TL;DR: Is increasing the level cap with every expansion really essential to the games progression?
Now I know what you guys are thinking, if you’re sick of leveling after each expansion, why are you even playing wow?
Hear me out, I’m not saying that I don’t want questing content anymore, I just kinda feel like the raised level cap gets old. Oh golly, I get to level from 110-120!
It’s the same race every time, the raid gear you spent a ton of hours getting, and perfecting with enchants and gems is obselete, the raids you did become obselete, everyone is put on equal footing once again, and the race to the top begins again. But before the endgame race begins, you gotta go through the questing content first.
Some people may like that, and I can understand that. But that is also the exact reason I’ve seen countless friends and family quit the game. Is leveling truly the only way to keep progression going? 90% of everyone I knew irl playing the game quit after wrath because they just couldn’t do it anymore.
Why require leveling up 10 levels? Why not treat all things as endgame content at a max level? The gear still gets better throughout an expansion regardless, why not have questing content as an extra goody?
This last part is just an extra thing from me that will very likely sound silly, but having an ultra high level cap just doesn’t seem satisfying. Level 60? That is satisfying to look at. Level 120? How on earth did I get here? I’m actually excited to have a level squish for that exact reason.
Yes. A gear reset is essential. The game simply wouldn’t function with the amount of stats that you would get if you didn’t do a full reset of gear each expansion.
You’d get Mages who’d do literally nothing but spam instant Pyroblasts because their Crit Rating is ridiculously high, you’d have Energy Users who literally couldn’t spend all their energy if they wanted to, Tanks who are literally immortal due to their active mitigation usually scaling with Haste and so on.
The game gives players an exponential amount of power during an expansions lifetime, and the thing about exponential increases is that if you don’t level them off, they get real funky real fast.
And that’s not even taking into account expansion system gimmicks, like Legiondaries, Artifacts, the Heart of Azeroth, etc. What would the game look like if all those expansions were piled onto one character all at once?
Could gear resets be possible without the level cap changing? Like a new expansion centering content around endgame raiding & pvp right off the bat, so you can progress to get more powerful gear?
There’s only real two ways to go about doing a gear reset without raising the level cap. You’d either have to:
a) Make it a sideways progression. I don’t have any ideas off the top of my head on how it’d work, but you’d have to find a way of making it so the expansion after Shadowlands was still worth playing without any massive net increases in power.
b) Manually reset scaling. The TLDR of this is the 30-40% Crit/Haste/Whatever would have to be turned into like 5% so you can regain the secondaries to get 30-40% of those stats again.
The first option sounds like a genuinely difficult thing to do. It’d be a very delicate balancing act to keep older expansions relevant while still driving hype for newer ones. The second just sounds like the current system, but with extra steps.
The main issues are lack of character progression and stat scaling.
Currently the game relies on levels to adjust the value given by secondary stats, should levels cease to exist players will quickly find themselves at 100% crit, haste etc and thus progression is halted.
On the other hand levels also provide a guaranteed progression from the start of the expansion to the end. Whereas gear isn’t guaranteed and fluctuates in value and quality levelling is flat amd ensures a base level of progression for players.
Such base progression would have to be replaced (which honestly I believed were the initial ideas behind AP/azerite) with an alternative. It’s possible that alternative would need to be replaced following each expansion which again forces borrowed power which people have reacted negatively to.
I do believe there is an opportunity for a game with such a system to exist with flat level caps, however the current state of WoW does not really allow for it.
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Awkaward probably said it better than I, but I agree with this.
I would expect a system like that would result in a more cosmetic focused mmo where power rewards were negligible or power upgrades were trade offs (unlock a new spell but it costs the use of another to equip it etc, so you are more just changing spell layout than gaining strength)
Those are some pretty good points from Awkaward and Haavi. I never really put too much thought in how increasing the level cap is essential in itemization.
The reason behind that was mainly from looking at other titles such as ESO, or GW2 without fully realizing how they center their game around those kinds of systems.
Then surely it would be fairly simple to dump Shadowlands into the Legacy 10-50 bracket, and add the expansion into the 50-60 slot? That way we still get a power reset and there’s no more monster number creep.
Personally, I think this is what needs to be done. So we don’t run into another giant leveling problem in a few years, I think the current expansion should be 50-60, and relegate all previous content from 1-50.
When a new expansion comes out, lower the item level of all previous-expansion gear so it fits in with the power level of all other level 50 content, and then let the new expansion fit into the 50-60 power level.
For example, when the expansion after Shadowlands releases, set Shadowlands to match Legion’s level 50 power level, and the new expansion to match what Shadowlands previously was when it was 50-60.
I hope that makes sense.
People who enjoy ever-growing numbers won’t be happy, but this prevents us from ever hitting a level squish/huge number squish problem ever again.
Elder Scrolls Online kinda pulled off the “sideways” thing decently. Personally, it seems like a “pick your poison” type of thing to me, and I doubt any of us have the solution to power creep. FFXIV, on the hand, has done +10 every expansion so far, but that game is very story-driven while you’re leveling through an expansion. Maybe WoW should go in the same direction? I know there have been numerous times that I wished Blizzard would tell more of WoW’s story in-game. The leveling is much less of a slog when it’s done that way.
Blizzard could definitely do better though. IMO they should do what they’ve always done best, going all the way back to Warcraft, StarCraft, and WoW, which is take existing ideas from other places and tweak those ideas to perfection (or close to it). The old axiom “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal”, in other words.
Because WoW is a vertical progression, each new expansion needs a way to reset the secondary stats so they aren’t just constantly going up. Your 40% Critical Strike isn’t carried over once another expansion comes out, you give players a feeling of growth while slowly taking down their secondary stats back to 10% at the new max level.
It is possible to do it in 1-2 levels, but that’s a jarring effect on players to suddenly go from 40% Critical Strike to 10% after just one single level growth. It needs to be a slow change, little by little each new level.
In Guild Wars 2 the level cap is 80 since the vanilla game, now they going to their 4th expansion and the level cap still 80, but after hitting level 80 you keep earning experience but now you earn experience to unlock “Masteries” each expansions have their masteries, and masteries are alot of things, some simples things that require just 1 points of mastery to unlock like learning a new language to talk and trade with NPC from another race, faster gathering resources in the open world etc… and some very complex ones that requires 8-10 points of masteries to unlock it like unlocking a mount ability (similar to dragonriding), learn how to craft legendary gear from that expansion, learn how to gather better resources, some quality of life improvements like mushrooms in the map that you can bounce to reach places, learning how to use a glider etc… and that ammount of mastery points you have used to unlock those things are displayed in your character like your level, for example when you inspect a player and their profile says he is a level 80 warrior with 278 Mastery for example you know thats a warrior at max level that already spended 278 mastery points to unlock abilities from diferent expansions, maps etc…
