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A Fair Look at WAR's PvE -- Is it Really Lacking?
aurick
Member Posts: 317
I've seen quite a few people dismiss WAR as having sub-par PvE. I'd like to address that by discussing the major elements of WAR's PvE and especially focusing on some of the common complaints like "so much has been cut from the game!" or "the PvE is so linear!" Hopefully it'll help out some people who are on the fence about whether or not they should try WAR.
Regarding the content that has been (at least temporarily) cut from the game: Frankly, if you hadn't known that the original design had called for it, you would never know that stuff was missing. The fact that there are a couple missing tank classes would be a big deal if it wasn't easy to get between racial pairings. But that's a snap to do. I'm a Warrior Priest (Empire) and have spent all but the first four levels of my adventuring career in the Elven lands. The folks I play with include a Swordmaster (the Elven tank) and a couple Ironbreakers (the Dwarf tank). The dwarfs have also been playing with us since about level 5. During the time I WAS in Empire lands, I saw both Ironbreakers and Swordmasters already at the very first Public Quest which is for levels 1-4. Nobody is being hampered by the lack of an Empire tank, and I would imagine the picture is very similar for the Dark Elves. By the way, it's very interesting but the Swordmaster is proving to be phenomenal at holding aggro. I've heard that the Ironbreaker eventually makes the best tank on the Order side, but both of them are doing quite well so far.
As for the cities, I don't miss the other four at all. They stated that they were cutting those in order to bring better polish to the two remaining cities. I've heard that the Inevitable City is awesome. I know that Altdorf is great. It looks vaguely similar to Stormwind, but like with the rest of WAR it is much grittier and more realistic. It actually feels like a city where lots of people are living. It's actually dangerous at low levels; especially if you venture into the slums or to the docks. Exploration is rewarded, but not always how you'd expect. I started walking into various houses and checking out doorways. At one point, I stumbled into a spot below street level that was filled with a very hostile cult in their mid 20's. I was level 7, and barely escaped with my life. Now I'm looking forward to going back once I'm more seasoned. The city is huge, with all kinds of nooks and crannies. It's going to be a blast to PvP in when Destruction eventually manages to lay siege to it.
I feel that the game is stronger without those cities. If there were three cities on each side, then for one of them to be captured by the enemy would be sort of a yawn. "We lost a city? Oh well. I'll just travel to the Dwarf capital for my banking and auction needs." The way it is now, capturing a capital will HURT the enemy and really complicate their lives. Having yours captured will make your own life harder. Cities are made more important by there only being one on each side. This is the ultimate in risk vs. reward. Players genuinely have something to lose if their city is captured. It'll take a lot of time and effort to build back up again. What's more, it's been designed so that all three fortresses on the enemy faction's side have to be captured and held before the city can be sieged. That has the effect of adding another tier to the whole RvR progression and makes city sieges an even bigger accomplishment.
Regarding Questing: Other than the PQ's, there's nothing revolutionary here. But I don't find the quests boring to do. They're well implemented, and there is NO shortage of them. You could quite literally play through the game six times (once for each race) without ever repeating a quest. There are a huge number of them, and I'm regularly having to drop some within the current racial pairing because I've outleveled them. I'm looking forward to eventually replaying the game to see all the dwarf and human content.
Also, the fact that quest drops are guaranteed with every kill is a blessing. That was one of my biggest pet peeves in WoW. Random quest drops absolutely suck (any Hunters from WoW remember the level 50 quest killing coursers?), and I'm thrilled that WAR doesn't have them.
The questing interface is really good, too. It's easy to track whatever you want. It's easy to open your Tome of Knowledge to the correct entry and get more information if you need it. Just mousing over a quest in the tracker also gives a tooltip with helpful info on completing the quest. The general area where a quest objective can be found is also shown on the map and minimap. Sometimes this is very precise, and sometimes it's more vague. So yes, sometimes you do still have to search a bit. But never in a frustrating way.
Some people have complained that WAR's questing is linear. Yes, this is true [i]on the surface[/i]. Your path will follow a road that winds its way from your starting area all the way to the end game. Everything you have to do is pretty close to that road. So if you stay within a single racial pairing, your path will be pretty linear. That's not too different from WoW, though. What happens in WoW when you finish an area's content? The game gives you a quest to go to another zone. The thing about WoW, though, is that all paths converge. By your 30's, your progression becomes pretty much exactly the same as everyone else's. That path just happens to be very disjointed in that it's constanlty making you travel to other continents and run through a bunch of stuff you've already seen so that you can get to the flight master in the newest place you've been sent to along your linear path.
