And this is the result of not allowing people to play as they wish. Lack of player agency is a big issue.
People that like scaling and want to finish the stories are running into a wall.
So, what we can surmise is that people that don’t like scaling feel bad. And people that do like scaling and doing an expansion story feel bad. In the end everyone is miserable because BlizZard has straddled this fence for a long time by refusing to choose which side to go on. 
I’m pretty mixed on this. I am not a fan of the 1-80 but Pandaria and up feel good. I think I hate 60-80 the most because I’m not a fan of outland or northrend.
Definitely not a fan of it at all.
I’m mixed.
When I’m leveling my allied races and in the process picking up a few old zones for Loremaster I love it.
But, most of the time when leveling in a new expansion or alts in BfA it seems to make leveling feel useless.
Before level scaling even though you lost secondary stats each level, you felt stronger because your level had an effect on the mobs you were facing. Your level vs. a mobs level used to influence hit chance, crit chance, damage taken, and damage done.
Even if technically your crit chance went “down” from lvl 65 to 66, gaining that level still made you feel stronger because now when you attack a level 68 mob at 66 you are much better able to tackle it.
But, prior to its implementation in Legion, we did see many threads asking for it so maybe more people do want it.
I dunno, eliminating a sense of player progression is core to the endgame now. Why else would kids grind more gear so they can do higher keys so that they effectively do less damage?
In practice, people probably wouldn’t notice a difference between the old way and now because of the intended flow of leveling, enemies didn’t get harder anyways as the gearing pace would keep up and so would the enemy levels at a relatively steady pace.
Imo it’s more that it feels odd because of choice in zones so you can wind up dealing with a bigger threat in 1 zone then go back to a lowbie threat (Story wise) in another but the difficulty didn’t actually change.
I enjoyed being able to do whole zones rather than hopping from zone to zone every few quests. Missed out-leveling mobs in archeology sites, had a few issues with alts falling behind the gear curve and having a bad time until they caught up.
Personally I don’t really like it, I really loved the concept back when it was first being implemented, but after playing with it for a few years I’m not a fan.
The big thing for me is the static difficulty of the world, there aren’t places that feel dangerous, nor trivial anymore which kind of affects the feel of progression in my opinion.
I’d honestly like the option to turn it off for leveling.
Because a lot of us are playing Classic. Its leveling system ain’t perfect, but from a philosophical and character-progression point of view, it’s a whole lot better.
I do not know why, but I enjoyed auto-attacking and drinking-after-every-pull to 60 more than I’ve enjoyed leveling in modern WoW in almost a decade. Killing the old talent tree design was part of it, scaling is another. All these things may be better for endgame, but just feels bad everywhere else.
Classic really did have a much different philsophy, which is part of why players going back to it now find its most difficult endgame to be a roflstomp. It wasn’t designed to be challenging for those who hyper-optimize their character, use every consume and cheese strat they can, and stack all the world buffs to try and get a high score on a 3rd party leaderboard. It was designed to be very hard for the majority(at the time), where it only got easier the better you played, coordinated, and used resources.
World buffs, for example, weren’t intended to be something a whole raid uses - they were just a fun little bonus, a celebration for someone doing something cool.
Naturally, as the quote goes “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of the game.” That’s easily demonstrable in Classic, but at the same time, it’s always a player choice. Nothing in the game itself forces you to spec or gear a certain way(barring armor class restrictions), whereas if you don’t optimize your character in modern WoW, you won’t really see much content past LFR because the endgame is tuned so tightly.
I love it. I like to help my friends with the new leveling scaling and i like to ne able fo complete zones.
I find them enjoyable, also i like some of the older dungeons sometimes and i like to make them again. To me it is funny
World scaling doesn’t bother me none. As long as I can level effectively, and in a proper manner, I’m good.
no
10 characters
Yea, what you described isn’t quite for me, but it’s closer to what I want then what we have on live.
