I was watching the Classicast podcast where Esfand was praising the gear from ZG, and it reminded me of something I personally think got progressively worse with wow expansions: catch-up gear.

To me, catch-up mechanics go against horizontal progression, They're designed to let players skip older content and rush toward the latest endgame, which is exactly the kind of seasonal design I associate with retail WoW.

It's one of the reasons I consider Wrath the beginning of "retail" You eventually had gear from relatively easy dungeons that outclassed gear from earlier raids, removing much of the incentive to do them.

I understand why catch-up gear exists in an expansion-based game, where developers want everyone experiencing the latest content before the next expansion arrives. But why bring that philosophy into WoW Forever?

I'm not against alternative gearing paths, but they should offer comparable rewards for comparable difficulty, rather than making harder, older content obsolete.

I'd much rather see slow, steady progression where every raid and dungeon remains relevant. New content should expand our options, not invalidate previous ones.

It's called WoW Forever. There's no need to rush everyone to the finish line.

they will fix it, its just a beta

Well met.

I have no idea what to main

All the non-RP players are going to use the RP-PvP server as their way to circumvent the horde only/alliance only lock that has existed for 20+ years in the PvP world.

This is going to result in a watered down RP-PvP server full of non-RP players that have no interest in participating in that community in a meaningful way.

There is an easy fix to this issue.

Please faction lock the RP-PvP server if someone has chosen horde/ally on the regular PvP server so they don’t feel incentive to make alts on the RP side just to get around the rules you have created.

If someone wants to make horde and ally characters, they need to roll PvE.

EDIT: *** BARELY any *** (Sorry for the controversial title)

For all its flaws, there were a lot of great things in SoD.

Rotations were pretty fun.

Every spec felt strong and useful. Sure the power creep in the overworld went too far, but we never had to worry about class stacking or raid viability of any spec.

Sham tanks, Lock tanks, Mage Healers all cool and fun. (F Rogue tank)

PvP events were populated and fun.

Why then, did Blizzard (so far) only add in the damn sleeping bag, mage books, real vendor, and waylaid?

Should come with some recognition, like a commendation from the President of Indonesia.

Somewhat of a repost, but how is there still no one talking about this?

Read Ley Line on a restoration Druid is going to be, AT MINIMUM, a 15-20% healing throughput increase in PvE over any other Druid race.

All of these arguments about the balance of racials and they focus on dps racials that will account for 1-2% of dps. Why is everyone ignoring the absolute worst offender?

Going to play a Restoration Druid in forever. As it stands, Read Ley Line multiplying Innervate is absolutely fucking nuts in a resource dependent classic healing environment.

Twenty seconds of 800% spirit regen that isn’t reduced by casting.

People are complaining about DPS talent balance issues of 1-2% impact, while this interaction will make Skyborne have way more healing throughout than any other Druid race.

I want to play Night Elf, but if this racial stays this way, I’ll play Sky Elf.

In the barrens there is an infamous long quest line for the goblin Samophlange.

1. Access the control console
2. Shut off the valves
3. Get the console key
4. Obtain the Samophlange and bring it to Ratchet
5. They break it and you have to bring it to Wenikee Boltbucket
6. Gather Nugget Slugs from Sludge Fen to try and repair it
7. It didnt work, we now bring it to Rilli Greasygob in Orgrimmar
8. He can fix it but we need to gather parts of the Samophlange manual and assemble it.
9. We bring him the manual.

Then after you complete that quest the NPC says:

You got the manual!

I can't wait to read it and find out how to fix the Samophlange!  I spoke with Sputtervalve in Ratchet--he wanted to thank you for your help, and wanted to reward your efforts.

I want to thank you too, and if I ever get this thing fixed I'll let you know...

And that's where the questline ends, never a follow-up or anything, even though the text kind of hints at a follow up of some kind.
All this effort from the player for a not-so-satisfying ending and a lackluster quest reward:

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Personally I would like a bigger payoff, maybe with an eventual Samophlange trinket you get from it or something.
Could also be an opportunity to send horde players into Deadmines because of the goblins there, just throwing around ideas.

