3rd Quest ProblemFollow

I'm on level 2 and my third quest is the Fel Moss, I've tried twice and both times I've died. Is there anyway to kill these things at the level I'm at, the weapon I have doesn't really do much damage to them. Should I find another quest away from Shadowglen, I can't seem to find any other quests there anymore besides the one.

Oh okay, thank you so much. I forgot about my spells actually lol.

I hate not being helpful, but here was my original thought.

All of these years, all these improvements to the game in general and all the classes' leveling experience, and druids are still spamming Wrath at Level <10.... lol.

I still find that kind of funny. At least they don't have to wait to Level 20 to finally get Cat Form like they once did.

lmfao what automatically makes you think I'm a dude??? I'm sorry I just find that funny.

But yes that is the quest I am talking about.

lmao I love that, thats an awesome quote!

Assuming they haven't changed anything from Cata, it definitely is. When they increased the outgoing damage for mobs in CATA, their formula didn't properly take into account the severe lack of abilities at lower levels. It DID seem to take into account the availability of legacy gear, though.

Combined with the movement of healing skills on almost all classes to much later levels (if they can heal at all without a specialization), there were times when I was getting extremely discouraged leveling my Worgen druid last expansion. The most hilarious part was how imbalanced some of the level 10 skills were. Some classes could use them to one-shot anything, others were practically useless.

I actually died on my Monk the other day, at like level 5 or 6? Granted, I wasn't paying attention to my health at all, but I was spamming my abilities in the tightest rotation possible, and was only fighting two mobs. So many years of WoW taught me that was a fully acceptable leveling tactic. :P

Hunters can pick up a skill that gives them a constant 1% hp per sec hot on them. May not sound like much but with 350k health that is 3.5k per second, more than enough for soloing (unless you enjoy standing in crap) quests and certainly enough to get one through old raids as other specs besides BM + Spirit Beast. When I was playing I always carried enough respect thingies to switch from that and Aspect of the Iron Hawk for when I wanted to do a 5 man.

But to remain on topic, druids are very weak at low levels due to the lack of utility. Have fun in the Den of **** Rap when you reach around level 7ish Usani (unless they nerfed that quest chain to the ground... in which case I hate you).

I do believe they did nerf it. Considerably so IIRC.

But yes, that Den sucked sooooooooooo much back then. What part about "Level 5s cannot handle multiple mobs while wearing grey/white trash gear" didn't Blizzard understand back then? lol.

EDIT: Huh, ZAM outage or something, was trying to edit this earlier. Anyways, double-quoting with 1 click ftl.

Edited, Mar 2nd 2013 10:48pm by Lyrailis

In the Pandaren starting area, there's that quest when you have to gather some lumber from the nearby mill. There's a ! mob there (which, iirc, means anyone can attack him for credit, right?) But he's not a quest mob, and he doesn't drop green loot. He's just this stupidly powerful mob right next to quest items you need, and tackling him solo with my monk was WAY harder than it should have been.

I didn't die, but it was at the point where it was 100% RNG. I couldn't have possibly tightened my rotation more, I didn't have access to any additional skills (because someone decided Monks just don't need them), I didn't have any potions, and the Wandering Isle doesn't have mailboxes to send anything to help. And I was literally the only person in the entire zone, according to /who.

I really, really don't get it. Why go through all the trouble to revamp your leveling experience to attract new players, to turn around and make the first 20 as painful as you possibly can? And their decisions are so confusing even then. For example, Arcane Mages get Arcane Blast, but they can't use their Arcane Charges for another 2 levels. So they're just stuck with ridiculously high mana costs, which makes AB useless--just use Frostbolt. More mana efficient and you can kite.

But a new player is obviously going to assume, from the fact that they just specialized into Arcane and AB was their brand new sparkly ability listed as core to the spec, that it's what they should be using. Nope, 2 levels of pain and downtime if they try.

/sigh

I've been playing the 11 day trial, to see if I want to re-sub. I'm at about 70% in the no category.

Thing is, I'm sure the level 85-90 stuff is fun. The story is starting to get interesting again, after how boring it was last expansion. But I have altitis, and if leveling isn't fun, it's a big issue for me.

Because leveling actually isn't fun anymore. I get why they'd want to streamline things, but they just left it feeling so empty.

