Leveling Needs Fixing

Community General Discussion
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On the forums, the most complained thing seems to be endgame but the leveling process is truly what needs fixing for a multitude of reasons.

We may have the leveling boost nowadays, but the leveling process is important to anyone who is leveling an alt, doesn’t get the latest expansion, is trying out the Trial version or simply doesn’t want to start with a boosted character.

And right now it desperately needs help. Here are the reasons why:

1: The majority of content is years out of date and it shows. Until you hit at least level 80, the newest questing content you can play is from back in 2010. From 60-80, it backtracks further, to content over a decade old.

The age of it shows in all the mechanics and design changes that have been made from that era to more modern leveling. Phasing was just implemented, so there’s a lot of go here, come back, then breadcrumb to a new quest giver going on and questing from that era was heavily railroaded with few options for order or skipping.

2: There are far too many ‘empty levels’, where you gain nothing from leveling up other than the number next to your portrait going up by one.

3: There are no options for challenging content while leveling save for PvP. At maximum level, we have a plethora of options and difficulties for what we want to do, but until you hit that level, there is one difficulty setting.

4: The narrative is badly, badly disjointed. It’s not so bad from Cataclysm onward, as at least you can make the argument that you’re going forward in time but currently, you start in Cataclysm Era from 1-60, go back in time from 60-80, then finally start going forward again from 80 onward.

5: Your leveling choices mean almost nothing at endgame.

To be clear, I’m not advocating that leveling lock you into a choice until the end of time, but right now we have the opposite problem, that very little you do while leveling makes a difference at all. It would be nice if what we did had some small impact, perhaps giving us a headstart in one thing or another. This ties into the following problem.

6: Leveling now is a chore you complete so you can reach the endgame.

When your decisions made while leveling don’t matter, then leveling itself becomes merely this thing you need to do in order to reach endgame, where your choices actually do impact your character. It isn’t a fun process of building your character, instead, it’s a chore.

Now, the good news is that there are a number of things that can be done to fix these problems, ranging from the simple and easy to implement to the complex.

Here is a basic list of suggestions, sorted from the easiest to implement to the hardest:

1: Allow all expansions save BFA to scale up to 20 levels downward from where they are. That way, it would be Vanilla 1-60, BC/WotLK 40-80, Cata/MoP 60-90, WoD/Legion (Combining the two as Blizzard probably will next expansion) 70-110.

With heirlooms and the changes to level curve, most of the expansions can last 30-40 levels if you want, and downward scaling wouldn’t hurt anyone trying to do old content.

2: Create difficulty toggles for leveling, ranging from Normal to Mythic, allowing us to choose to have an easy path or a tough grind at our discretion.

3: Make it (one way or another) so that every level we get a reward, be it an ability, a talent, a passive, a choice of powerful gear, a cosmetic, a choice of rep token, or even a chest full of gold and low-level crafting materials.

4: Give us choices to make while leveling that actually have a small impact at endgame. For example, for each zone and dungeon we complete for the first time or each faction we get to honored or revered while leveling, we might get a chest when we hit 120 with some gold, gear, AP, crafting materials or some combination of the above.

5: Update the leveling process for the expansions. If it’s not a full revamp for narrative, at least touch them up so that the questing mechanics are no longer from 2010 and earlier.

TLDR? The leveling system is flawed, outdated, and offers far too few choices that matter. Follow the five instructions just above this paragraph to fix it.

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The worst part, for me at least, is lacking that one ability that makes your rotation feel good … for sometimes 80 levels.

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I would be surprised to see a cata like revamp again. Not sure I want them wasting time and money on such a thing.

I do agree leveling should be a major goal in the very new future. Was hoping the allied races would of made them implement a leveling fix.

As there has been many threads on the level squish idea it has brought up two major schools of thought.

Some hate the idea and just want to see abilities added and spread out so we see something new almost every level. Your ideas on this sound good to me.