This is where WAR becomes more free than WoW, because you can jump at any time over to one of the other racial pairings and quest there for a while. So you ALWAYS have three places that you can go, and every one of those places has all the content that you need to be able to advance your character. What that means is that there are dozens -- if not hundreds -- of paths that you could take to reach level 40, doing nothing but PvE. In other words, it's far less linear than WoW when you actually play it.
About the Tome of Knowledge: WAR has some of the best lore I've ever seen in an MMO. It's everywhere. Every quest has a big section of "flavor text" that is very, very well written and completely appropriate to the race that's giving you the quest. All quest text goes into your Tome. ToK unlocks often have even more lore, which combines with the quest lore to really steep everything you see and do in the rich Warhammer universe.
There are also a lot of easter eggs. Exploration is rewarded. In fact, every racial pairing has multiple hidden bosses. Some of them are very hard to discover, requiring determination to get to a place that doesn't seem like it would be possible to reach. Others require the completion of puzzles to open a door or otherwise access the boss. Some of these bosses would be a tough challenge to solo. Others are impossible. In a cave within tier 1 High Elf lands I was tab-targetting my enemies and accidentally found myself locked onto one of these bosses. Looking at the map, I saw a part of the cave that has no apparent entry, and I'm guessing that the boss is there. But get this: He's level 40, and has a skull under his portrait. I'm guessing that means he requires a max-level war band to kill. You can count on me being back to figure out the way in once my guildmates and I have gotten to that level.
Every Tome unlock gives you experience. Some unlocks give you titles. Others unlock more things to do. A few even launch quests. And while you're out questing in the world, it's a good idea to always keep your eyes open. You never know what will give you a quest. At one point I was fighting mobs in a public quest next to a ship. By the base of the gang plank there was a stack of crates, and it turned out I could interact with a scroll on them that gave me a quest. For the heck of it I also went onto the ship, and up in the stern I discovered a chest that gave me yet another quest. I've found stuff like this everywhere, and I can only imagine how much of it I have missed along the way.
Some Tome unlocks also give you tactics, which then get incorporated into your combat strategies. Your character has five tactics load outs, of three tactics each. Every load out has a slot for a core tactic (which you get from level training), an RvR tactic (which you get from PvP leveling), and a Tome tactic (which you get from tome unlocks). So yes, exploration and immersion in the world get rewarded in ways that genuinely benefit your character.
Other Tome unlocks grant trophies, which can then be equipped on your character and are able to be seen by everyone. There are a HUGE number of these that can be had. Each capital city has a library, and the NPC's in there will allow you to redeem specific unlocks for trophies. It's worth a visit just to see how many are available. I was shocked.
In Conclusion: My take on WAR's PvE is that there's not much that's revolutionary (mostly the PQ's and the Tome), but that's really fine with me. At launch, WoW had NOTHING except PvE to do and yet it had far less PvE content than WAR does. Sure, WoW had more zones. Big whoop. There was also a rediculous amount of running around wasting your time. There were big dead zones that left you with no options other than to grind meaningless mobs for a while. WAR has more PvE, by far.
WAR gives better immersion and has better storytelling. It also has the scenarios, world RvR, guild levels with rewards, city levels with content (like dungeons and raids) that unlocks with each city rank, etc. When you add it all up, WAR has more at launch than WoW did, and it delivers that with more polish and fewer serious bugs than WoW did at the same point in its development. I believe that WAR has the potential to become a serious threat to WoW. Especially if Mythic releases new content at a faster pace than Blizzard does. Given how much there already is at the start, and Mythic's track record with expansions and updates for DAoC, there's a serious game here.
Keep in mind that through this whole wall of text (sorry, folks!) I've pretty much just talked about PvE. I should mention real quick that I used to be a PvP hater. WAR has changed that for me as well, and I genuinely enjoy the various RvR activities that I can jump into at any time. They're meaningful, balanced, and fun. They also complement the PvE in a very positive way, adding to the whole value of WAR.
People just need to give up their preconceived ideas and give the game an honest chance. I for one was very skeptical about WAR when I first heard about it. In fact, I was wildly uninterested. My chance to enter beta came at a point shortly after I'd gotten fed up with Age of Conan, and I decided to check out WAR because I was bored and looking for something else to do other than going back to WoW and leveling yet another character up to 70. What I've found is a game that actually gets deeper the longer I play and the more I discover. Every one of my guildmates is raving about how they're having more fun than they did with WoW.
