Tuesday, the day before yesterday, when the World of Warcraft patch came out, I bought a half dozen of the newlly introduced level 30 mounts.
Ever since I started playing World of Warcraft over a year ago, buying a mount required your character be level 40 or above.
Reaching level 40 takes a long time. It reqiures patience and a lot of effort.
One reason it requires patience is that it takes a lot of time to get from one place to another and you have to do a lot of running about in many zones once your level gets to be up around 30.
Getting from once point to another can also be trickier when you are on foot as opposed to riding something. Creatures seem less likely to attack you when you are riding than when you are walking. Plus, you can more easily get away from them if you are traveling at mount speed rather than running speed. So getting thru crowds of outdoor monsters just became a lot easier for every 30 something WoW character with some money to spend!
A lot of my characters, almost half, had been stuck at level 30-something for ages.
In general, a character in its upper thirities is pretty nice. I operate my characters in teams. Their professions support each other's activities by supplying them what they need to craft items or do their adventuring.
Characters ability to progress upward in their profession is stopped at skill level 225 until they reach level 35. This prevents alternate characters from being transformed into uber twinks simply by getting them to a profession skill level of 375 poiints while they are still level 19 or 29. That would make battlegrounds unplayable by main characters.
Consequently, wanted to get that one character to level 35 ASAP. When the patch came out, I gained a couple levels for him over the next couple of days. I noticed it is far easier and less time consuming now. In other words, it is a lot more fun!
My 30-something characters with mining and herbalism professions are going to be a lot more productive now. This in turn contributes an ability to progress faster and produce more with their crafting professions. I use crafterd items a lot when playing. So this will be a huge boost to my game play for a lot of my characters, even some above level 40.
One thing that was really strange was doing a level 30-39 battle ground this week, following the 2.4.3 patch's release. Most of the characters in there already had mounts. Players wasted no time in buying their new mounts, juding from the battleground!
I already had one druid voice to me disappointment that players could buy mounts 10 levels sooner. He, like I, has a druid in its thirties. He had twinked it at level 39 - as I had been planing to do wth my druid.
Druids werre kings of Arathi Basin and especially Waroong Gulch battlerground. They could change into their Travel form and run faster than anything else in the battleground. They made excellent flag carriers. They could also speed to the defense of a flag or flag carrieir faster than anyone else.
At level 40, that advantage would disappear.
Now , it has disappeared at level 30.
I guess I am a little bit sad about that. However, in giving up one small advantage in just one aspect of the game - I have gained a big advantage in so many others.
On the Balance, if you will forgive the pun, I am very happy.