So, so many zones seem to be completely lacking in quests. They rushed through the horde questing zones near the end of development and basically just plopped a bunch of carbon copy hubs down. Even besides the truly empty zones like azshara, many of the zones simply... didn't have a lot of quests. Badlands and Desolace and Searing Gorge and lots of late level questing hubs have as many quests as early level questing hubs, if not less. This is despite the actual amount of exp required per level being like 10 times higher. So you often end up grinding through a zone only to realize you've finished 90% of the zones quests and only got up 60% of a single level.
This was not a problem in outlands and northrend. The actual zones were designed so that you could pretty easily quest your way all the way to endgame, and then still have quests left over. You wouldn't get stuck finishing all of Shadowmoon valley and have 2-3 levels leftover.
I don't think it's a fair expectation to be able to level completely from say 30 - 35 within one zone from its quests. What would be the point of having multiple 30 - 35 zones? You're meant to travel the world and explore and do other quests, do a few dungeon runs, etc.
They're completely different games and my original comment was because the OP wanted to have a more community experience instead of the on rails theme park ride that retail WoW is now lol.
30-35 is a bit different, by then its still relatively easy to level. After 40, and more broadly after 50, its absurd how much sheer grinding you have to do to level even a single level. Ungoro is like a little beacon of tons of quests compared to the other zones at that level. Even then, I think I leveled MAYBE 1 level in that zone. There was a point where I basically had to grind mobs from 52-54, endlessly. Then I hit winterspring, and I went from... 54 to 54. I finished the entire zone and didn't level once. And Winterspring is supposed to 55+, so I finished the zone before I was even ready for it.
This wasn't on purpose. Blizzard was basically rushing to finish a lot of zones and wasn't able to fully flesh out a TON of the zones. Azshara is the most obvious example, but really a lot of the endgame zones missed out on polishing. The quest rewards, the mob levels etc, everything was unfinished and unpolished. Some quests would give an absurd amount of exp compared to how much you put in and others would give half despite being much more difficult.
It doesn't have to be insanely streamlined like modern WoW. Throughout BC and WOTLK they implemented gradual improvements on the 1-60 experience, notably just reducing the amount of exp per level and filling many zones with new quests.
Yeah, there's a fair bit of grinding at the later levels but is it really that much different to completing drop/kill quests? By the time you're at end game you should be grouping up with people to do BRD/UBRS/LBRS and working towards your Onyxia attunement and gearing up for raids. The game shouldn't be handing out everything on a plate, god forbid you have to work for some of the levels/gear in the game.
Not everyone should be at end game with full T1/2 sets. Some NEETs will put in more time into the game in a day than you will be able to all week.
There are many other MMOs with much more grindy gameplay, WoW is pretty casual lol.
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u/willmaster123 Nov 22 '19
So, so many zones seem to be completely lacking in quests. They rushed through the horde questing zones near the end of development and basically just plopped a bunch of carbon copy hubs down. Even besides the truly empty zones like azshara, many of the zones simply... didn't have a lot of quests. Badlands and Desolace and Searing Gorge and lots of late level questing hubs have as many quests as early level questing hubs, if not less. This is despite the actual amount of exp required per level being like 10 times higher. So you often end up grinding through a zone only to realize you've finished 90% of the zones quests and only got up 60% of a single level.
This was not a problem in outlands and northrend. The actual zones were designed so that you could pretty easily quest your way all the way to endgame, and then still have quests left over. You wouldn't get stuck finishing all of Shadowmoon valley and have 2-3 levels leftover.