World of Warcraft's Class "Crash Courses" Aim to Help New "Insta-Level 90s"

[Steven Bogos]

World of Warcraft's Class "Crash Courses" Aim to Help New "Insta-Level 90s"

A series of World of Warcraft guides aim to help players taking advantage of Warlords of Dreanor's instant level 90 boost.

One of the perks players can enjoy for pre-purchasing the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion: Warlords of Dreanor, is the ability to instantly boost any character to level 90 [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/131413-Update-WoW-Warlords-of-Draenor-Pre-Order-Bonus-is-an-Instant-Level-90] (including fresh, level 1 characters). The obvious outcome of this is going to be a whole bunch of players at max level with exactly zero idea on how to play their shiny new level 90 characters, so to combat this, Blizzard has released a series of class "crash course" videos.

The video guides are very short and sweet - around three minutes a piece - and offer a very rough guide on what spells players should be casting and when. The guides, while in no way comprehensive, should hopefully stem the flow of players queuing for battlegrounds or dungeons with absolutely no idea of what any of their abilities do.

First up, here's the Death Knight's video:


Then, the Druid:


The Hunter:


The Mage:


The Monk:


The Paladin:


The Priest:


The Rogue:


The Shaman:


The Warlock:


The Warrior:


If you've recently used an instant level 90 boost yourself, or know of someone else who has, please be sure to share these videos with them!

Source: Blizzard [https://www.youtube.com/user/WorldofWarcraft/videos]

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[Ferisar]

These teach the bare minimum class rotations. I guess they're useful? They miss out the vast majority of the class features. A crash course on Shamans without even mentioning totems?

I feel like a guide to a class which misses out the core class features is a bit off.

Eh, they're not horrible. Knowing the very base-line spells to do -anything- is kind of important, especially for those who got to 90 with the instant thing. Everything else will need to come later (and really, the players should be looking at that themselves). These aren't "guides", per se

Also, totems? I thought they don't actually work the same way anymore (in that, you barely need to summon them outside of cooldown equivalent abilities).

 

[synobal]

I really hate that you can just buy lvl 90s now. Its like WoW just said "screw it" who needs to explore the world or enjoy none max level content. You'd think with them reworking most the lvling experience in cata they'd have figured something out.

I'm glad I left after Cata Launched. WoW has just about played itself out.

 

[Flutterguy]

But... leveling was the best part of that game.. and I've heard its 60$ to boost a character...

I guess that its a decade old game now Actiblizzard just wants to squeeze everything they can out of the remaining fan-base. Considering the nature of MMO's many of the remaining players are probably just dandy with throwing their money at it.

 

[DugMachine]

I really hate that you can just buy lvl 90s now. Its like WoW just said "screw it" who needs to explore the world or enjoy none max level content. You'd think with them reworking most the lvling experience in cata they'd have figured something out.

I'm glad I left after Cata Launched. WoW has just about played itself out.

I wish the feature was only for folks who have already leveled legitimately to 90 already. As it stands, lots of people who are new to the game are coming in with max level characters and not knowing where anything in the world is and more importantly how to play their class.

But I have 7 max level characters and for me this is a huge convenience for when I have extra spending money. I've done practically every single quest in this game and explored every nook and cranny of the world, I don't want to do it an eighth time lol

 

[Ferisar]

I really hate that you can just buy lvl 90s now. Its like WoW just said "screw it" who needs to explore the world or enjoy none max level content. You'd think with them reworking most the lvling experience in cata they'd have figured something out.

I'm glad I left after Cata Launched. WoW has just about played itself out.

I wish the feature was only for folks who have already leveled legitimately to 90 already. As it stands, lots of people who are new to the game are coming in with max level characters and not knowing where anything in the world is and more importantly how to play their class.

But I have 7 max level characters and for me this is a huge convenience for when I have extra spending money. I've done practically every single quest in this game and explored every nook and cranny of the world, I don't want to do it an eighth time lol

I do think this is what the baseline should have been, but I have doubts that they'll change it at this point, which is unfortunate.

Also, the whole "buying 90's RIP Blizzard": The 90 boost comes with the expansion. The reality is, people were going to just keep on buying WoD to just get max level toons via account mergers, which they do already to power-level characters with the refer-a-friend program since it provides extra experience gain. It's hardly out of place at this point, although it does speak of a larger problem revolving around content expectations and the game center being max-level raid content, but we've got ourselves to blame for it sadly. People yelled at Blizzard that it was too inaccessible, so we got Wrath (which I will still defend to being on the whole one of the best "content" expansions that Blizzard released). Then people yelled that it was too easy, so we got Cata at launch, which people complained was too hard.

