Hi everyone. I’m a player who used to play pretty heavily during vanilla and who have recently come back to World of Warcraft.
To get back into the game, me and my friend decided we would level up new characters to see all this new amazing content Cataclysm brought in.
I must say, Blizzard has done an amazing job with the leveling experience. The revamped content is great, the zones are so much smoother, classes have better skills to level with, and things generally don’t feel as “clunky” as they used to in vanilla.
There is however one thing I really miss, and that’s some danger during the leveling experience. Vanilla absolutely had its faults, I stopped leveling more than one character out of sheer frustration (old Westfall anyone?), and sometimes the leveling experience was downright hazardous, like pulling certain camps would be tricky as several mobs would often aggro and swarm you, but this also made it exciting and kept you awake.
My friend and I have been leveling for quite some time now and not once have we been close to dying yet, mobs are placed far apart so that we only ever have to pull one at a time unless we go out of your way to pull more.
We were also disappointed to see that all elites have been removed from the world. Elite quests were fun and exciting, and if you were really bold you could have a go at soloing them, which made for a great challenge.
Why have Blizzard removed these aspects of leveling? It feels like playing Diablo 3 through normal mode, if that makes any sense to some of you, you have to make an effort to die and that dumbs it down a little.
So bottom line is, the new leveling experience is a great improvement, but how about adding a bit of danger? Anyone here remember the Sons of Arugal in Silverpine forest? Level 25 elites placed in a level 10-15 leveling zone. You had to avoid those bastards, and if you were careless you’d run into them and get torn apart which added a huge sense of danger to the zone, which was already very creepy.
There's nothing wrong in killing players from time to time while they are leveling. Dying all the time is frustrating, but getting your !@# handed to you while questing can force you to wake up and actually make an effort to improve your gameplay.
And for the record, we're not using heirlooms, so let's not even begin discussing that =)
Edit; After reading several pages of this thread, I’d like to include this bit as some have a tendency to simplify things. I am not saying I want things back to how they used to be in vanilla, quite the contrary; I enjoy most of the changes that have been made. I just wish the difficulty wasn’t scaled down to such an extreme degree. I’m fine with not being torn apart by elite mobs at every corner I pass, I just want to be challenged a little every now and then, and I'm sure even the average casual player would agree that the current state of leveling is a little too easy.
I'm very puzzled to see that those who have a tendency to do this the most are actually the blue posters in this thread. They seem to answer my arguments with arguments like "Vanilla was so terrible, you were torn apart by mobs, you had long corpse-runs, you had to get groups for everything, surely you don't want the game to be like that again?"
No of course I don’t, but can’t we have something in between?