft wasn’t too different than in most single player RPGs. Sure, helpful or hurtful players sped up or slowed down your leveling rate, but you rarely required others. Dungeons were an exception, as these always required five players, but you didn’t need dungeons to keep leveling. In fact, while the dungeon blue gear was much better than the typical leveling gear, dungeons slowed you down. The XP was split among players and the two hours it took to assemble a party and the frequent wipes made them inefficient. In those early days, experience came from only two sources: killing monsters and quests. Everything was slow compared to where it is now. Quests were far apart. Mounts came at level 40. Flight points were rare.

It took me approximately 400 hours to level my Warlock from 1 to 60. It felt epic. I never looked at a guide, or searched the web, but took the game as it came. Aside from the occasional frustration, progress was slow but steady. Things were tuned much harder back then and catching a second (or, God forbid, a third) add (additional monster) could mean certain death. Graveyards were spread far apart. Sometimes it was even easy to get lost on the corpse run back to a dungeon (like Black Rock Depths).

But at 60, this steady rate of progress took a huge downshift. Why?

Even at launch, WOW was a big game. So big, that as a game creator my jaw dropped at the sheer number of zones, quests, mobs, items, dungeons, etc. Still, it took years to make. There is no possible way, no matter how much money Blizzard spent, that they could create leveling content at even close to the rate at which players could consume it.

So they had to slow you down and design “endgame” content that was slower to consume.

General Questing

Back in 2005, questing at 60 was a waste of time unless you merely loved the lore. Quests didn’t even award (meaningful) gold on turn in. They rarely earned reputation. They were pretty useless except for the obsessive. Without achievements, it was hard to judge how many you had even done.

Class Quests

One exception to this, and short lived, were class specific quest chains. Warlocks had class specific quests every 10 levels and at 60 could quest for a special demonic pet called the Doomguard and to earn a special epic (i..e. fast) mount. Both of these chains were fairly difficult and required help from others but occupied me for a few days as a new level 60. Too bad the Doomguard was — at that time — utterly useless (except for torturing newby Aliance) and the Dreadsteed cost a fortune in gold. Still, these were cool chains.

You needed 4 friends to help you get the “epic” Warlock mount!

Key Quests

In vanilla, most of the level 60 dungeons and the three early 40 man raids (Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, and Onyxia’s Lair) all required keys. As a brand new 60, I didn’t even understand what raiding was, so I’ll come back to that, but it took a bit of work to grind out all the quests needed to get the keys for Scholomance, Stratholme, UBRS, and Dire Maul. These often involved normal questing mixed with dungeon runs and had quest chains that strategically bounced back and forth between continents (adding 30 minutes of travel time to each leg). The UBRS chain was hard enough that despite the instance’s popularity owners of the key were few and far between (each group only needed one key holder).

5 Man Dungeons

For a short while, the five man dungeons represented a decent source of level 60 blue gear, which was much better than quest greens. Unfortunately, the return on investment was often very poor. Guild runs were great, but my guild was a tiny group of real life friends and rarely went. PUGs (Pick Up Groups of random players) were another matter entirely. In general, it took perhaps an hour or two to recruit a tank and healer and get them all to the desired dungeon. Then one of two things happened: 1) you spent about 2-3 hours making really solid process through the dungeon or 2) you spent 3-5 hours wiping constantly and eventually one or more people left and the monsters respawned.

In the first case, you had a great time and might even earn some needed loot or clear out a few difficult dungeon quests. In the second, you almost certainly wasted the time completely and spent a bunch of gold on repairs and materials. As you got more and more blue gear the odds of winning something you wanted declined. Combining this with the high odds of “option 2” in random PUGs meant that few players wanted to run level 60 dungeons with strangers.

Those of you who never played Vanilla or Burning Crusade may not really understand what the old five man dungeons were like for people in blue and green gear. They were all gigantic, with 5+ bosses and obscene amounts of trash. It was easy to get lost. The tuning was such that each individual pull required crowd control to have any hope of success. Accidentally dragging in a PAT or second group was almost always suicide. Monsters respawned fairly quickly which meant that dying could involve clearing a second (or third) time. Only a Warlock Soul Stone or Shaman Ankh could prevent a long corpse run after a wipe. Druids healers didn’t even have a resurrection spell! Replacements had to travel across the world to enter the dungeon (could take 30 minutes). Summoning could not be done inside the dungeon and required carefully exiting the whole party so the Warlock could summon.

