Hard pass. I’m old now, chief. I don’t have the years left to dump innumerable hours into getting one level bar filled.
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I leveled my first character the old way during Legion, as a new player to the game, and it was horrible and confusing. There was awkward time traveling between expansions, made worse because I started as a Blood Elf, so my leveling path was BC → Cata → BC again → Wrath → Cata again → MoP → WoD → Legion. I would still out-level an expansion’s content after one or two zones, so I spent a lot of time locking and unlocking my XP, because I wanted to finish out the stories.
Exactly. I started playing during Legion pre-patch, so somewhere in July or August 2016. Thanks to my slow path of stopping XP while leveling in order to play through everything, I didn’t hit level 110 until October 2017. I wasn’t playing 24/7 that entire time, but I was playing quite a lot; there’s just that much content to play through after so many expansions. I actually got into a substantial argument with my partner who’s been playing since Vanilla and initially tried to get me to power-level during the pre-patch invasions, because I didn’t want to skip the entirety of the game to play a new expansion I had no narrative context for.
I don’t entirely like the current pace of leveling, but I much prefer the current flexibility to the old way. Nowadays when leveling an alt I usually pick one expansion and level through it by questing. I would like to see something Story Mode implemented for old expansion raids so that expansion stories can actually be completed while leveling.
Yeah, it took most people several months to get to max level. Back in the day, 4-6 months wasn’t uncommon. And then add on a few weeks for the average person for each expansion. It adds up.
But you need to do it again
and again
and again
and again
Grind it out baby
Been there done that go play classic.
should just make the endgame content playable at lower levels.
Could leveling be slowed down a bit? Yea, probably. Blizz did make it too fast in retail. They could probably make leveling take 50% longer than it does now and you’d still hit max level within a few days.
I would, in a heartbeat, have a toon (I’m imagining a hunter) that I’d gradually play through 10 expansions worth of narrative content at a slow pace. A mode that focussed on the RPG and World than the MMO.
Though I honestly think this might be coming…
Once there are enough expansions of ‘classic’ released, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were weaved into a single server type where you stepped through each major patch on a 3-6 month cycle (depending on the size of the patch). Classic being broken up into 20-level chunks a bit like SoD
Edit: IIRC EverQuest did/does something like this with their “TLP” servers. And I think the idea makes good sense for WoW, too at this point
They ruined Classic almost entirely. They added in micro transactions and put in lots of account bound stuff and changed how BG titles work now and have realm transfers up 100% of the time instead of limited and put in a bunch of new mounts into SoD that cannot work with regular Classic. And in Sod a lot of the Night Elf tarting zone quests are glitched horribly so the items don’t even drop from the quests there anymore but they were dropping a week agon when I did the exact same quest. And my shammy totem bars were glitched for the entire time that WoTLK Classic was up and running.
It’s ironic that you’re making this point while doing the exact same thing. Retail exists, Classic exists—why do you want Retail to become more like Classic when Classic already exists?
To quote you: “Why does it always have to be your way?”
Also, stop pretending that leveling in Retail is easy. I’ve seen new players who have never played WoW before struggle. They have absolutely no idea what to do or what’s going on.
It may seem easy to someone who’s been playing WoW for over 20 years, but you’re not considering the perspective of new players.
And yes, the proof is on YouTube. Just search for “first time WoW player” and you’ll see very basic things that new players struggle with—things you’d assume they would know, but they don’t.
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You guys do realize that the OP asked for the option, right? He didn’t ask for Blizzard to make it permanently like that for everybody. And here you are throwing a fit over it because “I don’t want to do that.”
Then, uh… don’t? That’s what it being an option means.
There’s literally zero negative if they just add an option that cuts xp rates down. They already did it for the twinks that turn off xp gain. It’s the same thing just instead of 0 it’s like 25% or whatever.
I literally don’t see the issue, but I can read so I imagine that helps matters.
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The people yearn for AP
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Ok then, if it is optional, he can play wow - classic. It is right there, it is optional.
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I am a big classic enthusiastic, but I believe that the speed of leveling for retail is accurate. There is way too much content outside of levelling for new characters to catch up on. Making it take longer to get there will only turn new characters away. At this point, its just too many expansions to do what you want done, unless they change max level to 1000 lmao
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Because every addition added to the game creates a gameplay mechanic that requires support for it to be functional. Which takes away from other things, even the most minute of addition has this element to it.
Which is what frustrates people whenever bugs that have negligible impact on the overall gameplay gets unanswered for years. Because it is a bug that doesn’t matter to anyone effectively. It is still the correct decision to document the bug, but it doesn’t mean it is the correct thing to prioritize up a bug that is affecting a negligible number of people.
What the OP is asking for is effectively the same thing but replace “bug” with “feature” and you get pretty darn close to it. Games cannot and shouldn’t be designed around a negligible number of players. Just because players have in the past, for an example, levelled to max level just picking flowers on the Wandering Isles doesn’t mean that type of gameplay style should receive updates to make it viable, relevant, or even realistically bug free (if bugs were to appear).
The problem is that Classic is a much smaller game. If you tried that crap in current WoW you’d have:
- Vanilla
- BC
- Wrath
- Cata
- MoP
- Warlords
- Legion
- BFA
- Shadowlands
- Dragonflight
- Warwithin
- Twilight
- Titans
Who the hell wants to prog through more than 10x expansions just to “progress” to where their friends are? As it stands you have the OPTION of questing in any expansion, but players choose to dungeon grind and fast level because they’ve done all of the previous stuff so many times. They just want the newest freshest expansion at this point.
I think they could definitely add something cool for levelling. I would like more interesting levelling but I don’t want to go back to Classic. Like some kind of Ironman mode and you get a cool cosmetic for it.
Looks at title.
Sees little squirmy bait on the end of a hook. Guaranteed to catch fishies. 
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Getting BiS Myth ;-; OP will be a grind fosho!
The idea is to get to the main content not spending months leveling a character to play the new expansion.
Imagine trying to level through 10 expansions, might take a year instead of months.