Dumb, folks will have barely broken out of Nagrand, let alone hit Blade's Edge, Netherstorm or Shadowmoon if they up the leveling speed between 60-70. The only way I'd find this acceptable is if Blizz created an option to display all available quests, even if low-level, that way I could go back and complete some unfinished business. An increase in leveling will do nothing more than force folks such as myself to skip content, when our desire is to explore as much as possible before outleveling a zone.

What's the problem? People can still go to Netherstorm etc. if they want to. Like now, I usually hit 70 in Nagrand or early BEM, so I still have BEM, Netherstorm, and SMV to do. I don't see the big problem, go Netherstorm if you want to or go Northrend, the choice is yours.

Told everyone on anther post that wow is becoming game for babys..

i agree with jamminvk... i hit 70 before stepping foot in netherstorm or smv... if people who have never done the bc content go through these areas they will either have to skip a huge chunk of outland or end up doing half of northrend after theyve hit 80... seriously blizz the leveling speed for 60-70 is fine... especially since dks tear through mobs like nothing...

Dalixam, the problem is as I stated, if at level 80, and you wish to go back to these areas, how is one to find available quests unless there was some option to make them visible. And please don't tell me to look them up on Thott or some other site. I missed out on a lot of vanilla WoW content because by the time you hit 58-60, you're hanging in Outland. With Wrath, one will hit 68-70, and feel compelled to move onto Northrend and miss out on BC content. Unlike some, the whiners that complain leveling is too slow, I prefer the slow grind, being able to do quests in as many zones as possible without them being green or gray.

Tralkar, your post is of no value here.

While I would like an option to display old/low quests -- or *gasp* an actual filter for them -- this is purely a playstyle issue. My shaman did almost all the quests in Outland before I made 70; my holy priest, for obvious reasons, did almost none of them and gained XP through instances.

This isn't "news" anyway since it is precisely what they did when BC went live so who would have imagined the same thing happening again? Anyone who was around when BC came out and voiced the exact same arguments then. /shrug It didn't destroy the game then and it won't destroy the game now.

What I *DO* regret, however, is that almost none of the really awesome instances will get used anymore. It's already almost impossible to find groups for the old 50+ instances and I foresee MrT, the current heroics, Kara and up going out the same way. Why put up with pulling together a Kara run when you could be pulling down comparable blues in NR?

Blizz spends so much effort making this content and then just throws it all away with the next expansion. I really wish they'd find some way to make running the instances more viable instead of just having them bypassed.

After all, there's nothing quite like getting into a PUG for, say, BF or SP and finding out that one or more of the characters has NEVER been in an instance before. >_<

Peace.

But Jamm here's the deal - if you want to "fly" through Outland as most people will then this is good. If you want to take your time and do every quest as you are noting then go for it and when you get to 80 you may have 3-4 zones of quests to do (at coin/quest) so either way you win.

Hoji - I agree with you about the TBC instances - but the thing is people barely do them now. Most people barely do heroics as it stands, they go to KZ once a week and get 22 badges. People will have been running those instances for close to 2 years and unless they have an alt coming up are probably sick to death of them. So while it sucks to see the content "go to waste" as a lot of the pre-TBC endgame stuff did, it's prbobably more the "nature of the beast".

Personally I think Blizzard needs to add about 1 quest per instance that gives a really nice item. Blue item that'll last you 10ish levels, except places like BRD+ (Since having an item at 61-68 from BRD would be a bit ridiculous.) but at least have the items last you about to 59.

I also think they should add about +25% more experience gained in instances in an equally leveled group. I mean, currently, you can barely get a group on peak times to Scarlet Monastary wings... Remember pre-TBC? That place was packed with at least 10 groups a day at peak time, on a medium pop server.

I agree, more XP by instancing would encourage people to go there. And I love instancing. At the moment it is just boosting until 60, rarely groups are made sadly...