On the plus side, the dungeons were really cool and involved all sorts of special setups.

New 60s could expect to spend a lot of time “raiding” undead Stratholme

PVP

The early honor system rewarded extreme investments of time spent grinding battlegrounds. PVE and PVP gear wasn’t very different in those days, so there were some decent blues that could be earned by reaching high levels of reputation with one of the three battleground factions. In practice, only Alterac Valley made this reasonable, involving a grind of “only” several weeks. The other two, could take months. If you focused your PVP time intensely into a short couple of weeks you could get your honor rank up and earn a few mid range blues. The epic (and quite awesome) sets were reserved only for the top ranks. The rank of High Warlord (he who PVPed the most on the server for the Horde) required an investment of approximately 16-18 hours a day for 6-9 months. Hardly casual.

Grinding Materials and rare Objects

Some players, me not included, seemed to enjoy grinding out various materials for trade skills, sale, or their guilds. This usually involved mindlessly killing a particular class of mob for extreme lengths of time (hours was just the beginning). An alternative variant was traveling around on your mount in a set route collecting either herb or mining nodes.

One variant of this, which I did occasionally do, was grinding for rare vanity pets. For example, the little colored whelplings which dropped 1 in a 1000 from various dragonkin. It took several hours to get lucky and collect one of these rare pets.

Professions

WOW professions have never been much of a minigame and instead just a straightforward grind. In Vanilla, the designers did add some interesting choices and splits into a couple of them. Like the goblin/gnome engineering divide. My main took Alchemy/Herbology, which while very useful, has always been one of the most boring combinations in the game. Across five expansions they almost never added anything interesting to either profession, Burning Crusade being a minor exception.

Most crafting skills involved some rare/epic component useful/necessary for high end raiding. This usually involved an obscene grind. Getting the Thorium Brotherhood reputation up for Blacksmithing, for example. With Alchemy, the original flask system made another brutal illustration. The recipes came only from raid bosses. The ingredients were very rare and worst of all, flasks, which are after all a consumable, could only be made at the two special Alchemy Labs: one deep in Scholomance, the other, even more cruelly, several bosses into Blackwing Lair (a difficult second tier 40 man raid)!

At least the scenery was nice while grinding for materials!

The Easy Raids

Prior to winter/spring 2006, it was possible to “raid” Scholo, Strat, LBRS, and UBRS with 10-15 players. The dungeons weren’t tuned any differently in these modes, so were MUCH easier than normal 5 man runs (UBRS was never possible 5 man, but required a minimum of ten). You couldn’t complete most quests this way, but you could get a shot at the blue loot. This was by far the easiest and most efficient way to get blue dungeon gear as 10 man raids rarely wiped (except in UBRS). They usually involved an easy mindless zerg with low odds of getting gear. Loot dropped infrequently, and only one blue per boss.

UBRS was a special exception, as it was harder, even with 15 people, and had slightly better loot. It was also very popular, vital for the Ony Key Chain, and so groups were readily available. Occasionally — very occasionally — it even dropped some mediocre epics.

The Class Epics

The designers created specialized quest chains that allowed many classes to get one or two epics, often head gear. In addition, there were a few weapons like the priest staff, the hunter bow, or the warrior sword (as usual, DPS casters got nothing). This gear was better than dungeon blues, but not nearly as good as the raiding epics. The grinds were also pretty obscene. In Vanilla, when they said epic, they meant it! The helmets all required the “pristine hide of the beast” an exceedingly rare drop from The Beast in UBRS (available only to max level skinners with a special rare tool) plus a whole bunch of rare materials from other dungeons. Several weeks of dungeon grinding were required to make one item.

The weapon quests, which were all tied into raiding, were difficult, but regarded by many as super cool and rewarding (after you finished).

Reputations

Reputations have come a long way in WOW. The early reps combined both obscene grinds (like kill several thousand Furblogs or run Strat and Scholo at least 150 times) with an extreme paucity of rewards. Getting exalted with the Argent Dawn was a tedious weeks (or months) long process of endless dungeon runs, yet in the end, you merely got a shoulder enchant that added +5 chromatic resist. At revered, you could pick a single school of resist.

Other factions offered even less reward. Timbermaw took weaks for one (more or less) vanity item! However, by the later days of Vanilla, the AQ and ZG factions did offer some real gear — but were tied to raiding and retained the brutal grind.

Getting into a Raiding Guild

A few weeks after turning 60, there was only one way to make any real progress on your character: get into a real raiding guild. This made for a clear and sharp divide between raiders and non-raiders. A quick glance at a character told the tale. Raiders were sprinkled (or covered) in purple.

