Wow’s archaic leveling system is a barrier that’s stopping new players from coming in. It’s been a problem for years. My suggestion to fix this is the following:
Keep old content to enthusiasts. Make a way to get new people straight into the newer content. And no, I’m not meaning the boost. The boost is a band-aid fix that is lame and unintuitive.
This is my suggestion:
Break the leveling system apart, like you did with professions.
It should work more or less like how HOTS works with the Player level and “Hero” level.
Then add each expansion’s level to a total of the player level, or a “legacy level” that doesn’t affect the stats or anything outside of each expansion’s content.
That way if a player in BFA content is level 10 on BFA, it would be capped on this content.
For example: If a player is level 10 on BFA, he would still be level 0 on TBC content and if he would like to go there and do end game content for farming etc, he would still need to level up there. With the scaling tech we get nowadays this is actually very feasible.
This way you can get people straight to the most current content without being unfair to those who have been playing though all of these years.
You could even add some sort of a “learning curve” in the first levels for newer players, like that new class “trial” so they can learn spells and learn how to play their class while leveling in current content.
Anyway, I think something like this would make the game much better for newer and old time players.
The leveling is fine, after all it’s a part of it being a mmo. The problem is the lack of leveling options for a mmo in 2019.
For example they have Island Expeditions, these could be available from level 15. Warfronts - same here. Maybe try something with the older raids. Make them scale from level 15 and up. Remove the need for tank/healer and balance the bosses around it. Basically something similar to Rift but more accessible, the emphasis is on fun and good experience.
Just throwing out some ideas. Leveling doesn’t need to be boring and feel like a grind, that’s a choice Blizzard has made. It can change.
Nah. Your idea accomplishes the same thing as the boost while taking away any real incentive to ever level a character more than the ~10 you would need for the current xpack.
For the same reason all the 400 ilvl freebie rewards and ease of mythic+ make me uninterested in Heroic Raiding right now, having the option of skipping all but current leveling with no real downside would make me uninterested in leveling through other content, even if I do enjoy the activity itself, because it would become a waste of time.
Do not want. Boosts let you do it with one character and if you want more, you level. That’s fine.
/silly
WoW’s 110 > 120 leveling system is just sooo archaic.
/sillyend
Look here, leveling sucks because they ripped out a lot of the systems like talent points and spell ranks that made individual levels compelling.
The character boost system, that reduces leveling for new players to only the most current expansion, was their solution.
They threw out the baby with the bath water and this is what it got them.
The leveling system being “old” (or archaic) isn’t what turns new players off from the game. It’s not archaic. What turns players away is the fact that the game isn’t a whole lot of fun for them to play. And there is painful lack of general depth to most of the game.
This was an idea I hated the first few times I saw it… but the more I have thought about this problem with old expansions and leveling this solution makes more and more sense…
You might actually find groups for old raids, people doing old endgame activity, etc… in prior expansions.
it might also allow them to re-introduce old systems that only work in their given content… glyphs that work in MoP, Artifacts that only work in Legion zones and content, maybe add back in the cloak and ring quests from MoP and WoD and only have them work in those zones, dungeons and raids…
A HUGE no thank you. Please don’t try and match leveling between a MOBA and MMO. 2 completely different games and styles of play. Leveling is fine right now.
Stat squish, 60 cap, and open up the entire map to your character, like in ESO.
Then use those systems you’re mentioning as a “questing” end game path progression of some sort.
The truth is that quests are not great until MoP, and in WoD and Legion blizzard gives no time to enjoy the experience because you outlevel everything so fast.
Sorry but disagree here. Spell ranks were horrible and not really needed. They were just gold sinks which in Vanilla, gold was hard to come by and a lot of times people couldn’t afford to train and had to wait until they had the gold. The only time I ever needed to use a lower spell rank was in AQ40 on that one boss that freezes and needed a certain amount of frost attacks to freeze.
As for the talents, if you preferred to not raid and play casual then sure, it was fun, but if you actually wanted to raid and see all of the content, no guild would pick up someone who’s talents weren’t optimal and there were set cookie cutter specs that if you didn’t follow your dps/hps etc. would be a lower.
Counter proposal, remove boosting services and reduce leveling XP by 2/3rds from all sources. I think anyone who is capped should at least have a basic understanding of the world and its lore in addition to how to play their class.
I don’t disagree with you.
But there are two problems here.
1 - Old content is old, not just in a conceptual sense, but also in graphic quality. It makes new people go away and we know it does. Current expansion content always look much better than 1-60 or TBC/WOTLK…
2 - When the original game was made there were just 60 levels. Not 120. It makes leveling boring and uninteresting with lots of levels without no benefits at all.
Breaking the system apart we could reintroduce the journey.
I like it, seems like a compromise between what we have/had and an idea I suggested.
Imo they jumped the shark when they made everything scale UP to your level instead of scaling you DOWN to the zones level cap after you pass it while still scaling up rewards to your current level. Essentially exactly how timewalking works but in the open world instead just a few instances every couple of weeks. Pretty much how GW2 handles scaling
Boost is bad.
I’ll explain why:
People have to buy the game to use the boost. With the existing trial, when people eventually need to buy the game they might already have a bad idea about the game after playing a 10 year old dated “trial”.
Sure, word of mouth is important, even more in a MMORPG, but, believe me, a LOT of people try wow, play that 20 levels trial and never look back.
I would probably do that, too, if I were a new player.
The point is, people need to get to the most current content as soon as possible. That way they can get a real taste of what WoW is like nowadays. Because that is the game they are going to play. Not vanilla WoW. The actual game is very different from what the 1-20 trial that potential new players get to experience.
It’s a interesting idea. I think it would work if the game where built like that from the beginning. Sadly it can’t be shifted to that way this late in the game. But thank you for sharing your idea.