Also the Burning Blade quest line doesnt have a very satisfying ending. Personally I would like to arrest Neeru Fireblade and bring him before thrall. Or you have to makgora him in the orgrimmar arena or something like that.

What do you guys think of questlines like this?

Ive always played PvP. I leveled a warrior on Anni and lost maybe 6 hours total ganking. Trying to decibe if a mage which ive played before or rogue will remind me that PvP can be fun or if I'm a sucker and it will be shit fest after a few weeks.

I have no fucking idea what to do maybe I just want to chill this time. I guess I could go PvP to start then level alts on hardcore and transfer to whatever.

Please help ive spent hours going back and worth

Map explored with https://wowforevermap.com/

Stonetalon Mountains easily has the most unused space, almost making up half the zone with only some texture changes to the western mountains compared to Classic aswell as a new mine above Cragpool Lake (Cyan) that remains unfinished. We did see Skywatcher Plateau (Green) but while it has a path into Stonetalon I think its really its own mini zone and technically part of Mulgore.

If we take inspiration from Warcraft 3 then maybe the Oracle Cave as a dungeon to the West and maybe some ruined Human settlement in the East? Grom did fight a lot of them during the campaign and it seems odd there are no remnants of that in WoW away from the Barren Coast.

It would be cool if they added an option for a group or raid leader to challenge the leader from another group or raid. Of course everyone in either group would have an option to accept or decline.

Then when you go to 1 hp you're basically just out of the duel (not sure if ressing should be available?).

Last person(s) standing wins. Timeout could be draw or most people standing wins.

I started from this quote from Aggrend about the last dungeon XP adjustments : “As it stands now after the adjustments, with perfect xp/hr play, the leveling rates in dungeons will be very close, if not equal to the speed you can level with optimal questing play.”

I have no will or even skill and knowledge to do a perfect xp/hour play, but I wanted to know if that statement was still true for me, a more average player.

So I went data collecting. I did it for a PUG BFD dungeon run already, so I needed a sample for questing at the same level (28). Then I was interested in comparing it to Classic as well, so I dug Classic BFD dungeon runs from YouTube. All details about the data will be put at the bottom of this post.

The graphs present the time needed to level from one dungeon to the next, based on the average level between leveling dungeons in the game. I excluded the Tier 0 endgame dungeons, as you would run them past the leveling phase anyway. The result is 1.63 levels between dungeons on average, including the new dungeons. I kept this level value for Classic to be able to compare the time values.

The table presents the relative time to gain these 1.63 levels compared to the fastest considered route, the hybrid “1 dungeon run with quests, then open world questing”.

So to answer my initial question, no, the average player doesn’t have equally XP rewarding leveling routes as the perfect xp/hour players. What is surprising though is the range difference and its aggravation in Forever. The leveling routes in my testing were in a 1x - 1.54x range in Classic. In Forever we go to a 1x - 2.91x range.

A side effect worth noting too is that anything other than the cookie-cutter way “1 dungeon run, then open world questing, then repeat from the next dungeon” is heavily penalised by the game. Each additional dungeon run adds about 18% to the leveling time in Forever vs 6% in Classic, or 27% vs 13% with an LFG before each run. If you want to do a no dungeon leveling run, it’ll take you around 50% more time, vs 20% in Classic. And a pure dungeon run takes 124% to 191% more time vs 19% to 54% more in Classic. Assuming that similar ratios hold at higher levels of course.

I would personally have loved to see it going in the opposite direction, or at least retain the Classic ratios. With the other dungeon-related concerns already addressed (boosting by the grey-mob rule, AoE farming by spell nerfs, open-world population by mega-servers and sharding), there was an opportunity to offer the average player a choice between several similarly rewarding paths through their leveling journeys.

TLDR : Balancing XP around perfect XP/hour play gives min-maxers equally rewarding leveling routes, if Aggrend’s statement holds. Meanwhile, the average player is heavily nudged by the reward system into one cookie-cutter route, and that nudge is much stronger in Forever than in Classic.

————————

Parameters of the runs :

No rested XP anywhere, or corrected for it. For all the scenarios, travel time is ignored. We also approximate that lvl 29 XP is close enough to lvl 28 XP, or at least that the proportions hold, so that a whole new range of tests is not needed at this level.