A bad case of not knowing what players actually wanted combined with streamlining for accessibility caused a lot of the game's content that was centered around smaller groups and "clunky" areas (which oftentimes were quite charming: i.e. Hillsbrad Foothills or Arathi Highlands) to be erased, and the alternative became raiding, as dungeons and scenarios are both actively trivial with the challenge modes being locked to the top tier. And don't even get me started on LFR. Ugh. If there's one thing that should have never been added to this game.
It's all weird. How they manage all of it is still -really- mind-boggling.
Either way, I'm looking forward to the expansion. The new 90's really can't bother me all that much given the average player's performance at that level.

 

[Neonsilver]

I shudder at the thought of visiting instances after the expansion is out. The guides are helpful to not get killed when you play solo, but without at least some basic understanding of the aggromechanics they just get themselves and the rest of the group killed. Thats not even mentioning those morons that join the groups as tanks or healers.

At least it would be like that in vanilla or bc wow, don't know how it is now.

 

[anthony87]

I really hate that you can just buy lvl 90s now.

I know....options right? The horror!

 

[Cyrromatic]

These teach the bare minimum class rotations. I guess they're useful? They miss out the vast majority of the class features. A crash course on Shamans without even mentioning totems?

I feel like a guide to a class which misses out the core class features is a bit off.

To be fair, totems have been stripped of -much- of their core functionality in WoW to date. Pretty much all of them last under 40 seconds for speedy, situational buffs, and I think searing totem is only used by enhancement specs.

 

[anthony87]

I shudder at the thought of visiting instances after the expansion is out. The guides are helpful to not get killed when you play solo, but without at least some basic understanding of the aggromechanics they just get themselves and the rest of the group killed. Thats not even mentioning those morons that join the groups as tanks or healers.

At least it would be like that in vanilla or bc wow, don't know how it is now.

I reckon it won't be so bad. I'm not sure about the normal difficulty but heroic dungeons will require a specific achievement to enter and getting the achievement requires knowing what the hell you're doing with your respective role.

 

[Neonsilver]

I shudder at the thought of visiting instances after the expansion is out. The guides are helpful to not get killed when you play solo, but without at least some basic understanding of the aggromechanics they just get themselves and the rest of the group killed. Thats not even mentioning those morons that join the groups as tanks or healers.

At least it would be like that in vanilla or bc wow, don't know how it is now.

I reckon it won't be so bad. I'm not sure about the normal difficulty but heroic dungeons will require a specific achievement to enter and getting the achievement requires knowing what the hell you're doing with your respective role.

I only speak from my experience and I have stopped shortly before wrath of the lich king was released so I don't know how easy or hard normal instances are now, but when I think about my first time visiting deadmines I have serious doubts about that. That visit took several hours and we wiped several times and one member of our group was at least 10 levels higher than the rest. I was too inexperienced to determine who was responsible for the problems, but I'm quite sure the fact that I didn't know anything beyond a basic damage rotation caused at least some problems, if not all of them.

And again that doesn't even consider those that join groups as healers or tanks.

 

[Diddy_Mao]

I just can't sleep at night knowing that people are doing things in a game that won't really effect me directly!

Kidding.

I don't really have a problem with this free character boost to 90 or even the paid boost. If you have the space scratch to drop $60.00 on a character boost you go right ahead and do it, it's no skin off my back.

I've pretty much decided that I'll use it to level up my priest because I want another max level healer, but I'll be damned if I'm going to dungeon grind another support class through the insufferable cat herding process of dungeon leveling.

 

[Nilanius]

Or here's a better idea Blizzard. Instead of selling instant 90's, make leveling actually fun, and introduce class storyline quests for every 5 levels that are designed to teach said class their role. Blizzard lost a lot of respect from me the day Cross Realm Zones went live with all the bugs and their at the time lead developer instead of addressing the bugs, told players complaining about said bugs they just wanted a single player game and should go play skyrim.

And I love how when they introduced the in game store (Which came a few months after I left), that it would only be used to sell mounts, pets, and cosmetic gear for transmog, and never for anything that effects gameplay at all. At this point, they've alienated most of their long time players, and from what I heard, there's servers that are ghost towns now even with forced CRZ. Not to mention all the news coming out about their fans canceling their WoD pre-orders. WoW is dying, and Blizzard is killing it.

 

[BoogieManFL]

I doubt this will help all that much.

The boosted characters have been around awhile in the current expansion and they just DRAG down raids something fierce. Tossing people into raids that have only a basic understand of their class is just painful for everyone.

 

[Cartographer]

Got to the Crash Course Druid video and could only think one thing:


very unique...

 

[Kungfu_Teddybear]

As an elemental shaman player all I can say is that shaman video was awful.