Cataclysm

[Ingmar]

There's dwarves doing their archaeology thing in both Mulgore and Barrens; in both cases the taurens basically say, go kill the shit out of those dwarves that are digging shit up!

[Kail]

There's dwarves doing their archaeology thing in both Mulgore and Barrens; in both cases the taurens basically say, go kill the shit out of those dwarves that are digging shit up!

Also says "Many innocent tauren lost their lives or were forced off their ancestral birthplace when the dwarves of Bael Modan arrived" though, so who knows what the hell is going on there.

[Lantyssa]

As one of the altaholics in question (highest is a 71 after months of 'grinding'), it's a combination of factors.

The lack of a mount until 40, then 30(?), was a big one.  The areas start getting larger.  The quests start sending you all over the bloody place.  You're contrained to specific areas because of level, so you can't really explore.  Abilities, and levels, have slowed down if you're going solo.  More than likely you are solo, because the rest of the world is playing in whatever the latest high-level content is.  Even as a dedicated soloer it gets lonely and by the 30s you're really starting to feel it.  You can't do instances to break up the monotenty.  Each expansion your friends are ten levels further away.  If you're prone to re-rolling then you're also doing the same content over after a couple of characters.  Then you're doing the content which you found boring over again, still by yourself, and you just sort of give up.

They've lowered mount levels.  They're redesigning the flow of zones.  Cross-server LFG in instances.  Two new races and a revamp so the Old World is populated again.  Only five levels.  It won't stop people making alts, however it does give those getting stuck in those hell levels a few more option in moving further along.

[Rendakor]

I agree with you on all counts Lantyssa. For every 80 I have (3, with a 4th coming soon), I have another stalled somewhere 30-42.

In addition to larger, the areas keep getting further away from major cities.

[Selby]

Ah, the reason why I chose a mage as my primary character all those years ago.  The ability to teleport from one continent to the other and not need to fly as much.  Was worth it!

The spread-out nature is mostly inherent to the old world though, once in Outlands and Northrend that problem goes away.  It was pretty horrible in the 35-55 range though.

[Mattemeo]

Camp Tarujo burns!

King Beefslab McFistgroin: "I shall clearly demonstrated that the Horde is evil and must be punished by picking on the closest thing this world has to genuine nice guys and razing one of their towns. This shall unequivocally show that it's all the orcs fault and not, for example, make the Tauren equate the Alliance with the centaur clans that used to do the exact same thing (which nearly drove the tauren to extinction) thereby cementing their bond with the rest of the Horde and giving Bairne Bloodhoof one final reason to give new Warchief Hellscream their full backing".

 

Not-Warchief-yet Faceeater O'Brainwrong: "Rarr! Clearly I must undermine all the goodwill the Horde had left, cause massive political ructions that will devastate the world as much as a cranky Dragon will, and I will have the ancestral, eons old forests of the Nightelves, who's lands we have been happily desecrating for years, burned and chopped down, somehow managing to enlist those noble, spiritual brethren beasts the Tauren who will conveniently turn a blind eye to the disgusting destruction of sacred life; and amazingly, somehow, people will still blame King Beefslab McFistgroin for everything".



Also: Grimtotems.

[WindupAtheist]

blarg

I quit paying any attention to your rah-rah-horde bullshit about the third time you started going on about how the Alliance attacked the poor innocent Forsaken and then went suspiciously mute when asked what the fuck you were talking about.

[Slyfeind]

I suspect Blizzard thinks altaholics rerolling before getting a single character to cap all the time means there's probably an issue. Because it obviously held their attention long enough for 35, what happened that made them stop? I think it's less "rolling alts is bad" and more "people never ever making it to cap means something WE did is wrong."

Yeah, interesting. Players cancelling their account at 35 is wrong. Players rerolling at 35 isn't necessarily wrong, and could very well be something right. It could be that it's the most reliable metric they have to determine the fun factor of a level bracket.

