I started playing the game with a new level 1 this morning, and the first thing I noticed is how much the monster respawn changes the game - and I think not for the better. First of all, it makes even simple quests take much more time. Going back and forth between the locked treasure chest and the NPC in Forest Haven 3 (? - not sure about the exact level) and doing the other quests quickly turned pretty boring as we had to kill the same zombies over and over. I was lev 4 playing with a lev 4 and 5 who were new to the game and none of us were sure where to go, so we were wondering around getting separated as each had to return to the quest or the dungeon entrance NPC at a different time - which would have worked fine except that every time we did that there were the same monsters to kill again. I had way more than 4 blue zombie hairs by the time we were done (and maybe some extra white ones on my own head as well ;)). And when I was done with my own quests, I wondered whether the thing to do now is to leave, or stay and help walk the other lev 5 back to the chest - not something that ever came up before.
But the even bigger issue is, it's much harder to join and existing group of players if your path is full of new mobs when you enter a new game. When I joined the forest haven 4 (or 5?) quest there was another player not very far ahead. I was like, great, I happened to join a pretty new game. Except that I quickly realized there was no way I was going to catch up with him. I was level 5 and there were a ton of monsters in my path. Then the issue becomes, do you run past them and drag them until you reach the existing group? (Yeah they'd love that, I'm sure.) Or just sit there slowly killing them alone, when there are more players not so far ahead? (Not fun.)
Also, I wonder how this would change the correspondence between quest levels and the time when players level up. I've already seen a lev 8 and lev 13 doing forest haven 4 quests. Before the respawns the quest progression and leveling were pretty well matched (except for the 1024 tomes quest; got to level 23 at just 150 tomes). Now I think people will reach the level caps way before the quests are done.
I know you put in the respawn rates because of player requests... but I wonder how many of those requests came from level 45s who of course would have no problems with a ton of zombies respawning all the time. Personally I never felt it was a major issue that things didn't respawn before; yeah there were a few times when I got into a game too late, but it didn't happen often and was easy enough to join a new game. It was a minor annoyance, but now this changes the whole game a lot. Maybe we could have a compromise where the boss and others in his room respawn but not all the mobs along the path?