Quoting wowwiki...
Pre-2.3
"The total experience needed to reach level 60 was 4,084,700. The total for 60 to 70 was 6,762,300, making 1 to 70 10,847,000 points in total"

The total number of same-level mobs that must be killed to reach level 60 with no rest or quests was 16,971 which would take approximately 76 hours at 16 seconds per kill.

After 2.3 XP buff

"The total experience needed to reach level 60 is 3,378,400. This is a decrease of 706,300 experience from pre-2.3.0."

Going by the pre-2.3 total XP amounts the XP required to level 60-70 was 60% of the TOTAL XP required to level from 1-60. So if they keep with that trend of requiring 60% required XP increase over the previos level set it would be an additional 4,057,380 for a total of
10,819,680 to level 70-80.

IF they however go by a 60% increase of total XP to reach the max level prior to expansion it would be a total of 17,355,200.

I readily admit i've applied the most simplistic equation, but when i've been awake for 26 hours the wowwiki formula's just look evil to me. I tend to lean towards the 17.35 million as the amount of xp to go from 70-80.

I've been playing wow for 3 years and change on and off now. My first character was a palidan, back in the days of MC being the ONLY raid instance in existence. I admit, it took me 28 days of play time to level from 1-60 with mining and blacksmithing maxed out. Looking back i find it really depressing that it took me that long, but i was in the initial awe of the game and tried to finish every single instance quest, didn't acknowledge the benifit of rested XP at all and would spend hours combing through the AH every time i leveled to get the best gear possible. Things like thottbot were still somewhat of a gamble so i didn't really know where to go or what to do a good deal of the time after level 30.

I spent another 25 days of play time over the following 6 months running through UBRS, DM, Strat and scholo for rep and drops, literally 100's of botched BRD runs to hand in Thorium brotherhood rep turn ins. I did this as a ret pally, in the time of palidans being considered completely useless save for back-up healing in 15 man UBRS or MC. I loved it, i also loved the fact that i topped overall dmg in every instance up to MC, and more often than not was #1 in dps as well; still placed in the top 7 for overall damage when running MC with only 30 people. But then came ZG and the talent changes and combat mechanic changes....and palidans were universely regarded as buff-bots and healers. Being one of the few people to this day that actually has read the class descriptions, i refused to go holy so my pally got pretty boring, on top of which the realm i played on Greymane, had a serious population decrease. So after all that work, i decided to roll a warrior...and do so on another server leaving what i had planned to be my foundation character behind on a generally dead server.

So once i started my warrior....oddly enough i pretty much knew where to go for every quest i picked up. I wasn't in zombie addict mode so i actually took advantage of rested xp. I found that it took me under 24 hours to level from 1-20. Not wasing my time going to try for every instance quest and not going out of my way to complete group quests that were difficult to find help for it took me only 11 days play time to level 1-60 with mining and armorsmithing at max skill, having refused to set foot inside any instance before lvl 50 (which would mean prior to BRD).

Now all these years later, i have all 9 classes leveled to 70 ( 7 of them prior to the 2.3 XP buff) 5 of the 7 following my pally and warrior did not set foot inside an instance prior to 70, with all 7 remaining out of instances prior to level 60. Before BC came out i was able to get my 1-60 play time down to 6.5 days with proffessions at max skill, my 1-70 play time was at around 9 days prior to 2.3, and down to 6 days and change after 2.3 This is with soloing, no instances, no groups.

But i found, that even with rested xp at times, i would hit a wall of no quests around 47, then again at 54 then a fairly smooth stretch up until 64 then again at 66. Where i would have to grind out the last 30-50% of level because of a lack of soloable quests. Now, i love to raid, i love to pvp in arena, but when you have leveled more than 2 chars, the lore gets old, and the quests aren't offering new content. For all the hours that are spent looking for groups, and then waiting for one or two more people to show up once you're in a group...then the AFK's, the wipes, people leaving, or bickering or just deciding to chit chat while everyone eats/drinks/rebuffs that turns into 20 minute conversations....you come to realize that in the time it took you to run an instance and complete a quest to get that shiny rare item...you could have soloed out 50%-75% of a level and got a BoE rare or solo quest reward as good or better than the instance quest item or drop. Possibly even spent the time banking some honor to get the welfare epics once you hit 60 or 70.