[SurfD]

Going:

Also, Grimtotems every time someone mentions Taurens being nice guys is kind of like going

Also, Dark Irons when someone mentions Dwarves
Also, Naga when someone mentions Night Elves
Also, Defias when someone mentions Humans

etc, etc.

Hell, as far as I am aware, the ONLY race in the whole game that does not have its own actively "evil" (for lack of a better word) offshoot is the Gnomes, who, if it wasn't for Toxic poisoning of their capital, wouldn't even have an excuse for being in the game, and would be happily tinkering away underground oblivious to the world around them.

[K9]

There's no evil Drenaei in game as far as I know. The only hostile ones are the ghosts around Achunidoun.

[OcellotJenkins]

I dusted off a level 30 warrior that I haven't played in years a week or so ago and decided to see what old world leveling was like these days.  What I found was that Duskwallow Marsh solves a good bit of the problems I used to have with the 30-42 leveling range.  Rather than getting stuck in that gap between sets of quests in STV (post Kurzen, pre Bloodsail), I went to Duskwallow and found a steady stream of content that flowed nicely.  A good bit of these were not there on release right?  I do not recall seeing all of those quests available in Theramore before (like Mudsprocket etc.).  Of course the leveling curve changes helped out a lot too and I went from 30-40 in about 5 days of very casual play.

The revamp is going to be awesome though.  I plan on leveling 3 new alts up through the revamped content before even thinking about the new end game stuff.

[K9]

Mudsprocket was added in patch 2.3 or 2.4 as I recall; the overall revamp of Theramore and Dustwallow marsh was really very good. It's possibly the best-done Alliance levelling zone now in terms of quest hubs and progression.

[kaid]

One of the main reasons I have few alts is once you have epic mounts its REALLY REALLY REALLY hard to go 40 levels to get a basic mount and 60 for a epic one. That stopped my alts so often in their 30s as it just got to annoying running around at the speed of slow. Now though you can get your movement stuff very quickly specially with the increased leveling which helps the game out a TON. I love having a dreadsteed at level 40 on my warlock alt.

After seeing how good they can do quest hubs now in the TBC newbie areas and  TBC and WOTLK main areas its about damn time they go and clean some of the old zones up.

Some old zones like strangle thorn were pretty damn well setup lots of quests decent hubs to get them from. Others like darkwind pass had zero quests at all other than the few ones added when khara opened up. Others were just spread out and sent you hither and yon in a very disjointed experience.

Given what they know now going back and revamping the zones that were laid out badly quest wise and just tweaking a bit ones like elwynn or strangle thorn that were setup fine could really make alts level up experience much more enjoyable.

I also think its good they are bringing the population back to the main land area a bit. One problem in old MMO such as eq1 is eventually after enough expansions people got spread out across such a wide amount of area that you could go a long time without seeing anybody. This hurt the ability to get groups when leveling up and the whole MMO feeling of the game.

[AutomaticZen]

There's no evil Drenaei in game as far as I know. The only hostile ones are the ghosts around Achunidoun.

No, because the Draenei are literally the good ones of their race.  The rest of them are evil.  Archimonde, Kil'jaeden, and Velen were contemporaries.

The entire chain of things is indirectly their fault as well.  Kil'Jaeden only found the orc's world because he was chasing Velen's people who had taken a pitstop there.  Any other world, and Warcraft never happens.

[Delmania]

There's no evil Drenaei in game as far as I know. The only hostile ones are the ghosts around Achunidoun.

Draeni is what they call themselves, it means "exiled ones" in their native language.  They are actually eredar.

[Mattemeo]

Also, Grimtotems every time someone mentions Taurens being nice guys is kind of like going

Also, Dark Irons when someone mentions Dwarves
Also, Naga when someone mentions Night Elves
Also, Defias when someone mentions Humans

Yeah, yeah. But Grimtotems enslave and kill Sprite Darters. I mean, if you're looking for the embodiment of pure evil as displayed by the blackest of dark hearts, killing and enslaving Sprite Darters is it.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Sprite darters deserve to die.  It's as if care bears were real, you know you'd want to shoot them.