But raiding involved 40 (or occasionally 20) player groups with a particular class composition. The raids themselves were exceedingly difficult even with everyone present. Reading strategies and installing and using an external voice chat program were mandatory. Guilds at this time usually had web pages and formal applications. The armory wasn’t yet available, so you had to list all your gear and progress, and even fill out a couple of essays.

Acceptance, if it happened, was provisional. Guilds had rules and policies and as a new member you had to tread lightly or get kicked out. “Dragon Kill Point” systems ensured that newbies had a very low chance of getting gear.

The Ony Key Chain

One of the most loved and reviled things about Vanilla was the Onyxia Key Chain. In order to enter this single boss 40 man raid, you had to atune your character and doing that meant finishing one of the most arduous quest chains in the game. Having completed it was often a requirement for entry into raiding guilds.

The Horde version of the chain began with my most hated quest of all time: Warlord’s Command. This required you to run LBRS 5 man several times. Without guild help, this was brutal. LBRS could easily be 4-5 hours and offered subpar rewards. No one ever wanted to run it except for the Ony or UBRS keys. I spent a good ten days continually recruiting groups. Several times I even got into the place only to wipe and fall apart 3-4 hours later. One of the drops was even a single scroll hidden in one of four random locations which only one party member could get. Only the mercy of two of my real life friends helped me finish this rite of passage.

And after that, the quest chain bounced you back and fourth between a remote spot on the eastern continent and Rexxar, an elusive quest giver who wandered two whole zones on the western. In between, you ran UBRS again and again for various stages of the chain. Other than Warlord’s Command (and an equivalently brutal Alliance version in BRD), it wasn’t really hard, but it was a test of will power and perseverance.

The lower “half” of Blackrock spire. So big, so hard, no one wanted to run it!

The Middle Raids

An important thing to understand about all raids in WOW (particularly Vanilla) is that each player could enter each one only a single time each week. This was called the lockout. Once you became “bound” to a raid ID for the week that was your instance until next Tuesday. This meant that one of the worst things that could happen was to be accidentally bound to a raid with a group that was incapable of making significant progress. If you did, you blew your shot at those bosses for the week. Also bad was to join an existing raid that had already killed the easy bosses, as you would become bound and miss those bosses for the week.

While I was leveling, Blizzard released the first of Vanilla‘s two 20 man raids, ZG. In January of 2006, they added AQ20. These raids were easier than their 40 man brethren and certainly getting a group organized was simpler. The gear was mixed blue and epic and in both cases tied in a complex faction to the dungeon reputation. Most serious raid guilds ran them as “off night” content when a big raid wasn’t going. Getting into the group was easier. Killing the bosses sometimes easier. But the rewards weren’t great. The gear was odd and you often had to run the place again and again for weeks to have enough rep to turn in the better rewards. Some of the fights were pretty hard too and interesting gear was often offered by optional bosses that were very difficult to summon — meaning groups rarely bothered.

Molten Core

Molten Core, or MC, was the bread and butter of Vanilla raiding. It had LOTS of bosses. It dropped the whole Tier 1 set, three epics per boss without constraint. It was fairly easy with 40 people who knew the place. The atunement was easy. Our guild sometimes had trouble filling all 40 spots and so that was a bit of a problem. The instance was also VERY long if you weren’t efficient. There were a lot of bosses and immense swaths of trash, so sometimes it took two nights, which meant clearing the trash twice! The final boss, Ragnaros, was hard. He required high fire resist and was a serious DPS check, but he did drop the T2 pants.

MC was the key to getting seriously geared in Vanilla. If your guild ran it every week and actually cleared to Domo (the boss before Rag) then your odds of getting some serious T1 loot were high. It was a serious time commitment, scheduled (for example, 6 to 10pm on tues and wed) but in the early days, before it devolved into a six hour slog through solid orange, it was damn fun and felt seriously epic.

This is pretty much what Rag did to the unprepared!

Ony

If MC was the bread and butter, Ony was the creme. As a single boss behind only four trash mobs, she dropped at least four T2 epics including two T2 helms. This was the best gear that was moderately accessible. Ony wasn’t even that hard, but she was random. Her second of three phases made or broke the whole event. She flew around above periodically sweeping half her chamber with “deep breath.” Sometimes it didn’t happen, sometimes once, sometimes three or four times. One hit you could survive, particularly if you swigged a fire protection potion in advance. Two or three? Forget it. If most of the raid lived to phase three, you’d probably kill her. If someone didn’t pull agro or get themselves knocked into the whelp caves, therefore bringing out a fatal brood of her spawn.

