After writing my “boo hoo” post about being ultra-casual yesterday, I asked the wife if I could spend the night playing WAR (after dinner and a walking the dog together). She was happy to oblige as she had her own things to do.
I ended up putting in 2.5 hours of straight solo questing and PQ-grinding in Troll Country (I had already tapped Barak Varr and Marshes of Madness dry). I didn’t do a single scenario because I wanted to max out my Chapter 8 influence bar and get a decent head start on Chapter 9 (it never happened). You know what I learned?
Normal quests yield really crappy XP and so do single mobs!
Even with a four-bubble rested XP bonus, the rank 17-19 mobs in the area were yielding 150-200 XP per. Is that a bug? A visual display error? Equal con mobs in Barrack Varr were giving me almost 500xp per with a rested bonus! What’s going on? Each normal quest would give me 2000-3000 XP, which may not sound bad, but it took me an about 15-20 minutes to complete each one.
What did I have to show for my entire night’s efforts focused on solo PvE? I went from 19.15 to 19.6 (I could confirm this if the Realm War page was actually working) and very little time was spent idling or crafting (maybe 10% of my total session). Two and a half hours amounted to about half a rank.
I realize WAR has fewer ranks than WoW and that each rank will be about 50% harder to gain if they want to maintain a similar pre-TBC progress rate, but I’m not even half way to the level cap and I’m already experiencing very slow gains. In WoW, it took me about 2-3 hours per level from 50-60 in the original game, which is about 4-6 hours in WAR-time). I’m fine with slow gains like that near the level cap—in T4 for example—but not T2!
Would it be faster if I mixed in some scenario RvR? Only if I was winning, but that’s beside the point. This post is about the slow progress of PvE. Would it have been faster if I could get into an AoE guild group? Yes, but there aren’t enough people in my guild in my level-range. What about participating in non-guild groups (pick-up groups)? Coordination time aside, yes, if they weren’t always kinda silly, unskilled (not to sound elitest but it’s frustrating grouping with people who lack the basics MMO common sense - “Hey, let’s kite this hero into five champions, YEAH!”) or simply unwilling to group with me because they had their own good thing going.
The rate of solo PvE in WAR really needs a boost. It shouldn’t take me 5+ hours to get from rank 19-20. I’m really hoping this wasn’t a design decision and that I was simply bugged (there has to be a reason why I was getting half the XP for equal-con mobs in TC compared to BV). Am I just really slow, or are you guys noticing this too?
It’s not about a race to the finish line. It’s about earning an acceptable reward for the time I’m putting in and maintaining some kind of pace with my guild, because frankly, if I didn’t have guild groups to look forward to, there’s no way I would be playing WAR solo if this is how it’s going to be all the way toward rank 40…
