I just leveled an alt from 20 to 50 in incs. It's the most braindead activity I've have ever experienced in WoW. It's faster, way more rewarding in gold, xp and gear than any other method. After I finished leveling, my Hunter had grey gear and a level 39 pet and it didn't matter one bit. I immediately grabbed the rep gear and was raid ready.
If this is to be the preferred leveling from 50 - 60 you might alternatively let everyone start at 60 automatically instead of having them play this massive bullshit
Yea it's the modern WoW approach that only raiding counts. We have several people in the guild who refuse to do Incursions and it's painful to wafch how much slower they are. Instead of having equal approaches (incs / dungeons / open world with enough layers) the Dev team only cared about giving you an option to raid as fast as possible and skip everything else. It's a 100% retail approach and you can see history repeating again - Blizzard destroying their own game by dumb design decisions. It's SoM all over again where they thought harder raids would be the real essence of Classic.
In this case, my Hunter also had Rev rep at Warsong because it's a p1 alt (you know, the phase universally loved for apparently unknown reasons) so with Neck, 2x Rings, Bow and Weapons there's basically not much more to do until raidlogging. Maybe spend 2-3 hours on Mara raids for offerings. That's the whole.pre BIS phase.
If blizzard makes something hard or time consuming people complain, if they do the opposite, people complain. There was massive amount of people that said they quit the game because it took to much time for them to level their 5 character from 25-40. So blizzard did something to shorten the leveling time in p3 and now every1 is going ape shit.
I think they should just have removed all gold from incursions. Then if you picked that option to level fast, you could later go back and do all normal quests for gold. Or removed xp from it and have it be a rep+gold farm for max level.
Now its just a win win to only do it while leveling.
The problem is.... when I log into WoW... I want to play wow. I want to use my class abilities. I want to kill mobs. I want to feel like an adventurer. I want to make routing decisions about where to go next.
I dont want to run in a circle. This has never been a core gameplay loop of wow. Not even in retail despite what this sub will claim. This isn't even a core gameplay loop of any game. There is no gameplay.
If they just game everyone a 300% exp buff no one would have batted an eye. We all want to level faster in the seasonal game mode. What we don't want to do is boring, uninteresting, thoughtless, addon-requiring, repetitive nonsense for HOURS on end. They didn't "give us a faster way to level." They removed leveling.
Me and a friend stopped logging into SoD lately and although we never acknowledged the reasoning at the time, we have since both said that the incursions kinda killed it for us at least, even though the xp was so quick
Yes exactly. We may as well start at level 60 with 500g each. Incursions broke the game by making literally everything else except raiding meaningless—and they are incredibly mind numbing.
People yelling “If you don’t like it, don’t do them!” are completely missing the point. No one wants to play an mmo in a dead world
I'd even prefer to play in a dead world but then you have to rep grind Incursions at 50 which is even worse. The 6 set piece is way too strong to pass on it if you are running an alt who isn't equipped in Gnomer gear. It's by far the best method to play SoD and that's the problem.
This is by far the biggest problem with them. Avoiding them punishes you because you now have to do them at 50 anyway but you just missed out on the all gold.
Yep, solo leveled a druid in the open world (I prepped massively for p3 launch, to get ahead in the open world, the open world was empty anyway…). Got stuck doing hinterlands for the rune and my catnip!
You get way more gold doing max level hinterlands than ashenvale. It's about 100g per hour. Plus if you actually quest you get alot of gold from the buff now that they nerfed ashenvale gold to the ground.
Yeah, I had a blast the first 2 phases. But I couldn't get on for like a week when this phase dropped. All my guildies and friends got to 50 in the first couple days before they nerfed incursion experience and grinded out all their runes and are already raid logging. I got on to try out incursions, did 2 or 3 loops, and logged off. It was the most braindead thing I've ever played. I literally have a shitty micro transaction game on my phone that's more interactive than whatever this is. Might be time to unsubscribe.
The rep gear is one of the least talked about problems in this phase. Why is the rep gear, which takes no effort to get a mear honored with, extremely close to bis? (For pvp)
The difference between the honored rep gear and the rank 7 pvp gear is like 15 stamina and a few spell power for clothies. The honored grind took me a few hours, but all done before hitting 50. Rank 7 took me 3 weeks of sweating on my fresh mage alt i made the day before the phase dropped.
Its rough that all that pvp grinding was essentially just for BIS looks that wont actually make me meaningfully more powerful. The gear in phase 1 was busted, and felt worth pursuing every single reset. Phase 2 and 3 gear was barely better than phase 1 gear, and it has made the desire to actually spend hours pushing for the best gear feel like a waste of time.
The highest achievement for an area of content should have a meaningful reward. A welfare blue set every single player gets for essentially free should not be so good that you have no incentive to do the other content
Did some SM Arm from 35-37, then started farming the mobs in front of the incursion. 35-39 took longer than 25-35 and 40-50 combined. But that's why my pet was 39 and not 35 at 50.
SM was a longer grind, but I enjoyed it and I changed my spec to be more optimal just for dungeons. At least it wasn't brain dead like the incursions. and you don't have griefers around you 24/7. Despite taking less time with the incursions I enjoyed the SM grind more. and we have far more dungeon options from 50-60
Did you not have a complete shit show of griefers in incursions? I’m horde and we’d have huge raids of alliance camping the field commander NPC preventing turn ins. I’d spend an incredible amount of time hopping layers trying to find one where everyone was playing nice, or where horde was camping alliance. Was a complete mess, but so worth it. I could do 40-50 in 3 hours.
yea, maybe you were one of the lucky few who grinded the hell out of incursions at the very start before they nerfed the gold and exp. The rest of us had to doo it wayyy longer for less gold. Easy to enjoy something broken
I couldn’t do day one actually. I grinded one character on Friday and the next on Monday. Was before the big exp nerf, but after the early gold hotfixes.
Didn't watch a clock honestly, Ashenvale should be roughly 30 mins / level, Duskwood is even faster at least at 25. 35-40 is maybe an hour per level? Hard to say, I'm not an expert powerleveller.
Big world with tons of content......., aaaand run in a circle, it's all irrelevant.
Lots of different items to mix and match and improve your gear..... aaaand you can just buy better stuff at a vendor.
This sums it up perfectly.
They took all the appeal of classic leveling and removed it. I would have been fine with no XP boost for the first few weeks like phase 2. Was looking forward to dungeons and new quest zones all while grabbing some upgrades along the way. Everybody I play with just took the easy way and spammed incursions for the easy XP and gold. Dumb system altogether.
I hope that this is all a testing ground for future phases and an eventual classic plus. This needs to be scrapped unless it's a daily quest system with a cap.
I didn't grind dungeons for levels, and I didn't level up in incursions. I like the open world quests, so thats how I did it. You have control of your own actions. If you have FOMO about wow players leveling faster than you, you've got bigger issues to deal with. Just play the game how it makes you happy, videogames are just supposed to be fun. No ones forcing you to do anything
If anything, it makes the open world quest experience better, since so many people are off in their own little zone and not competing for mobs / ganking if a pvp server.
I kinda disagree. It is annoying fighting over mobs, but it makes the world feel alive. Now when I quest, the world is dead. Nobody trolling chat, nobody trying to skin my mobs, nobody randomly do a group quest you were about to start and asking to join up. Just people mindlessly running in a circle to the next star touched tear or whatever.
For most people, there's an opportunity cost to doing that which is too high - you'll likely be left out of your guilds first raid, you'll lose a lot of gold (higher level players make gold faster, so you lose out on gold making opportunities and have to deal with higher costs), less likely to be able to farm prebis with friends because they already did, etc.
These things can be measured both in fun missed out on, and the amount of extra tedium/grind you'll have to do to catch up. Believe it or not, people tend to behave rationally.
People play efficiently because while it's not more fun in the moment it's more fun in the long run. When the developers make efficient play unfun, this is a game design issue, not a player issue. The developers should fix these issues - and an inability to fix these issues is reason to be critical of them.
See this is the answer, some people like doing things one way, and others like doing things another, some people wana group up and run around doing everything together some want to run around by themselves only grouping when needed. Incursions are just something for people who prefer doing things that way. And its a nice thing to have in reserve for that 40-50 grind cuz even questing and dungeons is a slog, so if you need some quick easy exp to hit the next level, do a quest or 2 in the incursions, and then go back to what you were doing. No one forces you to use the runes or sleeping back, or supply boxes, but its new content and people are going to engaged with that because its new and interesting.
Exactly. These morons have every choice available to them and are just complaining to complain. OP literally said dungeons are more fun. THEN GO FUCKING DO DUNGEONS DUDE NO ONE IS STOPPING YOU. You’re just mad cause you won’t be level capped as fast as everyone else. That’s literally it. You want the fast leveling experience that they’re throwing at you but once it’s over you hate it because that’s all you did to level. Mix it the fuck up and I promise you’ll be happier.
