[WoW] Want to start a petition to Blizzard to improve "group" leveling...please read.

Hi all,

I like to play multiple teams, as many people on this forum do.

RAF blah blah blah to 59.5 or so. Then came the long journey from 60-80 for my multiple teams.

I decided to write a questing guide for 60-80 so you wouldn't have to do instances unless you wanted to and would avoid all collection quests unless they lead to a decent number of follow up quests. I started it mainly because I was leveling a rag tag group of 2 warriors, a hunter, and a mage and I felt they wouldn't be too effective in instances, and I could follow it with other groups. That and in general I think questing is fun.

It's been a couple of months, my toons started at 59.5 and are at 69.5 and i've done all of the Outland quests I wanted to. Could squeeze in another .5 level by picking Scryer and finishing up Shadowmoon Valley...

I have this guide that is about 18 pages long, and was looking at the task of doing the same for Northrend, which will probably be 3 times in length...while taking a break, I was hit with an idea...

Blizzard is constantly changing the game for updates, etc. What if we posted on their suggestion forum or bug fix, or whatever it is that gets their attention, and post something like the following:

"I love to quest with friends while leveling in World of Warcraft. Something I've noticed that makes this difficult for groups is the collection quests. If a collection quest is designed to take 10 minutes, and there are 5 of us in our party leveling together, it may take us 50 minutes, making it innefficient, so we usually end up skipping the collection quests. To fix this, I would suggest that if a collection item drops from a mob, that all party members can loot it. I've noticed this occurs with some quests, so I know it is possible, but changing this for all would greatly help. Also if the collection item is a node, if the node can stick around for 20 seconds or so for everyone in a party to be able to loot it before it despawns, or even if it becomes "tagged" by the party to prevent 30 people from looting it. Then our party can continue to quest without being slowed down by the collection quests or skipping them. This is especially important in Northrend as some areas have intricate quest lines that unlock other quests. I know my friends and I can run instances if we are a party of five, but we would also like to enjoy all of the quests without having to play them all solo. This will make it possible (but not require it) to allow leveling to be more of a social activity which will in turn make it more fun, instead of people having to "put in the work" of leveling to 80 before they can play with their friends.

If this cannot be done for Outland and Northrend, please keep it in mind for future game design."

If we can petition Blizzard to change this game mechanic (in the name of group play) it would mean I wouldn't have to create a 70-80 questing guide skipping the collection quests, you could just follow any of the standard questing guides and would get the full advantage of playing and enjoying all of the quests from the expansion without slamming your head against your keyboard while spending 50+ minutes to do a quest designed to take 10 minutes. We as boxers would then be able to take advantage of tighter quest hubs, and ultimately would level at closer to a normal progression.

What does everyone think?

I think this is a brilliant suggestion and something I've been wondering about myself lately. It's as though Blizzard are forcing you to quest solo at certain points. If you were feeling lucky you could perhaps add that you feel as though it's "not in the spirit of the game (hate that terminology)" to force people to solo collection quests instead of playing with friends.

I really hope they do something about it, we all know they can.

considering I am leveling a new group of characters without RAF, I am all for this change!

Leveling from 1-60 with RAF goes very fast, maybe they could extend the time you can level faster with RAF (now it's 60 or 90 days). From 60-70 should be after 3.0 no Problem, because they lowered the XP you require per level and the Outland Quests are not so bad for Multiboxing, because you can now skip all the collecting quests :) But leveling in WotLK is a pain in the ass, alot of collecting quests and alot of quests you have to do with machines ... boost leveling from 70-80 :)

They should increase mob range (before they stop following you) by about 20percent (so you can pull more mobs at one time), and increase the exp each mob gives for killing it from 5 to 6 X the mob level. Make killing mobs equal to questing for leveling.

I'm not trying to convince you that should shouldn't bother, but I can't believe that Blizzard wouldn't have already considered and put off, or rejected, these ideas. It makes complete and obvious sense for us multiboxers, but there must be some reason they haven't made the change for traditional groups. I don't have the answer, but for whatever reason, the current collection quest mechanic is OK to them.

I think this is because they're geared to smaller groups than we tend to run, 1-3 people maybe, which seems to be a maximum usual group size outside group quests. This is an assumption I'm making, but I'm considering my personal pre-multiboxing group experience, and the fact that I never ever see a group larger than 2 or 3 outside PvP or a meeting stone. Consider also that the collection quests that are explicitly written for 5-man groups tend to have drops in abundance, or at least just enough so that all five players will have barely or almost completed by the end of the instance (I'm thinking Zul'Farak and Shadow Labyrinth). In my experience, collection quests with 1-2 other humans do not seem that arduous, they're just a different flavor of quest.

