There is a lot of discussion about this topic, and a lot of misguided ideas floating around. So let’s set the record straight about what won’t be and what should be. First, I’ll talk about the purpose of a level squish, then how I see a successful implementation working out. (Scroll to the quote boxes to find the important bits.)
1. PURPOSE
There are several reasons for having a level squish. Total time to hit max is NOT one of them. Neither is “120 is too daunting”. Expect levelling time and challenge to remain roughly the same either way.
-Rewards: The main reason Ion floated in the Q&A is reward pacing. Currently, there are huge gaps where you gain nothing. With less levels, every level could offer a talent, spell, or other direct reward to your character. Many people opposed to the squish say this doesn’t matter to them. To them, I have two responses: first, that argument says you don’t know as much about your own psychological responses as you think you do, and second, it’s not about you specifically. It’s about creating a better game that is better at attracting and holding new and old players. A ding with a reward trains you to anticipate and enjoy the ding. A ding with no reward is more like your roommate’s alarm that keeps going off every 10 minutes on snooze. Annoying and repetitive. This does not spark joy.
-Milestones: Another important aspect of good game design is to have goals to look forward to and work towards. Things like mounts upgrade at 20, 40, and 60. Or a big spell or talent that fundamentally changes your play style. Or completing a zone and finishing its story. If you can see a road map of your levelling progress in your mind with the major milestones that you will pass, your gameplay will be less tedious and feel quicker. It’s like being at work and looking forward to your next break. First you look forward to morning coffee, then lunch, then afternoon coffee, and finally to going home. If, an hour into your shift, you’re looking forward to going home, it will make the entire day seem much, much longer and more tedious. Note how well Vanilla levelling creates milestones, whereas levelling through 60 levels of expansions do NOT. This is why 60-120 feels so much worse than 1-60. This will be an important concept later.
-Storytelling: By far, however, the most important reason to have a level squish is for storytelling reasons. Imagine you had a kindle with 1000 books on it, tailored to your interests and reading preferences. Now imagine each time you got half-way into a book it got deleted and you had to move on to the next book. How long would you keep using that kindle? Not very long. That’s how WoW’s levelling currently plays. Far more important than rewards and milestones or the time it takes to level is the storytelling aspect of the game. How many stories do you have to play through before embarking on the current expansion’s story? Are they good stories and DO YOU FINISH THEM!? I’d rather do something I enjoy for hours than sit and watch paint dry for 20 minutes. Vanilla WoW, which was unmatched in its player investment and retention told 6 or 7 stories before max level. This seems like a really good number to aim for.
-Permanence: The last reason for the level squish should be to lock max level. To fix every kind of number creep once and for all and never need to rework the entire game again, as they have for all the various number squishes. Let’s just do it, have a good “non-broken” game, and move on, shall we?
-What not to do: With all this in mind, a squish that sees Vanilla go from 1-25, BC from 25-30, LK from 30-35, etc. completely misses the point. You can’t just take the current levelling path and condense it. That misses the main purpose of a level squish, which is to create a consistent and engaging levelling experience that doesn’t need to be reworked two expansions down the road.
-Conclusion: A recurring theme in the above points is how well the levelling of Vanilla WoW was crafted and how much worse current levelling feels. The level squish needs to lean on this heavily. In fact, Vanilla levelling should make up the bulk of character levelling. That’s specifically what Kalimdor and the EK were designed for, far more than any expansion. If we squish to 60 levels, Vanilla should not be touched, except occasional tweaks that make it a better levelling game than what Cataclysm left us with.
2. Implementation
-Vanilla vs. Classic: Before we continue further, I want to create a distinction between 1.0 levelling (1-50), which I will refer to as “Vanilla”, and 1.x endgame content (50-60), which I will refer to as “Classic”. Think of Vanilla as the base levelling game, and Classic as the first expansion which was released at the same time. This is where the tweaks I mentioned above come in. The following storylines would make up the Classic expansion:
- Searing Gorge -> Burning Steppes => Blackrock,
- Un’Goro -> Silithus => AQ,
- Plaguelands => Naxx,
- and Onyxia’s Lair.
Winterspring should be Vanilla levelling content, as there’s no real endgame story there.
-The Levels: Without further ado, here are my proposed 1-60 levels for WoW.
- 1-50: Vanilla levelling
- 50-60: Every outdated expansion from Classic to BfA
- Prestige Levels 1-10: Current expansion content.
-1-50: Vanilla: The EK & Kalimdor would be the core levelling content of WoW. This is where your toons would gain most of their levels. This is where new players learn the game and their class. Instead of being 10-15 year old content, zones would be refined into cohesive stand-alone stories that build up the general lore of Azeroth & its major themes, villains, heroes, and peoples. Rather than being tied to a time or expansion, stories would be timeless, and lorewise, always “current”.