Because when you really look at the big picture, 98% of the stuff that you accumulate prior to level 68 is replaced by the time you hit 70, or while raiding or even 5 man instance grinding. Once you hit 70, there is rep to gain to unlock quests, craftable patterns/recipes etc or gain access to instances, armor and weapons to save up for or grind for mats. There is flying mounts to save up for, there are dailies to be completed and PvP to be played.

People joke about the fact that you spend days or weeks worth of time playing the game to reach level 60 or 70...so you can start actually playing the game, but it's true. ON several characters i've spent 5x-6x longer playing at 70, then the actual accumulated time it took me to reach 70. I still see plenty of people looking for pre-BC instance groups, a number of guilds that cap off at lvl 60 and do not play any BC content at all, and the ever growing population of "twinks" that don't understand what the definition of the word they use to describe their waste of time actually is. Aside from the fact that if you actually want to explore every single quest, instance and every other aspect ofthe game that's why you're able to create 10 characters per server with a choice from 9 different classes and a total of 50 characters per account. Part of the selling point of the game is the fact that it is IMPOSSIBLE to come anywhere near expeiriancing all the game content on a single character through normal level progression.

As for the game being tailored to "babies" that is unfortunatly nothing new. Parents get hooked on WoW and their solution to making themselves feel better and not blatently present themselves as horrible parents is not to cut back on play time....but to get their 6, 7 or 8 year old their own account so they can play "together." Which in turn creates large numbers of controlling obnoxious players trying to censor any conversation beyond what would be found in a G-rated movie because they are playing the game with the +14 year old rating with their children who still haven't reached age in the double digits.

Then of course there is the "twink" issue. In which large amounts of mostly pre-teen to junion high age players get bored at level 70 either because they have dedicated every free waking moment to raiding, or beacuse they can't raid and thus have just collected gold that they decide to make a level 19 (or the debatedly more pathetic 29, 39, 49, 59...or saddest of all 69 level char) collect the same 10-20 items as everyone else and apply thousands of gold worth of enchants to their craptastic gear and "pwn" others of the same sad club in pvp. Aside from preventing the average player from getting a fair match in BG's it sky rockets the pre-level 20 rare items to the hundreds or thousands of gold in price again preventing the average player, or new-comer from being able to aquire something that should only be useful for 3-5 levels (which is about 6-20 hours playtime) because they want to pretend that what they're doing is much different from playing at 70, aside from the fact that it require no actual skill, just large surplus of gold and no life beyond grinding for crappy low level items.

While at face value, the fact that blizzard puts such stock in customer opinion about what should be done with characters, and game content, that puts the power in the hands of masses that aren't actually old enough to pay for the game themselves. The classes have gone so far off the intended roles that their is hardly any similarity anymore....where the hybrid support classes that are supposed to be "ok-at-everything" but great at nothing are so overpowered that 2 classes are capable of playing the roles of all 9, These hybrid 3*/2* talent builds cause classes to have an "unfair" advantage against another class so nerfs are applied with those builds in mind with little effect that inturn are a huge nerf for players that actually go 41 pts into a talent tree.

Forcing EVERYONE to be required to spend 15-20 days play time to put a char at max level is stupid. All content is still acesseable if you're really that much of a fanboy but the point of the game...is to get to end game content...and progress in the content and plot...not drag it out. There's plenty of ways that blizzard allows for it to be dragged out as it is..and to anyone who's thinking "it's just a game, lighten up" yes it is just a game. But it's a game that i, and many other people actually pay $15 a month for with their own money and while that certainly isn't alot, regardless of it being a game it requires time to play. While some may have the luxery of being able to sit around for 12 hours a day 7 days a week playing, not everyone is still in highschool, and everyone shouldnm't have to rely on the bottom 10% in order to get their money's worth and progress in the ever changing content of the game.