[ahoythematey]

I can sympathise with Grimtotems on this issue.  Sprite darters are a pain to mana-using classes; every faerie dragon killed is one step closer to a better world.

[Slyfeind]

There's no evil Drenaei in game as far as I know. The only hostile ones are the ghosts around Achunidoun.

There's some in the Swamp of Sorrows.

[Lantyssa]

You people are heartless monstrosities!  Stay away from my baby sprite darter.

[WindupAtheist]

Grimtotems nothing. Until the Horde turns upon the Forsaken and runs those genocidal Scourge-wannabes out of their faction, there can't really be any conversation. I can post all the "Yes they really are that bad!" lore yet again if anyone really wants to force me to. It'll be easy since I can just mine it from previous posts. Pissing and moaning over who's on who's land is pretty minor in comparison to the poor "misunderstood" Forsaken and their "DEATH TO THE LIVING! DEATH TO THE WORLD! MAHAHA!" routine.

[Rasix]

 

[kaid]

Seriously after the events at wrathgate even the horde should be clueing to the obvious that this plague that kills both the living has been worked on by the forsaken for a long time and the obvious end play for the forsaken is to kill everybody horde and alliance. It was hard enough to justify giving them the benefit of the doubt before wrathgate but now the horde should be about as agressive to the forsaken as the alliance are.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Grimtotems nothing. Until the Horde turns upon the Forsaken and runs those genocidal Scourge-wannabes out of their faction, there can't really be any conversation. I can post all the "Yes they really are that bad!" lore yet again if anyone really wants to force me to. It'll be easy since I can just mine it from previous posts. Pissing and moaning over who's on who's land is pretty minor in comparison to the poor "misunderstood" Forsaken and their "DEATH TO THE LIVING! DEATH TO THE WORLD! MAHAHA!" routine.

Technically it wouldn't be genocide. We don't want everyone dead, just UNdead.

It's not "Death to the living" it's "Death To the living" it's a gift, we'd like to share. 

[Lantyssa]

Depending on your viewpoint, it technically would be genocide.  It's just a kinder, gentler genocide.

If it'll let me roll a banshee, I'm okay with that.

[AutomaticZen]

You people are heartless monstrosities!  Stay away from my baby sprite darter.

Don't you have to farm Sprite Darters for that to drop?   

[kildorn]

You people are heartless monstrosities!  Stay away from my baby sprite darter.

Don't you have to farm Sprite Darters for that to drop?   

No, the alliance quest for a pet darter is saving them from the grimtotem.

[Lantyssa]

No.  I rescued a bunch from the Grimtotems and was given an egg to care for.  I only had to engage in Tauren slaughter.  Darnassus had a week long BBQ party.

[AutomaticZen]

UNFAIR!

[Ingmar]

I am pretty sure there are living evil draenei inside both Shadow Labyrinth and Auchenai Crypts.

[Sjofn]

I dunno if I would count naga as an OMG EVIL counter to night elves. Satyr are probably a better choice, although there are plain ol' night elves in the Twilight Hammer, so that would be the reeeeeeeal choice.

[Ingmar]

Plus Prince whats-his-ass in Dire Maul.

[Sjofn]

Plus most night elves are terminally stupid. Gnomes might've nuked themselves to try and kill off trogs, but they have yet to have a leader that thinks letting out someone like Illidan out was an awesome idea.

[Mattemeo]

You people are heartless monstrosities!  Stay away from my baby sprite darter.

Don't you have to farm Sprite Darters for that to drop?   

No, the alliance quest for a pet darter is saving them from the grimtotem.

UNFAIR!

I swear, if I played on a PvP server, I would actively defend the Sprite Darters in Feralas from the murderous Horde scum.
I don't mind that the Horde can now get Sprite Darters as pets, I do mind the way they get them.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I'll give them this, they are fashionable.

http://www.wowhead.com/?quest=2973