Anyone else feel like leveling is a really outdated system? There are way to many scaling problems in retail for this system to hold up.
Examples from just returning player and what is common:
*Old expansion content that should be soloable isn’t. (Legion)
*BFA profession scaling for first timers going from 10-50 is completely jacked. Food is scaled to work but requires level 45 Personal Example: Leatherworking patterns work fine with crafters marks. Base required level says 45 for basic green patterns… Turns to level 50 when you get to level 45. (Not important at all but it really breaks immersion, and it’s the little things)
*Enemies completely out of wack in Chromie time with certain abilities only meant to hit a level 20 or below being scaled incorrectly and one-shotting you. I believe there is a quest in either Wetlands or Loch Modan where a quest NPC uses Stormstrike. instant death to anyone above level 20. Was quite funny the first time…
The list I’m sure goes on and theses issues subside once you are max level, this just doesn’t feel good.
I think leveling as a whole needs to be reviewed and removing it and replacing it somehow would fix so many scaling bugs then tackling these problems scattered throughout the game one by one. It just feels really messy, which makes sense so many expansions down the road…
There are certain ground effects that are seriously overtuned for very low levels in Legion dungeons and will one shot them. Of course, they get these dungeons and can’t run out of the ground effects because they’re already dead.
That’s because so much has been nerfed or removed to make it pointless. I wouldn’t be surprised at this point that the only reason the “world” still exists is because it would be embarrassing to totally remove it when changing the game into a lobby-only esports-only game.
Leveling doesn’t serve much of a purpose in the current game, given that it’s a 17 year old game, and therefore most everyone is at level cap, and because of that, level cap is also where the content, such as it is, is focused.
Really, WoW wouldn’t lose much by getting rid of leveling. Replace it with a 5-10 hour tutorial with ten-level increments (kind of like Lineage 2 has now) and then dump the character at cap, because cap is WoW, and has been for some time. The “world” can be left in place for level cap characters to explore, via Chromie time or otherwise, and farm for collectables.
This game is dying precisely because the Blizzard design team shares that opinion. The endgame in an MMO is the filler that keeps players busy until the substantial content drops again. They’re cutting out all the substance and focusing on the filler.
Honestly, I’d rather see a definitive effort to put the first few expansions into scenarios or something like that.
Get people actually caught up on the story since the game started. I feel you could really condense any given expansion into a few key quest lines, and if a player wants to explore a zone or zones, let them, but much like how chromie time boots you out at 50, have the current expansion either boot you, or halt experience gain until you move to the next expansion.
You could work a nice flow from expansion to expansion, using the same methods that exile reach uses for key dungeons and raids to progress those parts of the story and have them pop out of legion or bfa ready for the current expansion, and relatively caught up on the happenings of the world.
They have spent enough time and resources on changing the leveling experience. Bottom line it gets old doing the same thing over and over. They need the time to fix other things going on with the game. Like class and NPC mechanics.