Reasonable discussion about Northrend Leveling

[heffner]

First off, I have only done quests in Howling Fjord..so I don't know if things change later on, but this is my experience.

I truly wonder if there are really that many more collection quests. It's been quite some time since they changed the amount of XP required to level in the old world and BC. These changes gave us the luxury of bypassing collection quests. I won't even mention RAF.

Personally, I don't find them fun. Not on one toon or five. However, it seems to me that the respawn and drop rates are much better in WoTLK than in BC/old world.

You must also admit one advantage is that we can do many quest "events" (I don't know what you would call them, but things like freeing or dismembering a corpse) once and get credit on all five toons.

I find the terrain more annoying than the collection quests. I get stuck on trees and poles all the time; and have to go up small towers or other structures....gah...so annoying.

[accretion]

My team is currently 75 and I've done about half of my leveling in The Nexus and UK. As far as xp/hour, I find it to be as good or better than quests (~220K) with better tradeskill mats. I've started to skip drop quests entirely, since so few of them will upgrade my gear. I just don't find them fun anymore. Instances aren't as much fun either, but I feel like I make overall progress. That said, I'll prolly open up the GH dailies and focus on those for the 75-80 grind.

[Stealthy]

My advice - do the collection quests that:

1. Open up more quests in a chain (easy to check with WoWhead, WoWDB or Thottbot).

2. Rewards with or leads to a gear upgrade.

3. Rewards with faction rep.

Also worth noting - some collection quests have items that can be looted by everyone in the party (e.g. Retest Now in Icecrown), or that can be traded bewteen players (the mojo for the Drakuru quests in the Grizzly Hills).

Also you should be doing dailies as well - huge exp gains & cash cow!

At lvl 69, 1 boxing friendly daily becomes available in Borean Tundra (Drake Hunt - also gives 250 Wyrmrest rep)

At lvl 71, 1 more boxing friendly daily becomse available in Dragonblight (Defending Wyrmrest Temple - also gives 250 Wyrmrest rep)

At lvl 73, 8 boxing friendly dailies become available in Grizzly Hills - (Blackriver Brawl, Crush Captain Brightwater!, Keep Them at Bay, Smoke 'Em Out, Shred the Alliance, Overwhelmed!, Keep 'Em on Their Heels & Seared Scourge - completing these will also net 1000 Horde Expidition rep)

At level 76, 1 boxing friendly daily becomes available in Sholazar Basin (Will of the Titans - must be aligned with The Oracles, also gives 700 rep).

At level 77, a truck load of dailies open up in The Storm Peaks & Icecrown. More dailies also open up in Sholazar Basin depending on whether you are aligned with The Oracles or Frenzyheart.

Hope this helps...

Cheers,

S.

[Perrigrin]

At lvl 71, 1 more boxing friendly daily becomse available in Dragonblight (Defending Wyrmrest Temple - also gives 250 Wyrmrest rep)

How do you box this one? Does follow work on the dragons?

[OzPhoenix]

You know why I love these forums? Lots of following posts and all of them intelligently put, even the ones I sort of diagree with....just wouldn't happen on the WoW Forums.

Ok, so the bits I disagreed with:

Kill Speed(1) - a number of posts argued that as groups we kill substantially faster. I concede that we do kill faster of course, but not often 5 times faster. I found very often that 5xLightning Bolt would leave the mob still standing (albeit with only a few % health left) forcing a 2nd cast of Frost Shock to finish them off. Having played Hunters quite a bit, I don't think the Shamans kill five times faster, maybe three times, but I admit that's pure supposition on my part.

Kill Speed(2) - the really big constraint on our kill speed isn't the mobs survivability but the mobs availability. I found that in many of these collection quests (excluding those that are "pick items off ground" types) it simply wasn't possible to make the most effecient use of the Shamans grouped power for lack of mobs. By this I mean, either the mobs were too dispersed to collect together (without going into Evade), or they were casters who'd refused to move anyway, or there just simply weren't enough of them to mow them down with great gusto. More often than not, I found that collection quests, those involving mob drops, meant long pauses in my leveling while I hunted down and fought a large number of small battles, often with only 1 or 2 target mobs involved in each.

