Their current talent system is horrible, everyone loved the Diablo 2 talent trees and that is what WoW used. Why did they break what was not broken to begin with.
As far as levels go, EverQuest 2 had a better system for advancing your character past max level with their AAs [alternate advancement points]. WoW copied 9 tenths of everything from EQ and EQ2 but never touched AAs who knows but they should at some time.
For my take, that’s a character-centric game (or a decision making game). We play a story-centric game where we get to experience the story. Since vanilla we’ve never been able to chart or change the outcome of the story. (In fact, id argue that bfa is the first time where there have been different narratives presented: Sylvanas loyalist; possible n zoth gift).
A role-playing game is one - to me - where mechanics are built around players engaged in specific roles that, when played in concert, can overcome these mechanics. Where choices affect whether or not we can overcome these obstacles.
To perhaps more directly answer your question, we can influence/makes choices about:
-What specialization/role your character is
-Talent choices affect what your character can/can’t do
For example - and a tertiary one - me playing a Paladin on the alliance changes how I experience the game, compared to a horde paladin.
I’d like to know more about what you feel makes a game a rpg or not. If it’s more about a character’s decisions having a real, measurable impact with the world - I can see that being lacking (outside of perhaps PvP or certain zone mechanics, which are mostly PVP anyway)
hey guess what decreasing the number doesn’t fix the talent or system or break it, it just changes the number, crazy thought right.
THIS. So much this. I feel like the main reason people want a level squish is they think it’ll make leveling somehow faster, when that really has nothing to do with the number of levels but the amount of exp required per level.
Some sort of talent or other reward system will make you feel like you’re getting something from your levels beyond just a number.
The problem is amplified by enemy scaling. I think it’s cool as far as experiencing a coherent story while questing but it ruins the sense of getting stronger. In some cases you actually get weaker when you level cause your gear falls behind, but the enemies get stronger.
Level squish won’t fix that. Stat squishes have already caused issues both times when they happened. I can only imagine what a level squish would do.
BLIZZARD PLEASE DO NOT APPLY A LEVEL SQUISH. There are better options
It’s easier to make talent tiers for 60 levels than 120 or 130 or even more.
I don’t see a problem with this and think it needs to happen at some point
You aren’t having your levels removed. You are still equivalent to max level and the journey from 1-max will likely be similar. Power is relative to the content so there’s not a problem here. This is just natural for a long running rpg, it would be silly for everyone to be doing trillions of dps because they didn’t squish content the other times.
The cocept of a level squish is A-okay by me, but in the context of WoW I can’t really give my opinion one way or another until I know exactly how it’s being done, if it’s being done. That said, squish or not, something has to be done about the leveling process.
Ideally, a squish (along with whatever other changes that may entail) would make the process more rewarding and feel more meaningful while cutting down time. If the time remained the same, I could deal with that so long as it improved the experience. If it made leveling take LONGER, however, I’d probably have to put my foot down.
If you take character levels out of the game it’s still as much an RPG as it ever was. The only difference is your character progression is entirely tied to your progress in the world. Aka gear from encounters and abilities from story arcs and other content.
We have a ton of progression systems in retail WoW. Clvl just happens to be the most unimportant one.
Well they gotta think of something to keep players interested.
Way to try and dismiss anyone that doesn’t agree with you, before even hearing what they have to say…
120 or 60, it’s just a number to me. If it’s the same XP to hit 60 after a level squish as it is to hit 120, I have zero reason to care. I’d be much happier leveling alts with every zone of the game as an option to quest in regardless of level than being stuck choosing xpac to xpac the upteenth time.
The level tiers should also be arranged so that things make sense from a narrative perspective. Gaining 119 levels allows you to faceroll Kil’jaden, Archimonde, Arthas, Deathwing, and Argus, and wipe to a dumb fat lady who’s superpower is owning a 19th century whaling company.
Honestly I would be fine if they just deleted levels literally. Just get rid of level 61-120 and I doubt anyone would care. The only important content anymore is the new leveling content.
Honestly if leveling weren’t important to learning your class and abilities you could squish even harder.
I’d rather have everything in level 61-120 spread out across 1-60 and not squish experience requirements- but lmao not when level boost exists. They’d rather remove exp boosts from heirlooms and tell people to piss off and buy a level boost.
Yep.
Lets look at an easy one I recall off the top of my head. Hunter murder of crows talent. smack dab in the middle level 60 talent.
We can call this level 60, or level 30 after squish. Its still 20+ hours to get this talent. Its still that grind in 1-59 now (1-29 after squish).
They did not want us to have this till Wrath/outland start. Its not coming any faster time wise.
Unless…they fix the xp. Rates, how much needed, anything to speed this up.
And fixes absolutely nothing… so what’s the point of changing the number when the leveling will still be unrewarding and slow?
Crazy thought, right? 
Not if it’s done properly. You can do anything with as many levels as you want. I’ve given one example out of many time and time again.
Agreed. And wow has multiple leveling schemes already that I think attest to this: character, item, artifact/expansion-specific item, reputation.
As I wrote before, leveling appears to be a tangible way to limit content towards certain groups to enhance that experience. Eg end game content is most likely tuned around available max-Level talents etc. thus a level 60 not only wouldn’t survive due to insufficient stamina/hidden-hit, but also because they could not “equip” the same talents as a level 120 - I write “equip” to drive the point that clevel and ilevel aren’t so dissimilar.
The way I see it from the very first 10 minutes of having the game open you should have access to all the abilities of the base class. The first rank of everything to play around with and the tutorial areas should do a good job of showing new players how to use everything they have. So maybe a half hour to an hour in you have a good grasp of what the game is about. Of course the content should also leverage all your toolkit. Or at least a good chunk of it right off the bat.
From that point on the RPG grind should be to obtain higher ranks of those abilities, some cool gear and consumables and of course all the mog/ pet / mount content we already have.
Then what happens two expansion later when they keep increasing the cap but can’t keep adding new stuff? Level squish again and again and again because it’s a lame band-aid fix that doesn’t actually help with anything.
They could make side wise content that doesn’t require a level squish by, you know, not increasing the level?
Or go back to 5 level expansions. meh.
We’re never going to stop getting new levels.
And they stopped doing that because it didn’t work as well as increasing by 10 levels.