Or level squish. 120 levels just may be to much, and to keep adding more will only make these problems worse.

Stat squish is an issue for me. We get very little stat gain from higher item level gear from 20 to 110. Its just sad and takes away from the good feel to ding and get upgrades. I believe a level squish would fix this.

Professions used to feel important when I leveled. That has been gone for years and would like to see it become useful and fun again.

If new content would be added to old zones I would be fine with world quests and some more worthy rares. Maybe invasion points for old zones for all levels too. Have these things give a currency, that could be used in the old school style of choosing what gear we get. For all levels.

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Not so much a Cata-style revamp, although that would be nice, but more like how they adjusted a lot of the BC quests in the past to not be kill 30 of X. Make the mechanics work better.

Really, just allowing us to scale everything down 20 levels would fix a good chunk of it, to be honest. Rather than having to do almost every expansion in order, you could probably choose 3 and level to 110 that way.

I’m pro level squish, but the point I was trying to make was that regardless of whether we squish or not, we need something, because the situation now is untenable.

World quests/invasions being added would be a good improvement and one I’ve suggested before. Add some variation to the leveling process :slight_smile:

As for Professions, that’s a harder fix IMO. The danger is making them too useful leads to min-maxing of them at endgame, which sucks given the cost to change and re-level professions. Essentially, you want them to be usable and have value both while at endgame and leveling, but not be so powerful that you’re in the situation again where entire raids are going for X profession.

It’s a tough balance, and one I don’t envy Blizzard on.

The leveling fixes don’t have to worry so much about that as they won’t impact endgame too much, just what happens on the way.

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Oh ya, I remember my main back in wrath would have two crafting professions for the extra bonus. I wouldn’t mind seeing some of these bonuses come back as leveling professions has now change, separating each expansion. That would cut some cost.

I mostly just want to see them useful as auctions and upgrades as we level. Something the stat squish has also made obsolete. Or maybe tie old world mats into new crafted gear for the latest and greatest. Plenty or ore and herbs out there, not sure why they wouldn’t still be useful for current content.

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I’d love for them to change how questing works. If I became interested in this game to stop the lich King I’d want to experience that first.

Once we hit level 20 I’d love to see a list of campaigns where I can pick and choose which chapter in wows history I’d want to experience first. Why we went to northrend. Where did that pandaria island show up from?

Each chapter can contain objectives( important geographical locations, world objectives, main story lines) we would need to do to level up and complete that chapter.

Once we complete those (adding a difficulty level for each chapter), we would be hopefully max level and can finally start playing the game lol (endgame)

Edit: Mmm licking

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1-60 is atrocius for a new player without knowledge and heirlooms. Imo, 1-60 should be 30-40% faster than it is.

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I like it. This would go good with the level squish idea. Instead of the same old jump from one expansion to another, start your journey with a chosen path. Experience it to level cap if so desired, but with the option to do other things of course. Sounds like a list of new achievements with cool rewards at the end. Just as long as its optional, no requirement to unlock races or flight or other crap like that.

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Maybe, but that kind of talk is all about just getting to end game as fast as possible. Less to do with improving the leveling experience.

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A. All zones 1-60 should scale to 1-100. ( Seriously, you only complete like 3-5 zones before you’re done and go to Northrend )
B. Have another expansion to revamp the old 1-60 zones once again, with world quests, new textures ( skyboxes ) and quests. Basically bringing it up to date.

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They can’t fix leveling. The storyline is a hot mess. Just buy a boost and move on.

Leveling , at one point, was about the journey. Now leveling is a brief step to end game. Any new players leveling the first time would think this is the worst thing ever written.

They haven’t fixed it since CATA broke it, what makes us think they care now?

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And I wish they would stop trying to be honest. People complaining about leveling will never be happy because they are looking for something this game can’t provide. A fresh, new experience every time they level a new character.

