Then they should just rip off the band-aid and scale all Legacy content to 50. It would look like:
1-5 Starting Zone/Tutorial
5-50 Vanilla - WoD
50-55 Legion
55-60 BfA
This would allow players to choose what expansion they want to be in at level 5 so that if a Night Elf wishes, they never have to leave Kalimdor or an Undead can go straight to Wrath and level to 50 solely within that expansion, if they choose.
The point of the squish is to make the game more friendly to new players and to help refresh it for old players. Scaling it like this would absolve all the timeline issues players face when starting the game after Wrath before being shuttled to BC or when rolling Allied Races that now have to fight their own people in the past which is exceptionally confusing/frustrating to new players.
It also means that expansions that are utterly dead could have new life breathed into them. As the system is now you only do about 5-6 zones in to level 60, 3-4 to 80, and then 1-2 for every other expansion until you hit 120; however, Blizz could increase interactions within Legacy content with very simple mechanics that already exist in game. Is it MoP timewalk? Why not also grant extra experience/honor while leveling in MoP zones since you can now go past Jade Forest before out leveling everything.
I’d like an OPTION to scale down to whatever content I was doing. Put a little button that we have to tick like War Mode does it, or a vendor we speak to.
How about squish to 60, everything scales to level regardless of expansion and everything after 9.0 just adds gear based progression which is basically all we get in BFA anyway.
The point is to take an arbitrary number (“120”) and change it to another arbitrary number (“60”) for people ignorant of the concept, i.e., people that look at 120 and say, “oh, that’s so many levels,” but look at 60 and say “I’ll do that.”
Nevermind that a level / number / ilvl squish is nothing but that - a squish of the numbers. No difficulty changes, no “time to max level” changes - just a number change. 60 levels instead of 120, but each level takes twice as long.
Does it sound less daunting? Sure, on the surface. I guess. To people who don’t know any better. I think that people getting hyped for this and jumping on the “level squish” bandwagon think that the new 60-level process will take half as long as the 120-level process. News flash: it won’t - it will be basically the same.
“But BB, abilities and stuff will come twice as fast!” No, they won’t. They’ll come at the same rate, but you’ll be tricked into thinking they come twice as fast because, “oh, look, I got this level 100 talent at level 50!” Yeah, but it took you twice as long to hit 50. There’s actually been no change at all.
This would be like if we, as a nation, suddenly switched to the metric system for speed limits, and then people got all crazy because the speed limit on the freeways is now 100 instead of 60. It’s an arbitrary friggin number; the speed is the same.
Getting X talent at level 10 that requires Y spell from level 40 and 30%+ of Z stat that you only get at the end of tier 2 at max level isn’t rewarding today.
Getting a 1% increase through a spell rank isn’t going to be rewarding either. 7 talents + ~30 spells is never going to feel good with 120+ levels. This development team has only removed and rearranged things since MoP, there’s literally zero chance of them adding to the talent system to make 120 levels meaningful.
The level cap should be 60. At level 10, you can choose where you want to go level, outlands, northrend, pandaria etc. However with the state of the current game, a lot has to be changed.
I would like to see a every older zone get some love. Revamp the zone with better graphics and fix certain quests to be relevant. Make cataclysm zones apart of vanilla and have it all scale up to level 50. Once at level 50, you can go to the new area (expansion). Add treasures, bonus objectives and world quests to older zones to make it more fun to level in.
It’s exactly 0% about the speed and 100% the lack of progression for the majority of levels because there aren’t enough spells plus talents, too many passives between them, and too much designed for max level for the limited ability pool to be meaningful spread out over 120 levels with 5-10+ gaps of nothing being all too frequent.
7 talents and ~30 odd spells properly distributed over 60 levels would at least add some impact and meaning to most of those levels unlike today where mobs level right along with you and rotations don’t change for days.
I think that this level squish is just an excuse to not work on the talent system. Instead of giving us new talents everytime we gain ten levels on a new expansion, they are going to squish so people don’t notice the lack of new talents and new abilities.
