They are not pleasant experiences, and it has nothing to do with role playing.

I started WoD at level 94.  I’ve made it to 97.  I have face-tanked more than at any other point in WoW’s history.

The starting scenario, where you break the portal and set up your garrison, the one that was a cakewalk on 5 characters.  The DK died a half dozen times… and I learned that there’s a timewarp effect that brings you back from the dead immediately.

Following that, I decided to take another look at my gear.  Aside from 2 crappy trinkets, everything else was within 10 item levels.  Ok… maybe it’s the spec?  I used to play frost, but heard good things about unholy as it had a pet.  Read up various guides on the interwebs.  It’s actually a remarkably simple build with 1 builder, 1 finisher, then others based on cooldown availability.  Cooldowns/triggers that take their darn time.

I do recall the first time through Draenor, where rares were quite hard to take down solo.  It was serious effort, but doable.  I am unable to get any of them to 50%.  I died quite a few times to the first mini-boss, blowing through every cooldown I had.  Even paying attention to spells in order to interrupt those worthwhile didn’t help.  I even resorted to consumables.

I won’t even go into the garrison invasion I botched.

Conspiracy Theory

Didjaknow that the refer a friend system was recently changed?  The experience boost was changed from 200% experience down to 50%.  And it no longer stacks with heirloom bonuses.

The way that RAF worked in the past, for the price of 1 month subscription you could level up like a rocket.  1 shotting everything and hitting max level in a few days.  This was great for two specific cases.

• People wanting to quickly level alts
• New players that wanted to go straight to the end game

This was bad for these use cases

• Learning how to play the game
• Experiencing any of the content in a logical manner
  • It was impossible to follow quest lines this way

The conspiracy here is that the RAF change, combined with the level scaling changes are a rather dramatic change to the leveling process that has been around since at least Cataclysm (7+ years ago).  The decision point of RAF vs. character boost is now gone.  If you want a max level character, then you need a character boost.

I will recognize that Blizzard has a talent for pricing things just at the top end of reasonable.  Enough to get people to complain, but not high enough to get them to not buy it.  I think most people can see the race swap requests that BfA will bring due to the new sub-races.  If that’s not a cash cow…

Death Knight Next Steps

I play a lot of multi-spec classes.  I have leveled nearly all of them as tanks.  That means that my DK is going to swap to blood and then try this run again. I only have a couple levels to go in WoD anyhow, which is good.

I had forgotten about the WoD enemy density issues.  Legion has groups of enemies close together, and most classes have decent AoE abilities. WoD was the final expansion of solo kills.  Once Legion closes up, I’ll write up a retrospect on the WoW expansions…it’s remarkable how this last one has addressed so many hurdles that WoD introduced.