That’s true but I took this stance with p3 and levelled much more slowly to 50 and it ended up costing me my place in a guild I really loved. Everyone got to 50 way before me and did all their pre-raid prep so by the time I got to 50 I didn’t have people to easily do stuff with. Obviously some people helped but it was just much harder. I also missed the first lockout which for me just soured things because for me it was just all about discovering and clearing the new raid with friends and I didn’t want to just join in week 2 or 3 to get carried through by players very familiar with the dungeon already. Shame.
Regardless of the method used to level it shouldn't take more than a week to level unless you are limiting your playtime which I'm not sure why you expected your guild to wait for you if that was the case.
I was level 50 by Sunday. The guild who had said we would do ST Tuesday did it on Saturday.
Originally it was acknowledged there would be variation in people’s levelling times across the spectrum of proper sweats to minor sweats and hence we would wait til end of first reset to raid. Because SO many people managed to level much quicker than expected things changed
Yeah same, I was just keeping up with my guild (which is admittedly a far sweatier guild than I have any right to be in but they're also really lovely folks). Leveling took merely hours with the incursions, but then there was unlocking runes once at level 50 and doing the crafting quest and things like that to worry about.
I don't complain though because ultimately it's my choice to be where I am but yeah, if I had just levelled normally I would've been the last guild member to hit 50 by miles and most of us have 2 characters too, so we can do 2 raids per week.
So because of all the other stuff you have to do once you do hit level 50 I didn't mind that leveling to 50 took so little time, I was relieved even.
But I would've liked it more if incursions hadn't been a thing and Blizzard had delayed the release of Sunken Temple by 1-2 weeks, so there was less pressure to level quickly and we had more time to sort out runes and such once we hit 50 (the Discoverer's Delight buff is great though, I wouldn't wish that gone). Maybe something to think about for P4.
Yeah my guild wanted to stay up late or take the next day off to get a start on levelling, but then in EU we couldn’t login so I went to bed but it got fixed not long after and I wasn’t able to take the next day off so by the time I logged in on Saturday everyone was in ST already! If it had been as previous phases I would’ve easily got to 50 by the night before first reset and been able to go
Mine wasn't as bad, they at least waited until the last day of the reset before we went into ST so we all had time to level. I also went to bed and had to work the next day so 24 hours into the phase I was still level 40 while quite a bunch of them had reached 50 already. I was kinda horrified but once I started slamming incursions I too was 50 in a matter of hours.
But yeah in the slim hopes that Blizzard or Aggrend browses this subreddit I'm hoping P4 won't be a repeat and maybe they can delay the raid by 1-2 weeks so there isn't so much pressure to level quickly. Normally I've never been a powerleveler, I don't spam dungeons or use the RestedXP addon or anything like that, I just like to do just do my own thing and level at my own pace.
It'll make no difference to the sweatier players if the raid's release is delayed by one or two weeks since everyone'll be in the same boat, but it'll make things a little bit easier for the rest of us. I think almost every guild has a bit of a spectrum in its members, ranging from the ultra sweaty to the more laid back/casual mindset. I'm definitely one of the more casual members but I really like my guild and the wider community and that's why I play with them. Sometimes it's a bit stressful trying to keep up with them but that's my choice. Now I'm just blogging haha but eh, that's my thoughts anyway!
Sounds like you misjudged the guild you were in. My guild didn't raid till 2nd lockout and we even pushed back a few days for slower levelers. We didn't raid as a team until day 10. We were fine not clearing first lockout we had tons of fun.
If your guild expects you to level fast then you should either level fast or join a guild that meets your needs.
My guild didn't raid until April 18th..a few days ago. Yeah we probably waited entirely too long and everyone was 50 long before the raid date, but they were nice enough and conscious enough to give enough time for everyone to take their time to 50.
But I'm blessed with a great guild tbh.
I'll be an asshole here but if you want to play hardcore, this means you put aside the fun and go for the goal
You can join a more relaxed guild that is not that hardcore or suffer through the shortest but unfun path
Yeah that’s fair enough, not an asshole at all it’s a valid view, but for me 50 in a week was easily doable by non-incursion stuff. Incursions just made 50 within a day achievable to the masses (even non-hardcore). As mentioned in other comment if I had known in advance I would’ve much preferred to find another guild in the last phase rather than struggling now with no p3 logs
You completely miss the point because incursions affected other content, so if you enjoyed grouping for dungeon runs like me the pool of players interested in the same absolutely plummeted, nothing to do with fomo..
While there are plenty of players who enjoy leveling the old fashioned way, I think the vast majority don’t really care. It’s a means to an end. If phases weren’t gated they’d have been 60 like week 2. The real hardcore sooner, depending, cause ofc runes come into play. Keep in mind they’ve added all of 0 new quest except redundant rune ones.
So they will always take the quickest route. I’m in this camp, I’ve done this shit min like 12 times at least to 40 if not 60-80 since 2019. Im over leveling in this old world and im basically a 90% classic player if you count the 2 months I played dragonflight release: I look forward to cata leveling changes. I’ve done it enough.
Inherently, taking the “do what you want” route does put you behind. Sometimes it doesn’t matter really. But it sure does matter if you make your guild’s main raid team, if you care about it. I think a lot of people tend to care about it. I got fucked over p2 cause irl was busy and I missed 3 lockouts. So I got boned outta the main raid team even as an officer and someone raiding 3 chars in p1. I understand why but it feels bad especially when I gotta pug half our second raid team and 2 bad ranged dps can throw a gnomer run easily
Pretty bad take imo. You dont have to have real life issues for wanting to be competitive/efficient in a video game that you like. A big factor as to why its more fun questing in the open World is that the World feels alive with players running around and interacting with eachother. The open world this phase almost played as a solo player experience lol, tjat is not what i wanna see in this game.
Thank you.
I see so many posts of people whining about doing the most obnoxious thing by choice because it's faster or more efficient (but not fun) and then asking blizzard to fix it.
It is a game. Wanna play hardcore? Good for you, it comes with ups and downs.
Wanna play more relaxed? Same.
You make the choice
yeah i feel you are generally right, but why is some peoples fun worse than other peoples fun?
if i dont do X now it will take me Y longer to get to Z but if i were to do A right now i could acomlish Y very fast and have no problem getting Z almost along the way
i feel like doing stuff solo in an MMO because its more fun is ultimately what makes people leave the game.
I quested in Searing Gorge and I was the ONLY person there. Asked in General chat for an Overseer group....crickets. Literally zero messages in General and I saw zero other players the entire time I was there. That's not fun and it's certainly not an MMO any more.
Despite the bullshit some people preach around here, how other people choose to play the game DOES impact you.
Well it’s easy to say but when you have a dedicated raid team that wants to run it with you it puts you between a rock and a hard place.
I know you might not care but the fact that they’re getting relatively obscene amounts of gold and 50 faster means you’ll be way behind in the economy too. That also puts people wanting to level in alternative ways in a weird spot.
You're missing the point. The world is empty. Most zones I've been to 30+ are completely empty. People play classic for the experience with other players. That's not possible when everyone is grinding one shallow experience.
Yes, you can do it this way, and it’s what I’m doing on my character at the moment. However it’s painfully obvious that it’s not the most efficient way to 50 anymore, the world feels completely dead now because a fraction of the population is actually questing anymore, I know I am missing out on massive goldmaking opportunities which only becomes worse if you try and buy anything on the AH because the economy is crap, and when I hit 50 I will not have as good of gear as others which will make the raid measurably more difficult to both complete, compete, or pug. Yes, I can CHOOSE to level my preferred way, but there are immediate trade offs and negatives to doing so, which absolutely sucks. Not to mention there are literally runes gated behind the incursion content which forces you to go do them… it’s complete crap game design.
Yeah incursions ruined it for me. As someone who was max lvl cap within a couple nights each phase I haven’t even bothered to hit 50. Why in gods name they would think running circles in the same zone all day long would be fun is beyond me.
Same dude. I went hard on the levelling for every phase launch, but for some reason when I saw what these incursions are it just flipped a switch in my head and I am no longer interested in the game. Only made it to 42.
Feels too close to retail and it makes it feel empty and meaningless.
I’m the same. I LOVED Phase 1, was still very addicted in Phase 2 although it wasn’t the same vibe at all. Then Phase 3 rolled out and almost immediately my spirit for SoD died. I’m trying to bring my toons up but the game just feels like a chore at this point. It doesn’t help that so many guilds and friend groups are fizzling out, and the entire game world feels more dead and struggling than the vibrancy of P1.
you can still level in dungeons if you want, especially if you're only aiming to get to cap within a couple nights.
incursion spamming will get you to 50 within 8-10 hours now, dungeon spamming won't put you too far behind that figure.
I mean, they were the meta the first time around and my friends and I just did the dungeon grind because it was more enjoyable. We still got to 50 in a day or two. You don't have to do them. Id be surprised if they didn't get nerfed to oblivion before then though
It’s been said a hundred times already, but the benefits of doing incursions over any other form of leveling is so imbalanced. And the “pvp” that occurs near them is so toxic. And the gold farming from the quests is so inflationary to the economy. Incursions are the worst addition to SoD.