Getting to level 10 is horrendous for every class. You have no skills, you can barely use your class mechanics (if you can use them at all), and the difficulty is just a headache if you aren't using legacy gear (and stupidly boring if you are). You can't play creatively, because creative play requires tools that can be used in different ways. Once upon a time, leveling a Mage was about switching between Frostbolt and Fireball to manage your damage-to-mana ratio, and keep your enemy snared, while you kited them. Frost Nova, Polymorph, and Frost Armor added to this. Wands helped keep mana up, so you didn't have downtime. And Fire Blast was super heavy on mana, so it was something you used tactically.

Now you just spam Frostfire Bolt. At level 10, you replace that with Frostbolt or Fireball. And then that's what you spam until you hit 15, when you replace that with Scorch spam, because Scorch is dirt cheap, can be cast while moving, and does just as good damage. Sure, eventually you'll get other abilities that make something else worth using, but that's just terrible design, and these issues seem to continue at least until you're in the late 40s for all classes.

That's ridiculously boring. You don't get to choose talents anymore which, combined with the lack of skill training and class quests, completely sucked the fun out of even gaining a level.

And while Cata definitely updated the leveling experience from a story/storytelling perspective, it doesn't really rival GW2's streamlined quest system or TOR's single player experience. Even with TOR's stupid experience limitations, it's still way more fun to level up in that game than it is in WoW. By a massive margin. Honestly, even with the Cata update, WoW's experience is only really only slightly better than LotRO's leveling content.

And without the event systems of GW2/RIFT? Meh.

But it's actually sad, because I don't understand how they could make so many bad choices at once. It's like every single design decision was made independently of each other, and no one bothered to actually think about what the player experience would be. How that happens, I have no clue. But the reality is that leveling might actually be more fun if they just gave you everything from the start, letting you specialize at level one.

And that's really sad, because earning something new is one of the best parts of playing an RPG. :( Hell, I even liked unlocking passive skills for Hope's sentinel role in FFXIII, despite almost never using Hope, never playing as Hope, and never playing with Hope as a Sentinel...

Shaving time off a spell was better than getting nothing of any interest for 15 levels. And, let's face it, most of the talent choices you make are ridiculously uninteresting from a leveling perspective. Let's take Mages as an example. You're obviously going to choose Scorch at your first option, because you have no reason to be thinking about something like raid DPS. The only possible exception I can see is if you're PVPing and want access to PoM. But even then, I wouldn't choose it. Cast scorch while strafing away from my enemy vs. cast one instant Pyroblast (which is only about double the damage of Scorch) every 1.5 seconds. The answer is obvious.

Choice 2, your defensive option. Two of them are heavily skewed towards PVP/endgame, the other is Ice Barrier, which lasts a minute and has a 25 second cast time. It's the vastly superior option for leveling.

Choice 3, you have the option of two different frost novas or a silence. You already have counterspell, and you won't need another interrupt while leveling. So it's your choice between Ring of Frost or Ice Ward. If you aren't leveling Frost, the answer is clearly Ring of Frost. If you are leveling Frost, the answer is still probably Ring of Frost, though Ice Ward might be attractive (because you can cast it on the elemental). But even then, RoF has double the duration. Ice Ward's shorter Cooldown isn't as attractive in this scenario, because Frost already has access to a second FN via the Elemental.

Choice 4, another survivability one. You're probably going to be going with Cold Snap, because you shouldn't be needing Cauterize or Greater Invisibility (Invis should be enough).

Choice 5, The first real "choice". But not really. Nether Tempest randomly damages nearby enemies, so that's out. Living Bomb's strength lies in having it up on 3 targets at a time, so that's out. Frost Bomb it is. Though I suppose you might go with LB, if you're killing things so fast that the 6 delay for FB's damage is too long.

I'm really not seeing any interesting choices here. For endgame, sure. But they're terrible for leveling. You wait 15 levels just to get to choose between 3 utility spells you should never have reason to use in solo PVE content? Not interesting. At all. Their build system is... fine... for endgame. But it's actually the worst leveling system I have seen in an RPG in a very long time.

