Personally for me, leveling in retail feels less like a fun gaming experience, and more like a slog to content that matters.
There’s so many levels and so much outdated content to get through, and each expansion that comes out, it only gets worse, is there even a solution to this?
Leveling in retail is boring because of how poorly designed the progression is, IMO.
New abilities and talents are spread out over massive level ranges with nothing in between, and level scaling makes you feel like you’re not really growing in power.
It’s one long, monotonous water-slide to end-game.
It depends. Sometimes I feel like hitting the reset button on something I love but I don’t love legacy WoW. I actually 5 box when I play so I have access to heirlooms and dungeons whenever I like.
I have no idea how you guys 1-120 solo playing. Do you do it while skimming youtube?
I liked WoD leveling that had lot exploration with treasures giving xp and you working on building up your garrison and earning new things/passive for your class each couple levels. With lot of interesting hubs and each zone unlocking different bonus to use in them.
BFA had pretty much no quests hub that I used to enjoy, you didn’t gain anything while leveling up, them keeping legendaries activated made it so the drop between 105 and 106 was really big. No treasures at all and rares not being that interesting. The only thing you earned were fast travel points (and loa transportation buffs for horde and ferry for alliance), and with the item they added you don’t even need to unlock those on alts. xd Also the whole mission table should have just not existed if they didn’t want to put as much work as before on it.
It can be fun depending how you look at it,
Personally if the quest/quests has a meaningful quest line that’s story driven, enough to feel the immersion of it, then it is worth the levelling.
Otherwise levelling can also feel mind draining
It’s more about the questing for me. While I wish there was higher production value with them these days, I enjoy traveling through different regions and crafting little stories for my dudes.
I used to.
But at this point I have more than one high level of most classes, any leveling I do from 0 is just for allied race achievements, and it feels like a chore.
I’ve done the content many times over 14 years. Not sure there’s much I can do to make leveling interesting.
The best way imho to fix it is with a level squish and a complete revamp of the old world and the removal of all old xpacs from the process. You can put them all in caverns of time as optional content for those who prefer them.
What that will do is make level scaling work better, it will fix the problems with the item level squish. Your level 30 quest item will actually be more powerfull than the level 20 because the game isn’t trying to stretch 180 item levels over 110 character levels.
Second it will fix the pacing of levels. Yes, each level will take longer, but each level will also have more meaning and reward.
Third it will consolidate the story and timeline. Jumping from one time to the next, from one wildly different theme of xpac to another and hitting a wall of xpac specific features that are no longer really in the game or relevant is discordant and jolting to the flow of leveling and puts people off.
The best way to accomplish all this though us WoW 2. So you want leveling to be better, what we really need us WoW 2.
I liked it until the WoW 2 thing. We don’t need a 2nd WoW. We just need a retail development crew that understands this ‘legacy content’ idea is bad.
When they introduced Scaling i stoped liking it
I prefer retail’s leveling over classic.
But I’m also one of those fellas who actually enjoys retail’s leveling.
Ive never enjoyed leveling in any mmo. I just want to get to max level and try high level content
No. And it has nothing to do with how spread out abilities are or anything of the like.
It’s because I don’t begin to become more powerful than the enemies I face until I hit max level.
Be it level 5, level 78 or level 104, I’m scaled to have the same degree of power.
It does not feel rewarding or engaging.
OP is right leveling is a mess because the content is 15 years long. They need a counter measure like a montage leveling scheme to current expansion.
It’s alright.
I kind of wish there was a holiday-style dungeon active constantly; 1 boss, get in, boom, done. Would be nice for people who casually level characters.
Pre-cata I enjoyed questing to cap exactly twice and cata it was fun 1-85 but now I’m pretty meh I leveled 20+ 100s in WoD so much free time, like 90 was and still is my favorite leveling bracket but everything else now is meh. Legion was fun the first 10 times and I did that in the beta. BFA I really havent enjoyed leveling at all I had fun on the zandalari troll leveling tell I hit legion leveling but I think that time was mainly I hit that on a sunday evening and had to do it during the week.
It was fun a few times but thats changed I just plan on leveling the 12 classes from now one and the last 1 honestly will only wit 120 because of a boost from next expac
Leveling in retail has really stepped far away from Older expansion’s “kill X amount of X”
Retail tries its best to share a story. The problem is that there is too much of it.
I feel like since Activition took over. Activision pushed their philosophy of “telling a story” more than expanding the raiding concept
This is why people say “Retail is a single player MMO”
My reasoning for WoW 2 is that trying to do everything I described to the current game could have too big of a negative impact on to large of a percentage of the playerbase. It’s just too big of a change for a lot if people to take.
Look at how many people vehemently oppose the idea of a level squish when it is proposed because they feel like it invalidates their accomplishments.
Just cutting the game off now, calling the next xpac WoW 2 and allowing everyone to “copy” their max level WoW 1 toons and all their achievements into a WoW 2 toon at just bellow the new max level makes the transition easier and more acceptable.
People don’t lose anything if their 120 decked out Warrior still exists in WoW 1 and they make a copy of it to a lvl 50 in WoW 2.
Additionally it also helps fix the server population issues. With a whole new set of servers. With WoW 2 they can condense the population down to fewer realms without any mergers or janky work arounds like connected servers.
I have been a staunch defender of scaling, but I do think there’s some room to give ground.
The one thing I do appreciate after playing Classic is how a given zone increases in level range as you get deeper into it (not always literally of course).
What I’d say is mobs can still have fixed level ranges even with scaling. That means mobs in the later quests will always be 2-3 levels higher. It makes sense for quests to be more challenging later on.
I still think the benefit of being able to say, do Wetlands at level 55 and get XP, outweighs the costs.
People always have to bring Classic into the tuning of mob health and damage, but that isn’t a good argument. Purely from a game design perspective equal level enemies SHOULD present some kind of challenge - and by challenge I don’t mean hard, but literally a challenge that one need to pay attention. Levelling is like a mindless affair and as such astonishingly uninteresting.
I love Kul Tiras and Zandalar and it really is a crying shame the world feels completely plastic because there’s no threat at all. I just imagine Drustvar actually being oppressive.
I have to disagree!
Retail leveling is more diverse.
You can do BG, pet battles, herb collecting, ore collecting, assaults (later), queue dungeons, quests, mobs grind.
You can even equip with numerous exp boosting items.
Regarding the boring part, its a 15 years old game, it has long history. We are high at level 120 now. They can’t allow leveling to 120 in a short time. And actually it doesn’t take long.
If you really think you want to skip leveling, you can buy a boost that remove significant part of the leveling.