Thoughts on Leveling in WoW Part 1: Forgotten Fun

The main reason why I enjoy WoW's Classic Era is that the leveling process is slow and steady.

Yes, it can be grindy, but the basic design of Vanilla WoW was that leveling was a good portion of the game, and the WoW community in general has moved on from that perspective to a primary focus on Endgame. If that weren't the case, in-game boosts and leveling guides and even externally paid level boosts* wouldn't exist. 

For all people like to claim that it's not the destination, it's the journey, we certainly see plenty of people ignoring that journey in their rush to get to the end.

Thank you, Prince Humperdinck.
From Imgflip and The Princess Bride.

But for me, the slow yet steady leveling pace of Classic Era takes all of the pressure off of me. I know where I'm going, but I already have been to the mountain, so I'm not worried about how quickly I get there.

And besides, I only know how to play two classes in Era --Mage and Rogue-- so I'd have to start from scratch to learn how to play a new class.** Nowhere better to start than in a game that has the journey as one of the key design pillars. 

***

I realize that even in Classic Era I'm in the minority, judging by the number of people who get boosted or advertise for boosts. The reality is that I can't make somebody like a leveling experience if they're predisposed to not enjoy it, and it is foolish to try. All I can do is point out that the pace of leveling in Classic Era is perfect for Classic Era. Accelerating it, as has been done in Season of Discovery, only served to push people to whatever the Endgame was at each phase of the seasonal release. Given that Classic Era doesn't have all that many things to do at Endgame, there's an increased risk of losing your players because "there's nothing to do!"

Still, I need to point out that the leveling environment in Classic Era just works. You get a few levels, you have to spend gold to train. Your gold is depleted, so you go craft or gather and sell on the market, go out and quest some more, and go up a few levels. Rinse and repeat.

There's only one major area where this breaks down, and it's the low L40s. Questing kind of dries up for a while because the quest chains out of Dustwallow Marsh and Azshara were left in an incomplete state, and the major instance to visit, Uldaman, has low L40s content only in the first half of the dungeon. Once you hit the mid-L40s, the rest of Uldaman becomes viable and Zul'Farrak and Maraudon open up. 

But I'm willing to give Blizzard a mulligan on that gap, because overall the game simply works.

Life is a journey too, and I'd hate to wake up one day at 80 years old, look around, and say, "What did I miss?"

*Whether to Blizzard or some nebulous third party.

**I did that in TBC Classic as an Enhancement Shaman, but only at a highly accelerated rate. Were it not for those low levels, however, I'd not know how to play Enhancement at all.

#Blaugust2024