As for the rate you get new skills. the problem is that all the interesting abilities have been relegated to high levels or locked into specs. If they had just locked the talent-based skills into the specialization, it would have been one thing. But spells like Frostbolt and Fireball are now spec-locked. Druids don't get healing touch until level 26. BACKSTAB IS LEVEL 40. Yeah, that doesn't matter for solo leveling, but it sure makes playing a Sub Rogue suck a hell of a lot more in groups. Good thing they replaced their main combo builder with a 24 second DoT. You know how mobs tend to live that long.

Yeah.

[EDIT]

As for TOR, the cutscenes were pretty much the same thing you get in any BioWare game. There wasn't any meaningful decrease in quality there. It feels way more like playing DAO than it does playing an MMO (while leveling, at least).

And while I agree that WoW's combat is better than TOR's in general, I don't think there's any way in which WoW does solo combat better. In TOR, you're almost always fighting groups of mobs that actually support each other. That means tactical gameplay is vastly rewarded even in solo content. Establishing a kill order, using your CC, and properly using your companion (whether you actively use their abilities or not) is a huge influence on your ability to take down the enemy easily. Because you can actaully die.

For most of WoW combat for most of WoW's history, you could auto-attack most classes to level cap. If you have legacy gear or play an AA-heavy class, you can still do that. You can't do that in TOR. Well, for one becasue they don't have AA, but also because spamming your base ability will get you killed.

The difference here is whether or not you are actually playing the game.

Edited, Mar 3rd 2013 4:39pm by idiggory

I kinda feel like Druid is the same way. I mean, why would your level 90 talent choices be two healing options and a passive +6% to your primary stat? Granted, one of them will give a 20% buff to damage, which is nice for burn phases, but the passive is still the clear winner for all things PVE. And that's the 90 point talent! That should be the most exciting of all of them! Instead, every single PVE Druid will have the same one (exception, Resto, which might want the oh-sh*t button, so they at least get to decide according to their play style).

I will be charitable and grant that hybrids are much harder to create interesting talent options for. But that just makes Mage/Rogue even more egregious--they should be WAY easier to create meaningful talent options, because there are way fewer factors to consider between their specializations.

The real problem is that I can't help but feel that the classes with interesting talent options are the minority. If I'm playing a Death Knight in PVE nearly every choice is clear for my role (DPS, Tank, PVP) with the only real exceptions coming from whether or not encounters have certain mechanics.

Tier 1- Are you Frost? Plague Leach. Otherwise, you take Rolling Blood for AoE and Unholy Blight for single target.
Tier 2- Purgatory. If the encounter is heavy on magic damage, you can take AMZ. If you need something to prevent fear/charm, Lichborne.
Tier 3- Death's Advance, no exceptions.
Tier 4- Death Siphon, no exceptions.
Tier 5- Only pick your poison one. But that's because these are all functionally about the same. If you care about a 4k dps gap, you go blood tap. Otherwise, who the hell cares? The only real difference is that you have to actually manage one of them, where the other two are passives. Nothing about this is interesting, at least to me. I looked at that tier, and all I could think was "Omg, I don't care."
Tier 6- 100% encounter specific, because none have any value in a tank-n-spank.

The thing about encounter-specific talents is that they aren't interesting. There's no real value there. Because you'll typically never want both. And you're obviously going to respec for the fight, so why bother making them talents at all? Lichborne does nothing in a fight without CC, AMZ does nothing in a fight without burst magic damage. Might as well just give me access to them, since it's generally rare I'd want both in one fight.

Idk, I just don't see why I should care. Once upon a time having access to AMZ felt important, because I couldn't just switch on the fly to get Lichborne. Well, I could, but that meant sacificing damage buffs from Blood. It was interesting to weigh the costs about whether to take it.

Now? There's nothing interesting there. It's not really about sacrifices, it's about taking whatever the fight tells me to take. I don't really sacrifice anything because there's nothing there I care about. I really don't care if I have Purgatory or not, because the chance of it actually saving me as a dps is so low.

I'll grant that these choices can be interesting if you're the tank, because then you'll be dealing with survivability nonstop, which makes changes to the way you do that important. For a dps? Don't care at all. Not because I don't like surviving, but because none of these provide a meaningful impact to the way I survive in typical play. The essential gist is the same. Avoid the goo, hit the button if the encounter means button.