As I said the other day, we've talked about the dumbed-down argument quite a few times before, but I think this is the first time I've ever heard the opposite argument put forth so succinctly: Tadaa asks, over on the forums, "Is WoW getting too complex?" Longtime players will probably say no at first glance -- the game has been streamlined a lot since it first game out, and things that took up much of your time previously (tracking quests, looking up quest targets, dealing with respecs, and finding groups) now have systems built into the game that let you get past them easily. But think of what it would be like to step into Azeroth nowadays -- instead of just a chat channel where you can find groups, there's a whole system with terms like "damage" and "tank" in there. On first glance, it might be tough to figure out. And then there's things like resilience and Replenishment (which some experienced players don't even fully understand), and even things we think of as helpful features (getting pets and currency out of our inventory) can be super confusing for new players: where did that pet go that I just clicked on, or that badge that I just saw looted to me in the combat window?

Reader Tiago sent us an interesting idea I thought was worth sharing. He suggests that Blizzard create a "leveling server" -- a server that would be marked as specifically for new characters, so when you rolled a new toon on there, you'd be surrounded by a bunch of other people pre-80. And the key here would be that when you hit 80 on this server, then you would get a free server transfer off. In other words, Blizzard would have one server (completely optional, of course) designed for people to level on, with a realm full of people playing in the old world and leveling through the old quests.

Sounds good, right? Like most of our ideas, Blizzard probably won't go for it -- they've already knocked down the idea of vanilla realms, and while this isn't the same thing (you'd be able to level to 80, the idea is just that you'd leave the server when you got there), it does mean creating a different ruleset for a brand new type of server. Plus, to a much lesser extent, it could create an even more lonely existence on the normal servers. Not to mention that Blizzard has been focusing on speeding past the low levels, not emphasizing them.

But I like the idea anyway -- it doesn't seem too tough to do (mark one realm recommended, and provide free server transfers off of it), and it seems like an excellent way to get people who enjoy leveling up all together in the same place. And that's really what MMOs like this are all about, right?

Heirlooms are something I've not really had much experience with but as I've been doing Wintergrasp a lot since hitting 80 (prior to my burnout, that is). However as the prospect of re-rolling a very different kind of class becoming more promising, so did heirlooms.

I remember hearing about them at last year's WWI and it sounded like a great idea at the time. A way to may have your main help out an alt. I would be able to outfit my lowbie toon with decent gear that gets better as she levels. Plus I like the fact they are an homage to classic WoW by taking their names and graphics from weapons no one ever uses anymore.

Oddly I don't know anyone in my guild who uses them but I'm pretty sure someone out there is buying them. I see lots of people regularly clustering around the sellers in Wintergrasp Fortress, diligently checking which item they want for which alt but it seems like the only reason to buy them is if you're an altoholic.

With this in mind, I'm curious, constant readers, did you buy heirlooms in order to make leveling an alt easier? Are they worth the expense? Did they make it easier to level and did you reuse them with multiple alts? What if you've never used them before, do they seem more appealing now the new items have been revealed on the PTR?

---

Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

---

I promise we'll get back to our Ulduar guide for tanks and DPS warriors next week. For this week, however, since we're midway through the sixth month of 2009 and we've seen patches up to 3.1 released (and we're waiting on 3.2) I thought it would be a good idea to go back and cover some of the things a leveling warrior might want discussed. We get emails from all kinds of warriors, and so it's only fair to cover the concerns of warriors who aren't raiding Ulduar but rather just setting foot off of the dock in Howling Fjord.

Before we get started, though, the upcoming Patch 3.2 changes for Warriors in their current entirety: Armored to the Teeth: This talent now provides 1/2/3 attack power per 108 armor, up from per 180 armor. Try not to get too excited, people.

First off, I'm often asked about stats for up-and-coming warriors. We have covered some of these before back in the beta, but the beta was a year ago now and things have been changed and polished. First off, I'm going to link all the posts of interest to a leveling warrior and discuss how they may have changed, and then I'll try and cover some more general advice.