The RNG (Random Number Generator) was killer. My guild vanquished Ony every week in 2006. She only dropped the Warlock helmet twice. Once on my birthday when I wasn’t there and once in October (while I was sneaking the raid in at work). I wanted that hat (the Nemesis Skullcap) for 9 months. Getting it was perhaps the biggest high of my WOW career (tied with achieving Hand of A’dal).

Ony had quite the capricious nature.

Blackwing Lair

Raids prior to BWL were hard, but didn’t require all that much coordination. Yeah, there was stuff to avoid, and tanks had different jobs, but for the most part DPS had to stay alive and do as much damage as possible. BWL was something else entirely. The first boss had no trash, but about 50 adds at a time. Different groups had to run around in a 100+ mob free-for-all kiting and managing this unwieldy and dangerous host while some designated “controllers” mind controlled a dragon and broke a bunch of eggs with special abilities. If somehow you had the coordination to survive this, it switched into a more or less normal boss fight after 10 minutes.

This opening, plus MC’s Rag and the later BWL bosses, separated the hardcore from the merely competent guilds. We worked on Razorgore (the first boss) for about two months before downing him. Nothing released in later patches geared you up to overcome the level of coordination needed for BWL. Guilds had to be disciplined to progress. You needed to raid 4-5 nights a week. To show up on time and have forty people of the right mix there. They needed to be the same people and they needed the patience to wipe again and again and again and again. They needed to watch videos and prepare, to pop flasks and pull out all the stops. Special mechanics gated certain bosses. Nefarion (the final boss) required that everyone in the raid have Ony cloaks, which could only be made from scales earned from the earlier dragon. It took half a year to make enough for everyone in the guild one, and only if people didn’t leave!

Blackwing layer didn’t “look” too hard from the entrance.

The Gates Open and Changes Occur

In early 2006 Blizzard changed a bunch of stuff in the endgame, most, but not all for the best. They added some epic quests. They discontinued the “raiding” of the normal dungeons, and they opened AQ20 and AQ40, two new raids. The dungeon changes actually made the end game harder by removing the easiest route to blue gear. The 5 mans got a hair easier, but still remained huge time sinks.

AQ20 gave midlevel guilds like ours something else to do and a way to get more approximately T1 gear. We dabbled in AQ40 but it wasn’t manageable by guilds that hadn’t farmed BWL.

Naxx

In May, Naxx launched. This monstrous 40 man raid was probably the most difficult ever made (the only other contender being Sunwell). Only the elitist guilds that had farmed through BWL and AQ40 could possibly make progress there. Its groundbreaking encounter design required extreme cooperation. Many of you probably saw it years later in its much easier 10 and 25 man Lich King incarnations.

I’ve always had a weakness for undead sorcerers and their homes!

Controlling Progress

You might wonder why I keep using the worlds hard, brutal, tedious etc. How come 10-15 million people played this game? Now, it was a little less during Vanilla (perhaps 7-9 million) but WOW was incredibly fun. Yes, often hard and frustrating, but immensely addictive. And honestly, it was much less frustrating than prior MMOs, which had been designed with the punitive model  Let’s speculate on WHY the designers did what they did with the endgame.

MMOs have a decent number of hardcore players. Some are willing to spend crazy amounts of time and energy on things and some have a very high level of skill. Yet, this isn’t most people, and so the designers wanted an endgame that could keep people playing for months or years regardless of their skill level.

The raid content served the hardcore. It required skill, coordination, practice and all that. It was/is also some of the most difficult content to make from a development standpoint so the sheer amount was very limited. Therefore, to make it last for the elite, it had to be very hard. Progression was further “slowed down” (or more gameplay created, depending on your perspective) by regulating the amount of boss kills and per boss loot. If the current tier has 9 bosses that means that approximately 30 epics drop for each guild of 40 players each week. This means one per player every week or two at best (there is a random factor and as you get better geared it gets harder to get that last specific item). It then takes a couple months for a raid to fully gear from a tier. Hopefully, by then, the dev team has time to build a new raid. In practice, for guilds who weren’t as good as the difficulty standard, it was far far slower (and more frustrating).

