For The Paladin

Hey guys, I’ve been really busy with finals and such and haven’t gotten around to playing/blogging for a while, but with the semester over I will be back to my normal routine. Sorry for the lack of posts this week.

Ghostcrawler (WoW’s Lead System’s Designer) recently talked about Cataclysm’s overall leveling improvements:

1. The gain is every level. You don’t have to reach certain milestones for your Shadow Bolt damage to increase. One of the scaling problems we have currently is that any spell without a level 80 rank starts to fall behind. Imagine Shadow Bolt just has 85 (free and automatic) ranks.

2. We changed the level at which you get abilities, in some cases dramatically. Currently, you get showered with abilities at low level, many of which aren’t even useful when soloing. By sliding these around we have every class to where you get an ability about every odd level. There are still some dry spells for some classes, but then you have talents and other things that fill in some blanks.

3. Related, the spell book tells you at what level you will get future abilities so you can plan accordingly. In addition, when you ding, the UI tells you not only about newly available spells, but also systems and mechanics not tied to your class trainer, such as the ability to train riding, dual spec or use Dungeon Finder. It’s pretty sweet. Our UI team is kicking some major booty for Cataclysm. Source

Personally, I’ve given up on leveling characters for a while. I thought that I was going to be able to level my warlock (who’s 68 at the moment) before the summer came around, but for me it’s getting way too boring. Hopefully these improvements will at the very least create a new experience when it comes to leveling in World of Warcraft.