Though there are many qualities that link WoW's sole existing Hero Class, the Death Knight, with the upcoming second one, the Demon Hunter, probably the most important in terms of gameplay is simply that they both begin at a level higher than one, starting with a class-specific quest and starting area rather than a racial one (though given the narrow racial choices for Demon Hunters, it's almost a racial starting zone.)
Death Knights begin at level 55, and at least as the XP gains were balanced in Wrath, you would finish the starting experience at level 58 - which meant you could travel to Outland immediately thereafter. Notably - not Northrend, but rather Outland.
So Death Knights were not tossed directly into the new expansion's content (other than their own starting experience.) Death Knights would have to level up through Outland first, going through the previous expansion's content before they could link up with characters that were ready from the launch to head off to Northrend already. They didn't actually need to hit 70 - for some reason, in the first two expansions the idea was that as long as you were within two levels of the previous level cap, you were allowed to move on (I wonder if there are newer players who don't know that and hit 70 in Outland.)
The thing is, while it feels the slowest of any of the expansion-areas now, Outland was a big step up from vanilla's world quest design in terms of leveling and gear rewards. Seriously, when you got past level 40 or so before the Cataclysm revamp, you'd find yourself finishing off all the quests available at your level in a place like Tanaris before you'd hit a level high enough to get more quests there, which meant you'd have to kind of bounce between zones (very far away from one another) or just grind dungeons over and over.
So I think that the positioning of Death Knights was less about how appropriate it was to do Outland and more how nice it would be to skip the Old World.
The other, more flavorful reason, was that they wanted to establish that Death Knights - simply by nature of their selection by the Lich King and the power and training he imbued you with - could not be anything less than at the "great hero" status that other characters had achieved by the time they hit level 60 back in vanilla. If a level 60 character was a big enough deal to take down Nefarian or Ragnaros or freaking C'thun, then that was the kind of baseline for the level of hero that a Death Knight should be at.
Of course, Wrath was merely the second expansion, i.e. the third iteration of the game. Legion will be the sixth expansion - 7.0. The 55-level head start that Death Knights get now is actually not all that much of a head start anymore. Going through Outland, Northrend, the Cataclysm Zones, Pandaria, and Draenor, probably takes longer than the 1-55 climb, both because XP requirements were nerfed and the Cataclysm revamp made those zones so much quicker (and I think more fun) to level through.
The other major factor is that as more players have played longer, they're more likely to have leveled up multiple characters. By the end of BC, I really only had three characters at level 70 (I did get the Hunter up there before Wrath came out, but after 3.0.) By now, I don't even want to know how many toons I've taken through Outland and beyond. And the more characters you have that hit the level cap, the more characters you're likely to be able to take to that level in the subsequent expansion.
So while my Death Knight was really only the fifth character I'd take through Outland, if my Demon Hunter were to start at 55, he'd probably be the twenty-somethingth. And even if he had to go through Draenor, he'd be the twelfth to go through it (assuming I finish leveling my Druid and Priest before Legion lands.)
And then of course there's the level boost to take into account. It looks like Legion will be granting a level 100 boost much like Warlords' 90 one (a feature I think we're probably going to be seeing with every new expansion - it's not for me, but I don't begrudge people wanting to jump into or back into the game.) Even if Demon Hunters were to start at 55, it seems pretty clear that the vast majority of players would use their boost on the Demon Hunter, making the starting level irrelevant.
Now, you could do something where the Demon Hunter is only eligible to do the boost after finishing their starting experience - making sure that people got the lore and the simple-class-training you get from such an experience before diving into the deep end. Because I'm that sort of player, I'd actually love to take a Demon Hunter through some of the older expansion content (really mostly Northrend, though the Cataclysm stuff is actually quite nice when you know there's more stuff to come later,) so I'd actually probably be happy leveling a Demon Hunter up from 55.
But I think a much more likely scenario is that Demon Hunters will either start at 100 and get no experience until they're funneled into the same expansion content as everyone else, or they'll start at level 95 or 97 and earn those last couple levels doing their starting experience quests.
Incidentally, I don't know if I mentioned what we know of those quests on the blog yet. Apparently it starts with Illidan sending you on a mission right as the heroes in Burning Crusade are fighting their way through the Black Temple. He sends you to the world of Mar'duun, which had been where Sargeras locked up the demons he defeated before he turned evil, and then later came back and destroyed the world to unleash them as his Burning Legion. I am so, so, so excited to see Mar'duun.
With Demon Hunters starting almost at the same level as existing characters, they should be able to mix into the game nice and quickly. While I did see some Monks even when I was raiding Heart of Fear as current content, they had a really huge gap to close. Death Knights had a very good head start, but with the current philosophies, I really expect Demon Hunters to get thrown into the mix very quickly.
Plus, this would let them delay an entire expansion before they decide how they want to handle Glaives as a weapon type and what kind of weapons Demon Hunters should be able to wield.
No comments:
Post a Comment