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Proper balancing and more intricate designed classes would do half of that, then apply either a revamp and/or serious changes to old zones and you might actually make it fresh. Yes I do believe this.

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if they spent that kind of time and energy on low level content this game would literally die. This game has always had a strong end game because of the number of long term players. That end game needs to be as strong as it can be and taking resources away from the end game to spend it on this is just foolishness.

There is absolutely no need to ‘balance and intricately design classes’ for content people spent a day in.

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While I agree a full revamp would be very time-consuming, most of these suggestions would be pretty simple to pull off.

Letting leveling scale backwards 20 levels so we can hop into Cata/MoP at 60 would be simple.

A toggleable difficulty setting that just boosts hp and damage for enemies would also be relatively simple.

Adding additional rewards while leveling is more a matter of deciding what rewards to add as actually adding them is pretty easy.

While these wouldn’t completely fix it in and of themselves, a little work would make the leveling process a long sight better.

For those of us who don’t buy boosts - and I never thought I’d see the day that people ignore improving the game in favor of advising us to spend more money - that’s 24-72 hours we spend leveling each character. Why shouldn’t we want that to be enjoyable?

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Leveling should offer fast leveling just grinding to max level for those that it suits. Heirlooms and similar stuff used to offer that before the leveling nerf / scaling.

For those Altoholics who like to slow down, then power level fast to the next point of interest that should be available.

Leveling needs to be in a world set up as a frame work where each player writes and lives their Own Story with their own Agency and choice.

It could be so much better.

Guilds with player instanced rooms and the GM can put the things like vendors etc in the main guild hall as he / the guild wants . Player housing would be their own rooms similar to how ya can invite people to garrisons to visit, but more.

For those without a guild the “player apartment” could be a instanced door in a inn. Take ya right there, and work similar to guild, but no guild hall.

World wide events that happen all the time, join up with others in the zone, and do the event, get rewards, make friends, write your story.

For me it is all about writing MY Story, not just doing a story and witnessing events done by main npc characters. Unless being a historian is part of my story then doing these things would matter to me.

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WoW has something like 100+ individual zones divided between the various continents and expansions.

If everything scaled, particularly with half as many character levels, that would open up a tremendous amount of variable paths for a game with a 50(?) character limit.

Now take that number, and phase pre-Cata WoW with post Cata wow and you’ve got more options still.

The problem with Cata is that it broke the world, which was necessary for the narrative, but also changed Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor questing to reflect the destruction it caused. Thus changing many of the zone specific story quests that didn’t necessarily tie into the overall story of an expansion to very specific for an expansion set after events in the mid level zones that weren’t updated.

Had Outland and Northrend gotten updated quests in Cataclysm then narrative flow would have been much better.

If Blizzard updated EK and Kalimdor again to reflect how the zones recovered from the cataclysm with more zone based quests, that would also help the narrative.

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It would just be cheaper to give everyone a PDF of the story for free.

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I think this argument is ridiculous and needs to be put to bed. Blizz is not going to re-work the entire game (content). What they need to do is re-design the ability progression and add levels back to most (if not all) spells… not to mention bringing back glyphs and stuff that added more options and flare to existing abilities . That way, people can have their little rewards each level. As it is, people are already getting some rewards like dungeon unlocks, mounting abilities, etc that they seem to be completely overlooking as “rewards” for leveling. Do you want a personal letter of congratulations from Ion each time you accomplish something as well?

Unless it’s your very first character in the game, it’s always going to be a chore. Once you start making alts, it is all about getting them to max level as quickly as possible. You already experienced most of the content without heirlooms and, whatever zones you didn’t hit, well that’s a little variety for your successive runs.

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I don’t believe that at all. I level’d in Vanilla once yes that was fun, I level’d again in Cata and it was just as fun then doing it with revamps. I took 6-8 months break then to level a different toon using a different route and it was fun.

It might be a chore to you, but there are people who centered leveling as their way to have fun in this game. Especially alt-a-holics.