I can only speculate why it would be OK with Blizzard that a collection quest should take a 1-3 person group more time than a non-collection quest, but I assume that it's in the spec. Maybe, to put it vaguely, they have a certain amount of time they want each quest hub to take and allocate long-ass collection quests along with non-collection quests and group quests to reach the total, all the while assuming a certain maximum group size. Changing the balance of the different kinds of quests changes the flavor of that zone or quest hub. Or they could have some completely different idea, likely because they do this for a living while I just thought about it for six or seven minutes, but I assume it's by design and not accident.

Here is my Theory on how it should work.

Collection quests: These items should not take up bag space. If someone 'loots' the required item it should just give quest credit like a kill quest does. Think of it like a quest bag or something like our key rings. Or the basic everyone can loot the item flag. This makes a lot more sense for quests where your asked to get like 5 skulls or something to summon a deamon. Why do we need 25 of them? Are we going trying to end this threat or make it 5 times as worse?

XP gains while grouping: Right now with a 5man group the xp per kill is lame. Its ((xp/5)*1.2) or near that. It comes out to be like killing 4 mobs in a full group equals the xp as killing one solo. On kill quests where everyone gets credit this greatly reduces the xp for that quest than doing it solo. Change: Remove the xp division from grouping, but keep the bonus to 5% per group additional member. So solo a guy for 100xp. 2man group its 105xp full group 120xp. I would keep the current xp reduction in place for level 80's grouping with noobs. I would half the current xp given from elite mobs (they should still give out a ton of xp but not like 10k-15k a kill that you would get with rested soloing a xp giving northrend instance mob). 90% of the games content is not group friendly (all quests and areas not group specific) and you are penalized for grouping, yet 100% of the end game you have to group. This would help people with knowing how to play with others instead of soloing to 80 then wtf noob the endgame.

New Toons: I would either offer a one time paid subscription upgrade or make this something for a new expansion. Create 2 new start zones, one for each faction and make it just like the Deathknights start area. Pick whatever toon you want and they start at 55 quest to 57ish to get your talent points.

Recycle old content: So far other than to train, the only time I have left Northrend was for the retakeing of undercity event. Given the new ability to the game to instance areas, this should be done to vanilla wow. We should be going back to an updated Stratholme, Scholomance and stuff. The old instance should be there as well, but I see no reason not to cut/paste and repopulate these old instances when it is very relevant to the game. This will also spread out the population again, instead of 80% of the players all crowding each other in Dalran. The Malygos problem should have us maybe going back to Onyxia or Blackrock, Heck even Wailing Caverns and the emerald dream or Sunken Temple. Vanilla wow is litte more than a place to go farm old mats to level tradeskills.

I will give them credit for the RAF buisness model. I have friends and people I know that do not consider themselves multiboxers in anyway that shell out $15 for wow and $25 for a paid transfer to skip the 1-60 antique tredmill.

I think blizzard have started nerfing quests already..

whilst running my latest mixed group through Nagrand I noticed that the Nessingway kill quests are only 12 of each now rather than 30, the Boulderfist mage and warrior kill quest cut from 20 to 10 and the telari supply crates collection quest has been halved from 20 to 10.. there are probalbly lots more thay have changed, but those are the only three i really noticed

Multiboxing aside, I HATE how blizzard treats Group Leveling.

They completely penalize it, resulting in 95% of people leveling on their own. Killing XP, killing collection quests, etc.

While im not about to spit out ideas of my own, I really want blizzard to implement ways to make us WANT to group up to quest/level. As it is, the only reason for group questing is Elite Mob killing quests. Totally stupid >.<


By no means do I want it to become FFXI like, where your only option is group questing, and I also don't want future solo'ers to be punished for soloing. I just think group questing needs a total buff.

I agree heartily with this. Already twice now I've had to pause my normal following of my leveling guide to grind out a few bubbles to next level so I can accept a quest the guide wants me to accept.

(It also sucks that the pally got a 25% exp boost over the priest thru doing her resurrection questline...I wanted to keep the toons equal all the way along, but I've already once had to rez the priest so glad I did the quest).