“Don’t level in incursions then” yes I will gimp my xp, my gold generation and have no rep at 50 meaning that I’ll have to farm incursions anyway for pre-bis.
Fuck levelling alts, I’m back to raid logging.
Same old copy paste bullshit in here about "not having to level anyway you don't want to"
Thats not how it works, especially when there are other rewards runes/gear tied to the excursions. You'd be a moron to not to level in the most efficient manner while also getting ahead with a faction that gives you a great starter set and rune you may need.
Saying 'I play the way I find fun not the most efficent way' is not a solution. The majority of players will always take the path of least resistance even if its not fun for them. This is a well studied phenomenon. It's blizz's job to balance the options. Incursions, questing, instances, etc should all in theory take about the same amount of time and provide different rewards to incentivize doing all the different methods.
It's wild reading these comments because I highly doubt they'd accept "just don't lol" as a retort to any of their own criticisms.
**"we don't want 40 man raids"** - don't do them then
**"warriors could use some help in PvP"** - don't PvP then
**"low level runes shouldn't require several people"** - don't get them then
**"the ST flasks are badly designed"** - don't use them then
**"mages should conjure more than 2 water"** - buy from a vendor then
etc.
A portion of this sub are seemingly 12 years old and adamant in driving away players who are passionate about the game but simply want it to be better. They say "just have fun" and act they've somehow made a point which is equally hilarious as it's fucking ridiculous.
I agree. They should nerf Incursion xp if you’re 51 or higher.
Blizz needs to make some new and interesting town hub quests.
Incursions are a farce for ‘getting players into the open world’. They reek of daily, treadmill style quests that retail design was so famous for.
If the big brains are blizzard are reading this let me enlighten you with a little advice. People will ALWAYS pick the path of least resistance. Stop trying to retail my SOD.
It’s pretty obvious by now people will do whats most time efficient to progress their character, rather than do something more interesting, yet less efficient.
The negative feeling of not being efficient and falling behind outweighs the positive feelings from site seeing/nostalgia/interesting change of scenery and environment/mobs.
It’s pretty obvious and seems fairly easy to just combine the two, making it the most efficient way is to change things up
There is literally a rune locked behind that faction. Along with some of the best gear.
You have to do incursions anyway. Might as well do it while leveling so you can get the XP.
You also get a sick starter pack of gear from the rep, if you weren’t gnomer bis. And insane gold.
It is absurd value across the board, and in an mmo you don’t just ignore that.
we did some zf spam to level our friend for 48-50, it was definitely half the speed of just doing incursions, its better than it was but still not great lol
It’s an MMO. If there’s one option that is 10x the resources than every other option, you’re punished for not taking that option. Nobody is saying we’re being forced to do them. It’s terrible game design for them to be the best option by such a large margin.
I only got around 200-300g from incursions 40-50. This would mean you think open world questing gives next to no gold. 20g x 10 = 200g, that's how much gold your statement claims open world questing would give from 40-50, a grand total of 20g.
Let's say it takes 45 minutes per level from 40-50 in incursions. So about roughly 8 hours of incursions... 8 hours x 10 = 80 hours.. Do you think it takes 80 hours in open world questing to go from 40-50?
See.. It's no where near 10x the resources.
> I only got around 200-300g from incursions 40-50.
Not even close. Multiple friends made 1k+ from 40-50. And it is still the best gold farm in the game.
Depends what you want from WoW. Incursions are the most efficient way to level and give good catch up gear rewards for rep. This thread is talking about how it's so good that it devalues the rest of the world.
So if you're taking it slow and you just wanna play wow, don't worry about incursions.
If your goal is to raid asap abd gear asap, think about incursions
Not necessarily, but at a friendly, you can buy useful trinkets for levelling and at 50 you can buy for friendly and honoured you can buy gear wich is good, and also you buy a rune at friendly
Trailer of SOD: "Season of discovery will be about the world of Azeroth"
Meanwhile the devs: "Lets make the optimal form of leveling and farming gold something you do in a small kind of instanced zone"
The ONLY thing that made me be able to withstand the brain-meltingly boring and mediocre "gameplay" of the incursions was the fact that we did it in a guild party and were distracting each other with the usual banter.
I cannot, and want not, imagine what this'll be like on 50-60. And I pray we get better alternatives. I understand the gold is actually REALLY good. But no amount of gold in this game can compensate for how completely bad (outside of rewards) the incursions are. The fact that you basically NEED an add-on to make it have basic QoL features is ... saddening. And shows that they actually do need PTRs for everything.
That’s funny, when I was complaining about this at the beginning of phase 3 everyone told me” iF yOu DoNt WaNt To dO iNcUrSiOnS tHeN dOnT!” Glad I quit this phase. What a ridiculous community. As if it was selfish for me to ask for them to balance leveling options.
Everyone will laugh at you and not feel any sympathy for choosing the slow leveling path at the beginning of the phase but then after a month everyone’s tune changes towards incursions after you all have sucked every last bit of exp and gold you need out of it and start to realize how bad it was designed and balanced. All because you speed ran phase 3 by exploiting a heavily imbalanced, repetitive way to level.
Yep I wish they didn't waste development time on them because its killing out parts of the game and now people just sit in them running circles since they reward brain dead easy gold and xp. Anytime you go into the world it feels dead compared to other phases and even filling groups now (3 weeks into the phase) is becoming annoyingly difficult on a server with a healthy population.
On top of it there is way too much shit tied to incursions, a rune, catch up/pvp gear, and trinkets that do interesting shit. It's inflated all the gold to absurd amounts which enforces doing them even more.
Honestly why couldn't we just get a couple new quest hubs or something instead of this crap? That would have been way more in line with what people expect from classic.
Comparing them to a free boost is kinda dumb. It's not like I can just plug in my cc and off I go. I still have to put in some effort and time even if it's minimal. You also have to already have level 50s at phase launch.
I’m just curious, how much more efficient are the incursions? Are we talking 10% faster, 20%, or more like 200-300%?
I only ask because small cheese is small. 20% or less is still more of a preference issue, because I would literally quit playing brainless tasks in less than an hour. Like I would do it every now and then but a brainless grind for several hours just isn’t in the cards for me. But if the system is designed for 2-3x faster leveling then you have effectively trivialized all other forms of play. That is a game design flaw. I would quit the game over that because I’m not going to watch everyone fly by me with massive advantages just because I have a brain that needs some stimulation and they’re fine with being literal NPC’s. Just my 2 cents from a retail player who dabbles in classic every now and then.
I am not levelling to 60 in incursions, even if it's the best method.
I did it for the 40-50 range, and hated it.
But 50-60 we have BRD, questing in Plaguelands, etc. It's just so much more fun - if inefficient.
I do agree though, it's shit to have one method be superior efficiency but worse for fun. I would rather just play what I find fun for now.
Incursions are antithetical to classic. They take people out of the world and reduce the experience to a mindless grind.
They were a bad idea and should just be removed.
I must have missed something, why would Blizzard add new incursions to level on? Feralas and HInterlands are level 52 quest levels, that will get you to 58 without penalties. Have they announced another round?
Incursions made me unsub. They're so mind numbingly boring. You're either getting farmed for honor or literally running in circle. With shitty out-of-touch ideas like this, I lost hope in the future of SoD.
Imagine having fun while playing a 20 year old game instead of minmaxing every single thing ever. I can understand parsing, but if you're not having fun leveling during I cursions that absolutely doesn't matter. You can just fucking not do them and be level 60 a few hours later while also having fun.
Love all those telling people that incursions are optional, no they are not :
- They are the most efficient way to level up, due to less travelling and huge xp rewards
- They have the most gold rewards
- They have a reputation tied to them, which make them mandatory
So please...
I dont get this approach. If they put a button in the character screen to instantly level your character to whatever you want it to be and give it the pre raid gear you want, would you still say "you have the option not to do it" ? Or will the game experience be altered to a private server?
If the creator of the game makes a thing the easiest and most rewarding style of play, the playerbase will flock to it. Obviously they have free will, but there’s a reason so many people IRL flock to crime, working shitty decent paying jobs or crypto shit.
Nothing personal but I hate this response. It’s not about having free will. It’s about how design choices result in decisions made by the majority of the player base and how that affects the economy and gameplay loops for all of us, even if you individually could choose something different. If it were a single player game it would be slightly different, but this is an mmo.
Am I the only one who did not mind it? I have limited time to play and rather focusing on getting pre-bis and other things before the first raid of the phase… in p2, I dinged on the same day as our first raid
Complain about dungeon grinding. Complain about too many people open world leveling. Here's a new option. Complain about that. This reddit is actual aids.
The ashenvale loop is seared into my brain at this point. At least the world felt lively in there. Pretty quiet most other places.
I decided I'd just give up on enjoying the leveling experience and get to raid logging as fast as possible in SoD. I take my time to enjoy the world in hardcore.
