I think one of the more interesting things being talked about is a level squish. The only real benefit to gaining levels is being able to go to a new zone at the minimum level. That itself is a type of reward, at least in my eyes. But, I know the leveling itself is still bland and the levels you gain while in those zones don’t really matter. So, how do you make them interesting?
We already work towards new abilities that we can see in our spellbook, we auto-learn new ranks of spells now and again for more power. We have our talent trees giving new abilities every so often… but it still doesn’t feel rewarding. Why is that? We passively gain these things while leveling and they aren’t designed in a way that’s exciting or delivered in a thrilling way.
Do you guys remember warlock pet quests, the paladin quest to get LoH, the druid quests for the forms? They were rewarding because we weren’t handed them for just getting a new level. We got to those levels and then were able to do questlines to unlock our class abilities. I think that’s why it’s so drab these days. We DING and a new spell just gets plopped onto our hotbar. Okay, cool, I don’t feel rewarded because I didn’t do anything.
That isn’t exciting, it devalues reaching a certain level because after you get handed something you just run to the next level anyway. If the levels were reduced and they put more of these types of quests in place it would make them far more exciting to reach. We are given spells at certain level caps and those are so infrequent that it makes everything in between seem meaningless because there are so many levels. Maybe that’s where the change is needed as well.
We can’t be rewarded 120 times unless it’s with something like our old talent system. So, we are rewarded every 5-10 or maybe 15 levels now. A level squish could really help the distribution of reward but it seems like a temporary fix much like stat squishes. It has to go up eventually unless a better system is designed. (And we know how paragon systems work with that inflation ;))
Dear friends, please design a new system or come up with interesting ways to add reward and flavor to the questing experience. Surely some of our collective brainpower can assist the teams over at Blizzard to try some stuff out for the betterment of our leveling experience. They need more ideas and opinions on what the players think so let’s give it to them. Would you guys be okay with one day logging in and being back down to level 60? Can we do away with levels in favor of something else?
I don’t have to be rewarded every single level really, I don’t mind small gaps, but there are some really large ones in the current game. This is something I think about a lot in my free time and I can understand why it’s tough to make a move here. How would you guys make leveling more exciting/rewarding? How would you change the fundamentals of it if you could?