Comments
WoW had big dead zones at launch?
You should try playing WoW sometime, you might like it.
Yeah lets not forget, most people are on the first couple levels... Im sure if you judged World of Warcrafts first couple of levels places (ESPECIALLY ORCS AND TROLLS, HOW BORING!) people would say the same thing
The PvE game is not anything spectacularly different. Normal questing progression is pretty standard stuff thats very similar to wow. It feels more linear then wow but I'd say the quality is similar. PQ quests are something unique and are a lot of fun. Some of them seem a bit too hard but generally they have two aspects. 1. you kill stuff and get infamy which lets you choose a very nice item. Infamy is kinda like faction you get from killing mobs and completing stages of the public quest. It is shared for groups and for anyone that contributes to the kill. 2. If you complete the quest there are several loot bags that are handed out to people that were involved in the final boss fight. These bags have a static set of loot choices which are also generally nice upgrades.
One thing that is lacking in the game are dungeons. So far I've seen no dungeons other then a few in the city. I'm only lvl 13 so I've only run around the first two tiers. Maybe this will change as I expore more. I think that PQ areas are maybe wars equiv for dungeons... I did find some caves in the dwarven area but when I'm thinking of dungeons I'm thinking instanced, group oriented, etc.... There was one in the sewers of the city but thats the only one so far.
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Ethion
WoW had big dead zones at launch?
You should try playing WoW sometime, you might like it.
Just for the record: I HAVE played WoW. A lot. In fact, I got into it at the tail end of beta and played that game almost exclusively for a good 3 or 4 years. I was one of the founders of what became the largest and oldest guild on our server. Then several of us changed servers to play Horde. All told, I have six level 70 characters.
Yes, I've played WoW. A lot.
And yes, WoW had content dead zones at launch. By "zones" I'm referring to ranges within the leveling progression. Points in your career where you ran out of quests and had to grind for a while. (Although in fairness, Deadwind Pass is a physical zone and at launch it had nothing. Just a few max level mobs with no loot. Silithus wasn't much better either, if you'll recall.)
Anyway, remember Dustwallow Marsh before they revamped it with more quests and a better layout? Not much going on, and if you were smart you spent half your time in that zone killing EVERYTHING as you traveled to and from your quest objectives. Otherwise, you'd finish the quests and still not be high enough level for the next quest content.
For that matter, anyone who's ever read Joanna's Leveling Guide knows how the expert on WoW leveling recommends certain places for certain points in your career where you grind random mobs the last stretch of the distance to your next level. Level 39, for example, is almost all grinding in that guide.
Today it's a bit of a different story. You can actually skip entire zones and still get to max level without having to grind. In fact, I now skip Stranglethorn Vale entirely because it's pure misery on a PvP server. But WoW didn't accomplish that by adding more content. They accomplished it by reducing the amount of XP that's required to level. In other words, WoW cheated.
What? You can't seriously expect us to believe that. The zones are so linear, you don't have much of a choice but to continue questing in a straight line.
"Well you can just go to a different pairing."
You could say the same for WoW. There's 4 different starting areas for each faction. Wait, that's 2 more than WAR! *gasp*
"Well, at least I don't have to backtrack."
Backtracking is realistic. When you go to an area for a quest, and all that's there is a few trees and a dozen spawns of the mob you've been sent to kill, you can't tell me that's not boring. WoW may reuse the same area, but at least you sort of get the feeling that it's a living, breathing zone and not just a container for XP waiting to be harvested.
I know WoW is not the perfect example of an MMO, but saying WAR has more PvE (or even just more interesting PvE) is just plain wrong.
What? You can't seriously expect us to believe that. The zones are so linear, you don't have much of a choice but to continue questing in a straight line.
"Well you can just go to a different pairing."
You could say the same for WoW. There's 4 different starting areas for each faction. Wait, that's 2 more than WAR! *gasp*
"Well, at least I don't have to backtrack."
Backtracking is realistic. When you go to an area for a quest, and all that's there is a few trees and a dozen spawns of the mob you've been sent to kill, you can't tell me that's not boring. WoW may reuse the same area, but at least you sort of get the feeling that it's a living, breathing zone and not just a container for XP waiting to be harvested.