• Building Up To It covers some target numbers and stats to focus on. I should note that this was written before the changes to Armor Penetration made it much, much better as a DPS stat for warriors: the more ArP you have, the better it is as a DPS stat until you have enough ArP to reduce target armor by 100%.
• We covered Hit and Expertise in two posts, one for DPS warriors and one for Tanks. The tanking post is still accurate as of 3.1, but the talent changes to Arms and Fury mean that there is currently no talent that reduces chance to dodge for Fury Warriors and Arms has both Strength of Arms for passive expertise and Weapon Mastery.
• We discussed the dangers of overstacking a stat to the exclusion of other, also necessary stats.
• Finally, we covered gearing up in a four part post just before Wrath launched Parts one, two, three and four were all published before Wrath itself had actually come out, but they're still reasonably accurate to help your warrior get from 70 to 80, We covered weapons between 70 and 80 too.

Yesterday Alex featured Cab Calloway blasting out Minnie the Moocher, a song that while was around for a long time was truly made epic by his performance with the Blues Brothers. And this lets me tie in perfectly to wish my brother Logan a happy graduation from high school next week. Logan and many of his friends were in their jazz band, and he often dressed up as the Blues Brothers when appropriate. And in lieu of that, today's reading music is the Blues Brothers' "Soul Man" performance from the 1978 SNL season. The good old days. 5 years before I was born.

Hokiebuddy asked...

"With the revamp of the bear and cat forms for Druids will there be any more Druid revamps in design such as the travel, swimming, or flying forms? Also will this spill over into other races and classes i.e. Warlock and Paladin mounts, Warlock minions, Shadow Priest shadow form, etc..."

There are a few accomplishments in this game that truly amaze me anymore. Leveling characters is routine now, and having an army of high level alts at your disposal isn't something super uncommon anymore. However I have been amazed by this:

Cautious, a Warrior, leveled to 80 without dying.

She had no deaths. None. Nada. Zilch.

There is no achievement for doing this, however I wouldn't blame Blizzard one bit if they went in and retroactively added one just for Cautious. Lord of the Rings Online has a no-death achievement, but only up through level 20. I got to level 18 without dying on LotRO on a recent attempt, however I perished when some "really really super awesome person" trained a bunch of mobs near me just as I executed an AoE attack. "Really really super awesome person" is what I called him too. Honest.

A few months ago in The Queue a reader asked if there would ever be (or is) such an achievement for WoW, and my response at the time was no, there is not one now and probably would not be one later. I reasoned that including such an achievement would just present undue psychological damage on the player if they died at 79 from an unforeseen circumstance. I still don't think there will be one, but it's pretty awesome someone managed to do it sans in-game achievement.

There are some interesting statistics Cautious had upon reaching level 80 without deaths. You can check out a lot of them on her armory profile, but those are inflated just a tad since she has played since reaching 80.

Some of her key stats upon reaching level 80 include:

Spinksville, following up to an earlier post concerning a great lore moment in Vengeance Landing, concludes that as a Horde player, Howling Fjord has emerged as the single best overall zone in Wrath. The more I consider it, the more I'm inclined to agree with her. The Fjord has a mostly unified questline that slowly splits off into sub-plots concerning the Kalu'ak and Taunka, and the farther you get, the more you realize the impact your previous actions have had on that little slice of the world (and most of it's not good). As Spinks observes, it's a very immersive experience that does a great job of conveying both the moral ambiguity of the Forsaken's position, and the fact that Northrend's a continent without a lot of good options. "Forced to choose between the lesser evil and the greater evil," she writes, "... you had better hope that the greater evil is very bad indeed because it is the only way to justify the things you have had to do."

That said, I have to admit that Icecrown is also pretty tough to beat lore-wise (with the Matthias Lehner quests being a particularly good touch, and please don't click that link if you haven't run into him yet). I haven't yet played an Alliance toon through Northrend, and Spinks is also a Horde player, so I'd like to get some input from Alliance-side players too. Is the Fjord as good for Alliance as it is for Horde, or are your best questlines elsewhere? If you're Horde, do you agree that the Fjord was your best questing experience?

