Breezing through the Old Content

I've been working on getting each class up to 90. So far, I've got my Paladin, Rogue, Death Knight, Warrior, and Shaman up there, with the Warlock at 89, the Mage at 87, and the Hunter about halfway through Jade Forest.

Of course, one of the classes that's going up there is the Monk (who will actually probably beat the Priest and the Druid to the top.) One thing I enjoy about each expansion is that you get an excuse to go level up through the old content. Obviously, one's goal is to get to the level cap and amassing pretty purple gear, but especially after the Cataclysm revamp (remember, whatever we thought of the endgame, the old-world revamp was an absolute triumph) it's cool to go through and see the world.

The Monk seemed to be designed to level quickly, as was the Pandaren race. With the potential for twice the rested experience bonus on top of the Monk's Peak of Serenity daily quests (not only giving a good chunk of xp but also giving you an hour-long buff that increases xp gained by 50% - which I think is multiplicative with rested experience) makes leveling up go insanely fast, even before you account for the fact that they reduce the xp needed to get to the previous level cap each expansion.

Blizzard has stated that they want the journey from level 1 to the level cap in every expansion to take roughly the same amount of time. With a rise in the level cap each time (necessary to reset rating-style stats, or else we'd all have 300% crit chance by now) that means that the journey from level 30 to 31 gets quicker every two years.

Mind you, this is a good thing. Making it take longer and longer to hit the level cap every expansion would lock out new players and strongly discourage leveling alts.

The sad consequence of this is that certain areas that were very fun to quest in back in the day can really blow by you. Granted, nothing is preventing you from just sticking around and finishing the quest chain, but if you try to be thorough, you're going to find yourself doing green and grey quests.

Beyond the quests, it also means that you're probably going to be skipping a lot of zones. This, again, is not necessarily a bad thing. Having the option to, say, not do Arathi Highlands (I'd love to know if they had plans to Cataclysm-ize it and what they might have done) is probably for the best.

Personally, though, I felt like I barely spent any time in Outland, and I'm shooting through Northrend like crap through a goose (as General Patton would say.) There are aspects of the game that I wouldn't mind spending more time with, like the cool, futuristic/alien feel to Outland or the grim, bitter cold of Northrend.

One of the traps that I think WoW tends to fall into is that there is so much focus placed on the current, new continent, that the rest of the game's history kind of falls by the wayside. Cataclysm was an attempt to make the rest of the world feel vital, but in practice, each zone felt extraordinarily isolated, even though they were nestled right between a bunch of zones we knew before.

Now, granted, Mists of Pandaria's story is all about exploring this new continent - a landmass that is in many ways more alien than Outland. But I think we could use more quests and events that took us back to old places.

And it looks like we will be getting at least a bit of that in 5.1. SPOILERS. Warlocks will have a special quest chain that takes them into a phased/instanced version of the Black Temple (which I imagine could help set up Illidan's resurrection, though don't quote me on that.) Horde players join Thrall in liberating the Echo Isles from Garrosh's Kor'kron (when Orcs of the actual Horde are attacking Thrall, you know shit has gone bad.)

What I hope Blizzard is coming to realize is that they have an amazingly large world to play with. Binding that world together with quests and events - reminding us that life is still going on in Thousand Needles and Duskwood - will make the game feel more exciting and enjoyable.