You have a twisted sense of "fun" but, as long it's fairly well balanced I don't care. The last thing this game needs right now is a GRIND that feels like a chore. The heirloom changes were not huge, but everything adds up that's for sure. Imagine yourself rolling a healer and you're standing there wailing on the mob for 30+ seconds. How is that epic in any way? I've seen mmos go down in flames for less nerfs than that *cough* RIFT. I'm fine as long it feels BALANCED. Considering I've leveled 50 characters to 100-110 so yeah, I'm at my cap. I don't really care but I will delete some random character to try out the leveling at least.
It's like the game has matured over the years. I'm realizing things may have been a lot easier than we thought and now they're showing us and challenging us to be better. No more tank and spank guys, learn your class and use those skills!
Stat-squishing has been done for the last 2 expacs so this should not be a big surprise. What I want to see for heirlooms is removing the ilvl breaks at each expac boundary (60, 70, 80, 85, 90, 100). Now that the base game includes all the way through WoD, does it really make sense to have ilvl break at the former expac transitions?By ilvl break I mean the jump in ilvl from the previous expac to the next one. For example, when you hit 80 (Wrath) your looms are ilvl 187 and make a jump to ilvl 279 when you hit 81 (Cata). It's even more jarring entering Legion at 605 and jumping to 695 when you hit 101. Since all but WoD are being rescaled, a smoother ilvl progression would help the leveling experience when using heirlooms.
One thing that really gets me.. The flying and Heirloom changes. A lot of players have worked really hard in gathering gold, grinding away to pay for these highly expensive items. Pre-Legion the total to upgrade all Heirlooms was 252,700 gold. Doesn't seem like much? 13554 gold per character for flying expenses. Like to hoard a lot of different characters/classes? The maximum allowed characters per Battle.net account is around 36 characters? Assuming that they are all post Pandaria, the total cost is 487,944 for them all to fly. Players who have had all of those flying expenses and Heirloom expenses are now basically being laughed at, and will limit those "heirloom users" on how much they can help new players inside the game.Personally, with the Heirlooms, I would just have them lose durability, which yes would cost players a small amount, but would balance it out for players who like to have multiple characters who are "Raid Ready" or "PvP Ready". All this is going to cause is people to focus more on a single character. That, personally, is my worst nightmare (I like to class hop).Now, I'll move onto "Mob Health." My partner has no heirlooms. She's new to the game. She's also taken a massive break because she finds it really hard to kill more than one mob at once as a shadow priest, due to the fact that she is new. New players, which are becoming higher on the rarity scale, are going to find it even harder to get into World Of Warcraft with these new changes. Yes, I admit, that most of the community is players that have been playing for years, and a lot of them enjoy the social aspects of World Of Warcraft through guilds etc, but I feel that new players are going to be pushed out more, and whereas older players were relied on to help level the lower-levels, I feel like there is going to be even more pressure on them to actually keep the game alive.I shall soon be deciding on whether or not to purchase Battle of Azeroth, but if it's going to take me six months to get anywhere in the game after release, I am really unsure whether or not it will be the game for me.I concede!
I recently returned. I hadnt played in 10 years, I had a lvl 60 back when lvl 60 was max. Started a new account few weeks ago. I was having fun especially when I got in a guild with other low lvls and made some friends. I was questing in EPL when 7.3.5 comes out. What suddenly I have to go back to westfall or duskwood or redridge! Slugging on in duskwood. Everybody comes there to pk now, like shooting fish in a bowl. At least duskwood is a bit less boring than westfall. Our guild is falling apart. So many people are depressed with the game. Half my low lvl frinds havnt been on for more than 10 minutes since this patch. If your a low lvl this is like taking a pay cut. very depressing. Im glad that so many lvl 110s love that low lvl life is so boring now. Dont worry you will soon have the game to yourselves. All the low levels are leaving, ask one if you can find one. For me and about half the low lvls i know its depressing, the other half appear to have left. Its sad, the end of a game like this.
How many hours would you (Blizzard) consider an ideal range to level from 1 to 100, or to max level? I have heard other players say "30-40 hours" is the range they often get on their alts. That seems unwisely long to me. Yes, for 30-40 hours I have played--and enjoyed--games like Skyrim, or even shorter linear games like Tomb Raider. But that was time spent in the core game. Many people consider the newest expansion to be the core game of World of Warcraft. Granted, some will enjoy spending extensive time in 1-100 zones, but I suspect many more will see a 30-40 hour prologue as a barrier to entry.So my next question: what do you (Blizzard) consider the "core game" of WoW?When I started my first WoW character seven years ago, I did it to play with friends in an active guild. So I spent a few hours trying out different characters until I found one to focus on. Then I spent several weeks leveling, watching my friends in /g chat about the waning days of WotLK, before I could join them shortly after Cata launched. WEEKS of playing a game I was not excited about to get to a game I was excited about.And I'm glad I did. WoW is an amazing game and experience. You all are doing fantastic work. I can't thank you enough.But I am betting many more people would not put up with that delay. I'm not saying no leveling grind. Just reduce it by 1/3 or 1/2, for new and veteran players both.
I would always box 2 characters and power level my lower one in dungeons. Will I still be able to do that? That was fast exp.