The non-raid content was designed for the more “casual” but because of the existence of those willing to spend 100+ hours a week on grinding, each individual route to progression needed to be incredibly slow so they couldn’t power through it. Blizzard had not yet transferred the raid lockout concept to this arena as it would in Burning Crusades (i.e. dailies, but I’ll discuss that when I post about the expansion). So, their solution was gating by sheer time investment, and a steep one at that. Some crazy people (High Warlords I’m looking at you!) rose to the occasion!

Concluding Thoughts

While the Vanilla endgame did have its share of problems: a lack of content for non-raiders, frustration factors, tank shortage, class imbalances, broken specs, extremely steep grind curves, and very high difficulty levels, it was overall pretty damn successful. The designers built a truly stupendous amount of content and invested heavily in unusual and “one-off” quests and details. Compared to later expansions, items were highly individualized, classes varied, factions different, and the game was filled with all sorts of unique quests and features. This, combined with the high difficulty, lent things an extremely epic and deep feel.

The long saga continues with thoughts on The Burning Crusade…

WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria.
or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling.
Latest hot post: Reaper of Souls Analysis!
If you liked this post, follow me at:

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
or the video game post depot
or win Crash & Jak giveaways!

Related posts:

  1. Mists of Pandaria Leveling
  2. Diablo 3 – Beta Preview
  3. Games, Novels, and Story
By: agavin
Comments (47)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Experience point, Game design, Massive Multiplayer Online, Player versus environment, Player versus player, pt_wow_endgame, Roleplaying, Single-player video game, Video Games, Warlock, World of Warcraft

Mists of Pandaria Leveling

Oct15

First a bit of background on me and WOW (World of Warcraft):

I bought the game at launch but didn’t start playing until 2005. Once I did, I was instantly addicted — truly I’ve never been so addicted to a game in my life — and I’ve played at all stages of the game’s evolution. In Vanilla, my main (Undead Warlock) raided everything except for Naxx. Even my Night Elf Rogue wore Bloodfang. In Burning Crusade, my Warlock tanked Illidan and cleared all but the last bosses of Sunwell. My Paladin and Druid healed and tanked Karazan. In Wrath of the Lich King, I raided through to and including Icecrown with both my Warlock and Holy Paladin. But at the end of LK my guild fell apart and I didn’t have the willpower to apply to another, so with Cataclysm I merely leveled my Warlock, geared him for raiding, then gave up.

After almost two years hiatus, I swore I wouldn’t bother with Mists of Pandaria. Of course, this didn’t stop me from buying the collector’s edition. I have all the others except for Vanilla. I didn’t even log in for a few days.

Talent Trees et al

When I finally zoned in, I was daunted by the effort needed to revamp my interface before I could play. All the spells had changed. I had to pick new talents from the completely redesigned (non) talent trees. I had to update all my addons, glyph, and layout my action bars nearly from scratch. I’ve long preferred Destruction on my Warlock, with a minor in Demonology, only having briefly played Affliction during LK.

I found the new Destruction spells make for a much tidier toolbar. A lot of abilities are gone or moved to other specs and so all the main combat spells actually fit on convenient keys for the first time since vanilla. I’ll eventually have to see if this is true on my Paladin. Historically, the Pally’s obscene collection of roles and buffs has meant the default action bars don’t even have enough slots for all the abilities.

Anyway, the new Destruction rotation didn’t take long to learn — although it’s really weird not to have Lifetap and Corruption which were such longtime Warlock staples. The new Destro Lock is more Mage-like than ever with only a single DOT. But the burst is pretty awesome and thanks to a bunch of defensive cooldowns and heals, survivability is excellent. I didn’t choose either Howl of Terror or Shadowfury so my only problem is if I get mobbed by 5+ tough enemies.

I’m not sure how I feel about this new talent system. Broken as they were, I liked the talent trees back in the old days of Vanilla and BC. But the compressed Cata trees felt a bit lame. And most importantly, what seems to be missing now-a-days is the feeling of upgrading while leveling. Between 85 and 89 nothing happened. No talents. No new abilities of note (one minor passive change to Backdraft). All rather anticlimactic. I liked slowly depositing points into those trees and eventually gaining new abilities.

Zones

Pandaria looks gorgeous. From the trailers, I was initially skeptical of the whole Kung-fu Panda thing, but it actually works. The Asian look, and the shear dramatic verticality of many zones can be breathtaking. They are easily the best looking yet. I liked the look of BC and LK, but Cata never did it for me. Most of those zones were flat, and far too dislocated.

