There has been a large multitude of Diablo-like action roleplaying games for single players in the last two years, and even several good attempts to bring that concept online with games like Mythos, Dungeon Runners, or Hellgate: London. Besides the click-to-combat system, these games are characterized by constant gathering of loot. The players are motivated by expecting loot they can use around every corner, a constant stream of upgrades. If we compare that to World of Warcraft, we can say that the end-game to some extent is also very much about loot. But while leveling up, loot plays only a minor role, and doesn't contribute all that much to player motivation. Why is that so?
There are a number of factors that prevent WoW loot to be as fun as it could be while your character is still leveling up: item levels, item material, and stats.
Items in WoW have both a minimum level and an "item level". While the minimum level tells you what level your character needs to have to wear an item, the item level tells you where you are likely to find that item. An item with item level 40 would typically drop as loot from a level 40 monster or be a reward for a level 40 quest. But the minimum level is typically 5 levels lower than the item level, so the level 40 mob drops items that a level 35 character can wear. Obviously players are interested in wearing the best gear they can, so a level 35 player would look for items with a minimum level of 35, which have item level 40. Thus to gather them by himself he would need to do level 40 quests or farm level 40 mobs. That isn't impossible, but it is hard, and it isn't the best strategy to gain the most experience points per hour. You level up much faster if you do quests of your own level or slightly below than if you do quests of higher levels, because the effort to do the harder stuff goes up faster than the xp rewards do. So if a player pursues an optimum strategy for leveling up fastest, the gear he finds will be constantly 5 levels behind.
The problem of item material is one that isn't limited to the leveling part of the game. I'm playing a mage, so I can only use cloth armor and certain types of weapons. Whenever I find leather, mail, plate, or something like an axe, the stuff is completely useless to me. I can only sell it, or disenchant it. Stats are a very similar problem. While technically nothing prevents me from wearing gear that adds to my mage's strength or agility, I would need to be downright stupid to do so. These stats don't do anything for a mage. Again this problem persists even in the end-game, although some classes suffer more than others. For example if my warrior groups with a paladin and we find two pieces of plate armor, one with bonuses to stamina and defense, the other with bonuses to intellect and healing, my warrior could only roll for the former, while the paladin could find use for both of them.
Add it all together and you arrive at a situation in which 99% of the loot that you get while leveling, either from mobs or from quests, is being sold or disenchanted. And the gear you wear is most likely bought from the auction house. Only some long quest series, group quests, or instances are likely to reward you with gear that you would actually want to wear. But there are no important game design reasons of why that has to be this way. There are a number of ways in which Blizzard could improve the fun potential of loot gathering while leveling. And while it isn't very realistic to expect them to do that for the old content, some of the improvements would be possible to implement in future expansions, as each of these adds a new leveling part to the game.
The biggest improvement possible would be to the quest rewards. The moment the game offers you a quest, the game *knows* what class you are, and thus what types of gear you could possibly use. Many quests currently offer the choice only between one to three items, what with 4 possible materials means that some classes won't get anything, while the "choice" of the other classes is predetermined. Instead of offering one piece of leather, and one piece of mail armor, the game should know that I'm a mage, and offer me two different pieces of cloth armor, for example a fire and a frost one. If I'd do the same quest with a warrior, the reward should be a choice between two pieces of plate armor, one with more defense, the other with more strength bonus. And so on. What kind of a "reward" is it if you offer a plate helmet to a mage, which is even bind on pickup? World of Warcraft quest rewards shouldn't force you to study third-party websites just to find the few quests which reward you with items you can actually wear. There is a lot of potential fun in gathering loot, and World of Warcraft should exploit that potential better.
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