“The Grind”
With Wrath of the Lich King arriving last week it only made sense to jump into the new content “Lich King” style. Although we had initially reacted to the beta, playing the final content was much more fun with all of our guild and friends to play along.
It only took a few hours to get my new Death Knight to level-58 beyond the starting area and into the real world of Azeroth. Upon reaching the main city (Ogrammar as we’re horde) I picked up two new professions to make me a bit of dime: mining and skinning. This is where the beauty of the Death Knight fell apart…
A level-58 character has a few options open for exploration with the Burning Crusade content being the most desirable starting point. However, quickly it became apparent that my professions of mining and skinning were useless in Hellfire and other Burning Crusade areas. Why? Professions start with a value of 1. The last expansion requires your professions to be roughly 300 before you can utilize them.
My level-58 Death Knight has no experience in the ways of skinning and mining, what has he been doing all his life? Apparently killing innocent people in small villages throughout the Eastern Plaguelands. My anticipation with leveling my Death Knight died knowing I’d spend the next few days hunting mines and killing animals as if I where a level-10 toon.
There I was, a high level character trolling Crossroads and Thousand Needles hunting for copper and tin and skinning all the low level creatures I could find. Why didn’t Blizzard consider this when they allow you to create a level-55 character on day one? If we don’t go off and grind our way to a profession level of 300 we might as well not even pick professions at all.
I was not alone in these findings, along my path I found several Death Knights with skinning knives and mining tools looking for open opportunities to cut into the earth or the dead animals skins all around them. Sure, we can kill a cat in seconds flat but the “grind” is what we wanted to avoid, this is what characters spend their first twenty levels doing!
After three sessions of mind numbing grinding I’ve managed to reach a skill of 340 in skinning and coming upon 200 in mining. Mining is still too low for high level game content so I must whisk myself away to noobville every so often to catch a few mythril nodes and pray for a gold deposit along the way.
This may not be a bug in the Wrath of Lich King expansion but it sure is an annoying design flaw.
Hi guys!
Thanks for this episode! I really loved, that you talked so much about older games, so I could listen more carefully because I nearly knew all the games!
But some things to mention:
Open world Elden ring: I am completely on your side Jonah: I don’t have that much time to grind 10 hours to get to next point. I want games where I knew that they will end after 10 levels or when you solved 50 puzzles or something like that. Open world games don’t have that goal for me. I totally understand that people having fun with that, but not me 🙂
Street fighter 3: I was involved in the street fighter video game scene so I knew what you tried to analyze. In my opinion on 3rd strike came up when SF4 was released. Many old players didn’t like it and tried to show their disrespect by hyping 3rd strike again.
Hard mode / easy mode / achievements:
I think it’s hard for developers to find the best way between „not to easy but hard enough to not get bored“. Sometimes I like to change the difficulty but sometimes I feel like I don’t wanna have the choice because I want to play the game how it was intended by the developers.
Achievements: sometimes I try to get them, sometimes I don’t care. It depends on the game. It’s nice because you don’t need them, they don’t change the game itself but if you really want to can play the game a different way. So I think it’s a nice thing and it’s a nice addition.
Thanks again and please stay healthy and enjoy life!
Greetings,
Ralf