Jade Forest is a great place to begin and it’s really lovely. Valley of the Four Winds is tongue in cheek, but reminds me (in a good way) of Nagrand which was my favorite BC zone. Kun-Lai Summit is another favorite. This has a high Tibetan feel that is really cool. Being on foot/mount is great, as the scale when you crest some of these mountains wouldn’t work if one was flying. Krasarang Wilds and Townlong Steppes are a little less exciting, but certainly fine. I haven’t played the Dread Wastes yet.

The music is top notch.

Leveling

I played Jade Forest, Valley of the Four Winds, Krasarang Wilds, and Kun-Lai Summit in that order, completing 100% of the quests in each before moving on (I’ve had Loremaster since two weeks after LK shipped, so this is no surprise). I turned 90 just as I finished up Kun-Lai. I’ve always wondered why Blizzard paces the XP so that you usually have two zones left over when you hit max level. In LK it was three! The Pandarian zones are the biggest yet. Jade Forest and Kun-Lai are almost heroically big. Too big perhaps, as I was starting to feel a little weary moving into the final sub zones of Kun-Lai.

The whole process took me less than a week and I wasn’t playing that hard.

Overall difficulty was very easy. Similar to Cata, but much easier than BC and Vanilla. In those old days you used to die while leveling. Sometimes a lot. I probably died 2-3 times from 85-90.

This was the best leveling experience in a long time, but I can’t help but think it would have been even better with 10 levels, and with the pacing spread out so you hit 90 right at the end of Dread Wastes and with more spell and talent rewards per level.

Quests

The quests seem hugely improved. There are still plenty of kill and gather quests, but they are doled out in a really efficient way. You almost always get about five quests at a time all concentrating on a single area. They usually mix collection and kill quests. You head back and pick up a new crop. There is no sense that you might miss some. It’s extremely easy to do them all and feel that you got 100% of the quests. This is in marked contrast to the haphazard nature of old vanilla quests. There is a total absence of postal (long distance delivery) quests and long back and forth quest chains. They also seem to have toned down those giant story chains that took a lot of time in Cata. I’m talking about the Bronzebeard one and that weird vision quest thing in the tedious and way-too-big Vashj’ir. I don’t miss these. Replacing it are some fun chains like the odd but funny monkey/sniper adventure and the highly amusing kung-fu training. It’s all pretty light hearted but enjoyable.

Gear

For perhaps the first time ever, the quest rewards were actually useful. I pretty rapidly replaced my blues and purples with green (and the occasional blue) quest rewards. The huge thing is that the rewards are ALL for your class! In the old days, particularly as a DPS only caster, 90% of the rewards couldn’t even be equipped, or were useless healing gear. Plus the rapid step up of base stats (dare we say runaway inflation – my level 90 Lock has 400,000 HP, at 60, in raid gear, I had 6k) means that in MOP, a level 87 green is probably better than your level 85 raid gear, at least for leveling.

Interestingly, there are almost NO socketed items until the endgame. Blizzard doesn’t seem to want you to have to deal with it. There is no need for enchants. The game is easy anyway, and the same scaling means that old cheaper enchants are a waste of time and new endgame MOP enchants too expensive to bother with on leveling gear. You grab and go.

Bag space, at least for a hoarder like me, is still a problem. I need to move some more crap into void storage. The asian look of some of the armor is cool, although I’ve been stuck at 90 with a dumbass looking green hat and need to transmorg it.

Tradeskills

My Warlock is, and always has, been Herbology/Alchemy. I’m going to write up a separate post later on the level 90 endgame where I will discuss the bigger changes in the skills, and confine myself here to the experience while leveling. It’s clear that Blizzard is currently thinking that you should concentrate on crafting skills at 90.

Gathering nodes are, however, available in almost obscene quantity. This is in stark contrast to LK where there was barely an herb to be found. I hit 600 with Herbology about half way thru. At first I thought there was a crazy overabundance of Green Tea Leaf, but then I realized this holds for every Pandarian herb except for Golden Lotus. It’s nice that you get XP from the nodes as this rewards you for the 30 seconds spent chasing them down.

Alchemy right now is also very straightforward and doesn’t even require ANY return visits to the trainer or grinding of reputations. This is perhaps boring, but more on this in the next post.

Cooking and Fishing are clearly intended to level at the end as they are both tied to level 90 daily quests. First Aid is, as usual, trivial, and I find Archeology too tedious and am stuck at about 250.