I know WoW is not the perfect example of an MMO, but saying WAR has more PvE (or even just more interesting PvE) is just plain wrong.
Yes lets compare a game thats had an expansion to a game thats brand new. Personally half of WoW's areas could be cut out of the game and no one would notice. The game is too spread out (has always been too spread out since the day of Launch) and there's little reason to go to some areas unless you want to have some personal satisfaction in doing all the quests. While everyone bitches that WAR's map is linear if you actually place all the areas on a geographic map of the warhammer world its rather spread out and there's tons of areas that are NOT in the game which means expansios will not only have the chance of a new race but outward expansion of the Tiers so there's more places to go.
The way WAR is set up makes alot of sense otherwise we'd have to flight path everywhere or have alot of empty zones or alot of Crap worthless zones (honestly half the zones in WoW are shitty and were almost always empty and since their expansion spread you even FURTHER away from those areas they're even MORE empty.) WAR is designed to keep people together since community is important..kinda hard to have community if your off in an empty zone soloing.
Personally I think WoW's pve is crap you end up killing dozens of creatures to get 5 items..atleast in WAR i only kill 5 creatures and always get the item. WAR"s pve is better and far funnier to me than WoW's ever was. WoW simply wrote a crap little story that had nothing to do with anything going on in the world and said "go kill" atleast in WAR we get quests that ask us to open shaking talking barrels kill the dwarf inside only to later on be the person who is filling the barrels and shoving them off a giant stone wall. All the quests in some way relate to the WAR even if its funny stuff like beating up another goblin because he stole an orc's choppa. No namby pampy pie & mail delivery quests here.
Granted, Warhammer does have a lot of quests but a lot of them are the typical boring and generic "fetch A, go to B". The public quests are quite fun but they seem to have a pattern of "kill 120 minor enemies, kill 10 champions, kill hero". I'm not really dissapointed because I didn't really expect much here.
That said, the PvP/RvR is excellent and exceeds my expectations. I play warhammer strictly for pvp, if they can carry on expanding on that i will be happy.
Very well written, even your rebuttal about WoW was very clear and truthful. I hope this helps people have a little different perspective on what WAR is and what is tries to do.
Addition, to the guy above, what sort of quests do you want? I been doing similar questions like that since I was playing Nintendo, its never once bothered me.
Yes, let's. Part of the problem with the WAR fanbois is that they insist on comparing WAR to WoW as it was 4 years ago. I'm not playing WoW 4 years ago, I'm playing it now.
Regardless, WoW then was better than WAR is now, so it's a moot argument.
Excellent first post, I learned a few things as well.
Good read! Looking forward in playing the game tonight.
My brand new bloggity blog.
WoW had big dead zones at launch?
You should try playing WoW sometime, you might like it.
Just for the record: I HAVE played WoW. A lot. In fact, I got into it at the tail end of beta and played that game almost exclusively for a good 3 or 4 years. I was one of the founders of what became the largest and oldest guild on our server. Then several of us changed servers to play Horde. All told, I have six level 70 characters.
Yes, I've played WoW. A lot.
And yes, WoW had content dead zones at launch. By "zones" I'm referring to ranges within the leveling progression. Points in your career where you ran out of quests and had to grind for a while. (Although in fairness, Deadwind Pass is a physical zone and at launch it had nothing. Just a few max level mobs with no loot. Silithus wasn't much better either, if you'll recall.)
Anyway, remember Dustwallow Marsh before they revamped it with more quests and a better layout? Not much going on, and if you were smart you spent half your time in that zone killing EVERYTHING as you traveled to and from your quest objectives. Otherwise, you'd finish the quests and still not be high enough level for the next quest content.
For that matter, anyone who's ever read Joanna's Leveling Guide knows how the expert on WoW leveling recommends certain places for certain points in your career where you grind random mobs the last stretch of the distance to your next level. Level 39, for example, is almost all grinding in that guide.
Today it's a bit of a different story. You can actually skip entire zones and still get to max level without having to grind. In fact, I now skip Stranglethorn Vale entirely because it's pure misery on a PvP server. But WoW didn't accomplish that by adding more content. They accomplished it by reducing the amount of XP that's required to level. In other words, WoW cheated.
from level 29-40 on Alliance side was pure misery zones with 2-3 quests all scattered everywhere.
They required a ton of traveling and it was better to just grind.
