I understand that with each new expansion the leveling process is designed to give a feeling of gradually increasing ones power. But once you reach level cap the primary system for increasing ones power is via gear.
So I am wondering if, rather than using levels that slowly increase your base character stats and give additional talent points, instead have a floor level you cap at with max stats/talent points and instead award items from quests that you can apply to gear to increase their item level. Those kinds of systems already exist, take the heirloom upgrade items.
Essentially you would receive base level gear from quests and further quest will award items that you can apply to the gear to upgrade to higher ilvls. Whether the upgrade items are specific or can be applied to any armor piece can be an option.
Beyond the initial launch I haven’t worked out an idea yet.
Thoughts?
I’d rather see leveling be something that occurs gradually over an expansion rather than all at the beginning. It would alleviate all the gear catchup systems they seem to be creating by simply making the new level in a patch offer a soft reset for everybody. It would be like stepping into hfp after vanilla.
It would also reduce the frequency in stat squishes as you’d no longer have 3 tiers at the same level. It wouldn’t have to be linear either. Launch could be like 6 levels, then 2 and 2. Blizz actively nerfs old content gear if its shown to be desirable (the bow and ring from vault) so I wouldn’t consider them to care much about the first raids staying relevant like vanilla/tbc did.
An extra few talent points would be interesting given the way the current trees work out, it could offer a bit of nuance between tiers without forcing tier sets to be night and day between raids.
Maybe some people like how mid expansion fire mages start to pick up and how s1 some classes excel, but I’d rather the game try and find a consistent level of secondary stat pools and instead have things like tier/trinkets/talents be the variables between seasons that matters most.