Dungeons

There are only four leveling dungeons: Stormstout Brewery, Temple of the Jade Serpent and at level 87: Mogu’shan Palace and Shado-Pan Monastery. These are all really great leveling dungeons. The quest givers are inside and there are exactly two quests for each. They take about 15-20 minutes and are easy but fun. They feel different enough. They don’t require any sort of crowd control or marking. You just pull a pack and whack away at it and then pull another. Even adds won’t wipe you.

The XP and gear rewards are very good. The gear for sure is better than from quests. The overall balance and length of these instances is very consistent. All four are fun and there is no frustration factor.

If I had a major criticism I think that all the MOP dungeons should have been leveling dungeons and the heroics reserved for 90. I hopped right into heroics without ever playing the level 90 normals (and had no problem) so these are wasted. The designers would have been better off making the Palace and Monastery available at level 86 and the two bug dungeons available at 88 in normal mode.

Overall, the instances serve as nice breaks from the tedium of questing. Now-a-days, with the dungeon finder, you can just queue and keep questing, hop into one, and then back out to questing. It’s all very efficient. You don’t even have to walk in once like in Cata. At some level, I miss the cool interweaving of the world and dungeon quests that Vanilla and BC had, but in practice, back when I leveled vanilla, the time it took to gather a group and run the ludicrously large dungeons was not adequately compensated by the rewards. It was much faster to quest on past them.

I’m also of two minds about the dumbing down. It began with Lich King, saw a frustrating reversion in Cata, and is back in full force. I guess for leveling dungeons, where one is in a hurry, this is a good thing.

Extras

Despite the fact that I collect vanity pets (I had over 175 even before this expansion), I haven’t dealt with the whole battle pet mini-game yet. It doesn’t turn up XP or gear, so I figured I’d save it for when I run out of normal stuff to do.

I keep meaning to play a Pandarian (Monk) through the turtle zone, but I haven’t yet.

Conclusion

While there is nothing radically new about MOP, it feels a hell of a lot better than Cata. I didn’t expect to like it, but I did. It was fun to level again and Blizzard has cleaned up a lot of stuff that after four expansions had become a little messy. This “new” game is still very much World of Warcraft. They have not reinvented the wheel, but they continual the usual iterative improvements. I suspect that Cataclysm suffered from the redoing of the old zones, which was a lot of content that continuing players like myself never saw.

Anyway, the real meat of the matter is in the end game, and I’ll discuss that in a second post.

If you liked this post, follow me at:

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
or the
video game post depot
or win Crash & Jak giveaways!

Latest hot post: War Stories: Crash Bandicoot

Related posts:

  1. Diablo 3 – Beta Preview
  2. Diablo 3 – Barbarian 1-60
  3. Diablo 3 – The Infernal Barbarian
  4. Expansion of the WOW Factor
By: agavin
Comments (3)
Posted in: Games
Tagged as: Blizzard Entertainment, Cataclysm, Kung-fu Panda, leveling, Massive Multiplayer Online, review, Roleplaying, Video Games, Warlock, World of Warcraft
Watch the Trailer or

Buy it Online!

Buy it Online!

96 of 100 tickets!

Find Andy at:

Follow Me on Pinterest

Subscribe by email:

More posts on:



Complete Archives

Categories

  • Contests (7)
  • Fiction (404)
    • Books (113)
    • Movies (77)
    • Television (123)
    • Writing (115)
      • Darkening Dream (62)
      • Untimed (37)
  • Food (1,765)
  • Games (101)
  • History (13)
  • Technology (21)
  • Uncategorized (16)

Recent Posts

  • Happy Hibi
  • Eating Naples – Palazzo Petrucci
  • Eating San Foca – Aura
  • Eating Otranto – ArborVitae
  • Eating Lecce – Gimmi
  • Eating Lecce – Varius
  • Eating Lecce – Duo
  • Eating Lecce – Doppiozero
  • Eating Torre Canne – Autentico
  • Eating Torre Canne – Beach

Favorite Posts

  • I, Author
  • My Novels
  • The Darkening Dream
  • Sample Chapters
  • Untimed
  • Making Crash Bandicoot
  • My Gaming Career
  • Getting a job designing video games
  • Getting a job programming video games
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  • A Game of Thrones
  • 27 Courses of Truffles
  • Ultimate Pizza
  • Eating Italy
  • LA Sushi
  • Foodie Club

