I have no problem with the game getting harder at the higher levels.
I just think that the current dev team forgot the audience that built this game, and that we’re witnessing a lot of band aids over time unraveling.
- First they nixed the talent trees, weapon leveling and skill training. This led to leveling feeling emptier to make it feel easier.
- They reduced EXP requirements and added scaling. This led to the feeling of growth disappearing.
- They removed expansion profession requirements. Suddenly leveling that is no longer valuable.
- With leveling feeling less meaningful, they turned their attention to end-game systems that felt like leveling. AP.
- We asked for them to fix the large gaps of empty levels during the leveling process. They revamped the leveling. Now there’s scaling and fewer levels. You no longer feel like you’re progressing, because you aren’t. So all that’s left to find progression is end game.
At this point, all value of progression has been removed from leveling. This was what a lot of us fell back to when the end game content gets stale. Can’t really do that anymore, because it doesn’t provide the feeling we sought-after.
- They removed AP and end-game leveling systems from the game to appease raiders and group-content enthusiasts, because they don’t want to do the content we enjoyed.
- They removed targeted emissary caches and the chance at item upgrades from the game, because group-content enthusiasts didn’t want to do our content, and they felt like we had to.
So, now we’re left with a game where leveling provides no feeling of character progression, and world content provides little feeling of character progression. Professions provide no character progression, even while leveling, because the crafting is oddly gated in a way that you can’t benefit from anything you make at an appropriate level.
So, what do they do from here? They have cut everything that felt like progression to appease the M+ and raid crowd, and in doing so they completely estranged a whole section of their playerbase.
We need something to replace all of those things that they took from us, all of those feelings of personal progression that don’t depend on sitting in LFG and chain-running dungeons.
One weekly raid is not enough meaningful content. I want to be out in the world playing this game and for it to feel meaningful.
I hope the Devs understand this.