{"id":8816,"date":"2010-07-30T19:21:17","date_gmt":"2010-07-31T00:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=8816"},"modified":"2010-07-30T19:21:17","modified_gmt":"2010-07-31T00:21:17","slug":"experienced-points-77behind-the-grind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=8816","title":{"rendered":"Experienced Points #77:<br\/>Behind the Grind"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table   class=\"\" cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' border='0' align='center'><tr><td><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/splash_wow1.jpg' class='insetimage'   alt='splash_wow1.jpg' title='splash_wow1.jpg'\/><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.escapistmagazine.com\/articles\/view\/columns\/experienced-points\/7919-Experienced-Points-Behind-the-Grind\">My article this week is a bit about grinding in RPG&#8217;s. <\/a><\/p>\n<p>When I played World of WoWcraft two years ago, I got fed up and quit as the mid-30&#8217;s slump kicked in.  The same thing happened again at about the same level in LOTRO.  But now I&#8217;m back to WoW and right now <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wowarmory.com\/character-sheet.xml?r=Kirin+Tor&#038;cn=Shadowless\">Shadowless<\/a> is about 2 dead spiders away from level 42. <\/p>\n<p>Part of my success is attributable to the changes to the leveling that sped up things in the mid game.  Part of it is that the game is a little more polished and fun. Part of it is that I knew the slump was coming, so I didn&#8217;t get discouraged when progress slowed. Part of it is that this time around I knew where to go for level-appropriate quests. <\/p>\n<p>By nature, I WANT to stay in one area until I&#8217;ve exhausted all of the quests.  But you usually can&#8217;t do that. The quests will go up in level faster than you do, and you&#8217;ll eventually be in over your head. This even applies in the early game.  If you do all the quests around <a href=\"?p=1742\">Goldshire<\/a> in the human area, you&#8217;ll be two or three levels short of being able to enter Westfall.  I don&#8217;t think you should have to travel to some other area of the world or level grind that early in the game. (Or ever, but especially then.)<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s often better to do the 30-35 content in one zone, then hop to another zone and do the 30-35 content, then another, then head back to the first zone and take on the 35-40 content. I dislike this, as there are a few quest lines in these zones that tell a little story.  They&#8217;re not Shakespeare or anything, but they&#8217;re sometimes amusing and often give a new look at the setting. But the zone-hopping breaks them all up.  You&#8217;ll turn in step 2 of a quest chain and find that step 3 is suddenly five levels above you.  (This problem is really bad in Stranglethorn Vale. I&#8217;ve been to that zone three times, and I still have a bunch of unfinished quests there.) Maybe next weekend you&#8217;ll be back, but by that time you&#8217;ll have forgotten what was doing which thing to what dudes because of huh? <em>Ah, screw it.  Just hit &#8220;accept quest&#8221; and let quest helper aim me at my goal.  I don&#8217;t have time to look this up on the wiki and figure out what was going on.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Still, I have to keep reminding myself that WoW is six years old.  I&#8217;m sure this system was viewed as very friendly and gentle compared to then-leader Everquest.  I&#8217;ll bet a lot of this will be smoothed over in the upcoming Cataclysm global revamp. (Which is funny. Hey! The world is beset by disaster and now everything works better!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My article this week is a bit about grinding in RPG&#8217;s. When I played World of WoWcraft two years ago, I got fed up and quit as the mid-30&#8217;s slump kicked in. The same thing happened again at about the same level in LOTRO. But now I&#8217;m back to WoW and right now Shadowless is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}