Mob XP - My Shamans would typically get almost all their XP gain in a session from quests. Out in Northrend, I'd make brely 250xp per kill (rested!). My Paladin meantime is knocking up 1500xp. Where's the bonus? I mean admittedly the Shamans started outlevelling their zones so were also taking a hit due to lower mob levels, but it really felt like mob XP in a group was almost pointless. 250xp for a kill would require me to kill well over five THOUSAND mobs for ONE level. Ouch.......so much of non-instanced grinding. Even at double this rate (which I was almost able to achieve in higher zones), we're still taking just over 3,000 mobs per level. Very much most of my XP going to 80 came from the quest rewards.

Party Penalty - This is my biggest gripe I guess, because I think it's the one most fundamentally at odds with what MMO's should be. I got into Blizzards games from the Diablo series (and plan on going back there on D3). The philosphy of that game to group was perfect: always encouraged, always rewarded, never required. WoW seems to suffer a little indecision in its design. For end-game WoW's philosophy can be summed up as: always encouraged, always rewarded, always required. I don't have any problem with that. However, for leveling, it changes into: sometimes encouraged, sometimes rewarded, often penalised. In a game designed around bringing large numbers of players into a persistent virtual world, grouping should never be penalised. I just can't see how it ever should be.

[Caspian]

At lvl 71, 1 more boxing friendly daily becomse available in Dragonblight (Defending Wyrmrest Temple - also gives 250 Wyrmrest rep)

How do you box this one? Does follow work on the dragons?

As long as all in group have the quest and stay near the quet dude on one person has to get a dragon and bring it back. That one will count for all in group, just turn in. My daughter always makes me go fetch the dragon. Of course she is fetching my RL beverage during that time so I guess it is fair .

[Caspian]

You know why I love these forums? Lots of following posts and all of them intelligently put, even the ones I sort of diagree with....just wouldn't happen on the WoW Forums.

This is one of the things that makes this community great.

On to the discussion.

Kill Speed #1 - it is not just kill time you have to take into account, it is also down time. Hunters probably have the best kills per hour rate solo, though I hear DKs can get close. But one hunter vs your 5 shaman isn't the best comparison. How fast would each of your 5 shaman kill individually? I would be willing to wager that the gourp is more then 5x overall. Even if it was only 3x faster the total XP/hour your group earns is still 300% more then a solo toon. You have to remember at the end you will have 5 level 80 toons, not just 1.

Kill Speed #2 - This is a very valid point. I certainly had these issues as well but I think that the times where I had nice big clumps of melee mobs wander around together made up for the really bad lone caster quests (both kill and loot). All in all I did have more times where I wish there more mobs grouped closer together. Kill yellow mobs also sucks, having to dismount to get mobs to dislike me is annoying.

Mob XP/party penality - I agree, if you are questing most of your XP will come from the quests themselves, in a group or solo. AS far as XP though the XP/hour for the group is what counts and, in a 5 man group, you do get a 40%
bonus over a solo kill of the same mob. Solo player gets 1000XP your group get 1400XP/5. Your mob that nets 1500XP for a solo kill should give 420XP per person in the group, assuming same rested state and levels. So it should only be about 4000 kills vs 1100 for the solo player (1.7 million XP/level, hey we are ball parking here ) if you were grinding. Going back to the kills per hour comparison, who would ding first? All things being equal, mob availabilty, play time gear level etc. I think the MB group would come out ahead. The MB group would cast fewer spells overall per kill and the solo shaman wouId have to eat/drink every 5-10 mobs or so while chain killing and the MB box group could go much longer before that down time. I still assert that there is not a party penality, especially for multiboxers who end up with 5 max level toons in less time then it takes to get 2 toons levelled solo, in almost all cases.

[heffner]

I think the worst timesink is looting on five different toons. This adds up and is why many people don't loot when they are leveling up. For me, I have to switch mice and fumble around with my view on my second monitor to loot. I always have to get around my big-arse Tauren druid or some other toon in the way...move them etc.. Not to mention having to track who has what completed and to make sure everyone is done before I move on - typically this isn't an issue, but I have on occasion missed 1 item or a click and had to go back. These things annoy me the most. Drop rates, having to kill a lot of mobs or waiting for respawns (usually can kill other things in the meantime) doesn't really bother me. Of course, if I had to collect 50+ of an item I probably wouldn't do the quest.