I love the Battlegrounds. In my mind, it's the halfway point between general world PvP (no objectives), which is a free-for-all, anything goes brawl and Arenas, which is a tightly controlled deathmatch environment. The former epitomizes war in its absolute sense -- no controls or limits for balance in terms of numbers or levels or gear, there are no match start times, and there is no set ending. Think of old school Hillsbrad PvP or run-of-the-mill gankage. It's pure conflict with no constraints. The flip side is Arenas, which is as close as the game can get to a sport, as much as possible trying to pit evenly matched teams against each other.

Battlegrounds are the compromise. The format tries (admittedly sometimes unsuccessfully) to control numbers as well as limit the instances where organized teams are matched against a rabble of random players. Brackets limit level disparity and map objectives give direction to the encounters. Battleground objectives give a little flavor to the PvP, although players can treat it like a deathmatch, too, sometimes at the expense of prolonging or losing the game. Solo players -- playing any class of any spec -- can have a go at it and come away with a good experience, as Battlegrounds aren't as harsh as Arenas in terms of team composition. In Patch 3.2, Blizzard plans to introduce a new Battleground, which should be pretty exciting. The fun doesn't stop there, either, as it looks like developers are at work on even cooler things for this aspect of the game.

WoW.com readers, it's up to you to decide the fate of Turpen the Gnome Warlock with Choose My Adventure. Help test the site's new features by participating in this event, casting your vote toward the many aspects of Turpen and following his exploits on Alex Ziebart's WoW.com profile!

It hasn't quite been a week since I started this adventure, but Tuesdays (or around there) will be the days you'll be seeing on-the-front-page updates for Turpen the Gnome Warlock from here on out. For everything in between that, keep an eye on my WoW.com profile. Whether you do that by bookmarking my profile or adding it to your feed, that's completely up to you! So with that said, what's gone down since this project began?

What's Old is New Again
Since the character I was told to roll was a Gnome, I naturally started leveling in Dun Morogh. Despite how many Alliance characters I have, this is probably the starting zone I've done the least. I never really liked it, and to be completely honest... I don't normally do the Gnome/Dwarf thing. I don't really like them much. I love the aesthetics of Draenei and Humans, and I think the Human lore in WoW is awesome. I generally stick to those. Dun Morogh was a relatively fresh experience.

We're all still slaving away on WoW.com, finding bugs and filing feedback. To help that process along, we're going to try a little experiment. I'm going to level a character from level 1 to level 80, and all of it will be documented on my WoW.com profile. The hook is that you guys are going to decide most aspects of this character, such as race, class, and talent spec.

Such things will be determined largely via polls right here on the front page of WoW.com, where I'll be giving weekly updates on my progress along with what I've learned about the class and the world and any other observations I might have. If you want a little more detail on the process such as where I'm going, what I've done, and any other little notes I make via the Adventurer's Note feature, you can follow that on my profile. If you don't dig our profiles portion of the site, hey, no problem. You'll still get weekly updates right here on the blog until I'm level 80.

There are two polls: Race and Class. I will play whichever choices are the most popular. If the chosen race can't actually be the chosen class, I'm going to go with whatever is the most popular class that I can actually play as that race. The polls are below, and there's a little more information behind the cut underneath them.

Update: Polls will remain open so those who voted can still see the results, but as of May 22nd, Gnome Warlock won the polls and the adventures have begun.

I first heard about this from El Jeppy when I visited him and company on the Rawrcast Show a few weeks ago, but now he's posted a little more about goals and method on his site. He's just beginning something called "Project 62*80," which sounds pretty crazy on the front of it: he's planning to level 62 different characters (which is apparently one of each race and class combination for both Horde and Alliance) to level 80, and he's planning to do it by Christmas of this year. With 224 days until Christmas, that's 22 levels a day -- pretty easy when you're starting from level one, but not so much when you're trying to do 60-80.

