Squishing levels…why do you people even play WoW? Go play something else if you cant take the leveling experience even WITHOUT heirlooms. This game was meant to be played slowly and progressively with small accomplishments that took time to achieve. Im all for a paid level boost to boost sales, but i was never for this heirloom stuff that made questing feel just downright inefficient (you dont get anything out of leveling with heirlooms it just makes leveling that much more tedious psychologically.) People now want more opportunity to level quicker because blizzard gave these people an inch and they want a mile…
My opinion: Get rid of heirlooms altogether. Force the community to buy the level boosts so they can stop complaining about not being able to level quickly enough. The heirloom accelerated level option has created too many “give an inch, take a mile” people. Just make them buy the level boosts if they want another toon immediately or implement the use of tokens to buy level boosts.
Are they going to acknowledge people who reached level 120 before a squish or are they going to just squish the levels down and give everyone just a feat of strength achievement.
Are they going to make leveling feel rewarding, and I don’t mean just a new ability at every couple of levels.
Are they still going give players the ability to solo old dungeons and raids for a chance at transmog and mounts.
what they SHOULD have done along time ago, is every other expansion could just be continued progression. Just like everquest did, they would drop a new xpac youd have attunements etc but they wouldn’t increase the level cap. That way you are progressing your character in a meaningful way w/o increasing level. Or for instance, the artifact weapon was enough progression during legion, have us have some type of alternative progression w/o changing levels but then find a way to wipe the slate clean at end of xpac. Problem is blizzard just has the time gating stance now with just about every aspect of the game.
This makes absolutely no sense. If each and every one of my alts had to go through the exact same experience my first 60 in Vanilla did…and then to level 120 in same way? The game would have died a decade ago.
Heirlooms aren’t the problem when leveling because there’s no system on this planet that could make running your 5th+ alt through the exact same route over and over fun and engaging.
On top of that, I’d appreciate if you read past the title before commenting. My post has nothing to do with leveling speed and everything to do with allowing players (new and old) the opportunity to choose their own path and adventure so that leveling can once again be made fun and engaging.
They even left professions in the dust. A large part of the game, in the beginning, was the profession system and having your profession leveled was a means to boost how strong your character could be. I cant believe blizzard short sighted everything theyve done to the game. Theres like nothing cool to use from previous expansions like awesome recipes that would drop from raids that you could still use in subsequent expansions. This cutting corners business has to stop.
I personally loved the old class chain quest lines that would take you everywhere in the world to obtain a great weapon or piece of armor or mount that wouldnt be just some legendary quality crap that everyone gets. You knew it would be useless in a few levels but, man, the power that was behind it for that short time. Ugh…i miss it. Cant wait for vanilla.
In a way, i dont think J. Allen Brack supports the creation of vanilla wow. I think j. Allen. Brack is in the pockets of the big businesses and is trying to place retail on a level with classic so people dont feel the need to play classic when you can accomplish the same amount of levels in retail. In other words, i may be a conspiracy theorist, but i think the fat cats and j. Allen brack are trying to actively undermine the recreation of vanilla wow. Its something j. Allen brack was never a part of until he was a producer on BC.
Exactly every 15 levels you get something that you can use or nothing so useful , reaching new lvl is simply one level higher nothing special about it. Stupid requirements for flying in wod, legion that doesn’t make sense at all. Profession don’t provide you with useful things until end game content and then even some professions provide you with something useful . And not to mention terrible, terrible terrible customer support .
Leveling will never be fun and engaging with heirlooms. Thats why they created the level boosts. Heirlooms get you leveled so fast you just do one zone in one expansion. Theres absolutely no ‘World’ of warcraft anymore. Heirlooms cause everything to just become tedious drivel. You dont see the world. Its not fun and engaging. Its a huge waste of time. Level squishing with heirlooms now? Give me a break…you really think thats gonna be fun and engaging AT ALL? In other words, do you even play ‘world’ of warcraft or do you actually like to hack and slash your way through 20 enemies to the top?
You do realize that leveling will still take the same amount of time right? So gaining a level will take a lot longer with the squish. A lot longer meaning feeling longer because instead of hitting level 20 by the time you finish your starting zone and part of the next zone, you likely will only be level 2 in that time.
“We’ve floated the idea of a level squish a couple times in the past, it’s something we’re talking about very seriously at the moment internally… and trying to maybe get back to a world where we condense the current experience into simply fewer levels.”
“What if instead of going to 120, you went to 60 again, but every single one of those levels gave you something. Always a new ability, a new talent row, a new rank of an ability that improved it in some way, access to new systems like mounts or the like, and also probably speeding up the process as we did that.”
It wasn’t a huge part of the statement, but they’re aware of the speed it would seem. It sounds to me like it’s not just a squish, potentially, and that it may in fact be a faster experience.
Your argument hinges on them being against reducing the overall time, but they’ve clearly indicated they are, in fact, open to doing that during the squish.
You cannot have a healthy game where you’re forced to go through each part of 7+ expansions just to get to the endgame. That is far worse for the game than the number 120 or heirlooms will ever be.
Yes, I do. I’m acutely aware of how very dead much of the world is.
That’s the whole point of my suggestion. This system would allow for Blizzard to implement Open World Timewalking. Knowing you’d get increased XP, Rep, and Honor would encourage people to level alts in specific expansions and if Blizz added TW Tokens to quest rewards it could provide an alternative for maxed out characters so they don’t have to spam the same dungeons for a straight week.
My suggestion utilizes existing systems and content and is far more doable, and reasonable, than “Make Retail Vanilla Again”
So, we’re back to speeding the leveling experience up again, which they were actively working to undo back in Legion. In two more years, we’ll probably be back to “leveling is too fast!” again, and hordes of new players still won’t materialize.
I think that really depends. You can increase the time to cap while reducing the overall levels. If a level took 1 hour presquish, it’d take 2 hours post squish. If you take 15% off the top of the needed experience:
Pre-Squish: 60 Minutes > 51 Minutes
Post Squish: 120 Minutes > 102 Minutes
Leveling would still end up 15% faster, but each individual level would still end up feeling more like a level that you spend a little time at. It really depends on whether or not you think going from ~50 hours down to 42 hours is more important than having each level take longer and feel more like an actual “level”.
All of this actually adds weight to my suggestion.
By implementing Legacy scaling as I suggest Blizzard would be better able to make minute changes to leveling time without absolutely shattering everything like they did for the 60-80 tier in 7.3.5.
It frees them to focus on adding features, such as mini-holidays and timewalking, that focus on specific zones/expansions that are relevant across the board and encourage more player interaction throughout the world.
I’m going to call shenanigans. The end result at max might be the same, but when discussing progression during leveling? It’s patently false that the progression will be the same.
Currently, most of us get at most 1 or 2 abilities after level 80. That’s a 40 level gap that you might get one or two abilities in. The last third of your leveling experience (probably the last half given that later levels require more XP than earlier levels) is devoid of class progression.
If we cut it down to 60 levels, you could get a passive, talent, or ability every level. Even if it took 1-2 hours per level, that’s still consistent progression across the entire experience. As compared to now where the last dozen or two hours have almost nothing in them.
If our current abilities were spread out evenly across all 120 levels, I’d be inclined to agree with you. They are, however, not spread out evenly. They’re bulked up between level 1 and level 70, with some outliers around the 80 mark. So the progression would only be the same if 1-60 only gave abilities for 1-40, and didn’t give any talents after 50.
I definitely agree with this, even if I would take it farther. It would be a nice way to make old content feel relevant when you didn’t dip into the beginning of its questing and then head off to the next expansion because whoops you leveled too much.