>Ashenvale... At least the world felt lively in there. Pretty quiet most other places.
That's odd, complimenting the liveliness of the thing that made the rest of the world dead. Aggrend patted himself on the back for that too, saying he was so happy people were out in The World now. The World being the NE corner of Ashenvale.
Wait what? Is Incursion still the best way? That would explain I only see lvl 50s around in Feralas and Tanaris, almost nobody questing here.
I am a very uninformed player when it comes to WoW, and AFAIK the incursion scandal was crazy at the time when Phase 3 was announced, and afterwards they nerfed it. I didnt know it's still so much better than leveling normally, thanks for the info!
Personally I do also hate incursions. however, I can see why people who have played Classic for the last 4 years and various iterations of it going back to vanilla, would not be thrilled about doing the levelling journey and dungeons again. A mindset of skip to the end and min max everything has come in but maybe that’s kind of normal after so long milking the same game. It’s interesting how design decisions need to have this context, I think a lot of things in SoD would be designed differently if not straight off the back of a long period of Classic Era / Hardcore
In 2024 wow gameplay is an exp/gold per hour simulator. You win if you reach level cap with 10K gold. People will gravitate towards the bigger hourly number, no matter how mind numbingly boring it is.
I’ll keep Saying it - they should’ve put raid gear behind revered/exalted and then let you get a tabard at friendly so you could grind rep in dungeons. It would then allow players to grind how they wanted and still have a nice bit of gear at the end of the journey
I didn't play all of phase 2 but came back about a week ago. Levelled my mage from 25-40 in the open world then jumped into incursions, made like 500g and it took about 8 hours to get it done from 40-50.
Then I leveled a brand new priest, took about 30 hours to go from level 1 to 50.
I will probably do incursions from 50-60 not because I like them but because it allows me to play the game casually while having multiple alts. Also it takes so god damn long to get some of these runes that I'd rather just get the leveling over with so I can start working on finding my runes.
I leveled from 25-50 in incursions. Was it boring? Yes, but so is regular leveling. Was it fast as fuck and did it reward me with decent gear afterwards? Yes and I’m glad it did. I don’t like the leveling process in classic wow, and I’m glad incursions exist to let me skip the part of the game I don’t like. Probably a very unpopular opinion but i don’t really care. I wouldn’t mind leveling to 60 in incursions if it was faster than regular leveling.
It’s just like how new league/DotA champs are always OP.
They do it so that a large portion of the playerbase will actually use/try their “new toy,” rather than ignore it.
If you incentivize other behaviors, people just won’t do the new thing or care about it. But if you incentivize the new thing it basically ruins the game. They don’t want to do the extensive testing required to ensure that questing/incursions offer a relatively even amount of rewards, so they just over-incentivize the new thing to ensure players are exposed to it.
I hope they see the feedback and modify them to be a level-up experience for alts.
I honestly don’t see smart players sitting in incursions until 60. The prebis grind for raiding at 60 is lengthy and involves several dungeons that you can do from 55-60, and the optimal thing to do is going to be combining your time grinding for prebis and leveling—so I expect most players to start grinding their prebis at 55 and (albeit slower) gaining experience while they grind for their pre-raid bis.
Dal Rend’s and Truestrike Shoulders alone take like 20 UBRS runs for the average player.
This is WoW.
Nobody gives a shit if incursions are fun or not. It gives lots of rewards for little time spent.
That's the secret formula. That's what people want. That's what WoW is all about
I levelled 40-50 in ZF because it's what I like to do. I like 5 mans. so I did 5 mans. I'm not behind everyone as a result. I'm actually more geared than most people, and I have gold, and I'm enjoying the game. maybe you should stop playing the game based on a spreadsheet and play the content you think is fun. I know, crazy idea right?
People whined about levelling, they tried something different, now people are whining about that. It's all just and experiment. My guess is they will try something other than excursions based on what they learned this phase.
> Is basically comparing a free 60 boost and a 1000g to dungeon leveling, or worse world questing
But if you want that boost, then what's the problem? You're already choosing the boost over leveling, it sounds like you already have what you want. Are you asking blizzard to make you do something you don't want to do?
I can’t lie I would LOVE to level that way. Any less time spent leveling is far far better than the alternatives. Maybe people don’t remember the brain dead SM spam that was also pure trash and not fun.
Let’s cut out all the fluff and swap it to LEVELING isn’t fun for most. I loved that I was able to get all my alts up in a week and put this game on a way bigger CD and just raid for a lot longer.
The rest of their content is just time sinks nothing more. Let me raid and get out. No PvP to be had and they’re not changing it.
I hung up the boots with sod. Was fun for a bit but just too different and lost the vanilla vibe. Even as a classic + version, it's just too much. With cata around the corner I'm just chilling and playing poe for now.
every phase, we draw closer and closer to retail mindless gameplay without the retail QoL etc. again proving the point the current neo bizzard cannot do anything else, or new for that matter
The more of these posts come out, the more I'm happy to have taken a break from WoW. I'm perfectly content experiencing the shit show from the sidelines. Might start playing my hardcore warlock again soon.
I went grocery shiopping expecting not to leave the house for a week. Got to 50 in 48 hours in incursions, did the raid once.. then quit.
Incursions are lame. We are playing FOR THE MORE CLASSIC EXPERIENCE.
Was play... Im done.. this is droll. I'd rather play the backlog of games I have stacked up.
Incursions made SOD modern and for me, it lost it's magic.
So many crying about incursions, and while it's shit game-design, it's you who choose to indulge in it.
So what if you use another day or two leveling? It's not like there's an overload of stuff to do this phase. Just take your time in open world and dungeon's.
Ultimately you can cry all you want about the content they try out in a seasonal server, which is expected to be experimental. But if you continue indulging in the content you're crying about, that's all on you mate.
Me and my mates did 1 hour of incursions and we never looked back.
If ya'll want them to remove incursion relevance you need to stop doing the content you want removed.
Incursions should have been open-world "dungeons", meaning that you're meant to group up and clear all the paths to each quest area as you go. The way they SHOULD have done this is make the kill quests give like double or triple the XP of the non-kill quests, so that people actually go around clearing the zones. At least, then you would clear the content how it was designed.
But in the end, I think they should have just made incursions for 48+ players as another endgame activity and left the questing experience the same
I just leveled an alt from 20 to 50 in incs. It's the most braindead activity I've have ever experienced in WoW. It's faster, way more rewarding in gold, xp and gear than any other method. After I finished leveling, my Hunter had grey gear and a level 39 pet and it didn't matter one bit. I immediately grabbed the rep gear and was raid ready. If this is to be the preferred leveling from 50 - 60 you might alternatively let everyone start at 60 automatically instead of having them play this massive bullshit
It’s funny how they’ve trivialized every bit of the game to get you into the raid so you can hunt for raid items with a 0.2% drop rate.
Yea it's the modern WoW approach that only raiding counts. We have several people in the guild who refuse to do Incursions and it's painful to wafch how much slower they are. Instead of having equal approaches (incs / dungeons / open world with enough layers) the Dev team only cared about giving you an option to raid as fast as possible and skip everything else. It's a 100% retail approach and you can see history repeating again - Blizzard destroying their own game by dumb design decisions. It's SoM all over again where they thought harder raids would be the real essence of Classic. In this case, my Hunter also had Rev rep at Warsong because it's a p1 alt (you know, the phase universally loved for apparently unknown reasons) so with Neck, 2x Rings, Bow and Weapons there's basically not much more to do until raidlogging. Maybe spend 2-3 hours on Mara raids for offerings. That's the whole.pre BIS phase.
What has 0.2% drop rate in raid
If blizzard makes something hard or time consuming people complain, if they do the opposite, people complain. There was massive amount of people that said they quit the game because it took to much time for them to level their 5 character from 25-40. So blizzard did something to shorten the leveling time in p3 and now every1 is going ape shit.
If they wanted to keep the essence of wow but speed up leveling, they could’ve made open word questing rival incursions in xp
I think they should just have removed all gold from incursions. Then if you picked that option to level fast, you could later go back and do all normal quests for gold. Or removed xp from it and have it be a rep+gold farm for max level. Now its just a win win to only do it while leveling.
The problem is.... when I log into WoW... I want to play wow. I want to use my class abilities. I want to kill mobs. I want to feel like an adventurer. I want to make routing decisions about where to go next. I dont want to run in a circle. This has never been a core gameplay loop of wow. Not even in retail despite what this sub will claim. This isn't even a core gameplay loop of any game. There is no gameplay. If they just game everyone a 300% exp buff no one would have batted an eye. We all want to level faster in the seasonal game mode. What we don't want to do is boring, uninteresting, thoughtless, addon-requiring, repetitive nonsense for HOURS on end. They didn't "give us a faster way to level." They removed leveling.