The respawn and drop rates in WoTLK are pretty decent IMO [so far]. Of course, I only just got to Northrend last Sunday so it's pretty empty in Howling Fjord so this may not have been the case for many of you.

Mob availability can be an issue for sure. Obviously all those people solo questing will result in this. However, this is highly dependent on the current state of the game play. When the expansion was first out, this was probably insane. Now, that many people are 75+ it is less of an issue. The exception probably being dailies. Of course, the advantage we have is that we can take on multiple mobs at a time, while the solo player may not always have that option. Now, as you stated if they are all spread out, well..guess we are SOL on that.

I definitely could not agree more that grouping should not be penalized. However, I would assume that how they design the game [esp. expansions] is dependent on how people play the game. People don't group for leveling, so I don't see why they would design it to be as such. It's counter-intuitive for an MMO, but look at us....we are the prime example of solo play. Also, keep in mind I don't think it would be a good business decision to make leveling up efficient by any means. Why would they want to do that? It has to be balanced or the game will fail. Never disconnect the business from the gameplay. It will always be a business first.

[blast3r]

My advice - do the collection quests that:

1. Open up more quests in a chain (easy to check with WoWhead, WoWDB or Thottbot).

2. Rewards with or leads to a gear upgrade.

3. Rewards with faction rep.

Also worth noting - some collection quests have items that can be looted by everyone in the party (e.g. Retest Now in Icecrown), or that can be traded bewteen players (the mojo for the Drakuru quests in the Grizzly Hills).

Also you should be doing dailies as well - huge exp gains & cash cow!

At lvl 69, 1 boxing friendly daily becomes available in Borean Tundra (Drake Hunt - also gives 250 Wyrmrest rep)

At lvl 71, 1 more boxing friendly daily becomse available in Dragonblight (Defending Wyrmrest Temple - also gives 250 Wyrmrest rep)

At lvl 73, 8 boxing friendly dailies become available in Grizzly Hills - (Blackriver Brawl, Crush Captain Brightwater!, Keep Them at Bay, Smoke 'Em Out, Shred the Alliance, Overwhelmed!, Keep 'Em on Their Heels & Seared Scourge - completing these will also net 1000 Horde Expidition rep)

At level 76, 1 boxing friendly daily becomes available in Sholazar Basin (Will of the Titans - must be aligned with The Oracles, also gives 700 rep).

At level 77, a truck load of dailies open up in The Storm Peaks & Icecrown. More dailies also open up in Sholazar Basin depending on whether you are aligned with The Oracles or Frenzyheart.

Hope this helps...

Cheers,

S.

I have just one more level to go. Think I am just going to do dailies and grind rep for Wyrmrest rep.

[Duese]

As sad as it sounds, I honestly wish that you needed MORE xp to level. I mean, I will ding max level with 2+ ZONES worth of quests left to do. I really don't want the only reward for these quests to be gold and a crappy green item that I had better gear than 5 levels prior.

This same thing happened in BC. I followed the standard progression of zones and I ended up in BEM on all FOUR of my solo toons dinging 70, leaving 2+ full zones worth of quests that essentially gain me nothing except some gold. I've earned over 17k+ gold from just quest rewards over 4-5 toons plus all the drops. I don't need the gold.

If you go through the majority of the quests in any zone, do that zones instance, and then move on to the next zone, you will probably end with at least 1-2 full zones worth of quests left to do. I dinged 80 in Sholazar Basin, about 3/4's the way through on my 2box pally/warrior. That was without even doing a bunch of the 5 mans like Gun'drak, HoL, HoS, CoS, Occulus, etc. I hadn't even completed a single quest in Icecrown or Storm Peaks.

I dunno, maybe I like the fact that I got a chance to see an xp bar on my main's again. 2 weeks of bliss until the next xpack comes out that raises the level cap. Leveling alts just doesn't give me the same feeling as leveling my mains, even when I spoil the crap outta my alts. This is why I miss games like Asheron's Call and even FFXI. Never stop getting xp.

And yes, I do realize that my views won't be shared by many others, but I'm a sad panda not seeing my xp bar anymore. I took so many screenshots this time around.