Archives

  • May 2025 (4)
  • April 2025 (4)
  • February 2025 (5)
  • January 2025 (3)
  • December 2024 (13)
  • November 2024 (14)
  • October 2024 (14)
  • September 2024 (15)
  • August 2024 (13)
  • July 2024 (15)
  • June 2024 (14)
  • May 2024 (15)
  • April 2024 (13)
  • March 2024 (9)
  • February 2024 (7)
  • January 2024 (9)
  • December 2023 (8)
  • November 2023 (14)
  • October 2023 (13)
  • September 2023 (9)
  • August 2023 (15)
  • July 2023 (13)
  • June 2023 (14)
  • May 2023 (15)
  • April 2023 (14)
  • March 2023 (12)
  • February 2023 (11)
  • January 2023 (14)
  • December 2022 (11)
  • November 2022 (13)
  • October 2022 (14)
  • September 2022 (14)
  • August 2022 (12)
  • July 2022 (9)
  • June 2022 (6)
  • May 2022 (8)
  • April 2022 (5)
  • March 2022 (4)
  • February 2022 (2)
  • January 2022 (8)
  • December 2021 (6)
  • November 2021 (6)
  • October 2021 (8)
  • September 2021 (4)
  • August 2021 (5)
  • July 2021 (2)
  • June 2021 (3)
  • January 2021 (1)
  • December 2020 (1)
  • September 2020 (1)
  • August 2020 (1)
  • April 2020 (11)
  • March 2020 (15)
  • February 2020 (13)
  • January 2020 (14)
  • December 2019 (13)
  • November 2019 (12)
  • October 2019 (14)
  • September 2019 (14)
  • August 2019 (13)
  • July 2019 (13)
  • June 2019 (14)
  • May 2019 (13)
  • April 2019 (10)
  • March 2019 (10)
  • February 2019 (11)
  • January 2019 (13)
  • December 2018 (14)
  • November 2018 (11)
  • October 2018 (15)
  • September 2018 (15)
  • August 2018 (15)
  • July 2018 (11)
  • June 2018 (14)
  • May 2018 (13)
  • April 2018 (13)
  • March 2018 (17)
  • February 2018 (12)
  • January 2018 (15)
  • December 2017 (15)
  • November 2017 (13)
  • October 2017 (16)
  • September 2017 (16)
  • August 2017 (16)
  • July 2017 (11)
  • June 2017 (13)
  • May 2017 (6)
  • March 2017 (3)
  • February 2017 (4)
  • January 2017 (7)
  • December 2016 (14)
  • November 2016 (11)
  • October 2016 (11)
  • September 2016 (12)
  • August 2016 (15)
  • July 2016 (13)
  • June 2016 (13)
  • May 2016 (13)
  • April 2016 (12)
  • March 2016 (13)
  • February 2016 (12)
  • January 2016 (13)
  • December 2015 (14)
  • November 2015 (14)
  • October 2015 (13)
  • September 2015 (13)
  • August 2015 (18)
  • July 2015 (16)
  • June 2015 (13)
  • May 2015 (13)
  • April 2015 (14)
  • March 2015 (15)
  • February 2015 (13)
  • January 2015 (13)
  • December 2014 (14)
  • November 2014 (13)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (12)
  • August 2014 (15)
  • July 2014 (13)
  • June 2014 (13)
  • May 2014 (14)
  • April 2014 (14)
  • March 2014 (10)
  • February 2014 (11)
  • January 2014 (13)
  • December 2013 (14)
  • November 2013 (13)
  • October 2013 (14)
  • September 2013 (12)
  • August 2013 (14)
  • July 2013 (10)
  • June 2013 (14)
  • May 2013 (14)
  • April 2013 (14)
  • March 2013 (15)
  • February 2013 (14)
  • January 2013 (13)
  • December 2012 (14)
  • November 2012 (16)
  • October 2012 (13)
  • September 2012 (14)
  • August 2012 (16)
  • July 2012 (12)
  • June 2012 (16)
  • May 2012 (21)
  • April 2012 (18)
  • March 2012 (20)
  • February 2012 (23)
  • January 2012 (31)
  • December 2011 (35)
  • November 2011 (33)
  • October 2011 (32)
  • September 2011 (29)
  • August 2011 (35)
  • July 2011 (33)
  • June 2011 (25)
  • May 2011 (31)
  • April 2011 (30)
  • March 2011 (34)
  • February 2011 (31)
  • January 2011 (33)
  • December 2010 (33)
  • November 2010 (39)
  • October 2010 (26)
All Things Andy Gavin
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Programmed by Andy Gavin