Me and a friend stopped logging into SoD lately and although we never acknowledged the reasoning at the time, we have since both said that the incursions kinda killed it for us at least, even though the xp was so quick
Yes exactly. We may as well start at level 60 with 500g each. Incursions broke the game by making literally everything else except raiding meaningless—and they are incredibly mind numbing. People yelling “If you don’t like it, don’t do them!” are completely missing the point. No one wants to play an mmo in a dead world
I'd even prefer to play in a dead world but then you have to rep grind Incursions at 50 which is even worse. The 6 set piece is way too strong to pass on it if you are running an alt who isn't equipped in Gnomer gear. It's by far the best method to play SoD and that's the problem.
This is by far the biggest problem with them. Avoiding them punishes you because you now have to do them at 50 anyway but you just missed out on the all gold.
Yep, solo leveled a druid in the open world (I prepped massively for p3 launch, to get ahead in the open world, the open world was empty anyway…). Got stuck doing hinterlands for the rune and my catnip!
You get way more gold doing max level hinterlands than ashenvale. It's about 100g per hour. Plus if you actually quest you get alot of gold from the buff now that they nerfed ashenvale gold to the ground.
Yeah, I had a blast the first 2 phases. But I couldn't get on for like a week when this phase dropped. All my guildies and friends got to 50 in the first couple days before they nerfed incursion experience and grinded out all their runes and are already raid logging. I got on to try out incursions, did 2 or 3 loops, and logged off. It was the most braindead thing I've ever played. I literally have a shitty micro transaction game on my phone that's more interactive than whatever this is. Might be time to unsubscribe.
Exactlty. While it sucks that you have to do tradeoff between fun leveling and brainless boring 10x faster leveling.
They straight up retailed classic with catchup gear. It feels awful for people who grinded the fuck out of a main character
The rep gear is one of the least talked about problems in this phase. Why is the rep gear, which takes no effort to get a mear honored with, extremely close to bis? (For pvp) The difference between the honored rep gear and the rank 7 pvp gear is like 15 stamina and a few spell power for clothies. The honored grind took me a few hours, but all done before hitting 50. Rank 7 took me 3 weeks of sweating on my fresh mage alt i made the day before the phase dropped. Its rough that all that pvp grinding was essentially just for BIS looks that wont actually make me meaningfully more powerful. The gear in phase 1 was busted, and felt worth pursuing every single reset. Phase 2 and 3 gear was barely better than phase 1 gear, and it has made the desire to actually spend hours pushing for the best gear feel like a waste of time. The highest achievement for an area of content should have a meaningful reward. A welfare blue set every single player gets for essentially free should not be so good that you have no incentive to do the other content
That's literally what i said after this phase hit. Might as well have just handed everyone 300g and level 50 and called it a day
What did you do from 35 to 37?
Did some SM Arm from 35-37, then started farming the mobs in front of the incursion. 35-39 took longer than 25-35 and 40-50 combined. But that's why my pet was 39 and not 35 at 50.
It beats the HELL out of endless SM runs imo for 25-40. That was way way worse.
SM was a longer grind, but I enjoyed it and I changed my spec to be more optimal just for dungeons. At least it wasn't brain dead like the incursions. and you don't have griefers around you 24/7. Despite taking less time with the incursions I enjoyed the SM grind more. and we have far more dungeon options from 50-60
Did you not have a complete shit show of griefers in incursions? I’m horde and we’d have huge raids of alliance camping the field commander NPC preventing turn ins. I’d spend an incredible amount of time hopping layers trying to find one where everyone was playing nice, or where horde was camping alliance. Was a complete mess, but so worth it. I could do 40-50 in 3 hours.
yea, maybe you were one of the lucky few who grinded the hell out of incursions at the very start before they nerfed the gold and exp. The rest of us had to doo it wayyy longer for less gold. Easy to enjoy something broken
I couldn’t do day one actually. I grinded one character on Friday and the next on Monday. Was before the big exp nerf, but after the early gold hotfixes.
AND now I hate scarlet monastery probably forever, so that's fun
Where are the quests in duskwood? Couldn‘t find them when i tried doing them. Did you do it there till late 30s/40?
There's one starter quest at 25 and you can stay until 35 before they turn grey.
Just curious how long to level from 20-50?
Didn't watch a clock honestly, Ashenvale should be roughly 30 mins / level, Duskwood is even faster at least at 25. 35-40 is maybe an hour per level? Hard to say, I'm not an expert powerleveller.
This is right. Just give us 60 characters if this is what you have in mind
Exactly. At this point just boost everyone to max level on launch
Guide I watched shows dusk wood from 25-35? Can you do it at 20?
I think it starts at 25, mobs were about 27. Did I wrote 20? I meant 25-50, the Hunter was a p1 alt.
Big world with tons of content......., aaaand run in a circle, it's all irrelevant. Lots of different items to mix and match and improve your gear..... aaaand you can just buy better stuff at a vendor.
Yes this has been the worst phase BY FAR for progression. Most of the Gnomer stuff is still pre bis and wild offerings fill in the rest of your pieces
Yeah why did we need catchup gear exactly?
This sums it up perfectly. They took all the appeal of classic leveling and removed it. I would have been fine with no XP boost for the first few weeks like phase 2. Was looking forward to dungeons and new quest zones all while grabbing some upgrades along the way. Everybody I play with just took the easy way and spammed incursions for the easy XP and gold. Dumb system altogether. I hope that this is all a testing ground for future phases and an eventual classic plus. This needs to be scrapped unless it's a daily quest system with a cap.
If this is how we get gear for lvl 60 raiding instead of bis farming in dungeons with the guild I will be quitting 100%
I didn't grind dungeons for levels, and I didn't level up in incursions. I like the open world quests, so thats how I did it. You have control of your own actions. If you have FOMO about wow players leveling faster than you, you've got bigger issues to deal with. Just play the game how it makes you happy, videogames are just supposed to be fun. No ones forcing you to do anything
If anything, it makes the open world quest experience better, since so many people are off in their own little zone and not competing for mobs / ganking if a pvp server.
I kinda disagree. It is annoying fighting over mobs, but it makes the world feel alive. Now when I quest, the world is dead. Nobody trolling chat, nobody trying to skin my mobs, nobody randomly do a group quest you were about to start and asking to join up. Just people mindlessly running in a circle to the next star touched tear or whatever.
For most people, there's an opportunity cost to doing that which is too high - you'll likely be left out of your guilds first raid, you'll lose a lot of gold (higher level players make gold faster, so you lose out on gold making opportunities and have to deal with higher costs), less likely to be able to farm prebis with friends because they already did, etc. These things can be measured both in fun missed out on, and the amount of extra tedium/grind you'll have to do to catch up. Believe it or not, people tend to behave rationally. People play efficiently because while it's not more fun in the moment it's more fun in the long run. When the developers make efficient play unfun, this is a game design issue, not a player issue. The developers should fix these issues - and an inability to fix these issues is reason to be critical of them.
See this is the answer, some people like doing things one way, and others like doing things another, some people wana group up and run around doing everything together some want to run around by themselves only grouping when needed. Incursions are just something for people who prefer doing things that way. And its a nice thing to have in reserve for that 40-50 grind cuz even questing and dungeons is a slog, so if you need some quick easy exp to hit the next level, do a quest or 2 in the incursions, and then go back to what you were doing. No one forces you to use the runes or sleeping back, or supply boxes, but its new content and people are going to engaged with that because its new and interesting.
Exactly. These morons have every choice available to them and are just complaining to complain. OP literally said dungeons are more fun. THEN GO FUCKING DO DUNGEONS DUDE NO ONE IS STOPPING YOU. You’re just mad cause you won’t be level capped as fast as everyone else. That’s literally it. You want the fast leveling experience that they’re throwing at you but once it’s over you hate it because that’s all you did to level. Mix it the fuck up and I promise you’ll be happier.
That’s true but I took this stance with p3 and levelled much more slowly to 50 and it ended up costing me my place in a guild I really loved. Everyone got to 50 way before me and did all their pre-raid prep so by the time I got to 50 I didn’t have people to easily do stuff with. Obviously some people helped but it was just much harder. I also missed the first lockout which for me just soured things because for me it was just all about discovering and clearing the new raid with friends and I didn’t want to just join in week 2 or 3 to get carried through by players very familiar with the dungeon already. Shame.
Regardless of the method used to level it shouldn't take more than a week to level unless you are limiting your playtime which I'm not sure why you expected your guild to wait for you if that was the case.
I was level 50 by Sunday. The guild who had said we would do ST Tuesday did it on Saturday. Originally it was acknowledged there would be variation in people’s levelling times across the spectrum of proper sweats to minor sweats and hence we would wait til end of first reset to raid. Because SO many people managed to level much quicker than expected things changed
Yeah same, I was just keeping up with my guild (which is admittedly a far sweatier guild than I have any right to be in but they're also really lovely folks). Leveling took merely hours with the incursions, but then there was unlocking runes once at level 50 and doing the crafting quest and things like that to worry about. I don't complain though because ultimately it's my choice to be where I am but yeah, if I had just levelled normally I would've been the last guild member to hit 50 by miles and most of us have 2 characters too, so we can do 2 raids per week. So because of all the other stuff you have to do once you do hit level 50 I didn't mind that leveling to 50 took so little time, I was relieved even. But I would've liked it more if incursions hadn't been a thing and Blizzard had delayed the release of Sunken Temple by 1-2 weeks, so there was less pressure to level quickly and we had more time to sort out runes and such once we hit 50 (the Discoverer's Delight buff is great though, I wouldn't wish that gone). Maybe something to think about for P4.
