Alliance monk is now mid-60s
I have been leveling a second monk, Alliance-side this time, to pair with my blood elf monk. The belf is my most-progressed best-geared character, so he has become my MoP main. The second character I leveled was Praetorian, my trusty BC-era belf paladin. I decided I'd have to do an Alliance-side toon next, to balance things out. So I have now seen CRZ in action on both factions through a big chunk of the game's total content. And I have this to say about that: - Spawn-camped rare battle pet spawns are not fun. - Waiting for ten minutes for a quest target mob's body to despawn and the mob itself respawn is not fun. - Questing with PVP-flagged opposite-faction characters jumping up and down in your face & making rude gestures at you is not fun. - Watching max-level druids in flight form sweep through and snag resources faster than you can even approach them is not fun. I grouped with other lowbies to kill quest mobs twice, both times in the first week of the expansion in the blood elf Ghostlands zone. (To kill the elite quest targets pathing around, remember those guys?) For the rest of the time, the best CRZ has done for me is make the zones look busy. Guess what! The zones *are* busy. They're busy supporting loads of player counts several times greater than what they were designed to support even back in the heyday of slow leveling. This is especially true once you hit BC zones. I quested through Zangarmarsh last night, thoroughly enough to get the zone quest achievement, and about half the time when I had a named quest target to kill, I sat there waiting for it to respawn because it was dead on arrival. On one occasion, as I approached a named naga leader, another player zoomed in past me and tagged it. Probably somebody who didn't want to have to wait. Waiting isn't fun. The monk class? Awesome. The quests themselves? Awesome. The speed of leveling? Awesome. CRZ? Not awesome. I realize that Blizzard is not going to undo it, so I am left pondering other solutions. Maybe just make the target population per zone lower? Another solution might be going through and re-tuning all the spawn rates to fit the new higher desired populations. That would help the resource side of the problem. The social side of the problem can't be helped, because the social pressures aspect of the game is dead dead dead and has been since the moment the dungeon finder was introduced.