-Zone completion: To incentivize players to fully play through zones, rewards would improve as you move through the story. Each zone would have 3 main phases of quests: 2 in the world and one in a zone dungeon (where possible). The first phase would give green items as rewards. The second phase would give greens with set bonuses for normal quests and blues for key quests. Finally, dungeons would give blue set pieces from trash and purples from bosses. After finishing off the big baddy of the zone (either dungeon or world boss), each zone would drop a single heirloom. This way, sticking out to the end of a story is more profitable than dropping it and moving to a higher level zone. Because of scaling, your rewards would be at the same level, but higher quality for the zones you’ve already started progress on.
-Story Engagement: At the same time, move quest hubs form the quest log to the world map, like how bonus zones and world quests work. That way from the world map you can see where the hubs you can go to are, what your progress in that hub is, and the rewards you get for completing the objectives. Include Legion style voiceovers and really bring the story of the zone visually and audibly to the forefront. WoW should TELL its story, not have its story passively available in your jumbled mess of a quest log.
-50-60: Campaigns: New players would actually be capped at 50. At 50, however, you get a letter from Chromie summoning you to the Caverns of Time. There, she tells your character some amazing news: YOU are the hero of Azeroth! Up until now, NPCs have treated you as a random adventurer, with a few looking at you curiously or whispering odd things as you pass. “Is that him/her!?” “No, it can’t be, he/she’s much more powerful!” “The resemblance is uncanny!” It turns out that in the past, you won victory in Outlands, defeated the Lich King, had Thrall KS Deathwing on you, etc, etc. All these feats you have accomplished! Just not yet from your perspective. This is why in later expansions NPCs treat you with more and more reverence, even if you’ve only been playing for a couple weeks. You have done all those great deeds in their past, they’re just still in your future. Chromie gives you a choice of all the old expansions to start with, and sets you off on your first Campaign™ and sends you back in time to the expansion of your choice with a new level cap of 60. Levels from 51-60 don’t come from XP, but rather from progression. Questing up to the expansion’s first Raid will ding you to 60. You can go back to Chromie at any time and begin another campaign if you don’t like the one you started. In theory, you could hit 58 by doing just the intro quests to every expansion, but as with Vanilla content, reward quality improves for sticking to a single story.
-Hero Classes: So how do we handle DK’s and DH’s? Start them at 45-50 and have their starter zones lead directly into their first Campaign. They don’t go to Chromie at all, and they start with a cap of 60. Experienced players CAN leave their Campaign and even visit Chromie and start up on another if they so wish, but new players will move seamlessly into the relevant storyline for their class.
-WTF are Prestige Levels? Rather than building from 60 up, new expansions would have 10 Prestige Levels which come from progress in the expansion. Your level underneath would still be 60. At the end of an expansion, Prestige Levels for that expansion would be translated into levels 51-60 as the expansion becomes another available Campaign. This way, rather than getting nerfed from 70 to 60 each expansion or having the level cap rise once again to mess up levelling, the expansion progress simply becomes obsolete, similar to what happened to artifact progression.
-Old Content: There would be two ways to experience old expansion content at max level. The first is to simply travel there. Doing this will allow you to use your Prestige power levels to blast through old dungeons & possibly even raids. This does not count towards your Campaign progress or grant Campaign-level awards. The second method is to use your HearthChrome™ to enter the old expansion through Chromie in the CoT. This puts you in Campaign mode, where your prestige levels have no effect and your items are scaled down to normal level 60 gear. This way, you can’t cheat your way to the Achievements and rewards for finishing a campaign, and you can basically do Timewalking for any end-game dungeon or raid ever made whenever you want, while still giving players a way to solo that content for gold or transmog.
-Raid Tier Sets: As a last bonus, every tier of raid gear would be at the same ilvl, meaning you can use set bonuses from any tier ever made in any raid! This could create some broken scenarios, but having players search for them and farm them would be half the fun! Forcing Blizzard to push out hotfixes because something from a BC raid makes SoO too easy. 
Players should always have the opportunity to find ways to break the game.
3. Character Transition: So how does your toon go from 120 to 60? What about an alt at 73? At 42? Simply put, characters 60 and below would stay at the same level. Characters above 60, having “finished” Classic, become level 60. Since this would be done between expansions, no character would start out with prestige levels.
tl;dr / Summary
The important part of the levelling squish is to make WoW into a game with a good levelling system that never needs another <insert thing> squish again. To give a consistent, engaging, and rewarding levelling process with tangible benefits for caring about the story.
The crux of the level squish is to take all the old expansions and make them parallel 50-60 zones rather than linear zones that take up 60+ levels to slog through. To remove most of that content from the levelling experience and only require a player to play through ONE expansion per toon.
The levels should follow this pattern:
- 1-50: Vanilla levelling zones (EK & Kalimdor)
- 50-60: either Classic end-game or any ONE other old expansion.
- 60+: Separate “Prestige” levels from 1 to 10 for the current expansion. These become 51-60 when the expansion is over and becomes another optional 50-60 levelling zone.
Finally, zones should be updated with modern quest tech that moves quests from the quest log to easily readable map icons, like bonus objectives or world quests.