He's not just grinding away on it, though -- he's chosen to do some multiboxing, and plans to level three characters at a time up until 60, and then three to five characters per group up to level 80, so if he can move four characters up five levels each a day, he'll be pretty close to his goal rate. And he's using recruit-a-friend, so the triple XP will make things even easier on him. It definitely seems like he can do it if he stays committed, but man, it's not something that would ever appeal to me.

He started off with Paladins (for the free mounts and the survivabiilty), and from there it sounds like he's going with Death Knights next, to raise some quick gold for the rest of the enterprise. You can follow his progress over on the Ten Gnomes blog if you want to see where he's at. It's hard to wish him luck (does anyone really need 62 freakin' 80s?), but we'll do it anyway: good luck, Jeppy.

Welcome Warlocks! This week, Nick is taking a break from your regularly scheduled Blood Pact to bring you a 71-80 leveling guide! About time, eh?

Wrath of the Lich King brought us Northrend, Naxxramas, and of course, ten more levels of DoTing, Rain of Firing, Shadow Bolting Warlockery. So saddle up your Dreadsteed, and float or fly your way to the frozen north--crown of the world. It's time to get diabolic. And this time, it's personal.

Transitioning from Outland to Northrend is a lot like transitioning from vanilla-WoW content to Outland was. The mobs hit a little harder, and the gear is a little better. The step up isn't quite as sudden or as large as it was last time, but you definitely want to take a good look at some of those quest greens you're offered, and it's best not to take a level 68 Vrykul too lightly. They're kinda mean.

These last 10 levels are rather straightforward in comparison with their predecessors. If you've made it this far, then what you're going to see over the next 10 levels is mostly just an inflation of your numbers that will make you squeal and clap your hands in glee. Other than that, though, you should continue playing as you did in the later part of the 61-70 bracket. If you're leveling Affliction, DoT-DoT-Fear still gets the job done with gusto. If you're leveling Demonology, the felguard still tanks, and your nukes still burn. If you're leveling Destruction, you're still insane and should get your head checked.

Reader comments – ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.

Flamers and trolls aside, WoW Insider readers are generally a contentious lot. Their viewpoints are as divergent as the player demographics the site attracts – all types of players, from the casual to the hardcore. With this many angles to consider, WoW Insider becomes a melting pot of ideas and opinions, from the sublime to the ridiculous. (And let's face it – some of the so-called ridiculous ideas are the most entertaining to read.)

Yet this week, readers seemed to be more often of one mind than not – whether that agreement was ultimately to agree over the topic at hand or to agree to disagree. [1.Local] highlights several reader conversations that made the radar this week.

Gaviedrummer has exactly the problem that I have, only mine is probably worse: he has about 50 Badges of Justice left over from the last expansion. True, I've only got about 30, but I've also got stacks of Apexis Shards, Spirit Shards, Halaa Tokens, Obsidian Warbeads, and pretty much every other old reputation and currency item from the Burning Crusade sitting around clogging up my bank. And while some of it is just me being lazy (I could turn the Warbeads in, and I think I could probably grind out a few more Halaa tokens to pick up something there), as gaviedrummer finds out, most of it is completely useless. Yes, we can still trade for level 70 items, but who needs those any more?

It would be nice, especially with the soulbound stuff (I presume I will someday have an alt coming up through Outland that might need some help), for Blizzard to give us an out. Even if it requires level 80 to do, and even if the exchange rate is terrible (something like one level 80 badge for five or ten level 70 badges), at least we'll be able to get rid of the old stuff. Obviously, they're worried that if they offer exchanges for new items, people will go back and grind the old instances for the old currency. But there has to be some middle ground or a level requirement or something, some rate that allows us to get something for the old junk, while keeping current level 80s from exploiting the system. Heck, even cloth has a reputation turn-in value, at the very minimum.

The Stone Keeper's Shards at least have a turn-in for honor, and at the bare minimum, that's what you'd want for any currency -- something cheap that you can just cash out of the system with all of your leftovers. Blizzard may say what's past is past (and like I said, I may just need to spend a weekend cleaning out the bank), but it would be nice to have an NPC in Shattrath that can say "Oh, you're level 80? Let me just take those old tokens off your hands at a discounted price!" And it would be an Ethereal, of course.