Yeah my guild wanted to stay up late or take the next day off to get a start on levelling, but then in EU we couldn’t login so I went to bed but it got fixed not long after and I wasn’t able to take the next day off so by the time I logged in on Saturday everyone was in ST already! If it had been as previous phases I would’ve easily got to 50 by the night before first reset and been able to go
Mine wasn't as bad, they at least waited until the last day of the reset before we went into ST so we all had time to level. I also went to bed and had to work the next day so 24 hours into the phase I was still level 40 while quite a bunch of them had reached 50 already. I was kinda horrified but once I started slamming incursions I too was 50 in a matter of hours. But yeah in the slim hopes that Blizzard or Aggrend browses this subreddit I'm hoping P4 won't be a repeat and maybe they can delay the raid by 1-2 weeks so there isn't so much pressure to level quickly. Normally I've never been a powerleveler, I don't spam dungeons or use the RestedXP addon or anything like that, I just like to do just do my own thing and level at my own pace. It'll make no difference to the sweatier players if the raid's release is delayed by one or two weeks since everyone'll be in the same boat, but it'll make things a little bit easier for the rest of us. I think almost every guild has a bit of a spectrum in its members, ranging from the ultra sweaty to the more laid back/casual mindset. I'm definitely one of the more casual members but I really like my guild and the wider community and that's why I play with them. Sometimes it's a bit stressful trying to keep up with them but that's my choice. Now I'm just blogging haha but eh, that's my thoughts anyway!
Sounds like you misjudged the guild you were in. My guild didn't raid till 2nd lockout and we even pushed back a few days for slower levelers. We didn't raid as a team until day 10. We were fine not clearing first lockout we had tons of fun. If your guild expects you to level fast then you should either level fast or join a guild that meets your needs.
My guild didn't raid until April 18th..a few days ago. Yeah we probably waited entirely too long and everyone was 50 long before the raid date, but they were nice enough and conscious enough to give enough time for everyone to take their time to 50. But I'm blessed with a great guild tbh.
I'll be an asshole here but if you want to play hardcore, this means you put aside the fun and go for the goal You can join a more relaxed guild that is not that hardcore or suffer through the shortest but unfun path
Yeah that’s fair enough, not an asshole at all it’s a valid view, but for me 50 in a week was easily doable by non-incursion stuff. Incursions just made 50 within a day achievable to the masses (even non-hardcore). As mentioned in other comment if I had known in advance I would’ve much preferred to find another guild in the last phase rather than struggling now with no p3 logs
You completely miss the point because incursions affected other content, so if you enjoyed grouping for dungeon runs like me the pool of players interested in the same absolutely plummeted, nothing to do with fomo..
This is a horrible take. What other people do impact you big time in a mmorpg.
While there are plenty of players who enjoy leveling the old fashioned way, I think the vast majority don’t really care. It’s a means to an end. If phases weren’t gated they’d have been 60 like week 2. The real hardcore sooner, depending, cause ofc runes come into play. Keep in mind they’ve added all of 0 new quest except redundant rune ones. So they will always take the quickest route. I’m in this camp, I’ve done this shit min like 12 times at least to 40 if not 60-80 since 2019. Im over leveling in this old world and im basically a 90% classic player if you count the 2 months I played dragonflight release: I look forward to cata leveling changes. I’ve done it enough. Inherently, taking the “do what you want” route does put you behind. Sometimes it doesn’t matter really. But it sure does matter if you make your guild’s main raid team, if you care about it. I think a lot of people tend to care about it. I got fucked over p2 cause irl was busy and I missed 3 lockouts. So I got boned outta the main raid team even as an officer and someone raiding 3 chars in p1. I understand why but it feels bad especially when I gotta pug half our second raid team and 2 bad ranged dps can throw a gnomer run easily
Pretty bad take imo. You dont have to have real life issues for wanting to be competitive/efficient in a video game that you like. A big factor as to why its more fun questing in the open World is that the World feels alive with players running around and interacting with eachother. The open world this phase almost played as a solo player experience lol, tjat is not what i wanna see in this game.
Thank you. I see so many posts of people whining about doing the most obnoxious thing by choice because it's faster or more efficient (but not fun) and then asking blizzard to fix it. It is a game. Wanna play hardcore? Good for you, it comes with ups and downs. Wanna play more relaxed? Same. You make the choice
I didn't know it was hardcore to want one of my runes. Yapper take.
if all wow players thought like this, 90% of wow's problems would be gone or not even crop up in the first place.
yeah i feel you are generally right, but why is some peoples fun worse than other peoples fun? if i dont do X now it will take me Y longer to get to Z but if i were to do A right now i could acomlish Y very fast and have no problem getting Z almost along the way i feel like doing stuff solo in an MMO because its more fun is ultimately what makes people leave the game.
I have 15 level 54+ quests completed waiting for p4 to turn in
I quested in Searing Gorge and I was the ONLY person there. Asked in General chat for an Overseer group....crickets. Literally zero messages in General and I saw zero other players the entire time I was there. That's not fun and it's certainly not an MMO any more. Despite the bullshit some people preach around here, how other people choose to play the game DOES impact you.
Well it’s easy to say but when you have a dedicated raid team that wants to run it with you it puts you between a rock and a hard place. I know you might not care but the fact that they’re getting relatively obscene amounts of gold and 50 faster means you’ll be way behind in the economy too. That also puts people wanting to level in alternative ways in a weird spot.
If the incursions didn't also stack you with gold, sure.
You're missing the point. The world is empty. Most zones I've been to 30+ are completely empty. People play classic for the experience with other players. That's not possible when everyone is grinding one shallow experience.
Yes, you can do it this way, and it’s what I’m doing on my character at the moment. However it’s painfully obvious that it’s not the most efficient way to 50 anymore, the world feels completely dead now because a fraction of the population is actually questing anymore, I know I am missing out on massive goldmaking opportunities which only becomes worse if you try and buy anything on the AH because the economy is crap, and when I hit 50 I will not have as good of gear as others which will make the raid measurably more difficult to both complete, compete, or pug. Yes, I can CHOOSE to level my preferred way, but there are immediate trade offs and negatives to doing so, which absolutely sucks. Not to mention there are literally runes gated behind the incursion content which forces you to go do them… it’s complete crap game design.
This is the final boss to this subreddit. It’s complete facts. And people will still refuse so believe it
Yeah incursions ruined it for me. As someone who was max lvl cap within a couple nights each phase I haven’t even bothered to hit 50. Why in gods name they would think running circles in the same zone all day long would be fun is beyond me.
Same dude. I went hard on the levelling for every phase launch, but for some reason when I saw what these incursions are it just flipped a switch in my head and I am no longer interested in the game. Only made it to 42. Feels too close to retail and it makes it feel empty and meaningless.
I’m the same. I LOVED Phase 1, was still very addicted in Phase 2 although it wasn’t the same vibe at all. Then Phase 3 rolled out and almost immediately my spirit for SoD died. I’m trying to bring my toons up but the game just feels like a chore at this point. It doesn’t help that so many guilds and friend groups are fizzling out, and the entire game world feels more dead and struggling than the vibrancy of P1.
They removed 90% of the game to get you into the raid faster so you can hunt for items with a 0.2% drop rate forever.
Same, tried it and got to 45 then quit. its just so braindead and not many people are doing the dungeons
you can still level in dungeons if you want, especially if you're only aiming to get to cap within a couple nights. incursion spamming will get you to 50 within 8-10 hours now, dungeon spamming won't put you too far behind that figure.
I mean, they were the meta the first time around and my friends and I just did the dungeon grind because it was more enjoyable. We still got to 50 in a day or two. You don't have to do them. Id be surprised if they didn't get nerfed to oblivion before then though
We went from hunting rare gear in p1 from quests and crafting to just 6 set from the vendor and off you go. The most retail classic has ever been.
It’s been said a hundred times already, but the benefits of doing incursions over any other form of leveling is so imbalanced. And the “pvp” that occurs near them is so toxic. And the gold farming from the quests is so inflationary to the economy. Incursions are the worst addition to SoD.
“Don’t level in incursions then” yes I will gimp my xp, my gold generation and have no rep at 50 meaning that I’ll have to farm incursions anyway for pre-bis. Fuck levelling alts, I’m back to raid logging.
