16 February 2009

The dead zone

I got my mage to 60 over the weekend and bid a joyous farewell to Azeroth.

Those last ten levels were truly awful. I think it was a combination of the tedium of zone-hopping — Felwood to Ungoro to Plaguelands to Winterspring to Silithus — and the utter dearth of gear.

I forgot how pointless quest rewards were back in classic. I don't think I equipped anything after Hinterlands. No crafted armor is worth wearing and the auction house is virtually empty of decent gear until 55 or so, when BC drops start appearing for outrageously inflated prices. You can find the odd bit of spellpower gear but generally at the cost of stamina and intellect. I suppose you could run instances to pick up some reasonable blues, but who does anymore? I went through the Dark Portal still wearing some 40-something armor and jewellery, and don't get me started on weapons. Basically, 50-60 was vile.

Which got me thinking. If you are melee, or a hunter, your primary stats contribute directly to your combat stats — strength and agility boost attack power and crit at the same time, in various combinations, depending on your class. So even in crappy boe greens, which is what we're talking about here, your damage is respectable. But, short of a very poor conversion of intellect to crit, casters depend entirely on combat stats for damage, stats that are very hard to come by before Outland.

Presumably it all balances out somehow. But it did make we wonder if melee classes have an easier time traversing this dead zone of gear than casters, and why casters don't get more of a baseline benefit from primary stats.

And if you're wondering why I waited till 60 to move to Outland, that's because it took me all of two levels to hit 300 mining. Thorium, how I hate thee.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I recently got my Druid and Hunter in to Outlands and both were wearing some +agi cape and +agi shoulders from SFK. It seems that when Blizzard did the revamping of the old world instance gear, a lot of stuff you get out there in the early instances can last quite some time.

I couldn't agree more that the quest rewards, for the most part, are pretty lackluster and a majority of the craftable stuff sucked.

How did we ever survive in vanilla-WoW with such horrible gear?

Anonymous said...

I've leveled several melee and casters into Outland and beyond and I'm pretty sure it's much harder for melee classes. As melee, a huge portion of your damage is determined by the damage of your weapon so if it doesn't get updated frequently you're severely gimped. As a caster the only way to make your spells hit harder is by adding spell power which basically doesn't exist (as quest rewards) until outland, meaning you'd kill mobs at roughly the same rate naked as you would with all your gear on.

Merlot said...

Ah, I didn't think about weapon damage (that should tell you how much time I've spent playing melee). I've just got a pala to Ungoro Crater but I've been splashing out on boe blue weapons and boosting with crusader, so I'm clearly masking the true pain!

Anonymous said...

I dont think i could do another alliance from 1-60 again.

I have got an Orc rogue which is pretty cool but im seeing places froma different angle and new quests as well but my Paladin and Priest will be the only ones ill be playing other than my Rogue.