For horde side it was after level 22 i believe, quests were scattered in stone talon, ashenvale and Hillsbrad foothills, it sucked ass to level hode in those zones. I remember just staying in hills brad grinding until mobs turned green.
I think WoW fanbois forget how wow used to be, or maybe they just started playing when Tbc released.
Playing: Nothing
Looking forward to: Nothing
What? You can't seriously expect us to believe that. The zones are so linear, you don't have much of a choice but to continue questing in a straight line.
"Well you can just go to a different pairing."
You could say the same for WoW. There's 4 different starting areas for each faction. Wait, that's 2 more than WAR! *gasp*
"Well, at least I don't have to backtrack."
Backtracking is realistic. When you go to an area for a quest, and all that's there is a few trees and a dozen spawns of the mob you've been sent to kill, you can't tell me that's not boring. WoW may reuse the same area, but at least you sort of get the feeling that it's a living, breathing zone and not just a container for XP waiting to be harvested.
I know WoW is not the perfect example of an MMO, but saying WAR has more PvE (or even just more interesting PvE) is just plain wrong.
Read better next time. He's talking about zones PAST the starting areas.
In WOW every player ends up questing in STV from his 30's, on to Tanaris, WPL, etc, etc. I'm not even talking about Outlands which is also pretty much linairy quest progress. The OP is stating that WAR has a Tanaris and an STV for EACH of the racial pairings. So if you level your second char you are able to do so without repeating a single quest you did with your first char which sounds just great! I always hated to repeat some of the standard quest content in mmo's and WAR got rid of that which is just plain excellent in my opinion.
My brand new bloggity blog.
What? You can't seriously expect us to believe that. The zones are so linear, you don't have much of a choice but to continue questing in a straight line.
"Well you can just go to a different pairing."
You could say the same for WoW. There's 4 different starting areas for each faction. Wait, that's 2 more than WAR! *gasp*
"Well, at least I don't have to backtrack."
Backtracking is realistic. When you go to an area for a quest, and all that's there is a few trees and a dozen spawns of the mob you've been sent to kill, you can't tell me that's not boring. WoW may reuse the same area, but at least you sort of get the feeling that it's a living, breathing zone and not just a container for XP waiting to be harvested.
I know WoW is not the perfect example of an MMO, but saying WAR has more PvE (or even just more interesting PvE) is just plain wrong.
So is permadeath. Do you want that as well? Reread what he said to start. Then if you know anything about WAR, which it doesn't seem you do, then you can argue both sides. Otherwise, you're making yourself look pretty bad.
Yes, let's. Part of the problem with the WAR fanbois is that they insist on comparing WAR to WoW as it was 4 years ago. I'm not playing WoW 4 years ago, I'm playing it now.
Regardless, WoW then was better than WAR is now, so it's a moot argument.
Maybe to you it was...but to me its not. I dont like compareing the two games as their core designs are inherently different. WoW can burn in hell for all I honestly care. I never liked the game I kept trying to play it at friends requests only to just finally temporarily retire from MMOS and play something else. I'm playing WAR and having a blast.
I'm not a fanbois I'm simply enjoying a game thats fun and appeals to me AND i dont ahve to pve raid thank god in order to accomplish completenss in the game.
What? You can't seriously expect us to believe that. The zones are so linear, you don't have much of a choice but to continue questing in a straight line.
"Well you can just go to a different pairing."
You could say the same for WoW. There's 4 different starting areas for each faction. Wait, that's 2 more than WAR! *gasp*
"Well, at least I don't have to backtrack."
Backtracking is realistic. When you go to an area for a quest, and all that's there is a few trees and a dozen spawns of the mob you've been sent to kill, you can't tell me that's not boring. WoW may reuse the same area, but at least you sort of get the feeling that it's a living, breathing zone and not just a container for XP waiting to be harvested.
I know WoW is not the perfect example of an MMO, but saying WAR has more PvE (or even just more interesting PvE) is just plain wrong.
Read better next time. He's talking about zones PAST the starting areas.
In WOW every player ends up questing in STV from his 30's, on to Tanaris, WPL, etc, etc. I'm not even talking about Outlands which is also pretty much linairy quest progress. The OP is stating that WAR has a Tanaris and an STV for EACH of the racial pairings. So if you level your second char you are able to do so without repeating a single quest you did with your first char which sounds just great! I always hated to repeat some of the standard quest content in mmo's and WAR got rid of that which is just plain excellent in my opinion.
