Every level gives me more power and increases my stats. I don’t really need anything else, to be honest.
HOWEVER
I do understand the folks who feel they need a bigger carrot. I think Blizz should have more talents awarded more often. The traits on our artifacts and in the azerite armor should have been talents. No extra grinding out of artifact power, etc.–just level up and get another talent.
Lowering the xp gained would be counter productive to lowering the xp needed. If they did both, how would that reduce the time it takes to level? After all, it is the combination of the sheer amount of xp needed and the time it takes to level that is the issue for me.
Scaling makes the idea of fewer levels really a bad idea.
If anything we should be arguing for more faster/shorter levels, not less.
Say you’re level 57, almost 58 out of 120, you got a few pieces of gear this level. You’re in the middle of the woods surrounded by wolves. You can handle a few at a time, no problem. Then you ding.
The world scales up. Your -best- gear (assuming you’re not already twinked out with heirlooms) is now at best a level below you. You have just gotten oh, roughly 15% weaker compared to the wolves around you. Not terrible, if you’re not unlucky you’re probably okay… it’ll be slower and harder until you get better gear, but you’ll live.
That’s now, with 120 levels.
What happens if they squish us to 60 instead?
You ding, and suddenly everything around you isn’t 15% harder, it’s 30% harder, or more. That’s a difference you’re really going to feel, and even though you’re fighting the EXACT SAME THINGS that were trivial a moment ago, now your survival is starting to look very uncertain.
Why? You levelled up! You should FEEL more powerful, not weaker. Where’s the logic in this?
There isn’t any. And that’s why I’m vehemently opposed to ‘level squish’.
A great deal would depend on the percentages. Lowering exp needed by 75% while lowering exp gained by 65% still drops the numbers while allowing you to level faster. I was under the impression that the numbers were getting out of hand, hence the squish.
I have a sneaking suspicion that such a result would become such a runaway disaster that not even Blizzard would implement it that way. You’d eventually reach a point where you simply couldn’t kill anything.
A squish doesn’t inherently mean keeping the same power curve. In fact, it would be mandatory to alter the curve of power so that what you suggest does not happen. I can not see this fear as anything more than completely unfounded. However much things get “harder” as you level now would be the goal of the squish. A squish would completely ignore the concept of the old 120 and it’s power scale.
I would not consider leveling 10% faster to be acceptable. If they cut the levels in half without also cutting both xp needed and time to level by the same amount, then leveling would still be too slow for me. I consider the rate we level at now, to be reasonable. If the time/xp that it takes to gain one level is any longer than it is now, then I would regard a level squish as pointless.
Ever think about why the 60-80 bracket is the one that got the most complaints when Blizzard first implemented zone scaling? It is because it takes longer to get through those 20 levels than it does to get through the 10 levels of each of the other expansion based brackets.
Level scaling does, after all, mean that it’s the brackets that matter when it comes to leveling, and not so much the individual levels within those brackets. Which is why I, personally, think that a level squish is pointless, regardless of how they do it. I see nothing but downsides to a level squish.