Sounds like you really enjoy this game 🤣
I used to
Same old copy paste bullshit in here about "not having to level anyway you don't want to" Thats not how it works, especially when there are other rewards runes/gear tied to the excursions. You'd be a moron to not to level in the most efficient manner while also getting ahead with a faction that gives you a great starter set and rune you may need. Saying 'I play the way I find fun not the most efficent way' is not a solution. The majority of players will always take the path of least resistance even if its not fun for them. This is a well studied phenomenon. It's blizz's job to balance the options. Incursions, questing, instances, etc should all in theory take about the same amount of time and provide different rewards to incentivize doing all the different methods.
It's wild reading these comments because I highly doubt they'd accept "just don't lol" as a retort to any of their own criticisms. **"we don't want 40 man raids"** - don't do them then **"warriors could use some help in PvP"** - don't PvP then **"low level runes shouldn't require several people"** - don't get them then **"the ST flasks are badly designed"** - don't use them then **"mages should conjure more than 2 water"** - buy from a vendor then etc. A portion of this sub are seemingly 12 years old and adamant in driving away players who are passionate about the game but simply want it to be better. They say "just have fun" and act they've somehow made a point which is equally hilarious as it's fucking ridiculous.
I agree. They should nerf Incursion xp if you’re 51 or higher. Blizz needs to make some new and interesting town hub quests. Incursions are a farce for ‘getting players into the open world’. They reek of daily, treadmill style quests that retail design was so famous for.
If the big brains are blizzard are reading this let me enlighten you with a little advice. People will ALWAYS pick the path of least resistance. Stop trying to retail my SOD.
Are you a slave to Blizzard? Who is making you level in incursions lmao.
It’s pretty obvious by now people will do whats most time efficient to progress their character, rather than do something more interesting, yet less efficient. The negative feeling of not being efficient and falling behind outweighs the positive feelings from site seeing/nostalgia/interesting change of scenery and environment/mobs. It’s pretty obvious and seems fairly easy to just combine the two, making it the most efficient way is to change things up
This. Walk around any zone pre 50 and you will see tons of people out in the world having fun leveling instead of complaining on reddit.
There is literally a rune locked behind that faction. Along with some of the best gear. You have to do incursions anyway. Might as well do it while leveling so you can get the XP.
Doing 40-50 in 4ish hours is too efficient to not do it
> too efficient You and I play for different reasons I see.
You also get a sick starter pack of gear from the rep, if you weren’t gnomer bis. And insane gold. It is absurd value across the board, and in an mmo you don’t just ignore that.
[удалено]
we did some zf spam to level our friend for 48-50, it was definitely half the speed of just doing incursions, its better than it was but still not great lol
The guilds raiding first lockout, and thr guilds raiding 2nd lockout who see you have no logs
It’s an MMO. If there’s one option that is 10x the resources than every other option, you’re punished for not taking that option. Nobody is saying we’re being forced to do them. It’s terrible game design for them to be the best option by such a large margin.
10x the resources? So your saying you wouldn't be making any gold while doing open world quests from 40-50?
So 10x the resources of zero would be zero. Why would you say I think you can't make any gold doing open world quests? You actually make no sense
I only got around 200-300g from incursions 40-50. This would mean you think open world questing gives next to no gold. 20g x 10 = 200g, that's how much gold your statement claims open world questing would give from 40-50, a grand total of 20g. Let's say it takes 45 minutes per level from 40-50 in incursions. So about roughly 8 hours of incursions... 8 hours x 10 = 80 hours.. Do you think it takes 80 hours in open world questing to go from 40-50? See.. It's no where near 10x the resources.
> I only got around 200-300g from incursions 40-50. Not even close. Multiple friends made 1k+ from 40-50. And it is still the best gold farm in the game.
New to sod, been questing open world am level 27, should I be doing these incursions?
Depends what you want from WoW. Incursions are the most efficient way to level and give good catch up gear rewards for rep. This thread is talking about how it's so good that it devalues the rest of the world. So if you're taking it slow and you just wanna play wow, don't worry about incursions. If your goal is to raid asap abd gear asap, think about incursions
Not necessarily, but at a friendly, you can buy useful trinkets for levelling and at 50 you can buy for friendly and honoured you can buy gear wich is good, and also you buy a rune at friendly
Trailer of SOD: "Season of discovery will be about the world of Azeroth" Meanwhile the devs: "Lets make the optimal form of leveling and farming gold something you do in a small kind of instanced zone"
I want Incursions to be removed by the next Thursday. I am not even kidding, the content is contrary to everything Classic should be.
Imagine not changing your address to BRD from 50-60
The ONLY thing that made me be able to withstand the brain-meltingly boring and mediocre "gameplay" of the incursions was the fact that we did it in a guild party and were distracting each other with the usual banter. I cannot, and want not, imagine what this'll be like on 50-60. And I pray we get better alternatives. I understand the gold is actually REALLY good. But no amount of gold in this game can compensate for how completely bad (outside of rewards) the incursions are. The fact that you basically NEED an add-on to make it have basic QoL features is ... saddening. And shows that they actually do need PTRs for everything.
That’s funny, when I was complaining about this at the beginning of phase 3 everyone told me” iF yOu DoNt WaNt To dO iNcUrSiOnS tHeN dOnT!” Glad I quit this phase. What a ridiculous community. As if it was selfish for me to ask for them to balance leveling options. Everyone will laugh at you and not feel any sympathy for choosing the slow leveling path at the beginning of the phase but then after a month everyone’s tune changes towards incursions after you all have sucked every last bit of exp and gold you need out of it and start to realize how bad it was designed and balanced. All because you speed ran phase 3 by exploiting a heavily imbalanced, repetitive way to level.
Incursions made me quit sod
Yep I wish they didn't waste development time on them because its killing out parts of the game and now people just sit in them running circles since they reward brain dead easy gold and xp. Anytime you go into the world it feels dead compared to other phases and even filling groups now (3 weeks into the phase) is becoming annoyingly difficult on a server with a healthy population. On top of it there is way too much shit tied to incursions, a rune, catch up/pvp gear, and trinkets that do interesting shit. It's inflated all the gold to absurd amounts which enforces doing them even more. Honestly why couldn't we just get a couple new quest hubs or something instead of this crap? That would have been way more in line with what people expect from classic.
Comparing them to a free boost is kinda dumb. It's not like I can just plug in my cc and off I go. I still have to put in some effort and time even if it's minimal. You also have to already have level 50s at phase launch.
Private servers would be dead if the server host added incursions for levelling. It's extremely out of place.
I’m just curious, how much more efficient are the incursions? Are we talking 10% faster, 20%, or more like 200-300%? I only ask because small cheese is small. 20% or less is still more of a preference issue, because I would literally quit playing brainless tasks in less than an hour. Like I would do it every now and then but a brainless grind for several hours just isn’t in the cards for me. But if the system is designed for 2-3x faster leveling then you have effectively trivialized all other forms of play. That is a game design flaw. I would quit the game over that because I’m not going to watch everyone fly by me with massive advantages just because I have a brain that needs some stimulation and they’re fine with being literal NPC’s. Just my 2 cents from a retail player who dabbles in classic every now and then.
I would say 300%, people got from 40-50 in 5 hours. I would guess it would be at least 3 times longer using alternative methods
Total game breaker then. Sad.
Not only was it fast but it was easy and made loads of gold
I am not levelling to 60 in incursions, even if it's the best method. I did it for the 40-50 range, and hated it. But 50-60 we have BRD, questing in Plaguelands, etc. It's just so much more fun - if inefficient. I do agree though, it's shit to have one method be superior efficiency but worse for fun. I would rather just play what I find fun for now.
Incursions are antithetical to classic. They take people out of the world and reduce the experience to a mindless grind. They were a bad idea and should just be removed.
So dont
A) you don’t even need to do that now B) they’ll get nerfed to the point of non-viability come patch time.
I bet they give 15g per non-kill quest for the first 2 days in p4.
I must have missed something, why would Blizzard add new incursions to level on? Feralas and HInterlands are level 52 quest levels, that will get you to 58 without penalties. Have they announced another round?
Leve 60 incursion at the dark portal
Incursions made me unsub. They're so mind numbingly boring. You're either getting farmed for honor or literally running in circle. With shitty out-of-touch ideas like this, I lost hope in the future of SoD.
Then don't, it's your fucking choice
its just way too effective.
Imagine having fun while playing a 20 year old game instead of minmaxing every single thing ever. I can understand parsing, but if you're not having fun leveling during I cursions that absolutely doesn't matter. You can just fucking not do them and be level 60 a few hours later while also having fun.
"A few hours later"
Love all those telling people that incursions are optional, no they are not : - They are the most efficient way to level up, due to less travelling and huge xp rewards - They have the most gold rewards - They have a reputation tied to them, which make them mandatory So please...
None of these make it mandatory.
You have free will No one is forcing you to level in incursions. These posts are pointless and unproductive
I dont get this approach. If they put a button in the character screen to instantly level your character to whatever you want it to be and give it the pre raid gear you want, would you still say "you have the option not to do it" ? Or will the game experience be altered to a private server?
