This is true, but I don’t think they can do a significant level squish without also speeding up the 1-max leveling process. The alternative would be to make it take significantly longer to gain a single level, which wouldn’t feel much better than the current system.
… they’ve made up their minds. Level squish is almost certainly unavoidable.
Whatever, I spend less than 10% of my play time below Max level… So if they want to screw up level scaling, risk making recent legacy content unsoloable, totally change talents-earned-order… Whatever. I’ll live.
Just don’t make me look at my nerfed level. Replace (60) with (star) or (max) or heck, just hide it entirely, until it’s no longer “Max level” because you added more.
Whole thing seems like a total waste of Dev anytime. Like trying to make old people happy by changing how you discuss their age. “Aww! Happy birthday Nana! You’re 8.9 decades young!”
Like… What’s the point!?
Pretty much this. While on the one hand, I would LOVE to go straight from the Turtle to Pandaria on every new panda I roll, changing the numbers and the zones won’t fix the issues with leveling. Just like squishing stats didn’t fix the problem with power bloat; instead, we get worse ilvl creep now than before, because the devs can just squish the numbers after each expansion and pretend that fixes things.
Character progression needs a fundamental overhaul, and frankly, I don’t think we’re going to get it from this dev team. Not when their character progression philosophy since WoD has been “temporary abilities that are removed along with the expac gimmick.”
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Ever since Achievements first launched the game has gone further away from character progression in favor of player progression. We have more account wide achievements, rep rewards, mounts, pets, etc than ever before.
With M+ and the quick rise of Raider .io which only considers player skill and has nothing to do with individual characters I expect this pattern to only continue.
I just don’t see how we could feasibly have true linear progression like there is in other RPGs across 7+ expansions without either:
A. Forcing people through the entirety of the game before hitting level cap to be met with a massive amount of bloat or,
B. Rebuilding the game from scratch because as it is now WoW doesn’t have the foundation required to pull it off
If they could do this:
then they could give us those same things every other level on our road to 120. But they don’t, because they’re actively pruning our abilities and allowing us to temporarily regain them via rental gear in current content. Do you really think they’re going to pull 60 new abilities and talents out of the mess they’ve made, if the do a level squish? Because my money is on having the same abilities, and the devs relying on ability ranks that let us slowly grind our abilities up from “garbage” to “decent” to “actually worth using.”
Six abilities with ten ranks each; that covers sixty levels without them having to actually add anything at all.
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All other questions and concerns aside, absolutely not. They’re not pulling 60 new abilities and talents out of anywhere, that’s for certain. Most classes have some amount of those abilities already, though!
- Retribution: 23 Abilities
- Beast Mastery: 22 Abilities
- Frost Mage: 22 Abilities (Not counting individual portal/teleports)
- Arcane Mage: 24 Abilities
- Balance Druid: 31 Abilities
- etc.
Roll in the fact that most classes have 3-6 passives, and you’re looking at ~30 new things needing to be added, in theory. If you roll PvP talents into the PvE gameplay (which, being honest, would make some classes feel significantly more fun right out of the gate).
- 5 levels that have mount upgrades.
- 7 levels that have talents.
- 11 levels for PvP talents (and roll PvP talents into the regular set).
You’re left with ~7 new abilities, passives, or ranks that need to be added. Some classes would need fewer, some would need more, but no class would need 60 new abilities. No class would need 20. I don’t think any class would even need 15.
In fact, if you did even a few ranks of abilities for each class, you might be able to get away with only adding as few as zero new abilities for some classes. Go further, and give fire mages frostbolt back, or frost mages fire blast, and make classes feel like classes not specs, and you’re probably over quota and could technically prune things and still have enough.
So what you’re saying is, right this minute we could be getting something new and special every other level, and yet, somehow, they aren’t able to make leveling to 120 feel like it matters.
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I’m saying that in terms of providing a reward at every lever pull, it’s a lot easier to provide enough rewards for 60 pulls than 120 pulls. Eventually the food bin won’t have enough room for rewards, period, and I’m suggesting we’re at that point now.
There aren’t enough things to give us 120 times to make each level feel rewarding. There are enough things, or close to enough things that it wouldn’t be much work, to reward us for half as many levels.
Honestly I’d argue it’s one of the reasons games use things like Paragon Points or Champion Levels. It’s a lot easier to create a post-leveling progression system that players don’t associate with new abilities, talents, or skill points, that provides passive small bonuses that can easily be balanced for.
The way you word it:
Sounds like you think that any arbitrary number of levels can be made rewarding, which is what the entire argument is about.
Can they incentivize every level at 120 levels? I don’t think so, not with abilities and talents the way they are at least. Not without bloating the spell books with genuinely useless spells.
They could, in theory, rework the entire system such that just playing is a reward in itself, but in practice very few games are fun enough based on just the game play to retain the popularity that WoW needs to stay afloat. That’s a much harder sell.
Ability ranks are something from Vanilla that I do not miss.
Especially the part about having to find and pay a trainer once you were eligible to upgrade a spell.
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Ability ranks still exist, just so we’re all aware. They’re not used often, but Retribution Paladins have only a single charge of Crusader Strike until level 24 (ish).
I think we often conflate spell rank issues with the having to find and pay for the spell. I firmly believe that slowly unlocked new “parts” of abilities can be an enjoyable upgrade, we just have to be careful not to butcher the spell in the process.
Something like adding a second charge, reducing the cooldown, or adjusting the stun duration on something are fine. Going from a 2 second stun to a 5 second stun 20 levels later is a nice quality of life upgrade, but the 2 second stun still does the trick at lower levels (where there’s less danger anyway).
Do you think there’s honestly that big a difference between getting one level with reward every two hours, and getting a level every hour, but only half of them give rewards?
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A considerable amount of people do which is why every other conversation on this post is about whether or not the squish is worth it rather than the scaling of Legacy content.
Jokes on you, a level squish will drop you back to lvl 20.
Why? Why not just:
- 1-5 Tutorial
- 6-55 Any non-current expansion
- 56-60 Current expansion
Same reason Legion isn’t currently farmable. Blizzard considers the previous expansion to be current content for those who’ve yet to purchase BfA.
You mean 70 pulls, because if they do squish, it will most likely set us to level 60 in the pre-patch with the expansion going up to 70.
But we don’t really need 120 talents and abilities. Say, every odd level gives you a talent or ability while every even level gives you some other reward, like piece of random gear or something else. That way you’re always getting something when you ding.
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Why does it matter so much if the rewards take the same amount of /played time to acquire?
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I still think copying the BFA changes to professions for levels would be the best approach.
Make it so you level 1-60 and unlock all abilities, talents, riding skills, and classic professions (but not the current expansion stuff). Then separate each expansion off into its own optional level path.
You would still have to gain those expansion levels to access anything that the expansion offered (like raids, factions, Argent Tourny, etc.), but you wouldn’t be obligated to level through it on each new character.
Existing characters will have already completed all of the expansion levels by default, and so wouldn’t have to go grind through them again. Just like how you didn’t have to re-level expansion profession tiers after the BFA changes took effect.
That sounds a lot like EQ2’s system of mentoring. In my opinion, mentoring beats auto level scaling any day.
That actually sounds more daunting to me. In my opinion, if they don’t cut the time to level in half along with the number, then there is no point to it at all.
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