That’s the thing as well, end game isn’t better for it. The game has way to many layers of complexity while not being complex at all. It’s weird, back in wrath, the game had some serious depth to it, but it wasn’t systems on top of systems. It was much more apples to apples. You got an item and it was usually very clear if it was an upgrade.
Now, there is some serious black magic and voodoo going on in the background to even know whats what. And even after you go through all the effort to find the best piece, scaling just ruins it.
Going back to my comment though, I’m just floored that all these players that complain about the game no longer having agency and RPG elements woudl rather attack others for min/max culture… rather then the game that has made it almost a requirement. I mean, this would be a non-issue if the difference was 1-2% or less. We all know that that won’t be the case. With corruptions and essences doing as much as 30-40% or more of damage or healing… we know these systems will be central to our experience.
If blizz would just tone it down some, min/max would be a small thing that player could still do, but it would be far less important. Now, instead of toning things down and fixing this insane power scaling, instead we have to deal with week lock outs and limited talent choices.
I miss the game that was simple… but still had depth.
Then, just like Suramar, the scaling isn’t working properly. Scale ALL the zones or shove off.
I agree with this.
Over time, the content design became more complex, more difficult, which put more and more pressure on players to optimize the hell out of their characters.
Naturally, this ostracized the more casual playerbase, so in comes the multiple difficulties, leading to insane levels of ilvl power bloat(on top of player power with new talents and abilities every expansion until Legion), which in turn was the reason why they brought in scaling to try to clean up the mess.
The wrong answer to the right question, so to say.
I think the best option would be if Blizzard really just dialed back the whole “competitive MMORPG” design with endgame. Reduce the difficulties to only a couple, and leave it up to the players if they want to push for things like the highest DPS they can get, but not make it a “requirement” enforced by the game’s tuning. Something that’s still challenging for most, but gets easier the better you get, as opposed to always being a challenge no matter what you do and have.
It all comes down to player agency, though. How much choice should players have? On one hand, more choice allows players more freedom to do what they want, but on the other, it lends to players ruining the intended design of the game through their own over-optimization. In the realm of an RPG, it leaves Blizzard in a difficult crossroads.
There are those who really like endgame content being very demanding, because they feel rewarded for conquering it. Taking that thrill would bore them. At the same time, it’s fairly clear that it can be a pretty frustrating environment for someone who just plays for the typical RPG reasons, and doesn’t care about their reflexes being tested: loot, character progression, and being able to do so with their friends without feeling the urge to pull their hair out.
I cannot blame players for min/maxing so hard in modern WoW, because the game design is largely built around it for most of the endgame, but I’m not sure if there is any easy solution that will please everyone, because modern WoW has its own target audience that’s taken a different shape over time.
In practice, there is a huge, very noticable difference.
That is how I found this board, I was searching for answers to find out why my adventuring had gone from an dark, dangerous journey to having all the intensity of a wet noodle.
To be honest maybe having mythic tuned more like Emeral Nightmare wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
I liked it when it only applied to Legion related areas, then hated it completely when it expanded to previous (and current) content. Challenge is fun, but not when common mobs become constant sponges, leave that for the elites.
I think it was designed to be this way since the beginning. I remember trying to run around and find new herbs and mining nodes around 114 the first time I went over to open a foothold right after launch. Everything was 120 (and I was in war mode) so I didn’t stay too long.
I’m guessing Suramar is the same since realistically, you had no business being there (for quests) sub-110.
They’re both rather silly and restrictive, I agree they should be changed to scale like the rest of the world. It will probably be like the no flying in the Exodar and Ghostland zones though, unchanged and forgotten. That’s still annoying after almost 14 years.
As I’m sure has been mentioned ad infinitum before, I do miss having non-instanced, over world areas that were threatening to enter during the current expansion. I remember looking at Shadowmoon and Netherstorm - and Icecrown after that - and thinking how cool it was to work towards playing in those areas because of threat, not simply because I haven’t decided to start their first.
Having that kind of power progression, to me, is what’s missing, and having a little less on-rails experience is healthy. On-rails in the sense that it’s difficult to get to an area that would outright punish you had you stumbled into it.