Okay, sitting here drinking with some friends that I played Everquest with, used to play Dungeons and Dragons, and we all joined in World of Warcraft in Vanilla aka Classic.
So first thing we agreed on is levels no longer matter, they don’t, seriously, they make leveling to what ever is the new “max” as quick as possible, and we only do it to follow along some story arc so that the game designer can say he “told a story”. Levels are pure BS. If you are Max level in DF you got there mere hours after starting.
You’ll spend 18 months at max level.
So just get rid of levels. Make everyone level 1. Might as well. They don’t matter.
Now, what does matter. Gear. Item level determines everything you can do in the game.
But item level basically gets reset 3 times ever expac. Max item level changes each new sub-content release. So you spend 6 months grinding to “level” your gear, over and over.
That blows.
So how about this.
Make it so there’s only 10 item levels.
Level 1 - Good nuff to get through the story line.
Level 2 - Stuff you get by going through the story line.
Level 3 - Stuff you can work really hard at to get and makes killing most stuff easy.
Levels 4 through 10 - Very minor upgrades over level 3 but which Raiding Guilds will entrench hundreds of hours of each month into getting.
We came up with this while drinking, thinking it was funny. Then we realized, there’s basically zero difference between this and what everyone already does. Then it stopped being funny. Because Blizzard has everything acting like this isn’t the reality.
I’m much funnier in my head. People who can read my mind and enjoy my clever jokes, I hope you enjoy them to the fullest. People who can’t, don’t worry. We’ll absorb each other’s energy down the road and if I remember, so will you. I’m also looking forward to thinking all of your thoughts that you remember.
The reason so many squishes are neccessary is because the devs can’t control themselves and they keep giving us exponential power gains every expansion. All they need to do is tone it down a bit between expansions. The gap between SL and DF wasn’t too bad, but we’re already doing 3x as much dmg as we were doing in M0 gear.
Part of this falls on the community as well. I mean people complained about not having big damage numbers the first time Blizzard did a stat squish in WoD.
Also exponential growth feels more impactful then linear growth. Simply because the former grows faster than the latter as x increases.
i dont see where it matters, its all relative to everything else, if its 10s 100s or 1000s millions or whatever its all the same, wasting dev time to shorten numbers for you is a waist, just ask chatgbt to make you an addon that rounds the numbers down to a decimal if ya want.
I despise squishes, every single time they happen, there’s an instance of me being able to do something yesterday that i can no longer do today, sometimes it’s a rare, a dungeon a legacy raid or whatever, but there are always negative consequences.
well its blizzs fault, thay need the new thing to be the only focus instead of the old days where older tier sets and lower ilvl gear still had a massive use, you needed sets for certian instances and the ilvl was close enough in xpantions that you were using kara tier in BC…that was great gearing gave loads of options, now days its do new buzzword content and get x, repeat