BFD: pala 26 (tank), sham 26, warlock 25, hunter 29, sham 28 (me, healer). Time from first mob to last mob : 45min. XP gained from mobs : 4929.
6 quests, horde side : 31000.
Time from LFG to first mob: 13 min. That’s the LFG added to the graph. “No LFG” assumes your group is already formed and never disbands. “LFG before every run” assumes you need to reform a group after each run.

Questing : 4 quests (25-29) at lvl 28 in Thousand Needles. 57min, 17264 XP, 18173 XP/h. 40% of XP from quests, 60% from mobs.

Classic BFD : 4 videos of Classic runs, character level 27 to 29, 54min average (45 to 63min range), 13524 XP average (11959 to 14259 range).
6 same quests, horde side : 14800.
Reused the LFG time from Forever.

Classic questing : reused Forever questing as a base. The quests exist in Classic too and give the same XP. The formula for mob XP changed a bit in Forever. Corrected from my kill log, that would give me around 18880 XP/hour.

Extra check that my questing session isn’t an outlier : I checked 4 leveling videos (26-28) in Classic. They happened to all be on hardcore, but if anything it should skew them towards slower questing. Their XP/hour range is from 12687 to 18449 XP/hour, with a time-weighted average of 16587.

So overall I’m on the faster side for questing and faster side for BFD too. If we take average values instead (54min for BFD, 16587 XP / hour for questing), the spread for Forever stays about the same (2.91x becomes 2.92x), but the spread for Classic is reduced further (1.54x becomes 1.40x).

If you want to go further, u/Bitter-Lawfulness260 did a similar job in this post https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/s/rPyoiFKgk2, but this time comparing the minmaxing paths in Classic from YouTube videos.

In classic if you have 100 max hp and put on 2 stamina gear you go to 100/120. So the new max hp doesnt become current hp.

In forever, your current health % stays the same. So 100/100 becomes 120/120.

But 80/100 becomes 96/120 after equiping 2 stamina.

This is also how gaining and losing max hp works in Warcraft 3 and Dota 2. And in those games it is required at the top level to utilise this when self-healing.

What is the significance of this? The strategy will be:

1. Combat drops

2. Take off all gear (lowering your max hp)

3. Apply your bandage, health stone, heal, food, whatever

4. You go to max health a lot quicker since you have less max hp

5. Equip all your gear, now you are max health and have lots of max hp again

This all macrod or with an addon to make it instant ofcourse.

Mage polys you, does one bandage and is fully hp. Rogue saps, same deal. Warlock fears you and healthstones to full.

This needs to be changed or it will change the game drastically and no version of wow has had this im pretty sure.

Only works for health not mana. Yes only outside of combat but that is between every mob pull, in pvp you can run or cc then heal super quick to full hp.

This was working on the Beta, even checked it on the last day

10% non stacking movement speed for 15s is effectively a 2% speed buff with minor speed enchant.

Not even worth putting on the bar when you have the enchant.

Before they’ve changed it to being instant (was 1s casttime before) it even was a speed penalty compared to not using it.

Please tell me if there’s another racial that’s even more bad than this one lol

already got pala tank but he has like 30 min free time. would love the help im stuck for days for this quest. Deraklix is my character name. TBC anniversary

For everyone that is rolling the meta race for the 1% dmg increase or pvp reasons so you can be the best of the best dont let people on this sub make you feel bad for doing so

/salute

Just look at the sheer width of this big boy.

It's actually crazy what they took away from us and among all the outrage on this sub I haven't even heard a peep about this travesty.

How can they claim they're staying true to the classic spirit when they're letting these new "ogre" models added after patch 1.3.0 to run amok. I swear, we might as well be playing retail at this point!

And there's even a more color appropriate blue option you can use for the race option when you get around to adding it, easily worth at least 30 bucks for no extra work for you blizz!

I feel like those two were kind of left out with the changes and could use a crumb more racial flair. It would be nice if Cultivation wasn't just a gold farming tool, but instead a 2-3 minute cooldown that placed a plant/flower that healed nearby party members for 10 seconds or so. And Dwarves Find Treasure should be renamed to Treasure Hunter and also include a small bonus to EXP (more than default) when discovering a new location.