At level 80, decked out in ICC gear, I was practically immortal when it came to questing through WotLK (and earlier) material. Waves of mobs? No problem. Giant pull while questing? AoE is all it takes. Group quests? Solo’ed them.
And I was far from being the only one. Level-capped players in WotLK with decent gear and half a brain could breeze through missed quests, dailies and the like without even breaking a sweat.
It’s nice — humbling, even — to be smacked down from that high horse.
Questing through Cataclysm content has refreshed my sense of being a mere mortal in these lands of Azeroth. I’ve died in the most unexpected of situations simply because I hadn’t yet adapted to the fact that I was no longer playing through material for which I was massively overqualified.
But with gear now made obsolete from the expansion and while fighting mobs that are at least at my level, if not higher, situations can get tricky. In those first few hours of questing in Cataclysm, in particular, I remember running into a couple of issues. It seems that mob re-spawn rates in the new areas were much higher than usual, and sometimes I would end up with multiple mob-respawns at the same place and time.
Usually no problem – AoE to solve the situation. But having three or four of these guys smacking on you at once is a different story than WotLK trash. Especially when it takes much more than just a couple of hits to kill them. A well-timed Vanish or Evasion has many times gotten me out of what could have been a mess, but even those tricks haven’t prevented me from taking several runs back from the graveyard to find my corpse. Oh, and Recuperate? It’s my new best friend and has become a regular fix in my rotation. I feel so weak.
Similar to our severe fallibility in Cataclysm heroics as poignantly described by Amatera,content in general just isn’t as easy when running content for which your gear is now obsolete. I only wonder how long it will take before we catch up. Will it be at the level cap? Perhaps after gearing up in heroics?
The challenge factor has been reinstated as I continue toward the new level cap. Let’s see how long it lasts before I claim my spot on top of the world once again.
It could just be my awfully geared, PvP specced Shadow Priest, but the Tol Borad dailies were no joke.
I sometimes have to go Prot to survive my Tol Borad dailies.
The respawn time + around 85k HP mobs that are clustered together… yeah.
A couple months before Cata, I finally broke down and ground out badges on my spriest. I ended up with almost all BiS items available outside of a raid. With that gear and the 4.0.1 talent tree, I was able to solo all Northrend group quests as well as all TBC normal instances.
Once I started leveling in Cata, all that went out the window. Content that I had breezed through before now became impossible. The level/gear reset hit me hard. However, once I hit level 85 and got geared up for heroics, things changed. I now can solo heroic Outland instances and I suspect I can solo vanilla raid content as well. So, grind up to 85 and get geared and it’ll all be puppies and kittens. Of death.
@Barugaara
No, your not. That place has a massive balance issue that makes it near impossible to Annyoing for anyone to quest in.
Literally right after you kill a mob, it immediately respawns, Then a pat comes to you while that respawns and if you kill that it respawns immediately too.
Terrible place on many level’s.
P.S. Happy new year :P