I agree. A lvl squish is a bad idea for a bunch of reasons.
If you want lvling to feel meaningful, thats a good goal. Maybe go back to talent trees and have a talent point every other lvl starting at 20. At lvl 120 that would give you 50 talent points and 55 for the future 130.
On the off talent levels give you new skills/passive. That would get you most the way through of lvling with new things each lvl.
For max lvl characters the end result would be the same as retail but the feel as you progress would be different
I don’t see a level squish making much of a difference. The problem with the current system is the 15-level gaps with no rewards/progression, not the time it takes. And slicing a number in half isn’t going to change the fact that gear-based progression systems like we had in Legion and BFA get broken the moment the expansion is over.
Going through 110 levels of useless content is also a chore. During a shorter stretch your gear replacement means more, you’re abilities don’t stop coming, and your additional talents, mastery, and other bonuses build a character without gaps.
The time /played between gear, abilities, talents, master, and other bonuses won’t change with the squish. You’re arguing for a new coat of paint and acting like that will change everything.
It’s a change for ha I f levels that give you abilities, unlocks, vs having a span of 60 levels where you only have maybe 2 talents and 3 skills. Tack on the miniscule hear climb and how the content does nothing and it’s laughable. I’d rather have 60 good levels than 120 trash.
But the speed of gaining new stuff wouldn’t change because it would take the same amount of time to get to the level cap. It’s a lame band-aid fix that wouldn’t actually fix anything.
At this point why even have levels? It’s more like a new diablo season every patch, you gotta play a little bit every day to get prepared, then you (maybe, some people don’t) push into endgame, or just jog on the loot treadmill.
They should just drop levels and just reset item levels.
I got to lvl 60 on my warlock before they changed the Vanilla xp requirements. Should I be mad at you for being able to level through all that so easily?
This is what most people don’t understand. It’s not just time per level or time to hit max but how they relate to each other.
Time per level * # of levels = time to hit max.
If you change # of levels, one or both of the other two things HAS to change. This is why levelling was “broken”- they were only changing time per level to keep time to hit max as a constant. Getting a level every 3 minutes and outlevelling zones in 30 is a really awful game design. Previous squishes and world-scaling are bandages on the problem, but eventually it’s going to hit critical mass.
And there’s another thing to consider: how many different stories you play through on your way to max level. More specifically, how long you have per story and how far into that story you get to progress. Each zone typically tells one story. Before world scaling, you got to do the intro of a couple dozen stories and that was it. Now you do less stories, but you mostly get to see them through. The problem is with expansions.
Expansion zones aren’t stand-alone stories like Classic zones. Expansion zones are small chapters in a larger expansion narrative. Even with scaling and parallel expansion paths, you are back to only doing the introduction of the stories you are levelling through. This is why expansion levelling still feels as bad as levelling has for years.
The best solution possible is to simply REMOVE expansion stories from the levelling path. Leave them in the game, but make them something EXTRA that players can CHOOSE to do. Make a whole system around running expansion campaigns and give it rewards and achievements. Making BC/LK and Cata/MoP parallel progression was a big improvement to levelling. Making ALL old expansions optional would be even better. The profession system already works that way, and that was a vast improvement as well.
THIS is what I think the level squish is about. If you remove the expansion slog from the levelling process, you’re back to 60 levels. 60 GOOD levels where all the spells are earned and you learn your class. 60 levels where you play through 4 or 5 complete stories and learn the game systems and are now ready for end-game content. The ONLY thing that needs to be revamped is the talent system. Make it every 10 levels starting at level 10 or something. Do that and you have a much cleaner, quicker, enjoyable levelling system that actually lets new players sink their teeth into the game and makes every level feel important.
Not only have you “fixed” levelling, instead of old expansions being an albatross around the game’s neck they can be a new Campaign System that can be implemented at max level, which allows players to play the expansion stories in completion at their own leisure.
tl;dr:
expansions in the levelling process make levelling bad. Remove that, and you have 60 levels of better, faster levelling and can use old expansion content to make new end-game content. Win-win.
It’s not that squishing levels will fix the game. Fixing the game will halve the # of levels, though.
If they were going to do another Cata and refurbish old zones, and/or they were going to move some old expansions out of the leveling path, I would welcome a level squish.
For instance, imagine that 0-60 is now refurbished old world zones, like Cata (but better), and 60-70 is the new expansion continent. Older expansion zones would be available as an alternative way to level but wouldn’t be the “main” path.
But it wouldn’t. They could remove half the levels and make the rest take twice as much XP, or remove half the XP from each one and leave the number of levels the same. Time per level is not some fixed constant that they have to abide by.
That’s what Ion said in the Q&A. He said a reduction in levels was something the dev team was heavily considering, and interrupted his sentence with an aside that the squish would “obviously” make the time to hit max level shorter.
I doubt it will be 50% shorter, because you don’t design the new system based on current metrics- you figure out how the new system works best and implement THAT, but people like Rankin mindlessly repeating over and over that levelling will take “just as long” are not just being illogical and defeatist, they’re contradicting one of the ONLY THINGS we know about a squish!
that’s the opposite of the entire purpose of a level squish. when 60 was the level cap, it took longer to hit 60 than it takes to hit 120 today starting from level 1. you didn’t get an experience bar, you had like 12 or 20 “bubbles” of your experience bar, and each bubble for a level took about as long as an entire level does today.
squishing our levels back to 60, they’d absolutely have to reduce xp gains and increase experience required per level so that people couln’t just blitz to 60 in a day. you can nearly get to 60 in one single day /played right now. a level squish would absolutely change that.