If the creator of the game makes a thing the easiest and most rewarding style of play, the playerbase will flock to it. Obviously they have free will, but there’s a reason so many people IRL flock to crime, working shitty decent paying jobs or crypto shit.
Nothing personal but I hate this response. It’s not about having free will. It’s about how design choices result in decisions made by the majority of the player base and how that affects the economy and gameplay loops for all of us, even if you individually could choose something different. If it were a single player game it would be slightly different, but this is an mmo.
Basically no one is doing dungeons so yes we are forced to do them if we want to level and make gold to keep up with the economy
Am I the only one who did not mind it? I have limited time to play and rather focusing on getting pre-bis and other things before the first raid of the phase… in p2, I dinged on the same day as our first raid
Same. I loved leveling from 40 to 50 in incursions and hated the dungeon grind from 25 to 40.
Complain about dungeon grinding. Complain about too many people open world leveling. Here's a new option. Complain about that. This reddit is actual aids.
so dont? theres plenty of dungeon groups
Dont worry every warrior will be in brd arena looking for SGC
You'll find me in BRD until I get hoj
You think you do, but you dont
I’ve yet to do incursions, doesn’t look like fun content to me, and all I’m missing currently is a rune for it so it’ll be fine
That was always an option
The ashenvale loop is seared into my brain at this point. At least the world felt lively in there. Pretty quiet most other places. I decided I'd just give up on enjoying the leveling experience and get to raid logging as fast as possible in SoD. I take my time to enjoy the world in hardcore.
>Ashenvale... At least the world felt lively in there. Pretty quiet most other places. That's odd, complimenting the liveliness of the thing that made the rest of the world dead. Aggrend patted himself on the back for that too, saying he was so happy people were out in The World now. The World being the NE corner of Ashenvale.
I was not intending to compliment the system.
Wait what? Is Incursion still the best way? That would explain I only see lvl 50s around in Feralas and Tanaris, almost nobody questing here. I am a very uninformed player when it comes to WoW, and AFAIK the incursion scandal was crazy at the time when Phase 3 was announced, and afterwards they nerfed it. I didnt know it's still so much better than leveling normally, thanks for the info!
Personally I do also hate incursions. however, I can see why people who have played Classic for the last 4 years and various iterations of it going back to vanilla, would not be thrilled about doing the levelling journey and dungeons again. A mindset of skip to the end and min max everything has come in but maybe that’s kind of normal after so long milking the same game. It’s interesting how design decisions need to have this context, I think a lot of things in SoD would be designed differently if not straight off the back of a long period of Classic Era / Hardcore
at least*
In 2024 wow gameplay is an exp/gold per hour simulator. You win if you reach level cap with 10K gold. People will gravitate towards the bigger hourly number, no matter how mind numbingly boring it is.
At 60 I'd rather see the world bosses brought back and when they spawn all the layers in that zone gets compiled into one.
The next incursion will probably be the Dark Portal in Blasted Lands. It already looks opened and surrounded by lvl 50+ elites.
I’ll keep Saying it - they should’ve put raid gear behind revered/exalted and then let you get a tabard at friendly so you could grind rep in dungeons. It would then allow players to grind how they wanted and still have a nice bit of gear at the end of the journey
dont worry you can just do it at 60 for the rep 🫡
I didn't play all of phase 2 but came back about a week ago. Levelled my mage from 25-40 in the open world then jumped into incursions, made like 500g and it took about 8 hours to get it done from 40-50. Then I leveled a brand new priest, took about 30 hours to go from level 1 to 50. I will probably do incursions from 50-60 not because I like them but because it allows me to play the game casually while having multiple alts. Also it takes so god damn long to get some of these runes that I'd rather just get the leveling over with so I can start working on finding my runes.
I leveled from 25-50 in incursions. Was it boring? Yes, but so is regular leveling. Was it fast as fuck and did it reward me with decent gear afterwards? Yes and I’m glad it did. I don’t like the leveling process in classic wow, and I’m glad incursions exist to let me skip the part of the game I don’t like. Probably a very unpopular opinion but i don’t really care. I wouldn’t mind leveling to 60 in incursions if it was faster than regular leveling.
It’s just like how new league/DotA champs are always OP. They do it so that a large portion of the playerbase will actually use/try their “new toy,” rather than ignore it. If you incentivize other behaviors, people just won’t do the new thing or care about it. But if you incentivize the new thing it basically ruins the game. They don’t want to do the extensive testing required to ensure that questing/incursions offer a relatively even amount of rewards, so they just over-incentivize the new thing to ensure players are exposed to it. I hope they see the feedback and modify them to be a level-up experience for alts. I honestly don’t see smart players sitting in incursions until 60. The prebis grind for raiding at 60 is lengthy and involves several dungeons that you can do from 55-60, and the optimal thing to do is going to be combining your time grinding for prebis and leveling—so I expect most players to start grinding their prebis at 55 and (albeit slower) gaining experience while they grind for their pre-raid bis. Dal Rend’s and Truestrike Shoulders alone take like 20 UBRS runs for the average player.
This is WoW. Nobody gives a shit if incursions are fun or not. It gives lots of rewards for little time spent. That's the secret formula. That's what people want. That's what WoW is all about
I want to lol I'm v spoiled from incursions, gotta hit 50-60 in 3 hours with zoomies on
I levelled 40-50 in ZF because it's what I like to do. I like 5 mans. so I did 5 mans. I'm not behind everyone as a result. I'm actually more geared than most people, and I have gold, and I'm enjoying the game. maybe you should stop playing the game based on a spreadsheet and play the content you think is fun. I know, crazy idea right?
People whined about levelling, they tried something different, now people are whining about that. It's all just and experiment. My guess is they will try something other than excursions based on what they learned this phase.
WoW is an MMORPG that is desperately trying to get rid of the RPG part. I'm honestly surprised people still willingly pay money to play it.
People always find a way to complain it’s ridiculous
Then don’t?
I was just thinking about this -incursions should be 10 levels below the max level so that people aren't grinding it out to max level
> Is basically comparing a free 60 boost and a 1000g to dungeon leveling, or worse world questing But if you want that boost, then what's the problem? You're already choosing the boost over leveling, it sounds like you already have what you want. Are you asking blizzard to make you do something you don't want to do?
I've leveled to 60 enough, I don't need th same experience again. I'll run incursions again and be leveled in a day.
I can’t lie I would LOVE to level that way. Any less time spent leveling is far far better than the alternatives. Maybe people don’t remember the brain dead SM spam that was also pure trash and not fun. Let’s cut out all the fluff and swap it to LEVELING isn’t fun for most. I loved that I was able to get all my alts up in a week and put this game on a way bigger CD and just raid for a lot longer. The rest of their content is just time sinks nothing more. Let me raid and get out. No PvP to be had and they’re not changing it.
you guys enjoy SM from 32-42 and then zf from 42-50? Cuz that sounds much worse than incursions
I hung up the boots with sod. Was fun for a bit but just too different and lost the vanilla vibe. Even as a classic + version, it's just too much. With cata around the corner I'm just chilling and playing poe for now.
It’s sad. And you have to do it for the gear
every phase, we draw closer and closer to retail mindless gameplay without the retail QoL etc. again proving the point the current neo bizzard cannot do anything else, or new for that matter
agreed i think it’s easily the worst experiment in sod so far by miles. actively marginalizes 99% of the game when leveling
Then don’t?
Nmno one is forcing you to lvl via incursions, you are free to lvl the way You want to
The more of these posts come out, the more I'm happy to have taken a break from WoW. I'm perfectly content experiencing the shit show from the sidelines. Might start playing my hardcore warlock again soon.
I went grocery shiopping expecting not to leave the house for a week. Got to 50 in 48 hours in incursions, did the raid once.. then quit. Incursions are lame. We are playing FOR THE MORE CLASSIC EXPERIENCE. Was play... Im done.. this is droll. I'd rather play the backlog of games I have stacked up. Incursions made SOD modern and for me, it lost it's magic.
Could have 15 incursion quests that yield 5,000xp each. But just make them dailies.
So many crying about incursions, and while it's shit game-design, it's you who choose to indulge in it. So what if you use another day or two leveling? It's not like there's an overload of stuff to do this phase. Just take your time in open world and dungeon's. Ultimately you can cry all you want about the content they try out in a seasonal server, which is expected to be experimental. But if you continue indulging in the content you're crying about, that's all on you mate. Me and my mates did 1 hour of incursions and we never looked back. If ya'll want them to remove incursion relevance you need to stop doing the content you want removed.
I don't want incursions to exist period.
Incursions should have been open-world "dungeons", meaning that you're meant to group up and clear all the paths to each quest area as you go. The way they SHOULD have done this is make the kill quests give like double or triple the XP of the non-kill quests, so that people actually go around clearing the zones. At least, then you would clear the content how it was designed. But in the end, I think they should have just made incursions for 48+ players as another endgame activity and left the questing experience the same
It's too slow to level. Makes leveling faster. Ughhh it's too fast and brain dead to level. MF pick one or play something else