Your forgetting Desolace, Hillsbrad Foothills, Arathi Highlands, Shimmering Flats, Swamp of Sorrows. Do I need to go on? :P
There are PQ's that deviate from this model and they're far harder to complete. Everyone thats skipping the regular PvE quests just ends up flocking to the ones they see along the roads but inside mountains & along shore lines there's other ones. Generally in the second chapter of every Tier you have 2 to 3 PQ's to choose from.
By far the hardest Tier 1 I've ever seen is in chapter 2 or 3 of the Chaos area. It starts out simple kill 100 peasants then it asks you to burn 25 buildings with in x time. THe only problem is champion level Fire Brigades wander alogn and put the fires out so you not only need people burning the buildings but people to fight the champions so the timer doesnt' run out.
there never was an empty space in wow where you would need to grind.. there were always tons of quest.. even before it was made easer.. yes i did play wow back in betas.. it was filled then too..
what pve to most players is . thats raiding. .thats high end content pve.. not 1-40/xxx lvling up..
aoc is pve game.. there is noone who could disagree even if it lacks lots of quests from some point in game..
there is not a single raid dungeon in war .. is there?
One thing that I enjoy about WAR's PvE is that it's essentially designed to get you involved with the RvR content as you move along. The quest progression naturally flows to the get actively involved in the PQ and in RvR in order to accomplish the goal.
Also, there is WAY more content to offer in the future for WAR. Considering there is what, 25 years of history in the Warhammer franchise, there is a steady stream of content to pull from as the game expands.
Most of those areas are always 'empty' or have 3 people in the area...whats the poitn of the world being massive if there's no one in the zones? Atleast WAR is set up to keep everyone together so the world feels like it should...busy hectic and alive.
Arathi Highlands I love that area but I'd get dead bored hoping people weould come along to quest there..same thing with Swamp of Sorrows and especially Shimmering Flats. I always ended up just skipping those zones entirely since there was little reason to go there.
They are essentially filled with some quest but completely 'empty space' as far as community action. WoW is not a community based game until end game..which is a shame.
He probably doesn't read the quest text... which is fine, sometimes I don't. Games with a rich background in lore (Warhammer, LoTRO), reading the text makes doing and completing the quests that much more enjoyable. So killing 5 boars or fetching some goblin's axe may not be all that bad if you are really into the PVE.
The discussion is about leveling paths, which includes the starting areas. Starting areas were mentioned, perhaps more than once, in his analysis of WAR vs WoW. Don't go around saying stupid crap like "read better next time" unless you know what the discussion is about.
Wrong again. There's any number of different zones you can go to at various levels and quest, and there are "lead" quests that take you to these zones should you decide to quest there. In fact, having leveled multiple 70s, I can say without doubt that I have skipped many zones entirely and still leveled to cap without grinding.
This whole debate is pointless though, since WAR isn't actually designed to have multiple zones to level through PvE. You're not really intended to level through PvE at all. I'm rather surprised you guys are so busy painting WoW with whatever lies you can come up with that you missed this single, obvious truth. WAR isn't supposed to have more PvE content, and it doesn't.
You can consider all of the keeps and the final capitals to be raid dungeons. You get items from them as well as RR. While they aren't dungeons one does not need to be hidden underground to have a "raid".
_______
|___
\_______/
=
|X| \*........*/ |X|
|X|_________|X|
You wouldn't understand
WoW had big dead zones at launch?
You should try playing WoW sometime, you might like it.
Just for the record: I HAVE played WoW. A lot. In fact, I got into it at the tail end of beta and played that game almost exclusively for a good 3 or 4 years. I was one of the founders of what became the largest and oldest guild on our server. Then several of us changed servers to play Horde. All told, I have six level 70 characters.
Yes, I've played WoW. A lot.
And yes, WoW had content dead zones at launch. By "zones" I'm referring to ranges within the leveling progression. Points in your career where you ran out of quests and had to grind for a while. (Although in fairness, Deadwind Pass is a physical zone and at launch it had nothing. Just a few max level mobs with no loot. Silithus wasn't much better either, if you'll recall.)
Anyway, remember Dustwallow Marsh before they revamped it with more quests and a better layout? Not much going on, and if you were smart you spent half your time in that zone killing EVERYTHING as you traveled to and from your quest objectives. Otherwise, you'd finish the quests and still not be high enough level for the next quest content.
For that matter, anyone who's ever read Joanna's Leveling Guide knows how the expert on WoW leveling recommends certain places for certain points in your career where you grind random mobs the last stretch of the distance to your next level. Level 39, for example, is almost all grinding in that guide.
Today it's a bit of a different story. You can actually skip entire zones and still get to max level without having to grind. In fact, I now skip Stranglethorn Vale entirely because it's pure misery on a PvP server. But WoW didn't accomplish that by adding more content. They accomplished it by reducing the amount of XP that's required to level. In other words, WoW cheated.
from level 29-40 on Alliance side was pure misery zones with 2-3 quests all scattered everywhere.
They required a ton of traveling and it was better to just grind.
For horde side it was after level 22 i believe, quests were scattered in stone talon, ashenvale and Hillsbrad foothills, it sucked ass to level hode in those zones. I remember just staying in hills brad grinding until mobs turned green.
I think WoW fanbois forget how wow used to be, or maybe they just started playing when Tbc released.
Total nonsense, there was no lack of quests for any level at launch...
lvl29-40... Did you try STV, one of the largest zones and quests in the game? seriously this kinda defeat all your points.Level 22 as horde, again, tonnes of quests in the Barens and Arathi. Level 39... again tonnes of quests in tanaris/feralas all the way until 40-45. Again multiple zones to try and dungeons to run.
The only Zones that have been added with quests since launch are Dustwallow and Silithius (Deadwind pass as it's name suggests, is pretty much dead and only Kara was added to it), but even there at high level you have Western and eastern plaguelands, Felwood, Winterspring, burning stepees, i mean how on earth can you say there was lack of quests...
The discussion is about leveling paths, which includes the starting areas. Starting areas were mentioned, perhaps more than once, in his analysis of WAR vs WoW. Don't go around saying stupid crap like "read better next time" unless you know what the discussion is about.
Wrong again. There's any number of different zones you can go to at various levels and quest, and there are "lead" quests that take you to these zones should you decide to quest there. In fact, having leveled multiple 70s, I can say without doubt that I have skipped many zones entirely and still leveled to cap without grinding.
This whole debate is pointless though, since WAR isn't actually designed to have multiple zones to level through PvE. You're not really intended to level through PvE at all. I'm rather surprised you guys are so busy painting WoW with whatever lies you can come up with that you missed this single, obvious truth. WAR isn't supposed to have more PvE content, and it doesn't.
He clearly said you can start different paths in WoW but once you geto in the 20-30s everyone takes the same path, making the other zones useless and unused. You keep NOT listening and refuse to read what he says and then respond in blind anger. It's getting tiring.
WAR is designed to have fun, read what the developers say about the game. The OP was stating that people like you, that make up this "isn't supposed to have PvE and doesn't!" lies, are wrong. It's clear, you know WoW... you don't know much about this game so please stop trying so hard.
Most of those areas are always 'empty' or have 3 people in the area...whats the poitn of the world being massive if there's no one in the zones? Atleast WAR is set up to keep everyone together so the world feels like it should...busy hectic and alive.
Arathi Highlands I love that area but I'd get dead bored hoping people weould come along to quest there..same thing with Swamp of Sorrows and especially Shimmering Flats. I always ended up just skipping those zones entirely since there was little reason to go there.
They are essentially filled with some quest but completely 'empty space' as far as community action. WoW is not a community based game until end game..which is a shame.
To be fair, that happens in every MMO I've played and, I'll predict, it'll happen in WAR as well.
It's not a flaw in the game so much as it is a result of human nature. Though from a certain perspective you could see it as a flaw in the design of some areas I suppose.
Basically, over time, as players learn the game, learn the areas and start to discover which provide:
- The fastest leveling
- The best rewards
- Named or otherwise "raid-type" bosses with the best drops
- The most people (which is a self-perpetuating thing)
They will begin to gravitate to those areas and leave the others abandoned as "useless"
The third point, about "the most people" is self-perpetuating because when people see more people going to one spot rather than others, it becomes known as "where you're supposed to go", and so everyone follows-suit. It's a complete flock mentality, but that's people for you; forever looking for the easiest/most obvious path.
I've seen it in WoW, in FFXI, in EQ2, AO... any MMO I've played. It's horrible in FFXI, where some people are so brain-washed they'll call you a complete idiot if you even suggest that it's *possible* to level outside of those areas - even in the face of proof that they are viable and, in fact, were used quite alot in the past.
It's not that the areas are useless... It's just that they're unused.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops